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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

#91
post #61

I don't know, this post wants to convince readers that there are UX rules from which the theme author created an objectively better Firefox theme, yet most of the changes strike me as personal preferences. It's obviously well made and maintained, but personally I don't think it's visually very appealing and looks in parts more cluttered. So I think people have different preferences, Firefox went with one design but t…

The UI is definitely a matter of taste, which is why I created the distribution in three different shapes. However, it was confusing that when muting, there was no indication that it was loading or there was no tab separator.

yeah, all the things that happen in the Korean version seem like bugs that should be filed IMO!

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#92
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I agree. It seems there are two conflicting views here.

"Firefox is a kind of browser, which happens to be running on a desktop."

"Firefox is a kind of desktop app, which happens to be rendering websites."

In the first, Firefox should act like other browsers because "browsers" are the relevant reference group. In the second, Firefox should act like other apps on the platform because the platform is the relevant reference group. Personally, I think the second view is simply correct. How often do you switch between browsers? For all but a few power users, switching browsers is vanishingly rare compared to switching desktop apps. This suggests that at least for browser chrome, desktop consistency is much more important than browser consistency.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#93
I like the Photon-style version of this, looks pretty good.

If anyone is using Nix + Home Manager, I lazily set it up with my Librewolf configuration by just manually porting the preferences and then @importing from the Git repository. Could probably be done better (is there a good way to import other JS files from the user.js file?) but it works.

Much smaller (and better looking) tabs, and yeah, the addition of icons back to the menus is an improvement for sure.

https://github.com/jchv/nixos-config/commit/d3db419ff44347a8...

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#94

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…

Plus looking at the screenshots of the "controversial" FF89 one of the biggest changes seems to be redesigning the tabs w/ more padding.

I didn't even notice that change because I have the top tab bar hidden and use Tree Style Tab that has a design which blends nicely with FF.

I don't like FF in particular but the tab tree is 100% enough of a UX gain vs all the small details chrome/safari does slightly better that I don't think twice (besides dev panel, I use chrome for frontend work).

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#95

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.

Padding's great on my desktop with two 24" monitors. On my one-screen 13" laptop it's less welcome.

Okay fair haha

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#96
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge has vertical tabs out of the box. And yeah we get it, because vertical tabs people and tree tabs people are the vegans of browser discussions. Please, we get that you like vertical tabs. No need to keep going on about it.

Please, don't perpetuate the myth that vegans "keep going on about things" unless you've seen someone do it in real life.

Most vegans I know use Edge.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#97

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…

I switched to Vivaldi as a result of the removal of this feature from Firefox, because Vivaldi still allows you to choose this behavior. Are there other Unix browsers you're aware of that allow you to disable click-to-select? It'd be nice to at least have some options, although I'm generally happy with Vivaldi.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#98
Everyone is writing their pet peeves, so here are mine:

* Having a large tree of bookmark folders, navigating it to add a new bookmark is horrible in the small pop-up that is the "Add Bookmark" UI.

* The Bookmarks sidebar allows to search by name but not to find where they are. A bookmark search add-on (Bookmark search plus 2) solves this, but it shouldn't be needed.

EDIT: I've been told about right-click -> Show in Folder. This is great! Not the best UI, though (the mentioned add-on is still much more intuitive)

* Cannot have multiple sidebars. So you cannot have Tree Style Tabs opened (for vertical tab handling) and the bookmarks folders & search at the same time. Bonkers.

Actually, that's all. Mostly it's about handling of bookmarks! Not sure if the rest of the UI is just fine or that I got used to it and I'm now blind to its quirks, but I feel pretty comfortable with Firefox. I never felt a strong need to complain about style redesigns, like some other people do.

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#99

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…

> 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.

TabMixPlus! Dynamic width vertically scrollable fully customizable multirow tab bar. I have 50 tabs open, 22 on screen, and perfect overview. It still technically runs on current Firefox, but you have to engage in some very vigorous modding. See the README https://github.com/onemen/TabMixPlus but be aware that this will completely disable extension signature validation. (I blame Mozilla.)

Re: How to make a better default Firefox UI

#100
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 boi…

never remove features: “product is too bloated”

remove features: “product is tricking us”

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