Quite franky I am tired of these fucking rounded corners everywhere. The current design is fine. Already a bit too rounded. Just make quality of life and web compatibility improvements rather than change the look of the GUI.
Its just wasted space. Horrible design.
Bah just fix the browser first. Give a way to disable audio for given sites. Fix the regression that made it impossible to turn off JavaScript on a page that was already loaded. Give a way to edit bookmark URLs from the toolbar bookmark widget. Make about:processes show why “Firefox” (rather than a specific tab) sometimes gobbled the whole CPU. Etc etc.
A full redesign every 4 years really is insane. And for what? Is the usability really better? I just hope this also improves customization, because they keep breaking the ability to change browser colors.
Their biggest challenge is getting attention, because most users just use the default browser. A redesign brings them into the news, as can be seen above.
They’ve also broken the plugin API more times than I can remember. Wonder if they’ll do it again with this redesign.
Too many UX designers needing to justify their jobs leads to this. It also leads to less customisation options, since they also seem to take it as an insult when someone doesn’t like their “masterpiece” as is.
You need way more than designers to do a full UI redesign. And less customization is really just a product of engineering. It takes way longer to make something fast and customizable. So they choose fast.
I kinda like it. But yeah, I’d prefer them to focus more on catching up on features like HDR support, or newer CSS features like anchor positioning…
Very different personnel involved in those tasks…
But the same money
If you want specific tasks for designers, here are some:
- Expand and reorganize Preferences
- Add an actual page for history with dates and times, filter, grouping, etc.
- Add an actual page for bookmarks
- Add a profiles button to easily switch between them
All of these require intensive input from designers and are a net-positive improvement, as opposed to the 4th redesign of the exact same scope.
It’s wild to me how UI developers just can’t let things be. Certain elements are timeless and just work. Why do you feel you have to reinvent the wheel every few years?
UI redesigns are a marketing feature for paid products because you need to give people a reason to update. (See Microsoft Windows looking different with every new major version).
Mozilla sees Firefox as a paid product (even if it isn’t) and their marketing team decides for a redesign every few actual major releases (not the bogus major releases to get the release number higher fast).
To casual users, the sort likely to lap up Apple’s colourful new MacBook Neo or find Google’s Material You colour flourishes appealing, it’s the kind of change that could win over hearts and minds; a way to signal “I am like the others, don’t think me strange”.
This sounds pretentious as fuck.
I don’t like this style, floating and rounded corners. This is (customized) how my Firefox looks and I like it and I don’t want to change it:
Click for bigger image: https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/421786ef-64c5-4d21-8124-3968911fb041.png
Heavy tweaking of Firefox UI (fortunately
userChrome.cssanduser.jsare still available, even if hidden in undocumentedabout:configoptions), heavy tweaking of labwc, using a custom labwc theme, tweaked GTK theme.
Window resized to get it all in one readable screenshot.
Ah that’s a good one too. I like the tabs. After my postings, I did some changes since then. Will do some further adjustments to the tabs. Iike its taking the full height of the tab row. The main thing I changed is having only one Bookmark folder in Bookmarks Toolbar, and put it in the same line as the tabs as a menu.
nice theme! gotta share mine as well…
Ah it looks so clean and dense, love it. So much better than what is proposed to be changed into. At least we can make adjustments with custom CSS. Mine matches the system theme (from the operating system) BTW. :-)
looks like shit. can’t wait to have them fuck over my highly customized userchrome and having to make it again from scratch…
Mozilla can do whatever the fuck they want as long as it don’t break my CSS, also FUCK ROUND CORNER
Damn, that looks absurdly ugly and even more like a foreign object on the desktop.
I hope this usability nightmare can be completely disabled or toned down so the browser looks like a native program compared to the rest of my programs.
Atrocious.
If you want to try Firefox with a UI Redesign that doesn’t suck, try Zen BrowserZen browser with its constant animations and UI elements shifting around and fading in and out, and all the blurry surfaces is everything, but not Zen.
I am happy with Waterfox. Time will tell if this redesign comes to it.
I think it looks really good. The combination of the tab bar and the url bar is a nice touch.
