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Lepton – Firefox UI Fix
- twobitshifter 5y agoThe code that changes the look is entirely CSS. What’s stopping FF from allowing this level of theming from normal addons?
- chrismorgan 5y agoThe browser’s UI is currently implementation detail: they can change structures, markup, &c. as they desire. If they allow add-ons to apply arbitrary CSS to the chrome, they can’t change it any more. Perhaps they could operate a selector whitelist or something like that, but it’d subsequently limit what they could do when they wanted or needed to change things. This was basically the problem with old-style XUL addons; they prevented the browser from improving, actively hindering in important areas like performance and security (by which I mean security of the browser itself even with no extensions—architectural things like sandboxing and going multiprocess), and so eventually they were done away with because they just kept on causing trouble. And that’ only considering the practical problems of allowing this. The security implications of allowing it are rather significant too: a malicious add-on could almost completely conceal its existence, preventing you from removing it.
- shawnz 5y agoI agree it was a good idea to get rid of the XUL-based UI and XUL addons. But I think allowing addons to apply some limited CSS changes to the new UI could be a good compromise. It would be significantly less powerful than what could be done with XUL, but it would provide a more reasonable interface to go beyond simply changing colours and background images. I can acknowledge that there would be challenges creating such a feature in a way that is resistant to abuse, but I think it could allow the browser to regain a big competitive advantage at a fraction of the cost of the old implementation.
- rob74 5y agoNot that Mozilla has ever really cared a lot to maintain backwards compatibility for the APIs that are public. Maybe it has improved in the last years, but some years ago I developed an extension which didn't need a lot of updates for its actual functionality, but I had to revisit it time and time again just so it would still work with the newest Firefox version...
- chrismorgan 5y agoAnd that showed the problem of the XUL approach: when everything is public interface, nothing is stable. WebExtensions, on the other hand, has a carefully-defined API with much more dependable stability guarantees.
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoReminder that you can disable Firefox's new 'Proton' UI by going to about:config and setting browser.proton.enabled to false.
- amarshall 5y agoYes, but this is likely to be removed in a future update the same way most of their UI flags are. Meanwhile, the userChrome changes here are likely to still be viable in some form.
- mopsi 5y agoBy that time, Firefox has probably had another redesign or few.
- heldergg 5y agoFor maximum effect I also use: * browser.compactmode.show=true - enable compact mode * browser.menu.showViewImageInfo=true - show menu icons
- bugmen0t 5y agoReminder that Firefox is most easily customized through Firefox Color at https://color.firefox.com/ https://color.firefox.com/
- yadascript 5y agoIt's handy but I've found no way to change the teal/cyan accent of the browser (or at least the color of links in the address bar)
- kilnr 5y agoThere's no visible teal/cyan anywhere for me. These are my Firefox Color settings: https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAJAAQAAAAAAAABBqYhm849SCia3ftKEGccwS-xMDPr3HHCUaaq-qy5QgqeHG4K15QdbTEgSPKN1fVKx4po1Ee5cFB-vVpY8-GIzywX9pMStVMKBO3bSk-xLE4WmezdA3sB4zCxc0Qs41pcQ_7d5CBC5O_65slot9etONqndHCrJeMbjjgm-Ku39gLqtuAL8I9yuikzegTwJvwkSR8-EZn6MbdHiRkT1VZbHCvRLi6o-cw4TK1dsPVUmf3CJzqCZ7op2Rv-Vk4AA https://color.firefox.com/?theme=XQAAAAJAAQAAAAAAAABBqYhm849... I've hidden the tab bar, though, so there will likely still be an accent there.
- yadascript 5y agoThe links in the address bar dropdown is teal/cyan for me: https://i.imgur.com/NfOavJ7.png https://i.imgur.com/NfOavJ7.png
- shawnz 5y agoThat simply allows you to create firefox themes. OP's changes are not possible with the firefox theme engine
- baal80spam 5y agoWhy use a browser that actively fights against the user by introducing pointless and unwanted changes?
- Ygg2 5y agoWhich browser is that? Chrome or Firefox?
- matkoniecz 5y agoBecause I need to use some browser and Firefox is still the least bad?
- wongarsu 5y agoWhat alternative do you suggest?
- random_dork1 5y agoI actually wanted changes like this and I welcome them. To each his own, I guess.
- TonyTrapp 5y agoThe increased menu item height was driving me nuts. Copying the stuff from "Menu - Reduce Padding" fixed that for me. Great!
- devit 5y agoI hope Mozilla reverts this absurd change as soon as possible, or at least maintains the previous UI indefinitely.
- wufocaculura 5y agoI especially liked the reduced padding part here. I really hate the trend of increasing padding in various apps / websites. One of the first things I usually do is search for "how do I make more condensed view here". I am probably in minority here - most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets) but there is still a group of people who have bigger screens and would love to see more data than empty space.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoI wonder if we really are that small a group. I'm in the same boat and I hear this all around me more and more.
- jl6 5y agoI expect current UI trends are informed by focus group testing that starts with the application in a blank state and adds small amounts of data. You’d get very different results if the focus groups concentrated on using the application in a mature state with ~months worth of data in it.
- bityard 5y agoMy hypothesis is that UI designers optimize towards "pretty" at the detriment of functional because pretty is much easier to show with a screenshot in a portfolio or on Twitter.
- gostsamo 5y agoThe decisions are made based on shared telemetry which many power users turn off. I keep my deliberately on for this exact reason.
- wufocaculura 5y agoI keep it on as well - just hope that they can see that after 89.0 was releases there was an increase (not big, but still) in changes to default look'n'feel and make some conclusions :)
- ChrisSD 5y agoThe only thing that bugged me enough to change it are the tiles on the new tab page. The new default is an absurd degree of nested padding so that the tile icons were tiny relative to the space given for each tile. If each and every tile is 60% whitespace then there's too much whitespace for me.
- bserge 5y agoAll I wanted was tabs on the side instead of at the top, for maximum vertical space. It must be hard to implement seeing as no one bothered, though very old FF versions had an addon that did exactly that.
- seumars 5y agoThe tab redesign is such a nonissue. "Is it a tab or is it a button". UI is very contextual, and in Firefox's case they're very obviously tabs.
- fredzel 5y agoIf you have more tabs opened than the window fits, there is no separator between them, other than fade away.
- throwaddzuzxd 5y agoThe favicon acts as a separator. I often have way too many tabs and the new style doesn't change anything, it's still very clear where a tab starts and where it ends.
- lbotos 5y agoWhat do we gain by separating the button from the content it's connected to? I'm not a fan of the new Safari style either, but in that case it's at least because they are trying to let the pages bleed into the full window.
- seumars 5y agoGood point. In Safari's case the redesign "tab as button" approach makes sense for the overall UI approach, whereas Firefox only made it half way.
- agumonkey 5y agoI beg to differ, to me they lost the tab identity. I'm no purist but I'm really tired of the reinvention of wheels here. Latest firefox ui efforts (beside the download progress icon which was great) were a negative on me from day one. Sorry. Mozilla, save your energy for other things .. I don't think you're losing users due to the shape of tabs. - some people are doing tab summary in their browser (nlp) - tab grouping is re-explored in chrome, it was nice in past firefox, it's not a useless idea but could be revisited - archiving helper (no more 404 maybe ?, partner with wayback machine maybe ? or archive.is) - history view
- lbotos 5y agoAside: I thought one of the big features of this release was Native menus. I was most looking forward to "look up" being an option in FF on Mac now. Do I have some weird setting that is stopping that, or is that still not possible?
- noisy_boy 5y agoHonestly the new appearance has grown on me and I don't see the need for change. I would rather have them focus on some features that can add value to the overall usage. For example, ability to add a folder to the toolbar and being able to put icons for plugins into it - right now, every plugin's icon just shows up and clutters the toolbar instead of me being able to only show those that I use most often and put the rest in a folder. Another example is ability to export a sub-folder of bookmarks so that if I need to save them to another browser, I don't need to do hacks like exporting all of them only to import them to a scratch folder and picking what I need.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago> ability to add a folder to the toolbar and being able to put icons for plugins into it - right now, every plugin's icon just shows up and clutters the toolbar instead of me being able to only show those that I use most often I've put most of those icons in the 'Other tools' double-right arrow submenu (translating the name, may not be the exact phrase). When you rightclick and choose Customize toolbar, the little window that appears on the top right part is that submenu's contents, and you can drag and drop from anywhere else into there to move things around.
- pitaj 5y agoI believe it's called the Overflow Menu in English.
- wodenokoto 5y agoI thought it was really interesting that Apple is moving towards making the chrome even smaller on Safari while Firefox is increasing their chrome.