Go to Menu -> Customize.

Tick "Title Bar"

Drag & Drop the "search" widget aside your URL bar

Drag & Drop the Five buttons you mention where you want

You're welcome.

(for the status bar URL link preview on hover it's already the case by default)

However, the status bar is no longer persistent, but only appears when hovering over a link. Also in the past you used to be able to control the text in the status bar via the window.status variable in JavaScript. This was disabled as it was used for malicious purposes (faking link destinations and misleading users by putting page-controlled content in the browser chrome), and after that there didn’t seem much point to wasting 20–30px of precious vertical space all the time.

I would also note that the address bar and search box got merged for a good reason, because their functionalities steadily converged over time as the address bar became more powerful and useful. You can still have them split if you really want, but it is unlikely to actually benefit most people.

And have it all reverted at random because well "there seems to be along time since you last used Firefox, do you want to lose all your configurations? Yes. Later."

Each time I see that prompt I have to pause and consider the otherwise wacky theory that there evil forces trying to cripple Mozilla from the inside.

Why. Just why.

It's hard to try to come up with another explanation, to be honest. When I try imagine how incompetence can explain everything that's happened with Firefox in the past several years, it feels like I'm going for the gold in the mental gymnastics world championship.

I dunno. Software often have very unintuitive features, like the problem of closing with CTRL-Q on Linux, that looks like a "damn, why did they put it there on the first place", but actually is something GTK does if you follow the guidelines (what goes to show that most software doesn't follow them).

My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

Hum... Keep in mind that there is no option to not erase your configurations. And that "configurations" has a very bread sense, including everything from about:config settings, themes, extensions, history, cache, cookies, saved passwords, and even for a short period including bookmarks (thankfully that one they stopped erasing). And, by the way, Firefox will revert from a backup if you are logged in into an account, what is probably the reason the devs didn't nuke this by themselves, but also leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories and user enragement.

Having a button somewhere where the user can go and reset those things is ok. But keeping pestering them until they click on the button is really not.

Thanks for clarifying that, I have seen the dialog before, but never investigated what it actually does.

It sounds like something which started out as a good idea and was then steered into user abuse territory.

Thank you for your reply. Your suggested solutions are not complete, however.

The status bar is not persistent.

Also, for whatever reason, the URLs displayed in the status bar are cut off with an ellipsis, even when they would fit inside the window.

The menu bar -- File, Edit, View, etc. -- is still not displayed. And when it is displayed, the keyboard accelerators are not. I do realize this is in part the window manager and OS's accomplishments.

By the way, most of the actions you described are not even possible without using the mouse. Firefox, and most desktop applications, used to be 100% accessible without using the mouse. (Mac has always been an exception, but it was covered 100% on Windows and close to complete on GNU.)

I just want the disconnect button. It used to sit in status bar. I don't want to fetch things when I am reading downloaded articles.

Remember when browsers would actually cache pages and not reload them every time you accidentally blinked or moved the mouse cursor?

Should drop CSS support while they're at it.

You can turn off CSS in many browsers. It is under the Accessiblity dialog in IE, at least in 6.x. Firefox also supports disabling CSS in older versions, and so does Opera before the crippling WebKit migration.

I can't imagine it being that difficult to implement as a feature. If the setting is on, you would skip interpreting any <style> tags and style= attributes.

Past versions of many browsers support selecting between multiple stylesheets specified by the page, as well as provide your own stylesheet to use in place or in addition to the page's stylesheet.

(This was one of the main, amazing fucking benefits of CSS, to separate presentation from content, so that users who were hindered by the page's styles could turn it off and still be able to view the content.

And all of it works great if you do it right, because the styles cascade, and, I apologize for repeating myself, the content layer is separate from the presentation layer.

At some point all these features went away, 'cause fuck accessibility, I guess.

Meanwhile, CSS became Turing complete, so security-wise it's like having a second JavaScript which cannot be turned off.

Great progress all around. /s

When people ask me why I spend time on ensuring that I support older browsers in my projects, this is one of the reasons. Sometimes I just want to use a decent fucking browser that's not been lobotomized, and at least I can do it on my own sites.

Was View -> Page Style -> No Style removed for 86?

The menu is no longer there, AFAIK. I have not spent much time looking for the feature, to be honest, and I no longer keep Firefox installed except when testing, so I won't look for its existence now.

(I usually apt install before testing and apt remove after, because otherwise it often becomes the system default.)

Just checked. It's there.

Thank you

Everything you listed except for the status bar can be gotten by customising the UI in Firefox (not single-click but pretty easy).

On the other hand, if this is the kind of approach to UI you like personally, I think the Vivaldi browser would be up your alley (sadly not open-source though).

Sorry, but that is not even close to true, see my other comment describing what doesn't work:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26276871

Vivaldi is OK, but it's proprietary AFAIK?

Aha, yes sorry: re: the menubar, I am on a Mac so I didn't realise that wasn't restore-able on other systems.

Re: the status bar I had mentioned that, that's unfortunately still missing.

Vivaldi is proprietary sadly :'( But it does tick all of your boxes otherwise.

Can't imagine anyone being happier nowadays without tabs.

Firefox has had tabs since it was in beta (and called Phoenix); It's the reason I started using it back then (~2002)

Tabs were always there since before it was even called Firefox.

Presumably your application would just be creating new windows and your windowing system would take care of displaying it as either tabs or separate windows.

Did you ever use Firefox 1.0? It supported tabs.