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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
> 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 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.
the real UI/UX nightmare of firefox is the legacy cruft. it's like every single basic browser function opens in it's own kind of a different view.
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.
I think it’s fine for some things to have a popover and window, but it needs to be implemented intelligently.
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.
The worst thing about the Proton UI that I never hear anyone talk about is that it is objectively a massive downgrade if you're not using a modern 1080p (or higher res) monitor. My laptop is an old X220 Thinkpad, so that change actually affected my ability to work efficiently by pointlessly wasting a ton of screen space, and it's part of the same trend in software engineering of user-hostile decisions that impact people who either can't afford or don't want to use newer hardware for whatever reason. Except in this case it's not even something like making everything a bloated Electron or React app, it was just changing the UI to something that looks way worse for no reason other than to create the superficial impression that Mozilla still cares about Firefox. I run a customized userchrome because Proton sucks so much for me to use.
Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) horizontal tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with it, or perhaps even more so that it's still the default in all major (and minor?) browsers.
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.
Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) vertical tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with so many open tabs at once.
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.
I know edge at least supports vertical tabs? I don't like them though (I don't have enough horizontal screen space, plus it doesn't free up the top bar space). If I start to have many open tabs I start cutting them down anyway.
So you're shocked every time you see a browser with default UI setup? I mean, I understand if it's not your preference, or even have good argumentation for why the default is not the best for everyone. But if you're shocked every time you see people use a default setting that isn't your preference, your life must be pretty shocking.
Most users, like 90% or more have tabs that all fit visibly in the horizontal space. Look it up. Mozilla's telemetry is public. 5 or 6 tabs fit just fine and in a sidebar are hugely wasteful of pixels. You think everyone browses just like you so you can't imagine why the browser is shaped for people not like you but your browsing habits are in the ultra-minority. Take a look at the telemetry before making silly posts like this.
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)?
Edge has vertical tabs out of the box. And yeah we get it, because vertical tabs people and tree tabs people are the vegans of browser discussions. Please, we get that you like vertical tabs. No need to keep going on about it.
Brave browser recently also introduced buttons. I was a tad annoyed with it, but accepted it. Until my wife recently saw the new look while I was working and asked how I could even put up with this. She argued that tabs should look like tabs and not buttons.
Fortunately for Brave the rollback is quite easy with a flag in `brave://flags` where you can disable the `brave-horizontal-tabs-update` feature.
The downside of using hidden flags like this is that most of the time you're just delaying the inevitable, as opposed to just biting the bullet now. Up to you to decide which is the least worst.
The same happens with Thunderbird. The new UI is a mess I can't find anything now. I fear when the rename K9 mail for Android to Thunderbird they break the UI too.
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.
I recently got fed up with Gmail and downloaded Thunderbird, which I haven't used in a looong time. I was wildly disappointed by the modern incarnation. The lack of checkboxes feels mind boggling... I still feel like I must be not grasping something. Sometimes one of my hands isn't on my mouse or keyboard, but the interface felt like it constantly demanded I use both together (e.g. shift+click) to get things done.
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.
Instead of losing the basics of usability I whish firefox would embrace new directions that have been shown by arc browser or at least allow the level of customiziation it used to. I made a prototype but the step to fork just to modify the ui seems ridiculous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxE8CD4dylQ
Where can I vent about that "upgraded"-page which wants me to click through many dialog boxes of stuff I don't want to know about?
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.
Thanks for saving the animals. Illustrations were great touch and added so much needed whimsy to usually boring error pages. Another improvement that is a must - removable "Add-ons" button. I understand why "Menu" button is not allowed to be removed (although, it would be neat experiment to move it around toolbar), but "Add-ons" is just taking up space. And considering, that other browsers allow to hide their variant of "Add-ons" button, there should be no excuses for Firefox. Customization is a rare feature in browsers these days, and huge pro considering other browsers.
Will try it out. Regardless of if I’ll use it or not I think this project is a great example of the rare type of engineering craft that seems to be a pre-requisite to build truly great software. A great signal if I were hiring.
The Lepton theme looks good. If I'd known about it I may not have bothered to cook up my own userchrome hacks. I'm pretty happy with the current results[0] though so I'll be sticking with them for the time being.
Same, also show the menu bar. And use a custom userChrome.css that makes the UI a bit more to my liking[0] (after an update the tab shading got a bit wrong and that red line showed up - i'm certain that one comes from the theme because this red color also appears in Thunderbird and i haven't customized that - but it hasn't bothered me enough yet to track it down).
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.
I like the Photon-style version of this, looks pretty good.
If anyone is using Nix + Home Manager, I lazily set it up with my Librewolf configuration by just manually porting the preferences and then @importing from the Git repository. Could probably be done better (is there a good way to import other JS files from the user.js file?) but it works.
Much smaller (and better looking) tabs, and yeah, the addition of icons back to the menus is an improvement for sure.
Catering to these types of hardcore fans makes any progress basically impossible. This dude writes a PhD thesis, because the top bar became like 5 pixels bigger some 40 versions ago.
I wish applications would stop changing their UIs for the sake of being hip and trendy. The new thunderbird, Firefox, and the desktop applications of O365 come to mind.
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
This is the same problem that modern Windows has: these systems are designed by 20-something year old designers who wear specs with thick coloured frames and who only use Mac and Safari. They don't give a shit because they don't have to use these systems ever; for them these systems are something they screenshot and put in their portfolios.
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..
tomxor|2 years ago
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.
logicprog|2 years ago
darkwater|2 years ago
Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
jasonjayr|2 years ago
3abiton|2 years ago
gsich|2 years ago
kwanbix|2 years ago
sikhnerd|2 years ago
black7375|2 years ago
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%...
tetris11|2 years ago
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.
jraph|2 years ago
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!
AlienRobot|2 years ago
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.
12345hn6789|2 years ago
```
1. Run script in your OS cmd line.
2. Navigate to `about:support` and click clear startup cache.
```
bloopernova|2 years ago
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)
jwells89|2 years ago
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.
015a|2 years ago
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.
dmix|2 years ago
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).
bloopernova|2 years ago
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...kjkjadksj|2 years ago
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.
ExecSushy|2 years ago
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.
Dwedit|2 years ago
FeepingCreature|2 years ago
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.)
DonHopkins|2 years ago
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
Yaina|2 years ago
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.
black7375|2 years ago
However, it was confusing that when muting, there was no indication that it was loading or there was no tab separator.
ihateolives|2 years ago
FirmwareBurner|2 years ago
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.
mikae1|2 years ago
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
[2] https://superuser.com/a/1424494
thecosmicfrog|2 years ago
werdnapk|2 years ago
badsectoracula|2 years ago
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).
PaulKeeble|2 years ago
ihateolives|2 years ago
alimbada|2 years ago
flurdy|2 years ago
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.
zx8080|2 years ago
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").
jwells89|2 years ago
mvdtnz|2 years ago
zx8080|2 years ago
madeofpalk|2 years ago
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.
mavamaarten|2 years ago
tiltowait|2 years ago
square_usual|2 years ago
tvshtr|2 years ago
Archelaos|2 years ago
Schlaefer|2 years ago
j1elo|2 years ago
* 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.
jwells89|2 years ago
I guess making bookmarks better isn’t sexy so nobody’s bothered.
yorwba|2 years ago
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.)
lopkeny12ko|2 years ago
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.
_notreallyme_|2 years ago
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...
cannam|2 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?
keyneus|2 years ago
mrob|2 years ago
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.
dathinab|2 years ago
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
ikt|2 years ago
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.
pxoe|2 years ago
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.
jwells89|2 years ago
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.
nyx_land|2 years ago
OJFord|2 years ago
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.
beAbU|2 years ago
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.
foolswisdom|2 years ago
gitaarik|2 years ago
mort96|2 years ago
bloopernova|2 years ago
Includes screenshots! :)
asadotzler|2 years ago
bscphil|2 years ago
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)?
c-hendricks|2 years ago
mvdtnz|2 years ago
alex3305|2 years ago
Fortunately for Brave the rollback is quite easy with a flag in `brave://flags` where you can disable the `brave-horizontal-tabs-update` feature.
madeofpalk|2 years ago
kilroy123|2 years ago
Astraco|2 years ago
thrdbndndn|2 years ago
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.
atomicfiredoll|2 years ago
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.
amelius|2 years ago
jFriedensreich|2 years ago
qwertox|2 years ago
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.
KTibow|2 years ago
> 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
butz|2 years ago
yoavm|2 years ago
rekado|2 years ago
black7375|2 years ago
tvshtr|2 years ago
vikeri|2 years ago
paol|2 years ago
[0] https://draic.org/scratch/ffoxuserchrome.png
BMSR|2 years ago
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...
silon42|2 years ago
badsectoracula|2 years ago
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.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/VNghjFA.png
amon22|2 years ago
asadotzler|2 years ago
jraph|2 years ago
In my case it has done its job of helping me find stuff when I needed it, occasionally.
medstrom|2 years ago
jchw|2 years ago
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...
giamma|2 years ago
wafriedemann|2 years ago
12345hn6789|2 years ago
nubinetwork|2 years ago
hendersoon|2 years ago
genericacct|2 years ago
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
unknown|2 years ago
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unknown|2 years ago
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etiam|2 years ago
Dwedit|2 years ago
Log_out_|2 years ago
cassepipe|2 years ago
It was so easy to install. And it looks fantastic.
maverick74|2 years ago
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-address-bar-placea...
pndy|2 years ago
maverick74|2 years ago
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!
unknown|2 years ago
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yashasolutions|2 years ago
bathwaterpizza|2 years ago
Slashbot3|2 years ago
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Slashbot3|2 years ago
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vdaea|2 years ago
dudefeliciano|2 years ago
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..
stainablesteel|2 years ago