The history of Firefox UI is important because my project compensates for the shortcomings of this Proton UI and inherits the strengths of the existing Firefox UIs.
It’s also one of the ways to prevent divisions in the community, given that there have been forks every time the UI changes big.
A detailed timeline of the changes to the user interface of Firefox.
I happened to notice the displeasing (IMHO) proton theme just got pushed into Firefox ESR today, which is used by Linux distros.
Is this article’s timing purely coincidental or were you actually looking for a way to revert the UI changes?
Mozilla isn’t doing users any favors by removing the option from about:config, ugh.
Edit: I did install the UI changes using the manual method. Running a remote shell script is such a bad practice and shouldn’t be encouraged, it should be a plugin IMHO.
I don’t like the provided menubar icons at all, but the style does look better than mozilla’s changes.
Didn’t Linux distros use 91.x ESR? I thought proton was imposed on the ESR as well since November 2021.
cevvalkoala,
For me on debian it’s 91.7.0 right now, I wish I had checked the version before it updated. Now that I look at it I think the browser is managed by debian and not FF, so I do believe you are right about the official ESR version.
It depends.
Fedora is v98. RHEL/CentOS is v91. The Firefox flatpak is at v98.
OMG those orange buttons in the first screenshot!!! I didn’t realize how nostalgic they would be for me! 😀
I know, right? I hadn’t thought about the Phoenix theme in years. 🙂
I forgot how ugly FF v1-3 were. :\
Mozilla has done plenty of baffling UI changes over the years, but Proton was bad enough that it pushed me into CSS hacking to start reverting it. The main issue I have is the (industry wide) cargo-culting over decreasing contrast, ensuring that the active tab is indicated by a shadow, which seems very insufficient to quickly identify which one it is.
malxau,
Mozilla had a way to disable the new UI and then removed it despite user protests. For anyone else trying to “fix it” the article’s author provides some fixes to make the UI look more like it was. Look under “Installation Guide”…
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix#installation-guide
I really want FF to stick around as a viable independent alternative but I find it grating when they nonchalantly override their own loyal user base. It creates completely unnecessary friction that they cannot afford IMHO. Bah.
Ohh… I had the same feeling and a comparable experience. I don’t understand why someone would want to make tabs less discernible. Like you, I had to create a theme. Fortunately Mozilla’s theme builder pages are pretty user friendly. I built this one and installed it on all the computers I manage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/plainistic/
Australis… they spent years chasing after Chrome’s UI all whilst pushing away the users who were perfectly happy with the existing UI. And then they went back to square tabs anyway! I don’t like the new disconnected tabs but not so much as to use another browser as the other choices are all variations on Chrome and I don’t want to support that.
Try Palemoon, or waterfox, i use palemoon and its been pretty solid and it has the old FF UI which I personally prefer and most of the major plug ins like adblock have their own version in the PM repo.
The Australis was the beginning of the end of all good things and advantages that Firefox had over Chrome. It’s the official start of the “simplification” effort that culminated the XUL/XPCOM phasing out with “Proton” release a few years latter, pretty much killing their own addon community.
And Australis was garbage at such a fundamental level that it pretty much made void any improvements on its release (if any, this article counts that sparse navigational atrocity with overly large fonts called “Contents based Setting UI” a “improvement”). Albeit this one improved a bit along the years, and Proton is not really that bad. Just happens that Proton default theme has a really annoying low contrast UI,
First Rule of GUI changes: no matter what you change, there will always be a small but vocal minority that proclaims the new GUI sucks and demands the old GUI is reverted.
New GUI sucks though. Active tab is hard to find, it’s wasting a lot of space here and there, I even wonder how long they will keep compact mode available. I don’t really care that much about redesigned menus as I rarely use them.
Wasted space was the main reason I didn’t like Australis and was using addons that were restoring older style. Now I’m using Lepton.
Without going into the merits of a GUI (re)design, it doesn’t matter if the new GUI is objectively better. It’s what you’re used to and change is hard.
To this day I use a FF extension to switch to old.reddit.com, I can’t bare the new GUI of Reddit. What a waste of space.
There is a website in Ireland called boards.ie and they tried to change their GUI to some modern JS framework but rolled back after a few weeks after their traffic dropped significantly. They now (tried to) reimplement the old look using a modern JS framework to move off their security ridden old frame work but only partially succeeded.
OSNews also changed the GUI (I believe for the same security reasons) and I still miss the old layout. But is it me with my nostalgia? Or is the new layout worse? There is no objective standard. I guess what I miss most is a like/dislike indicator (like ArsTechnica) to get a feel for the public consensus. But font choice and size are all in the eye of the beholder.
With FF 98 the difference between an active and inactive window is the greyness of the website-title in the tabs.
They don’t even use the accentcolor in windows anymore.
That’s inexcusable.
Flat-design has been garbage since its inception.
I can’t find what you mean by “the greyness of the website-title in the tabs”. Is there a screenshot?
I don’t think the way it’s been implemented is very good, but I do think the differentiation between active / inactive tabs is fine.
It’s not about nostalgia this time. I was hit hard with this switch to Proton. If I can’t discern witch tab is active, and I got a _lot_ of open tabs, I start spending my time staring at GUI instead of a website.
So why should I stay here if I can simply switch to, e.g., Vivaldi or Opera? Many would go as both do resolve this artificially created problem. The thing is, I try to stay away from Chrome and its derivatives as much as I can, so I try to either get used to my browser of choice or improve it the best I can.
Wondercool,
Why did they mess with the tabs? They’re really awkward. For better or worse I think designers feel the need to change things because that’s their job even though most users can do without it. This isn’t just mozilla but a widespread issue. I question the wisdom of using limited resources on unwanted changes, but since they were going to sign off on it regardless one of the requirements should have been to provide a more conventional theme as an option to not off-put users (again).
There was a database breach and they didn’t have the resources to fix the code so they went to a managed wordpress website. It’s part of a larger trend, the market for custom websites has dropped off a cliff with many switching to wordpress to save on development costs.
It’s more than just font and size though. Without going into wordpress’es internal shortcomings, there are user facing problems. There is broad consensus that wordpress comments are awful for discussions. You can’t even tell which comment is being replied to half the time even before exceeding the max comment depth. The longer the discussion the worse it gets. WordPress searches are objectively bad & incomplete. Since wordpress is often too inefficient to use without caching, many wordpress websites including osnews end up experiencing caching anomalies in the form of stale content and bad links until the cached pages refresh after an hour or so. More optimal websites usually won’t have these issues but the world just accepts them with wordpress.
I actually tried to convince osnews to do something about the comments because they’re so integral to osnews. The old site had the ability to display comments in chronological order, which I missed a lot. So I created client-side prototypes that don’t require any server-side changes.
http://vocabit.com/osnews/
#1 has an interactive section on the right that shows the comments in order. It was too weird for my tastes, but still interesting.
#2 is subtle and effective. When you mouse over a comment it displays a link you can click on to see the comments in chronological order. This gets back what osnews had and even auto scrolls to the same post. This is what I wanted osnews to use, but they wouldn’t go for it even though it didn’t touch server side code.
Look deep in your heart and answer this question honestly:
Imagine that you came to OSNews for the first time in your life when WordPress was already in place and now OSNews switches to a new layout, the layout they used 10 years ago…
My argument is that plenty of people will come up with plenty of (subjective, not objective, there is very little objective in UI design) reasons to declare that the new layout is wrong. They will complain about the font not being nice, the oldfashioned look and the lack of a Dark theme.
Change is hard to accept. Any change.
I am not sure I agree with you on that we all are circling down the WordPress drain.
First, WordPress can’t be that bad as many websites use it, a bad website = less traffic.
Second. WordPress has plugins.
and last but not least, a quick DDG search shows dozens of free and open source forum/comments software. The effort to put up this software never has been lower in history.
Wondercool,
I think you misread me. I don’t have a problem with change in general. However that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate regressions sometimes.
Oh there’s no doubt about it, web development is shifting from custom web development to wordpress development. I don’t think anyone working in the industry can miss this trend unless they’re extremely isolated from small and medium “main street’ businesses. Some people may like it, other’s don’t.
It doesn’t really negate what I’ve said. I’ve found wordpress has drastically changed the nature of web development work in ways I don’t like. Rather than using my own programming skills to solve challenging problems, which is work that I enjoy, it’s become search for a plugin and hack it as necessary. It has essentially eliminated the creation work I enjoy most with the maintenance work I enjoy least. Worse yet, it’s maintaining other people’s code that’s often of dubious quality. Furthermore functions are generally crammed into a generic but inefficient wordpress database design. For someone who’s always taken pride in writing efficient code and databases, it’s painful to sign off on code that objectively isn’t. It is what it is though. I understand that it’s motivated by financial pressure to reduce costs.
It is the majority that complains before they get used to the changes though. (if the changes are any good that is).
Hey,
does anyone else observed Firefox problems with Facebook? It`s mega slow. It open messenger windows very long, many times it has problems with loading photos or older posts… I`ve serched mozilla forums, but anserws were: “it`s fast, must be you”. The situation, however, is that I`ve more than 100 PCs with Windows 8.1, 10, 11 and Ubuntu and I`ve the same situation at many of them (maybe on all, but not everyone tell me that they have problem – even if they do). So I`m very close to leave Firefox, but I don`t feel good with this. Users from marketing that use Facebook very intensive already are on Edge and Chrome.
No – clearing cache and cookies don`t help.
Facebook in general is dirt slow. They are using complicated GraphQL queries for loading the data and these queries often take forever to complete. Secondary problem is that their content delivery servers seem to be very slow — at least for me here in Thailand. The first problem affects the UI being very slow and both problems affect e.g. photos not loading.
But, I have to say, I also have constant problems with Firefox on Google. The image search sometimes doesn’t work because probably some JS failed to load or execute or was buggy. This could be intentional from Google’s side as Google is known to be crippling Firefox on their services, but it is still very bad for Firefox to have these bugs that allows Google to exploit them.
Yes, Facebook is heavy, but other browsers (Brave, Edge, Chrome) work without problems
Marshal Jim Raynor,
Sometimes users assume the fault is with the browser when in fact it’s the website intentionally or unintentionally degrading the experience. The IRS for example literally breaks login functions on FF based on the user agent string. Using a fake chromium or edge string fixes the error. This is 100% the IRS’s fault, but in practice users will assume it’s the browser. even though it’s the website’s fault.
I don’t have a facebook account so I’m not able to test it for you, but unless you track down the root cause we won’t know whether facebook or mozilla are to blame for your problem. Even if turns out that it’s facebook’s fault, facebook may not care about FF. Like sj87 said, it’s not good for FF even if the real cause is not their fault.
It sounds like more data is needed. I’m not suggesting normal users should ever have to do this since it’s facebook’s job, but if you really want to dig into it you can use the “Network” and “Performance” features located in FF developer tools. These provide a lot of insight into the source of bottlenecks.
I’m OK with most of the GUI changes, but it really concerns me that the compact mode is deprecated and must be enabled in about:config. I REALLY dislike the modern trend of sparse UIs with oversized controls and tons of whitespace between everything.
In the past I used Netscape, and then the series of Mozilla-branded browsers befor they became branded as Firefox, and during that time it was curious to see how changes would be made to the UI, and in some cases, how they would be rolled back. These days I run 2 versions of Firefox side by side. The old one – FF52 plus extensions to mimic FF1 – is is far and away the one that gets used the most because it is much more functional than whatever the latest version of FF gets dumped on my machine. Never mind that the older FF likely has security holes and increasingly doesn’t work with the latest whiz-bang websites, the new one is just so painful. The adage that newer is better and the only reason that people don’t like it is because they are resistant to change is utter nonsense. If you think newer is better, prove it. I have yet to find a single element of the new UI to be superior to the old.
Beautiful orange buttons!