How to make a better default Firefox UI(github.com) |
How to make a better default Firefox UI(github.com) |
i spend 8 hrs+ a day in a vnc session to a remote computer where browsers are running.
In the last months firefox has begun crashing every few hours, apparently because of an xsystem exception.
on the other hand chrome after a few minutes from starting will stop accepting return keypresses along with a few others (pressing 5 not only will not work, but sometimes causes unexpected behavior)
i suspect my non english keyboard layout doesnt help
It was so easy to install. And it looks fantastic.
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-address-bar-placea...
I mean, in a tab it's included the URL bar, but the bookmarks toolbar has nothing to do with the page we're at. It should be above Tabs!
guiset_quiet gui none
I don't understand what you're referring to, this firefox addon? Or standard firefox? I'd image that firefox developers actually use it as their browser too..
>I'd image that firefox developers actually use it as their browser too..
The graphic design of Firefox is not made by developers, it's made by designers who don't use Firefox.
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
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%...
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)
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/
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!
* 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.
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.
settings - browser tab. history - a sidebar. actually that's just when you hit ctrl+h, manage history? ctrl+shift+h? that's a separate window. bookmarks, downloads - also that window. (that Library window that seems to be dragged up all the way from firefox 3/4.) downloads have their own little popup, but ctrl+j and manage downloads open that window. bookmarks - ctrl+shift+o opens that window, but ctrl+b opens a sidebar. profiles? just kidding, there isn't really a user-facing user-usable profile function, but there is a what looks like a legacy interface hidden at about:profiles. passwords? browser tab, with it's own look that doesn't really correspond to anything.
there's one bit of cohesion - settings and addons are both browser tabs and even have links to each other. everything else, an absolute mish mash of browser tabs, windows, sidebars, popouts, different uis everywhere. and it's been a mess like this for a while, and seems like it will be like that for a while still, because there is just no singular vision and no real effort to straighten that out.
they added a firefox view thing recently - and it just seems to be a yet another thing that piles on to those different uis with a yet another different ui. (it has history there, so there's like three different ways to view history, which is at least one too much.) one could guess that maaaybe they are trying to fix it with that, and maybe port functionality from Library window to View tab, but at this point in time, it's just adding to the mess.
to a degree this is an exaggeration, cause well, other browsers have recently taken a liking to sidebars and have their popups and menu things as well. but the real sticking out thing is (legacy? it looks legacy) Library window that pops up here and there, and how that contrasts with some functions (settings, addons, passwords) that open in a browser tab. it ends up making opening browser functions somewhat unpredictable as to what kind of thing it'd open, definitely so at first and with just a persisting feeling of 'everything opens up differently just because'. you get used to it, but it's still a mess.
Like in Safari, downloads are a popover by default, but the popover can be “torn off” to become a window. Use cases for both are served, yet consistency is maintained.
Firefox could use a good dose of this thinking.
I recommend Sidebery, but more than that I just recommend something to get your tabs listed vertically in a sidebar, so they don't squash each other up as you add more until you can't tell what's what at a glance, the width is fixed, and you can always read the title.
Which probably means implicitly 'I recommend FF', since I imagine Safari/Chrome/Edge don't let you make that kind of modification? FF actually doesn't even need an add-on for it, I used to do it just with a userChrome tweak I copied from somewhere, but Sidebery has a nice 'panels' (like tabs of tabs to switch between that the sidebar shows) feature, and you can bind them to the built-in 'container tabs' (which I always think should surely be called 'tab containers'?) so that work stuff opens in your work panel, for example.
Fortunately for Brave the rollback is quite easy with a flag in `brave://flags` where you can disable the `brave-horizontal-tabs-update` feature.
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/143ynrk/text_scalin...
A bigger problem with it is that it unfocuses from the last used/selected tab to this newly added tab so that it's hard to find where I left off, which can get a bit hard when using many nested tabs in Sidebery because the tab gets appended at the very end.
> A bigger problem with it is that it unfocuses from the last used/selected tab to this newly added tab so that it's hard to find where I left off
Often Firefox remembers the last tab you were at when you do ctrl+w, not sure if it works for this though
It has a lot of stuff including 182 commands and 253 settings.
You can assign commands to different actions including mouse gestures.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
I might dislike how Firefox looks out of the box but at the same time i think it is the most customizable browser, so i stick with it.
Also, not shown in the shot, but my userChrome.css puts the search bar (Ctrl+F) at the top of the viewport instead of at the bottom.
In my case it has done its job of helping me find stuff when I needed it, occasionally.
If anyone is using Nix + Home Manager, I lazily set it up with my Librewolf configuration by just manually porting the preferences and then @importing from the Git repository. Could probably be done better (is there a good way to import other JS files from the user.js file?) but it works.
Much smaller (and better looking) tabs, and yeah, the addition of icons back to the menus is an improvement for sure.
https://github.com/jchv/nixos-config/commit/d3db419ff44347a8...
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.
```
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:
:root.sidebar tab-item.unread .label-content {
font-style: italic !important;
}
:root.sidebar tab-item {
font-family: "SF Pro" !important;
font-stretch: condensed !important;
font-weight: 300 !important;
}
:root.sidebar tab-item.active .label-content {
font-weight: 500 !important;
}
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have maybe max 20 tabs open at any given time. When I'm done with $TASK I close all the tabs (save 2-3 that remain open and pinned, mail, calendar, etc). The tab bar is like my stack. I only fill it up for the task at hand, then clear the stack and move on when done. If there are things I need to come back to, I use bookmarks.
Vertical tabs and the browser's bookmarks manager are just too similar for me to want to use tabs over bookmarks. Especially considering a crash can wipe all open tabs.
I am glad the browser gives me this option as a setting. And a browser that forces vertical tabs on me will probably lose me as a user for life.
Also:
> since I imagine Safari/Chrome/Edge don't let you make that kind of modification?
MS Edge supports vertical tabs out of the box. Brave also, but I can't comment on the rest in your list.
But the advantage to vertical and nested tabs is that when I need to open a dozen links (like grabbing interesting links from a page without stopping mid flow) I can do it without having to ruin my environment. The tabs are there ready to be consumed: nicely nested below the source tab. Doing that with a horizontal tab bar would destroy my productivity until I closed all of those tabs. It allows you to switch tasks.
As far as wasted space… I hardly ever use a laptop screen. Text content is ideal at 70ch? That’s like a 1/3rd of a 27” monitor.
It's an entirely artificial argument that doesn't address the real problem: incompetent UI designers preemptively and inflexibly making that decision for all users in all situation, and forcing everyone to use one edge or the other instead of any or all, therefore squandering 3/4 of the usable perimeter.
Sure it makes it more manageable to treat them like temporary bookmarks (guilty!) but you don't have to, that's not why I like them.
I'm not sure what you mean about not freeing the top bar though? The topmost thing I have is the back/forward/refresh/URL/extensions/menu bar. (file/edit/view/etc. hidden unless I press Alt, but that's not where tabs would be I don't think.)
I can sort of sympathise, I'm fairly 'OCD' (not actually, but as people say) about similar things, but it's never bothered me I don't think. Maybe try with it a bit smaller? I don't think mine's 'huge' - maybe a bit wider than single horizontally displayed tab would be (just as my choice for the length of title it allows me to read), a couple of inches on a 24"-diagonal monitor.
Includes screenshots! :)
Most drivers don't need to pull a trailer.
Most people don't need a wheelchair ramp.
Still arguing for stopping processor development, removing the possibility to use towing hitches and removing wheelchair ramps isn't something I hear people argue for.
It is almost like in other areas of life we accept that different people have different needs and wishes, but in software everything needs to be pixel perfect the way the designers envisioned it.
Why?
You know what is also a waste of pixels? Websites pretending they are mobile view only on my 4K desktop monitor in landscape. Blogs, new Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, news sites, whatever else.
The vertical tabs wouldn't hurt that shit at all.
And if the vertical tabs would be a first class citizen in a browser it would greatly help so if needed I could have switch to it.
I've seen several people mention this addon. Can you (or someone using it) give a reason or two to prefer it over the standard alternatives (e.g. Tree Style Tab)?
Idk, I don't know why Tree Style Tab is any more 'standard alternative' (or certainly not that any others are, afaict TST & Sidebery are the most popular two) - they're both extremely popular (Mozilla gives 196k users of TST & 75k of Sidebery; nothing else close) and both 'Recommended' by Mozilla.
Use whatever you want, I did say more than that I just recommend using something to get vertically listed tabs. The tree-ing is a much less big deal to me tbh, though Sidebery does do that too fwiw.
I mainly use Chrome, and in their newest M121 release they made not one, but three major UI changes and I hate every single one of them.
For the curious, they are (together with my rant):
1. the new "simplified" bookmark save flow which is more complicated than the old one;
2. loss of the ability to disable system notification (i.e. to use Chrome's built-in one, which I prefer);
3. loss of the ability to disable "copy to highlight" context menu option via a command line argument, which I never use and it just messes up my muscle memory for right click -> copy.*
* Seriously, why is it so tough for software in the CURRENT YEAR to just offer fully customizable context menus? How hard is that? Funnily enough, this used to be a staple feature in nearly all the popular freeware back in the 2000s and 2010s. It feels like the whole UI/UX scene has taken a nosedive lately.
Kando: The Cross-Platform Pie Menu (github.com/kando-menu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206966
https://github.com/kando-menu/kando
A first glimpse at Kando's Menu Editor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLJ1-z9i3cI
Development Update for Kando's Menu Editor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIF6k9OxQ80
Item labels in Fly-Pie!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yyl5nMPI1f0
Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk
Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs
Gnome-Pie
Gnome-Pie 0.4 (12 years ago)
- the people who make the software don't know or don't care about the other way you want it
- it adds a bit more complexity / sometimes code debt to let that thing be customized
- the design might be a specific way that they don't want to change
It's not hard at all, Vivaldi does it. I consider Vivaldi the least worst browser.
I ended up cleaning my inbox with the Gmail web interface. Despite my gripes, at the end of the day Gmail was just better and more efficient at it. Maybe it's nostalgia, but it legitimately feels like a 15 year old version of Outlook would run circles around Thunderbird's UI.
This is painting with a broad brush, but coming from a background that included design, I've honestly come to resent modern UX designers. There are great ones, but there are also ones who are more interested in the design than the user and who ignore or bend the user data to support their (sometimes wild) opinions.
If you can use tiny fonts for everything else I'm sure the padding is less painful but it's super annoying if you have to scale things up and you can actually get completely lost in it if you have to use much fullscreen magnification.
This would be less frustrating if I could easily scale up UI fonts without also scaling up the whole UI proportionally, along with the padding.
In terms of apps in my life with annoying padding or wasteful use of screen real estate, though, I have to say Firefox doesn't even remotely make the list.
And some of this notifications where really reasonable to have like the containers. (Except the color thingy, that was some nonsense.)
The only exception is if you somehow end up in a situation where the browser (profile) is for whatever reason frequently fully reset, in which case you might have seen the same notification multiple times.
I just wish it was something more 3D and "skeuomorphic" instead of just making a flat gray arrow into a flat green arrow. For example, if Chrome used a yellow star instead of a white star outline, I bet a lot of people would say it looks ugly as hell and sticks out like a sore thumb, but I'd prefer it. I can barely tell these monochrome icons apart.
This is the first time I've heard of Lepton. Now I've installed it I don't think I will go back. Thanks!
I don't care about the tabs being buttons though. Mainly the huge amount of space the new design uses. And the lack of icons.
Makes sense if one considers how many 13” Macbooks and original MacBook Airs were likely being toted around the Google campus in the late 2000s, with Macs being the predominant development platform there at the time.
Further down the road in 2011, Chromebooks appeared, most of which are on the smaller side which also acts as incentive to keep Chrome usable on smaller screens.
Desktop Safari and MS Edge are also decent in this regard, likely a result of their parent companies being makers of popular small-screen computers.
What are the odds of that person identifying what is currently active?
If the counter is "you know because you remembered" or you "know because you learned" then any of these answers indicate a inferior and non-intuitive UI design.
Tags might work well but the friction involved is likely too high for me to consistently use them. It’s easier to just keep anything remotely short term in tab form.
An example for text paragraphs: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Reading-Online-Text%3A...
I think it really depends on individuals though. If you can memorise a dense screen of buttons you'll be able to work faster, avoid scrolling etc. But it'll make the UI harder to use for people who don't use it regularly.
Ultimately, every UI has to strike a balance. If you do it right you'll piss off both sides equally.
It's usually most important to quantify in the vertical axis; today's bloated touch-oriented UIs are horrific for 16:9 wide screens. Add up the taskbar, window title and tab bars, URL toolbar, the 72pt dickbar menu at the top of the web page with single-line labels, and the cookie banner at the bottom of the web page, and you're lucky to have half of the shortest dimension of your screen devoted to real content until you start excising the bad UI elements. It's like being back in the 1990s and seeing the old horrors of people who said yes to every adware toolbar that asked to install itself, except we're now wasting far more vertical space for far less functionality.
"Firefox is a kind of browser, which happens to be running on a desktop."
"Firefox is a kind of desktop app, which happens to be rendering websites."
In the first, Firefox should act like other browsers because "browsers" are the relevant reference group. In the second, Firefox should act like other apps on the platform because the platform is the relevant reference group. Personally, I think the second view is simply correct. How often do you switch between browsers? For all but a few power users, switching browsers is vanishingly rare compared to switching desktop apps. This suggests that at least for browser chrome, desktop consistency is much more important than browser consistency.
Raindrop is more or less perfect for me.
Yes, for a lot of things I just start typing: <customername wiki> or < git customername> but that works without bookmarking.
For longer time storage however, I just click the raindrop icon and fill inn tags and it is done.
Furthermore, my feelings in this matter extend far beyond user interfaces: not only do I prefer clean user interfaces with generous use of negative space, I prefer that in my books, and the walls of my house, and the organization of my room. If my wall was covered in posters and sticky notes, instead of a nice clean beige with one or two posters, that would make me feel anxious as well, and it isn't because I don't know how to read a post-it.
edit: the latter (or Sidebery does do it but my previous solution didn't and this is now redundant, I suppose), I have:
#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg){kind=link}
#TabsToolbar {
visibility: collapse;
}
#sidebar-header {
display: none;
}
most non-technical people treat urls mostly as blobs (which doesn't mean they don't understand it's consisted of parts, but that's irrelevant)
so the URL field is mostly operating one urls as a while
that's why if you click on it in difference to normal text it will always select the whole url, because most times most people will either copy that url or fully replace it
similar "Past and Go" also operates as the url as a whole, not text segments. So it pasts the new url to where the old url was and "goes" to the new website
additionally if you don't just replace an url but edit it a "do this edit and directly go without giving me a chance to double check it" functionality doesn't really have any reason to exist as its way too niche and people who do that likely anyway use keyboard shortkuts instead of the context menu
sure there probably could be a better name e.g. "Replace Tab and Go". Or they could not show it if you don't have all text selected.
But "Past and Go" isn't a description of functionality anymore but has become something like a slogan or special term. So neither renaming it nor changing behavior is really acceptable from a UX POV.
Firefox was very usable for most users even when it had real extensions.
The extension API didn't affect end users at all.
It feels like a war against power users, were designers want to take away control from us to make sure it always looks like they intended.
So if you really care about reasoning with people to challenge the stereotype, you need to know % vegans (according to some survey or whatever) in a population relevant to a person so that you can ask them to consider not if they've ever seen one vegan talk about it, but if they've seen a number X close to that % of the total people they've seen talk about it (and if not that they've encountered that-X% extra vegans without realising it).
I disagree. If you create a piece of software and develop a userbase that disproportionately opts out of telemetry relative to your software's alternatives, congratulations, you won. You got the power users, the developers, the people who care enough to submit quality bug reports, they're all on your side. Game over.
You don't need telemetry to understand what features these users need because they will tell you - loudly and forcefully - in bug reports filed if you break something. Assuming we're talking about open source software, and we are, they may also be the people sending you patches and improvements for these features.
Telemetry is what you need if you're making a mass market product that meets the needs of 80% of users. It isn't necessary, and in fact may not be useful, if you're developing software designed around the needs of the people contributing to the software. Some software tries to do both. But the way you do that isn't by looking exclusively at telemetry and then pretending that what you see there describes the behavior of all user categories, at least when it comports with the plans of your UX team. It's by listening to the people who are most passionate about the software.
Same with Windows 11; I know one person who refuses to upgrade literally only because the Windows 11 taskbar is bottom-of-monitor only; they don't support moving it to the left or right-hand side of the monitor.
Its actually unhinged. Our industry was filled with years, decades even, where we were so excited and proud to build things to be as powerful as possible, to do as much as possible. Nowadays, companies want to build the least they can possibly get away with. Its sad what we've lost.
Edit:
Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use.
In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done.
But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size.
Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis.
Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?
Your complaint, where the software is less convenient than it could be because the sidebar is too big, will never result in a Priority 1 Customer Support Ticket. Adding the ability to resize a sidebar can actually cause that to happen.
Someone accidentally resizing the sidebar to become unusably small or large and calling support because they don't know what they did or how to fix it will describe it as an emergency. This is not a lie, since the thing they need to get at to complete their work is impossible to get to without resizing the sidebar, and they don't know how it happened or how to do that. They resized the sidebar while trying to drag and drop something else, and since they weren't using it at the time they went some twenty minutes without even realizing anything was wrong, and now they've forgotten what they did.
Hopefully, it escalates up the support chain until someone finally manages to figure out what happened, or it escalates high enough and the customer is willing to give remote desktop access to a support tech [2]. If you're not lucky, they just give up and switch to a program that, hopefully, doesn't break on them.
Source: I used to work the support line for customer-facing software. I don't any more, but I still work directly with customer success agents, so I still regularly see this exact kind of problem.
[1]: Or, if you won't take it from me, take it from Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/12/choices/
[2]: Some companies just don't do remote desktop control support. This is so that they can directly tell their customers "we never ask for control of your computer, so if someone claiming to be us asks for it, they're a scammer." Remote desktop access is a dangerous way to do tech support because, if you accidentally wind up talking to a scammer instead of a real support tech, they can wreak havoc with that level of access. OTOH, the company I work for sells software that works with barcode scanners and printers, and I really don't feel keen on trying to talk people through setting them up so they work properly...
And that's why you have an in-house support departments whose job is to solve these issues. It's like buying a tractor, then relying on the company several towns away to provide repairs.
Customizability is good. Because when I settled in a workflow, I don't want to see things I don't want occupying space or distracting me. It's like not using part of the desk because you're supposed to have piles of books in this place.
I'm not advocating to have trillion of options a la VIM. But anything except the core purpose of the software should be customizable in some way, including the options to hide it.
Please don't tell that to UX experts. They will replace all four with a hamburgher menu. /s
1. Instead of just removing the feature, hide the feature and call it unsupported so the users who remember the feature can't complain yet.
2. Then finally remove the feature in the next update, with justification that it was an unsupported option and used by few people, so users can't complain.
Frog boiled. With each update the company seems to be acting rationally on "metrics" and principles, but the decision was set internally before that.
- Compact mode is rarely used and a pain to maintain
- If we hide the feature, what's the user reaction?
- Minimal user reaction to hiding, we're safe to remove
I didn't even know about it until after it became unsupported.
remove features: “product is tricking us”
I’d hesitate to call something like optional compact UI metrics “bloat”. To me the term is better applied to e.g. features associated with only tangentially related services or something running in the background sucking up CPU cycles for little user benefit… basically the modern Microsoft playbook.
There's a market for software that doesn't require that.
Small companies don't have in-house support departments. They contract with an IT provider. Big companies do, but theirs isn't materially different than the contracted one (a typical "big company" is really just three small companies standing on each others' shoulders wearing a trenchcoat). Their purchasing decisions are going to be based on what they think will reduce the amount of support calls they have to deal with.
> It's like buying a tractor, then relying on the company several towns away to provide repairs.
John Deere software locks their parts. They haven't gone out of business, so a lot of farms must be doing just that.
Edit: This is not an argument against RTR. Anyone who's willing to break a warranty seal and tinker with the inside of the computer or tractor they own should be allowed to do so. Being able to customize is good. Being able to accidentally customize is bad.
At least Google knows not to be intrusive and not fuck with the UI so often. Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years ago. Why can't Firefox imitate that quality of life feature? It's not that hard to not change shit at the surface.
They've been bleeding market share for years including faithful long time users who enjoyed the 'old, boring' Firefox but don't agree with the current direction of imitating Chrome at every step.
Old Firefox = Windows 7
New Firefox = Windows 11
I find the ads narrative pretty hard to believe. Back in the days, Firefox could compete with IE, which was the default in Windows, by being technically superior. It seems very likely that Firefox's users, who had gone out of their way to install Firefox, would also be very willing to go out of their way to install a new better browser even in the absence of ads.
while that isn't really true anymore in any relevant way it's still stuck that way in many peoples heads
And sure part of the perf issues where quite often not well behaving FF extensions, toolbars etc. also often installed by unrelated programs preexisting installed on the same computer and that FF needed some major refactoring/rewriting just because it was quite a bit older (which are done by now but had inevitable but sad effects like XUL extensions being gone).
I suggest you look for screenshot of Google Chrome in 2008.
Market share is what it is because google is pre installed in the majority of the mobile market, that firefox had bad performance rep in some areas, and that google is a synonym of internet in the mouth of the majority of people nowadays the same way explorer was a few decades ago.
Most people don't care about those UI changes.
2016: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/google-chrome
2024: https://flathub.org/apps/com.google.Chrome
They're basically the same, nothing like what Firefox has been doing. Buttons went flat, bookmarks moved to the right, and two dropdowns got combined into one menu. Tabs haven't changed at all.
that's not how it works the marked share is there for reasons which have little to do with that, at least when it comes to "non technical people" (i.e. not HN crowd)
1. what matters the most is what is pre-installed (like iOs Safari, Android Chrome, etc.)
2. then what matters a lot is mind share, Chrome still has in many peoples minds the image of "the good alternative", "fast", "reliable", "modern UX". While many people still think about FF as slow and clunky even through a lot of this opinions came from well over 10 years ago
3. What also a huge amount is if you can use it for all task you do. Due to apps like Slack, MS outright refusing to fully support Firefox or for example Notion having had egregious FF only bugs a lot of "normal" users have over time moved away and just never come back. The most sad thing is if you look at the technical details it's seldomly FF fault. E.g. basically every time I looked into it when some media player (and I think it was also the case for Notion as far as I remember) didn't work it was because the sites not being standard compliant with CORS. Another (older) example is FF missing media codecs due to licensing issues which Apple/MS fixed by having an OS and Google by having a ton of money. Or polyfills for bleeding edge sometimes not yet even standardized Chrome features being slow. Stuff like that is in my experience kinda true for close to any (systematic) issue of a sites not working correctly on FF.
Lastly when it comes to non technical people the overlap of people which would stop using FF because of stuff like that and the ones which anyway wouldn't use FF because they use some fancy chromium derivative like brave is quite high.
The reason they are bleeding market share is not because they updated to a new UI.
It's because it's today hardly possible to run a browser which isn't either chromium or webkit based.
Still not going to use a Google browser though, that's just a self own.
Don't get me wrong. When Firefox removes a feature, often it's not out the concern of bloat to be able to serve existing users better, but to shift resources for the next revamp that will make the browser ever more "modern", to claw for a new userbase.
And most people don't care how their tabs look and are used to dropdowns menus being reorganized and losing or getting added entries. People are used to software slowly but gradually changing. It is not like mozilla went from original phoenix browser[1] to the current one in one release. These kind of changes only annoy a small fraction of people with some special disorders.
[1] whose simplicity and colored buttons I loved personnally
For the ads, see some snapshots of what that campaign looked like at the time https://searchengineland.com/googles-jaw-dropping-sponsored-... It was a massive push of basically spammy links all over the internet.
To be clear, I'm sure some people switched for the features. But given the scale of the sponsored push to every internet user, we can't really say features were the reason for most people. There's no way to run the experiment the other way.
> UI was comparable.
They were not at all comparable. Here is an image of what Firefox looked like when Chrome was released [1]. Here is an image of what Chrome looked like at release [2]. Barring some design tweaks Chrome looks roughly like any modern browser whereas Firefox looks ancient by modern standards. It has the app menu, no integration with window decoration, a separate search box, tabs below the address bar, etc. Lots of things that Firefox would copy over the coming years. There's a reason Chrome was named after its Chrome–the UI was a huge selling point.
1: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/141687681... 2: https://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-browsing/search-...
