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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

#161

Post by OJFord »

mort96 wrote: post #59
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…

I find that having a huge sidebar shifts the content off-center in a really uncomfortable way.

Aren't you currently on a site where most of the content is more off-centre, and having a left sidebar would actually put it more in front of you?

I can sort of sympathise, I'm fairly 'OCD' (not actually, but as people say) about similar things, but it's never bothered me I don't think. Maybe try with it a bit smaller? I don't think mine's 'huge' - maybe a bit wider than single horizontally displayed tab would be (just as my choice for the length of title it allows me to read), a couple of inches on a 24"-diagonal monitor.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#162

Post by DonHopkins »

015a wrote: post #113
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…

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…

It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few?

While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.

But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want.

Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#163

Post by OJFord »

medstrom wrote: post #56
mvdtnz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please, don't perpetuate the myth that vegans "keep going on about things" unless you've seen someone do it in real life.

'unless you've seen someone' is not a good standard to use here, because of course some people are like that, that's where the stereotype comes from - but the vegans who don't 'keep going on about it' are inherently not as visible: it's not often you'll know someone is a vegan and not talking about it, essentially never for strangers.

So if you really care about reasoning with people to challenge the stereotype, you need to know % vegans (according to some survey or whatever) in a population relevant to a person so that you can ask them to consider not if they've ever seen one vegan talk about it, but if they've seen a number X close to that % of the total people they've seen talk about it (and if not that they've encountered that-X% extra vegans without realising it).

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#164

Post by 12345hn6789 »

wafriedemann wrote: post #117

Catering 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.

Does reinventing the wheel every 3 years count as progress?

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#165

Post by sikhnerd »

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…

Thanks for posting this, really makes a big difference!

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#167

Post by 12345hn6789 »

black7375 wrote: post #2

I'm the author of Lepton, a popular theme for Firefox. You can see how I made various decisions from my perspective and how I improved on some of Mozilla's less-than-stellar decisions. I think that might explain how we improved it and made it popular. This article is part of a series. - https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...

thank you for your work. The installation process was very easy. I would recommend though, to simply outline the steps and move the advanced section to the bottom completely.

```

1. Run script in your OS cmd line.

2. Navigate to `about:support` and click clear startup cache.

```

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#168

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

You wouldn't be having this argument if you could put your tabs on any edge you wanted to, at any time, even using multiple edges of you run out of space along one edge.

It's an entirely artificial argument that doesn't address the real problem: incompetent UI designers preemptively and inflexibly making that decision for all users in all situation, and forcing everyone to use one edge or the other instead of any or all, therefore squandering 3/4 of the usable perimeter.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#169

Post by DonHopkins »

medstrom wrote: post #51
mikae1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install Sidebery[1] and hide the native tabs[2]. This is the way. :) [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ [2] https://superuser.com/a/1424494

I have neither! No visible tabs at all. Just cycle tabs with Ctrl+Tab hotkey. This is clean. Once in a month I want some kind of overview, but extensions like Tab List can give me a popup menu. The tabs needn't be visible constantly!

And the tabs should have pie menus, too.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#170

Post by Klonoar »

darkwater wrote: post #138
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…

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.

KDE is fine with little to no padding. Their problem is often that they have inconsistent padding/spacing, which just throws everything off as death by a thousand cuts.
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