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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

#71

Post by lopkeny12ko »

My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570

Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship this "feature" AND remove the option to opt out of it.

Some users prefer it. And that's fine! But don't take away my god damn option and force it down my throat.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#73

Post by logicprog »

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.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#74

Post by flurdy »

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?

I don't give a monkey if it looks like a button or not.

But I have a problem with a lot of the Firefox themes making it very difficult to quickly see which tab is the active one. I generally look for themes where this is obvious.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#75

Post by _notreallyme_ »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #71

My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship thi…

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...

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#76

Post by arboles »

marionauta wrote: post #65
jasonjayr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any insight as to why do they mark it as "not supported" ?

It's corporate talk for "if it breaks, don't complain"

It's also a sneaky strategy to deal with features you've decided to remove, because users are that fucking stupid.

1. Instead of just removing the feature, hide the feature and call it unsupported so the users who remember the feature can't complain yet.

2. Then finally remove the feature in the next update, with justification that it was an unsupported option and used by few people, so users can't complain.

Frog boiled. With each update the company seems to be acting rationally on "metrics" and principles, but the decision was set internally before that.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#78

Post by black7375 »

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…

In the middle of the article, there is a brief discussion about icons and colors. I also think that well-coordinated color icons are good for readability and usability.

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...

However, it is difficult to apply it universally to support a variety of colors. If it is similar to the background color, it is difficult to distinguish and there may be contrast issues depending on the light/dark theme. I think it's just the ease of development of a solid color icon that matches the color of the text.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#79

Post by ikt »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #71

My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship thi…

> this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility

Really?

It literally says why it was changed:

it was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself. The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle, taking into account all the possible pref combinations (for example under certain combinations it was not possible to select a word), and having to execute more tests for them. Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#80

Post by lopkeny12ko »

_notreallyme_ wrote: post #75
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #71

My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship thi…

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...

> Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that

Yes, I understand, and that's true. But no other native text field behaves like this; only other browsers. In fact, one of the formerly big selling points of Firefox over Chrome for me, at the time, was that in Firefox, interacting with the URL bar didn't select all (read: it behaved like all other GTK text fields). "Making Firefox behave more like Chrome" is an anti-feature when most of your users aren't using Chrome precisely because of asinine behaviors like this.

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