It's had various tweaks since, but my day to day experience has been the same since then. This is not an absurd pace of UI change in my opinion.

And yes it is a conceptually simple UI, but with the whole stuff around the web with security, permissions, tab and window management and how an awful lot of modern computer use by an awful lot of people is conducted entirely inside a web browser it's a UI that is worth improving where improvements can be found.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/75.0/releasenotes/

It's really sad that both are gone. - https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/photon-engineering-n... - https://dolske.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/photon-engineering-n...

I cannot be the only one that uses that functionality 100 times a day at least, and it's so not conveniently placed I used to misclick "View selection source" instead a dozen times a day, and now I'll be taking screenshots or opening the print dialog by mistake. I've been googling a way of rearranging the context menu on Firefox so that selection search is rearranged or has a keyboard shortcut and not _one_ soul has ever mentioned it in the past decade, which is maddening.

One of the reason I use Edge nowadays is that "Search with Google" is the second option, between Copy and "Search with Bing in the sidebar", which isn't ideal, but it's still search.

Copy? Keyboard/mouse buttons for that.

Select All? Why would I want to do that when I just made a selection?

Print Selection? How common can that actually be, to justify being positions above "search the internet for this thing"??

Take screenshot???? Really??

Why does "Inspect Accessibility Properties" get real estate there? That's a legitimate question.

If you're a keyboard user you can do: ctrl-c ctrl-t ctrl-v enter

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-page-info-windo...

When Chrome first came out, the lightweight, clean and out of your field of view tab bar was a welcome change.

FF did pretty good with small changes that, in my view, have made it look better over the years.

edit : Ok, checked the new design. Definitely don't like the tab buttons, mainly because when there are multiple open, there are no discernable borders among them. So a tad bit confusing.

Mine looks like:

@-moz-document url("chrome://browser/content/browser.xul") { #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } }

#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar > .toolbar-items { opacity: 0; pointer-events: none; }

#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header { display: none; }

#titlebar { visibility: collapse; }

At the same time I like how the tab bar is separated from the address/bookmark bar. Makes it much easier to identify the active tab.

Especially when you have dozens of tabs, the current style make it cleaner.

I guess it's unsurprising that UX designers would want to continue having work to do.

The most recent change was GTK driven, where the buttons on common-file dialog moved to the top. But, it hit every app at once so the relearn was abrupt but short. And it was only one thing. Not a frustrating batch of a dozen inconsistent half-baked "tweaks"

This is not my experience.

The number one complaint I get from non-technical people using computers is "This doesn't look like it used to, I don't know how to do anything anymore."

The same can be said for developers. Few devs can just make arbitrary changes to an application. They take requirements, produce implementations, and go through review and revision.

Edit: I just upgraded after I posted this. Difference? Slightly darker and forward/backward buttons don't have a circle around them. And pocket button isn't in the URL bar and I can actually remove it (and here the other day everyone was complaining about it being bigger. GONE NOW). That's almost unnoticeable (unlike Android changing the clock location) and I can remove pocket. Win?

So collections/bookmarks weirdness, menu moved to bottom, dark style, major changes on "new tab" screen. I hope there will be no more changes to mobile view in this update.

This problem is everywhere. The last thing we should do when we need a problem solved is creating a department or office whose continued existence depends on the problem being there.

Makes me think of "Defunding the police".

deleting and re-importing history/bookmarks did nothing, but what did eventually work was opening the sqlite table and deleting the rows manually...

I found the file with strings | grep (was "places.sqlite")

sqlite3 places.sqlite then found the row with .dump, then deleted with DELETE FROM moz_places WHERE id = XXX:

This usually means we reskinned and somehow ended with it being slower.

Also the whole release notes are UI changes, particulary for mac ?

I wished the only non-chromium browser with active development was.. idk, different?

There is a reason why there's no "summer 2021 hammer" in hardware store.

I get that a lot of people feel differently and that's who Mozilla and many other companies are targetting, but it really bums me out that my tech tools can't be stable and reliable.

As if some pervert burgles your garage and does not go stealing, but replacing your car.

And you're underrepresenting how much change can happen for a given model: over decades the Honda Civic has gone from manual to continuously variable transmission, and entirely different chassis, etc. as technology and safety expectations evolve, and it's no exception.

I see that the Firefox UI designers agree that it's like fashion design...

This recent update seems more like a very minor reskinning than anything that would require adjustment.

Something material to point out as your contribution to firefox when you're interviewing for your next job.

The visual cue with the circle around it is also gone. Even the lines used to draw the arrow are thinner, making it less visible. Compare:

https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/19/here-is-what-is-new-and-ch...

It's very distracting to me.

When you actually try it instead of comparing screenshots, you'll see that its clickable area still goes all the way to the edge of the window. The button hasn't moved to the right; there's just more negative space because they removed the circle around it. Deleting that space would actually move the button to the left and make it more difficult to hit. As it is, it's as easy to hit as ever, and the “empty space” isn't there “for no reason”. (Moving it closer to the edge would actually be a mistake; there needs to be some margin for situations where pointing close to the edge changes the cursor's function to resizing the window.)

> lacks immediate feedback

How so? As soon as the mouse pointer touches the clickable area, the button lights up; after a second of hovering, I get a tool-tip explaining what it does, what the keyboard shortcut is, and how I can use it to show the tab's history. Again, that seems the same as it used to be?

Then after some delay, the "area" of the button is shown, but not inclunding the newly "empty" space, which you claim is clickable.

But what is highlighted starts to the right. If my mouse is already close to the edge, it visually signals that it's not over the button, that is, that I moved the mouse too far.

It's very awful experience: not having the limits of the button drawn (which doesn't give me any hint of the area I can target), then not showing the limits fast enough once the pointer is there, then misleading about the limits (forcing me to move the mouse to the right even if I was already on the right place), drawing with the thinner line the arrow (also making it less obvious where it is): four wrongs in just one enforced update which is claimed to "improve" UI. On the most used button.

In the case when the button does light up the instant it becomes clickable, I don't get the perception of ‘I've moved the mouse too far’ — instead, it's easier to see why the highlight isn't bigger: I don't just get a “hint of the area I can target”, I see exactly a standard-sized button, which I'm aiming for — but when I miss a bit, there's also a bonus area where the click still works.

Without the immediate feedback, the highlight seems ‘off’ (in the sense of displaced) in some arbitrary way. But really it's way more sophisticated (an overly pedantically detailed elaboration follows; I promise this is not apologetics on behalf of the Firefox UI designers, but illustrating a point I will attempt to make in the end and that I couldn't be bothered to put in fewer paragraphs out of sheer laziness):

1) There's a bonus area to the left. It's nice to have when you happened to click a bit too far to the left. But how far off you can be in that direction depends on the exact circumstances: E.g. in my case, in windowed mode I can approach the edge to within 1 or 2 px before the mouse cursor switches to ‘resize window’, whereas in fullscreen mode, I can go to 0 px, but pushing beyond that triggers the dock which otherwise lingers beyond that edge of the screen. So that's why it's a bonus area: It'll try to do the right thing, but it's not a promise that clicking there will work. And by directing your focus to the standard-sized button that would ordinarily be all you can click, it's more likely that you'll hit the intended target.

2) There's no bonus area to the right. Because the forward button is to the right. Instead of extending the standard-sized click target, hoping that this is what you meant to do, the GUI refuses to interpret your click as something that could be the exact opposite of what you meant to do.

3) There's a bonus area upwards. On MacOS, moving up even farther gets you to the buttons for closing and minimising the window, but they're a good few px away from the bottom of the title/tab bar, so we can approach that border all the way without risking a wrong click.

4) There's no bonus area downwards. Because that's where the web page you're viewing is, and making the top left corner of the page a link (e.g. to the home page of the site) is really common, so ignoring ambiguous clicks wins out over risking doing something you didn't want.

Thank you for your attention — you made it to the end where I attempt to make a point: AFAICT, the click target is the exact same it has always been. I understand that it can be annoying that they removed the circle when you're used to the circle being there; but I assure you, the circle never was the actual clickable area — it was just the visual target you were aiming for. You want ”the limits of the button drawn”? The circle doesn't do that. The button is a rectangle, and the clickable area is another rectangle that is almost the same, but a bit more generous in exactly those cases where the extra leeway can't do any harm.

> Wait, It's All Ohio? Always Has Been refers to an exploitable template in which two astronauts are in space. One looks at Earth and realizes the entire Earth is made up of something other than what is expected, and asks "Wait, it's all X?" The other astronaut, preparing a gun, says "Always has been."

— https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-...

https://postimg.cc/ThCLM7mK

The button area is visible as soon as one hovers with the mouse over the button.

Above: when the new code is turned on.

Below: when the new code is turned off.

The problem is: the area covered on hover should match the clickable area. If left of the button can't be clicked, the button is wrongly positioned. If it is intentionally bigger, the visual feedback should match it. The new code doesn't do that.

Most of the time, it doesn’t take too long to get used to the interface changes – though I think a lot of such changes are superficial (make it look shiny and new) and I’d rather developer resources were used elsewhere. It’s not like there are no open bugs on Bugzilla. Also, I wonder if they do any testing of the UI changes with an older demographic.

But I also realized I would never notice any of what you're talking about, because I pretty much exclusively use alt-left arrow for back and alt-right arrow for forward. You might try that for a while to see if it sticks in your muscle memory.

(Though it's likely that other things are mangled in your setup if something like the back button is misbehaving.)

It doesn't. Maybe small parts of it get tweaks here and there. But your argument about having to re-adjust every update is just dishonest.

Firefox updates are a constant stream of "1% of users use this feature so it's fine to do X to it" but it turns out that a lot of people fall into a lot of those small buckets at once.

New command apparently lacks alternative usage forcing current tab, but still opens image in new window instead of tab with Ctrl modifier. (Maybe it would be possible to plead for re-introduction of similar modifier?)

At least we can still drag/n/drop plain images to the Tab bar.

For example, they just changed "Undo close tab" to "Reopen closed tab". Not only is it difficult to justify how this is clearer (any casual computer user should be familiar with the concept of 'undo'), but for a regular user:

- There's a period where you have to adjust, scanning for the correct menu entry each time;

- This change also modified the hotkey from 'u' for 'undo' to 'o' for... re-open, apparently.

Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?

I love Firefox, am a daily user, but I get very annoyed at the lack of proper change control that's applied.

This kind of arbitrary change at the very least annoys users, but can also degrade usability and workflow.

Finally, by showing they don't review their minor changes very well, it makes it harder to trust that they won't accidentally introduce some major bug or security flaw.

I honestly wish my editor did. Emacs very deliberately does not do such things, and the result is a complete mess of weird keybindings, and many duplicated commands and modes which are just slightly different to each other. It's so scared of disrupting an existing user's workflow that the product as a whole definitely suffers.

You have no clue how annoying and nerve wrecking that is.

Changing my daily workspace where I am supposed to be productive is something that should be considered a breaking change. I'd like software to leave my workspace alone if at all possible.

Make another product for those who want it different.