I loved Photon. Proton added a lot of nice touches, but I never understood why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons. Tabs is a great metaphor from the real world, and they take less space. I don't see a single advantage of styling them as buttons. The whole point is that they're visually connected to the currently visible page.
Thankfully however I don't care too much because I can still completely hide the tab-bar with my userChrome.css, and use "Tab Center Reborn" to have my tabs on the side instead.
Seconding the tab idea. I need to know in which tab I am. Sometimes I have the five tabs of the same page (hello hn), look up, and I don't know which tab I am. I end up closing the tab with Ctrl+W when I'm done and learn where I was.
Thanks for the extension suggestion I may give it a try.
One advantage I could see is a vertical tab bar mode that’s more visually consistent with the standard horizontal tab bar. Could even animate seamlessly between those modes.
Unpopular opinion: I personally like the 'floating tab' look more. It's sleek and consistent and doesn't bother me at all. Though I think it should be a toggleable setting not a default.
> why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons
I think I read somewhere that the reason was that user studies showed that people did not understand that the tabs could be dragged around, moved to other windows, and generally were "detachable". Floating buttons should make that more obvious.
I'd be interested in research on whether they achieved that goal.
I can't off-hand remember any application where I was able to drag around buttons or, really, interact with them in any way other than pushing the button. That said, I don't think the widgets look particularly button-like (e.g. only the selected tab widget as any depth, the other widgets are flat).
The problem with user studies is that privacy-conscious power users (which are the majority of Firefox user base) don't like to participate in those studies, which make them really skewed.
I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI.
Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web
That expresses exactly what's wrong --- the native UI controls are predictable and accessible and styled with the rest of the OS, and as the cascade of dialogs above it (I'm not sure how that's even possible --- getting to "Offline Data" From "Exceptions - Saved Passwords"?) shows, you can actually see that you're controlling the browser and not merely a page inside it (related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329).
Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast
I've never heard that term before, but whenever I see things like that, I'm reminded of fancy progress bars and such --- the real problem is that you need one in the first place, and instead of fixing the underlying problem of why it's taking so long, you try to hide it...
> Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web
This is such a weird thing to me. Did anyone ever want this? Were users asking for this? Did user studies show that this was somehow desirable or preferable? Did they do a study of Chrome users and find that they were more likely to stick with Firefox if they made this change? Does it significantly reduce code maintenance burden somehow?
It seems like the kind of thing where users only "want" it because it's familiar, and it's only familiar because it's already been forced on them everywhere. Basically it's circular reasoning. It's like the meme of hiding a button and then claiming that users never use that feature, so you can justify removing it.
The problem with modern, native-looking UI surfaces is that they are hard to design and maintain on cross-platform applications.
How do you design and implement an interface that feels native across platforms?
First there is the easy approach: The common denominator elements. Essentially what you get when creating a Java Application. The UI will probably look kind of native, but also outdated. Think Windows 89-Style Settings. You're also limited in how you can present options because you have so few form elements to play with.
The other approach to native is to use modern UI elements. For one thing these are not easy to get. While on macOS Cocoa bindings are at least available, on Windows it is pretty much impossible to get anything but the Windows-89 style form elements. Even if all the bindings were available, which also has to take various Linux Desktop Environments into account, then you had to design for and maintain multiple versions of the same settings menu.
So I hope this explains why non-native controls are a sensible approach. You create your own design system that is (mostly) consistent across platforms. Designers only have to design one surface, they can create new patterns if necessary and engineers only have to maintain one implementation. Of course they have to be accessible and they are. I say "mostly consistent" by the way, because Firefox still respects some UI conventions from operating systems. For example it uses system fonts, system font-scales, and changes naming conventions and button orders appropriately.
This reduces work but of course it still is work to update and maintain that surface. about:preferences in Firefox has quite become quite messy over the years and is neither loved by designers nor engineers, but it's time and resource intensive to update it.
Well, your argument is based on an assumption that chasing latest trends of micro web apps is somehow inherently THE path to strive for. Redesigning around latest trends with web frameworks getting obsolete quicker than you can realistically complete a large project is really inefficient in itself.
Is it really more efficient to maintain a design framework chasing latest web trends instead of having separate native interfaces?
hard disagree here. Let us look at Windows and macOS for a second here, and exclude Linux, because Linux (rather, Linux + your favorite DE) is realistically the issue (due to KDE, GNOME, and a gazillion other types/styles). If you design around a given language for the most recent versions of a native OS, you'll never have issues. Both macOS and Windows include common libraries that map to their respective styles. Microsoft, for example: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/ (link on bottom if you want to drill down to code).
"What about users that want to customize things?"
Give them an alternate path. The browser loads slightly slower (the same as now), and they still get their ability to customize. The rest of us can use the default, faster path.
Product designers should definitely favor local OS norms in most cases. Using one design for all OSs might be organizationally easier in many ways, inter-OS visual consistency offers little benefit to users and doesn't leverage their familiarity with similar idioms in their environments.
> Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast
Yeah. Sometimes you do have to make users wait— e.g. parsing a huge cache to put in a dialog or making shaky network calls— and most designers mental model for addressing that frustration is the slow elevator problem†. Skeletons seemed like a good way to address it. We don't parse screens instantly: we first interpret structure/visual hierarchy so we know where to scan for titles, ordinals, controls, or whatever else we need. Skeletons theoretically let us do that while content loads. More recent research doesn't corroborate claims of silver-bullet efficacy:
† The related anecdote goes something like this: Tenants of an NYC office tower complained of slow elevator service during peak use. The property manager consulted with experts to evaluate the algorithmic efficiency and mechanical components, but it resulted in little improvement. The property manager then turned the exterior elevator doors int mirrors. Most riders were sufficiently emotionally engaged by a life-sized version of themselves long enough to make the wait seem much shorter.
FWIW, I personally really like it when a product is consistent across different devices. Most of learning to use a new product is learning a million details about that product and once I learn them I don't want to have to find they look super different or are in a radically different place just because I happen to be using a different computer for a day. The operating system doesn't really matter: it is a commodity at this point; but I want everything from Word to Facebook to look and function as much the same as possible on every single computer / device... which, BTW, also means I want it to largely look and work the same across different versions of the operating system, as if I am sitting down today at an old computer in a library I don't want Word to be some seemingly unrelated experience to when I use it on my newer computer.
I thereby will claim that cross-platform UI toolkits (which includes "the web") actually affords me--as a user--tremendous value, and I am always pretty happy when I see a product start to figure out their house brand. I do appreciate the other side of this, and I even have sometimes argued it myself to engineering teams I work with as--if nothing else--using the local style is certainly better than being bad at style, and I frankly would rather avoid having to work with a designer. But is it really so shocking to appreciate mine? I always feel like people jus let casually dismiss the idea that users might actually prefer software to look the same everywhere, and yet I feel like it is only particularly snobby tech people (which does include me: I hate poorly done UI) that seem to want the fully unified toolkit, and I think the success of bespoke UI in games really demonstrates this.
Except a browser should load things in the following order:
1) Create Window
2) Create UI (based on native controls for OS)
3) Load drop downs, top level down.
4) If you design your application this way, you won't have to build a skeleton. Mozilla is not using native UI/UX components to build their UI, so they have to go through several extra steps. I'm sure they do this in the name of customizability, but that, IMO, should be optional.
> I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI
Wow, I think you've identified the probable cause of something I've felt was "wrong" about Firefox for a long time but couldn't pin down. Firefox just "feels" bad on a Mac even in comparison to Chrome, not to mention Safari.
The new web-based pop-ups can take a long while to render if a heavy page is being loaded. So if I try to quit Firefox, the "are you sure you want to quit" popup renders empty until the current page is done.
Sure, this happens only on high resource usage, but the previous implementation di not suffer from this.
I think it's just the trend, ms also introduce the fullscreen file menu in office 2010/2013. Their menu also changed to more flat and fullscreen ui instead of popup based. The firefox simply matches the trend (and it is actually a little late to the party)
What an absolute abomination that was. An insane waste of space and a violently assaulting visual distraction. Especially when you're trying to open a document that the current one is referring to, hiding what you're trying to see with useless space.
For me Firefox’s UI design started going off the rails with Australis and Photon, where its UI began to be a major component of Firefox as a brand. I much preferred v1-v4 where Firefox felt more focused on being a tool that fit well into your desktop instead of trying to stand out.
I’m sometimes tempted to try to start a Firefox fork that returns its UI to a “smaller part of a larger desktop” look and feel, but then I remember how impossible it would be to maintain that over time. Wish Gecko was still embeddable so one could just write a new UI and not have to keep patches maintained.
Very well said. People often claim that everyone complains about every Firefox UI change, but this is a perfectly consistent thing to do if you think Firefox has been getting slowly worse since v3.5 or so.
The one thing I will say in its favor is that Firefox still maintains a decent amount of customizability, at least for the seriously dedicated. I still have a separate search bar, a menu bar, and have removed the "hamburger" menu button entirely. For me, the UI has changed very little over the years, but the pile of hacks in my usercss file has grown over time...
As people engage with many more devices on a day to day basis, applications have moved away from "matching the rest of the OS" and towards "consistency of the look an feel across all platforms".
It's still "consistent", just on a different dimension (app-wise instead of OS-wise).
I know HN favors the former, but I don't mind the latter too much. Especially when products are able to strike a nice balance like Outlook on Windows & Mac.
Even v4 was too much for me. I liked the UI pre-v4, and for the longest time after v4 released I would use the FF2 theme (back when themes meant more than just putting an image on your chrome - but that's a whole post by itself) and various extensions (Classic Theme Restorer, Status-4-Evar, and a few self-made Stylish userstyles) to preserve the look of pre-v4 as much as possible. It was comfortable for me.
Or finished Servo enough to embed that. Either would be awesome, then it could be "easy" to make a new browser. Used to be able to do this on Windows (c2000) and reuse the IE renderer all over.
Removing icons from the menus has been one of the most puzzling decisions they made. In the year or so since its removal, using their menus has been a real struggle, and I can see there's even an entry on Mozilla Connect Ideas for it: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/i...
As for the 'curvy' tabs, I can't say I was a fan of it, even in Chrome, it feels like a waste of space and draws attention to it. The straight tabs, even the 'button' tab is a lot better in being out of the way.
Icons in menus are good visual anchors which leads to better usability, but only if they are used sparingly. An icon for every menu item ends up being worse.
Let's say you want to print something, all you need to do is pop open the menu and can quickly scan for the printer icon which is a recognizable shape.
Without the icon, you have to consciously read the lines in the menu to make sure you are clicking on the right one.
You still read the text with the printer icon, but it's a faster index-match when the icon is present.
The only UX/UI request I have for Firefox: Stop changing it. Don't add any more useless tweaks or adware or bundled services.
Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.
Firefox would still have declined, that's kind of unavoidable with Google owning Android, but Mozilla wasn't helping here. Turning Firfox into a lame Chrome-clone by removing everything that made it unique in the first place just ensured that there was no more need to bother with Firefox. Loading the browser up with all kind of telemetry, cloud nonsense and ads also removed any desire to ever bother with it again.
I still think there is plenty of room for a privacy respecting browser in the market, but Mozilla hasn't even been trying to fill that niche in years and still claiming to do so just makes them look like untrustworthy liar.
While that's true, constant UI changing certainly didn't help retain what little market share it already had.
It made the browser compete with itself, and pushed people into alternatives. After all, if you're going to learn a new UI, why not try another browser altogether?
Mozzila turned itself into a privacy browser, not a browser with privacy.
Google added things like WebUSB, Bluetooth, all kinds of web app APIs Mozilla rejected because of tracking risk, etc.
Mozzila killed their coolest features like FlyWeb.
They just haven't kept up with Chrome, and their vision is way too "privacy at all costs" rather than allowing users to decide. They don't seem to share in the modern idea of web apps having full native parity.
> They just haven't kept up with Chrome, and their vision is way too "privacy at all costs" rather than allowing users to decide. They don't seem to share in the modern idea of web apps having full native parity.
Those are literally the last things keeping me with Firefox.
Here's an image of the prehistory: Netscape Navigator 2 and 3, Netscape Communicator 4, all on MacOS. (NS3 is the Gold Edition, as discerned by the edit button in the toolbar. NS4 introduced the bookmark bar, by this requiring more vertical screen estate for the Chrome. Also mind the default grey page background of #CACACA common to all iterations of the Netscape browser.)
Edit: The "Classic" themes of early Firefox and SeaMonkey were still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4, but the toolbar and the location bar merged. (In the early days Firefox and Netscape 6/7 still coexisted in parallel, packaging the same engine, and the "Classic" theme represented the Netscape legacy UI.)
Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen!
There’s another state that may be related to uBlock Origin (or other extensions) immediately afterwards, too: You can click bookmarks etc. but nothing loads (only after a significant delay). Again, awesome UX.
I guess I’m slowly becoming conservative because I’ve come to hate change. Most of the time, it doesn’t improve anything. And then, with increasing odds, changes actually make things worse. Not just limited to Firefox, of course. Also Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, whatever. Hell, even cars are getting worse every year.
Skeleton screens are a great example of bad design being popularized because a couple people in power set arbitrary requirements. "It has to start fast" is a common requirement (a certification requirement on some game consoles, in fact) which leads to skeleton screens, and it juices certain metrics in a way that appeals to metrics-driven leadership, so eventually you get them everywhere and it hides the fact that your application takes forever to actually load and be usable. There are a few different pieces of software I'm stuck using that will often show me a skeleton for multiple seconds while I wait to actually be able to use the app. Just show me a loading screen and a progress bar.
Some people in the browser space haven't lost their minds and track things like how often the layout of a page changes during loading, how often it wiggles around, etc - which penalizes skeletons and other bad tricks, as it should. But this particular sensibility hasn't caught on elsewhere.
Skeleton screen serves another purpose than just fast startup metrics.
Not everyone runs good hardware, in fact the majority doesn't. When you click to open something and it doesn't load immediately many people will click again and again which leads to opening 2+ windows and also adding to the loading time of the first one.
When 70%+ of the users are not skilled in tech using laptops on battery saving mode this happens a lot.
I used to love change up until about a decade ago. Back in the day, computing was still pushing the boundaries of what's possible and new features could change your life.
Nowadays, the innovation has plateaued and computing became an ad delivery mechanism and a way for employees of bloated corporations to justify their salaries "fixing" things that didn't need to be fixed.
> Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen!
Precisely. Much better. I know something is happening. And if done well, I can interact with the shell, like use the search box, while the content is still loading.
A skeleton screen is not interactive though. You cannot do anything except watching it pulse or whatever. Keep in mind that the content here is the shell itself.
I also already know something is happening. That’s what the busy cursor is for.
Personally I think it is actually pretty great. It opens faster so that I can position the window where I want and it loads fast enough that by the time I've actually tried to do anything it is ready to go.
Why doesn't Chrome UI elicit the same reaction from the community?
I get the feeling that many people have, that FF is following suit with chrome in terms of UX (and other things), rather than innovating[1]. There is some truth to that, but I do feel like FF tries out some nice things in their UI.
I'm currently running on FF on MacOS, and I find it incredibly hard to come up with any legitimate criticism of the UI, but it does help many apps that MacOS forces a top menu.
Yes, there are little things, like tabs are now buttons, and container tabs should be easier to use without first reading a guide.
[1] And maybe many vocal HN'ers objection is directed at the mere fact that innovation is attempted.
Chrome's UI hasn't had any massive, radical changes that I remember. Trying to go back to Firefox after getting disdained with Chrome was like using an entirely different browser.
People do get frustrated at Chrome UI changes from time to time, but Chrome (to it's credit I suppose) has always had very minimal chrome for people to get mad at! Way less surface area for people to get mad about, I suppose
Readit News
Thankfully however I don't care too much because I can still completely hide the tab-bar with my userChrome.css, and use "Tab Center Reborn" to have my tabs on the side instead.
https://superuser.com/a/1669549/9067
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
Thanks for the extension suggestion I may give it a try.
I think I read somewhere that the reason was that user studies showed that people did not understand that the tabs could be dragged around, moved to other windows, and generally were "detachable". Floating buttons should make that more obvious.
I'd be interested in research on whether they achieved that goal.
Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web
That expresses exactly what's wrong --- the native UI controls are predictable and accessible and styled with the rest of the OS, and as the cascade of dialogs above it (I'm not sure how that's even possible --- getting to "Offline Data" From "Exceptions - Saved Passwords"?) shows, you can actually see that you're controlling the browser and not merely a page inside it (related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329).
Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast
I've never heard that term before, but whenever I see things like that, I'm reminded of fancy progress bars and such --- the real problem is that you need one in the first place, and instead of fixing the underlying problem of why it's taking so long, you try to hide it...
This is such a weird thing to me. Did anyone ever want this? Were users asking for this? Did user studies show that this was somehow desirable or preferable? Did they do a study of Chrome users and find that they were more likely to stick with Firefox if they made this change? Does it significantly reduce code maintenance burden somehow?
It seems like the kind of thing where users only "want" it because it's familiar, and it's only familiar because it's already been forced on them everywhere. Basically it's circular reasoning. It's like the meme of hiding a button and then claiming that users never use that feature, so you can justify removing it.
In this day and age, noone cares what actual users want. Instead, corporations tell users what they "want".
Deleted Comment
How do you design and implement an interface that feels native across platforms?
First there is the easy approach: The common denominator elements. Essentially what you get when creating a Java Application. The UI will probably look kind of native, but also outdated. Think Windows 89-Style Settings. You're also limited in how you can present options because you have so few form elements to play with.
The other approach to native is to use modern UI elements. For one thing these are not easy to get. While on macOS Cocoa bindings are at least available, on Windows it is pretty much impossible to get anything but the Windows-89 style form elements. Even if all the bindings were available, which also has to take various Linux Desktop Environments into account, then you had to design for and maintain multiple versions of the same settings menu.
So I hope this explains why non-native controls are a sensible approach. You create your own design system that is (mostly) consistent across platforms. Designers only have to design one surface, they can create new patterns if necessary and engineers only have to maintain one implementation. Of course they have to be accessible and they are. I say "mostly consistent" by the way, because Firefox still respects some UI conventions from operating systems. For example it uses system fonts, system font-scales, and changes naming conventions and button orders appropriately.
This reduces work but of course it still is work to update and maintain that surface. about:preferences in Firefox has quite become quite messy over the years and is neither loved by designers nor engineers, but it's time and resource intensive to update it.
Is it really more efficient to maintain a design framework chasing latest web trends instead of having separate native interfaces?
"What about users that want to customize things?"
Give them an alternate path. The browser loads slightly slower (the same as now), and they still get their ability to customize. The rest of us can use the default, faster path.
Bias towards fashion trends is one of the biggest problems in the software industry.
> Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast
Yeah. Sometimes you do have to make users wait— e.g. parsing a huge cache to put in a dialog or making shaky network calls— and most designers mental model for addressing that frustration is the slow elevator problem†. Skeletons seemed like a good way to address it. We don't parse screens instantly: we first interpret structure/visual hierarchy so we know where to scan for titles, ordinals, controls, or whatever else we need. Skeletons theoretically let us do that while content loads. More recent research doesn't corroborate claims of silver-bullet efficacy:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326858669_The_effec...
† The related anecdote goes something like this: Tenants of an NYC office tower complained of slow elevator service during peak use. The property manager consulted with experts to evaluate the algorithmic efficiency and mechanical components, but it resulted in little improvement. The property manager then turned the exterior elevator doors int mirrors. Most riders were sufficiently emotionally engaged by a life-sized version of themselves long enough to make the wait seem much shorter.
I thereby will claim that cross-platform UI toolkits (which includes "the web") actually affords me--as a user--tremendous value, and I am always pretty happy when I see a product start to figure out their house brand. I do appreciate the other side of this, and I even have sometimes argued it myself to engineering teams I work with as--if nothing else--using the local style is certainly better than being bad at style, and I frankly would rather avoid having to work with a designer. But is it really so shocking to appreciate mine? I always feel like people jus let casually dismiss the idea that users might actually prefer software to look the same everywhere, and yet I feel like it is only particularly snobby tech people (which does include me: I hate poorly done UI) that seem to want the fully unified toolkit, and I think the success of bespoke UI in games really demonstrates this.
1) Create Window 2) Create UI (based on native controls for OS) 3) Load drop downs, top level down. 4) If you design your application this way, you won't have to build a skeleton. Mozilla is not using native UI/UX components to build their UI, so they have to go through several extra steps. I'm sure they do this in the name of customizability, but that, IMO, should be optional.
Wow, I think you've identified the probable cause of something I've felt was "wrong" about Firefox for a long time but couldn't pin down. Firefox just "feels" bad on a Mac even in comparison to Chrome, not to mention Safari.
The new web-based pop-ups can take a long while to render if a heavy page is being loaded. So if I try to quit Firefox, the "are you sure you want to quit" popup renders empty until the current page is done.
Sure, this happens only on high resource usage, but the previous implementation di not suffer from this.
What an absolute abomination that was. An insane waste of space and a violently assaulting visual distraction. Especially when you're trying to open a document that the current one is referring to, hiding what you're trying to see with useless space.
"Windows is called Windows, not Window."
I’m sometimes tempted to try to start a Firefox fork that returns its UI to a “smaller part of a larger desktop” look and feel, but then I remember how impossible it would be to maintain that over time. Wish Gecko was still embeddable so one could just write a new UI and not have to keep patches maintained.
The one thing I will say in its favor is that Firefox still maintains a decent amount of customizability, at least for the seriously dedicated. I still have a separate search bar, a menu bar, and have removed the "hamburger" menu button entirely. For me, the UI has changed very little over the years, but the pile of hacks in my usercss file has grown over time...
It's still "consistent", just on a different dimension (app-wise instead of OS-wise).
I know HN favors the former, but I don't mind the latter too much. Especially when products are able to strike a nice balance like Outlook on Windows & Mac.
As for the 'curvy' tabs, I can't say I was a fan of it, even in Chrome, it feels like a waste of space and draws attention to it. The straight tabs, even the 'button' tab is a lot better in being out of the way.
Could you give an example of it being a struggle?
Without the icon, you have to consciously read the lines in the menu to make sure you are clicking on the right one.
You still read the text with the printer icon, but it's a faster index-match when the icon is present.
Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.
My guess is the rise and marketing of Chrome and its offspring had more to do with Firefox's decline than anything Mozilla has done.
I still think there is plenty of room for a privacy respecting browser in the market, but Mozilla hasn't even been trying to fill that niche in years and still claiming to do so just makes them look like untrustworthy liar.
It made the browser compete with itself, and pushed people into alternatives. After all, if you're going to learn a new UI, why not try another browser altogether?
Google added things like WebUSB, Bluetooth, all kinds of web app APIs Mozilla rejected because of tracking risk, etc.
Mozzila killed their coolest features like FlyWeb.
They just haven't kept up with Chrome, and their vision is way too "privacy at all costs" rather than allowing users to decide. They don't seem to share in the modern idea of web apps having full native parity.
What an awful idea that is.
Those are literally the last things keeping me with Firefox.
https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/images/netscape-navigator-...
Edit: The "Classic" themes of early Firefox and SeaMonkey were still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4, but the toolbar and the location bar merged. (In the early days Firefox and Netscape 6/7 still coexisted in parallel, packaging the same engine, and the "Classic" theme represented the Netscape legacy UI.)
There’s another state that may be related to uBlock Origin (or other extensions) immediately afterwards, too: You can click bookmarks etc. but nothing loads (only after a significant delay). Again, awesome UX.
I guess I’m slowly becoming conservative because I’ve come to hate change. Most of the time, it doesn’t improve anything. And then, with increasing odds, changes actually make things worse. Not just limited to Firefox, of course. Also Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, whatever. Hell, even cars are getting worse every year.
Some people in the browser space haven't lost their minds and track things like how often the layout of a page changes during loading, how often it wiggles around, etc - which penalizes skeletons and other bad tricks, as it should. But this particular sensibility hasn't caught on elsewhere.
Not everyone runs good hardware, in fact the majority doesn't. When you click to open something and it doesn't load immediately many people will click again and again which leads to opening 2+ windows and also adding to the loading time of the first one.
When 70%+ of the users are not skilled in tech using laptops on battery saving mode this happens a lot.
Nowadays, the innovation has plateaued and computing became an ad delivery mechanism and a way for employees of bloated corporations to justify their salaries "fixing" things that didn't need to be fixed.
Precisely. Much better. I know something is happening. And if done well, I can interact with the shell, like use the search box, while the content is still loading.
I also already know something is happening. That’s what the busy cursor is for.
I get the feeling that many people have, that FF is following suit with chrome in terms of UX (and other things), rather than innovating[1]. There is some truth to that, but I do feel like FF tries out some nice things in their UI.
I'm currently running on FF on MacOS, and I find it incredibly hard to come up with any legitimate criticism of the UI, but it does help many apps that MacOS forces a top menu.
Yes, there are little things, like tabs are now buttons, and container tabs should be easier to use without first reading a guide.
[1] And maybe many vocal HN'ers objection is directed at the mere fact that innovation is attempted.