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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

#201

Post by paulddraper »

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.

> which may not give a specific practical advantage

It, in fact, gives a specific practical disadvantage.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#202

Post by medstrom »

DonHopkins wrote: post #169
medstrom wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you serious? Details? This sounds new and interesting.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#203

Post by logicprog »

paulddraper wrote: post #201
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.

> which may not give a specific practical advantage It, in fact, gives a specific practical disadvantage.

I mean, I don't really care to optimize "number of buttons per screen" (and text can be as dense as it wants, although I usually set my font size to 16pt or above) but to each their own.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#204

Post by arboles »

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…

Code bloat is not that obscure of a thing. I think a decent portion of people realize that a program with features upon features is stretched too thin to meet users' needs in high quality, or in a timely fashion, especially if they paid $0 for it.

Don't get me wrong. When Firefox removes a feature, often it's not out the concern of bloat to be able to serve existing users better, but to shift resources for the next revamp that will make the browser ever more "modern", to claw for a new userbase.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#205

Post by kjkjadksj »

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 start to suck on a laptop. For one my auto hide sidebar hack for firefox broke and I am too lazy to fix it, so now I have basically a whole inch by several inches of dead gray space because I don’t have a full column of 100 tabs ever open, maybe 5 or 10.

This wouldn’t be so annoying except many modern websites use browser viewer size instead of the user agent to make the call you are a mobile or desktop user. So I basically have to use fullscreen browser windows because considering I already lose an inch to the tree style tabs, I really don’t have much width to lose before the site assumes I am an iPad and gives me a ton of hamburger menues that also suck to navigate because of how they tend to wrap text on constrained width browser viewers. Most of the time I just have to disable the sidebar entirely which of course adds a few clicks everytime I change tabs now.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#206

Post by a_subsystem »

jwells89 wrote: post #126
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…

Fan of vertical tabs here, it’s a major boon for how I browse, which tends to involve a number of long-running tasks. Tabs work better than this than bookmarks, because cleaning out bookmarks sucks with how undeveloped all browser bookmark managers somehow still are in 2024. I’m not too partial to nested tabs, but I think “panes” (Firefox extension Sidebery nomenclature) or “spaces” (what Arc calls them) where you ca…

I've been using Arc and I've become a fan of folders + vertical tabs also. But I also want bookmarks with tags. I don't want to keep 'pinouts for xyz motherboard' open somewhere all the time. I want to tag it with 'dell', 'motherboard', and 'pinout' and then search when I need it instead of having to remember what 'Space' I put it in. I prefer bookmarks to web search when possible because often enough I spend stupid amounts of time searching for a little tidbit and may want to come back to it later.

Rather than cleaning out bookmarks, I would keep a few main bookmarks and folders on the toolbar, and file away everything else under one few big folders with tags.

I use Firefox for tagging and it seems to be a fantastic way to keep track of thousands of sites with small cognitive load. Am I missing some workflow that's 'better'?

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#207

Post by kjkjadksj »

ihateolives wrote: post #16
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?

It bothers me because it's different enough from everything else with tabs that I have (not only browsers, file managers, editors etc) and I just can't jibe with it. Why throw all semantics out of the window? It looks like a button but doesn't behave like one.

A tab is literally a button with slightly different pixel shading. Its exactly the same thing as its always been.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#208

Post by kjkjadksj »

jwells89 wrote: post #140
pxoe wrote: post #70

the 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.

Thats exactly how firefox works out of the box, no? On my firefox at least theres a popover with a few recent downloads and a button to show all downloads.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#209

Post by oblio »

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 have a few decades worth of experience with software and cluttered UIs just suck.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#210

Post by gsich »

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…

"not supported" - that was out of spite for people who criticized the "modern" design choice.
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