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Firefox Release 89.0

mozilla.org

231–240 of 487 posts

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#231
I find it infuriating how designers keep adding more and more whitespace and padding on my desktop computer. If you want to make your UI easier to use on touch devices that's fine, but Windows 10 has a tablet mode that I keep disabled, so there's no reason to assume I'm not using a mouse. If I go to Customize toolbar there's three density options: Touch, Normal, and Compact (not supported). Why aren't there a supported compact mode, and why is the normal mode so full of unnecessary padding?

With the new design my bookmarks menu that previously had plenty of vertical space left now needs scrolling. Tabs have poor contrast and lack visual anchoring to the web content they contain.

I'm going to keep browser.proton.enabled to false in about:config as long as it's possible.

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#232
Removing menu iconography and making background tab separation less obvious seem odd choices from an accessibility point of view

The use of more vertical space is also bothersome but a personal preference

Overall, meh, at least on Windows. Feels like nothing important has changed other than it looks worse and screws with muscle memory. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

It feels like the "form over function" type of designers had their hands all over this. Experience is taking a backseat to design and I always hate that

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#234

Does anyone feel that this new UI brings notable improvement? I don't think it is much worse, other than taking some extra vertical space but for the most part my reaction is "meh". I feel like these resources could have been spent much better in other parts of the browser. Am I missing some reason why this is worth the investment?

I don't mind the changes. I had to look a bit for the new location of the screenshot tool. It's now a button you can add to the toolbar. Otherwise, the changes are mostly pretty subtle and they make sense to me.

They have UI people and designers. So they are going to be doing UI and design things. IMHO they are better off with these people than without. Browsers are very competitive. So, keeping the UI fresh and up to date is important.

Also, they can't keep everyone happy by changing nothing, which would make yet other people unhappy. So, kind of a damned if you do and damned if you don't. I feel the changes are mostly reasonable and not disruptive so I see very little reason to get upset over these changes.

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#235
post #169

I'm a long time user of FF. I really don't like the UI changes in this upgrade, but setting: "browser.proton.enabled" to false "browser.uidensity" to 1 (while using the `System Theme`) Seems to have done the trick, so, I can just ignore the UI changes (which is great)... fingers crossed in that this keeps working in the future. UI changes are very much subjective, so, I think that it's great that some people like the…

Settings probably will be removed as soon as possible. Take a look at UI customizations that can be made using userChrome.css : https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#236
post #151

Does anyone feel that this new UI brings notable improvement? I don't think it is much worse, other than taking some extra vertical space but for the most part my reaction is "meh". I feel like these resources could have been spent much better in other parts of the browser. Am I missing some reason why this is worth the investment?

Completely useless, yes. The tabs are now semi-transparent on Windows, which is annoying and doesn't help anything. I guess there's an option somewhere to set opacity to 100% but I'm not ready to spend 30 minutes to hunt it down.

If it exists, it's likely buried in about:config, which is guarded by a warning telling you to go away. And eventually it will be removed because no one[1] used it, which proves that the designers were right.

[1] Except for some weirdos who disabled telemetry. They're probably so paranoid they believe Mozilla would abuse the studies feature to promote a TV series or something like that.

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use niche or power user features frequently, then it can feel like almost every single update is reworking or removing a feature you depend on. Firefox updates are a constant stream of "1% of users use this feature so it's fine to do X to it" but it turns out that a lot of people fall into a lot of those small buckets at once.

What features are you talking about?

E.g. the last update removed right click -> open image, which I used all the time to view images in full screen. Now there's only an option to open the image in a new tab, which requires additional clicks to achieve the same thing.

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#238
post #169

I'm a long time user of FF. I really don't like the UI changes in this upgrade, but setting: "browser.proton.enabled" to false "browser.uidensity" to 1 (while using the `System Theme`) Seems to have done the trick, so, I can just ignore the UI changes (which is great)... fingers crossed in that this keeps working in the future. UI changes are very much subjective, so, I think that it's great that some people like the…

Oh, system theme made quite a difference. Uff.

Re: Firefox Release 89.0

#239
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly blunt it doesn't matter what a team is doing. They paid $X million to "design resources" and directed those resources at the redesign featured in this release. Instead they could have paid that to backend, other UX initiatives, the extension team, the privacy team... I understand that you can't swing resources around freely in the short term but you don't have a bunch of designers sitting around by ac…

Good UI developers are incredibly hard to find. If they let them go, it will take a couple years to get a new team assembled and integrated into Mozilla. I agree with the idea of other UX initiatives though. They could definitely have the team work on other parts of Firefox even though that isn't as immediately visible to all users.

>Good UI developers are incredibly hard to find.

Is that why the ones they do have keep messing up the UI?

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