I love Firefox but my biggest issue with it is that "History" fucking sucks. It's comically bad.
How to make a better default Firefox UI
111–120 of 266 posts
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also a sneaky strategy to deal with features you've decided to remove, because users are that fucking stupid. 1. Instead of just removing the feature, hide the feature and call it unsupported so the users who remember the feature can't complain yet. 2. Then finally remove the feature in the next update, with justification that it was an unsupported option and used by few people, so users can't complain. Frog boi…
never remove features: “product is too bloated” remove features: “product is tricking us”
Browser companies, famous for prioritizing avoiding bloat.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#113Better browser UX, in my strongly-held opinion, starts with vertical tabs. With horizontal tabs, you can have maybe 6 to 8 tabs open before things tabs get difficult to manage or track. With vertical, nested tabs; links that open in a new tab are automatically made a child tab. From that you can infer structure and context more easily than horizontal tabs. Then you add colours to indicate different sites and now you…
To each their own, but: I strongly believe the opposite.
Of course having more than 6 or 8 tabs open in a horizontal tab bar makes tabs difficult to manage and track. I've used Arc for the past 6 months. Having 6 or 8 tabs open in a vertical tab bar is also difficult to manage or track. I end up just spam-closing all of them and starting fresh pretty much every 4 hours anyway.
Here's the two arguments I've heard that I resonate more with, one in either direction.
(1) Count the number of pixels dedicated to the tab bar space when it is horizontal versus vertical. I've never seen a functional vertical tab bar that used the same or fewer pixels than a horizontal one.
(2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios; it feels untrue, to me, at the 16:10 aspect ratio; and unfortunately, this is an extremely common aspect ratio as its ~the aspect ratio Macbooks are made at.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#114My 2c:
i spend 8 hrs+ a day in a vnc session to a remote computer where browsers are running.
In the last months firefox has begun crashing every few hours, apparently because of an xsystem exception.
on the other hand chrome after a few minutes from starting will stop accepting return keypresses along with a few others (pressing 5 not only will not work, but sometimes causes unexpected behavior)
i suspect my non english keyboard layout doesnt help
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joke all you want but Firefox's market share agrees with me as most users value convenience above all else. At least Google knows not to be intrusive and not fuck with the UI so often. Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago. Why can't Firefox imitate that quality of life feature? It's not that hard to not change shit at the surface. They've been bleeding market share for years including faithful lo…
Google mainly knows how to display ads. The raise of Chrome wasn't so much about features at the time as about people being bombarded with "install chrome" ads. On Google results, in Gmail, in Adsense, everywhere. There was an absurd amount of money sacrificed (not really spent since the ads were internal) to gain the users. I'm not sure any other aspect can be reliably compared in that scenario.
Do you have any data to back that narrative? I know Mozilla is pushing that explanation, but from how I remember it Chrome gained market share because it was technologically superior to Firefox when it was released. It had a much more modern UI, much faster JS implementation, sandboxed tabs, etc. All features that it took Firefox years to copy. Some would say that Firefox has never caught up.
I find the ads narrative pretty hard to believe. Back in the days, Firefox could compete with IE, which was the default in Windows, by being technically superior. It seems very likely that Firefox's users, who had gone out of their way to install Firefox, would also be very willing to go out of their way to install a new better browser even in the absence of ads.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#116This thread is discussing tabs a lot. So I want to ask why do tabs need to be visible constantly in the first place? https://edstrom.dev/wgfjk/no-tabs-in-firefox
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#117Catering to these types of hardcore fans makes any progress basically impossible. This dude writes a PhD thesis, because the top bar became like 5 pixels bigger some 40 versions ago.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#118My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship thi…
> My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago
Totally agree. Four years on, and it still trips me up daily.
Ironically, the usual failure mode for me is actually the one this change was supposed to help with - I want to select the whole URL, so I instinctively double-click it. This has the effect of selecting everything on the first click, then reducing the selection to a single word on the second. I am momentarily perplexed, then I recover and start clicking again, but now it takes three more clicks to get the whole URL selected.
It's surprising how annoying this is!
The explanation given in the tracker seems to amount to "at some point in the future, we might do something else that justifies this". Four years later and I'm not seeing it?
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#119Everyone is writing their pet peeves, so here are mine: * Having a large tree of bookmark folders, navigating it to add a new bookmark is horrible in the small pop-up that is the "Add Bookmark" UI. * The Bookmarks sidebar allows to search by name but not to find where they are. A bookmark search add-on (Bookmark search plus 2) solves this, but it shouldn't be needed. EDIT: I've been told about right-click -> Show in…
Do you perhaps have muscle memory for the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut that used to open a large side panel but now just shows a narrow horizontal bar? I do and I'm certainly annoyed by this redesign, but I discovered the "manage bookmarks" shortcut Ctrl+Shift+O that opens a larger pop-up window with your bookmarks, which so far seems almost as comfortable as the old side panel. It also lets you search for bookmarks and rig…
No, I don't have muscle memory, and in fact you have introduced me to the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut to show or hide the Bookmarks Toolbar! :-D I won't use it though, because I have it visible and it's not something one typically changes a lot.
With "side panels" I mean what strictly speaking Firefox calls "Sidebar": menu View -> Sidebar -> choose ONE among Bookmarks, History, Synced Tabs, Bookmark search plus 2, or Tree Style Tab.
Why the hell I cannot have e.g. Tree Style Tab AND a Bookmarks sidebars on the left, at the same time? Seems silly to me. Ages ago I worked with Qt and made desktop applications that could have detachable panels (QDockWidget), or their native equivalents such as palettes on Windows, that could be placed anywhere on a main window; but now that we're living in the future it seems we went backwards on what our UIs are able to do.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#120The main issue I've had with their new UI is the massive size of everything, it's fair enough for fat finger phone displays but is annoyingly wasteful for any regular sized desktop. This is partly due to the increased padding as per the article, but also because they removed the "compact" UI density option. However you can bring this back under about:config browser.compactmode.show Then go to menu > more tools > cust…
It's strange, I much prefer a substantial amount of padding to my interfaces. Having a good amount of padding lowers the visual noise/clutter and gives everything room to breathe, which may not give a specific practical advantage, but makes me feel less anxious looking at it.
Whitespace can be a good thing as you note, but thoughtful allocation distribution is critical, particularly on desktop operating systems. Firefox default isn’t the worst here but it’s also far from the best.