6 ms·

And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by removing the actual title of the page from the window chrome. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Fir

by DHowett 13y ago

And Firefox continues the inexorable march towards Chromeness by removing the actual title of the page from the window chrome. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Firefox. This just strikes me as wrong; the rest of the new UI is fine.

RHSeeger 13y ago
That's one of the things I despise about Chrome... plus the fact that it doesn't have a title bar at all. They taking exactly the things that make Chrome less usable to me and putting them in Firefox. /sigh
- abenga 13y ago
  It's right there in the settings: (in Chrome) Settings > Appearance > "Use system title bar and borders". edit: clarified I meant Chrome.
  - OrsenPike 13y ago
    Not on Windows :/
  - narsil 13y ago
    Not on my Mac. Am I missing something?
    - serzz 13y ago
      It is available on Chromium (Linux)
    - tsm 13y ago
      What are you missing on your Mac? It has the system title bar, the system-provided x, -, and + buttons, and (on my Mountain Lion, at least), the system-provided full-screen button in the top-right. What more could there be?
      - RHSeeger 13y ago
        > What more could there be? A full height title bar with the title of the current tab in it that I can use to drag the window around. Having to precisely aim my mouse pointer in order to drag my window is extremely annoying.
- k__ 13y ago
  I read about people who like their tabs on the left, because they have so many. Opera allows this AFAIK. But why do you think the Firefox tab placement is better?
  - progrock 13y ago
    If you get tab happy, tabs are really difficult to navigate in Firefox without and extension, and I've tried most of the popular tab extensions - and have yet to find anything I like (that works without some bug). Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs. Really though managing tabs should be left to the window manager. Otherwise you just get inconsistant behaviour between applications. That's when the title comes into it's own.
    - pcwalton 13y ago
      > Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs. I use this tiny add-on, written by one of the main Firefox front end developers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-width/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-wi... It makes Firefox have the Chrome behavior of making tabs shrink infinitely. All it does it tweak one minor setting in the UI, so it's pretty bulletproof.
      - progrock 13y ago
        Thanks for that! Actually it still introduces the scroller at some point, but is slightly better.
- tsm 13y ago
  [Replying here due to HN's threading limits. This is in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5825892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5825892] Anyway, I fail to see a significant difference between Finder and Chrome's appearance: http://i.imgur.com/sgfMXOy.png http://i.imgur.com/sgfMXOy.png If Chrome was full of tabs, the ~20px area to drag the window around is arguably a bit small, but it'd look ridiculous if there was a huge margin above the tabs.
davidjohnstone 13y ago
The page title hasn't been shown on the window chrome for some time on Windows. I don't remember when it changed, but Firefox's UI hasn't changed for a little while.
- gluxon 13y ago
  Previously, the titlebar would be shown if you enabled the menubar.
gluxon 13y ago
The window titlebar doesn't make sense in every application. In this case, the title is already displayed on the tab. Showing it in two areas that are very close to each other is just redundant. On Windows Vista, 7, and 8, explorer does not have a titlebar since the location breadcrumb trail makes more sense. On OS X, iTunes and the App Store also do not have titlebars, favoring other ways to show information that makes more sense in the context of the app.
- lucb1e 13y ago
  Tabs are a bit too small to display much useful info though. A page yes, but which song is playing - already too wide. It would be a major improvement if tabs became about twice as wide by default, only shrinking on demand (like they already do).
- the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
  My tabs are all way too small to read the title.
  - gluxon 13y ago
    Perhaps because you have an excessive amount open?
magic_haze 13y ago
Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?
- aluhut 13y ago
  How about letting the user decide? I find myself installing addons to cut or move parts of the UI back to where it was when I was used to it. Starting with the location bar ending with status bars. Additional fumbling around in the config became the normal thing to do after an major update... I know it's nice if your are the developer and you can force stuff on your users because most of them can't do anything about it and will accept it in the end but remember one thing: you will cross a border for another part of your custormers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    The reason why X Windows was so much more popular than Mac OS X or MS Windows was because it was so configurable, right? As a matter of good design, configuration options should be used very sparingly. Yes they diversify the UX, but they also diversify the UX! Some decisions just have to be "made," like losing the title bar. > you will cross a border for another part of your customers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers. If the overall design is good, the customers loss are negligible vs. the customers gained. No one bothers chasing the miniscule emacs market.
    - ownagefool 13y ago
      It's more of a case of good defaults vs bad defaults. When 90% of your customers will never know how to change the defaults (or never like your system enough in the first place to bother) then being served up something weird by default doesn't help your popularity.
Svip 13y ago
Ah, but unlike Chrome, in Firefox, you can configure your client to look exactly like it did before. I know this is extra work for you (and me), but I guess it might work better for the vast majority of users.
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  The new ui update has the specific goal of reducing configurability, so new users dont get "confused". Such changes include the inability to edit any of the UI except a row of buttons on the top left, shockingly just like chrome!. I'm sure these changes will help focus their design vision, or something. So in short, no, you wont be able to configure your client to look exactly like it did before.
  - rom16384 13y ago
    It seems that too many times I have to install a plugin to revert some design decision I don't like. This sounds like one of those times.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - shock 13y ago
    The day the customizability of FF is removed will be a sad day for me. Hopefully someone will create a fork.
- lloeki 13y ago
  Like disabling Tabs on Top? Just as in Sublime Text (and even with a proper titlebar), I really dislike those Chrome-y tabs. They take too much real estate for my taste. Lion scrollbars finally landed on Aurora and I was hoping to move back to Firefox again when it would land in Beta. The move towards consistency with the platform was very welcome around Fx4. Now, striving for uniformity, they make it feel foreign again. Here's the agenda: Firefox as a brand has to grow and make a show of itself. Indeed the Chromification goes much deeper than simply tab looks: as the OS is relegated to a platform/hypervisor, the browser becomes an OS in itself, so that Firefox OS makes sense for people. They're moving to make phones, which will soon call for services (unless they plan to rely solely on third parties such as WhatsApp). Mozilla's product may increasingly end up looking like yet another vertically integrated software platform.
fragmede 13y ago
> the rest of the new UI is fine. The seemingly inexorable chrome-ification is just wrong. I didn't see it in the linked article, but what happens when I do Alt-V, z, r in the new UI (to pick one at random) to reset the zoom level? Will the rest of my memorized shortcuts cease working?
SiVal 13y ago
I'd like Firefox to give me back the ability to choose "full screen" and have it make the web page itself fill the screen from corner to corner, with no "chrome" (no title bar, no tabs, no menu bar, no URL bar, etc.) It used to be possible to use Firefox on Mac OS X to do a presentation with HTML and have the web page, and only the web page, fill the whole screen. (It was an option in the "View" menu.) That feature disappeared several versions ago, and now if you want to use it, you have to switch to Chrome.
- bad_user 13y ago
  I have the Full Screen option in the latest version, on Ubuntu and I don't remember a time when it wasn't there. It's still in the "View" menu. I just press F11, the default shortcut. Furthermore, Firefox implements the HTML5 Fullscreen API, which gives the ability to websites themselves to request the full-screen mode, with a dialog pop-up that allows you to either deny, or to temporarily or permanently give this privilege to a website: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Using_full_screen_mode https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Using... So basically your full-screen HTML presentation can load in full-screen mode by itself, without the user having to make an explicit View action for it. I find it hard to believe that you don't have it. If it's true, maybe it's a problem on OS X that will likely get fixed.
  - SiVal 13y ago
    The fullscreen API works fine. A website can display itself without any other clutter on the screen (with user permission). Unfortunately, it is no longer possible for a user on Mac OS X to cause the switch to fullscreen. The view menu (Firefox 21.0, for example, on OS X) still offers an "Enter Full Screen" menu item. Unfortunately, all it does is hide some of the chrome (it hides the menu bar and the title bar), leaving other bars (tabs, URL) still cluttering the screen. It has been this way for a couple of years, if I recall correctly, and it is only a "feature" on OS X. Nothing is being done to change it, AFAIK.
    - Osmose 13y ago
      I just tried this on Nightly and the chrome that's left behind (tabs + URL) slide up and out of the way within half a second of entering full screen mode, leaving nothing but the webpage on the screen. Are you sure that this isn't happening for you?
BystanderX 13y ago
Now if only they would copy the separate master process (Heck, put all the renderers in one process, I don't care) so I can move tabs around without waiting five seconds per tab.

by DHowett 13y ago

RHSeeger 13y ago

That's one of the things I despise about Chrome... plus the fact that it doesn't have a title bar at all. They taking exactly the things that make Chrome less usable to me and putting them in Firefox. /sigh

abenga 13y ago
It's right there in the settings: (in Chrome) Settings > Appearance > "Use system title bar and borders". edit: clarified I meant Chrome.
- OrsenPike 13y ago
  Not on Windows :/
- narsil 13y ago
  Not on my Mac. Am I missing something?
  - serzz 13y ago
    It is available on Chromium (Linux)
  - tsm 13y ago
    What are you missing on your Mac? It has the system title bar, the system-provided x, -, and + buttons, and (on my Mountain Lion, at least), the system-provided full-screen button in the top-right. What more could there be?
    - RHSeeger 13y ago
      > What more could there be? A full height title bar with the title of the current tab in it that I can use to drag the window around. Having to precisely aim my mouse pointer in order to drag my window is extremely annoying.
k__ 13y ago
I read about people who like their tabs on the left, because they have so many. Opera allows this AFAIK. But why do you think the Firefox tab placement is better?
- progrock 13y ago
  If you get tab happy, tabs are really difficult to navigate in Firefox without and extension, and I've tried most of the popular tab extensions - and have yet to find anything I like (that works without some bug). Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs. Really though managing tabs should be left to the window manager. Otherwise you just get inconsistant behaviour between applications. That's when the title comes into it's own.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    > Chrome and Opera squeeze the tabs, but list them all, whereas Firefox forces a scroll after so many, which feels horrible. Also Opera has let's you list and switch open tabs with CTRL+TAB, or lets you reposition your tabs. I use this tiny add-on, written by one of the main Firefox front end developers: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-width/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/custom-tab-wi... It makes Firefox have the Chrome behavior of making tabs shrink infinitely. All it does it tweak one minor setting in the UI, so it's pretty bulletproof.
    - progrock 13y ago
      Thanks for that! Actually it still introduces the scroller at some point, but is slightly better.
tsm 13y ago
[Replying here due to HN's threading limits. This is in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5825892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5825892] Anyway, I fail to see a significant difference between Finder and Chrome's appearance: http://i.imgur.com/sgfMXOy.png http://i.imgur.com/sgfMXOy.png If Chrome was full of tabs, the ~20px area to drag the window around is arguably a bit small, but it'd look ridiculous if there was a huge margin above the tabs.

davidjohnstone 13y ago

The page title hasn't been shown on the window chrome for some time on Windows. I don't remember when it changed, but Firefox's UI hasn't changed for a little while.

gluxon 13y ago
Previously, the titlebar would be shown if you enabled the menubar.

gluxon 13y ago

The window titlebar doesn't make sense in every application. In this case, the title is already displayed on the tab. Showing it in two areas that are very close to each other is just redundant. On Windows Vista, 7, and 8, explorer does not have a titlebar since the location breadcrumb trail makes more sense. On OS X, iTunes and the App Store also do not have titlebars, favoring other ways to show information that makes more sense in the context of the app.

lucb1e 13y ago
Tabs are a bit too small to display much useful info though. A page yes, but which song is playing - already too wide. It would be a major improvement if tabs became about twice as wide by default, only shrinking on demand (like they already do).
the_mitsuhiko 13y ago
My tabs are all way too small to read the title.
- gluxon 13y ago
  Perhaps because you have an excessive amount open?

magic_haze 13y ago

Is a title bar really necessary, though? The vast majority of the time, the exact same sentence is repeated again in the page as a h1. More prominently. With better styling. When I have the browser open, the favicon and the few characters on the tab are usually enough to figure out what the page is, and when it's minimized, the text shows up in the taskbar and alt+tab... I'm curious, what's missing?

aluhut 13y ago
How about letting the user decide? I find myself installing addons to cut or move parts of the UI back to where it was when I was used to it. Starting with the location bar ending with status bars. Additional fumbling around in the config became the normal thing to do after an major update... I know it's nice if your are the developer and you can force stuff on your users because most of them can't do anything about it and will accept it in the end but remember one thing: you will cross a border for another part of your custormers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  The reason why X Windows was so much more popular than Mac OS X or MS Windows was because it was so configurable, right? As a matter of good design, configuration options should be used very sparingly. Yes they diversify the UX, but they also diversify the UX! Some decisions just have to be "made," like losing the title bar. > you will cross a border for another part of your customers and then somebody will come up with something new just because you forced us and then you'll lose customers. If the overall design is good, the customers loss are negligible vs. the customers gained. No one bothers chasing the miniscule emacs market.
  - ownagefool 13y ago
    It's more of a case of good defaults vs bad defaults. When 90% of your customers will never know how to change the defaults (or never like your system enough in the first place to bother) then being served up something weird by default doesn't help your popularity.

Svip 13y ago

Ah, but unlike Chrome, in Firefox, you can configure your client to look exactly like it did before. I know this is extra work for you (and me), but I guess it might work better for the vast majority of users.

throwaway2048 13y ago
The new ui update has the specific goal of reducing configurability, so new users dont get "confused". Such changes include the inability to edit any of the UI except a row of buttons on the top left, shockingly just like chrome!. I'm sure these changes will help focus their design vision, or something. So in short, no, you wont be able to configure your client to look exactly like it did before.
- rom16384 13y ago
  It seems that too many times I have to install a plugin to revert some design decision I don't like. This sounds like one of those times.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- shock 13y ago
  The day the customizability of FF is removed will be a sad day for me. Hopefully someone will create a fork.
lloeki 13y ago
Like disabling Tabs on Top? Just as in Sublime Text (and even with a proper titlebar), I really dislike those Chrome-y tabs. They take too much real estate for my taste. Lion scrollbars finally landed on Aurora and I was hoping to move back to Firefox again when it would land in Beta. The move towards consistency with the platform was very welcome around Fx4. Now, striving for uniformity, they make it feel foreign again. Here's the agenda: Firefox as a brand has to grow and make a show of itself. Indeed the Chromification goes much deeper than simply tab looks: as the OS is relegated to a platform/hypervisor, the browser becomes an OS in itself, so that Firefox OS makes sense for people. They're moving to make phones, which will soon call for services (unless they plan to rely solely on third parties such as WhatsApp). Mozilla's product may increasingly end up looking like yet another vertically integrated software platform.

fragmede 13y ago

> the rest of the new UI is fine. The seemingly inexorable chrome-ification is just wrong. I didn't see it in the linked article, but what happens when I do Alt-V, z, r in the new UI (to pick one at random) to reset the zoom level? Will the rest of my memorized shortcuts cease working?

SiVal 13y ago

I'd like Firefox to give me back the ability to choose "full screen" and have it make the web page itself fill the screen from corner to corner, with no "chrome" (no title bar, no tabs, no menu bar, no URL bar, etc.) It used to be possible to use Firefox on Mac OS X to do a presentation with HTML and have the web page, and only the web page, fill the whole screen. (It was an option in the "View" menu.) That feature disappeared several versions ago, and now if you want to use it, you have to switch to Chrome.

bad_user 13y ago
I have the Full Screen option in the latest version, on Ubuntu and I don't remember a time when it wasn't there. It's still in the "View" menu. I just press F11, the default shortcut. Furthermore, Firefox implements the HTML5 Fullscreen API, which gives the ability to websites themselves to request the full-screen mode, with a dialog pop-up that allows you to either deny, or to temporarily or permanently give this privilege to a website: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Using_full_screen_mode https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/DOM/Using... So basically your full-screen HTML presentation can load in full-screen mode by itself, without the user having to make an explicit View action for it. I find it hard to believe that you don't have it. If it's true, maybe it's a problem on OS X that will likely get fixed.
- SiVal 13y ago
  The fullscreen API works fine. A website can display itself without any other clutter on the screen (with user permission). Unfortunately, it is no longer possible for a user on Mac OS X to cause the switch to fullscreen. The view menu (Firefox 21.0, for example, on OS X) still offers an "Enter Full Screen" menu item. Unfortunately, all it does is hide some of the chrome (it hides the menu bar and the title bar), leaving other bars (tabs, URL) still cluttering the screen. It has been this way for a couple of years, if I recall correctly, and it is only a "feature" on OS X. Nothing is being done to change it, AFAIK.
  - Osmose 13y ago
    I just tried this on Nightly and the chrome that's left behind (tabs + URL) slide up and out of the way within half a second of entering full screen mode, leaving nothing but the webpage on the screen. Are you sure that this isn't happening for you?

BystanderX 13y ago

Now if only they would copy the separate master process (Heck, put all the renderers in one process, I don't care) so I can move tabs around without waiting five seconds per tab.