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Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

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Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#151

Post by bconway »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #107
Taylorious wrote: post #13

Hi I'm Firefox and I'm trying to be just like Chrome. Maybe if I try hard enough I will eventually be indistinguishable from Chrome and then I can just give up and let Google push me out of the browser scene entirely.

Except they can't seem to emulate Chrome where it counts: The snappy page loads and heavy heavy caching. Regardless of benchmarks, Chrome is noticeably faster loading existing and new pages for me. Everyone else I know has the same perception.

You want Firefox to emulate Chrome's broken caching?

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#152

Post by pessimizer »

spindritf wrote: post #28
loupeabody wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh snap, now that's a UI overhaul. How's that tab interface working out? At a glance I can imagine how much more effective it is at displaying a large number of tabs in the same window. In fact, I'm finding it quite brilliant. The web at large takes advantage of vertical scrolling, so why shouldn't browsers? All of my bookmarks are already arranged in vertical lists. Even when faced with the input procedure of naviga…

> Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages? Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order). Some pages will be too wide, at least on a small screen like mine, forcing you to scroll horizontally. Also, after every (major) update you need to (re)move the new buttons. But those are all very minor. Otherwise, it's smooth sailing.

>Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order).

I haven't had that happen for months, so I'm hoping that it was a long standing bug that just got fixed.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#153

Post by acheron »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #139
SeanDav wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a tab manager add on like Tab Mix Plus. It is the first thing I install on any new installation of FF. You can rename tabs or set a minimum width to see more of the title. Plus numerous other customizations.

When the solution to a problem that nearly every user will have is, "Use an add-on", then that's clearly a time when the design/dev team should go back and re-think their implementation. I can see the phone calls now, "Yes, mom - you need to go install an add-on. What's an add-on? Well, maybe they call it an extension - depends which screen you're on. What's an extension?" Ugh - awful idea.

And then you end up with the old Netscape Communicator suite, until someone wants a "fast" minimal browser, maybe by moving some of the features out of the main browser into extensions....

It's the circle of life!

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#154

Post by pessimizer »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #146
dreamdu5t wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they can't seem to emulate Chrome where it counts: The snappy page loads and heavy heavy caching. Regardless of benchmarks, Chrome is noticeably faster loading existing and new pages for me. Everyone else I know has the same perception.

I agree, this is one of the most absurd things about Mozilla's actions over the past few years. Time and time again they've gone out of their way to bring the worst of the Chrome experience to Firefox. Much of this revolves around the awful UI changes starting with Firefox 4 that have made it harder and far less efficient to use. It's pretty sad that we now have to manually enable the menu bar, and install extensions…

>Chrome clearly does perform significantly better than Firefox. While the Firefox supporters like to trumpet how Firefox is "comparable to Chrome" in the arewefastyet.com micro-benchmarks, this just isn't observed under real usage patterns.

Not under my usage patterns. I rarely have fewer than 30 or so tabs open, and Chrome is simply useless for this.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#155

Post by wodenokoto »

SiVal wrote: post #122
DHowett wrote: post #66

And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by removing the actual title of the page from the window chrome. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.

I'd like Firefox to give me back the ability to choose "full screen" and have it make the web page itself fill the screen from corner to corner, with no "chrome" (no title bar, no tabs, no menu bar, no URL bar, etc.) It used to be possible to use Firefox on Mac OS X to do a presentation with HTML and have the web page, and only the web page, fill the whole screen. (It was an option in the "View" menu.) That feature d…

People are always complaining about existing features being lost.

"I am not using firefox again until they reinstate the back button!"

I see this kind of stuff on reddit and slashdot all the time. Is it some sort of FUD campaign against Firefox?

Click view > Enter Fullscreen

You can also use F11, unless you set OSX to high-jack that button. You can also use the fullscreen button in the top right corner on lion versions of OSX.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#156

Post by jasonlotito »

wodenokoto wrote: post #155
SiVal wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like Firefox to give me back the ability to choose "full screen" and have it make the web page itself fill the screen from corner to corner, with no "chrome" (no title bar, no tabs, no menu bar, no URL bar, etc.) It used to be possible to use Firefox on Mac OS X to do a presentation with HTML and have the web page, and only the web page, fill the whole screen. (It was an option in the "View" menu.) That feature d…

People are always complaining about existing features being lost. "I am not using firefox again until they reinstate the back button!" I see this kind of stuff on reddit and slashdot all the time. Is it some sort of FUD campaign against Firefox? Click view > Enter Fullscreen You can also use F11, unless you set OSX to high-jack that button. You can also use the fullscreen button in the top right corner on lion versio…

I still see the bar with the address and search fields, and associated buttons to the left and right. They don't seem to go away. This is on OSX.

The OSX fullscreen button does the same thing, leaving me with chrome up top.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#157

Post by lucb1e »

smithian wrote: post #140
lucb1e wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, makes me think there should be a way to keep the taskbar when you press F11. Sounds like that'd be an easy solution for what you're doing. (Offtopic: Oh wait nobody wants a taskbar anyway, ain't it so Windows 8? :P)

I'm on Windows 8 right now and I have a taskbar. Perhaps you were referring to the start button?

No I'm referring to the app mode they're trying to get every application to use. The desktop mode is only for legacy and backwards compatibility purposes. Though they might have changed their mind on that now that Windows 8 pretty much flopped, I'm not sure.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#158

Post by mihok »

magic_haze wrote: post #78
DHowett wrote: post #66

And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by removing the actual title of the page from the window chrome. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.

Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?

Your absolutely correct in my mind. I get more from the favicon then anything else, and since moving to Linux and losing the title bar I have not found myself missing it or lost.

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#159

Post by Osmose »

SiVal wrote: post #136
bad_user wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the Full Screen option in the latest version, on Ubuntu and I don't remember a time when it wasn't there. It's still in the "View" menu. I just press F11, the default shortcut. Furthermore, Firefox implements the HTML5 Fullscreen API, which gives the ability to websites themselves to request the full-screen mode, with a dialog pop-up that allows you to either deny, or to temporarily or permanently give this pr…

The fullscreen API works fine. A website can display itself without any other clutter on the screen (with user permission). Unfortunately, it is no longer possible for a user on Mac OS X to cause the switch to fullscreen. The view menu (Firefox 21.0, for example, on OS X) still offers an "Enter Full Screen" menu item. Unfortunately, all it does is hide some of the chrome (it hides the menu bar and the title bar), lea…

I just tried this on Nightly and the chrome that's left behind (tabs + URL) slide up and out of the way within half a second of entering full screen mode, leaving nothing but the webpage on the screen. Are you sure that this isn't happening for you?

Re: Firefox 25 will get a major UI overhaul

#160

Post by progrock »

k__ wrote: post #132
RHSeeger wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one of the things I despise about Chrome... plus the fact that it doesn't have a title bar at all. They taking exactly the things that make Chrome less usable to me and putting them in Firefox. /sigh

I read about people who like their tabs on the left, because they have so many. Opera allows this AFAIK. But why do you think the Firefox tab placement is better?

If you get tab happy, tabs are really difficult to navigate in Firefox without and extension, and I've tried most of the popular tab extensions - and have yet to find anything I like (that works without some bug).

Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs.

Really though managing tabs should be left to the window manager. Otherwise you just get inconsistant behaviour between applications.

That's when the title comes into it's own.

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