14 ms·

Fully agree that this change is needless, gratuitous and downright ugly. But it gets worse... The pref that disables the ugly behaviour is going away. Indeed,

Fully agree that this change is needless, gratuitous and downright ugly. But it gets worse... The pref that disables the ugly behaviour is going away. Indeed, in some sense it's already gone: ["Remove the megabar pref"](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1627969 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1627969) is already marked as `closed`. I think the UI change is not merely ugly, but actively harmful. When the user's attention is elsewhere, but the focus of the urlbar changes there's a nasty UI animation that occurs in the user's peripheral vision. As any real UI designer should know, human peripheral vision is primarily for motion detection, directly tied to fight-or-flight stress reactions and triggers an adrenal stress reaction which in this case is not merely "undesirable" but downright harmfully misleading. The last thing the world needs is more stress just because some delusional UI designers thought an animation upon receiving/losing focus was a good thing to implement. This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough.

1_player 7y ago
> This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough. These are some harsh words for a user interface change. One would think reading from this thread that Mozilla has committed a crime against humanity.
- mikro2nd 7y ago
  (Quite a few people think my language was overly harsh. I'll reply to this one, but take it as read that it's much the same reply to all similar comments. Nothing personal, just this one seems to best sum up the (perfectly valid) criticism.) Yes, indeed, it is a (very small) crime against humanity. (Not a BIG Crime Against Humanity, which sounds almost like a game of some sort.) To be human is to have a hardwired hormonal stress response to this changed UI. It's something that evolved when we still lived up in trees. It's not something we can learn our way out of or train ourselves to not experience. And it is unnecessary, nay, inappropriate in a world already over-filled with stressors and noise. And I would expect UI professionals to know about this and to avoid it except in places where a stress-response would be appropriate (time critical warnings, for example). So I'll stick with the harsh language, thanks. As pointed out by some, it was not (and never intended to be) personal. At the very least they could retain an option to disable to it, but no...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ericd 7y ago
    Sometimes I really miss my pre-internet computers, with software that was exactly the same every time I used it, until I decided that I wanted a new version.
coldpie 7y ago
> This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough. Please don't use this kind of language. It's software, and a lot of people work hard on it. Sometimes they make decisions you disagree with. There's no need to be rude.
- jsjddbbwj 7y ago
  That comment would be rude if it personally insulted the developers.
- stronglikedan 7y ago
  It's just a figure of speech. It's not meant to be taken literally. It's a valid description of a lot of people's feelings for this user-hostile feature.
  - Tagbert 7y ago
    It may be a figure of speech but it is a ridiculous overreaction to call it an abomination. You may not like it but it’s nowhere near enough to describe that way. What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?
    - CrappyFanThor 7y ago
      unusable
    - pengaru 7y ago
      > What term will you use when something truly bad comes up? Surely you can imagine genuinely offensive overreactions, plain use of 'abomination' is nowhere near over the top. Consult some of Linus Torvalds' famous rants for examples.
    - nocman 7y ago
      > What term will you use when something truly bad comes up? So you are saying it would be OK to call some feature of a piece of software "an abomination" if it were "something truly bad", then? Well, then why should mikro2nd be prevented from calling this feature "an abomination" if that is an accurate description of how he feels about it?
dessant 7y ago
I'm guessing this change was pushed forward after a Mozilla employee noticed the new Chrome and Google Search design [1] (click on the search bar to see it pop out and expand in a similar way), and nobody found the power to protest against it internally. This was a deliberate move by Google to reduce the visual distinction between Chrome's browser frame and the search site, and it was copied by Firefox without consideration. Experimentation is needed, but there should be more checks along the way, and feedback should be requested from the target audience, so that a designer's fever dream does not land on hundreds of millions of devices, to the bemusement of everyone. [1] https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&hl=en&gws_rd=cr&q=firefox https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&hl=en&gws_rd=cr&q=firefo...
- tetris11 7y ago
  I understand Mozilla's need to target base users in this losing war against google, so I'm forgiving when they make Firefox more like Chrome, but I just wish that in their releases they could say "hey, loyal Firefox fans - just disable this, this, and this to keep the previous behaviour". That way they can pander to the masses as much as they want and still keep their fan base. Right now it feels like the fanbase is being ignored.
  - coldpie 7y ago
    You (and others in this thread) are way, way underestimating the cost of configuration options in software used by lots of people. There's the cost of having to support that huge fractal in the code. And there's the cost of things being broken for users who don't understand the options and broke things for themselves. Configuration options are bad news for software not intended exclusively for technical users.
    - dessant 7y ago
      Alienating some of your most loyal users whom have spent decades advocating for Firefox has its costs too, and there are always ways to safeguard or hide configuration options, such as about:config. Personally I wouldn't mind a slight expansion to highlight the search bar, but the current design is crude and over the top, and it has led to usability issues.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
The about:config flag only ever existed so people running beta and nightly builds could easily switch for testing purposes. According to Mozilla employees, a big part of the new URL bar behind the scenes was cleaning up a mess of legacy code, so I can totally understand why they're not going to keep the old code around indefinitely. Good for Mozilla on the code cleanup, I just wish they hadn't also felt the need to make the URL bar expand...
- mike50 7y ago
  I'm willing to accept that as the original purpose. However it is now used to cover up and patch over poor design, missing features and unwanted sponsored content features.
jsjddbbwj 7y ago
Indeed Firefox 77 has removed the preference already, you can check if you download Nightly.
_curious_ 7y ago
"This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough." Ouch!
m463 7y ago
man that is as horrible as the firefox update dialogs. they keep on moving them around so you can't disable updates. I have a machine on a private network and I CANNOT get rid of the "firefox can't update to the latest version" nag no matter what setting I play with. user-hostile "features"
- slivanes 7y ago
  Maybe an updated version of Firefox has the feature to remove the nag?
  - m463 7y ago
    I've been waiting a long long time. probably ff 6x? I even dug into the doorhanger source code.
  - 32gbsd 7y ago
    Lol

1_player 7y ago

> This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough. These are some harsh words for a user interface change. One would think reading from this thread that Mozilla has committed a crime against humanity.

mikro2nd 7y ago
(Quite a few people think my language was overly harsh. I'll reply to this one, but take it as read that it's much the same reply to all similar comments. Nothing personal, just this one seems to best sum up the (perfectly valid) criticism.) Yes, indeed, it is a (very small) crime against humanity. (Not a BIG Crime Against Humanity, which sounds almost like a game of some sort.) To be human is to have a hardwired hormonal stress response to this changed UI. It's something that evolved when we still lived up in trees. It's not something we can learn our way out of or train ourselves to not experience. And it is unnecessary, nay, inappropriate in a world already over-filled with stressors and noise. And I would expect UI professionals to know about this and to avoid it except in places where a stress-response would be appropriate (time critical warnings, for example). So I'll stick with the harsh language, thanks. As pointed out by some, it was not (and never intended to be) personal. At the very least they could retain an option to disable to it, but no...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ericd 7y ago
  Sometimes I really miss my pre-internet computers, with software that was exactly the same every time I used it, until I decided that I wanted a new version.

coldpie 7y ago

> This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough. Please don't use this kind of language. It's software, and a lot of people work hard on it. Sometimes they make decisions you disagree with. There's no need to be rude.

jsjddbbwj 7y ago
That comment would be rude if it personally insulted the developers.
stronglikedan 7y ago
It's just a figure of speech. It's not meant to be taken literally. It's a valid description of a lot of people's feelings for this user-hostile feature.
- Tagbert 7y ago
  It may be a figure of speech but it is a ridiculous overreaction to call it an abomination. You may not like it but it’s nowhere near enough to describe that way. What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?
  - CrappyFanThor 7y ago
    unusable
  - pengaru 7y ago
    > What term will you use when something truly bad comes up? Surely you can imagine genuinely offensive overreactions, plain use of 'abomination' is nowhere near over the top. Consult some of Linus Torvalds' famous rants for examples.
  - nocman 7y ago
    > What term will you use when something truly bad comes up? So you are saying it would be OK to call some feature of a piece of software "an abomination" if it were "something truly bad", then? Well, then why should mikro2nd be prevented from calling this feature "an abomination" if that is an accurate description of how he feels about it?

dessant 7y ago

I'm guessing this change was pushed forward after a Mozilla employee noticed the new Chrome and Google Search design [1] (click on the search bar to see it pop out and expand in a similar way), and nobody found the power to protest against it internally. This was a deliberate move by Google to reduce the visual distinction between Chrome's browser frame and the search site, and it was copied by Firefox without consideration. Experimentation is needed, but there should be more checks along the way, and feedback should be requested from the target audience, so that a designer's fever dream does not land on hundreds of millions of devices, to the bemusement of everyone. [1] https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&hl=en&gws_rd=cr&q=firefox https://www.google.com/search?gl=us&hl=en&gws_rd=cr&q=firefo...

tetris11 7y ago
I understand Mozilla's need to target base users in this losing war against google, so I'm forgiving when they make Firefox more like Chrome, but I just wish that in their releases they could say "hey, loyal Firefox fans - just disable this, this, and this to keep the previous behaviour". That way they can pander to the masses as much as they want and still keep their fan base. Right now it feels like the fanbase is being ignored.
- coldpie 7y ago
  You (and others in this thread) are way, way underestimating the cost of configuration options in software used by lots of people. There's the cost of having to support that huge fractal in the code. And there's the cost of things being broken for users who don't understand the options and broke things for themselves. Configuration options are bad news for software not intended exclusively for technical users.
  - dessant 7y ago
    Alienating some of your most loyal users whom have spent decades advocating for Firefox has its costs too, and there are always ways to safeguard or hide configuration options, such as about:config. Personally I wouldn't mind a slight expansion to highlight the search bar, but the current design is crude and over the top, and it has led to usability issues.

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

The about:config flag only ever existed so people running beta and nightly builds could easily switch for testing purposes. According to Mozilla employees, a big part of the new URL bar behind the scenes was cleaning up a mess of legacy code, so I can totally understand why they're not going to keep the old code around indefinitely. Good for Mozilla on the code cleanup, I just wish they hadn't also felt the need to make the URL bar expand...

mike50 7y ago
I'm willing to accept that as the original purpose. However it is now used to cover up and patch over poor design, missing features and unwanted sponsored content features.

jsjddbbwj 7y ago

Indeed Firefox 77 has removed the preference already, you can check if you download Nightly.

_curious_ 7y ago

"This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough." Ouch!

m463 7y ago

man that is as horrible as the firefox update dialogs. they keep on moving them around so you can't disable updates. I have a machine on a private network and I CANNOT get rid of the "firefox can't update to the latest version" nag no matter what setting I play with. user-hostile "features"

slivanes 7y ago
Maybe an updated version of Firefox has the feature to remove the nag?
- m463 7y ago
  I've been waiting a long long time. probably ff 6x? I even dug into the doorhanger source code.
- 32gbsd 7y ago
  Lol