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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

#211

Post by jwells89 »

a_subsystem wrote: post #206
jwells89 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, not having bookmarks is probably Arc’s biggest weakness. I find bookmarks useful too, but only add them when I know I’m going to keep them around for a while.

Tags might work well but the friction involved is likely too high for me to consistently use them. It’s easier to just keep anything remotely short term in tab form.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#212

Post by jlarocco »

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.

The mistake is to think there's a single "right" way to do it.

Either make the UI flexible enough to accomadate everybody's personal preferences, or accept that some people won't like it and will choose something else.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#214

Post by DonHopkins »

jsrcout wrote: post #196
DonHopkins wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I was less than satisfied about they layout of the buttons in xcalc, so I built a version of the window manager that let me specify the root window containing the windows to manage, and gave it the window id of the xcalc window, so it put window frames around each calculator button so I could move them around, resize them, even close them into icons (bigger than the button) if I didn't want to use them. Not what the xcalc or window manager designers had in mind, probably.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#215

Post by bigDinosaur »

Yaina wrote: post #147
_notreallyme_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An idea can be good regardless of telemetry, telemetry is descriptive and not prescriptive. Telemetry is inherently reductive in that sense. You're making a leap of logic that's genuinely unfounded - an idea can be good or bad and this is wholly independent of telemetry unless your only concern is maximising or minimising use of some kind of feature. I would never dismiss an idea because someone has telemetry disabled and it seems like a genuinely disturbing idea to even hold the position that a user with telemetry disabled is lacking value.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#216

Post by asadotzler »

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…

All features require maintenance as code around them and through them changes with time. Feature bloat is very often code bloat and maintaining code costs money, especially 20 million lines of it. When a module owner sees an opportunity to improve their module by removing low-use features that are built on code that's a challenge to maintain, that's a good thing for the long term health of the code base and the features it provides and the app they make up.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#217

Post by throwaway-56453 »

jsrcout wrote: post #196
DonHopkins wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Software maintenance is not the primary cost of a configuration option. The biggest cost is the customer support load [1]. This is especially a problem if the customer manages to get the application into a "busted" state.

Your complaint, where the software is less convenient than it could be because the sidebar is too big, will never result in a Priority 1 Customer Support Ticket. Adding the ability to resize a sidebar can actually cause that to happen.

Someone accidentally resizing the sidebar to become unusably small or large and calling support because they don't know what they did or how to fix it will describe it as an emergency. This is not a lie, since the thing they need to get at to complete their work is impossible to get to without resizing the sidebar, and they don't know how it happened or how to do that. They resized the sidebar while trying to drag and drop something else, and since they weren't using it at the time they went some twenty minutes without even realizing anything was wrong, and now they've forgotten what they did.

Hopefully, it escalates up the support chain until someone finally manages to figure out what happened, or it escalates high enough and the customer is willing to give remote desktop access to a support tech [2]. If you're not lucky, they just give up and switch to a program that, hopefully, doesn't break on them.

Source: I used to work the support line for customer-facing software. I don't any more, but I still work directly with customer success agents, so I still regularly see this exact kind of problem.

[1]: Or, if you won't take it from me, take it from Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/

[2]: Some companies just don't do remote desktop control support. This is so that they can directly tell their customers "we never ask for control of your computer, so if someone claiming to be us asks for it, they're a scammer." Remote desktop access is a dangerous way to do tech support because, if you accidentally wind up talking to a scammer instead of a real support tech, they can wreak havoc with that level of access. OTOH, the company I work for sells software that works with barcode scanners and printers, and I really don't feel keen on trying to talk people through setting them up so they work properly...

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#218

Post by asadotzler »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #215
Yaina wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An idea can be good regardless of telemetry, telemetry is descriptive and not prescriptive. Telemetry is inherently reductive in that sense. You're making a leap of logic that's genuinely unfounded - an idea can be good or bad and this is wholly independent of telemetry unless your only concern is maximising or minimising use of some kind of feature. I would never dismiss an idea because someone has telemetry disable…

A user with telemetry disabled isn't lacking value, it's throwing away its vote. Plain and simple, if you want a vote that tells the software maker how you think the product is best used, that's telemetry. If you don't care about that vote, throw it away by turning off telemetry. Now, telemetry is only one (small) input into whether a feature warrants maintenance in a codebase of over 20 million lines, but it is one input that you have involvement in. As I said, up to you if you want to use your vote or throw it away but it's silly to complain about not having a voice after tossing yours in the dumpster.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#219

Post by asadotzler »

bscphil wrote: post #187
Yaina wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I disagree. If you create a piece of software and develop a userbase that disproportionately opts out of telemetry relative to your software's alternatives, congratulations, you won. You got the power users, the developers, t…

The users who opt out of telemetry are a very tiny minority barely worth considering in terms of numbers. Further, they are explicitly saying "I don't value my vote on feature usage as much as I value turning off this data report which contains zero personal information and is used for no other purposes than changing the product. Again, don't want a voice in how the product evolves, cool, just don't complain about not having a voice down the road when something you don't like happens. It's like people who don't like their local politician who spent the year before bragging about how voting was stupid and just a way for the government to track you so you weren't going to do it.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#220

Post by asadotzler »

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…

Most users, like 90% or more have tabs that all fit visibly in the horizontal space. Look it up. Mozilla's telemetry is public. 5 or 6 tabs fit just fine and in a sidebar are hugely wasteful of pixels. You think everyone browses just like you so you can't imagine why the browser is shaped for people not like you but your browsing habits are in the ultra-minority. Take a look at the telemetry before making silly posts like this.
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