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How to make a better default Firefox UI

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Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#121

Post by dathinab »

pprotas wrote: post #32
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox as my alternate browser. And whenever I fire it up it needs first to get in my way and interrupt me to tell me about the new changes and features it has implemented since the last time I opened it like Pocket, VPN, etc. God, stop it, just let me start browsing what I came here for, stop imitating Microsoft and their dark patterns of shoving Office 365 and Gamepass in your face between updates. Go and ad…

Chrome automatically opens up a tab with an ad for their new features after every automatic update. Isn’t that kind of the same thing?

yes hand the amount of times Firefox has done so in the last few years is also just a handful (like less then 1 time per year in average)

And some of this notifications where really reasonable to have like the containers. (Except the color thingy, that was some nonsense.)

The only exception is if you somehow end up in a situation where the browser (profile) is for whatever reason frequently fully reset, in which case you might have seen the same notification multiple times.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#122

Post by magicalhippo »

cannam wrote: post #118
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #71

My 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 reduci…

I vastly prefer the current way. It makes it very easy to manipulate parts of the URL. If I want to replace the URL I just open a new tab instead, and if I want to copy it I use ctrl+d which focuses URL and selects all.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#123

Post by jwells89 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #100
arboles wrote: post #76

Earlier 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”

Usually when people call a feature bloat it’s because its presence, resource consumption, etc is too great relative to its value and utility to users or it’s not particularly relevant.

I’d hesitate to call something like optional compact UI metrics “bloat”. To me the term is better applied to e.g. features associated with only tangentially related services or something running in the background sucking up CPU cycles for little user benefit… basically the modern Microsoft playbook.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#126

Post by jwells89 »

bloopernova wrote: post #90

Better 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…

Fan of vertical tabs here, it’s a major boon for how I browse, which tends to involve a number of long-running tasks. Tabs work better than this than bookmarks, because cleaning out bookmarks sucks with how undeveloped all browser bookmark managers somehow still are in 2024.

I’m not too partial to nested tabs, but I think “panes” (Firefox extension Sidebery nomenclature) or “spaces” (what Arc calls them) where you can swap what group of tabs (including pinned tabs) is represented by the tab sidebar with a click is powerful, particularly combined with association of a pane/space with a browser profile.

So for example, a single browser window can switch between being dedicated to general browsing, shopping, online university courses, or software development, and if I want to split a pane/space into a new window temporarily, this is possible too.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#127

Post by dathinab »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #29
hobs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn that new tab must pop up for me like... once a month! What a distraction! I guess giving all my data to Google is probably worth it.

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…

> market share agrees

that's not how it works the marked share is there for reasons which have little to do with that, at least when it comes to "non technical people" (i.e. not HN crowd)

1. what matters the most is what is pre-installed (like iOs Safari, Android Chrome, etc.)

2. then what matters a lot is mind share, Chrome still has in many peoples minds the image of "the good alternative", "fast", "reliable", "modern UX". While many people still think about FF as slow and clunky even through a lot of this opinions came from well over 10 years ago

3. What also a huge amount is if you can use it for all task you do. Due to apps like Slack, MS outright refusing to fully support Firefox or for example Notion having had egregious FF only bugs a lot of "normal" users have over time moved away and just never come back. The most sad thing is if you look at the technical details it's seldomly FF fault. E.g. basically every time I looked into it when some media player (and I think it was also the case for Notion as far as I remember) didn't work it was because the sites not being standard compliant with CORS. Another (older) example is FF missing media codecs due to licensing issues which Apple/MS fixed by having an OS and Google by having a ton of money. Or polyfills for bleeding edge sometimes not yet even standardized Chrome features being slow. Stuff like that is in my experience kinda true for close to any (systematic) issue of a sites not working correctly on FF.

Lastly when it comes to non technical people the overlap of people which would stop using FF because of stuff like that and the ones which anyway wouldn't use FF because they use some fancy chromium derivative like brave is quite high.

The reason they are bleeding market share is not because they updated to a new UI.

It's because it's today hardly possible to run a browser which isn't either chromium or webkit based.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#128

Post by pndy »

ihateolives wrote: post #16
thecosmicfrog wrote: post #10

Is anyone else not at all bothered by the tabs "being buttons"? I feel like I'm the only one sometimes. Are they really that jarring for first-time users?

It bothers me because it's different enough from everything else with tabs that I have (not only browsers, file managers, editors etc) and I just can't jibe with it. Why throw all semantics out of the window? It looks like a button but doesn't behave like one.

> Why throw all semantics out of the window?

Almost everything nowadays is designed with mobile-first in mind approach - whether it's a smartphone or tablet, or desktop software. That throw all semantics out of the window - look what happen to e.g. Gnome over the years. What's worse I'd say, is that the lack of clear differentiation between types of interface elements made easier to hide options within GUI under various dark patterns (active element vs static information etc.) - whenever its required to do so.

As for Firefox GUI changes: Mozilla ask their users for feedback many times and the feedback was given - often strongly criticizing the upcoming changes but they ignored it and introduced changes anyway. I did submitted mine when they were about to rollout Australis but I didn't bother myself to say anything when Proton was about to be introduced because I knew that the corporate facet of Mozilla doesn't care and they'll do whatever they like.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#129

Post by dathinab »

viraptor wrote: post #53
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #29

Earlier 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.

it also really helped that in difference to today wen Chrome was new it's performance gain over FF was often quite significant (same for security)

while that isn't really true anymore in any relevant way it's still stuck that way in many peoples heads

And sure part of the perf issues where quite often not well behaving FF extensions, toolbars etc. also often installed by unrelated programs preexisting installed on the same computer and that FF needed some major refactoring/rewriting just because it was quite a bit older (which are done by now but had inevitable but sad effects like XUL extensions being gone).

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