The main issue I've had with their new UI is the massive size of everything, it's fair enough for fat finger phone displays but is annoyingly wasteful for any regular sized desktop.
This is partly due to the increased padding as per the article, but also because they removed the "compact" UI density option. However you can bring this back under
about:config
browser.compactmode.show
Then go to menu > more tools > customize toolbar ... "density" at the bottom.
The option is labelled "not supported", but it's been like that for years.
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.
It's strange, the absence of padding gives me room to breathe, because if I can quickly scan a menu with my eye then I feel I have good overview and control over affairs. With more padding, you cannot do the same scanning motion with the eye, you have to read each item as a single atom unto itself, and suddenly the menu has become a jungle of megaliths where it's easy to get lost.
Whitespace can be a good thing as you note, but thoughtful allocation distribution is critical, particularly on desktop operating systems. Firefox default isn’t the worst here but it’s also far from the best.
That feeling of anxiety when looking over software should be taken as a cue to get better at it, not a feeling to be processed as such. Because it goes away as mastery goes up. Pretty soon all that whitespace becomes anxiety-inducing in and of itself
So we have people in the camp "don't waste space with padding, please" and then, each time a KDE discussion appears "how the hell can they cram so many information and text with no padding, it's unreadable" camp.
Well, yes and no. Different people want a different user experience. So this strikes me as a need for a new user configurable option.
Make a new user option, so it is easy for users to compact information if they want to. It sucks having to support multiple states (more things to test and verify) but it seems like there is an audience for both ideas.
The mistake is to think there's a single "right" way to do it.
Either make the UI flexible enough to accomadate everybody's personal preferences, or accept that some people won't like it and will choose something else.
KDE is fine with little to no padding. Their problem is often that they have inconsistent padding/spacing, which just throws everything off as death by a thousand cuts.
I'm the author of Lepton, a popular theme for Firefox.
You can see how I made various decisions from my perspective and how I improved on some of Mozilla's less-than-stellar decisions.
I think that might explain how we improved it and made it popular.
I would not usually customize too much my UIs and just try to get used to stuff instead. It's just less friction, and it's nice to be able to install something and be used to the defaults.
Your Firefox UI customization are so good and easy to setup that this is an exception. Thanks for making them. And they feel maintained, which is an important point.
I didn't know you wrote extensively on this, it looks interesting and it looks like it is well documented, I'll be sure to read this. Thanks again!
That's very interesting, specially that telemetry is being used to justify removing interface items. In my opinion the address bar is so incredibly large you could put 10 buttons in there and you would still have space, so I can't imagine a reason to bother removing things besides wanting to remove everything until there is nothing you can remove left.
You seem to be knowledgeable about UI/UX. May I ask you a question? I have a theory that monochrome icons are worse than colored icons. Do you know if there are studies about this or if there's any consensus? Thanks in advance.
In the middle of the article, there is a brief discussion about icons and colors.
I also think that well-coordinated color icons are good for readability and usability.
However, it is difficult to apply it universally to support a variety of colors. If it is similar to the background color, it is difficult to distinguish and there may be contrast issues depending on the light/dark theme.
I think it's just the ease of development of a solid color icon that matches the color of the text.
> the address bar is so incredibly large you could put 10 buttons in there and you would still have space, so I can't imagine a reason to bother removing things
Space isn't the only issue. Fewer options generally (very generally) yields better design - it's easier to find things, less distraction, cleaner, etc.
thank you for your work. The installation process was very easy. I would recommend though, to simply outline the steps and move the advanced section to the bottom completely.
```
1. Run script in your OS cmd line.
2. Navigate to `about:support` and click clear startup cache.
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 see tab groups more easily. On top of that you can bookmark tab trees, thus saving progress of your research, documentation, etc etc.
Fan of vertical tabs here, it’s a major boon for how I browse, which tends to involve a number of long-running tasks. Tabs work better than this than bookmarks, because cleaning out bookmarks sucks with how undeveloped all browser bookmark managers somehow still are in 2024.
I’m not too partial to nested tabs, but I think “panes” (Firefox extension Sidebery nomenclature) or “spaces” (what Arc calls them) where you can swap what group of tabs (including pinned tabs) is represented by the tab sidebar with a click is powerful, particularly combined with association of a pane/space with a browser profile.
So for example, a single browser window can switch between being dedicated to general browsing, shopping, online university courses, or software development, and if I want to split a pane/space into a new window temporarily, this is possible too.
I've been using Arc and I've become a fan of folders + vertical tabs also. But I also want bookmarks with tags. I don't want to keep 'pinouts for xyz motherboard' open somewhere all the time. I want to tag it with 'dell', 'motherboard', and 'pinout' and then search when I need it instead of having to remember what 'Space' I put it in. I prefer bookmarks to web search when possible because often enough I spend stupid amounts of time searching for a little tidbit and may want to come back to it later.
Rather than cleaning out bookmarks, I would keep a few main bookmarks and folders on the toolbar, and file away everything else under one few big folders with tags.
I use Firefox for tagging and it seems to be a fantastic way to keep track of thousands of sites with small cognitive load. Am I missing some workflow that's 'better'?
To each their own, but: I strongly believe the opposite.
Of course having more than 6 or 8 tabs open in a horizontal tab bar makes tabs difficult to manage and track. I've used Arc for the past 6 months. Having 6 or 8 tabs open in a vertical tab bar is also difficult to manage or track. I end up just spam-closing all of them and starting fresh pretty much every 4 hours anyway.
Here's the two arguments I've heard that I resonate more with, one in either direction.
(1) Count the number of pixels dedicated to the tab bar space when it is horizontal versus vertical. I've never seen a functional vertical tab bar that used the same or fewer pixels than a horizontal one.
(2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios; it feels untrue, to me, at the 16:10 aspect ratio; and unfortunately, this is an extremely common aspect ratio as its ~the aspect ratio Macbooks are made at.
It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few?
While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.
But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want.
Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!
If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal space for an apples to apples comparison.
When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.
> (2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios
This is true, and as a vertical tab bar user, it's important to me. However, when every app follows this logic and decides it gets to have a sidebar (or two!), all of a sudden I'm looking at a lot of apps that are barely usable unless they're maximized.
I often find myself thinking 'hey, fuck you, $APP! those pixels are for my vertical tab bar!!'
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).
Replying to my own comment: HN faux pas, or good information organization? :)
In the Tree Style Tab options page, there's an Advanced section that has a live-reloading user style sheet section. Very cool for testing out font choices without restarting the browser.
I've changed mine to use Apple's really nice SF Pro font, condensed. Somehow the Iosevka Mono that I use everywhere didn't look quite right on the tab titles.
Vertical tabs start to suck on a laptop. For one my auto hide sidebar hack for firefox broke and I am too lazy to fix it, so now I have basically a whole inch by several inches of dead gray space because I don’t have a full column of 100 tabs ever open, maybe 5 or 10.
This wouldn’t be so annoying except many modern websites use browser viewer size instead of the user agent to make the call you are a mobile or desktop user. So I basically have to use fullscreen browser windows because considering I already lose an inch to the tree style tabs, I really don’t have much width to lose before the site assumes I am an iPad and gives me a ton of hamburger menues that also suck to navigate because of how they tend to wrap text on constrained width browser viewers. Most of the time I just have to disable the sidebar entirely which of course adds a few clicks everytime I change tabs now.
Once monitors got wider I moved everything left and vertical.
It's also kind of a hierarchy that flows from left to right:
OS -> App -> content
Some content follows the same pattern (or can be configured close enough)
Eg: discord servers -> channels -> discussion
Eg: IntelliJ -> project files -> vertical tab for open editors -> editor
Most content nowadays is mobile-first anyway, which is a nice way of saying it wastes most of the space on desktop (most webpages fit a title and subtitle OR 3 bullet points on a 24" screen)
I've got around one hundred firefox tabs open currently, distributed in multiple windows on 8 workspaces and dual monitor.
Horizontal tabs where always a design fail unless their number and title is fixed AND small. Made sense in physical cabinets because gravity wins and the space in a single drawer was limited.
I do it all the time and I don't think it is "unusable". About the only "issue" with it is often that it shrinks the viewport just enough to trigger "mobile" breakpoints in CSS, but for some websites (YouTube, especially) that can be a feature as much as a "bug".
> 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.)
Vertical tabs are better in some situations and for some users, horizontal tabs are better in other situations and for other users. So all users should be able to choose to place tabs along any side of any window, and change which side and what position any tab is at any time. Not just tabs for emacs frames or web browser windows, but for ALL windows including top level and internal application windows. And you should also be able to mix tabs from different apps in the same frame, of course. Why not?
I implemented tabbed window with pie menus for UniPress Emacs in 1988, and still miss them! Later in 1990 I developed several other versions of tabbed windows with pie menus for NeWS that let you manage any NeWS and X11 windows, and drag the tabs around to any edge.
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
This is why you should be able to choose which side and position any tab is positioned along any window at any time, and change them at any time by dragging them to where you want.
Then you can assign meanings to each side, depending on your workflow, for example (this should be under user control, not set in stone, of course):
Tabs on the top for important stuff.
Tabs on the bottom for administrative stuff.
Tabs on left for things you haven't read yet.
Tabs on right for things you've already read.
Then drag the tab from the left to the right after you read something (like moving it from your "in box" to your "out box"), or pin its tab on the top or bottom of it's important and you want to keep it around and easy to find.
And if you really want, you should be able to hide the tab to save space.
And not only tabs for apps like browser and IDEs, but also the desktop window manager should support tabs on top level windows in a consistent manner, so you can drag tabbed windows in and out of other window frames, as well as arranging them in hierarchical outlines along the edges.
All this is super obvious, and saves a lot of time and effort, so it bewilders me why tabs like I described and implemented in the 1980's aren't universally supported on all desktops and applications by now.
It's not because they're patented. Adobe tried, and sued Macromedia over it, but that patent (illegitimate in my view, since it ignored the prior art, and was extremely obvious and not patentable) has long since expired.
DonHopkins 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–]
Also, not everything is a file. Tabs should apply to all edges of all windows, including top level windows, not just one edge of only windows with files in them. And you should be able to drag any window out to top level and it still has its tab attached, then move it around to any position along any edge, or hide it, and of course snap windows together along their tabbed edges, either tiling or overlapping.
How do you control all of that? That's where the pie menus on the tabs come in, of course. Thanks to the tabs, you can even pop up pie menus on windows that are completely covered up, and perform commands on them even though they're not visible, like bringing them to the top (stroke up) or down (stroke down), or closing them (diagonal stroke for confirmation submenu, then stroke up to confirm), or whatever (paste into terminal emulator, evaluate code in editor, etc).
And as long as you can have tabs on any side of a window, how about multiple tabs on the same window? Like child tabs as well as label tabs, that are links to other windows.
Another cool use of vertical tabs is for the tabs on the left to select between windows, and the tabs on the right select between children of the current window (not sub-windows, but related windows or sub-directories). And you can use the tabs along the top as breadcrumbs to navigate back up the tree.
Some IDEs kind of do that with a directory browser on the left and a function browser on the right, but with outlines and scrolling lists instead of actual tabs.
You could navigate the tab tree by clicking or gesturing left or right with a pie menu on a tab, sliding the right column of tabs over to the left to descend into the tree.
Like a Finder window that shows directories as tabs on the right instead of icons inside.
You could also have top and bottom edge tabs for different kinds of children (i.e. xml attributes vs elements, object methods vs properties, different views or editors, etc).
The original NeXT file browser had breadcrumbs along the top (but not tabs):
VScode started with vertical tabs only back in the day. It was a very interesting design choice. They switched to horizontal tabs from pressure.
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | next [–]
I just can't get my head around the mentality of making that decision for all of the users, hard coding it, and forcing it on them, not allowing you to choose for every window, or change your mind at any time, and simply drag any tab to any edge you want, whenever you want.
What makes user interface designers so arrogant and sure of themselves and lazy that they think one particular side is the only side, and the best for everyone, no matter what your screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, layout, number of tabs, icon or label size, workflow, direction of text flow, handedness, visual acuity, physical dexterity, task, and preference?
And then when you inevitably run out of space for tabs along the one edge, instead of simply allowing you to put more tabs along the other edges, you either add more horizontal rows along the top, so you get this abomination [1], or you have tiny little hard to use scrolling arrows at each edge so you can't see all the tabs at once, so you get that abomination [2]:
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
I've been implementing and using vertical tabs since around 1988, with I released a commercial product with tabbed windows, the NeWS version of UniPress Emacs, and used it to develop a hypermedia authoring environment for HyperTIES at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab.
Vertically tabbed windows combine synergistically well with pie menus, and are great for window management, especially when you have many windows.
They are purposefully NOT patented, since the idea is so fucking obvious, but it's disappointing they took so many decades to catch on finally. Still there aren't any decent desktop window managers I know of that implement tabs the right way. (tvtwm is not the right way!)
The later NeWS Toolkit versions from the early 1990's let you drag the tabs around to any side of the window you like: left, right, top or bottom, to any position along any edge. The user should be able to decide which edge and where the tabs are attached to for each window, it should not be hard wired like the tabs in VSCode and web browsers typically are. Being able to choose which edge the tab is on and where the tab is gives users better more flexible ways to organize and manipulate their windows.
I had a video of the NeWS tabbed windows, demonstrating dragging the tabs to different window edges, but youtube took it down because it contained copyrighted music (Herbie Hancock's Rockit).
Oh, here's the original video you can download from my server:
Here's another NeWS program that uses vertical (by default, but any edge if you want) tabs on windows around PostScript objects that you can push and pop on the stack with "direct stack manipulation":
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989
> And not only tabs for apps like browser and IDEs, but also the desktop window manager should support tabs on top level windows in a consistent manner
I miss the tabbed window feature in KDE 4.
This is the feature I'm most disappointed to see missing from version 5.
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 they also enable support to make these changes, and that's all nice.
But I find the post to a bit silly, in that the author wants to prove that their preferences are empirically right.
Ever since Firefox borked their tabs I've given up on it as my default browser. Every now and then I open it up for testing and when I still see buttons instead of tabs I make a mental note of trying again in half a year or so.
Light theme is especially insulting with white buttons on light-light gray.
It even doesn't repsect Windows' system theme settings, because in Windows you can have apps keep light theme but apply colors to taskbar, Start menu and title bars. Edge gets it, Chrome doesn't, but at least there's enough contrast, Firefox completely misses the mark.
I use Firefox as my alternate browser. And whenever I fire it up it needs first to get in my way and interrupt me to tell me about the new changes and features it has implemented since the last time I opened it like Pocket, VPN, etc.
God, stop it, just let me start browsing what I came here for, stop imitating Microsoft and their dark patterns of shoving Office 365 and Gamepass in your face between updates. Go and advertise your features to people who don't yet have Firefox installed, but I'm already your "customer", so stop bugging me.
This is why I'm mainly on Chrome. It may be inferior and spying on me but it never gets in my way.
I feel exactly this way, but about Chrome. I suspect it's just bias - I only open Chrome once a week or so so this screen is very annoying. Firefox is always open so I don't even recall seeing anything like that.
I have neither! No visible tabs at all. Just cycle tabs with Ctrl+Tab hotkey.
This is clean. Once in a month I want some kind of overview, but extensions like Tab List can give me a popup menu. The tabs needn't be visible constantly!
Is anyone else not at all bothered by the tabs "being buttons"? I feel like I'm the only one sometimes. Are they really that jarring for first-time users?
I'm a daily FF user and I wasn't even aware this was considered an "issue". I haven't put a single thought into this until seeing these comments... and I'll go back to not thinking about it again as I find the tab bar completely usable as-is. Thanks for the thoughts though.
Tabs being buttons doesn't really bother me and if anything this is such a common alternative to tab appearance that even Windows 95's tab control has a mode to make tabs look like buttons (AFAIK it was used in the original task bar). It was also used for, e.g. switching channels/windows on mIRC since the 90s too.
However personally i do not like how these particular "tab buttons" look like and if nothing else (they remind me of those long pills that often feel hard to swallow :-P), i am used to them looking like tabs and see no reason for that change (fortunately Firefox allows you to customize its look and i have a userChrome.css that makes it look more to my liking).
It doesn't impact my use of Firefox. They are just wasting pixels putting a gap where one doesn't belong. But I think at this point I am used to insane UI decisions and just roll with whatever organisations give me, few seem interested in any form of consistency or easy discovery.
It bothers me because it's different enough from everything else with tabs that I have (not only browsers, file managers, editors etc) and I just can't jibe with it. Why throw all semantics out of the window? It looks like a button but doesn't behave like one.
Almost everything nowadays is designed with mobile-first in mind approach - whether it's a smartphone or tablet, or desktop software. That throw all semantics out of the window - look what happen to e.g. Gnome over the years. What's worse I'd say, is that the lack of clear differentiation between types of interface elements made easier to hide options within GUI under various dark patterns (active element vs static information etc.) - whenever its required to do so.
As for Firefox GUI changes: Mozilla ask their users for feedback many times and the feedback was given - often strongly criticizing the upcoming changes but they ignored it and introduced changes anyway. I did submitted mine when they were about to rollout Australis but I didn't bother myself to say anything when Proton was about to be introduced because I knew that the corporate facet of Mozilla doesn't care and they'll do whatever they like.
I don't give a monkey if it looks like a button or not.
But I have a problem with a lot of the Firefox themes making it very difficult to quickly see which tab is the active one. I generally look for themes where this is obvious.
Firefox v89 was the last version I used. I just couldn't be bothered with them constantly changing and removing features for no reason. I switched to Vivaldi, which offer basic functionality like vertical tabs, and a fully customisable UI out of the box. It's far from perfect, notably being closed source which was hard for me to swallow, but it annoys me far less than Firefox ever did. I have it set up how I like it, and that setup has stayed static in the three years I've used it now. Firefox frankly feels user hostile in comparison.
Thunderbird was ruined with version 115, so I switched to Kmail. I miss calendar integration in my email client though.
I don't care about it at all. None of this UI criticism seems very important to me. I'd rather the Firefox team spent time making the browser less buggy and get feature parity for obvious missing features.
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.
I had exactly the same thought. I even installed the theme in question to see if I would like tabs better and honestly I prefer how Firefox does it stock.
I see constant complaints about how "garbage" the Firefox UI is, and I just don't see it. It's ... fine? I mean, it's basically Chrome's UI with a slightly different tab bar, yet here we are with a very long post about alleged fixes.
Every time someone says "button tabs are objectively wrong" I'm reminded of the fact that most normal, non technical users I know prefer Safari's button tabs. That's a feature you have to seek out and turn on, btw.
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.
It doesn't render the one you clicked on in a different colour? That might be a issue with the theme you use, my firefox shows the active tab in a clearly different colour from the inactive one.
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.
Bookmarks have received woefully little attention in all browsers for reasons unknown to me. If one pulls up a browser from 20 years ago, bookmark management is basically identical or even slightly better in some circumstances.
I guess making bookmarks better isn’t sexy so nobody’s bothered.
Over the years, there have been dozens of serious attempts at reinventing bookmarks (from third-party services and plugins), and none of them have caught on.
My conclusion is that they're just not a concept that works for people; they got squeezed out by web search on one side and complex note-taking applications on the other.
Do you perhaps have muscle memory for the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut that used to open a large side panel but now just shows a narrow horizontal bar?
I do and I'm certainly annoyed by this redesign, but I discovered the "manage bookmarks" shortcut Ctrl+Shift+O that opens a larger pop-up window with your bookmarks, which so far seems almost as comfortable as the old side panel.
It also lets you search for bookmarks and right-clicking to select "show in folder" in the context menu shows you where in the hierarchy it is. (Though all my bookmarks are in "other bookmarks", so I don't expect to be using this much.)
No, I don't have muscle memory, and in fact you have introduced me to the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut to show or hide the Bookmarks Toolbar! :-D I won't use it though, because I have it visible and it's not something one typically changes a lot.
With "side panels" I mean what strictly speaking Firefox calls "Sidebar": menu View -> Sidebar -> choose ONE among Bookmarks, History, Synced Tabs, Bookmark search plus 2, or Tree Style Tab.
Why the hell I cannot have e.g. Tree Style Tab AND a Bookmarks sidebars on the left, at the same time? Seems silly to me. Ages ago I worked with Qt and made desktop applications that could have detachable panels (QDockWidget), or their native equivalents such as palettes on Windows, that could be placed anywhere on a main window; but now that we're living in the future it seems we went backwards on what our UIs are able to do.
My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago. And as you might expect, Mozilla does not care. If you read the bug report, this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570
Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship this "feature" AND remove the option to opt out of it.
Some users prefer it. And that's fine! But don't take away my god damn option and force it down my throat.
Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that. You can check with chrome, and indeed it behaves like firefox.
For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...
I don't find it ironic at all. The purpose of telemetry is to be able to obtain information about the user population at large. It's anonymous and the data only flows one way (i.e. you don't see personalized ads based on telemetry data), but of course some data about your browsing behavior is being sent somewhere, yes.
It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.
Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
> Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that
Yes, I understand, and that's true. But no other native text field behaves like this; only other browsers. In fact, one of the formerly big selling points of Firefox over Chrome for me, at the time, was that in Firefox, interacting with the URL bar didn't select all (read: it behaved like all other GTK text fields). "Making Firefox behave more like Chrome" is an anti-feature when most of your users aren't using Chrome precisely because of asinine behaviors like this.
> My greatest "unnecessary Firefox UI change gripe" is the removal of browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll 4 years ago
Totally agree. Four years on, and it still trips me up daily.
Ironically, the usual failure mode for me is actually the one this change was supposed to help with - I want to select the whole URL, so I instinctively double-click it. This has the effect of selecting everything on the first click, then reducing the selection to a single word on the second. I am momentarily perplexed, then I recover and start clicking again, but now it takes three more clicks to get the whole URL selected.
It's surprising how annoying this is!
The explanation given in the tracker seems to amount to "at some point in the future, we might do something else that justifies this". Four years later and I'm not seeing it?
I vastly prefer the current way. It makes it very easy to manipulate parts of the URL. If I want to replace the URL I just open a new tab instead, and if I want to copy it I use ctrl+d which focuses URL and selects all.
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.
And it's still broken, because the "Paste and Go" feature doesn't work.
Common sense suggests "Paste and Go" would be equivalent to using "Paste" (which correctly inserts text from the clipboard at the cursor position) followed by "Go to the address in the Location Bar." But if you unselect the automatically selected URL, position the cursor within it, then use "paste and go", Firefox ignores the previous URL and simply tries to go to the text in the clipboard. This could potentially be a security risk by tricking people into visiting URLs they didn't intend to.
If they don't want to fix this, it should be renamed to "Clear, Paste, and Go", because that's what it actually does.
internal options are internal options, no browser cares much about them outside of e.g. some huge company support contracts
if you have to go to `about:config` for anything but dev or MDA related things then you can't expect things to continue working with any update
and every option is code which needs to be maintained
if I should guess they rewrote the code which used the option and did the faster/cheaper thing of not re-implementing a feature they officially anyway don't support
> this literally cannot be explained by anything except user hostility
Really?
It literally says why it was changed:
it was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself. The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle, taking into account all the possible pref combinations (for example under certain combinations it was not possible to select a word), and having to execute more tests for them. Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them.
> 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.
Readit News
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
Then go to menu > more tools > customize toolbar ... "density" at the bottom.The option is labelled "not supported", but it's been like that for years.
It, in fact, gives a specific practical disadvantage.
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Make a new user option, so it is easy for users to compact information if they want to. It sucks having to support multiple states (more things to test and verify) but it seems like there is an audience for both ideas.
Either make the UI flexible enough to accomadate everybody's personal preferences, or accept that some people won't like it and will choose something else.
I think that might explain how we improved it and made it popular.
This article is part of a series. - https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...
Or is Lepton a previous generation UI for Firefox that no longer exists except on old releases?
Sorry if these are stupid questions, I did read the article but I may have missed some things.
Yes. I know it's really uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the fact that it was this popular is also proof that the existing UI was inconvenient.
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Installatio...
Your Firefox UI customization are so good and easy to setup that this is an exception. Thanks for making them. And they feel maintained, which is an important point.
I didn't know you wrote extensively on this, it looks interesting and it looks like it is well documented, I'll be sure to read this. Thanks again!
You seem to be knowledgeable about UI/UX. May I ask you a question? I have a theory that monochrome icons are worse than colored icons. Do you know if there are studies about this or if there's any consensus? Thanks in advance.
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...
However, it is difficult to apply it universally to support a variety of colors. If it is similar to the background color, it is difficult to distinguish and there may be contrast issues depending on the light/dark theme. I think it's just the ease of development of a solid color icon that matches the color of the text.
Space isn't the only issue. Fewer options generally (very generally) yields better design - it's easier to find things, less distraction, cleaner, etc.
```
1. Run script in your OS cmd line.
2. Navigate to `about:support` and click clear startup cache.
```
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)
I’m not too partial to nested tabs, but I think “panes” (Firefox extension Sidebery nomenclature) or “spaces” (what Arc calls them) where you can swap what group of tabs (including pinned tabs) is represented by the tab sidebar with a click is powerful, particularly combined with association of a pane/space with a browser profile.
So for example, a single browser window can switch between being dedicated to general browsing, shopping, online university courses, or software development, and if I want to split a pane/space into a new window temporarily, this is possible too.
Rather than cleaning out bookmarks, I would keep a few main bookmarks and folders on the toolbar, and file away everything else under one few big folders with tags.
I use Firefox for tagging and it seems to be a fantastic way to keep track of thousands of sites with small cognitive load. Am I missing some workflow that's 'better'?
Of course having more than 6 or 8 tabs open in a horizontal tab bar makes tabs difficult to manage and track. I've used Arc for the past 6 months. Having 6 or 8 tabs open in a vertical tab bar is also difficult to manage or track. I end up just spam-closing all of them and starting fresh pretty much every 4 hours anyway.
Here's the two arguments I've heard that I resonate more with, one in either direction.
(1) Count the number of pixels dedicated to the tab bar space when it is horizontal versus vertical. I've never seen a functional vertical tab bar that used the same or fewer pixels than a horizontal one.
(2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios; it feels untrue, to me, at the 16:10 aspect ratio; and unfortunately, this is an extremely common aspect ratio as its ~the aspect ratio Macbooks are made at.
While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.
But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want.
Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!
This is true, and as a vertical tab bar user, it's important to me. However, when every app follows this logic and decides it gets to have a sidebar (or two!), all of a sudden I'm looking at a lot of apps that are barely usable unless they're maximized.
I often find myself thinking 'hey, fuck you, $APP! those pixels are for my vertical tab bar!!'
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).
I literally cannot tell them apart.
In the Tree Style Tab options page, there's an Advanced section that has a live-reloading user style sheet section. Very cool for testing out font choices without restarting the browser.
I've changed mine to use Apple's really nice SF Pro font, condensed. Somehow the Iosevka Mono that I use everywhere didn't look quite right on the tab titles.
The CSS:
Same link as my previous comment now has a screenshot of the result of that CSS: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...This wouldn’t be so annoying except many modern websites use browser viewer size instead of the user agent to make the call you are a mobile or desktop user. So I basically have to use fullscreen browser windows because considering I already lose an inch to the tree style tabs, I really don’t have much width to lose before the site assumes I am an iPad and gives me a ton of hamburger menues that also suck to navigate because of how they tend to wrap text on constrained width browser viewers. Most of the time I just have to disable the sidebar entirely which of course adds a few clicks everytime I change tabs now.
Once monitors got wider I moved everything left and vertical.
It's also kind of a hierarchy that flows from left to right:
OS -> App -> content
Some content follows the same pattern (or can be configured close enough)
Eg: discord servers -> channels -> discussion
Eg: IntelliJ -> project files -> vertical tab for open editors -> editor
Most content nowadays is mobile-first anyway, which is a nice way of saying it wastes most of the space on desktop (most webpages fit a title and subtitle OR 3 bullet points on a 24" screen)
I've got around one hundred firefox tabs open currently, distributed in multiple windows on 8 workspaces and dual monitor.
Horizontal tabs where always a design fail unless their number and title is fixed AND small. Made sense in physical cabinets because gravity wins and the space in a single drawer was limited.
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.)
I implemented tabbed window with pie menus for UniPress Emacs in 1988, and still miss them! Later in 1990 I developed several other versions of tabbed windows with pie menus for NeWS that let you manage any NeWS and X11 windows, and drag the tabs around to any edge.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38338008
DonHopkins 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–]
UniPress Emacs for NeWS, with tabbed windows and pie menus: 1988.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337808
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
This is why you should be able to choose which side and position any tab is positioned along any window at any time, and change them at any time by dragging them to where you want. Then you can assign meanings to each side, depending on your workflow, for example (this should be under user control, not set in stone, of course):
Tabs on the top for important stuff.
Tabs on the bottom for administrative stuff.
Tabs on left for things you haven't read yet.
Tabs on right for things you've already read.
Then drag the tab from the left to the right after you read something (like moving it from your "in box" to your "out box"), or pin its tab on the top or bottom of it's important and you want to keep it around and easy to find.
And if you really want, you should be able to hide the tab to save space.
And not only tabs for apps like browser and IDEs, but also the desktop window manager should support tabs on top level windows in a consistent manner, so you can drag tabbed windows in and out of other window frames, as well as arranging them in hierarchical outlines along the edges.
All this is super obvious, and saves a lot of time and effort, so it bewilders me why tabs like I described and implemented in the 1980's aren't universally supported on all desktops and applications by now.
It's not because they're patented. Adobe tried, and sued Macromedia over it, but that patent (illegitimate in my view, since it ignored the prior art, and was extremely obvious and not patentable) has long since expired.
https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-i...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337876
DonHopkins 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–]
Also, not everything is a file. Tabs should apply to all edges of all windows, including top level windows, not just one edge of only windows with files in them. And you should be able to drag any window out to top level and it still has its tab attached, then move it around to any position along any edge, or hide it, and of course snap windows together along their tabbed edges, either tiling or overlapping.
How do you control all of that? That's where the pie menus on the tabs come in, of course. Thanks to the tabs, you can even pop up pie menus on windows that are completely covered up, and perform commands on them even though they're not visible, like bringing them to the top (stroke up) or down (stroke down), or closing them (diagonal stroke for confirmation submenu, then stroke up to confirm), or whatever (paste into terminal emulator, evaluate code in editor, etc).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38347429
DonHopkins 3 months ago | prev | next [–]
And as long as you can have tabs on any side of a window, how about multiple tabs on the same window? Like child tabs as well as label tabs, that are links to other windows.
Another cool use of vertical tabs is for the tabs on the left to select between windows, and the tabs on the right select between children of the current window (not sub-windows, but related windows or sub-directories). And you can use the tabs along the top as breadcrumbs to navigate back up the tree.
Some IDEs kind of do that with a directory browser on the left and a function browser on the right, but with outlines and scrolling lists instead of actual tabs.
You could navigate the tab tree by clicking or gesturing left or right with a pie menu on a tab, sliding the right column of tabs over to the left to descend into the tree.
Like a Finder window that shows directories as tabs on the right instead of icons inside.
You could also have top and bottom edge tabs for different kinds of children (i.e. xml attributes vs elements, object methods vs properties, different views or editors, etc).
The original NeXT file browser had breadcrumbs along the top (but not tabs):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrTag7nSHlw&t=701s
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38341279
donatj 3 months ago | prev | next [–]
VScode started with vertical tabs only back in the day. It was a very interesting design choice. They switched to horizontal tabs from pressure.
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | next [–]
I just can't get my head around the mentality of making that decision for all of the users, hard coding it, and forcing it on them, not allowing you to choose for every window, or change your mind at any time, and simply drag any tab to any edge you want, whenever you want. What makes user interface designers so arrogant and sure of themselves and lazy that they think one particular side is the only side, and the best for everyone, no matter what your screen size, resolution, aspect ratio, layout, number of tabs, icon or label size, workflow, direction of text flow, handedness, visual acuity, physical dexterity, task, and preference?
And then when you inevitably run out of space for tabs along the one edge, instead of simply allowing you to put more tabs along the other edges, you either add more horizontal rows along the top, so you get this abomination [1], or you have tiny little hard to use scrolling arrows at each edge so you can't see all the tabs at once, so you get that abomination [2]:
Is it ever okay to have multiple rows of tabs?
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/is-it-ever-okay...
Awesome Scrolling For Wide Tab-Interface Applications - ScrollTabs:
[2] https://www.jqueryscript.net/layout/Awesome-Scrolling-For-Wi...
It's like only putting only one arrow key on the keyboard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38337425
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Vertical Tabs in Visual Studio Code
I've been implementing and using vertical tabs since around 1988, with I released a commercial product with tabbed windows, the NeWS version of UniPress Emacs, and used it to develop a hypermedia authoring environment for HyperTIES at the UMD Human Computer Interaction Lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
Vertically tabbed windows combine synergistically well with pie menus, and are great for window management, especially when you have many windows.
They are purposefully NOT patented, since the idea is so fucking obvious, but it's disappointing they took so many decades to catch on finally. Still there aren't any decent desktop window managers I know of that implement tabs the right way. (tvtwm is not the right way!)
The later NeWS Toolkit versions from the early 1990's let you drag the tabs around to any side of the window you like: left, right, top or bottom, to any position along any edge. The user should be able to decide which edge and where the tabs are attached to for each window, it should not be hard wired like the tabs in VSCode and web browsers typically are. Being able to choose which edge the tab is on and where the tab is gives users better more flexible ways to organize and manipulate their windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)
HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS, tabbed windows, pie menus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU
I had a video of the NeWS tabbed windows, demonstrating dragging the tabs to different window edges, but youtube took it down because it contained copyrighted music (Herbie Hancock's Rockit).
Oh, here's the original video you can download from my server:
https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov
Here are some different version from 1988-1991 for different versions of NeWS:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tabwin.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tab-1.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tabframe-1.ps
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tab-3.0.2.ps
Here's another NeWS program that uses vertical (by default, but any edge if you want) tabs on windows around PostScript objects that you can push and pop on the stack with "direct stack manipulation":
The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989
https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...
PSIBER Space Deck Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuC_DDgQmsM
I miss the tabbed window feature in KDE 4. This is the feature I'm most disappointed to see missing from version 5.
- https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343690 - https://community.kde.org/Plasma/5.4_Errata
I think this is a really essential feature when displaying tiled windows.
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 they also enable support to make these changes, and that's all nice.
But I find the post to a bit silly, in that the author wants to prove that their preferences are empirically right.
However, it was confusing that when muting, there was no indication that it was loading or there was no tab separator.
God, stop it, just let me start browsing what I came here for, stop imitating Microsoft and their dark patterns of shoving Office 365 and Gamepass in your face between updates. Go and advertise your features to people who don't yet have Firefox installed, but I'm already your "customer", so stop bugging me.
This is why I'm mainly on Chrome. It may be inferior and spying on me but it never gets in my way.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
[2] https://superuser.com/a/1424494
This is clean. Once in a month I want some kind of overview, but extensions like Tab List can give me a popup menu. The tabs needn't be visible constantly!
However personally i do not like how these particular "tab buttons" look like and if nothing else (they remind me of those long pills that often feel hard to swallow :-P), i am used to them looking like tabs and see no reason for that change (fortunately Firefox allows you to customize its look and i have a userChrome.css that makes it look more to my liking).
Almost everything nowadays is designed with mobile-first in mind approach - whether it's a smartphone or tablet, or desktop software. That throw all semantics out of the window - look what happen to e.g. Gnome over the years. What's worse I'd say, is that the lack of clear differentiation between types of interface elements made easier to hide options within GUI under various dark patterns (active element vs static information etc.) - whenever its required to do so.
As for Firefox GUI changes: Mozilla ask their users for feedback many times and the feedback was given - often strongly criticizing the upcoming changes but they ignored it and introduced changes anyway. I did submitted mine when they were about to rollout Australis but I didn't bother myself to say anything when Proton was about to be introduced because I knew that the corporate facet of Mozilla doesn't care and they'll do whatever they like.
But I have a problem with a lot of the Firefox themes making it very difficult to quickly see which tab is the active one. I generally look for themes where this is obvious.
The overall state of UX is very sad for Firefox and also Thunderbird (I had to stop using it after their menu bar fiasco and other "improvements").
Thunderbird was ruined with version 115, so I switched to Kmail. I miss calendar integration in my email client though.
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.
* 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.
I guess making bookmarks better isn’t sexy so nobody’s bothered.
My conclusion is that they're just not a concept that works for people; they got squeezed out by web search on one side and complex note-taking applications on the other.
I do and I'm certainly annoyed by this redesign, but I discovered the "manage bookmarks" shortcut Ctrl+Shift+O that opens a larger pop-up window with your bookmarks, which so far seems almost as comfortable as the old side panel.
It also lets you search for bookmarks and right-clicking to select "show in folder" in the context menu shows you where in the hierarchy it is. (Though all my bookmarks are in "other bookmarks", so I don't expect to be using this much.)
With "side panels" I mean what strictly speaking Firefox calls "Sidebar": menu View -> Sidebar -> choose ONE among Bookmarks, History, Synced Tabs, Bookmark search plus 2, or Tree Style Tab.
Why the hell I cannot have e.g. Tree Style Tab AND a Bookmarks sidebars on the left, at the same time? Seems silly to me. Ages ago I worked with Qt and made desktop applications that could have detachable panels (QDockWidget), or their native equivalents such as palettes on Windows, that could be placed anywhere on a main window; but now that we're living in the future it seems we went backwards on what our UIs are able to do.
Literally no other text field in any UI behaves like this. I cannot fathom why Mozilla chose to both ship this "feature" AND remove the option to opt out of it.
Some users prefer it. And that's fine! But don't take away my god damn option and force it down my throat.
For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...
It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.
Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.
You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
Yes, I understand, and that's true. But no other native text field behaves like this; only other browsers. In fact, one of the formerly big selling points of Firefox over Chrome for me, at the time, was that in Firefox, interacting with the URL bar didn't select all (read: it behaved like all other GTK text fields). "Making Firefox behave more like Chrome" is an anti-feature when most of your users aren't using Chrome precisely because of asinine behaviors like this.
Totally agree. Four years on, and it still trips me up daily.
Ironically, the usual failure mode for me is actually the one this change was supposed to help with - I want to select the whole URL, so I instinctively double-click it. This has the effect of selecting everything on the first click, then reducing the selection to a single word on the second. I am momentarily perplexed, then I recover and start clicking again, but now it takes three more clicks to get the whole URL selected.
It's surprising how annoying this is!
The explanation given in the tracker seems to amount to "at some point in the future, we might do something else that justifies this". Four years later and I'm not seeing it?
Common sense suggests "Paste and Go" would be equivalent to using "Paste" (which correctly inserts text from the clipboard at the cursor position) followed by "Go to the address in the Location Bar." But if you unselect the automatically selected URL, position the cursor within it, then use "paste and go", Firefox ignores the previous URL and simply tries to go to the text in the clipboard. This could potentially be a security risk by tricking people into visiting URLs they didn't intend to.
If they don't want to fix this, it should be renamed to "Clear, Paste, and Go", because that's what it actually does.
Technical people have the tendency to use keyboard shortcuts.
internal options are internal options, no browser cares much about them outside of e.g. some huge company support contracts
if you have to go to `about:config` for anything but dev or MDA related things then you can't expect things to continue working with any update
and every option is code which needs to be maintained
if I should guess they rewrote the code which used the option and did the faster/cheaper thing of not re-implementing a feature they officially anyway don't support
Really?
It literally says why it was changed:
it was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself. The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle, taking into account all the possible pref combinations (for example under certain combinations it was not possible to select a word), and having to execute more tests for them. Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them.
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.