[HN Gopher] How to make a better default Firefox UI
___________________________________________________________________
How to make a better default Firefox UI
Author : black7375
Score : 333 points
Date : 2024-02-19 11:02 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| black7375 wrote:
| 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.
|
| This article is part of a series. -
| https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/%5BArticle%...
| jraph wrote:
| 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!
| tetris11 wrote:
| How I find Lepton? In the addons store there's nothing listed
| under themes for that name.
|
| 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.
| black7375 wrote:
| Since Mozilla does not allow it as an add-on, you must
| download and install it yourself.
|
| 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...
| iruoy wrote:
| It takes 2 minutes and the instructions are very clear.
| Should not be a problem.
|
| 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.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Do you know how lepton would interact with the various
| firefox css themes (like those on the r/firefoxcss
| subreddit)? Some of them look really good but I'd imagine
| there might be conflicts and resulting instabilities. Btw
| thanks for posting this, I remember using lepton a long
| time back, I need to switch from edge soon haha
| AlienRobot wrote:
| 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.
| black7375 wrote:
| In the middle of the article, there is a brief discussion
| about icons and colors. I also think that well-coordinated
| color icons are good for readability and usability.
|
| 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.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Oh, I missed that. It's satisfying to see what I assumed to
| be true to be laid out so concretely as data points.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > the address bar is so incredibly large you could put 10
| buttons in there and you would still have space, so I can't
| imagine a reason to bother removing things
|
| Space isn't the only issue. Fewer options generally (very
| generally) yields better design - it's easier to find things,
| less distraction, cleaner, etc.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| 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.
|
| ```
| silon42 wrote:
| The first thing that I do is to enable standard WM title bar.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://i.imgur.com/VNghjFA.png
| yoavm wrote:
| If anyone is interested, I've worked on creating a cleaner
| interface for Firefox with sidebar tabs here:
| https://github.com/bjesus/fireside
| black7375 wrote:
| Oh, it looks pretty neat.
| rekado wrote:
| This is very nice. I'm using
| [Sidebery](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/sidebery/) for vertical sidebar tabs. How does
| fireside differ?
| yoavm wrote:
| You can use Sidebery with Fireside. Fireside doesn't really
| care what extension you're using for your tabs sidebar, but
| you might need to adjust some spacing. Fireside isn't an
| extension - it's a userChrome customization to hide the tabs,
| and move the location bar to the left so it's feel "merged"
| with the sidebar.
| tvshtr wrote:
| This is great
| vdaea wrote:
| 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.
| dudefeliciano wrote:
| > these systems are designed by ...
|
| 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..
| vdaea wrote:
| Standard Firefox.
|
| >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.
| Yaina wrote:
| Citation needed, I'd say.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| vdaea just said it
| thecosmicfrog wrote:
| 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?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| 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).
| ihateolives wrote:
| 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.
| pndy wrote:
| > Why throw all semantics out of the window?
|
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| A tab is literally a button with slightly different pixel
| shading. Its exactly the same thing as its always been.
| zx8080 wrote:
| There's so much things going south with each update I just
| don't care anymore.
|
| 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").
| encom wrote:
| Firefox v89 was the last version I used. I just couldn't be
| bothered with them constantly changing and removing features
| for no reason. I switched to Vivaldi, which offer basic
| functionality like vertical tabs, and a fully customisable UI
| out of the box. It's far from perfect, notably being closed
| source which was hard for me to swallow, but it annoys me far
| less than Firefox ever did. I have it set up how I like it,
| and that setup has stayed static in the three years I've used
| it now. Firefox frankly feels user hostile in comparison.
|
| Thunderbird was ruined with version 115, so I switched to
| Kmail. I miss calendar integration in my email client though.
| zx8080 wrote:
| Why wasting space for a button lower border if it's actually a
| tab's title and not a button?
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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.
| werdnapk wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| tvshtr wrote:
| It doesn't freaking matter on hi-dpi screen. Also I've just
| hidden them (tabbar) and I'm using compact vertical tabs.
| alimbada wrote:
| I never noticed it and even after it's been pointed out it's
| not an issue. Seems very nitpicky by those for whom it is an
| issue.
| flurdy wrote:
| 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.
| Archelaos wrote:
| It is ugly, but I can live with it.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| 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.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| It doesn't render the one you clicked on in a different
| colour? That might be a issue with the theme you use, my
| firefox shows the active tab in a clearly different colour
| from the inactive one.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| 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.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I wouldn't say they bother me per se, but they don't exactly
| feel right either. They're incongruent without good reason.
| tiltowait wrote:
| 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.
| square_usual wrote:
| 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.
| ihateolives wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| 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.
| hobs wrote:
| Damn that new tab must pop up for me like... once a month!
| What a distraction! I guess giving all my data to Google is
| probably worth it.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Joke all you want but Firefox's market share agrees with me
| as most users value convenience above all else.
|
| 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
| hobs wrote:
| I would agree that most people would be glad to give up
| their privacy for minor convenience. if I was a developer
| of Firefox I might care that its marketshare is falling,
| but truthfully nobody needs to be married to a web
| browser, or take its rise and fall too seriously.
|
| Still not going to use a Google browser though, that's
| just a self own.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The rise and fall reflects user popularity. And Firefox
| is less popular than ever, with both the new generation
| who grew up only knowing Safari and Chrome, and also with
| the old generation who they pissed off by trying to copy
| the shitty parts of Chrome instead of staying true to
| what made them popular in the first place such as speed,
| light weight, and getting out of your way by not charging
| the UI every 6 weeks.
| yoavm wrote:
| Sure, maybe everyone left Firefox because of the "what's
| new" tab and the UI changes. But maybe it's because
| Safari is default on some devices, and Chrome has the
| world biggest marketing company behind it.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Of course Google won the browser war mainly because
| they're World Heavyweight Advertising Moneybags World
| Champion, but Firefox also did itself no favors by
| annoying it's old and faithful userbase with often,
| unnecessary and unpopular UI changes a while ago.
| medstrom wrote:
| But your premise that one is more intrusive, isn't even
| true. Like others said by now, Chrome does the same thing
| if you don't open it often.
| viraptor wrote:
| Google mainly knows how to display ads. The raise of
| Chrome wasn't so much about features at the time as about
| people being bombarded with "install chrome" ads. On
| Google results, in Gmail, in Adsense, everywhere. There
| was an absurd amount of money sacrificed (not really
| spent since the ads were internal) to gain the users. I'm
| not sure any other aspect can be reliably compared in
| that scenario.
| paldepind2 wrote:
| Do you have any data to back that narrative? I know
| Mozilla is pushing that explanation, but from how I
| remember it Chrome gained market share because it was
| technologically superior to Firefox when it was released.
| It had a much more modern UI, much faster JS
| implementation, sandboxed tabs, etc. All features that it
| took Firefox years to copy. Some would say that Firefox
| has never caught up.
|
| 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.
| viraptor wrote:
| Ehh... UI was comparable. Chrome was a bit faster.
|
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| it also really helped that in difference to today wen
| Chrome was new it's performance gain over FF was often
| quite significant (same for security)
|
| 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).
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Chrome looks almost exactly like it did over 10 years
| ago.
|
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| 2008: https://techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/first-public-
| screen-captur...
|
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| > market share agrees
|
| 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.
| yoavm wrote:
| I feel exactly this way, but about Chrome. I suspect it's
| just bias - I only open Chrome once a week or so so this
| screen is very annoying. Firefox is always open so I don't
| even recall seeing anything like that.
| pprotas wrote:
| Chrome automatically opens up a tab with an ad for their new
| features after every automatic update. Isn't that kind of the
| same thing?
| dathinab wrote:
| yes hand the amount of times Firefox has done so in the
| last few years is also just a handful (like less then 1
| time per year in average)
|
| 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.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Install Sidebery[1] and hide the native tabs[2]. This is the
| way. :)
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
|
| [2] https://superuser.com/a/1424494
| medstrom wrote:
| I have neither! No visible tabs at all. Just cycle tabs with
| Ctrl+Tab hotkey.
|
| This is clean. Once in a month I want some kind of overview,
| but extensions like Tab List can give me a popup menu. The
| tabs needn't be visible constantly!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And the tabs should have pie menus, too.
| medstrom wrote:
| Are you serious? Details? This sounds new and
| interesting.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| See my other posts, and the links!
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39432170
| tomxor wrote:
| 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.
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Is there any insight as to why do they mark it as "not
| supported" ?
| marionauta wrote:
| It's corporate talk for "if it breaks, don't complain"
| arboles wrote:
| It's also a sneaky strategy to deal with features you've
| decided to remove, because users are that fucking stupid.
|
| 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.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| never remove features: "product is too bloated"
|
| remove features: "product is tricking us"
| arboles wrote:
| Browser companies, famous for prioritizing avoiding
| bloat.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Usually when people call a feature bloat it's because its
| presence, resource consumption, etc is too great relative
| to its value and utility to users or it's not
| particularly relevant.
|
| 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.
| stevage wrote:
| For Firefox the classic example is Pocket.
| arboles wrote:
| Code bloat is not that obscure of a thing. I think a
| decent portion of people realize that a program with
| features upon features is stretched too thin to meet
| users' needs in high quality, or in a timely fashion,
| especially if they paid $0 for it.
|
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| It can be metrics driven the whole way.
|
| - 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
| bitvoid wrote:
| If I recall correctly, that was their justification for
| no longer supporting it: too few people used it. Except
| it was tucked away in a small dropdown at the bottom of
| the customize toolbar screen, which requires right-
| clicking the toolbar to get to. If it was in the actual
| settings somewhere or, better yet, given as an option
| during the first launch flow, I imagine more people
| would've used it.
|
| I didn't even know about it until after it became
| unsupported.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Of course, people who modify their settings in the first
| place are more likely to disable telemetry, particularly
| if they're choosing a non-default, low market-share
| application that specifically bills itself as privacy
| friendly.
| 3abiton wrote:
| That was my issue with ir, I will try the flag today!
| logicprog wrote:
| 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.
| Shrezzing wrote:
| Padding's great on my desktop with two 24" monitors. On my
| one-screen 13" laptop it's less welcome.
| logicprog wrote:
| Okay fair haha
| jwells89 wrote:
| Whitespace can be a good thing as you note, but thoughtful
| allocation distribution is critical, particularly on desktop
| operating systems. Firefox default isn't the worst here but
| it's also far from the best.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| I uses a 40inch 4k monitor. The padding looks horrible.
| Chrome is not better in this regard though
| medstrom wrote:
| It's strange, the absence of padding gives me room to
| breathe, because if I can quickly scan a menu with my eye
| then I feel I have good overview and control over affairs.
| With more padding, you cannot do the same scanning motion
| with the eye, you have to read each item as a single atom
| unto itself, and suddenly the menu has become a jungle of
| megaliths where it's easy to get lost.
| pdntspa wrote:
| That feeling of anxiety when looking over software should be
| taken as a cue to get better at it, not a feeling to be
| processed as such. Because it goes away as mastery goes up.
| Pretty soon all that whitespace becomes anxiety-inducing in
| and of itself
| logicprog wrote:
| I think you're making condescending assumptions in order to
| explain away my different preferences, and I don't
| appreciate that. The feeling I'm experiencing is not
| anxiety at not knowing how to use the software or read the
| information presented, I am very comfortably a power user
| of basically every piece of software I use regularly. It's
| simply the fact that high levels of visual noise are more
| difficult to process than when information is clearly
| separated out and grouped and given enough visual space to
| be processed independently. Dense interfaces are just less
| visually restful. This is why I actually tend to prefer
| pieces of software with little interface at all, just
| keybindings, like my config of emacs. And I see no reason
| why being a power user would inherently make white space
| anxiety inducing, since there is no sensible psychological
| mechanism for the two to be connected in that direction,
| unlike the sensible psychological and vision processing
| connection between dense cluttered interfaces and a feeling
| of visual clutter.
|
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| I have a few decades worth of experience with software and
| cluttered UIs just suck.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > which may not give a specific practical advantage
|
| It, in fact, gives a specific practical disadvantage.
| logicprog wrote:
| I mean, I don't really care to optimize "number of buttons
| per screen" (and text can be as dense as it wants, although
| I usually set my font size to 16pt or above) but to each
| their own.
| darkwater wrote:
| 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.
|
| Damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
| medstrom wrote:
| That's why much like the dark/light mode switch has become
| standard, "compact"/"touch mode" should too.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Going full circle Hildon / Maemo.
| Klonoar wrote:
| KDE is fine with little to no padding. Their problem is often
| that they have _inconsistent_ padding /spacing, which just
| throws everything off as death by a thousand cuts.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Well, yes and no. Different people want a different user
| experience. So this strikes me as a need for a new user
| configurable option.
|
| Make a new user option, so it is easy for users to compact
| information if they want to. It sucks having to support
| multiple states (more things to test and verify) but it seems
| like there is an audience for both ideas.
| jlarocco wrote:
| The mistake is to think there's a single "right" way to do
| it.
|
| Either make the UI flexible enough to accomadate everybody's
| personal preferences, or accept that some people won't like
| it and will choose something else.
| sikhnerd wrote:
| Thanks for posting this, really makes a big difference!
| cassepipe wrote:
| I have been using that for some time but I just tried Lepton
| now. Installing Lepton is as easy as one-liner and imho well
| worth it.
| gsich wrote:
| "not supported" - that was out of spite for people who
| criticized the "modern" design choice.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| medstrom wrote:
| Please, don't perpetuate the myth that vegans "keep going on
| about things" unless you've seen someone do it in real life.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I have.
| a_gnostic wrote:
| Most vegans I know use Edge.
| OJFord wrote:
| 'unless you've seen _someone_ ' is not a good standard to
| use here, because of course some people are like that,
| that's where the stereotype comes from - but the vegans who
| don't 'keep going on about it' are inherently not as
| visible: it's not often you'll know someone is a vegan and
| _not_ talking about it, essentially _never_ for strangers.
|
| 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).
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I use tree style tabs btw
| foolswisdom wrote:
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| Fair enough not having the horizontal space for it. It's
| usually still the opposite that annoys me (small centred
| content not making use of space) but of course this depends
| on zoom level etc. too.
|
| 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.)
| foolswisdom wrote:
| The space where tabs go (when horizontal) isn't removed in
| vertical tabs mode. So using vertical tabs doesn't save any
| extra on vertical space, only uses additional horizontal
| space.
| OJFord wrote:
| Well what I'm saying is I don't have it, so either
| Sidebery handles it or I put something in userChrome, but
| either way it's something I have not had to think about
| in all the years I've been using vertical tabs, such that
| I was not aware of the issue.
|
| edit: the latter (or Sidebery does do it but my previous
| solution didn't and this is now redundant, I suppose), I
| have: #TabsToolbar {
| visibility: collapse; } #sidebar-
| header { display: none; }
|
| (~/.config/mozilla/firefox/profile/chrome/userChrome.css)
| beAbU wrote:
| 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.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| I feel the same way. Keep limited tabs open most of the time.
|
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| You wouldn't be having this argument if you could put your
| tabs on any edge you wanted to, at any time, even using
| multiple edges of you run out of space along one edge.
|
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| I find that having a huge sidebar shifts the content off-center
| in a really uncomfortable way.
| OJFord wrote:
| Aren't you currently on a site where most of the content is
| more off-centre, and having a left sidebar would actually put
| it more in front of you?
|
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| There's userChrome modifications that make Firefox's sidebar
| collapsible, expands on mouseover and covers the page instead
| of pushing the page aside. I use that with TreeStyleTabs.
| Mine when collapsed is only ~3 favicons in width.
| bloopernova wrote:
| My userChrome tweaks for vertical tabs:
| https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...
|
| Includes screenshots! :)
| bscphil wrote:
| > I recommend Sidebery
|
| 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)?
| OJFord wrote:
| I already mentioned 'panels' and container integration.
|
| 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.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Safari has a side bar where tabs are in fact vertical. Tab
| groups will also let you, um, group tabs, and they're presented
| as a tree in the sidebar.
| alex3305 wrote:
| 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.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Yes, I don't love it either. However, they FINALLY have truly
| pinned tabs that don't go out of sight, like Firefox. So I'm
| happy with the change.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| BMSR wrote:
| I use Grasshopper for vertical tabs.
|
| 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...
| etiam wrote:
| Anybody aware of corresponding damage mitigations for Thunderbird
| after the start of version 115 ?
| Astraco wrote:
| 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Rule number #1 of interface design: don't change the interface!
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| It's (almost) every major software.
|
| 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.
| KTibow wrote:
| If I had to guess why they might not let you customize it
|
| - 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
| encom wrote:
| >fully customizable context menus? How hard is that?
|
| It's not hard at all, Vivaldi does it. I consider Vivaldi the
| least worst browser.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Simon Schneegan's "Kandu" cross platform pie menus, as well
| as his older "Fly-Pie" and "Gnome-Pie" projects, let you
| create and edit your own pie menus with a WYSIWYG drag-and-
| drop direct manipulation interface.
|
| 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
|
| https://vimeo.com/30618179
|
| Gnome-Pie 0.4 (12 years ago)
|
| https://vimeo.com/35385121
|
| https://schneegans.github.io/gnome-pie
| atomicfiredoll wrote:
| 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.
| paol wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://draic.org/scratch/ffoxuserchrome.png
| vikeri wrote:
| 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.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| 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
| Yaina wrote:
| 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.
| black7375 wrote:
| The UI is definitely a matter of taste, which is why I created
| the distribution in three different shapes.
|
| However, it was confusing that when muting, there was no
| indication that it was loading or there was no tab separator.
| Yaina wrote:
| yeah, all the things that happen in the Korean version seem
| like bugs that should be filed IMO!
| qwertox wrote:
| 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.
| KTibow wrote:
| I've never seen any page like that (I'm on Fedora)
|
| > 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
| pxoe wrote:
| 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.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Firefox could use a good dose of this thinking.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Thats exactly how firefox works out of the box, no? On my
| firefox at least theres a popover with a few recent downloads
| and a button to show all downloads.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| 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.
| _notreallyme_ wrote:
| 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...
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > Actually their argument was that all other major browsers
| behaved like that
|
| Yes, I understand, and that's true. But no other native text
| field behaves like this; only other _browsers_. In fact, one
| of the formerly big selling points of Firefox over Chrome for
| me, at the time, was that in Firefox, interacting with the
| URL bar _didn 't_ select all (read: it behaved like all other
| GTK text fields). "Making Firefox behave more like Chrome" is
| an anti-feature when most of your users aren't using Chrome
| precisely _because_ of asinine behaviors like this.
| Yaina wrote:
| I don't find it ironic at all. The purpose of telemetry is to
| be able to obtain information about the user population at
| large. It's anonymous and the data only flows one way (i.e.
| you don't see personalized ads based on telemetry data), but
| of course some data about your browsing behavior is being
| sent somewhere, yes.
|
| It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in
| turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If
| you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not
| contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being
| made.
|
| Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions
| and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt
| out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's
| problem.
|
| You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
| bscphil wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| [delayed]
| ikt wrote:
| > 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.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| > it was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it
| was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other
| browsers on Linux itself.
|
| So GTK text fields behave a certain way on the entire
| platform (Linux). Other browsers choose to implement a
| behavior that is totally inconsistent with the rest of the
| platform. As far as I am concerned, Firefox was the only
| browser that implemented this _correctly_. Do you truly
| personally believe the right move here was to match the
| beahvior of other browsers, who themselves are _incorrect_ by
| not respecting platform conventions?
|
| > The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to
| handle
|
| Don't fix something that isn't broken.
|
| > Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources,
| since we still need to maintain them
|
| I can hardly see how "having more code means it makes it
| harder for me to maintain" is a legitimate argument. This
| argument makes no sense. Delete the entire URL bar then. The
| URL bar requires lots of code and is hard to write unit tests
| for. (/s) 1. Mozilla engineers are literally paid to maintain
| the browser, 2. not wanting to update unit tests to deal with
| a pref is pure laziness, no excuse.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| I agree. It seems there are two conflicting views here.
|
| "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.
| keyneus wrote:
| 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.
| mrob wrote:
| 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.
| dathinab wrote:
| For non-technical people it would be a huge security risk of
| not behaving that way, similar Clear, Past and Go would just
| be unnecessary confusing.
|
| Technical people have the tendency to use keyboard shortcuts.
| mrob wrote:
| If there is one command called "Paste", and another command
| beginning with and commonly abbreviated to "Go", "Paste and
| Go" should be equivalent to using both in sequence. If it's
| impossible to make it act in the expected manner, and
| impossible to label it correctly, the only remaining option
| is to remove the feature.
| dathinab wrote:
| you are missing the point
|
| 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.
| cannam wrote:
| > 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?
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I vastly prefer the current way. It makes it very easy to
| manipulate parts of the URL. If I want to replace the URL I
| just open a new tab instead, and if I want to copy it I use
| ctrl+d which focuses URL and selects all.
| dathinab wrote:
| > as you might expect, Mozilla does not care
|
| 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
| giamma wrote:
| On MacOS in my opinion this theme makes the experience much
| better: https://github.com/ideaweb/firefox-safari-style
| nyx_land wrote:
| 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.
| bloopernova wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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)
| dmix wrote:
| 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).
| stevage wrote:
| I use FF primarily, but sometimes Chrome for debugging, on
| macOS.
|
| I literally cannot tell them apart.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| > 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.)
| SSLy wrote:
| I think Sideberry is nowadays more comfortable than TMP.
| 015a wrote:
| 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.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users
| were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome
| was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design
| decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.
| jwells89 wrote:
| > chrome was made for small screen laptop users
|
| 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.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so
| arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for
| all their users that they should only have tabs on one side,
| be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why
| restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side
| only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the
| other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall
| monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a
| few?
|
| While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys
| from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over
| whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key,
| and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy
| a keyboard with only a left-arrow key.
|
| But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no
| arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever
| arrow you want, whenever you want.
|
| Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times
| for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four
| edges, too!
| jsrcout wrote:
| I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's
| desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely
| gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately
| and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying
| the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest
| amount of white space. The results beggar belief.
|
| 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?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I was less than satisfied about they layout of the
| buttons in xcalc, so I built a version of the window
| manager that let me specify the root window containing
| the windows to manage, and gave it the window id of the
| xcalc window, so it put window frames around each
| calculator button so I could move them around, resize
| them, even close them into icons (bigger than the button)
| if I didn't want to use them. Not what the xcalc or
| window manager designers had in mind, probably.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters
| shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal
| space for an apples to apples comparison.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| a_subsystem wrote:
| I've been using Arc and I've become a fan of folders +
| vertical tabs also. But I also want bookmarks with tags. I
| don't want to keep 'pinouts for xyz motherboard' open
| somewhere all the time. I want to tag it with 'dell',
| 'motherboard', and 'pinout' and then search when I need it
| instead of having to remember what 'Space' I put it in. I
| prefer bookmarks to web search when possible because often
| enough I spend stupid amounts of time searching for a little
| tidbit and may want to come back to it later.
|
| Rather than cleaning out bookmarks, I would keep a few main
| bookmarks and folders on the toolbar, and file away
| everything else under one few big folders with tags.
|
| I use Firefox for tagging and it seems to be a fantastic way
| to keep track of thousands of sites with small cognitive
| load. Am I missing some workflow that's 'better'?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yeah, not having bookmarks is probably Arc's biggest
| weakness. I find bookmarks useful too, but only add them
| when I know I'm going to keep them around for a while.
|
| 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.
| bloopernova wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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; }
|
| Same link as my previous comment now has a screenshot of the
| result of that CSS:
| https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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
| black7375 wrote:
| > And not only tabs for apps like browser and IDEs, but also
| the desktop window manager should support tabs on top level
| windows in a consistent manner
|
| I miss the tabbed window feature in KDE 4. This is the
| feature I'm most disappointed to see missing from version 5.
|
| - 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| Vertical tabs would be unusable on a window that's resized to
| be half the width of a 16:9 display.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I do it all the time and I don't think it is "unusable".
| About the only "issue" with it is often that it shrinks the
| viewport just enough to trigger "mobile" breakpoints in CSS,
| but for some websites (YouTube, especially) that can be a
| _feature_ as much as a "bug".
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is a good point especially on laptops. It might be nice
| to display side tabs until a breakpoint and thereafter
| autohide
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| jchw wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/jchv/nixos-config/commit/d3db419ff44347a8...
| j1elo wrote:
| 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.
| yorwba wrote:
| 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.)
| j1elo wrote:
| No, I don't have muscle memory, and in fact you have
| introduced me to the Ctrl+Shift+B shortcut to show or hide
| the Bookmarks Toolbar! :-D I won't use it though, because I
| have it visible and it's not something one typically changes
| a lot.
|
| With "side panels" I mean what strictly speaking Firefox
| calls "Sidebar": menu View -> Sidebar -> choose ONE among
| Bookmarks, History, Synced Tabs, Bookmark search plus 2, or
| Tree Style Tab.
|
| Why the hell I cannot have e.g. Tree Style Tab AND a
| Bookmarks sidebars on the left, at the same time? Seems silly
| to me. Ages ago I worked with Qt and made desktop
| applications that could have detachable panels (QDockWidget),
| or their native equivalents such as palettes on Windows, that
| could be placed anywhere on a main window; but now that we're
| living in the future it seems we went backwards on what our
| UIs are able to do.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| look, if you guys aren't using vertical tabs you're living in the
| past
| amon22 wrote:
| I love Firefox but my biggest issue with it is that "History"
| fucking sucks. It's comically bad.
| jraph wrote:
| In which ways? Please entertain us :-)
|
| In my case it has done its job of helping me find stuff when I
| needed it, occasionally.
| genericacct wrote:
| My 2c:
|
| 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
| medstrom wrote:
| This thread is discussing tabs a lot. So I want to ask why do
| tabs need to be visible constantly in the first place?
| https://edstrom.dev/wgfjk/no-tabs-in-firefox
| wafriedemann wrote:
| 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.
| 12345hn6789 wrote:
| Does reinventing the wheel every 3 years count as progress?
| hendersoon wrote:
| I find the new default UI usable with the compact mode enabled. I
| did prefer the old one with the blue highlight line on the active
| tab, though.
| butz wrote:
| 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.
| pndy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that Waterfox fork uses Lepton already for quite
| some time
| maverick74 wrote:
| With all those changes to GUI (such as tabs on bottom) i have to
| ask why can't i put Bookmarks above the Tabs Bar (and URL bar)???
|
| 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!
| maverick74 wrote:
| also, take a look at:
|
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/make-address-bar-placea...
| Dwedit wrote:
| Thank you very much for making Firefox UI Fix. I wish we didn't
| need it.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Ho wow, it's good to read what you were thinking about the new UI
| from the beginning.
|
| It was so easy to install. And it looks fantastic.
| yashasolutions wrote:
| Well, honestly since I have found Tridactyl, I have fixed the UI
| with guiset_quiet gui none
|
| it remove all the problems. Literally.
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