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Mozilla plans to remove the Compact Density option from Firefox's Customize menu

• ilmiont 6y ago
  That's awful. This is one of the reasons I use Firefox, because its UI is customisable and not massive. Mozilla seems to be intent on taking away the power user features. I didn't even know this redesign was coming, but those screenshots look horrendous. Why are the tabs "floating" as giant blobs? The current design looks much more cohesive and less distracting. Sad to see Firefox succumb to the "must design everything every few years" mentality.
  • kossTKR 6y ago
    This is in line with the stupid whitespace-hell trend only worsening over the last years. Huge text, huge icons, huge boxes, lots of scrolling, everything hidden behind sub-menus. I honestly don't get it. I mean, i also like "pretty, light" whatever interfaces, and i also use glasses - still i can easily read an information dense website and it feels way more alive to me.
• jasonjayr 6y ago
  Well, now I'm upset because I didn't know this setting existed, and I prefer the tighter layout! How, exactly does Mozilla measure user engagement of these features? And if they are using telemetry, how are they accounting for the users that disable telemetry out of privacy concerns? (Which, I assume is a sizable amount of FF users)
  • ljm 6y ago
    Data-driven design like that is really just going to get you to a lowest-common-denominator product.
    • marcos100 6y ago
      It's only data-driven when they remove features.
    • tablespoon 6y ago
      > Data-driven design like that is really just going to get you to a lowest-common-denominator product. Our data shows people typically use the defaults, so lets get rid of all configuration!
      • chrisan 6y ago
        I had no idea this was even an option to change. I love it already. I'm guessing the feedback they provided in the ticket means they will be keeping this option, thankfully
        • tablespoon 6y ago
          Yeah, I had no idea about it, but flipped it on solely because of this story and I like it. I even enabled telemetry because I'm sick of stuff like this. Personally, I hate the current fad of low-density, white-space-filled UIs. Sure, it might be suitable for some airport kiosk that I'll use exactly one, but for the things I use frequently I want their UI to be as compact and information dense as possible.
    • kmeisthax 6y ago
      Wasn't that the whole point of Firefox? To be the browser with 10% of the features that 90% of the users need?
      • dathinab 6y ago
        The problem is FF had once been that "1000% of all features you can imagine most of which are used by at most 1% or 2% percent of users" browser. This was so because of the huge customizability of XUl and other parts. But this became a maintenance nightmare the moment it was put in context with requirements like stability (there where many extensions which made FF unstable) and security (how extensions are sandboxed, how likely they can escape, what damage they can do without an sandbox escape), change (new internal engine, changed rendering pipeline etc.). A Company of Googles size could probably have maintained it, but for FF it became increasingly more infeasible to go on like that. So they switched to remove XUL and support mainly the parts most users use, sometimes adding new features but also removing them if they don't gain any traction in the user base. I personally see little use for the compact density as it just removes some spacing which is mostly vertical. So (at least in my case) using compact spacing doesn't at all create more space for tabs or similar it just adds a view more pixel to the vertical axis of the websites view. But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
  • marcos100 6y ago
    For this feature, apparently then don't measure. They measured screen resolution and are assuming that only people with low res screens use this feature. And they probably don't measure those who disable telemetry.
• anoncake 6y ago
  I'm starting to think someone inside Mozilla is getting paid by Google to fuck up. This level of incompetence is incredible.
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    i have been sure of it for a while. it would not be difficult with only a few "collaborators".
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    I've thought this on a lot of projects. Even seriously looked for it. Haven't found much yet. There's profound staggering levels of incompetence and regression on some of these larger projects.
  • The_rationalist 6y ago
    Mozilla is only still alive because of Google you know?
• cute_boi 6y ago
  LOL today when i installed fresh firefox and tried to customize I found the compact density and I really love it. I think Mozilla claim is invalid. I think its just not discoverable easy and hidden. If they give ability to setup compact density I believe many user will choose compact over fat tabs.
• Causality1 6y ago
  Mozilla has mutilated Firefox trying to chase after Chrome's market share instead of holding onto its users who already liked it. They're going to end up with no users at all.
  • pessimizer 6y ago
    > They're going to end up with no users at all. This has already happened. I'd be surprised if there were a single month they gained users over the last five years.
    • superkuh 6y ago
      It all started with version 37 when they decided that software freedoms didn't matter and only allowed users to install/use extensions approved by Mozilla. Then dropping their entire extension ecosystem and burning it to the ground made everyone realize what was happening. Now there is no XUL, 1/20th the amount of add-ons, and the ones that do exist don't have the power to restore features of the GUI Mozilla removes. All that's left is a relatively quick (but crashy, because low level features) chrome-clone-in-spirit.
      • Causality1 6y ago
        It's also very difficult to keep two separate Firefox installations from interfering with each other, so a lot of people like me switched to using Chrome for 90% of their browsing and kept an old version of Firefox for some use case they couldn't do without.
        • BugWatch 6y ago
          Don't install it. Use portable Firefox. I've been using portable variants exclusively for the last 10 years.
          • Causality1 6y ago
            I tried that but I couldn't get it to save anything. Settings, extensions, tabs, etc would reset every time I exited it.
• caskstrength 6y ago
  What a terrible decision. I use compact density and, if anything, I would prefer them to introduce something like "even more compact density".
• mariusmg 6y ago
  I'm using it Mozilla, so move the option itself if you want to satisfy your UI designers but DO NOT entirely remove it. This is how it looks with compact https://i.imgur.com/MXppXq2.png https://i.imgur.com/MXppXq2.png
  • Macha 6y ago
    Yeah, I've been using it pretty much since introduced. This is surprising to me, after all the drama their telemetry has caused, they don't even know if people are using a pretty visible feature? What are they even recording then?
  • antihero 6y ago
    Man, I didn't know about that - this is amazing! Also this Proton redesign looks worse in every manner. Tabs are replaced by buttons at the top. Why would there be buttons? This is just strange. Also it is huge. I am not a child.
    • oblio 6y ago
      Touch UIs. The computing market is ordered like this, from top dog to underdog: Smartphones -> laptops -> tables -> desktops Smartphones tend to have their own UI and desktops are slowly but surely dying off except for gaming and certain categories of tech professionals (some developers, some graphics artists, etc.). So that leaves the middle: laptops and tables. Which are slowly converging towards each other. Already in Windows-land many laptops are becoming 2-in-1s, both laptops and tables, so the screen is a touch screen. Tablets are moving the other way, adding keyboard accessories and multitasking features. So laptops are getting touch-friendly UIs and tablets are getting some keyboard-friendly features. It's a slow slog which will probably continue for decades, but pure desktops will be squeezed to less than 5% of marketshare at some point.
  • juusto 6y ago
    Nice, can you list your extensions please?
• ancarda 6y ago
  For fuck sake really? Is it making Firefox hard to maintain or something? I have a small screen (1280 x 800) - I need things like compact density to make the screen more usable.
• gbrown_ 6y ago
  Another disgruntled user of the compact view here. I don't understand why every design update seems to insist upon adding padding these days, but removing the option entirely feels like a real kick in the teeth.
• soapdog 6y ago
  Instead of flocking here to complain, go to bugzilla at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 and complain there. Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to reach out through bugzilla.
  • gbrown_ 6y ago
    This would seem contrary to what Mozilla are saying https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67
    • ancarda 6y ago
      >The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback. Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless? Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
      • nikanj 6y ago
        Well, obviously the Visionary Leader wanted this feature removed. They’ll push against user feedback, quote Ford (”If I asked what the customers want, I would still be selling horses”). We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
        • turbonoobie 6y ago
          “Visionary leader fallacy”
        • SllX 6y ago
          The thing about leadership is it only makes you the leader; a leader is no such thing without a good team. Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
• username91 6y ago
  Love compact mode; use it all the time. I guess there's always userChrome.css
• xnx 6y ago
  Mozilla should embrace it's niche browser role and cater to power users. It will always be a worse choice for the typical user.
  • anotherhue 6y ago
    At this point Brave is the power-user choice. And Mozilla show no signs of slowing down their self inflicted decline. I miss using Firefox, but I don't miss the dread-churn of notices like this.
    • arghwhat 6y ago
      QuteBrowser is the power-user choice. Brave seems more like the "consumer disliking ads/google" choice.
      • llimos 6y ago
        This is starting to sound like https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
        • arghwhat 6y ago
          Unfortunately, nc has become a slightly less user-friendly web-browser after the HTTPS everywhere movement. It's tricky to do the math in your head before the timeout hits. In all seriousness, very few power-user browsers exists, to the point where QuteBrowser is the only fully-functional one I can think of... Which is sad. Brave is "just" a completely regular browser owned by someone else + a few bonus features.
          • eager_noob 6y ago
            Nyxt browser is also interesting from the point of view of power users. https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/ https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
        • torstenvl 6y ago
• huhtenberg 6y ago
  And that's how you force your users to NOT install any updates.
• laurent123456 6y ago
  I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to achieve. They've been randomly removing features, or even plain butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile update) for several years, and all they probably achieved is to lose more and more users. Yet with their tiny market share they aren't exactly in a position to lose users.
  • gitowiec 6y ago
    Exactly this: recent Firefox mobile update. It is the worst happen to software I like to use and I use it on daily basis. It went bad. And I don't understand why they removed so many helpful features. It is time to (again) depart from Firefox and choose Chromium again.
    • dastx 6y ago
      Please don't. Anything but Chrome based browsers. Chromium based browsers already have a monopoly, giving Google a huge weight when it comes to the web.
      • asddubs 6y ago
        so firefox
        • kevincox 6y ago
          Unfortunately yes. I really do wish we had more options. I guess the other option is WebKit which is now independent from Chrome so has influence over the direction of the web.
          • userbinator 6y ago
            The other option is IE --- I will continue to fight its deprecation because it still works damn well for the majority of non-JS sites, and MS continues to release security updates for it (contrary to what a lot of propaganda is saying.) Of course it doesn't have all the (site-facing) features of other browsers, and especially Google's behemoth, but I'm of the opinion that the web is already too bloated and needs to stop "moving forward" anyway. (My main browser is IE. My secondary one is Firefox.)
• KallDrexx 6y ago
  I don't get it. The wording of the bugzilla specifically says > The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar" view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets low engagement. So not only do they not have telemetry for that, they aren't even attempting to make it more discoverable to test if there's a correlation between "hard to discover" and "low engagement"? I would use this but never knew this could be changed.
  • cout 6y ago
    > I would use this but never knew this could be changed. Same here, but since it affects both the toolbar and the tab bar, I'm inclined to keep the density set to Normal except on small screens.
  • kevincox 6y ago
    That is the most messed up reasoning I have ever heard. "We will remove this feature because we didn't promote it well." It might be a crazy idea, but maybe we could add telemetry and see if people actually use it despite it being hard to discover.
    • klyrs 6y ago
      Yes, that idea is nonsensical. The reason I use FF is because they're fighting tracking and telemetry. Not so they can spy on me.
      • spijdar 6y ago
        Firefox has telemetry, it just doesn't gather data on this feature. It does gather: Interaction data includes information about your interactions with Firefox such as number of open tabs and windows, number of webpages visited, number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons and session length, as well as Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals. [0] I don't think telling if the compact UI was enabled is more invasive than this data. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
• sseneca 6y ago
  PWAs, Compact Density, what's the next useful feature they'll remove?
  • tomcooks 6y ago
    They remove PWA use on FF? More information?
    • sseneca 6y ago
      Yes, they removed PWAs from desktop FF. More information: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593 Not only did they remove PWA support, they currently have "no plan for PWA support in Firefox" at all.
      • throw111116 6y ago
        I had read that that's not really true, here on HN. I think the thing is that FF refuses to implement some things they think would be bad for security and privacy. They are not saying no to all PWAs. Chrome on the other hand doesn't give a damn and is trying to make the browser an OS. Take a look at 'encrypted client hello' on FF. I'm on FF Beta android, which supports 'about:config'. Now I can access many blocked sites because of the ECH.
        • detaro 6y ago
          That argument doesn't really apply very well to the linked bug.
      • BadInformatics 6y ago
        This was about removing the feature (which IIRC wasn't completed yet) that would allow you to "install" a PWA. I'm as disappointed as you that they removed it, but calling it "they removed PWAs" is just FUD.
• TonyTrapp 6y ago
  First, browser remove more and more chrome to give back space to the actual website content, then they remove the option to remove even more chrome. Oh the irony.
• supernes 6y ago
  Firefox has been on a steady trajectory of declining usability for a while now, and I'm left with the impression that the people responsible for these decisions either have no experience in the field or have never used Firefox. This "compact density" drama may not be a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but the paper cuts are adding up fast, and will only accelerate the migration to Chromium forks (and Chrome itself.)
  • zapt02 6y ago
    What a typical HNews comment - full of hyperbole, handwaving and bike shedding. I guarantee you that the people working on FF are both very experienced and do use their own product.
    • tubularhells 6y ago
      Signed - Salty Mozilla Employee
    • supernes 6y ago
      Maybe it would have been more constructive to give concrete examples and suggestions for improvement, but I've done that plenty over the years and it seems it's always fallen on deaf ears. So I'm just sharing my impressions, not making statements.
    • rvba 6y ago
      Their product has been bleeding out users for years. Everyone knows that Firefox was supposed to be "the customizable" browser. Everyone apart from Mozilla. Mozilla wants to make Firefox a Chrome clone. In every thread users write how they want addons and customization (especially in UI), and in every thread Mozilla apologists talk how the foundation should drop the "tech savy" group for some other group. That other group doesnt seem to materialize - they are losing users fast. Also explain to your grandmother that the UI needs to change for 10th time just because someone from Mozilla says so. Chrome is in fact stable in this regard (although they like to change settings all the time what is same problem).
      • 6y ago
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  For those who want to use Firefox without all the Mozilla Foundation fuckups, Waterfox and Pale Moon are viable, usable, and security-updated forks who could use your support.
  • torstenvl 6y ago
    Is the Pale Moon team really into Rescuers Down Under or something?
    • forgotmypw17 6y ago
      I don't know about the name origin, if that's what you mean, but I can say that it's a great browser, in my top five in daily use, and truly in the spirit of Mozilla before their stupidity phase.
      • vocatus_gate 6y ago
        +1 for Palemoon, they do a good job of maintaining what to me feels like Firefox, before Mozilla started making all these bizarre and unwanted changes.
• mrob 6y ago
  The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively invisible. When I saw this article I checked the Customize Firefox page to confirm I had compact layout enabled. I did not see the toolbar. I compared the UI density with a screenshot, and it seemed I had already set it to Compact, which I vaguely remembered doing. Puzzled, I returned to Customize Firefox, and still failed to see the toolbar. I then checked about:config (which was also sabotaged recently to make it slower and remove features), and found browser.uidensity set to 1, so I really did have Compact density enabled. I returned to Customize Firefox, and only then, on my third attempt, did I see the toolbar.
  • EMM_386 6y ago
    > The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively invisible. Exactly! I have been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days and I had never seen this option until I read about this on HN today. That's 20+ years!
  • hypertele-Xii 6y ago
    Holy shit I just found dark mode next to density in customize! When did they add that??
    • KptMarchewa 6y ago
      You could find it in themes in about:addons, and that's where I expected to find option like density too.
    • sp332 6y ago
      On Windows, the default theme now follows the OS setting. So if you turn on "Dark mode" for apps, Firefox will automatically go dark.
• tubularhells 6y ago
  I'm surprised how Firefox is becoming more and more unusable, without much improvement. I live in a country that is not my mother tongue, and I'm not a fluent reader/speaker yet. I need the inline site translation feature to navigate things I'm unsure about, say government sites, tax office stuff. Firefox is not usable in such a scenario (make no attempt at convincing me, I looked far and wide for a good solution. The available plugins are not a substitution, as they trigger bot and spam filters). Mozilla have been promising Chrome-like inline translation for a decade now, without any signs of actually working on it. I kept waiting for much of that decade, but 2 years ago I switched to Chromium. I now do not recommend people to use Firefox, even though I advocate for free software in my circle of friends and acquaintances. Maybe this will change, but I do not really expect much from Mozilla's current leadership.
  • rPlayer6554 6y ago
    I'm in the same situation. It's not as convenient as Chrome, but if you get the Google translate function, you can right click and say "translate page". It will open up the page in Google which does inline translation. It's not as convenient as the Chrome Ui but at least it's something.
    • tubularhells 6y ago
      You didn't read carefully, I'm afraid.
      • rPlayer6554 6y ago
        Well I guess my brain accidentally skipped that sentence...but hey for anyone else now you know.
        • tubularhells 6y ago
          No worries, happens to me all the time.
• Hard_Space 6y ago
  Sad, and a deal-breaker for me. Have disabled updates and notifications via a JSON file, pending the possibility of a turn-around or other solution. When will the white-space mania end?
• Brian_K_White 6y ago
  I'm one of the 11 remaining FF users, and I use that setting, and it matters to me non-trivially, so of course, F me.
• charlesdaniels 6y ago
  I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. There used to be an XUL extension to do this, before XUL was killed off. Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain. Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point, what's the sell? Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973
  • testesttest 6y ago
    I only use them on mobile at this point (for adblock). For desktop, they are just worse than Chrome.
    • fastball 6y ago
      Brave has better adblock on mobile in my experience anyway.
  • masklinn 6y ago
    > I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is just way too unnecessarily large. A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my personal hardware covers).
    • charlesdaniels 6y ago
      I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.
• grishka 6y ago
  Touchscreen laptops exist, which means those who use keyboards and mice — the overwhelming majority of desktop OS users — must suffer. Always loved this logic.
• batterylow 6y ago
  I use "compact density" on every machine...
• emaro 6y ago
  I agree with the majority here. Removing this option would be really bad. In addition, personally I'm open to most UI changes (I really liked the FF Quantum update). But the screenshots of the Proton UI look awful. Seems very touch-centered and (background) tabs blend into each other. Please don't do it.
  • dathinab 6y ago
    > I agree with the majority here. Are you sure it's the majority? I would argue that people which don't care if it is removed are quite unlikely to comment on this thread. I for example really don't care if it's there or not, and besides maybe 720p screens I have a really hard time to see any value in the feature TBH. (and yes I tried it out). EDIT: To be clear what I tried out was the compact layout which is scheduled to be removed. I honestly wonder why they do change the view in the proton update because, this isn't adding any value for anyone at all. Not for touch users and not for desktop users, it just annoys people because they need to get used to a new view and for some people fits less into their general desktop design...
    • dathinab 6y ago
      Now I have tried out the actual nightly proton UI: - It still seems to be in flux, the one I see (slightly) differs from the one in the pictures which differs from the one in pictures in other articles. - I never cared about the compact density at all, until I used the proton UI which feels quite a bit bulky and grabs to much attention. It's similar to how gnomes "large" title bars (with potential other) features feel clunky. And they where definitely one of (multiple) reasons I'm not using gnome... - Ironically it looks all fine on my HiDPI laptop screen, I have no complains about proton on it at all. But on my 1080p24" monitor it a different story. - The music playing/muting feature is now more discoverable, at the price of having multi line tab text. I'm not sure this is worth it tbh. And while (on my 1080p24" screen) tabs feel like they are wasting a lot of space tabs which play music feel squished together. Worse when muted they write "MUTED" there but let's be honest a muted symbol is much faster visually recognized, not sure if that matters. - I'm worried about tab bar customization being hidden behind "More Tools.." being able to e.g. remove that annoying spacers before and after the tab bar and being able to remove all the symbols I don't use matters for me. (As a side not I would love if the "in tab bar symbols" are removable, I don't need a screenshot symbol there, I'm doing screenshots with my OS). - The reader mode is gone, you are probably meant to use pocket for this? - In default style the current tab is close to not highlighted at all, this seems to be a bug as in light and dark default themes it is highlighted properly. - The background behind the tabs and the one behind the buttons/uri-bar is different leading to a visual line which makes the UI feel more bulky/attention grabbing(in a negative way) then it should be. Merging both areas visually likely would improve the feeling of the proton UI and would fit better with the new look of the tab bar I think. As a side note does anyone know if there is any explanation about why they changed the tab bar in the way they did? It seem to add a little but not much improvements for touch screens while braking common design rules about tabbed views. I do not believe it has any chance to attract new users while it has a lot of potential to scare away old users. I mean doing a lot of work for negligible improvements for touch "PC's" and music icon/mute discoverability while having a good chance to lose users seem to be a somewhat strange decision to make tbh. Or differently formulated a big UI change (feels big) should also have big improvements for most users, which I'm not seeing anywhere.
• canada2us 6y ago
  Very good choice. People simply make decisions without much consequences in 2 scenarios: 1. They have too many users, the users have to accept it. 2. They have too few users, the users are neglectable to care. Firefox is exactly in the second scenario.
• Yizahi 6y ago
  Typical modern Mozilla. After they have forced Uglybar on us and said that we better like it as is, I'm not surprised about this news. If only there were more than 2 browsers for Windows...
• ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  This would be my last straw with Mozilla. I've been peeved about Chromium forks for ages, but if Firefox isn't going to even try to be a good alternative, neither should I.
  • throw111116 6y ago
    Hope you please reconsider. Firefox has many things going for it, see my comment [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26467749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26467749
    • ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I've stood in defense of Firefox for a really long time, it remains my primary browser. And my hope is that in light of the publicity about this travesty of an attempt, Mozilla will backtrack. But I'm sick of Firefox being absolutely unwilling to support the needs of their already niche userbase.
• kristopolous 6y ago
  Why are designers unquestionable dictators and tyrants these days? You get vast seas of "NO!!" and the projects are like "well sorry, mr art school over here moved some jpegs around. This is what we're doing!" I mean what on earth, stop this insane nonsense already. Listen to the users.
  • rlpb 6y ago
    > Listen to the users. To be fair, this tells you what the vocal users think, and this is sometimes very different from what the majority of users think. For something with a shrinking market share, you also have to consider what potential users think, not just existing users.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      That's the "don't listen to real people. Imagine people instead" defense. It allows people to justify whatever they want without any confirmation or feedback on reality. They can always imagine some future user that permits them to ignore every single existing one. It's a closed loop justification to do whatever they want without listening to anyone while pretending they're making it better for everyone.
      • bobthepanda 6y ago
        This is supposed to be what A/B testing with KPIs is for. There are plenty of times when stated preference contradicts actual behavior (e.g. more search results per page resulting in less successful searches on Google) due to other countervailing factors (additional latency causing abandonment before the page finishes loading)
        • kristopolous 6y ago
          That's not what this is. The quantitative model has its own problems. It's why youtube, for instance, looks like it's designed for toddlers using tablets.
      • 6y ago
• throw7 6y ago
  Accessibility is fairly hard to discover and it gets low engagement. It too should be removed.
  • nerdponx 6y ago
    Might as well remove the ability to type full URLs, because our user research indicates that most users use a search engine.
    • mywittyname 6y ago
      Oof, I know this sarcasm, but I do have concerns that FF will eventually ditch the split view for search and address bars. I hate the unified bar, but I suspect that I'm in the minority here.
      • dathinab 6y ago
        Hm, they might. Funny thing is I had been using the address bar as search bar (removing the search bar using customization) even since before it was really supported (it just happened to work, somewhat, unreliable). But I still hope they wouldn't do so as there are clearly situations where a combined bar just doesn't work well at all (like searching a URL or domain name in your search engine). And if I wouldn't be using mostly a laptop and 1080p24" monitor my setup might have been different.
    • natch 6y ago
      Yikes, don’t give their tone-deaf product managers ideas like this, they might take you seriously...
    • molofaha 6y ago
      I use the search engine, because ever since the omnibar / awesomebar I've never fucking being able to get the autocomplete to go where I want. (It's worst on Chrome, which strongly prioritises previous search results, as if it's intentional that you always go to the search engine first...)
• qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Add another voice to the I'm using this feature, please don't take away my functionality that costs you nothing to run or maintain.
• qbasic_forever 6y ago
  Is management at Mozilla completely rotten? They've had a couple rounds of big layoffs in the last year. I worry it's turning into a Hunger Games situation there, where every senior level person feels the need to assert their existence or else get the cut. Hopefully someone remembers to fight for the users...
• xmdx 6y ago
  Just bike shedding. I don't understand it.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• fleaaaa 6y ago
  This is #1 reason to use FF for me..
• GhostVII 6y ago
  All I want from Firefox is the ability to autohide the address bar. The main reason I switched to Firefox is because you can write custom CSS to hide it. 99% of the time the address bar is a waste of space, and on a 13 inch screen with a tiling window manager it is actually a significant amount of space when I have multiple firefox windows open. Current compact mode seems somewhat useless since it isn't that big of a change, if they could have compact mode actually hide the address bar and show on hover that would be huge for me. If chrome did that, I would switch.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    There used to be an extension that did this; it would collapse everything but the actual tabs bar unless you moused over it. It was beautiful for getting the most out of your screen real estate. Naturally, it died in the... first(?) great extension purge.
• kokx 6y ago
  Thanks Mozilla. This literally just directed me to this feature. Turned it on and actually feels quite good. Now I'll have to get back to make sure I don't get too used it before its taken away again.
• GNOMES 6y ago
  I have been switching between Chrome and Firefox almost every other day past few months to see if I could make the switch away from Chrome or not. This was one of the benefits for me. While it's on a few pixels in comparison to my external monitors, it's almost a necessity on a laptop.
• dlbucci 6y ago
  Man, I hadn't heard of this feature before, and tried it out after reading this. It's so much nicer!
• approxim8ion 6y ago
  Actually just moved from compact to touch (the other extreme) a couple of weeks back. I don't miss it but the appeal is obvious. I don't get why you'd just remove the option altogether.
• odc 6y ago
  Don't remove it. Please. I'm begging you ;_;
  • sp332 6y ago
    Can you expand on this? What's so bad about the defaults?
• antattack 6y ago
  I just enabled it! Looks good.
• hnaccy 6y ago
  > which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets low engagement. >We want to make sure that we design defaults that suit most users and we'll be retiring the compact mode for this reason. >The word from Product Management is still that we should remove this, for the reasons listed in the User Story. After tens of polite comments with reasoning in support of feature the FF dev throws up hands as Product says it has to go. What happened to Mozilla?
• russdpale 6y ago
  Is it even worth the man hours to get rid of this?
  • sgarrity 6y ago
    An option like this adds time and complexity to all other interface changes, so removing the option could save development and testing time in the long run.
    • pseudalopex 6y ago
      Yes for testing. But developers said it won't save development time because they still have to provide an even less dense layout for touch. And maybe the UI should change less anyway.
• jholman 6y ago
  Dear Mozilla, I've been an evangelist for FF for 15-ish years, since before Chrome existed. I teach computer science, which means my evangelism is multiplied by the hundreds of students I see every year. Why is it that every time we interact, you're ruining something? This removal of Compact will not be the straw that breaks my back, but it's still one more straw. Why are you playing chicken with your userbase? Yours, jholman
  • kaba0 6y ago
    Try interacting with the actual developer-oriented forums about new features, not the click-baity, feeling-based HN thread.
    • jholman 6y ago
      Weird, because Mozilla's actual advice on this bug report is to interact with the HN thread. So I did.
• unethical_ban 6y ago
  Turns out, I was using default density. I thought I was using Compact, so I suppose it isn't personally a big deal to me. I do agree with most of the complaints, however. It is apparent to me that there is a faction within Mozilla/Firefox that have an explicit directive to trim low-use features, no matter how passionate the users of those features are. I wish Firefox looked to the GNOME project to see how people feel about removing low-use features ideologically (hint: it sucks). Chrome does a lot of things correctly, and it has its core competencies. Firefox should have its own, and optimize towards that. The only large group of people advocating for it anymore seem to be skilled users. Why piss them off? Separate but related: My parents explicitly wanted off FF because it kept on changing its layout. Casual users don't like UI changes.
  • mywittyname 6y ago
    It's unfortunate that they are trimming the low-use, killer features that enthusiasts love. But I suspect they have limited developer resources, and given their declining market share, it makes sense that they would focus their efforts. Unless a group of independently wealthy developers want to take up the mantle of maintaining the enthusiasts features, we should anticipate more cuts.
    • freebuju 6y ago
      Except they recently renewed a cool $400M a year [0] Google search deal. [0] https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/mozillas-renewed-deal-with-google-puts-firefox-on-steadier-ground/ https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/mozillas-renewed-deal-with-go...
      • jjordan 6y ago
        You underestimate the ability of Mozilla's leadership team to piss away money.
        • kaba0 6y ago
          Or you know, a browser is not a trivial app, especially with the feature churn of the modern web, that has to be kept up-to-date.
• LanternLight83 6y ago
  I agree that it's hard to discover, as I haven't been aware of it until today, despite the thickness of firefox's UI being the most major grip I have with it as an otherwise ardent user. I've added it to my configs and will find a CSS solution if the option goes away.
• lukewrites 6y ago
  Thanks to this article I discovered and now use this feature. Crud.
  • acheron 6y ago
    Same, I didn't know this existed. But I turned it on and it's nice.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  My dream browser would completely separate the UI from the engine. I would specify a UI plugin from the command line, and if I didn't like it, or the provider started working against my interests, I could specify or create a different one. It'd be cool if the browser engine took commands over unix sockets or other IPC mechanism instead of being intimately melded at all with any UI. The Uzbl browser was very close to this I believe; it used Webkit. Would it be that hard to do that with the Firefox codebase? Firefox already has to work under multiple operating systems so some of the plumbing ought to be there.
• bhauer 6y ago
  I am very opposed to the removal of the compact density option. I adjust to compact on all of my computing devices because any screen real-estate recaptured for content without the loss of functionality is a good thing. On any device with a mouse, the compact layout is easy enough for me to target. As others have said here, I would opt for even more compact if it were an option. What do we think is the best way to engage with the Mozilla decision-makers on this? I feel instinctively reluctant to spam the linked Bugzilla issue, but perhaps that is best. Other thoughts?
• globular-toast 6y ago
  One of the first things I try to do with all software is reduce the number of pixels used by toolbars etc. as much as I can. Needless to say I've been using compact with Firefox for years now. I just looked at standard again and can't see why I would want to use more pixels for the exact same interface.
• seany 6y ago
  Arg. I've been looking for a way to make this smaller for a long time. How have I just discovered this right before it goes away?
• II2II 6y ago
  As a Firefox user who uses this feature, I am going to emphatically declare I don't care. We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and about 0.5% to 1% of typical screens. Much more screen real estate can be regained by entering full screen mode and much more screen real estate is lost to the typical design of web sites. While there are problems with how the project is managed, this case is a poor illustration of developers ignoring users since the users who are complaining are making a mountain out of a molehill. If the developers expend their energy addressing small things they would be able to accomplish little else.
  • cge 6y ago
    >We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and about 0.5% to 1% of typical screens. While that is true now, it's worth noting that this removal is meant to coincide with a redesign that will also make the toolbar and tabs take up much more vertical real estate to begin with.
  • SECProto 6y ago
    > We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and about 0.5% to 1% of typical screens My (corporate-issued) laptop has a 1366x768 screen. The proposed changes will result in Firefox wasting 12% of my screen. It's an additional 3-4 percentage points, which is 30-50 percent more.
  • Sharlin 6y ago
    > Much more screen real estate can be regained by entering full screen mode Ironically, they already butchered full screen mode years ago by not hiding the browser chrome anymore, making any real estate gain rather minimal at least on macOS.
    • II2II 6y ago
      I have verified that the chrome is removed in full screen mode under Linux, and I seem to recall the same being true under Windows. Why the macOS version would behave otherwise is a mystery.
• jefftk 6y ago
  > The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar" view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets low engagement. [1] This is a nice illustration of why telemetry is important: if Mozilla knew the feature usage they could make a much more informed decision. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028
• rubyist5eva 6y ago
  For crying out loud Mozilla I want to see web pages not empty parts of the user chrome, especially because vertical screen real-estate is at a premium on most monitors.
• rychco 6y ago
  I had genuinely forgotten there were alternative options to compact. I understand the point of larger options for preference and accessibility, but I feel for the majority of people that compact is likely the best viewing experience in terms of conserving screen space. I hate exaggerating or sounding alarmist, but this will likely cause me to migrate to another browser.
• shmerl 6y ago
  This is seriously nasty. I always use compact mode. I don't need this "it's a tablet" design on my desktop.
• natch 6y ago
  I wish they would remove the unwanted Pocket spam instead.
• vimacs2 6y ago
  I had switched to Brave a few months ago once I saw the writing on the wall (the writing being that Mozilla clearly want to "diversify" from their browser). Despite being unable to have certain extensions, I have not been missing Firefox much at all. Really, the only thing that I really miss is the containers functionality but that can be sort of emulated through profiles (though that's not a perfect match admittedly).
• zamadatix 6y ago
  I think something a lot of the comments are missing (rather than just realizing it's a well hidden setting these days) is this line: "The upcoming Proton design refresh of the Firefox web browser could increase the default size of that interface significantly." There is a UI redesign due in a few versions and in the previews at the moment it increases the UI size quite a bit. Compact is being removed as part of "making that new UI code simpler" so even if you think normal is fine today it's going to get larger - doubly so for those that used the compact feature on the old UI.
  • wlesieutre 6y ago
    Yup. I'm using Firefox in Compact mode already, but the Proton tabs look even taller than the current Normal size. Not looking forward to this redesign. I'll try it, but decent odds that this is the straw that pushes me to switch browsers. One of my computers I've done the jumping through hoops of browser customization to set up Tree Style Tabs with no tab bar up top, and I'm just not interested in going through more of that to figure out if there's a way to hack the Proton UI down to a size I like. Hell, I don't even know if Proton still lets you do apply custom CSS to the UI at all, it seems like the kind of feature that they'd want to drop to keep it "simple to maintain." What's even sadder is they're keeping Normal and Touch, so it's not like this lets them take out the system for changing the sizes of all these UI elements. They're just taking away the small size. "People have vertical pixels, and damn it we're going to use as many of them as we can!" As if I wasn't using that space for displaying webpages in my web browser or anything.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• SubiculumCode 6y ago
  Mozilla this is a mistake. If anything, I wish you'd offer an ultra-compact setting as well.
• clon 6y ago
  Just found out about this feature, enabled it and it is brilliant. This ought to be the default. So I'm happy and sad at the same moment :)
• mrloba 6y ago
  Removing things because of relative low usage often seems like flawed logic to me. Sometimes it makes sense (most users only use the most used features), but quite often a piece of software will consist of a large number of low-usage features. Take them all away and you've lost most of your users. Basically zipf's law in action. So the value provided by the software is in flexibility and customization. How should we decide if a feature is worth keeping in such software?
• breakfastduck 6y ago
  Please don't do this. I set this option straight away every time I install.
• afrcnc 6y ago
  Just because it's hard to discover doesn't mean you have to remove it. It's not the users' fault Mozilla's designers are useless.
• ObscureScience 6y ago
  I'm not invested in this feature specifically, even though I always enable it. I'd rather have a general way of scaling the ui and reducing padding/margins. So I hope it's removed for architectural reasons, not to prevent ui customizations.
• kccqzy 6y ago
  In other news, Safari in Big Sur is also engaging in this kind of egregious vertical space wasting [0]. The toolbar becomes taller, with no way to customize. This is not a Firefox problem. This is an industry-wide UI/UX problem. [0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqz1bn20pu9j4v3/big%20sur%20safari%20ugliness.png?dl=1 https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqz1bn20pu9j4v3/big%20sur%20safari...
• sgarrity 6y ago
  I suspect there's a kind of selection bias in a discussion like this. People who care about this feature are motivated to comment. People who don't care aren't. Interface variations have a cost as a complexity multiplier, adding another variation to consider and test when making improvements and testing.
• nearmuse 6y ago
  I am using it, and I always hated gratuitous redesigns or feature cuts. It doesn't even seem to be the kind of feature that requires enormous attention to maintain, on the other hand though regular browser users stick with it for a long time and it can take some of it or some power user posts about "that great feature I've been using and you should too" for it to become popular and later mainstream. I don't see how a fat bar isn't a downgrade and I sure hope it is not some kind of hamfisted attempt to differentiate Firefox from it's competition that puts content first by reducing UI around it.
• Causality1 6y ago
  I think the reason Firefox has been making all these horrible decisions lately is quite clear if you think about it. Everybody on the Firefox team knows they're on a sinking ship, and therefore each person's top priority is to not be fired in the next round of layoffs. How do you avoid that? You do stuff so you have a record to point at and say "look at how much I've contributed to Firefox". Doesn't matter if your changes are idiotic so long as you personally seem important.
• skratlo 6y ago
  I don't even care anymore, there's just one browser and that's the reality. I stopped using Firefox long time ago when they stopped caring about performance and stability. UI stability too.
• chunsj 6y ago
  Yet, Mozilla cannot fix the fullscreen mode problem in macOS (automatic hiding of toolbar). And they are just redecorating toolbar.
• peanut_worm 6y ago
  Another feature I use now gone I have also been getting “sponsored highlights” now Is there an alternative to firefox that doesn’t use chromium?
• stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Was it really taking up that much of their time to maintain it? I like compact style I don't need huge everything. I still have pretty good eyesight.
• djhworld 6y ago
  This will be really sad if they go through with this, I've always turned Compact mode on, on every machine regardless of screen dimensions (although it's impact is much better felt on my 13" macbook laptop)
• butz 6y ago
  Firefox is one of a few applications that still has pretty decent customization options, especially if you can get into editing some CSS. They should find a way to work them into convenient UI, so other, less tech savvy users, or just users who don't have time to tinker with config files, could easily customize their browsing experience. It is sad, that in this day and age of various display sizes (4K, widescreen) and scaling (not only retina 2x screens, but 125% scaling on Windows too) Firefox designers are still working with pixels. How about using some of that modern CSS magic and building truly responsive UI, that works not only for desktops, but tablets and phones (e.g. Pinephone)?
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I do not believe that any number of commenters here are in a camp that will move one way or the other on this issue. Probably fine.
• stuaxo 6y ago
  The what now? If I knew this was there I might have used it.
• kdmytro 6y ago
  I wish it was cool again to not remove features and keep backwards compatibility.
• brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
  I'm a dire hard Firefox fan. I won't switch to Chrome, but I may start giving Qutebrowser and others a look. All Mozilla has been doing is playing catch-up with Google, chopping away at excellent (even if mildly used) features (RSS anybody? now this, plus others before), and occasionally embedding 3rd party, proprietary addons. Ok, sure, Mozilla ended up buying Pocket, but that wasn't the case when it was first added to the browser from the user's perspective... I remember Firefox before it was Firefox - phoenix, firebird....now we have a pretty decent Chrome clone with some legacy features left (about:config), but not much else. Other browsers are looking better every day.
• eggman314 6y ago
  Toyota has this philosophy, Kaizen, which focuses on a continuous process of making small improvements to their products instead of singlemindedly trying to make the best product possible. The British cycling team [1] drew inspiration from this when they remade the team before the 2008 Beijing olympics. [1] https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-to-olympic-gold https://hbr.org/2015/10/how-1-performance-improvements-led-t... Mozilla, it seems to me, has for the last several years been doing something close to the opposite of this. Granted, they have made some real improvements to privacy and speed, but so do other browsers. What happens with Firefox, which seems pretty unique in that market, is that almost every release they make some changes that piss off a small segment of their user base. OK, yes, they may only lose a percent or two each time, but I can't imagine this is good for their market share in the long run.
• megous 6y ago
  Firefox can also be used on PinePhone, which in landscape mode affords 720px of height, excluding any WM extras on top/bottom. It's already a bit fat, and this Proton redesign doesn't help at all. Hopefully userChrome.css keeps working.
• mnadkvlb 6y ago
  I miss the "close other tabs" and "close tabs on the right" feature when they used to be directly available with a single right click. Now you need two clicks for that and are hidden !! why break something when nobody ever complained about it. Its getting ridiculous, like someone from another browser team is the product owner for firefox choosing how to cripple this browser one tiny step at a time
• brutal_chaos_ 6y ago
  I've already commented my disdain below, but to add more: why does Mozilla keep taking away features I use...?! I swear they are trying to destroy themselves. Or trying, very badly, to pivot. Either way, rable-rable-rable,get off my lawn, if it ain't broke don't fix it, etc. Qutebrowser looks interesting...
• ajnin 6y ago
  When I read articles like this I'm always reminded of this little story about the law of averages : a few years after WW2 the US air force had a problem : their planes kept crashing. After some investigation they realized the issue was that the cockpit, based on old measurements, was too uncomfortable to control the plane properly for the bigger and taller pilots of the time. So they decided to take measurements from 4000 pilots, averaged them, and got ready to update the dimensions of the new universal pilot seat. Surely it would be adequate for most pilots that were just measured to create the new design. However one young recruit decided to check exactly how many of the 4000 pilots would be within 30% of average for the 10 most critical dimensions. The answer : none. Every pilot was different, and had a combination of different noone else had. The new pilot seat would have to be a fully customizable one, full of knobs that would allow it to be fit to each specific pilot. You can apply this analogy here (and in fact to most software) : all users use a differt combination of features. Maybe just a few use compact mode. And just a few use RSS inside the browser. And just a few use some other little used feature that was removed without making the headlines. But those are not the same users. When you make the intersection of all those sets of people, turns out it's almost all of them. I don't know if that explains the decline of Firefox's market share, but it certainly is part of the reason.
• bulleyashah 6y ago
  Tangential question but hoping someone knows how to do this : Is there a setting in Firefox that allows me to invert colors without a plugin or javascript? The default Black on white is too painful for eyes.
• fyrn- 6y ago
  What are they thinking, they say they assume no one uses this feature, maybe they should actually get data on that? If you don't uave telemetry for it, then add that first. At least do a poll.
• userbinator 6y ago
  I share the same sentiment to the many others here in opposition. This is yet another datapoint on the insidious trend of dumbing down UIs and destroying user-individualism. As a reminder of how much we've fallen, look at the appearance settings for Windows 95: http://toastytech.com/guis/win95schemes.png http://toastytech.com/guis/win95schemes.png You can change the colours, fonts, and sizes of all the UI elements, and have everything looking exactly the way you want, down to the pixel size and RGB value! That was possible 25 years ago, with the technology and computing power of the time, as well as developer effort. For fun, I decided to open the linked site in IE6 with its default theme, and compare how its UI looks. In almost exactly the same vertical space taken by "Firefox Compact Current" which shows two lines of tabs (with cut-off titles), an address bar (with cut-off URLs), and navigation buttons, IE6 manages to fit four lines: [1] A full titlebar, [2] A menubar, [3] Navigation buttons, and [4] A full URL. With current Firefox, you only get three choices: "large", "huge", and "WTF"; and Mozilla plans to remove the already-too-large choice to make it two. No doubt sometime in the future it will become one, if this trend continues. What's more, the UI of IE will change size, font, and colour if I change them in the system's settings, so I can have the same consistent appearance throughout. If I want a huge UI, more interesting fonts, dark mode, or whatever else, I don't have to set it per-application, unless it's an application like Firefox which draws its own UI... What happened? When an entity like Mozilla would rather spend a lot of effort on complicated site-facing features, yet remove already-trivial yet extremely useful configurations like these, it's really hard to not see that software is going backwards and becoming more user-hostile.
  • ImprovedSilence 6y ago
    So much truth. In fact, the reason I left firefox for chrome in (2008ish?) was precisely because chrome was more compact, and left more room for just the webpage. Now Firefox is at least competitive in that regard, and I use compact as well. But more to your point about customizability, for some god forsaken reason, I cannot set a keyboard shortcut so that command-: and command-; become previous and next tab. I uses this for every other tabbed program ever both mac and linux. But somehow in firefox i need something dumb like ctrl-shift-left or something. Thats the single biggest factor keeping me out of firefix. Getting rid of compact isnt going to help them either I suppose. Who is making these decisions for Mozilla, Google?
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I’ve used Firefox almost continuously since the Firebird days but the dumbing down of the browser, along with dubious moves by Mozilla over time, have caused me to recently give other alternatives a shot. I was surprised by how nice Vivaldi is, and it seems like the new “power user” browser (https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/). Brave (https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/) also seems innovative for its monetization model for the web.
• amberj8 6y ago
  The thing that's the worst about this is the sheer arrogance of the Firefox dev team. I noticed it acutely a few months(?) ago when they introduced the update that inexplicably makes the address bar grow in size when you focus on it. The disturbing bit wasn't "we're making this dumb change the new default", it was "we are also not making a way to turn this off and literally do not care if this bothers you, we know better than you so just accept it".
• Tossitplease12 6y ago
  Someone tell them to stop this.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  Damn that's not an easy feature to find, I just went looking for it from the directions in the article and it was still hard to find. Admittedly Safari is my default browser, but still.
• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  Oof... this is a bummer. I can't stand the default layout, wish this option had been more discoverable and want an even denser option, TBH. Other than ripping out privacy features or removing the dev console or something crazy like that, I can't think of much Mozilla can do to say they don't want me as a user than this. Information density is priceless.
• vic20forever 6y ago
  Please don't do this, Mozilla. I have a lot of open tabs on my 1920 x 1080 monitor, and switching from compact density to default (I just tested this) reduced the amount of visible text on each tab such that I couldn't identify what most of the tabs contained. In other words, if you have a lot of tabs open at once, the reduction in usability is significant.
• johnchristopher 6y ago
  Many years ago, in Mozilla firefird time, they were citing more information in less space as a feature over the competition and how the interface gives more space to website content. They being not the same guys, obviously.