Now that I've had time to play with it, I'm even more convinced my initial reaction was correct. But I've also had time to reflect on why, and in my view there are two problems with this new design.
Removing visual separators from the tabs makes them much harder to distinguish - the only difference between one tab and the next is a larger horizontal space. In prose, when we want to separate sentences, we don't just use longer spaces; we use other visual indicators like capital letters and full stops (periods). Paragraphs are separated by vertical space, which is visually distinct from a horizontal one.
The second problem is that the tab you're not supposed to click on (the active tab) looks like a button, while the tabs you are meant to click on (the inactive tabs) are presented as text. This is opposite to normal UX conventions.
There are some subjective improvements to the look and feel of this UX change, but overall I'm confused as to why the Firefox UX team would go against established conventions to produce something that's visually more difficult to use and less intuitive than they had before.
Fortunately userChrome.css is still usable if you set an about:config option (toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets), so I can see about fixing the problem myself, but I'm concerned that Firefox's march toward reduced configurability will eventually remove this option.
Overall, my concerns on Firefox are the same as most; in the pursuit of market share, they're moving further and further away from their roots by removing customisation options. Remember when you could change Firefox's theme without using hidden configuration options?
While I think the redesign looks good, I don't really have strong feelings on it. I mostly just want a supported interface, so I finally gave up on compact mode. It's just ok. I guess they wanted to differentiate themselves from Chromium browsers in a more significant way?
While most complaints, including from my spouse, are that the tabs are no longer delineated, that part hasn't bothered me much. I consider the delineation the icon on the left, and x on the right.
Part of me likes the freshening up. I won't quit using Firefox over these changes, I've been using it for 20 years now and won't be changing until I'm forced. There's still no other browser with a built-in search bar that also works correctly with a keyboard shortcut other than Firefox and Vivaldi. Vivaldi has everything I need in a desktop browser, it just isn't supported at all on iOS which is equally important for me these days. And honestly, Firefox is probably the only browser that isn't from Apple or Microsoft that I'd use. Otherwise I prefer something as important as a browser backed by a truly large organization. Microsoft Edge is really hard to beat in my view once you consider all the intrinsic qualities to it like support. I'll put it this way, no one is making a mistake using Safari or Edge.
I like most everything about Firefox, the browser hasn't ever been ruined, but you got to wonder if there's truly even a place for 3rd party browsers in this era. If I weren't a legacy user, I'd just use Edge and be happy not knowing what I'm missing out on with alternatives.
It looks close, but details and behavior are a bit off. For example:
- Firefox context menu does not respect system's dark mode
- Different horizontal and vertical margins between items
- Different font rendering (e.g. text looks bolder)
- Different right caret icon
For behavior difference, for example: when navigating sub-menu items, macOS uses cursor velocity and cursor direction to determine if user is trying to go to submenu and immediately dismiss it if user is not. Firefox context menu uses a delay to archive similar effect. (To test this: open a sub-menu in a context menu, then move the cursor up. macOS native menu dismiss immediately, where old Firefox has a small delay before it is dismissed.)
40x the energy usage vs Safari. It's atrocious. Laptop gets to silly high temps, has to be bad for battery life... But I'm sure glad we have some new popup confirmation windows. Cool.
EDIT: I use FF on my Mac as my primary browser. Just so frustrated at how little fucks they give about performance and battery usage.
BUT, I really do like Firefox's ability to clear history and cookies on close. I like the extensions for Firefox... Safari doesn't really have any extensions... not really anyway. Things work funky, if they work at all. I think I run 40+ Firefox extensions for work.
Everything from ClearURLs, to Wappalizer, to Reddit Shine. Nothing works on Safari.
Firefox is great, except they don't give a flying poo about battery life or heat issues on Macs. Really frustrating given we're all mobile these days.
https://www.codeproject.com/Tips/1035362/Simple-Window-With-AssemblyBut as you can see it brings some users back to Firefox.
Simply: it's make-work.
I'm absolutely sick of this trend of dumbing-down lowest-common-denominator UI, removing useful features and affordances for learning. Insanely huge buttons, rounded corners everywhere, floating controls in a sea-of-white/blackspace...
On the bright side, I believe the UI is still highly customisable so it should be possible to make it look exactly as you want, but it's not exactly straightforward.
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/tree/photon-styl...
This is pure speculation on my part, but I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the selected tab to stand out visually. The selected "tab" turns white in the default theme. But if the tab is attached to the URL toolbar, then the URL toolbar also needs to be the same colour as the selected tab. It would look odd if they were attached but each was a different colour.
I assume the "Firefox team" wanted the active tab to stand out visually, but not the whole URL toolbar. So the tab becomes a button and is detached from the URL toolbar. Now the active "tab" and the URL toolbar can have different colours: A "louder" colour for the selected tab to make it stand out, and a "quieter" colour for the URL toolbar that lets it recede a little from the foreground.
That's what I think may be the reason for the tab change - but as I say, it's pure speculation (and could be completely wrong).
If I want something that looks like Chrome I can use Chrome. It's not like it's more expensive or anything...
After removing all corner rounding and tweaking tab bar I am quite happy.
[1] https://gist.github.com/myfonj/f5415dd0580663a82ea18407ef2ee... This file starts with instructions how to make it work; I'm on Developer edition, Windows, dark theme. Same instruction wit illustration can be seen in Twitter thread [2] [2] https://twitter.com/myfonj/status/1387584962354982912
That said, I won't really notice since I use the Sidebery extension for vertical tabs. But I've got a separate profile running to isolate Spotify and its desire for DRM, and there it's been nice in a small way.
That was present for a few versions now. Playing tabs had the audio icon which could be used to mute/unmute.
They have UI people and designers. So they are going to be doing UI and design things. IMHO they are better off with these people than without. Browsers are very competitive. So, keeping the UI fresh and up to date is important.
Also, they can't keep everyone happy by changing nothing, which would make yet other people unhappy. So, kind of a damned if you do and damned if you don't. I feel the changes are mostly reasonable and not disruptive so I see very little reason to get upset over these changes.
I guess there's an option somewhere to set opacity to 100% but I'm not ready to spend 30 minutes to hunt it down.
[1] Except for some weirdos who disabled telemetry. They're probably so paranoid they believe Mozilla would abuse the studies feature to promote a TV series or something like that.
These days I'm more satisfied with the default CSS on e.g. the Firefox Home page, although some pages like "view source" still do not respect dark mode unless I edit them.
I don’t dislike them as much as I initially did. They’re just a little to big on low resolution monitor.
Personally I’d like to see browsers move away from trying to be “special” and just follow the design of operating system. A little tricky on Linux, but for Windows and macOS just follow the guidelines from Microsoft and Apple.
I understand that you can't swing resources around freely in the short term but you don't have a bunch of designers sitting around by accident. Someone decided that they should hire them.
I definitely agree that we need to think about people, that was a large component of "you can't swing resources around freely". Firing people is not something that I would like to see. The point I was trying to emphasize is that it isn't as if Mozilla just happened to have X people with design skills and Y people with whatever other skills. There was planning to build the teams and planning to pick the projects. So while I agree that you can't just put people on random projects I wanted to point out that Mozilla had a lot of agency in the decisions that lead up to a team working on the redesign, it didn't happen just because they happened to have a bunch of designers available.
I don't think it's considered rude, since "Human Resources" is a widely accepted term.
Human resources is less bad because it doesn't refer to specific people. And most people can't choose what the department is called. But they can choose what they call other people.
I agree with the idea of other UX initiatives though. They could definitely have the team work on other parts of Firefox even though that isn't as immediately visible to all users.
Is that why the ones they do have keep messing up the UI?