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> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker Oh no, more of this. What a

> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker Oh no, more of this. What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable? Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.

JohnFen 2y ago
The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
- Teever 2y ago
  The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now. The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
  - nindalf 2y ago
    First time I’ve heard Google being blamed for Mozilla’s self inflicted problems. Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Without Mozilla antitrust enforcement becomes much more likely. That’s why Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine provider. That’s the main source of revenue for Mozilla. If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
    - palata 2y ago
      > Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Assuming that "surviving" is good and "reasonable" is... what... 3% and dropping?
    - Teever 2y ago
      First time huh? That's surprising. It's only mentioned every time Firefox and Mozilla come up. I'm sure Google would like a slightly healthier captured 'competitor' but that doesn't mean that they didn't put them in this place through subversive practices.
  - schmidtleonard 2y ago
    > the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years (Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.
    - cassepipe 2y ago
      I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome : You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with just Ctrl + L, Tab and Enter. You can also launch @search_engine $keyword directly in the bar, search bookmark/history/tabs directly with */^/% symbols. You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...) This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
      - JohnFen 2y ago
        I dislike the "awesome bar" quite a lot. Fortunately, as you say, you can disable a lot of its "awesomeness" (enough that I can live with it), but not all of it. You do have to do a bit of research to find out the various magic "about:config" settings you need to change.
        cassepipe 2y ago
        It's easy enough to bring back the search bar without about:config though : right-clik on the chrome then drag and drop the search box item
        JohnFen 2y ago
        Sure, but that's a bit different. What I'm talking about is that I want the "awesome bar" to be just a plain URL bar and not be overloaded with other functions like search. You can get very close to this with a few setting changes. Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.
- jimjimjim 2y ago
  I would love for applications and even web sites to have an expert mode. Maybe when the UX teams aren't looking devs could add a mode that puts Everything back in the UI.
- saurik 2y ago
  > FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.
- layer8 2y ago
  I like the approach where it’s configurable which items are available in menus and toolbars. The application can come with a default configuration that is suitable for the average and novice user, and power users can change the menus and toolbars to their needs. When not all items are shown, the respective menu or toolbar can have a “More…” item that opens the configuration dialog. That way it’s discoverable.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  I'm also for user choice but this consistent notion that uncluttered UIs are only for non-techie people is very annoying. I'm a software developer by trade but that doesn't mean I want every UI to look like the inside of an airplane cockpit or a 90s teletext. The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)
  - willywanker 2y ago
    It's a bullshit trend that goes away from the past where the UI was customizable to whatever level of simplicity or complexity one preferred to now where the developer decides what's good enough for you (in this case a totally dumbed down and limited UI targeted at the great unwashed, who despite all this effort continue to stay with Chrome). Don't like toolbars? Hide them. Remove buttons you don't want. This used to be the norm with all desktop apps until the 2010s when UX mandarins decided that nobody but smartphone users with their constrained screen space and system resources mattered anymore.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. Aesthetics is a matter of taste, of course, so there's no right or wrong there. Only if you like it or not. But the trend towards minimalist UIs is something that actively gets in my way and makes the software more difficult for me to actually use. That's why I dislike it.
resource_waste 2y ago
And all the old documentation/forum help to change settings is obsolete, but google still has them Indexed. The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed. I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.
iforgotpassword 2y ago
IDK, they're just following what Chrome has been doing forever now, and it has worked there. I guess that really is what the vast majority of normal people want. And considering how even among my most tech-savy friends and colleagues Chrome appears to be the browser of choice, it seems even these folks don't really care...
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia. Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
  - Kye 2y ago
    Firefox certainly didn't help by becoming a bloated mess. Firefox was bad when Chrome came out. All Chrome did was the same thing Firefox did to IE in the same situation: take advantage of complacency. Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Yeah, that was always funny to me too... Google built a browser that was actually faster and more secure, and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win. Of course, they didn't actually get destroyed in court for it, so I suppose being evil works in this case.
      - palata 2y ago
        > and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win Or precisely because it was not enough to have the better product? Don't tell me you believe that the better product usually wins. Marketing wins.
        2y ago
kreyenborgi 2y ago
I hope they don't put more of the menu items into unremovable buttons in the address bar (which already contains four icons: tracker protection, certificates, containers, bookmark) or next to it (both an overflow menu for extensions and an overflow menu for ..other things? and a hamburger for ..other-other things? in addition to the buttons I actually do want there). On my laptop I can hardly read the domain name of the url unless I fullscreen the window.
rurp 2y ago
The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that. Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles. Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.
- olejorgenb 2y ago
  > and removing about:config What?
  - josephcsible 2y ago
    On mobile.
- aquova 2y ago
  > removing about:config about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?
  - dralley 2y ago
    You've missed nothing, OP is full of it.
  - 0x_rs 2y ago
    They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years. Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it). https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276
    - Intralexical 2y ago
mrandish 2y ago
My cognitive style in using computer interfaces is to remember where things are, so features that move things around (or hide them) based on some algorithm are not only annoying but slow down my workflow and increase cognitive load. Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.
mwcz 2y ago
If all actions and options were reachable from a fuzzy finder, then I'd be very happy with all UI components being hidden to reduce clutter.
iza 2y ago
I hope this means they're changing the main menu back to functioning like an actual menu instead of a weird panel thing, but somehow I doubt it.
- Zecc 2y ago
  I don't know if you know this, but you can still get the traditional kind of menu if you tap the Alt key. It won't stay permanently visible if you change focus back to the content page though.
lxgr 2y ago
> What about less used options? Put them in sub-menus? I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).
userbinator 2y ago
Every time someone complains about "clutter" I suspect they're trying to turn users into lusers --- stunting their chance of growth by removing everything that could possibly catch their attention, so they can be lead blindly and exploited for whatever is most desirable. Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.

JohnFen 2y ago

The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.

Teever 2y ago
The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now. The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
- nindalf 2y ago
  First time I’ve heard Google being blamed for Mozilla’s self inflicted problems. Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Without Mozilla antitrust enforcement becomes much more likely. That’s why Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine provider. That’s the main source of revenue for Mozilla. If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
  - palata 2y ago
    > Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Assuming that "surviving" is good and "reasonable" is... what... 3% and dropping?
  - Teever 2y ago
    First time huh? That's surprising. It's only mentioned every time Firefox and Mozilla come up. I'm sure Google would like a slightly healthier captured 'competitor' but that doesn't mean that they didn't put them in this place through subversive practices.
- schmidtleonard 2y ago
  > the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years (Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.
  - cassepipe 2y ago
    I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome : You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with just Ctrl + L, Tab and Enter. You can also launch @search_engine $keyword directly in the bar, search bookmark/history/tabs directly with */^/% symbols. You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...) This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      I dislike the "awesome bar" quite a lot. Fortunately, as you say, you can disable a lot of its "awesomeness" (enough that I can live with it), but not all of it. You do have to do a bit of research to find out the various magic "about:config" settings you need to change.
      - cassepipe 2y ago
        It's easy enough to bring back the search bar without about:config though : right-clik on the chrome then drag and drop the search box item
        JohnFen 2y ago
        Sure, but that's a bit different. What I'm talking about is that I want the "awesome bar" to be just a plain URL bar and not be overloaded with other functions like search. You can get very close to this with a few setting changes. Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.
jimjimjim 2y ago
I would love for applications and even web sites to have an expert mode. Maybe when the UX teams aren't looking devs could add a mode that puts Everything back in the UI.
saurik 2y ago
> FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.
layer8 2y ago
I like the approach where it’s configurable which items are available in menus and toolbars. The application can come with a default configuration that is suitable for the average and novice user, and power users can change the menus and toolbars to their needs. When not all items are shown, the respective menu or toolbar can have a “More…” item that opens the configuration dialog. That way it’s discoverable.
Barrin92 2y ago
I'm also for user choice but this consistent notion that uncluttered UIs are only for non-techie people is very annoying. I'm a software developer by trade but that doesn't mean I want every UI to look like the inside of an airplane cockpit or a 90s teletext. The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)
- willywanker 2y ago
  It's a bullshit trend that goes away from the past where the UI was customizable to whatever level of simplicity or complexity one preferred to now where the developer decides what's good enough for you (in this case a totally dumbed down and limited UI targeted at the great unwashed, who despite all this effort continue to stay with Chrome). Don't like toolbars? Hide them. Remove buttons you don't want. This used to be the norm with all desktop apps until the 2010s when UX mandarins decided that nobody but smartphone users with their constrained screen space and system resources mattered anymore.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. Aesthetics is a matter of taste, of course, so there's no right or wrong there. Only if you like it or not. But the trend towards minimalist UIs is something that actively gets in my way and makes the software more difficult for me to actually use. That's why I dislike it.

resource_waste 2y ago

And all the old documentation/forum help to change settings is obsolete, but google still has them Indexed. The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed. I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.

iforgotpassword 2y ago

IDK, they're just following what Chrome has been doing forever now, and it has worked there. I guess that really is what the vast majority of normal people want. And considering how even among my most tech-savy friends and colleagues Chrome appears to be the browser of choice, it seems even these folks don't really care...

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia. Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
- Kye 2y ago
  Firefox certainly didn't help by becoming a bloated mess. Firefox was bad when Chrome came out. All Chrome did was the same thing Firefox did to IE in the same situation: take advantage of complacency. Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Yeah, that was always funny to me too... Google built a browser that was actually faster and more secure, and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win. Of course, they didn't actually get destroyed in court for it, so I suppose being evil works in this case.
    - palata 2y ago
      > and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win Or precisely because it was not enough to have the better product? Don't tell me you believe that the better product usually wins. Marketing wins.
      - 2y ago

kreyenborgi 2y ago

I hope they don't put more of the menu items into unremovable buttons in the address bar (which already contains four icons: tracker protection, certificates, containers, bookmark) or next to it (both an overflow menu for extensions and an overflow menu for ..other things? and a hamburger for ..other-other things? in addition to the buttons I actually do want there). On my laptop I can hardly read the domain name of the url unless I fullscreen the window.

rurp 2y ago

The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that. Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles. Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.

olejorgenb 2y ago
> and removing about:config What?
- josephcsible 2y ago
  On mobile.
aquova 2y ago
> removing about:config about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?
- dralley 2y ago
  You've missed nothing, OP is full of it.
- 0x_rs 2y ago
  They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years. Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it). https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276
  - Intralexical 2y ago

mrandish 2y ago

My cognitive style in using computer interfaces is to remember where things are, so features that move things around (or hide them) based on some algorithm are not only annoying but slow down my workflow and increase cognitive load. Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.

mwcz 2y ago

If all actions and options were reachable from a fuzzy finder, then I'd be very happy with all UI components being hidden to reduce clutter.

iza 2y ago

I hope this means they're changing the main menu back to functioning like an actual menu instead of a weird panel thing, but somehow I doubt it.

Zecc 2y ago
I don't know if you know this, but you can still get the traditional kind of menu if you tap the Alt key. It won't stay permanently visible if you change focus back to the content page though.

lxgr 2y ago

> What about less used options? Put them in sub-menus? I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).

userbinator 2y ago

Every time someone complains about "clutter" I suspect they're trying to turn users into lusers --- stunting their chance of growth by removing everything that could possibly catch their attention, so they can be lead blindly and exploited for whatever is most desirable. Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.