17 ms·

Firefox UI/UX History

439 points by black7375 5y ago

txtsd 5y ago
I wish Firefox would incorporate Tree Style Tab!
black7375 5y ago
I'm making a firefox custom theme, and researching the UI/UX history of Firefox. 1. Early (v1 ~ v3) v1~v3 are classic UI that we remember when we were in the early 2000s. Features - Clear as the icons do only one thing - Unique color for each icon Limits - Not fused with OS UI - UI height - Contrary to the modern interface philosophy as there is no abstraction - Inconsistent icon size and texture 2. Classic (v4, 2016.10) Thus, v4.0 was released after a large-scale UI reconstruction project was launched!! It is the longest-lived UI and loved by many people. Commonly called a Classic theme. Features - Orange app button at the top left like the symbol - Calmer tone - Win7 Aero Glass support - Stop / Reload / Go with one button - Tab moved to the top Limits - Unfamiliar interface with large-scale changes 3. Australis (v29, 2014.04) Australis, which had a lot of likes and dislikes compared to Proton UI. It was a change that put a lot of effort into simplicity. Features - Curved Tab - Drag & Drop customizing UI - Change settings UI pop-up to contents(tab) format - Animation Limits - Panel UI that looks like a tablet - Remove status bar 4. Photon (v57, 2017) Photon was a generally well-received update to the UI that was used until June of this year(2021), when Proton appeared. Features - Components: List based panel and page actions, library menu - Animation: Add animation to actions of buttons, tabs, panels, etc. - Visual redesign: tabs, icons, density, etc. - Performance: improved initialization, synchronization reflow, etc. Limits - It looks a bit complicated - Only light weight themes are allowed. 5. Proton (v89, 2021.06) This is the moment I started working on themes. Features - Neatly organized menu - Icon that are pretty enough to remind of the edge - Some of animations that I like & skeleton screens - Stylish color scheme - Moderate rounding - Meticulous implementation Limits - Excessively wide padding - Remove icons from menu - Feels like a button rather than a tab with a connected look - Confusion of tab indicators - Remove page action menu in address bar - Delete bookmarks / library animations and illustrations - The icon size of the new tab contents - Changed the search bar of the new tab to be performed on the URL bar.
- exodust 5y ago
  > Remove status bar Missed still! On large screens I prefer a permanent status bar with useful info persisting, than a URL flashing over the page. Chrome did it first, then Firefox copied like a mirror. The status bar was oddly banished to UI hell, not even a config switch lifeline. Replaced with google's flickering lower left overlay.
cute_boi 5y ago
One of the design feature I abhor in Proton is sound icon in tab. Its too confusing for my peanuts brain. Further, it add text "Playing " which looks redundant.
- black7375 5y ago
  Yes. Actually the tab indicator behavior is weird. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292608-37d2ab50-1e13-4e7c-a7d7-31cb5de20757.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292608... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292618-13703b69-8cf8-4aeb-84be-211a85ff2116.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292618... Each language has different behavior and does not display information properly.
yoavm 5y ago
I loved Photon. Proton added a lot of nice touches, but I never understood why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons. Tabs is a great metaphor from the real world, and they take less space. I don't see a single advantage of styling them as buttons. The whole point is that they're visually connected to the currently visible page. Thankfully however I don't care too much because I can still completely hide the tab-bar with my userChrome.css, and use "Tab Center Reborn" to have my tabs on the side instead.
- pier25 5y ago
  Completely agree. Objectively buttons don't seem to have any advantage and personally I find them fugly.
- throwaquestion5 5y ago
  Seconding the tab idea. I need to know in which tab I am. Sometimes I have the five tabs of the same page (hello hn), look up, and I don't know which tab I am. I end up closing the tab with Ctrl+W when I'm done and learn where I was. Thanks for the extension suggestion I may give it a try.
  - heftig 5y ago
    I think using a theme with a high contrast between the active tab and inactive tabs is probably the easiest way to fix the UX for you. E.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/proton-redone-hybrid/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/proton-redone-hybri...
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    If I only had just 5 HN tabs open...
- skavi 5y ago
  One advantage I could see is a vertical tab bar mode that’s more visually consistent with the standard horizontal tab bar. Could even animate seamlessly between those modes.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Modernity and simplicity is nice an all, but the Proton redesign process was a big failure in my opinion. I've heard nothing but annoyances from basic users about the weird tab display, and many advanced screens (like in the settings) are being disappeared for the sake of simplicity without an equivalent implementation. The redesigns are welcome but left unfinished. Up until around Photon, I considered every UI update an improvement. Photon itself was a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly contained improvements. That marked the turning point for me; Photon is where I actively started disliking the more prominent features. Unlike Photon, Proton was just a huge step back, with no real improvements to compensate. Trying to get details about a TLS certificate, something only power users do and even then is done very rarely, is now a full page ordeal, with a small column down the middle of the page for content. Apparently the popup was too clumsy or something? I seriously don't understand why any UI designer ever cared. Everything is now bring dumbed down, information that doesn't satisfy the top 80% just gets completely removed and the space saved is dedicated to padding and margins making the entire UI more bloated. Then there were dumb plans to make Firefox interesting (I think? What else were they doing?) like the idea of "colourways" being available for a limited time only, which was simply preposterous. Earlier they took over Pocket, a service everyone has now seen the icon for and barely anyone ever uses. When it comes to decisions about the browser, everyone who dares reduce telemetry gets ignored . Mozilla brands itself as a privacy aware company, but when you try to use that privacy it turns its back on you. I suppose I should be thankful Mozilla isn't trying to ruin Firefox in desktop as much as it's trying to push users to abandon Firefox on mobile. My tab bar has gone through three changes I don't really give a damn about, collections have come and gone, and I've given up on ever using the addon API again. The text encoding settings and menu seems to have inexplicably disappeared, leading to some very annoying broken web pages that can't be fixed anymore. You can't even enter an IPv6 address on Android. The browser engine can browse to IPv6 addresses just fine, the URL bar just doesn't accept them. The regex to determine if an input is a URL or not doesn't test for IPv6 and the single attempt by someone else to fix it was apparently too complex and therefore removed later. That person abandoned their efforts and the whole process doesn't exactly make me want to contribute either. In my frustration I've actually considered (and quickly dismissed) the idea of writing a tool to spam Mozilla with telemetry to get the features that I use more hits. Telemetry warfare, of sorts.
MMS21 5y ago
Photon was so good why they hell did they mess with it
- conradfr 5y ago
  Agree. I disliked the tab design of Australis (but remember being able to remove that curved nonsense) but Photon was great (until they started to mess with url bar dimensions etc). Damn do I hate Proton.
  - sph 5y ago
    I've just learned about Proton being distinct from Photon. Of all the names they could've used, they chose one that's one Levenshtein distance from the previous. Looking forward to the next redesign dubbed Protan.
vsskanth 5y ago
I really like their UI for desktop. Has anyone managed to package their latest UI into a framework that can be used like Qt ? I remember they had an XUL based framework but I understand it's deprecated now ?
destructionator 5y ago
Kinda astounding how the firefox v1 was not great but ok, and it got overall worse in literally every redesign since then. v1 remains the best UI firefox has ever had to this day. No wonder they peaked user share early on and have rapidly hemorrhaged since then.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  The v1-v4 have a feeling of immense simplicity. Now Firefox is a fighter jet, but I miss driving a mini.
  - masswerk 5y ago
    The "Classic" theme was still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4 (just reworked icons and toolbar and location bar were merged), while the "Modern" theme was much the same in layout but introduced round buttons of varying size. (Firefox came with both themes.)
- yoavm 5y ago
  I feel like it became somewhat popular to bash Firefox (and Mozilla) on HN, which is sad. What exactly did you like about v1? It takes huge space and literally most buttons are completely useless. Are you using "refresh" very often? Do you need a huge "loading" indicator that takes space even when you're not loading? a button to show all-"history"-of-the-forward-button-in-the-current-tab? What makes v1 "the best ever"?
  - metadat 5y ago
    Only popular to bash because Mozilla has been husked and is now a money siphon for the executives while they slowly destroy everything good about Firefox, one bit at a time.
  - destructionator 5y ago
    > Are you using "refresh" very often? Ummm yes? Funny, I just wrote another comment complaining how hitting refresh on a major airline's flight status page is liable to give one of those terrible "something went wrong" messages (apparently the search results are liable to expire, but until they do, refreshing will actually update the info, so it is useful to periodically press to see if the flight got delayed). Combining stop and refresh is also dangerous since that's a race condition. Suppose the page is taking forever, I decide I've had enough of that and want to press stop. But in the second it takes me to actually click on it, the page decided to finally load! Now my click, instead of stopping the annoying spinner animation, clears out the information that FINALLY arrived and brought the annoying spinner back. (I actually think there is a pretty good case to just remove the stop button though, it isn't vital and just hitting back or close does the same thing anyway. But combining it with the refresh button is about the worst possible thing you could do to either button. It takes one useful button and one meh button and combines them into one awful button.) Speaking of clicks, that's actually the last straw that made me abandon firefox entirely: in version 75, they broke clicking on the url bar. Instead of doing the sane thing - putting the cursor where I clicked - it instead selects all. Before, double click would select all, meaning if you wanted that, it was still easily available. Now double click instead selects... a word. So they completely removed the very useful single click functionality and turned double click into a completely useless behavior. Absolutely unbearable. I could tolerate or undo most the other UI changes they did, but this click thing couldn't be user style'd away, couldn't be configured away. They just shoved this massive breakage down. So I uninstalled it . > takes space even when you're not loading I'd rather have a predictable UI of marginal utility that doesn't change out from under me than a UI that randomly changes from bad to worse in its own time. At least you can get used to consistency, even if it is consistently mediocre. > What makes v1 "the best ever"? Don't put things in quotes that weren't actually said. I actually said "v1 was not great but ok, and it got overall worse". There's actually specific changes I think were good, coupled with other changes that were bad.
masswerk 5y ago
Here's an image of the prehistory: Netscape Navigator 2 and 3, Netscape Communicator 4, all on MacOS. (NS3 is the Gold Edition, as discerned by the edit button in the toolbar. NS4 introduced the bookmark bar, by this requiring more vertical screen estate for the Chrome. Also mind the default grey page background of #CACACA common to all iterations of the Netscape browser.) https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/images/netscape-navigator-guis.png https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/images/netscape-navigator-... Edit: The "Classic" themes of early Firefox and SeaMonkey were still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4, but the toolbar and the location bar merged. (In the early days Firefox and Netscape 6/7 still coexisted in parallel, packaging the same engine, and the "Classic" theme represented the Netscape legacy UI.)
kitsunesoba 5y ago
For me Firefox’s UI design started going off the rails with Australis and Photon, where its UI began to be a major component of Firefox as a brand. I much preferred v1-v4 where Firefox felt more focused on being a tool that fit well into your desktop instead of trying to stand out. I’m sometimes tempted to try to start a Firefox fork that returns its UI to a “smaller part of a larger desktop” look and feel, but then I remember how impossible it would be to maintain that over time. Wish Gecko was still embeddable so one could just write a new UI and not have to keep patches maintained.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
  This is a scourge of all applications these days. The user's need for consistency is demoted to favor the developer's need for brand awareness.
  - dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 5y ago
    As people engage with many more devices on a day to day basis, applications have moved away from "matching the rest of the OS" and towards "consistency of the look an feel across all platforms". It's still "consistent", just on a different dimension (app-wise instead of OS-wise). I know HN favors the former, but I don't mind the latter too much. Especially when products are able to strike a nice balance like Outlook on Windows & Mac.
    - rhn_mk1 5y ago
      > people engage with many more devices on a day to day basis Do they actually? I'm guessing most people in the world have one smartphone, followed by those who have a laptop to match it. I would be careful to say that most people have more than one device though, which means a vast number see no consistency at all.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Very well said. People often claim that everyone complains about every Firefox UI change, but this is a perfectly consistent thing to do if you think Firefox has been getting slowly worse since v3.5 or so. The one thing I will say in its favor is that Firefox still maintains a decent amount of customizability, at least for the seriously dedicated. I still have a separate search bar, a menu bar, and have removed the "hamburger" menu button entirely. For me, the UI has changed very little over the years, but the pile of hacks in my usercss file has grown over time...
politelemon 5y ago
Removing icons from the menus has been one of the most puzzling decisions they made. In the year or so since its removal, using their menus has been a real struggle, and I can see there's even an entry on Mozilla Connect Ideas for it: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/idi-p/46 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/i... As for the 'curvy' tabs, I can't say I was a fan of it, even in Chrome, it feels like a waste of space and draws attention to it. The straight tabs, even the 'button' tab is a lot better in being out of the way.
- cosmotic 5y ago
  Icons in menus are good visual anchors which leads to better usability, but only if they are used sparingly. An icon for every menu item ends up being worse.
  - cute_boi 5y ago
    I think they were using icons properly. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18iDDBEB42EEB3F5183/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18i...
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      The key here is that the icons next to the entries robustly tied the menu entry to the icon in the toolbar: "this menu item does what the button with this icon does". Getting rid of the icons in this case means you don't get a hint that this menu entry is an alias for that button (or vice versa).
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > using their menus has been a real struggle Could you give an example of it being a struggle?
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    Let's say you want to print something, all you need to do is pop open the menu and can quickly scan for the printer icon which is a recognizable shape. Without the icon, you have to consciously read the lines in the menu to make sure you are clicking on the right one. You still read the text with the printer icon, but it's a faster index-match when the icon is present.
longstation 5y ago
I have been using Lepton since the beginning. Currently browsing this page with Lepton! Thank you for making the theme and a detailed history of FF theme.
- black7375 5y ago
  Thank you very much!
technobabbler 5y ago
The only UX/UI request I have for Firefox: Stop changing it. Don't add any more useless tweaks or adware or bundled services. Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. My guess is the rise and marketing of Chrome and its offspring had more to do with Firefox's decline than anything Mozilla has done.
  - grumbel 5y ago
    Firefox would still have declined, that's kind of unavoidable with Google owning Android, but Mozilla wasn't helping here. Turning Firfox into a lame Chrome-clone by removing everything that made it unique in the first place just ensured that there was no more need to bother with Firefox. Loading the browser up with all kind of telemetry, cloud nonsense and ads also removed any desire to ever bother with it again. I still think there is plenty of room for a privacy respecting browser in the market, but Mozilla hasn't even been trying to fill that niche in years and still claiming to do so just makes them look like untrustworthy liar.
    - yoavm 5y ago
      We hackers like to complain about stuff that bother us, but the truth is they don't bother anyone else but us. Firefox didn't lose marketshare to Chrome because it had telemetry. Users don't care about it, and if they did, they'd know Chrome is doing it much worse. Same for "cloud nonsense and ads" - you really think they disliked it so much, so they went to Chrome were they are forcefully logged-in, have every action linked to their Google account and have inferior adblockers? C'mon. It's kinda like saying "I'm moving to North Korea because freedom of speech in the US sucks!"
cosmotic 5y ago
Aero Glass support is mentioned as a positive change but Aero Glass was always a hindrance for me; it made things hard to read and was disorienting.
kactus 5y ago
v3 was the last good Firefox UI imo, even if it was heavily inspired by IE. v4 was a ripoff of Opera's design at the time. Australis was a Chrome UI clone. The Photon design is my second favorite after v3. I really hope Proton gets dropped. Worst one they've done since Australis.
Dunedan 5y ago
https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/ https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/ offers a nice collection of CSS hacks to customize the appearance of Firefox and to restore some design elements from previous versions. I use it for example to get a usable tab visualization again.
losingom 5y ago
The great thing about Firefox before the Photon addons apocalypse was that anyone could theme the browser in whatever way they wanted. Sure, it's still possible, but userChrome is a messy hack that Mozilla are trying to get rid of any moment now. Soon, we'll be stuck dealing with whatever UI Mozilla feels like implementing for the current week. Thanks for your efforts for now at least.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  I'm fond of that capability as well. Still it was good to restrict things for security and support reasons. Preserving the integrity of the line of death is hard enough without arbitrary UI changes and interactions among X different add-ons.
amelius 5y ago
Who made these designs?
mdoms 5y ago
I'd almost forgotten how much I hated that big orange FIREFOX dropdown menu.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Predecessor of the infamous hamburger menu?
- ajot 5y ago
  I really miss it, being "less tall" means I don't have to move the cursor so much to reach any submenu. But mostly, I miss having the dropdown menu on the left. Why doew it have to be fixed on the right? If I miss-click it (and it has happened me more than once), I close the whole window!!
abhinavk 5y ago
Between all these efforts of UI redesign, they removed one feature that was unique to Firefox: Tab Groups. Ironically, it's now present in all other major browsers. Safari went above and beyond to make it a headline feature.
- albru123 5y ago
  Still disappointed to this day that they removed Panorama.
jd3 5y ago
call me orthodox/traditional, or just a creature of habbit, but for most of my adult life, i've just kept a userChrome.css which reverts the current firefox ui/ux du jour back to the classic netscape/mozilla suite xpfe interface (w/ a jwz-inspired throbber, just for fun) i value productivity above all else, so over the years, I've found that a familiar interface that i have muscle memory for is the most important aspect of browser ui/ux, imo https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai
- baal80spam 5y ago
  Is that how your Firefox looks like? Could you please share your userChrome.css file or does it contain any sensitive data?
  - Multicomp 5y ago
    Agreed, that looks heavenly
  - fortyhertz 5y ago
    Love it!
kleiba 5y ago
Sure, UI/UX can be a whole science, but in the end, a lot of it boils down to preference. As you can see when reading through this comment thread. My personal biggest pet peeve: I hate, Hate, HATE that they changed the default behavior of clicks into the address or search bar, from simply "put the cursor here" to "select all". Oh my goodness, do I hate this, even after all these months. It breaks a fundamental behavior of text fields since, I don't know, the beginning of time? Even today, I don't know how many times I keep inadvertenly deleting the contents of my search bar when all I want to do is add another term at the end. My brain is probably just too old to learn something new, I guess. Also annoying: with the new add-on system, you cannot even write a plugin to restore the previous sane behavior.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- black7375 5y ago
  The default value is always necessary, so it is worth studying. However, I agree that the different preferences should not undermine the possibility of customization.
- mtone 5y ago
  On FF desktop it doesn't bother me too much, but on iPadOS Safari I was having quite a challenge editing a URL param due to selecting all on touch with no obvious way to switch to cursor mode (!). My solution: touch to select all, touch again to reveal sliders, drag the (only visible) left slider to the right to reveal some unselected text, touch the unselected area to get a cursor, touch+hold to drag cursor to end of URL, edit URL, profit! I've seen easier puzzles in puzzle games!
userbinator 5y ago
I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI. Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web That expresses exactly what's wrong --- the native UI controls are predictable and accessible and styled with the rest of the OS, and as the cascade of dialogs above it (I'm not sure how that's even possible --- getting to "Offline Data" From "Exceptions - Saved Passwords"?) shows, you can actually see that you're controlling the browser and not merely a page inside it (related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329). Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast I've never heard that term before, but whenever I see things like that, I'm reminded of fancy progress bars and such --- the real problem is that you need one in the first place, and instead of fixing the underlying problem of why it's taking so long, you try to hide it...
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI Wow, I think you've identified the probable cause of something I've felt was "wrong" about Firefox for a long time but couldn't pin down. Firefox just "feels" bad on a Mac even in comparison to Chrome, not to mention Safari.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Still not enough to make me hold my nose and use Chrome. I’ll stick with Firefox
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web This is such a weird thing to me. Did anyone ever want this? Were users asking for this? Did user studies show that this was somehow desirable or preferable? Did they do a study of Chrome users and find that they were more likely to stick with Firefox if they made this change? Does it significantly reduce code maintenance burden somehow? It seems like the kind of thing where users only "want" it because it's familiar, and it's only familiar because it's already been forced on them everywhere. Basically it's circular reasoning. It's like the meme of hiding a button and then claiming that users never use that feature, so you can justify removing it.
tormock 5y ago
Talking about Firefox.... it again reseted to default settings for my new tabs... and started to show pocket spam again.
- Hitton 5y ago
  Talking about Pocket... do you remember how more than five years Mozilla promised to make it open source? Five years and this proprietary service is still integrated with Firefox.
binwiederhier 5y ago
I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird. I feel old. It's gotten better and better every year.
fuzzy2 5y ago
Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen! There’s another state that may be related to uBlock Origin (or other extensions) immediately afterwards, too: You can click bookmarks etc. but nothing loads (only after a significant delay). Again, awesome UX. I guess I’m slowly becoming conservative because I’ve come to hate change. Most of the time, it doesn’t improve anything. And then, with increasing odds, changes actually make things worse. Not just limited to Firefox, of course. Also Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, whatever. Hell, even cars are getting worse every year.
- gherkinnn 5y ago
  > Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen! Precisely. Much better. I know something is happening. And if done well, I can interact with the shell, like use the search box, while the content is still loading.
  - fuzzy2 5y ago
    A skeleton screen is not interactive though. You cannot do anything except watching it pulse or whatever. Keep in mind that the content here is the shell itself. I also already know something is happening. That’s what the busy cursor is for.
    - gherkinnn 5y ago
      That does make it like a splash screen of old. With extra teasing. I understand the annoyance. It seems as if only Firefox on Windows has these skeleton screens and so couldn't try for myself. I assumed that much of the shell like search bar, close button, and the menu would be ready.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I used to love change up until about a decade ago. Back in the day, computing was still pushing the boundaries of what's possible and new features could change your life. Nowadays, the innovation has plateaued and computing became an ad delivery mechanism and a way for employees of bloated corporations to justify their salaries "fixing" things that didn't need to be fixed.
Shadonototra 5y ago
What a mess On other hand Chrome didn't change, they kept a simple, effective and clean UI/UX from the beginning Firefox followed Gnome's design philosophy mess, hence why users left the ship
Lammy 5y ago
See also: "A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox": http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html
ouid 5y ago
The lesson here is to intentionally use an older version of firefox.
pixelbeat__ 5y ago
Here's an equivalent visual history of the mozilla mail clients https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/ https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/
ghosty141 5y ago
I never liked the standard browser UI/UX. I hate the wasted vertical space that's used up by menu bars, adress bars and whatever. I customized my firefox so all the "bars" are in the window-title. https://i.imgur.com/xop7oVJ.png https://i.imgur.com/xop7oVJ.png
- userbinator 5y ago
  That's the exact opposite of what I like. How can you drag the window if there's no place to click without activating something? My monitor has plenty of vertical space. ...which just shows that there's no one-size-fits-all, and that being able to customise the UI is a very important feature.
  - infinityplus1 5y ago
    I just use keyboard shortcuts to snap the window to left/right side or to expand again. I've been pretty happy with this arrangment and never need to drag the window manually.
causality0 5y ago
Peak Firefox UI was when the "close current tab" button was always in the same place and I could do it with muscle memory instead of hunting for wherever my current tab is on the list.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  You probably know this, but Ctrl+W can be an alternative to close the current tab since those buttons won't move. Or using mouse gestures (blast from the past I suppose, but e.g. I use the 'up' and 'down' gestures to scroll to the top or bottom of a page very often).
causality0 5y ago
Contrary to the modern interface philosophy as there is no abstraction Modern interface philosophy means that if you don't use something every day you have no fucking idea what it does anymore. For example, every time I use the desktop Gmail interface I have to wait for tool tips just to figure out which inscrutable icon does what.
wolverine876 5y ago
What browser GUI do people, here in the HN bubble, look at and click on? I look at the URL for the hostname, look at tabs to find the one I want and sometimes click on it (more often I use ctrl + pagedown/pageup), click on a certain extension GUI regularly because it lacks a keyboard UI, and that's about all but the edge cases. Everything else is done on the keyboard and sometimes the mouse scrollwheel (when presssing the spacebar doesn't work). My guess is that browser GUI design has limited impact here; website GUI is a far bigger factor for me.
epolanski 5y ago
Where can I find more information about the svg filmstrip technique?
- black7375 5y ago
  Basic information is the same as the article. https://msuja.ws/svg.html https://msuja.ws/svg.html The actual implementation is exemplified to read the Firefox source code. - https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=reload-to-stop.svg https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=reload-to-sto...
hudo 5y ago
Any way of returning tabs back instead of this new awful awful buttons for tabs!?
- black7375 5y ago
  That's why I made a theme. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
lucb1e 5y ago
Looking through all these designs, I'm reminded how much I liked Vista-inspired themes like Firefox adopted. Curves, transparency, fancy. Not the most energy efficient or easiest on the eyes, and I'm not actually a fan of transparency in general because it makes stuff move that you're not meant to be looking at (e.g. if the page you're scrolling on slides below your task bar, it's not useful to be distracted by something on your task bar moving), but it was the prettiest in my opinion.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
For me, it is about CONSENT. Changes which the user did not ask for and did not want are NON-CONSENSUAL. Non-consensual changes foisted on the user are par for the course in proprietary software, but they should absolutely not be a thing in FOSS. If the developer can repeatedly force non-consensual changes on users without any recourse, that means the project is not healthy and needs to be forked. If it cannot be forked, then the idea of it being a FOSS project can be safely interred and a tombstone placed above it. (Still using Firefox 3.x on occasion and ensuring my sites work with it.)
iJohnDoe 5y ago
I tried to use Firefox v47.x as long as possible. For whatever reason it seemed like the most stable and user friendly. I’ve never been able to leave hubdreds of tabs open in Firefox for any length of time. Eventually it will consume so much RAM or crash. Any Chrome based browser seems to handle hundreds of tabs open for days at a time without any problems.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Why doesn't Chrome UI elicit the same reaction from the community? I get the feeling that many people have, that FF is following suit with chrome in terms of UX (and other things), rather than innovating[1]. There is some truth to that, but I do feel like FF tries out some nice things in their UI. I'm currently running on FF on MacOS, and I find it incredibly hard to come up with any legitimate criticism of the UI, but it does help many apps that MacOS forces a top menu. Yes, there are little things, like tabs are now buttons, and container tabs should be easier to use without first reading a guide. [1] And maybe many vocal HN'ers objection is directed at the mere fact that innovation is attempted.
- emsixteen 5y ago
  Chrome's UI hasn't had any massive, radical changes that I remember. Trying to go back to Firefox after getting disdained with Chrome was like using an entirely different browser.
- rtpg 5y ago
  People do get frustrated at Chrome UI changes from time to time, but Chrome (to it's credit I suppose) has always had very minimal chrome for people to get mad at! Way less surface area for people to get mad about, I suppose
quicksilver03 5y ago
I haven't had any major issue with Firefox's UI lately, as long as they can let me show the menu bar. However, the scrollbars since v98 are a big issue, they no longer follow the system UI (I'm using KDE Plasma on Fedora) and sometimes they take the same color as the web page background, making them invisible. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an alternative other than the n-th Chromium-based browser.
intothemild 5y ago
One of the things I don't really like about Proton was the removal of the "Compact" density. ...You can add it back in with a flag... but I have no idea why it was removed

439 points by black7375 5y ago

I wish Firefox would incorporate Tree Style Tab!

I'm making a firefox custom theme, and researching the UI/UX history of Firefox. 1. Early (v1 ~ v3) v1~v3 are classic UI that we remember when we were in the early 2000s. Features - Clear as the icons do only one thing - Unique color for each icon Limits - Not fused with OS UI - UI height - Contrary to the modern interface philosophy as there is no abstraction - Inconsistent icon size and texture 2. Classic (v4, 2016.10) Thus, v4.0 was released after a large-scale UI reconstruction project was launched!! It is the longest-lived UI and loved by many people. Commonly called a Classic theme. Features - Orange app button at the top left like the symbol - Calmer tone - Win7 Aero Glass support - Stop / Reload / Go with one button - Tab moved to the top Limits - Unfamiliar interface with large-scale changes 3. Australis (v29, 2014.04) Australis, which had a lot of likes and dislikes compared to Proton UI. It was a change that put a lot of effort into simplicity. Features - Curved Tab - Drag & Drop customizing UI - Change settings UI pop-up to contents(tab) format - Animation Limits - Panel UI that looks like a tablet - Remove status bar 4. Photon (v57, 2017) Photon was a generally well-received update to the UI that was used until June of this year(2021), when Proton appeared. Features - Components: List based panel and page actions, library menu - Animation: Add animation to actions of buttons, tabs, panels, etc. - Visual redesign: tabs, icons, density, etc. - Performance: improved initialization, synchronization reflow, etc. Limits - It looks a bit complicated - Only light weight themes are allowed. 5. Proton (v89, 2021.06) This is the moment I started working on themes. Features - Neatly organized menu - Icon that are pretty enough to remind of the edge - Some of animations that I like & skeleton screens - Stylish color scheme - Moderate rounding - Meticulous implementation Limits - Excessively wide padding - Remove icons from menu - Feels like a button rather than a tab with a connected look - Confusion of tab indicators - Remove page action menu in address bar - Delete bookmarks / library animations and illustrations - The icon size of the new tab contents - Changed the search bar of the new tab to be performed on the URL bar.

exodust 5y ago
> Remove status bar Missed still! On large screens I prefer a permanent status bar with useful info persisting, than a URL flashing over the page. Chrome did it first, then Firefox copied like a mirror. The status bar was oddly banished to UI hell, not even a config switch lifeline. Replaced with google's flickering lower left overlay.

cute_boi 5y ago

One of the design feature I abhor in Proton is sound icon in tab. Its too confusing for my peanuts brain. Further, it add text "Playing " which looks redundant.

black7375 5y ago
Yes. Actually the tab indicator behavior is weird. https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292608-37d2ab50-1e13-4e7c-a7d7-31cb5de20757.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292608... https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292618-13703b69-8cf8-4aeb-84be-211a85ff2116.png https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/160292618... Each language has different behavior and does not display information properly.

yoavm 5y ago

I loved Photon. Proton added a lot of nice touches, but I never understood why would you want to turn the tabs into buttons. Tabs is a great metaphor from the real world, and they take less space. I don't see a single advantage of styling them as buttons. The whole point is that they're visually connected to the currently visible page. Thankfully however I don't care too much because I can still completely hide the tab-bar with my userChrome.css, and use "Tab Center Reborn" to have my tabs on the side instead.

pier25 5y ago
Completely agree. Objectively buttons don't seem to have any advantage and personally I find them fugly.
throwaquestion5 5y ago
Seconding the tab idea. I need to know in which tab I am. Sometimes I have the five tabs of the same page (hello hn), look up, and I don't know which tab I am. I end up closing the tab with Ctrl+W when I'm done and learn where I was. Thanks for the extension suggestion I may give it a try.
- heftig 5y ago
  I think using a theme with a high contrast between the active tab and inactive tabs is probably the easiest way to fix the UX for you. E.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/proton-redone-hybrid/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/proton-redone-hybri...
- kingcharles 5y ago
  If I only had just 5 HN tabs open...
skavi 5y ago
One advantage I could see is a vertical tab bar mode that’s more visually consistent with the standard horizontal tab bar. Could even animate seamlessly between those modes.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Modernity and simplicity is nice an all, but the Proton redesign process was a big failure in my opinion. I've heard nothing but annoyances from basic users about the weird tab display, and many advanced screens (like in the settings) are being disappeared for the sake of simplicity without an equivalent implementation. The redesigns are welcome but left unfinished. Up until around Photon, I considered every UI update an improvement. Photon itself was a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly contained improvements. That marked the turning point for me; Photon is where I actively started disliking the more prominent features. Unlike Photon, Proton was just a huge step back, with no real improvements to compensate. Trying to get details about a TLS certificate, something only power users do and even then is done very rarely, is now a full page ordeal, with a small column down the middle of the page for content. Apparently the popup was too clumsy or something? I seriously don't understand why any UI designer ever cared. Everything is now bring dumbed down, information that doesn't satisfy the top 80% just gets completely removed and the space saved is dedicated to padding and margins making the entire UI more bloated. Then there were dumb plans to make Firefox interesting (I think? What else were they doing?) like the idea of "colourways" being available for a limited time only, which was simply preposterous. Earlier they took over Pocket, a service everyone has now seen the icon for and barely anyone ever uses. When it comes to decisions about the browser, everyone who dares reduce telemetry gets ignored . Mozilla brands itself as a privacy aware company, but when you try to use that privacy it turns its back on you. I suppose I should be thankful Mozilla isn't trying to ruin Firefox in desktop as much as it's trying to push users to abandon Firefox on mobile. My tab bar has gone through three changes I don't really give a damn about, collections have come and gone, and I've given up on ever using the addon API again. The text encoding settings and menu seems to have inexplicably disappeared, leading to some very annoying broken web pages that can't be fixed anymore. You can't even enter an IPv6 address on Android. The browser engine can browse to IPv6 addresses just fine, the URL bar just doesn't accept them. The regex to determine if an input is a URL or not doesn't test for IPv6 and the single attempt by someone else to fix it was apparently too complex and therefore removed later. That person abandoned their efforts and the whole process doesn't exactly make me want to contribute either. In my frustration I've actually considered (and quickly dismissed) the idea of writing a tool to spam Mozilla with telemetry to get the features that I use more hits. Telemetry warfare, of sorts.

MMS21 5y ago

Photon was so good why they hell did they mess with it

conradfr 5y ago
Agree. I disliked the tab design of Australis (but remember being able to remove that curved nonsense) but Photon was great (until they started to mess with url bar dimensions etc). Damn do I hate Proton.
- sph 5y ago
  I've just learned about Proton being distinct from Photon. Of all the names they could've used, they chose one that's one Levenshtein distance from the previous. Looking forward to the next redesign dubbed Protan.

vsskanth 5y ago

I really like their UI for desktop. Has anyone managed to package their latest UI into a framework that can be used like Qt ? I remember they had an XUL based framework but I understand it's deprecated now ?

destructionator 5y ago

Kinda astounding how the firefox v1 was not great but ok, and it got overall worse in literally every redesign since then. v1 remains the best UI firefox has ever had to this day. No wonder they peaked user share early on and have rapidly hemorrhaged since then.

agumonkey 5y ago
The v1-v4 have a feeling of immense simplicity. Now Firefox is a fighter jet, but I miss driving a mini.
- masswerk 5y ago
  The "Classic" theme was still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4 (just reworked icons and toolbar and location bar were merged), while the "Modern" theme was much the same in layout but introduced round buttons of varying size. (Firefox came with both themes.)
yoavm 5y ago
I feel like it became somewhat popular to bash Firefox (and Mozilla) on HN, which is sad. What exactly did you like about v1? It takes huge space and literally most buttons are completely useless. Are you using "refresh" very often? Do you need a huge "loading" indicator that takes space even when you're not loading? a button to show all-"history"-of-the-forward-button-in-the-current-tab? What makes v1 "the best ever"?
- metadat 5y ago
  Only popular to bash because Mozilla has been husked and is now a money siphon for the executives while they slowly destroy everything good about Firefox, one bit at a time.
- destructionator 5y ago
  > Are you using "refresh" very often? Ummm yes? Funny, I just wrote another comment complaining how hitting refresh on a major airline's flight status page is liable to give one of those terrible "something went wrong" messages (apparently the search results are liable to expire, but until they do, refreshing will actually update the info, so it is useful to periodically press to see if the flight got delayed). Combining stop and refresh is also dangerous since that's a race condition. Suppose the page is taking forever, I decide I've had enough of that and want to press stop. But in the second it takes me to actually click on it, the page decided to finally load! Now my click, instead of stopping the annoying spinner animation, clears out the information that FINALLY arrived and brought the annoying spinner back. (I actually think there is a pretty good case to just remove the stop button though, it isn't vital and just hitting back or close does the same thing anyway. But combining it with the refresh button is about the worst possible thing you could do to either button. It takes one useful button and one meh button and combines them into one awful button.) Speaking of clicks, that's actually the last straw that made me abandon firefox entirely: in version 75, they broke clicking on the url bar. Instead of doing the sane thing - putting the cursor where I clicked - it instead selects all. Before, double click would select all, meaning if you wanted that, it was still easily available. Now double click instead selects... a word. So they completely removed the very useful single click functionality and turned double click into a completely useless behavior. Absolutely unbearable. I could tolerate or undo most the other UI changes they did, but this click thing couldn't be user style'd away, couldn't be configured away. They just shoved this massive breakage down. So I uninstalled it . > takes space even when you're not loading I'd rather have a predictable UI of marginal utility that doesn't change out from under me than a UI that randomly changes from bad to worse in its own time. At least you can get used to consistency, even if it is consistently mediocre. > What makes v1 "the best ever"? Don't put things in quotes that weren't actually said. I actually said "v1 was not great but ok, and it got overall worse". There's actually specific changes I think were good, coupled with other changes that were bad.

masswerk 5y ago

Here's an image of the prehistory: Netscape Navigator 2 and 3, Netscape Communicator 4, all on MacOS. (NS3 is the Gold Edition, as discerned by the edit button in the toolbar. NS4 introduced the bookmark bar, by this requiring more vertical screen estate for the Chrome. Also mind the default grey page background of #CACACA common to all iterations of the Netscape browser.) https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/images/netscape-navigator-guis.png https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/images/netscape-navigator-... Edit: The "Classic" themes of early Firefox and SeaMonkey were still very much reminiscent of Netscape 4, but the toolbar and the location bar merged. (In the early days Firefox and Netscape 6/7 still coexisted in parallel, packaging the same engine, and the "Classic" theme represented the Netscape legacy UI.)

kitsunesoba 5y ago

For me Firefox’s UI design started going off the rails with Australis and Photon, where its UI began to be a major component of Firefox as a brand. I much preferred v1-v4 where Firefox felt more focused on being a tool that fit well into your desktop instead of trying to stand out. I’m sometimes tempted to try to start a Firefox fork that returns its UI to a “smaller part of a larger desktop” look and feel, but then I remember how impossible it would be to maintain that over time. Wish Gecko was still embeddable so one could just write a new UI and not have to keep patches maintained.

rhn_mk1 5y ago
This is a scourge of all applications these days. The user's need for consistency is demoted to favor the developer's need for brand awareness.
- dsQTbR7Y5mRHnZv 5y ago
  As people engage with many more devices on a day to day basis, applications have moved away from "matching the rest of the OS" and towards "consistency of the look an feel across all platforms". It's still "consistent", just on a different dimension (app-wise instead of OS-wise). I know HN favors the former, but I don't mind the latter too much. Especially when products are able to strike a nice balance like Outlook on Windows & Mac.
  - rhn_mk1 5y ago
    > people engage with many more devices on a day to day basis Do they actually? I'm guessing most people in the world have one smartphone, followed by those who have a laptop to match it. I would be careful to say that most people have more than one device though, which means a vast number see no consistency at all.
bscphil 5y ago
Very well said. People often claim that everyone complains about every Firefox UI change, but this is a perfectly consistent thing to do if you think Firefox has been getting slowly worse since v3.5 or so. The one thing I will say in its favor is that Firefox still maintains a decent amount of customizability, at least for the seriously dedicated. I still have a separate search bar, a menu bar, and have removed the "hamburger" menu button entirely. For me, the UI has changed very little over the years, but the pile of hacks in my usercss file has grown over time...

politelemon 5y ago

Removing icons from the menus has been one of the most puzzling decisions they made. In the year or so since its removal, using their menus has been a real struggle, and I can see there's even an entry on Mozilla Connect Ideas for it: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/idi-p/46 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/bring-back-menu-icons/i... As for the 'curvy' tabs, I can't say I was a fan of it, even in Chrome, it feels like a waste of space and draws attention to it. The straight tabs, even the 'button' tab is a lot better in being out of the way.

cosmotic 5y ago
Icons in menus are good visual anchors which leads to better usability, but only if they are used sparingly. An icon for every menu item ends up being worse.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  I think they were using icons properly. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18iDDBEB42EEB3F5183/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/18i...
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    The key here is that the icons next to the entries robustly tied the menu entry to the icon in the toolbar: "this menu item does what the button with this icon does". Getting rid of the icons in this case means you don't get a hint that this menu entry is an alias for that button (or vice versa).
wolverine876 5y ago
> using their menus has been a real struggle Could you give an example of it being a struggle?
- Sunspark 5y ago
  Let's say you want to print something, all you need to do is pop open the menu and can quickly scan for the printer icon which is a recognizable shape. Without the icon, you have to consciously read the lines in the menu to make sure you are clicking on the right one. You still read the text with the printer icon, but it's a faster index-match when the icon is present.

longstation 5y ago

I have been using Lepton since the beginning. Currently browsing this page with Lepton! Thank you for making the theme and a detailed history of FF theme.

black7375 5y ago
Thank you very much!

technobabbler 5y ago

The only UX/UI request I have for Firefox: Stop changing it. Don't add any more useless tweaks or adware or bundled services. Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. These tweaks were not successes or celebrations, they were the death by a thousand cuts.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> Its UX "history" made it plummet from the top browser at one point to a forgotten has-been. My guess is the rise and marketing of Chrome and its offspring had more to do with Firefox's decline than anything Mozilla has done.
- grumbel 5y ago
  Firefox would still have declined, that's kind of unavoidable with Google owning Android, but Mozilla wasn't helping here. Turning Firfox into a lame Chrome-clone by removing everything that made it unique in the first place just ensured that there was no more need to bother with Firefox. Loading the browser up with all kind of telemetry, cloud nonsense and ads also removed any desire to ever bother with it again. I still think there is plenty of room for a privacy respecting browser in the market, but Mozilla hasn't even been trying to fill that niche in years and still claiming to do so just makes them look like untrustworthy liar.
  - yoavm 5y ago
    We hackers like to complain about stuff that bother us, but the truth is they don't bother anyone else but us. Firefox didn't lose marketshare to Chrome because it had telemetry. Users don't care about it, and if they did, they'd know Chrome is doing it much worse. Same for "cloud nonsense and ads" - you really think they disliked it so much, so they went to Chrome were they are forcefully logged-in, have every action linked to their Google account and have inferior adblockers? C'mon. It's kinda like saying "I'm moving to North Korea because freedom of speech in the US sucks!"

cosmotic 5y ago

Aero Glass support is mentioned as a positive change but Aero Glass was always a hindrance for me; it made things hard to read and was disorienting.

kactus 5y ago

v3 was the last good Firefox UI imo, even if it was heavily inspired by IE. v4 was a ripoff of Opera's design at the time. Australis was a Chrome UI clone. The Photon design is my second favorite after v3. I really hope Proton gets dropped. Worst one they've done since Australis.

Dunedan 5y ago

https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/ https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/ offers a nice collection of CSS hacks to customize the appearance of Firefox and to restore some design elements from previous versions. I use it for example to get a usable tab visualization again.

losingom 5y ago

The great thing about Firefox before the Photon addons apocalypse was that anyone could theme the browser in whatever way they wanted. Sure, it's still possible, but userChrome is a messy hack that Mozilla are trying to get rid of any moment now. Soon, we'll be stuck dealing with whatever UI Mozilla feels like implementing for the current week. Thanks for your efforts for now at least.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
I'm fond of that capability as well. Still it was good to restrict things for security and support reasons. Preserving the integrity of the line of death is hard enough without arbitrary UI changes and interactions among X different add-ons.

amelius 5y ago

Who made these designs?

mdoms 5y ago

I'd almost forgotten how much I hated that big orange FIREFOX dropdown menu.

userbinator 5y ago
Predecessor of the infamous hamburger menu?
ajot 5y ago
I really miss it, being "less tall" means I don't have to move the cursor so much to reach any submenu. But mostly, I miss having the dropdown menu on the left. Why doew it have to be fixed on the right? If I miss-click it (and it has happened me more than once), I close the whole window!!

abhinavk 5y ago

Between all these efforts of UI redesign, they removed one feature that was unique to Firefox: Tab Groups. Ironically, it's now present in all other major browsers. Safari went above and beyond to make it a headline feature.

albru123 5y ago
Still disappointed to this day that they removed Panorama.

jd3 5y ago

call me orthodox/traditional, or just a creature of habbit, but for most of my adult life, i've just kept a userChrome.css which reverts the current firefox ui/ux du jour back to the classic netscape/mozilla suite xpfe interface (w/ a jwz-inspired throbber, just for fun) i value productivity above all else, so over the years, I've found that a familiar interface that i have muscle memory for is the most important aspect of browser ui/ux, imo https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai https://imgur.com/a/xSoDYai

baal80spam 5y ago
Is that how your Firefox looks like? Could you please share your userChrome.css file or does it contain any sensitive data?
- Multicomp 5y ago
  Agreed, that looks heavenly
- fortyhertz 5y ago
  Love it!

kleiba 5y ago

Sure, UI/UX can be a whole science, but in the end, a lot of it boils down to preference. As you can see when reading through this comment thread. My personal biggest pet peeve: I hate, Hate, HATE that they changed the default behavior of clicks into the address or search bar, from simply "put the cursor here" to "select all". Oh my goodness, do I hate this, even after all these months. It breaks a fundamental behavior of text fields since, I don't know, the beginning of time? Even today, I don't know how many times I keep inadvertenly deleting the contents of my search bar when all I want to do is add another term at the end. My brain is probably just too old to learn something new, I guess. Also annoying: with the new add-on system, you cannot even write a plugin to restore the previous sane behavior.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
black7375 5y ago
The default value is always necessary, so it is worth studying. However, I agree that the different preferences should not undermine the possibility of customization.
mtone 5y ago
On FF desktop it doesn't bother me too much, but on iPadOS Safari I was having quite a challenge editing a URL param due to selecting all on touch with no obvious way to switch to cursor mode (!). My solution: touch to select all, touch again to reveal sliders, drag the (only visible) left slider to the right to reveal some unselected text, touch the unselected area to get a cursor, touch+hold to drag cursor to end of URL, edit URL, profit! I've seen easier puzzles in puzzle games!

userbinator 5y ago

I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI. Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web That expresses exactly what's wrong --- the native UI controls are predictable and accessible and styled with the rest of the OS, and as the cascade of dialogs above it (I'm not sure how that's even possible --- getting to "Offline Data" From "Exceptions - Saved Passwords"?) shows, you can actually see that you're controlling the browser and not merely a page inside it (related article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30697329). Another important change is the introduction of a skeleton screen to make the start feel fast I've never heard that term before, but whenever I see things like that, I'm reminded of fancy progress bars and such --- the real problem is that you need one in the first place, and instead of fixing the underlying problem of why it's taking so long, you try to hide it...

CharlesW 5y ago
> I've always found the UI after IE6 / FF2 to look "off", and that's likely because they started using non-native controls, drawing their own instead of relying on the platform UI Wow, I think you've identified the probable cause of something I've felt was "wrong" about Firefox for a long time but couldn't pin down. Firefox just "feels" bad on a Mac even in comparison to Chrome, not to mention Safari.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Still not enough to make me hold my nose and use Chrome. I’ll stick with Firefox
nerdponx 5y ago
> Firefox’s Redesigned Preferences Feel More like the Web This is such a weird thing to me. Did anyone ever want this? Were users asking for this? Did user studies show that this was somehow desirable or preferable? Did they do a study of Chrome users and find that they were more likely to stick with Firefox if they made this change? Does it significantly reduce code maintenance burden somehow? It seems like the kind of thing where users only "want" it because it's familiar, and it's only familiar because it's already been forced on them everywhere. Basically it's circular reasoning. It's like the meme of hiding a button and then claiming that users never use that feature, so you can justify removing it.

tormock 5y ago

Talking about Firefox.... it again reseted to default settings for my new tabs... and started to show pocket spam again.

Hitton 5y ago
Talking about Pocket... do you remember how more than five years Mozilla promised to make it open source? Five years and this proprietary service is still integrated with Firefox.

binwiederhier 5y ago

I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird. I feel old. It's gotten better and better every year.

fuzzy2 5y ago

Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen! There’s another state that may be related to uBlock Origin (or other extensions) immediately afterwards, too: You can click bookmarks etc. but nothing loads (only after a significant delay). Again, awesome UX. I guess I’m slowly becoming conservative because I’ve come to hate change. Most of the time, it doesn’t improve anything. And then, with increasing odds, changes actually make things worse. Not just limited to Firefox, of course. Also Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, whatever. Hell, even cars are getting worse every year.

gherkinnn 5y ago
> Ah yes, the skeleton screen. Because it’s so much better to have the application in an unusable state, but at least it’s on-screen! Precisely. Much better. I know something is happening. And if done well, I can interact with the shell, like use the search box, while the content is still loading.
- fuzzy2 5y ago
  A skeleton screen is not interactive though. You cannot do anything except watching it pulse or whatever. Keep in mind that the content here is the shell itself. I also already know something is happening. That’s what the busy cursor is for.
  - gherkinnn 5y ago
    That does make it like a splash screen of old. With extra teasing. I understand the annoyance. It seems as if only Firefox on Windows has these skeleton screens and so couldn't try for myself. I assumed that much of the shell like search bar, close button, and the menu would be ready.
Nextgrid 5y ago
I used to love change up until about a decade ago. Back in the day, computing was still pushing the boundaries of what's possible and new features could change your life. Nowadays, the innovation has plateaued and computing became an ad delivery mechanism and a way for employees of bloated corporations to justify their salaries "fixing" things that didn't need to be fixed.

Shadonototra 5y ago

What a mess On other hand Chrome didn't change, they kept a simple, effective and clean UI/UX from the beginning Firefox followed Gnome's design philosophy mess, hence why users left the ship

Lammy 5y ago

See also: "A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox": http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html http://www.andrewturnbull.net/mozilla/history.html

ouid 5y ago

The lesson here is to intentionally use an older version of firefox.

pixelbeat__ 5y ago

Here's an equivalent visual history of the mozilla mail clients https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/ https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/netscape_email/

ghosty141 5y ago

I never liked the standard browser UI/UX. I hate the wasted vertical space that's used up by menu bars, adress bars and whatever. I customized my firefox so all the "bars" are in the window-title. https://i.imgur.com/xop7oVJ.png https://i.imgur.com/xop7oVJ.png

userbinator 5y ago
That's the exact opposite of what I like. How can you drag the window if there's no place to click without activating something? My monitor has plenty of vertical space. ...which just shows that there's no one-size-fits-all, and that being able to customise the UI is a very important feature.
- infinityplus1 5y ago
  I just use keyboard shortcuts to snap the window to left/right side or to expand again. I've been pretty happy with this arrangment and never need to drag the window manually.

causality0 5y ago

Peak Firefox UI was when the "close current tab" button was always in the same place and I could do it with muscle memory instead of hunting for wherever my current tab is on the list.

lucb1e 5y ago
You probably know this, but Ctrl+W can be an alternative to close the current tab since those buttons won't move. Or using mouse gestures (blast from the past I suppose, but e.g. I use the 'up' and 'down' gestures to scroll to the top or bottom of a page very often).

causality0 5y ago

Contrary to the modern interface philosophy as there is no abstraction Modern interface philosophy means that if you don't use something every day you have no fucking idea what it does anymore. For example, every time I use the desktop Gmail interface I have to wait for tool tips just to figure out which inscrutable icon does what.

wolverine876 5y ago

What browser GUI do people, here in the HN bubble, look at and click on? I look at the URL for the hostname, look at tabs to find the one I want and sometimes click on it (more often I use ctrl + pagedown/pageup), click on a certain extension GUI regularly because it lacks a keyboard UI, and that's about all but the edge cases. Everything else is done on the keyboard and sometimes the mouse scrollwheel (when presssing the spacebar doesn't work). My guess is that browser GUI design has limited impact here; website GUI is a far bigger factor for me.

epolanski 5y ago

Where can I find more information about the svg filmstrip technique?

black7375 5y ago
Basic information is the same as the article. https://msuja.ws/svg.html https://msuja.ws/svg.html The actual implementation is exemplified to read the Firefox source code. - https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=reload-to-stop.svg https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=reload-to-sto...

hudo 5y ago

Any way of returning tabs back instead of this new awful awful buttons for tabs!?

black7375 5y ago
That's why I made a theme. https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

lucb1e 5y ago

Looking through all these designs, I'm reminded how much I liked Vista-inspired themes like Firefox adopted. Curves, transparency, fancy. Not the most energy efficient or easiest on the eyes, and I'm not actually a fan of transparency in general because it makes stuff move that you're not meant to be looking at (e.g. if the page you're scrolling on slides below your task bar, it's not useful to be distracted by something on your task bar moving), but it was the prettiest in my opinion.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

For me, it is about CONSENT. Changes which the user did not ask for and did not want are NON-CONSENSUAL. Non-consensual changes foisted on the user are par for the course in proprietary software, but they should absolutely not be a thing in FOSS. If the developer can repeatedly force non-consensual changes on users without any recourse, that means the project is not healthy and needs to be forked. If it cannot be forked, then the idea of it being a FOSS project can be safely interred and a tombstone placed above it. (Still using Firefox 3.x on occasion and ensuring my sites work with it.)

iJohnDoe 5y ago

I tried to use Firefox v47.x as long as possible. For whatever reason it seemed like the most stable and user friendly. I’ve never been able to leave hubdreds of tabs open in Firefox for any length of time. Eventually it will consume so much RAM or crash. Any Chrome based browser seems to handle hundreds of tabs open for days at a time without any problems.

wodenokoto 5y ago

Why doesn't Chrome UI elicit the same reaction from the community? I get the feeling that many people have, that FF is following suit with chrome in terms of UX (and other things), rather than innovating[1]. There is some truth to that, but I do feel like FF tries out some nice things in their UI. I'm currently running on FF on MacOS, and I find it incredibly hard to come up with any legitimate criticism of the UI, but it does help many apps that MacOS forces a top menu. Yes, there are little things, like tabs are now buttons, and container tabs should be easier to use without first reading a guide. [1] And maybe many vocal HN'ers objection is directed at the mere fact that innovation is attempted.

emsixteen 5y ago
Chrome's UI hasn't had any massive, radical changes that I remember. Trying to go back to Firefox after getting disdained with Chrome was like using an entirely different browser.
rtpg 5y ago
People do get frustrated at Chrome UI changes from time to time, but Chrome (to it's credit I suppose) has always had very minimal chrome for people to get mad at! Way less surface area for people to get mad about, I suppose

quicksilver03 5y ago

I haven't had any major issue with Firefox's UI lately, as long as they can let me show the menu bar. However, the scrollbars since v98 are a big issue, they no longer follow the system UI (I'm using KDE Plasma on Fedora) and sometimes they take the same color as the web page background, making them invisible. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an alternative other than the n-th Chromium-based browser.

intothemild 5y ago

One of the things I don't really like about Proton was the removal of the "Compact" density. ...You can add it back in with a flag... but I have no idea why it was removed