[HN Gopher] Firefox 91 - Revert back to old tab style
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Firefox 91 - Revert back to old tab style
Author : thangalin
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-08-15 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (superuser.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (superuser.com)
| teekert wrote:
| Fwiw, I love the new style. Looks good and clean and more modern
| to me. I see no downsides.
| bartvk wrote:
| I really like the Close Tab button on the left, so while custom
| userChrome.css still works, I've fixed that. But for the rest,
| it's fine for me.
| unicornporn wrote:
| Haven't seen the regular tab bar in ages. Just install the Tree
| Style Tab extension and never look back. :)
| chmod775 wrote:
| The new tabs are objectively bad and someone at Mozilla is awful
| at their job.
|
| Another boneheaded thing they did with tabs was _replacing_ the
| favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is playing audio[1],
| instead of displaying the loudspeaker at the end of the title or
| overlaid like when you pin a tab.
|
| Now I have trouble finding the tab of a YouTube video among a lot
| of tabs because I can't just look for the YouTube favicon. It was
| clearly better before, and that should have been _obvious_ to any
| UX designer worth their salt.
|
| They're clearly not asking "What is a good interface?", they're
| asking "What is a shiny interface?".
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/T13tZXq.png
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| That's because you're using the unsupported "compact" mode.
| Switch back to normal mode and the speaker only shows on hover
| (in addition to the "PLAYING" text on the second line, which is
| omitted in "compact" mode).
| marczellm wrote:
| I disagree with unsupporting compact.
| mlinksva wrote:
| > _replacing_ the favicon with a loudspeaker when the tab is
| playing audio
|
| Ah, that explains how I've inadvertently muted tabs several
| times over the last few days, when I've never done that before.
| nullc wrote:
| This interface style where there are no visible edges and where
| control surfaces are entirely indistinct is considered the gold
| standard today, unfortunately.
| amadeusz wrote:
| As much as I kept using firefox while it progressively got more
| unusable, I just straight abandoned it after 91, at some point
| time spent fighting configuring my browser to be usable is better
| spend choosing from alternatives.
| nominated1 wrote:
| If you'd like to play around and see your changes take place live
| as you're editing:
|
| Enable the Browser Toolbox[1] > Style Editor > userChrome.css
|
| [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Tools/Browser_Toolb...
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The new style looks awful on Windows, and that's on a 1440
| screen, can't imagine how unreadable it must be on 1080.
|
| You can also add this .tab-secondary-label {
| display: none }
|
| to hide the annoying all-caps 'PLAYING' subtitle.
| rascul wrote:
| I'm still undecided about the PLAYING subtitle, but I might
| disable it. Thanks for this.
| gary_0 wrote:
| It's dumbfounding that you have to go to these lengths just to
| restore a standard UI metaphor. It's also very worrying that
| Mozilla is giving the finger to power users who care about that
| sort of thing -- the very people who helped make Firefox the
| success it seems determined to no longer be.
| sdiq wrote:
| Firefox has been my primary browser for years now. I mostly use
| Chrome for Gmail and other Google services. Typing this from a
| Firefox browser on Android. I also mostly use a small screen
| laptop that has a huge collection of bookmarks (I am not even
| sure I will come to read all of them). These bookmarks now
| overflow the screen due to increased spacing between them. On
| Firefox 90, I could disable Proton ui settings. These are no
| longer possible in Firefox 91. While it is a very small
| annoyance, the overflown bookmarks irk me so much that I am now
| contemplating moving to Chrome for good. Privacy be damned. Well,
| at least for me.
| leo_bloom wrote:
| Maybe the Firefox devs will at some point have mercy and undo
| this change to the tab bar. Maybe they can sell it in version 95
| as a "fresh new idea to improve usability".
| formerly_proven wrote:
| A browser has like two main UI controls, the tab bar and the
| address bar. How do you make a redesign that fucks up
| approximately 50 % of your primary UI? Just don't get it. This
| screams "Oh but it looks so fancy and modern to me, a UX
| designer". Meanwhile you a) removed the main UI visually
| "flowing" into the active tab header (which signals which tab is
| active) while b) severely reducing the contrast of the active-
| inactive background in the contrast (to wit: before the change it
| was almost literally black and white, now it's two slightly
| different shades of white).
|
| Stuff like this should simply be rejected. Design that is
| unusable and tailored to look "clean" on a calibrated monitor is
| not design at all.
| alserio wrote:
| I don't dislike the ui per se, but the tabs have clearly been
| designed by someone that does not use firefox. I challenge any
| person to look at firefox with other tabs open in a Container
| context and guess which tab is the active one.
| atribecalledqst wrote:
| I was mad when I upgraded Firefox and suddenly I couldn't see the
| boundaries between my tabs anymore. I have a lot of tabs. Glad to
| see that there is a trick in Firefox 91 to restore the old style,
| otherwise I would have just stayed on Firefox 89 forever.
| Interesting that CSS is used to style the browser chrome.
|
| Another thing I didn't like after upgrading to FF89 was
| overscrolling, but fortunately once I figured out the term itself
| (which took a good bit of Googling as the effect is hard to
| describe) it was easy to disable.
|
| Recent updates to Firefox have made me pretty unhappy with
| Mozilla, though. Really not a fan of major UI changes happening
| between updates with no warning. They should make it easier to
| revert to the old UI.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| What I don't understand is why this isn't just a checkbox in the
| "customize toolbar" sheet. As proven by all the "fixes" that have
| been posted, it's purely stylistic, and with addons no longer
| being able to muck with XUL, breaking addons is not a concern
| either. Maybe I'm missing something, but from my viewpoint the
| development overhead of offering such an option is almost
| nothing.
| leppr wrote:
| I didn't know about this experimental CSS function `color-mix`.
| Can't wait until it gets widely implemented.
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/CSS/color_value/color-mix()
|
| (code formatting because HN doesn't support the trailing
| parentheses in links)
| lykahb wrote:
| For the past several years the Firefox management has made many
| decisions that show disdain for their users. Disabling addons on
| the Android Firefox is based on a whimsical decision from the
| product management, not on the technical limits, as Firefox
| Nightly shows.
|
| Notably, those changes cannot be adjusted with the options. Even
| if they care about the simplicity of the settings panel more than
| the experience of the power users, adding a setting to
| about:config would be the right choice.
|
| I still use Firefox on the daily basis because I wouldn't want
| the pages I develop work only on Chromium. [putting on a
| conspiracy theorist hat] However, the biggest payer of Mozilla is
| not users, but Google. It is in their best interest to keep
| Firefox in a state that has a small share of the market, and yet
| does not let the regulators claim that Google holds a monopoly on
| browsing. The decline of FF usability is sad but not surprising.
| runlevel1 wrote:
| Between Firefox's Proton UI update and Safari in Monterey Beta 2,
| I'm genuinely baffled.
|
| If modern UI theory is to make it as simple as possible and no
| simpler, then it seems we're straddling the line where important
| information (e.g. which tab is which) is now being lost.
| sweettea wrote:
| I don't understand what Mozilla does. I've been using FF since
| Deer Park, and it was great then. Adding increased security,
| speeding rendering... probably some nice incremental changes
| there. But blowing up the extension universe, preventing you from
| using ftp, not letting you ignore old security on ancient
| websites, and the assorted UI cripplings of which this is just
| the latest? It could have been a perfected tool, unchanging in
| appearance because it's the way everyone knows and can wield
| whether a novice or master.
|
| I still use FF, but it is no longer the easy to use yet deep
| power tool that vim/emacs/imagemagick are.
| zecg wrote:
| On Android, they removed saving pages locally. No PDF, no
| mhtml, nothing. Forced me to go to bromite after years and
| years.
| krick wrote:
| A traditional question for these threads: are there real
| alternatives yet? I mean, such that you actually did switch.
|
| You said that you didn't, and neither did I. I just don't know
| if anything but Chromium would be sustainable, and I still
| don't want to switch to Chromium. If anything, FF profiles are
| still a reason to use it. Even though I don't really believe FF
| is still much better than Chrome in terms of privacy and such
| (well, TBH, it still gives me peace that I can disable some
| stuff in about:config I almost surely couldn't in Chromium: I'd
| need to investigate, and it doesn't help that Chromium users
| generally don't bother themselves with such issues). And it
| hardly is in terms of actual browser technology. I didn't check
| if all plugins I need work under chromium, but I assume they
| would, since most non-major stuff was broken in FF anyway, and
| major stuff tends to have even better support in chromium
| nowadays.
| xfitm3 wrote:
| Mozilla has a substantial payroll and those folks need to
| justify their pay, so we see all kinds of changes introduced
| for the sake of change. It's not just Mozilla, it's the broader
| mature software industry.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| To Firefox developers reading this: we know it's to much to give
| us the old style back. But please, just add it as an option
| somewhere so that when those of us who use it update Firofox, it
| is preserved. I understand you may not want to keep it in the
| general preferences, but please at least keep it in the
| about:config and don't remove this code in the future releases. I
| hope this is not to much to ask. The amount of bending backwards
| we do now to undo that is ridiculous.
| mopsi wrote:
| To Firefox developers reading this: please stop active warfare
| on your users or soon you will have no market share left at
| all.
|
| Signed,
|
| a Firefox user since the time it was still called Firebird
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Adtly. Signed,
|
| a Firefox user since the time it was called pheonix
| tkot wrote:
| I started using a theme called Qiyu Light
| (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/qiyu-light/)
| after the tab style changed to be able to find current tab
| reliably.
|
| It doesn't seem to change anything other than marking current tab
| blue.
| trog wrote:
| Some other useful resources, including how to get tabs on bottom
| for those of us that like our world topsy-turvy:
|
| - https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix - a good base
| including different light/dark themes. See Tips for code to put
| tabs on bottom
|
| - https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx - huge collection of
| different CSS that you can mix together for the perfectly
| customised UI
|
| Hoping some day someone builds a playground so it's easy to
| build/customise interfaces through a GUI as I find it a bit of a
| chore to get things tweaked exactly right!
|
| In the meantime it's worth noting you can use remote debugging[1]
| to live edit the interface.
|
| 1.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/73dvty/tutorial...
| jandeboevrie wrote:
| Here's my take on it:
| https://raymii.org/s/blog/Firefox-89-proton-ui-tab-styling.h...
| paol wrote:
| And mine: /* Deprotonify */ @-moz-
| document url(chrome://browser/content/browser.xhtml) {
| #tabbrowser-tabs .tab-background { border-radius: 3px
| 3px 0 0 !important; margin-block-end: 0 !important;
| } #urlbar:not([focused="true"], [open]) >
| #urlbar-background, #searchbar:not(:focus-within) {
| border-color: var(--lwt-toolbar-field-border-color,
| hsla(240,5%,5%,.2)) !important; } }
| menupopup > menu, menupopup > menuitem { padding-block:
| 3px !important; }
|
| (I actually have a few other rules to hide buttons I don't
| want, but I omitted that here to keept the experience
| standard.)
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| I've just disabled updates & will be sticking to V89 until it
| breaks, at which point I'll jump ship to something else. Maybe
| even go back to Chrome.
|
| Mozilla have shown and time and time again that just when you
| think they surely can't make a bad change (and keep all the
| previous bad changes) for the Nth time in a row, they absolutely
| can.
| layer8 wrote:
| How do you disable the nagging about new versions?
| 63 wrote:
| I didn't have as much of a problem with the new tab style as I
| thought I would after I started using it. It was a jarring change
| to see in the changelog, but in practice I hardly notice.
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(page generated 2021-08-15 23:01 UTC)