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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

#141

Post by bloopernova »

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…

Replying to my own comment: HN faux pas, or good information organization? :)

In the Tree Style Tab options page, there's an Advanced section that has a live-reloading user style sheet section. Very cool for testing out font choices without restarting the browser.

I've changed mine to use Apple's really nice SF Pro font, condensed. Somehow the Iosevka Mono that I use everywhere didn't look quite right on the tab titles.

The CSS:

  :root.sidebar tab-item.unread .label-content {
    font-style: italic !important;
  }

  :root.sidebar tab-item {
    font-family: "SF Pro" !important;
    font-stretch: condensed !important;
    font-weight: 300 !important;
  }

  :root.sidebar tab-item.active .label-content {
    font-weight: 500 !important;
  }
Same link as my previous comment now has a screenshot of the result of that CSS: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#142

Post by jwells89 »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #139
015a wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> chrome was made for small screen laptop users

Makes sense if one considers how many 13” Macbooks and original MacBook Airs were likely being toted around the Google campus in the late 2000s, with Macs being the predominant development platform there at the time.

Further down the road in 2011, Chromebooks appeared, most of which are on the smaller side which also acts as incentive to keep Chrome usable on smaller screens.

Desktop Safari and MS Edge are also decent in this regard, likely a result of their parent companies being makers of popular small-screen computers.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#143

Post by gloryjulio »

logicprog wrote: post #73
tomxor wrote: post #14

The 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.

I uses a 40inch 4k monitor. The padding looks horrible. Chrome is not better in this regard though

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#144

Post by J_Shelby_J »

beAbU wrote: post #44
OJFord wrote: post #22

Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) horizontal tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with it, or perhaps even more so that it's still the default in all major (and minor?) browsers. I recommend Sidebery, but more than that I just recommend something to get your tabs listed vertically in a sidebar, so they don't squash each other up as you add more until you can't tell what's what at a glance, the wid…

Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) vertical tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with so many open tabs at once. I have maybe max 20 tabs open at any given time. When I'm done with $TASK I close all the tabs (save 2-3 that remain open and pinned, mail, calendar, etc). The tab bar is like my stack. I only fill it up for the task at hand, then clear the stack and move on when done. If there are thing…

I feel the same way. Keep limited tabs open most of the time.

But the advantage to vertical and nested tabs is that when I need to open a dozen links (like grabbing interesting links from a page without stopping mid flow) I can do it without having to ruin my environment. The tabs are there ready to be consumed: nicely nested below the source tab. Doing that with a horizontal tab bar would destroy my productivity until I closed all of those tabs. It allows you to switch tasks.

As far as wasted space… I hardly ever use a laptop screen. Text content is ideal at 70ch? That’s like a 1/3rd of a 27” monitor.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#145

Post by jwells89 »

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?

I wouldn’t say they bother me per se, but they don’t exactly feel right either. They’re incongruent without good reason.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#146

Post by J_Shelby_J »

mvdtnz wrote: post #33
OJFord wrote: post #22

Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) horizontal tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with it, or perhaps even more so that it's still the default in all major (and minor?) browsers. I recommend Sidebery, but more than that I just recommend something to get your tabs listed vertically in a sidebar, so they don't squash each other up as you add more until you can't tell what's what at a glance, the wid…

Edge has vertical tabs out of the box. And yeah we get it, because vertical tabs people and tree tabs people are the vegans of browser discussions. Please, we get that you like vertical tabs. No need to keep going on about it.

I use tree style tabs btw

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#147

Post by Yaina »

_notreallyme_ wrote: post #75
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…

Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that. You can check with chrome, and indeed it behaves like firefox. For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...

I don't find it ironic at all. The purpose of telemetry is to be able to obtain information about the user population at large. It's anonymous and the data only flows one way (i.e. you don't see personalized ads based on telemetry data), but of course some data about your browsing behavior is being sent somewhere, yes.

It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.

Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#148

Post by encom »

zx8080 wrote: post #17
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?

There's so much things going south with each update I just don't care anymore. The overall state of UX is very sad for Firefox and also Thunderbird (I had to stop using it after their menu bar fiasco and other "improvements").

Firefox v89 was the last version I used. I just couldn't be bothered with them constantly changing and removing features for no reason. I switched to Vivaldi, which offer basic functionality like vertical tabs, and a fully customisable UI out of the box. It's far from perfect, notably being closed source which was hard for me to swallow, but it annoys me far less than Firefox ever did. I have it set up how I like it, and that setup has stayed static in the three years I've used it now. Firefox frankly feels user hostile in comparison.

Thunderbird was ruined with version 115, so I switched to Kmail. I miss calendar integration in my email client though.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#150

Post by tiltowait »

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?

I see constant complaints about how "garbage" the Firefox UI is, and I just don't see it. It's ... fine? I mean, it's basically Chrome's UI with a slightly different tab bar, yet here we are with a very long post about alleged fixes.
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