> "We’ve redesigned and modernized the core experience to be cleaner, more inviting, and easier to use."
Why does the UI change with every single Firefox release? I find myself having to re-adjust every time a new update is shipped.
What's wrong with having a consistent experience that survives for more than 6 months? It's just a URL bar, and a bunch of tabs. Just leave it be already.
Last major Firefox UI overhaul was... Firefox 57, the first Quantum release, in November 2017.
It's had various tweaks since, but my day to day experience has been the same since then. This is not an absurd pace of UI change in my opinion.
And yes it is a conceptually simple UI, but with the whole stuff around the web with security, permissions, tab and window management and how an awful lot of modern computer use by an awful lot of people is conducted entirely inside a web browser it's a UI that is worth improving where improvements can be found.
Your day to day experience isn't necessarily the same as everyone else's. It hasn't been long since "View page info" was confined to a hidden menu and all context menu labels were changed for absolutely no reason.
When Chrome first came out, the lightweight, clean and out of your field of view tab bar was a welcome change.
FF did pretty good with small changes that, in my view, have made it look better over the years.
edit : Ok, checked the new design. Definitely don't like the tab buttons, mainly because when there are multiple open, there are no discernable borders among them. So a tad bit confusing.
This is what happens when you have UX designers as full-time employees. They need some sort of grand project to work on. Same thing happened with reddit.
I would point out that "the UX community" is no more a monolith than "the developer community" -- many UX designers do not spend their time chasing the latest UI fads and adding novelty for its own sake.
UX and designers don’t initiate changes. That is driven by product managers who define features, ask for new designs, review options and choose the final design.
The same can be said for developers. Few devs can just make arbitrary changes to an application. They take requirements, produce implementations, and go through review and revision.
I've been on FF for decades, what are you talking about? The last "major" change was quantum and it still looks 90% the same. Even the UI changes look mostly the same. I've seen bigger UI changes between every Android/iOS version. GitHub has changed more. Spotify. Slack. I'm still the tabs, url bar, bookmark toolbar that I've had since the early 2000's. I actually appreciate the fact that things haven't changed much.
Edit: I just upgraded after I posted this. Difference? Slightly darker and forward/backward buttons don't have a circle around them. And pocket button isn't in the URL bar and I can actually remove it (and here the other day everyone was complaining about it being bigger. GONE NOW). That's almost unnoticeable (unlike Android changing the clock location) and I can remove pocket. Win?
Check out mobile. I had to spend a lot of time with parents to teach them how this works after upgrade. Only to realize I did not understand recent changes - I though collections are there instead of bookmarks, but it's a collection of tabs... Really confusing for me and my parent-users. Also very easy to mess up by them.
So collections/bookmarks weirdness, menu moved to bottom, dark style, major changes on "new tab" screen. I hope there will be no more changes to mobile view in this update.
It makes me dread taking their monthly releases. I wish they would decouple security fixes with everything else. My address bar is permanently broken, I cannot delete previously viewed sites as suggestions at all anymore.
UIs can be function first just like clothing, which is how I like it, just like clothing.
Fashion is nothing but an obstacle for people with practical concerns. Pardon me for hating fashion, but I do.
I also frequently wish developers would leave well enough alone, but what changes are you referring to? I don't remember big changes since Firefox 57 and even those took me maybe thirty seconds of adjustment.
This recent update seems more like a very minor reskinning than anything that would require adjustment.
Even the back button is wrong in the new version. Previously it spanned up to the left edge of the window. Now it's moved to the right, lacks immediate feedback and then it is drawn to the right with some new empty space for no reason but to make it harder to hit the back button, the most used button of the interface.
The visual cue with the circle around it is also gone. Even the lines used to draw the arrow are thinner, making it less visible. Compare:
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.
I disagree. These small unnecessary tweaks can really disrupt regular users' workflows.
For example, they just changed "Undo close tab" to "Reopen closed tab". Not only is it difficult to justify how this is clearer (any casual computer user should be familiar with the concept of 'undo'), but for a regular user:
- There's a period where you have to adjust, scanning for the correct menu entry each time;
- This change also modified the hotkey from 'u' for 'undo' to 'o' for... re-open, apparently.
Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?
I love Firefox, am a daily user, but I get very annoyed at the lack of proper change control that's applied.
This kind of arbitrary change at the very least annoys users, but can also degrade usability and workflow.
Finally, by showing they don't review their minor changes very well, it makes it harder to trust that they won't accidentally introduce some major bug or security flaw.
Small tweaks are like living with opinionated people who have to touch and move everything that is not where they think it should be.
You have no clue how annoying and nerve wrecking that is.
Changing my daily workspace where I am supposed to be productive is something that should be considered a breaking change. I'd like software to leave my workspace alone if at all possible.
Make another product for those who want it different.
It does. As you said they are small and maybe you don't notice, but for some of us, it may mess up our muscle memory. I believe parent poster's honesty because in every update, trying to change back new UI elements is really annoying. Worse, some of them cannot be reverted. You have to adjust yourself to a libre software's changes.
idk. I kind of trust that the firefox team has competent designers that know what they are doing. Perhaps they found some issues in usability studies, tested a redesigned that fixed those, and sent the patch in the current release.
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.
This is absurd, but I wound up finding some settings in about:config to compensate for it.
- browser.compactmode.show = true, which brings back compact
- layout.css.devPixelsPerPx scales the whole app. I brought it down from 2 to 1.95, which looks normal scale on a retina screen.
- But this also scales down the content of the page. To compensate for that, I want to be zoomed in slightly at all times. So I added 1.05 to toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues, and then set 1.05 as the browser default.
The tabs shrink back down to normal scale, the web stays the same, and it fits much better on my 13" display.
Having the tabs be free-floating buttons is still weird, but you can't win them all.
Having empty space is considered «clean», «light», «fresh» and having less buttons (by hiding everything into some menus that you need 3 clicks to access) is called «streamlined interface».
I hate that too. On my phone that is 2.5x larger than my old Samsung I see less information on screen compared to old phone, because everything needs to be «light» and «clean».
I miss text that would just wrap along the length of the window. Using Github always infuriates me because I have a nice, wide macbook screen, yet they force code to be displayed in a text box that uses maybe 1/3 of my screen width
"works" in quotes. Compact after an update I measured as a third taller than "normal" density before the update (100px vs 75px). I want maximum vertical space for the website, not for the browser UI. It's really not compact anymore.
I can't stand this new UI. Removing icons that which ends up making navigating menus more difficult, these new "floating" tabs are ugly as sin, you can barely see them in light mode...just...awful. Making the browser harder to use to follow "design trends" is ruining Mozilla. That Alpenglow theme was a completely asinine waste of resources, just make your browser match the system theme - we have theme extensions for a reason. They claim they are removing unused features but give us useless garbage like that built-in rainbow theme.
The only reason I use Firefox is because it's the only decent FOSS option that I can use on all my devices. My patience is wearing thin and this is not going to be a good enough reason for much longer.
Make your browser competitive with Google instead of trying to impress your inner circle of designer hipster friends. The CEO gave themselves a fat raise and gutted staff for _this_?!
- Non-Google, non-chromium, non-blink engine browser
- Support for good keyboard navigation (vimium etc)
- Support for Ublock Origin
And the only browser that satisfies those requirements is ruining my user experience by removal of «compact» mode (I know it can be brought back but it's temporary) and making UI bigger without any reason, because having unnecessary empty spaces everywhere is what's considered good design now.
Recently I opened some page that was filled with ads and banners and only 17% of my screen was actually filled by content that I want to be reading. Now, with the new Proton™ design I guess I'll have to get used to 12% of my screen being used.
The lack of tab separators and the poor contrast between the tab bar and the rest of the chrome are my biggest issues. Chrome has both tab separators and higher contrast between the tab section and the rest. And of course, the old Firefox design also has tab separators and very high contrast.
One of my biggest complaints about Firefox is how much work I have to do in my userChrome.css to make it look nice. My current one is almost 400 lines and it's mostly adding separators/element padding, changing border radiuses and disabling hover and focus styles.
that and the container highlight has moved to the top of the tab. On windows 10, i am having a difficult time identifying which tabs are in a container and which are not...
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 new UI better and keep using it as long as there's also a way to not alienate existing users that like the existing UI.
The browser.uidensity setting is actually exposed in the UI, in the customise toolbar panel, so it seems to be an official setting that should stick around.
It no longer exposes compact option, despite it still being in many places in chrome's browser.css (if you grep browser.css there's about the same amount of references to compact and touch variants). Just why? It looks like it was not removed for any technical/maintenance reason, but just to spite users.
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?
My initial reaction to the beta version was that the UI was much worse, but I decided to give it a chance and spend a few weeks trying to get used to it.
Now that I've had time to play with it, I'm even more convinced my initial reaction was correct. But I've also had time to reflect on why, and in my view there are two problems with this new design.
Removing visual separators from the tabs makes them much harder to distinguish - the only difference between one tab and the next is a larger horizontal space. In prose, when we want to separate sentences, we don't just use longer spaces; we use other visual indicators like capital letters and full stops (periods). Paragraphs are separated by vertical space, which is visually distinct from a horizontal one.
The second problem is that the tab you're not supposed to click on (the active tab) looks like a button, while the tabs you are meant to click on (the inactive tabs) are presented as text. This is opposite to normal UX conventions.
There are some subjective improvements to the look and feel of this UX change, but overall I'm confused as to why the Firefox UX team would go against established conventions to produce something that's visually more difficult to use and less intuitive than they had before.
Fortunately userChrome.css is still usable if you set an about:config option (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets), so I can see about fixing the problem myself, but I'm concerned that Firefox's march toward reduced configurability will eventually remove this option.
Overall, my concerns on Firefox are the same as most; in the pursuit of market share, they're moving further and further away from their roots by removing customisation options. Remember when you could change Firefox's theme without using hidden configuration options?
Oh god, you were not joking. I'm honestly wondering what graphics designers are thinking to come up with a design that _literally will not distinguish neighboring elements from each other_.
Pretty good observations. I'm someone who knows very little about UX/UI and what you said makes a lot of sense. Having the active tab "depressed" is more typical.
While I think the redesign looks good, I don't really have strong feelings on it. I mostly just want a supported interface, so I finally gave up on compact mode. It's just ok. I guess they wanted to differentiate themselves from Chromium browsers in a more significant way?
While most complaints, including from my spouse, are that the tabs are no longer delineated, that part hasn't bothered me much. I consider the delineation the icon on the left, and x on the right.
Part of me likes the freshening up. I won't quit using Firefox over these changes, I've been using it for 20 years now and won't be changing until I'm forced. There's still no other browser with a built-in search bar that also works correctly with a keyboard shortcut other than Firefox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has everything I need in a desktop browser, it just isn't supported at all on iOS which is equally important for me these days. And honestly, Firefox is probably the only browser that isn't from Apple or Microsoft that I'd use. Otherwise I prefer something as important as a browser backed by a truly large organization. Microsoft Edge is really hard to beat in my view once you consider all the intrinsic qualities to it like support. I'll put it this way, no one is making a mistake using Safari or Edge.
I like most everything about Firefox, the browser hasn't ever been ruined, but you got to wonder if there's truly even a place for 3rd party browsers in this era. If I weren't a legacy user, I'd just use Edge and be happy not knowing what I'm missing out on with alternatives.
I personally think it's a big improvement over what it was before -- on macOS at least. On macOS, Firefox had always felt a little bit off. Nothing too egregious, but just enough to make it slightly unpleasant (like the non-native context menus). I feel like that has been resolved in this update.
Since you've already mentioned it - I hear that Firefox has non-native context menus all the time, but for the life of me couldn't tell any difference between "native" and "non-native" context menus. Anybody has any proof/example of this?
Try streaming a call on MacOS... you'll feel a bit off.
40x the energy usage vs Safari. It's atrocious. Laptop gets to silly high temps, has to be bad for battery life... But I'm sure glad we have some new popup confirmation windows. Cool.
EDIT: I use FF on my Mac as my primary browser. Just so frustrated at how little fucks they give about performance and battery usage.
I think the new design is really beautiful. For me that is an improvement and I switched from Edge to Firefox for now. But design is always subjective and I can understand how many people would rather see technical improvements over UI refreshes.
But as you can see it brings some users back to Firefox.
I've been using it for a while now with Firefox developer edition and I can't figure out a reason why it was done. Does it give a new look? Sure, but I too don't know if anything was made better because of it.
Many of these changes are made not to improve some actual user grievance but merely to satisfy designer egos or product managers' needs to remain employed.
I'm absolutely sick of this trend of dumbing-down lowest-common-denominator UI, removing useful features and affordances for learning. Insanely huge buttons, rounded corners everywhere, floating controls in a sea-of-white/blackspace...
On the bright side, I believe the UI is still highly customisable so it should be possible to make it look exactly as you want, but it's not exactly straightforward.
I'd like some arguments for why this inane trend of UI is occurring, instead of just downvotes... otherwise the "we'll dumb you down so you can't rebel" theory gains more weight! If there's one thing this fucked-up industry is good at, it's lying and pulling the wool over your eyes so they can herd you where they want.
I think I'll throw a fit when my 'tabs-on-the-bottom' css inevitably stops working. Why? I don't know. It's not notably better, it's just I like having the top of the content at the top of the screen. But it uses the most legacy of firefox's legacy features, so I can't see it staying around forever.
I don't like it. The tabs look like buttons and not tabs. It's such an unnecessary deviation from a standard tabbed interface look and feel that everyone is accustomed to. I'm not sure what their reasons are for experimenting with something new but I would be curious to know.
I'm using https://github.com/ShatteredIcicle/firefox-ui-regression-men... in my userChrome.css file to use more traditional looking tabs. I'm trying to figure out how to make the active tab background the same colour as the bar where the forward/backward buttons are so it integrates into that UI.
"I'm not sure what their reasons are for experimenting with something new but I would be curious to know."
This is pure speculation on my part, but I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the selected tab to stand out visually. The selected "tab" turns white in the default theme. But if the tab is attached to the URL toolbar, then the URL toolbar also needs to be the same colour as the selected tab. It would look odd if they were attached but each was a different colour.
I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the active tab to stand out visually, but not the whole URL toolbar. So the tab becomes a button and is detached from the URL toolbar. Now the active "tab" and the URL toolbar can have different colours: A "louder" colour for the selected tab to make it stand out, and a "quieter" colour for the URL toolbar that lets it recede a little from the foreground.
That's what I think may be the reason for the tab change - but as I say, it's pure speculation (and could be completely wrong).
After using it for a couple of hours the new version is super annoying. It takes more time and effort to find a tab, everything is less legible. What could possibly be the point of this?? Look more like Chrome?
If I want something that looks like Chrome I can use Chrome. It's not like it's more expensive or anything...
There's more info on tabs now, e.g. when a tab is playing audio. And it apparently was also triggered by observing that people didn't really know they could move tabs around and manipulate them in other ways, which does seem more obvious now that they're "detached" from the content.
That said, I won't really notice since I use the Sidebery extension for vertical tabs. But I've got a separate profile running to isolate Spotify and its desire for DRM, and there it's been nice in a small way.
With the disconnect from the page, they’re not really “tabs” anymore at all, and haven’t been on mobile for a while. The tab bar is now a dock/task bar/window manager.
I had the same reaction. It reads a bit like the UI engineers didn't have enough to do and stared at it until they found things to change. For instance, having the tab visually disconnected to cue that you can rearrange it is fine... but at this point if a user doesn't know they can rearrange tabs, maybe they shouldn't be rearranging tabs.
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.
I had the same issue with the screenshot tool, and added it back, but then I learned that it's been added to the right-click context menu and now I'm torn on whether I still need it as a separate button.
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.
One notable recent improvement I will mention is better support for dark mode in the default theme (although I think this fix precedes Firefox 89, it's definitely available in Firefox 88). I previously had to hack the CSS to prevent Firefox pages from searing out my eyes with white at night.
These days I'm more satisfied with the default CSS on e.g. the Firefox Home page, although some pages like "view source" still do not respect dark mode unless I edit them.
I found the UI changes on windows, while being fairly minor, being much nicer than what was before. It's added a lot of polish without affecting my workflow in any ways.
yeah honestly I don't understand why they don't just freeze the UI and focus on some privacy incentives, that's what end users care as well as where VC money is.
Really? They seem much bigger, like twice the size.
I don’t dislike them as much as I initially did. They’re just a little to big on low resolution monitor.
Personally I’d like to see browsers move away from trying to be “special” and just follow the design of operating system. A little tricky on Linux, but for Windows and macOS just follow the guidelines from Microsoft and Apple.
The UI/UX team that works on this likely aren't backend coders. They can either fire the team or put them to use, but reassigning them random C++/Rust tasks probably isn't possible.
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 accident. Someone decided that they should hire them.
I love Firefox ethos, Firefox keeps redesigning itself over and over, and this time, for the worse.
I have a 400 LOC userChrome.css file because the new redesign was barely usable since Firefox beta received this makeover.
- There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart. Made worse on sides without Favicons.
- I loved the mic/speaker icon when a tab is playing/listening audio. They had to make it TWO lines in the tab, and made it difficult to notice when you have more tabs.
- I could use some icons in the right top menu. It looks nice and easier to use in Edge, that has icons for every option.
- Compact mode is gone, that was discussed here before.
That said, I like the native elements (buttons, up/down arrows, etc). The new icons in the addressbar look nicer and fits nicely in.
There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart.
It seems every UI eventually turns into a featureless sea of white (or black) once enough "modern" "designers" have their way with it.
I seriously do not understand the appeal of "clean" or "sleek", and the ridiculous hiding of everything that's important; the appropriate analogy here is that of a machine shop, where tools and work are everywhere you look --- and a "clean" one with everything put away is a sign of nothing being done.
The speaker one threw me for a loop today and I hate it. So much harder to scan for...
Beyond that, I do not understand why the active tab cannot be "connected" to the browser chrome. I don't hate the strong shadow nor the subdued non-active tabs but the disconnect feels like an unnecessary abstraction.
I use the Tree Style Tabs extension [0], which took some getting used to but is miles better for tab navigation.
Vertical tab sidebar means you can see more tabs at a time, the collapsible tree means you can organize them into logical groups, and it's super customizable.
Tab contrast and audio icons are identical to the way they were in FF 88.0 for me.
Previously tabs always took one line of text, but now they sometimes take two (e.g. to show the currently playing indicator, which is now text and not just an icon)
I suspect that a large percentage of Firefox's remaining user base are power users - people who tend to value function over fluff. It seems odd to me that they'd alienate their current users like this. I've used Firefox for over 10 years, but I think I'll start using chromium until the next Firefox UI overhaul. The tab design is just unacceptably awful.
I've been using FF for 20 years. More if you count its previous incarnations. Not that it's a competition or anything.
Looking at the screenshots, UI changes seem mindful and subtle to me. They even removed some useless iconography.
Content aware tabs aren't such a bad idea and seem to be executed nicely. Having an option to remove the clutter would be nice, though.
I've been reading about people switching to Chromium due to UI changes for over a decade. Still doesn't make sense to me. I feel people just want to vent but I could be wrong and UI changes do have this powerful effect on some.
Still though, Gnome and FF making UI changes somehow generates tons of rage that I mostly ignore but sometimes find amusing.
I used to think the same. Then they broke my favorite extensions, then removed RSS, later bookmark descriptions. Just wait long enough and they'll probably get to the features you like. The other day I installed a different browser to see what it was like and you know what, there wasn't anything I missed from Firefox. I didn't change my default because I'm used to the Firefox dev tools, but I really have no reason to prefer it anymore, I'm one extension or feature away from becoming one of those people that left for something else.
Readit News
Why does the UI change with every single Firefox release? I find myself having to re-adjust every time a new update is shipped.
What's wrong with having a consistent experience that survives for more than 6 months? It's just a URL bar, and a bunch of tabs. Just leave it be already.
It's had various tweaks since, but my day to day experience has been the same since then. This is not an absurd pace of UI change in my opinion.
And yes it is a conceptually simple UI, but with the whole stuff around the web with security, permissions, tab and window management and how an awful lot of modern computer use by an awful lot of people is conducted entirely inside a web browser it's a UI that is worth improving where improvements can be found.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/
When Chrome first came out, the lightweight, clean and out of your field of view tab bar was a welcome change.
FF did pretty good with small changes that, in my view, have made it look better over the years.
edit : Ok, checked the new design. Definitely don't like the tab buttons, mainly because when there are multiple open, there are no discernable borders among them. So a tad bit confusing.
I guess it's unsurprising that UX designers would want to continue having work to do.
The same can be said for developers. Few devs can just make arbitrary changes to an application. They take requirements, produce implementations, and go through review and revision.
Edit: I just upgraded after I posted this. Difference? Slightly darker and forward/backward buttons don't have a circle around them. And pocket button isn't in the URL bar and I can actually remove it (and here the other day everyone was complaining about it being bigger. GONE NOW). That's almost unnoticeable (unlike Android changing the clock location) and I can remove pocket. Win?
So collections/bookmarks weirdness, menu moved to bottom, dark style, major changes on "new tab" screen. I hope there will be no more changes to mobile view in this update.
deleting and re-importing history/bookmarks did nothing, but what did eventually work was opening the sqlite table and deleting the rows manually...
This usually means we reskinned and somehow ended with it being slower.
Also the whole release notes are UI changes, particulary for mac ?
I wished the only non-chromium browser with active development was.. idk, different?
There is a reason why there's no "summer 2021 hammer" in hardware store.
I see that the Firefox UI designers agree that it's like fashion design...
Deleted Comment
This recent update seems more like a very minor reskinning than anything that would require adjustment.
Something material to point out as your contribution to firefox when you're interviewing for your next job.
The visual cue with the circle around it is also gone. Even the lines used to draw the arrow are thinner, making it less visible. Compare:
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/19/here-is-what-is-new-and-ch...
It's very distracting to me.
It doesn't. Maybe small parts of it get tweaks here and there. But your argument about having to re-adjust every update is just dishonest.
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.
For example, they just changed "Undo close tab" to "Reopen closed tab". Not only is it difficult to justify how this is clearer (any casual computer user should be familiar with the concept of 'undo'), but for a regular user:
- There's a period where you have to adjust, scanning for the correct menu entry each time;
- This change also modified the hotkey from 'u' for 'undo' to 'o' for... re-open, apparently.
Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?
I love Firefox, am a daily user, but I get very annoyed at the lack of proper change control that's applied.
This kind of arbitrary change at the very least annoys users, but can also degrade usability and workflow.
Finally, by showing they don't review their minor changes very well, it makes it harder to trust that they won't accidentally introduce some major bug or security flaw.
You have no clue how annoying and nerve wrecking that is.
Changing my daily workspace where I am supposed to be productive is something that should be considered a breaking change. I'd like software to leave my workspace alone if at all possible.
Make another product for those who want it different.
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.
- browser.compactmode.show = true, which brings back compact
- layout.css.devPixelsPerPx scales the whole app. I brought it down from 2 to 1.95, which looks normal scale on a retina screen.
- But this also scales down the content of the page. To compensate for that, I want to be zoomed in slightly at all times. So I added 1.05 to toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues, and then set 1.05 as the browser default.
The tabs shrink back down to normal scale, the web stays the same, and it fits much better on my 13" display.
Having the tabs be free-floating buttons is still weird, but you can't win them all.
I hate that too. On my phone that is 2.5x larger than my old Samsung I see less information on screen compared to old phone, because everything needs to be «light» and «clean».
https://i.imgur.com/DEgnh2t.png
https://i.imgur.com/8lreTHi.png
The only reason I use Firefox is because it's the only decent FOSS option that I can use on all my devices. My patience is wearing thin and this is not going to be a good enough reason for much longer.
Make your browser competitive with Google instead of trying to impress your inner circle of designer hipster friends. The CEO gave themselves a fat raise and gutted staff for _this_?!
- Non-Google, non-chromium, non-blink engine browser - Support for good keyboard navigation (vimium etc) - Support for Ublock Origin
And the only browser that satisfies those requirements is ruining my user experience by removal of «compact» mode (I know it can be brought back but it's temporary) and making UI bigger without any reason, because having unnecessary empty spaces everywhere is what's considered good design now.
Recently I opened some page that was filled with ads and banners and only 17% of my screen was actually filled by content that I want to be reading. Now, with the new Proton™ design I guess I'll have to get used to 12% of my screen being used.
Check.
- compact mode
Check.
Orion may be for you (if on Mac)
OTOH, the only other browser that lets you tweak its chrome with your CSS is AFAIK Vivaldi.
[1] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee...
Edit: Welp, the new Firefox update kinda broke MaterialFox: https://i.imgur.com/biLz0e2.png
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 new UI better and keep using it as long as there's also a way to not alienate existing users that like the existing UI.
For anyone not familiar with how to edit the browser config, simply type in 'about:config' into your URL bar and have at it.
Now that I've had time to play with it, I'm even more convinced my initial reaction was correct. But I've also had time to reflect on why, and in my view there are two problems with this new design.
Removing visual separators from the tabs makes them much harder to distinguish - the only difference between one tab and the next is a larger horizontal space. In prose, when we want to separate sentences, we don't just use longer spaces; we use other visual indicators like capital letters and full stops (periods). Paragraphs are separated by vertical space, which is visually distinct from a horizontal one.
The second problem is that the tab you're not supposed to click on (the active tab) looks like a button, while the tabs you are meant to click on (the inactive tabs) are presented as text. This is opposite to normal UX conventions.
There are some subjective improvements to the look and feel of this UX change, but overall I'm confused as to why the Firefox UX team would go against established conventions to produce something that's visually more difficult to use and less intuitive than they had before.
Fortunately userChrome.css is still usable if you set an about:config option (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets), so I can see about fixing the problem myself, but I'm concerned that Firefox's march toward reduced configurability will eventually remove this option.
Overall, my concerns on Firefox are the same as most; in the pursuit of market share, they're moving further and further away from their roots by removing customisation options. Remember when you could change Firefox's theme without using hidden configuration options?
While I think the redesign looks good, I don't really have strong feelings on it. I mostly just want a supported interface, so I finally gave up on compact mode. It's just ok. I guess they wanted to differentiate themselves from Chromium browsers in a more significant way?
While most complaints, including from my spouse, are that the tabs are no longer delineated, that part hasn't bothered me much. I consider the delineation the icon on the left, and x on the right.
Part of me likes the freshening up. I won't quit using Firefox over these changes, I've been using it for 20 years now and won't be changing until I'm forced. There's still no other browser with a built-in search bar that also works correctly with a keyboard shortcut other than Firefox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has everything I need in a desktop browser, it just isn't supported at all on iOS which is equally important for me these days. And honestly, Firefox is probably the only browser that isn't from Apple or Microsoft that I'd use. Otherwise I prefer something as important as a browser backed by a truly large organization. Microsoft Edge is really hard to beat in my view once you consider all the intrinsic qualities to it like support. I'll put it this way, no one is making a mistake using Safari or Edge.
I like most everything about Firefox, the browser hasn't ever been ruined, but you got to wonder if there's truly even a place for 3rd party browsers in this era. If I weren't a legacy user, I'd just use Edge and be happy not knowing what I'm missing out on with alternatives.
40x the energy usage vs Safari. It's atrocious. Laptop gets to silly high temps, has to be bad for battery life... But I'm sure glad we have some new popup confirmation windows. Cool.
EDIT: I use FF on my Mac as my primary browser. Just so frustrated at how little fucks they give about performance and battery usage.
But as you can see it brings some users back to Firefox.
Simply: it's make-work.
I'm absolutely sick of this trend of dumbing-down lowest-common-denominator UI, removing useful features and affordances for learning. Insanely huge buttons, rounded corners everywhere, floating controls in a sea-of-white/blackspace...
On the bright side, I believe the UI is still highly customisable so it should be possible to make it look exactly as you want, but it's not exactly straightforward.
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This is pure speculation on my part, but I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the selected tab to stand out visually. The selected "tab" turns white in the default theme. But if the tab is attached to the URL toolbar, then the URL toolbar also needs to be the same colour as the selected tab. It would look odd if they were attached but each was a different colour.
I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the active tab to stand out visually, but not the whole URL toolbar. So the tab becomes a button and is detached from the URL toolbar. Now the active "tab" and the URL toolbar can have different colours: A "louder" colour for the selected tab to make it stand out, and a "quieter" colour for the URL toolbar that lets it recede a little from the foreground.
That's what I think may be the reason for the tab change - but as I say, it's pure speculation (and could be completely wrong).
If I want something that looks like Chrome I can use Chrome. It's not like it's more expensive or anything...
After removing all corner rounding and tweaking tab bar I am quite happy.
That said, I won't really notice since I use the Sidebery extension for vertical tabs. But I've got a separate profile running to isolate Spotify and its desire for DRM, and there it's been nice in a small way.
That was present for a few versions now. Playing tabs had the audio icon which could be used to mute/unmute.
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.
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.
[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.
These days I'm more satisfied with the default CSS on e.g. the Firefox Home page, although some pages like "view source" still do not respect dark mode unless I edit them.
I don’t dislike them as much as I initially did. They’re just a little to big on low resolution monitor.
Personally I’d like to see browsers move away from trying to be “special” and just follow the design of operating system. A little tricky on Linux, but for Windows and macOS just follow the guidelines from Microsoft and Apple.
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 accident. Someone decided that they should hire them.
I have a 400 LOC userChrome.css file because the new redesign was barely usable since Firefox beta received this makeover.
- There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart. Made worse on sides without Favicons.
- I loved the mic/speaker icon when a tab is playing/listening audio. They had to make it TWO lines in the tab, and made it difficult to notice when you have more tabs.
- I could use some icons in the right top menu. It looks nice and easier to use in Edge, that has icons for every option.
- Compact mode is gone, that was discussed here before.
That said, I like the native elements (buttons, up/down arrows, etc). The new icons in the addressbar look nicer and fits nicely in.
It seems every UI eventually turns into a featureless sea of white (or black) once enough "modern" "designers" have their way with it.
I seriously do not understand the appeal of "clean" or "sleek", and the ridiculous hiding of everything that's important; the appropriate analogy here is that of a machine shop, where tools and work are everywhere you look --- and a "clean" one with everything put away is a sign of nothing being done.
Beyond that, I do not understand why the active tab cannot be "connected" to the browser chrome. I don't hate the strong shadow nor the subdued non-active tabs but the disconnect feels like an unnecessary abstraction.
Vertical tab sidebar means you can see more tabs at a time, the collapsible tree means you can organize them into logical groups, and it's super customizable.
Tab contrast and audio icons are identical to the way they were in FF 88.0 for me.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
It's always been on one line for me, and I use the default styling.
Looking at the screenshots, UI changes seem mindful and subtle to me. They even removed some useless iconography.
Content aware tabs aren't such a bad idea and seem to be executed nicely. Having an option to remove the clutter would be nice, though.
I've been reading about people switching to Chromium due to UI changes for over a decade. Still doesn't make sense to me. I feel people just want to vent but I could be wrong and UI changes do have this powerful effect on some.
Still though, Gnome and FF making UI changes somehow generates tons of rage that I mostly ignore but sometimes find amusing.