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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

#191

Post by OJFord »

foolswisdom wrote: post #186
OJFord wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough not having the horizontal space for it. It's usually still the opposite that annoys me (small centred content not making use of space) but of course this depends on zoom level etc. too. I'm not sure what you mean about not freeing the top bar though? The topmost thing I have is the back/forward/refresh/URL/extensions/menu bar. (file/edit/view/etc. hidden unless I press Alt, but that's not where tabs would…

The space where tabs go (when horizontal) isn't removed in vertical tabs mode. So using vertical tabs doesn't save any extra on vertical space, only uses additional horizontal space.

Well what I'm saying is I don't have it, so either Sidebery handles it or I put something in userChrome, but either way it's something I have not had to think about in all the years I've been using vertical tabs, such that I was not aware of the issue.

edit: the latter (or Sidebery does do it but my previous solution didn't and this is now redundant, I suppose), I have:

    #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
    }

    #sidebar-header {
      display: none;
    }
(~/.config/mozilla/firefox/profile/chrome/userChrome.css)

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#192

Post by stevage »

jwells89 wrote: post #123
micromacrofoot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Firefox the classic example is Pocket.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#193

Post by stevage »

dmix wrote: post #94
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…

Plus looking at the screenshots of the "controversial" FF89 one of the biggest changes seems to be redesigning the tabs w/ more padding. I didn't even notice that change because I have the top tab bar hidden and use Tree Style Tab that has a design which blends nicely with FF. I don't like FF in particular but the tab tree is 100% enough of a UX gain vs all the small details chrome/safari does slightly better that I…

I use FF primarily, but sometimes Chrome for debugging, on macOS.

I literally cannot tell them apart.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#194

Post by c-hendricks »

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…

Safari has a side bar where tabs are in fact vertical. Tab groups will also let you, um, group tabs, and they're presented as a tree in the sidebar.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#195

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal space for an apples to apples comparison.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#196

Post by jsrcout »

DonHopkins wrote: post #162
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…

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 monito…

I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest amount of white space. The results beggar belief.

Edit:

Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use.

In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done.

But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size.

Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis.

Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#197

Post by michaelmrose »

Dwedit wrote: post #179
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.

This is a good point especially on laptops. It might be nice to display side tabs until a breakpoint and thereafter autohide

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#198

Post by viraptor »

paldepind2 wrote: post #115
viraptor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any data to back that narrative? I know Mozilla is pushing that explanation, but from how I remember it Chrome gained market share because it was technologically superior to Firefox when it was released. It had a much more modern UI, much faster JS implementation, sandboxed tabs, etc. All features that it took Firefox years to copy. Some would say that Firefox has never caught up. I find the ads narrative…

Ehh... UI was comparable. Chrome was a bit faster.

For the ads, see some snapshots of what that campaign looked like at the time https://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-... It was a massive push of basically spammy links all over the internet.

To be clear, I'm sure some people switched for the features. But given the scale of the sponsored push to every internet user, we can't really say features were the reason for most people. There's no way to run the experiment the other way.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#199

Post by pdntspa »

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.

That feeling of anxiety when looking over software should be taken as a cue to get better at it, not a feeling to be processed as such. Because it goes away as mastery goes up. Pretty soon all that whitespace becomes anxiety-inducing in and of itself

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#200

Post by logicprog »

pdntspa wrote: post #199
logicprog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That feeling of anxiety when looking over software should be taken as a cue to get better at it, not a feeling to be processed as such. Because it goes away as mastery goes up. Pretty soon all that whitespace becomes anxiety-inducing in and of itself

I think you're making condescending assumptions in order to explain away my different preferences, and I don't appreciate that. The feeling I'm experiencing is not anxiety at not knowing how to use the software or read the information presented, I am very comfortably a power user of basically every piece of software I use regularly. It's simply the fact that high levels of visual noise are more difficult to process than when information is clearly separated out and grouped and given enough visual space to be processed independently. Dense interfaces are just less visually restful. This is why I actually tend to prefer pieces of software with little interface at all, just keybindings, like my config of emacs. And I see no reason why being a power user would inherently make white space anxiety inducing, since there is no sensible psychological mechanism for the two to be connected in that direction, unlike the sensible psychological and vision processing connection between dense cluttered interfaces and a feeling of visual clutter.

Furthermore, my feelings in this matter extend far beyond user interfaces: not only do I prefer clean user interfaces with generous use of negative space, I prefer that in my books, and the walls of my house, and the organization of my room. If my wall was covered in posters and sticky notes, instead of a nice clean beige with one or two posters, that would make me feel anxious as well, and it isn't because I don't know how to read a post-it.

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