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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

#171

Post by DonHopkins »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #52
Astraco wrote: post #35

The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.

It's (almost) every major software. I mainly use Chrome, and in their newest M121 release they made not one, but three major UI changes and I hate every single one of them. For the curious, they are (together with my rant): 1. the new "simplified" bookmark save flow which is more complicated than the old one; 2. loss of the ability to disable system notification (i.e. to use Chrome's built-in one, which I prefer); 3.…

Simon Schneegan's "Kandu" cross platform pie menus, as well as his older "Fly-Pie" and "Gnome-Pie" projects, let you create and edit your own pie menus with a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop direct manipulation interface.

Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu (github.com/kando-menu)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966

https://github.com/kando-menu/kando

A first glimpse at Kando's Menu Editor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLJ1-z9i3cI

Development Update for Kando's Menu Editor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIF6k9OxQ80

Item labels in Fly-Pie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyl5nMPI1f0

Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk

Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs

Gnome-Pie

https://vimeo.com/30618179

Gnome-Pie 0.4 (12 years ago)

https://vimeo.com/35385121

https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#172

Post by wolverine876 »

AlienRobot wrote: post #68
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%...

That's very interesting, specially that telemetry is being used to justify removing interface items. In my opinion the address bar is so incredibly large you could put 10 buttons in there and you would still have space, so I can't imagine a reason to bother removing things besides wanting to remove everything until there is nothing you can remove left. You seem to be knowledgeable about UI/UX. May I ask you a questio…

> the address bar is so incredibly large you could put 10 buttons in there and you would still have space, so I can't imagine a reason to bother removing things

Space isn't the only issue. Fewer options generally (very generally) yields better design - it's easier to find things, less distraction, cleaner, etc.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#173

Post by Izkata »

prmoustache wrote: post #69
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…

> Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago. I suggest you look for screenshot of Google Chrome in 2008. Market share is what it is because google is pre installed in the majority of the mobile market, that firefox had bad performance rep in some areas, and that google is a synonym of internet in the mouth of the majority of people nowadays the same way explorer was a few decades ago. Most people don'…

2008: https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/first-public-screen-captur...

2016: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/google-chrome

2024: https://flathub.org/apps/com.google.Chrome

They're basically the same, nothing like what Firefox has been doing. Buttons went flat, bookmarks moved to the right, and two dropdowns got combined into one menu. Tabs haven't changed at all.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#174

Post by atomicfiredoll »

Astraco wrote: post #35

The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.

I recently got fed up with Gmail and downloaded Thunderbird, which I haven't used in a looong time. I was wildly disappointed by the modern incarnation. The lack of checkboxes feels mind boggling... I still feel like I must be not grasping something. Sometimes one of my hands isn't on my mouse or keyboard, but the interface felt like it constantly demanded I use both together (e.g. shift+click) to get things done.

I ended up cleaning my inbox with the Gmail web interface. Despite my gripes, at the end of the day Gmail was just better and more efficient at it. Maybe it's nostalgia, but it legitimately feels like a 15 year old version of Outlook would run circles around Thunderbird's UI.

This is painting with a broad brush, but coming from a background that included design, I've honestly come to resent modern UX designers. There are great ones, but there are also ones who are more interested in the design than the user and who ignore or bend the user data to support their (sometimes wild) opinions.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#176

Post by Izkata »

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.

There's userChrome modifications that make Firefox's sidebar collapsible, expands on mouseover and covers the page instead of pushing the page aside. I use that with TreeStyleTabs. Mine when collapsed is only ~3 favicons in width.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#177

Post by SamuelAdams »

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.

Well, yes and no. Different people want a different user experience. So this strikes me as a need for a new user configurable option.

Make a new user option, so it is easy for users to compact information if they want to. It sucks having to support multiple states (more things to test and verify) but it seems like there is an audience for both ideas.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#179

Post by Dwedit »

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…

Vertical tabs would be unusable on a window that's resized to be half the width of a 16:9 display.
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