The worst thing about the Proton UI that I never hear anyone talk about is that it is objectively a massive downgrade if you're not using a modern 1080p (or higher res) monitor. My laptop is an old X220 Thinkpad, so that change actually affected my ability to work efficiently by pointlessly wasting a ton of screen space, and it's part of the same trend in software engineering of user-hostile decisions that impact people who either can't afford or don't want to use newer hardware for whatever reason. Except in this case it's not even something like making everything a bloated Electron or React app, it was just changing the UI to something that looks way worse for no reason other than to create the superficial impression that Mozilla still cares about Firefox. I run a customized userchrome because Proton sucks so much for me to use.
How to make a better default Firefox UI
81–90 of 266 posts
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#82My 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 a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself.
So GTK text fields behave a certain way on the entire platform (Linux). Other browsers choose to implement a behavior that is totally inconsistent with the rest of the platform. As far as I am concerned, Firefox was the only browser that implemented this correctly. Do you truly personally believe the right move here was to match the beahvior of other browsers, who themselves are incorrect by not respecting platform conventions?
> The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle
Don't fix something that isn't broken.
> Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them
I can hardly see how "having more code means it makes it harder for me to maintain" is a legitimate argument. This argument makes no sense. Delete the entire URL bar then. The URL bar requires lots of code and is hard to write unit tests for. (/s) 1. Mozilla engineers are literally paid to maintain the browser, 2. not wanting to update unit tests to deal with a pref is pure laziness, no excuse.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#83Is 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 moved on to sideberry and hide the normal tab bar completely. But if you open two identical tabs in the default layout I have no clue which one is active anymore. You can't understand that UI, you have learn it. It's infuriating.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#84Where can I vent about that "upgraded"-page which wants me to click through many dialog boxes of stuff I don't want to know about? A bigger problem with it is that it unfocuses from the last used/selected tab to this newly added tab so that it's hard to find where I left off, which can get a bit hard when using many nested tabs in Sidebery because the tab gets appended at the very end.
I've never seen any page like that (I'm on Fedora)
> A bigger problem with it is that it unfocuses from the last used/selected tab to this newly added tab so that it's hard to find where I left off
Often Firefox remembers the last tab you were at when you do ctrl+w, not sure if it works for this though
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#85Is 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 can understand why someone would make a different design decision, and I would probably agree with their rationale to prefer 'connected' tabs.
But no, I don't have a problem with Firefox's tab style. It's immedaitely learnable. I've never once second guessed which was the active tab or what those things up there are.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#86The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.
It's (almost) every major software. I mainly use Chrome, and in their newest M121 release they made not one, but three major UI changes and I hate every single one of them. For the curious, they are (together with my rant): 1. the new "simplified" bookmark save flow which is more complicated than the old one; 2. loss of the ability to disable system notification (i.e. to use Chrome's built-in one, which I prefer); 3.…
If I had to guess why they might not let you customize it
- the people who make the software don't know or don't care about the other way you want it
- it adds a bit more complexity / sometimes code debt to let that thing be customized
- the design might be a specific way that they don't want to change
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#87Whenever 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…
My userChrome tweaks for vertical tabs: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...
Includes screenshots! :)
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#88Brave browser recently also introduced buttons. I was a tad annoyed with it, but accepted it. Until my wife recently saw the new look while I was working and asked how I could even put up with this. She argued that tabs should look like tabs and not buttons. Fortunately for Brave the rollback is quite easy with a flag in `brave://flags` where you can disable the `brave-horizontal-tabs-update` feature.
The downside of using hidden flags like this is that most of the time you're just delaying the inevitable, as opposed to just biting the bullet now. Up to you to decide which is the least worst.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#89The 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.
Padding's great on my desktop with two 24" monitors. On my one-screen 13" laptop it's less welcome.
Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI
#90Better 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 see tab groups more easily. On top of that you can bookmark tab trees, thus saving progress of your research, documentation, etc etc.
My CSS file and a couple of screenshots are here: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...
(I need to add a screenshot with nested and coloured tabs, will add that once I submit this comment)