Thanks for saving the animals. Illustrations were great touch and added so much needed whimsy to usually boring error pages. Another improvement that is a must - removable "Add-ons" button. I understand why "Menu" button is not allowed to be removed (although, it would be neat experiment to move it around toolbar), but "Add-ons" is just taking up space. And considering, that other browsers allow to hide their variant of "Add-ons" button, there should be no excuses for Firefox. Customization is a rare feature in browsers these days, and huge pro considering other browsers.
How to make a better default Firefox UI
131–140 of 266 posts
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#132My 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…
> as you might expect, Mozilla does not care
internal options are internal options, no browser cares much about them outside of e.g. some huge company support contracts
if you have to go to `about:config` for anything but dev or MDA related things then you can't expect things to continue working with any update
and every option is code which needs to be maintained
if I should guess they rewrote the code which used the option and did the faster/cheaper thing of not re-implementing a feature they officially anyway don't support
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#133Better 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…
> 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. TabMixPlus! Dynamic width vertically scrollable fully customizable multirow tab bar. I have 50 tabs open, 22 on screen, and perfect overview. It still technically runs on current Firefox, but you have to engage in some very vigorous…
I think Sideberry is nowadays more comfortable than TMP.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#134Earlier 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…
It can be metrics driven the whole way. - Compact mode is rarely used and a pain to maintain - If we hide the feature, what's the user reaction? - Minimal user reaction to hiding, we're safe to remove
Of course, people who modify their settings in the first place are more likely to disable telemetry, particularly if they're choosing a non-default, low market-share application that specifically bills itself as privacy friendly.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#135My 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…
And it's still broken, because the "Paste and Go" feature doesn't work. Common sense suggests "Paste and Go" would be equivalent to using "Paste" (which correctly inserts text from the clipboard at the cursor position) followed by "Go to the address in the Location Bar." But if you unselect the automatically selected URL, position the cursor within it, then use "paste and go", Firefox ignores the previous URL and sim…
For non-technical people it would be a huge security risk of not behaving that way, similar Clear, Past and Go would just be unnecessary confusing.
Technical people have the tendency to use keyboard shortcuts.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#136I'm pretty sure that Waterfox fork uses Lepton already for quite some time
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#137Everyone 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…
Bookmarks have received woefully little attention in all browsers for reasons unknown to me. If one pulls up a browser from 20 years ago, bookmark management is basically identical or even slightly better in some circumstances.
I guess making bookmarks better isn’t sexy so nobody’s bothered.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#138The 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…
So we have people in the camp "don't waste space with padding, please" and then, each time a KDE discussion appears "how the hell can they cram so many information and text with no padding, it's unreadable" camp.
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#139Better 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…
When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#140the real UI/UX nightmare of firefox is the legacy cruft. it's like every single basic browser function opens in it's own kind of a different view. settings - browser tab. history - a sidebar. actually that's just when you hit ctrl+h, manage history? ctrl+shift+h? that's a separate window. bookmarks, downloads - also that window. (that Library window that seems to be dragged up all the way from firefox 3/4.) downloads…
I think it’s fine for some things to have a popover and window, but it needs to be implemented intelligently.
Like in Safari, downloads are a popover by default, but the popover can be “torn off” to become a window. Use cases for both are served, yet consistency is maintained.
Firefox could use a good dose of this thinking.