'Mozilla Is Hellbent On Making Their New Firefox UI Unusable' 181
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Over the past ten years, Firefox market share has decreased substantially and the web browser has lost its appeal and coolness. Seeing that, someone at Mozilla probably decided that the best way to entice people back is by changing its UI, thus Firefox has already seen quite a huge number of changes despite other major web browsers staying relatively the same in terms of their visuals; i.e. Google Chrome and Apple Safari look almost the same as they did a decade ago. The most substantial redesign, which is being prepared for the next release, called Proton, promises to drive most power users away because it's broken on a number of levels and makes using the browser a very unpleasant experience.
So, what has changed:
- The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.
- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.
- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.
- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming.
It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?
So, what has changed:
- The compact density option for the address bar is now gone, and not only that, the title bar is now a lot taller than before. Overall, vertically, the title bar and address bar now take almost a dozen pixels more than previous Firefox releases, which steals very precious vertical space.
- The floating tabs. The active tab is now totally disconnected from the active web page and it looks out of place.
- The inactive tabs now completely lack a delimiter between them; and in the case of websites lacking a favicon, all inactive tabs look like one, which makes understanding what's open and what to click very difficult and time consuming.
- Mozilla has removed icons from menus, which makes navigating them slower and more difficult. Human beings can easily recognize and memorize icons, and now instead you have to read 20 menu items and try to understand what you actually need to click. Just to illustrate it, check how Firefox 88 looks and what is up and coming.
It surely looks like whatever UX studies Mozilla has done were either not run properly, or the data being collected was not properly understood. Mozilla has disabled feedback for Firefox, they've made it abundantly clear that you cannot leave comments in their Bugzilla, and considering they want to deprecate userChrome.css, it makes it impossible to restore the semblance of a good web browser experience. The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?
WTF (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm with you. Works fine. Changes from time to time. Isn't Google. Well-documented. Behaves well with a wide variety of code. Has great AD BLOCKERS available for it, so as to not enable someone's pension plan.
Much ado about nothing.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I don't get it either. I have no idea where all the complaints on Slashdot come from. Nothing has broken for me and I don't even notice the interface changes that everyone here seems to think make it "unusable".
To answer the question in the summary: maybe stop shitting on it needlessly? We get it -- you hate any and all changes. Maybe accept that little UI changes aren't the end of the world? Honestly, You can spare 12 vertical pixels. (This from the people who complained endlessly about Australis, which gave them more vertical space!)
Seriously. I looked at the screenshots, and don't see any obvious or important difference between that and what I'm looking at now. I expect that when my browser updates, I won't notice or care about whatever changes.
All this ridiculous bitching and whining is doing is turning Chrome into the new IE6. Already, I'm starting to see sites that rely on Chrome only features and break in odd ways on FireFox.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Their current method is deny choice. From a company that used to promote choice, it is pretty offensive. Real neolib stuff, we know you hate it but we believe it is better for you, so SHUT THE FUCK UP and take it. Instead it continues to shrink firefox market share. People used to be able to choose what their browser interface looked like, now they are told what it WILL LOOK like and to fuck off if they don't like it and they are.
Perhaps that is their intent they want out of the browser business more back end, perhaps under pressure from google, perhaps because of moles from google purposefully seeking to shrink firefox market share.
Things change, Firefox become pretty anal retentive and controlling and I think purposefully undermined by Google plants and looks to be fading away, such is life, things change and people are abandoning Firefox because they keep doing exactly this, forcing changing, blocking choice, deciding for you want you like and do not like and it is all becoming pretty offensive.
Of course now way in hell I will trust Google and M$ can flock right off. So there are other browsers out there to choose from. For the Firefox team the choice is to provide choice to the end user with regard to the UI layout on screen or continue to lose market share, stop deciding for people what they will have to accept or delete the app.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
Choice is expensive. Every choice they offer has to be supported. If hardly anyone uses it and those people are not willing to pay anything for its maintenance, it's hard to justify spending money maintaining a feature.
And before you rant about how this is what is destroying Firefox's market share, consider that all the more popular browsers offer even less choice. If people are annoyed because they want more choice then the last thing they will do is switch to a Chrome derivative or Safari.
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At least with Chrome, once you get used to its UI, it's kind-of OK. Google does not change it up. The latest Chrome looks pretty much like the first version did.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Informative)
And yet somehow 1 guy can make Waterfox nice and customizable with all the old Firefox extensions and keep it up to date but Mozilla can't do this with how many hundred of millions of dollars and dozens of programmers? Doesn't compute.
How about someone actually ask people why the left Firefox, I left it because they destroyed the UI but I suspect other people left it because Bing is forcibly loaded to their PC and Chrome constantly tells people their browser is slow on Google's pages.
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Does he fix all the security issues though? Are there even enough people looking for security issues in Waterfox? It's a small target and probably gets by on security through obscurity.
Also it looks like it is still single-threaded so performance is crap. Clearly 1 guy isn't enough to maintain a modern, high performance web browser.
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I've never had any problems with performance using a CPU that is now about 9 years old. It gets bug fixed.
1 guy does maintain a modern high performance web browser whether you like it or not. Mozilla didn't wreck extension compatibility and force their design decisions on people because of staffing issues, they did it for other reasons. Given that people liked Firefox because of how customizable and flexible it was, those reasons are bad ones. Management have failed, 2/3rds of the user base or more have lef
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> Management have failed, 2/3rds of the user base or more have left
--And somehow I think this is deliberate... Manglement is incompetent and the changes are pissing off your userbase, you continue to deny them free choice to change settings and stifle their attempts to communicate.
--Fix: Find another browser (like palemoon), firefox is not recoverable unless the manglement changes hands and the company starts in a different direction.
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Choice is expensive. Every choice they offer has to be supported. If hardly anyone uses it and those people are not willing to pay anything for its maintenance, it's hard to justify spending money maintaining a feature.
Riddle me this, then... take a look at the screen shots and tell me why:
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Most people I know zoom by Ctrl++, Ctrl+- and Ctrl+0.
Find is a simple Ctrl+F and print is Ctrl+P.
I'm pretty sure these won't be changed.
Also, the Menu bar is likely still available.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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1. There's a slight gap between the highlighted tab and the main part of the window. While this doesn't strike me as good in general, it's not exactly a showstopper
The gap does not help readability and is a waste of verticle space. More so since ....
The Address Bar is taller by adding extra verticle padding on the top and bottom of the bar. Again, doesn't improve readability, so is also a waste of verticle space
I do use the Compact option, so I will get more than an extra 12 verticle pixels. Since Mozilla is removing the Compact option, I won't have a choice
2. The Pocket feature is now gone from the URL bar. Did anyone use Pocket? I still don't actually know what it is.
I never used it, but I know some people who do use it. While I don't care, others do care
3. The menu bar has a cleaner look, but no longer uses meaningless icons next to the short, descriptive, text. TFA thinks this is a travesty. I think it's good. There's no need to have meaningless icons next to short descriptive text. It's unnecessary. It offers no help at all.
While I agree that the
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Re: WTF (Score:4, Insightful)
No one is forced into a life of Chrome.
No one.
Crime maybe, but not Chrome. Haven't used it in years. Happy camper.
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No, Firefox in recent years has churned features, some UI wanks thinking they'll make their mark on the world by purposeless rearrangement and making common menu options harder to get to. But then competing browsers do this stupidity too. Firefox is less usable and harder to use, but people without a brain for UI design (who often also think MS Ribbons or Win 10 desktop are great) can't see it. It's like you can saw the leg off a four legged chair and give it to such, and they'll fall off the three le
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox has done this wankery with their UI since very early on - a lot of us remember the bullshit around the "AwesomeBar" which removed a lot of the functionality we liked and used, and replaced it with something that didn't work very well for a long time and then refused to listen to their users complaints. That was the point at which I dropped Firefox, after having used it since its Phoenix days.
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Curiously what functionality was lost with the awesome bar?
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I see your three-legged chair, and I raise you a one-legged stool. [blogspot.com]
Except, in this case, the whole point of that stool was to keep the guy watching the pot awake. The irony of your post is not lost to me.
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Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Churning is a side effect of web based Agile processes. You must prove you are worth hiring by constantly creating useless changes. If you take the time to develop a well thought out features then you get laid off for not being productive. And the easiest way to churn is to change a GUI. No thought needed at all, barely any codiing skills required either.
Re: WTF (Score:2)
It doesnt work fine. And one of the FF dudes split to create Brave.
Try Brave, then if youre unhappy go back to firefox.
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I found Brave on Android to be equally dumb, initially it let you have bookmarks on the front page which was very useful for quickly visiting your favorite sites. Then it took that away because fuck you, search bucks are more important. And the constant revenue related nagging. No thanks.
Waterfox works well for me, Slimjet is a good Chrome clone that can use Chrome extensions.
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FTP is going (gone?) away. They're shutting down their newsserver and mailing lists so we can't easily interact with the developers anymore.
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Same as it's always been?
Sure if you only browse Facebook and don't use any browser features and don't care if the interface is getting fat whilst they remove bits. Empty space is wasted space on a browser.
Who is the dumb one when you dumb you interface down when it was being used by power users... causing them to leave?
I switched to Waterfox, I have a proper menu, page nav' buttons, URL box, search box and window min/max/close buttons all on the same top line and I have a line of 50ish bookmarks and it sti
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Yes, and Waterfox supports the plugin ecosystem that Firefox killed. I gave up on NoScript ages ago, it is too much work and it breaks everything. With Ghostery I rarely have to interact with it and it doesn't break web pages since it's focused on blocking just the spyware junk. (7 trackers and analytics sites block on Slashdot).
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Answers to Questions Posed (Score:3)
The Slashdot crowd loves free and open-source web browsers, so the question is, how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?
Create your own open standards body, refuse access to the corporate wanks, go back to a simpler version of HTML/CSS/anything but javascript. Write a browser that implements the spec. Convince everyone to use it.
Easy. Should take you a couple weeks, yeah?
I use Firefox all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I use Firefox all the time (Score:4, Funny)
This. Not sure what all this hyperbolic ranting is about, I've noticed nothing, so these whatever they've changed is well below my give-a-crap level.
Re:I use Firefox all the time (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of the new UI changes don't activate if you've forced older UI changes to be disabled. Try a fresh install.
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Looking at the side by sides, it sounds like this guy just wants a hill to die on. Personally, I never liked the icons in the menu, so the new menu looks a lot cleaner and easier to use. Similarly, I frequently use a convertible laptop so the new interface looks a lot more touch friendly. On my desktop system though, I'd like the old compact option with the new menu design.
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Install the beta version and you'll see it. My first impression was "ooh shiny I like it!" but the article has a whole lot of truth in it.
It's the same flat UI everyone roasted Windows 8/10 for going towards. Apple is doing it / has done it to iOS and OS X.
Mozilla shouldn't get a pass. They may do other things great, but UI isn't one of them.
The menu change in my opinion isn't too terrible or noticeable. The flat tabs are a pain though. I just deal with it in Chrome or Edge because they have other features
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The article is discussing version 89 - not the current 88.
Story? Nah, let's just post an opinion (Score:4, Informative)
Look if someone hates Firefox or not, that argument aside for a second. This isn't even a story, this isn't coming from some website like ZDNet or whatever, this is literally just this guy's opinion [slashdot.org] submitted and this editor [twitter.com] felt a need to go ahead and green light it for Front Page. Okay, I'm sure we've all got opinions on Firefox and Mozilla in general, but fuck, let's not turn this place into Facebook where we promote everyone's opinion as a story. I mean there's literally here [phoronix.com] that you could have linked to as a story, but NO, let's just run with that guy's opinion. And what's worse is it looks like this person's submission is a rehash of the comment section of that very story, especially the similarity of this comment [phoronix.com]. Literally the plagiarism is super strong here, which you know if this was a link to the original story and the person is rehashing that, cool. But that is not how this is being presented.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but EDITORS, WTF?!
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> where we promote everyone's opinion as a story
Isn't that half of /. these days? /s
Re:Story? Nah, let's just post an opinion (Score:5, Informative)
Have you checked the new design? Is there anything the submitter lied about? Lastly, for some reasons even staunch Firefox aficionados are not fans of the new Proton UI:
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/firef... [reddit.com]
2. https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04... [ghacks.net]
3. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/20... [omgubuntu.co.uk]
4. https://www.neowin.net/news/mo... [neowin.net]
Barely anyone likes or supports it aside from Mozilla.
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Have you checked the new design? Is there anything the submitter lied about?
None of that was even the point of comment. There's no link provided with the submission, so this is just an opinion that hit the front page which the editors are supposed to (maybe I'm just old) not let happen. Usually they include a link to a story.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/firef [reddit.com]... [reddit.com] 2. https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04 [ghacks.net]... [ghacks.net] 3. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/20 [omgubuntu.co.uk]... [omgubuntu.co.uk] 4. https://www.neowin.net/news/mo [neowin.net]... [neowin.net]
Yeah, like literally any of those links would have been nice to include in the story but they didn't EDITORS, literally ACs are doing a better job than you.
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Is there anything the submitter lied about?
No one claimed the submitter lied. The GP claimed the submitter voiced an opinion and nothing more. Opinions are not a story.
Is there anything about this you don't understand?
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The story is Firefox is making a bunch of gratuitous UI changes aain, which appears to be correct, and the idea that there's something different between Some Guy's Opinion and a dude working for spare change at zdnet is a stretch.
You guys are making up rules about what constitutes A Story.
Theming (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of forcing a single UI paradigm, they should focus on making all these things themeable. Then they can manipulate the default theme however they want, and everyone else can still be happy.
People who want tabs on the top could have that, and people who want tabs on the bottom can have that. People who want their tabs floating as a panel on a different monitor with inverted colors can have that.
Re:Theming (Score:5, Informative)
Themes is actually how Firefox started ... in a way.
Mozilla once developed a browser/newsreader/mailer (like Netscape Communicator before it) officially called Mozilla [wikipedia.org], which was completely themeable. The theme engine was called "Chrome", and the UI was specified in a XML-based language called XUL [wikipedia.org]. There were hundreds of user-supplied themes available to download from a web site called "Chrome Zone".
But Mozilla's "Chrome" user interface was slow. Very slow, on the day's hardware.
So Firefox was started as a fork, stripped of the theme engine (and other things) so as to be fast, and made as a browser only.
(BTW, That Google called their browser Chrome is officially not trolling. In both cases, "chrome" refers to the visual trim around the web page)
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The problem with XUL was it didn't have a clear interface, meaning that they were too deeply integrated into Firefox. There are better ways to do theming.
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Instead of forcing a single UI paradigm, they should focus on making all these things themeable.
Theming is a double edged sword, as is customisability. It may improve a single user's experience but it drastically reduces portability and understanding across all users. Especially if there's ever a problem, "how do I X", "oh easy, click the button which looks like Y", "I have no button which looks like Y."
This is why theming has generally been reduced across the board to a few colour changes. Consistency, it breaks less, and it's easier to support.
Slow day? (Score:3)
Three rules to never break (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Never give users admin rights
2) Never let web designers design your web site
3) Never let programmers program your software
Clearly, Mozilla, and a multitude of other companies (I'm looking at you ServiceNow and Microsoft) don't grasp rule number 3. It's like the old saying, Give someone and inch and they'll take a mile. In the current case, once you let programmers have a say in how something is programmed the software inevitably looks, acts and works like shit.
And Adobe is guilty of rule number 2.
The Firefox UX shuffle continues... (Score:5, Interesting)
They get rid of menus to save vertical space, then lose said gains by significantly increasing the space used by all the other element. Mozilla, this is why people mock your constant UX shuffle. It's like you're schizophrenic, not to mention pointless changes like this just irritate your current users while impressing no one. People generally hate change, so when you change something, it had better be a definitive win overall. This is just "I think it will look nicer with a bit more space here" nonsense.
That being said, it doesn't seem like a huge issue to me. It's not like I'm going to switch browsers over this if I haven't switched for two decades through some far worse changes. I've got a few basic criteria for a browser. It should:
* Render correctly in all common cases
* Perform well
* Support u-block origin and LastPass plugins
* Not spy on me
Firefox still wins out here.
Does it hide the actual FQDN? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least FF isn't hiding the "www" and other "trivial" subdomains like Chrome does...
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THE SKY IS FALLING! (Score:5, Informative)
I've actually tried it out and honestly, it doesn't look very different to me. You can try it too.
Type about:config in a new tab
Click ‘Accept the risk and continue’
Search for browser.proton.enabled
Click the toggle icon to enable the setting
Restart Firefox
I'm not sure what this guy is going on about but I'm sure it's nothing a dose of lithium couldn't improve.
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The only thing I noticed on Win10 is that it's very slightly larger and the icons in the menu are gone (Which I do agree with the article there. Icons make navigating faster)
Compact Density is still here. it's not as compact as before, but it's not hugely different like the pictures. Tabs don't seem to be that far out of place vs the older system. Address bar still does the infuriating expand when you open Firefox or click on the address bar, but it's not the end of the world
While it's a little different, a
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Ah, UI/UX designers (Score:4, Insightful)
UI/UX designers are truly the interior designers of the software world, overpaid airheads who will give you an unpadded concrete armchair, deathrattling glass shower doors, furniture with corners that can cause puncture wounds if you're not careful, those goddamn bowl-on-a-table sinks, and any and all other vapid anti-functional designs that may happen to be fashionable at the moment.
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yeah sure (Score:3)
And systemd is the devil, and pulseaudio is evil. You can haz opinions, but we aren't your army.
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Don't worry you can now replace PulseAudio and Systemd by running your Linux desktop apps in Windows Subsystem for Linux, now complete with GUI and audio support.
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No, systemd is just an unnecessary out-of-control init system.
All the distros moving to it as well as the several which have attempted to replace sysvinit, and the some 10 alternative init systems trying to address various shortcomings of sysvinit would disagree with you that it is "unnecessary".
When you have a thought like this: "Everyone is dedicating a huge amount of resources to this thing I believe is unnecessary", always remember to follow up that statement with a question: "What am I missing?" People don't generally like wasting their time so its quite likely t
Eh, still the best option for me (Score:2)
I may not like some of the UI changes over the past cycles but that's true for Chrome also. I'm not sure if Chrome supports no script or some of the other ad blockers and trackers that work in Firefox but it's nice to know Google isn't directly getting all my browsing habits. They probably buy them from the Mozilla foundation but at least it is another step.
I haven't seen the latest patch just yet but the UI change in recent memory that really annoyed me was FF UI on my phone changing. Sure, it still works
Maiming? (Score:2)
... how can we make the company stop maiming and destroying their most important product?
It's open source. Fork it under new leadership, and if your project becomes more popular than the original, after a few years, they'll fold your fork into the main repo in place of what's there now, just like WebKit replaced KHTML.
4:3, I pine for thee (Score:2)
I don't doubt your observation, but I note the reason vertical space is so precious is that monitor vendors have forced us from 4:3 to 16:10 to the essentially unusable 16:9, for no good reason that I have been able to determine.
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Or dare watch a pre-1990 widescreen movie that is in a NON-STANDARD FORMAT NOT 16:9!
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16:9 is better than 4:3. I would like to try maybe a 3:2.
Best browser that uses earlier Firefox add-ons? (Score:3)
I like Pale Moon [palemoon.org]. I don't yet know how to install it to act as 3 different browsers so that I can keep the kinds of work I do separate.
What do you think of the Cyberfox browser? [sourceforge.net]
I'm one of the many people who are mystified about some of the changes made to Firefox.
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Pale Moon here too. The chief reason for using the old Firefox was extensions made this browser do things others couldn't. When it broke that model it lost its appeal. If Firefox wants to get back its mojo and prior users it needs to empower extensions like the old days.
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I don't yet know how to install it to act as 3 different browsers so that I can keep the kinds of work I do separate.
If it's based on Firefox, something like palemoon -noremote -profilemanager could do it. Alternatively, try about:profiles.
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What do you think of the Cyberfox browser? [sourceforge.net]
I honestly don't see what the point of it is, I visited the page and it just said:
"Cyberfox is a Mozilla-based Internet browser designed to take advantage of 64-bit architecture but a 32-bit version is also available. ".
Which leaves me scratching my head, if it's sole purpose for being is to cater to 64bit as best as possible then why is their a 32bit version?
I need a far better reason to switch to a browser than it's for 64 bit when there's already a 64bit Version of Firefox.
I think I'll skip toadyshadow101's browser for now.
Can't quite put my finger on it, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just guessing, but comparing the two sample images, it looks like Mozilla is trying to make Firefox more finger/thumb friendly. I don't use FF on my phone so don't know if that's a motivator, and I'm not a fan of touch screens on laptops/PCs.
Re: Can't quite put my finger on it, but ... (Score:2)
That't te thing missing from. TFA: What are the goals and motivations and reasons of the people who designed this.
I mean they might still be crap.
But just leaving them out is clearly very deliberate.
And the fact that if they were bad, anyone arguing agains them would have listed them, to be able to point at them and go "boo", makes me side with "they are probably better reasons than we think now".
This makes me side more against Google.
And I say that as somebody who thinks Mozilla is batshit insane on the in
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Firefox mobile has a completely different UI than desktop FF. It has the address bar at the bottom (for small hands on 6.8 inch phones. I cursed it for three days, but you get used to it.) FFM doesn't even work with desktop add-ons since a year or so.
The desktop UI change could indeed still be for desktops with touchscreens, like those hybrid tablet/laptop devices running a desktop OS.
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Firefox mobile is the most sorry software I've ever seen. As in, "We're sorry, Firefox has crashed. Do you want to tell Mozilla?"
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Putting the address bar at the top is one of the few things you can configure on mobile FireFox.
Re: Can't quite put my finger on it, but ... (Score:2)
"and I'm not a fan of touch screens on laptops/PCs."
I had a PC with a touch screen. Ended up using the keyboard and mouse instead. Because "gorilla arm" and touch screens still suck for most "office" type tasks vs keyboard and mouse.
It needs an interface that speaks to the user (Score:2)
Time spent (Score:4, Insightful)
I've spent way more time reading complaints about the Firefox UI on Slashdot than I have adapting to the small changes they've made.
"which steals very precious vertical space. " (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but I like tabs above URL more. (Score:2)
The address bar is part of the page. It is a different one for each page.
The rest is mostly minimalism. A stupid fad at the moment, due to the anxiety epidemic being so severe that people literally are afraid of gears or brakes on their bicycles... and of icons, and bevels and colors apparently.
Re: I'm sorry, but I like tabs above URL more. (Score:2)
"The rest is mostly minimalism. A stupid fad at the moment, due to the anxiety epidemic being so severe that people literally are afraid of gears or brakes on their bicycles... and of icons, and bevels and colors apparently."
It sucks that during the past 44 years of my life, I watched people become more afraid of their own shadows. Wasn't so bad in the 80s and 90s, but after 9/11, this got kicked up quite a few notches. And in recent years, it really ramped up.
You can thank the Fear Industrial Complex, whi
Firefox Mobile Cannot Use Bookmarks! WTF! (Score:2)
Is Mozilla is being sabotaged?
So use SeaMonkey instead, the original Mozilla! (Score:2)
It seems we get a story complaining about Firefox's user interface about once a month here. Every time I point out that Firefox is actually a fork of the Mozilla Application Suite (formerly Netscape Communicator). If, like me, you don't like this fork's UI, then you can always use SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org], which is a continuation of the original Mozilla Application Suite. Unlike Firefox, the SeaMonkey developers have kept the UI pretty close to how it's always been. (And if you don't like it that way, it's pretty easy
Not all sites work in Firefox (Score:2)
The developers should address compatibility, not the looks. I still use Firefox but have Chrome as a backup, because some sites no longer work in Firefox. One example is Yandex Taxi [yandex.ru] (superficially looks fine, but try to detect your location and it fails).
Still use FF on the desktop, but gave up on mobile (Score:2)
Mozilla decided that the "Desktop Site" feature would be turned off each and every time you start FF on Android. I cannot find a route to keep it on permanently. This has prompted me to stop using FF on mobile as too many sites are unreadable (too small) to read without the ability to zoom the text. Yes, I have a current prescription for glasses.
Still more privacy oriented than the alternative. (Score:2)
That's it. That's the post.
PC version (Score:2)
That ship has been sinking for years (Score:2)
They don't care about UI or UX (Score:2)
Maybe they just outsourced their UI/UX work (Score:2)
To the Gnome desktop folks.
I'm kidding of course, but, unfortunately, it looks like it from the screenshots. Wish it weren't so.
Re:Icons are in your top 5? (Score:5, Funny)
In order to please people who want icons and people who'd rather read, we could just switch to Chinese.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need to switch to Chinese - just switch to Kanjis.
The same Kanjis work in all languages. They are like icons or emojis, but Google does not change them every 3 months, and most of them have been the same for 4,000 years.
The original objection was that it is hard to encode kanjis in 7 bits, unlike ASCII, but my machine, and probably yours, are 64 bits, so this is obviously fixable now.
Re: (Score:2)
YES!! for many years now. (Score:2)
They may have been working on this ever since the CEO got the boot over nothing.
Re: (Score:2)
I am also a professional trained graphic designer, so... I know this.
Yeah at some point the people who like things like being able to customize your browser so that you can get the stuff you do done as quickly as possible and have it look the way you want it to look left Mozilla and 'designers' took over. Mozilla is obsessed with design to the detriment of everything else, they are so obsessed that they won't let users change anything much like tabs on top.
Re: (Score:2)