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Firefox 29: Redesign
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 29 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. This is a massive release: Firefox Sync has been revamped and is now powered by Firefox Accounts, there's a new customization mode, and the company's major user interface overhaul Australis has finally arrived. 'The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster. It’s easy to see what tab you’re currently visiting and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when you’re not using them. The Firefox menu has moved to the right corner of the toolbar and puts all your browser controls in one place. The menu includes a “Customize” tool that transforms Firefox into a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature, service or add-on.' Here are the full release notes and a demo video."
Firefox becomes less usable and less configurable with each release. Might as well use Chrome at this point, it's virtually indistinguishable.
For those that want the old GUI back: Classic Theme Restorer.
You can search in the address bar. I do it all the time. No special add-ons needed either. It will search your default search engine very similar to Chrome. Why they have an additional search bar I don't really know. I never use it because I don't need to.
These: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=13350353&sid=cee01d7621130bd32543a5154b4419c9#p13350353
How about a status bar? :)
Seriously, UX folks, just stop.
Your profession's insistence on itself has destroyed Digg, Flickr, Yahoo's message boards, Yahoo's email interface, Slashdot, Firefox, GNOME, and even Windows 8.
Your profession is a cancer upon this industry worse than marketing.
Stop redecorating my desktop. If I wanted a browser that looks like Chrome, I would install Chrome. If I wanted a browser that looks like it's meant to be used on a touch screen (just where did that menu of icons come from...), I would use a tablet. This is my NON-TOUCH DESKTOP you're ruining.
Why does everybody seem hellbent on killing the traditional desktop? Are you bored? Running out of bugs to fix?
Stop moving things around! Every time you do that, I lose something that I've become accustomed to for no good reason at all. That's like moving a table a couple of inches, making me bump into it for a couple weeks, and then you change it some more. Or changing the height of the stair steps. Don't do that. It's at best irritating.
I am seriously fed up with this shit.
The tabs are sleek and smooth to help you navigate the Web faster.
Well that's a fucking relief. I've been slogging awa with these slightly squarer tabs for months and my productivity has been in the toilet as a result.
Seriously, do they have any actual metrics that the new tabs actually help anyone "navigate the web faster" ?
Itâ(TM)s easy to see what tab youâ(TM)re currently visiting
It was already easy.
and the other tabs fade into the background to be less of a distraction when youâ(TM)re not using them.
Tweaking the relative brightness between current and other tabs hardly counts as revolutionary. I'm indifferent at best.
The Firefox menu has moved to the right corner of the toolbar and puts all your browser controls in one place.
I get how this different, but how is this, in any way 'better'?
I can't wait for this to get into cars. Who doesn't want a perfectly empty dashboard with all the controls crammed into the right corner.
In all seriousness, whoop-dee-doo so they moved the top left menu to the top right, but now its got that newish 3 bar icon which has come to mean "we stuck the menu here".
I guess people who heretofore have only ever used a twitter app will will finally be able to find the firefox menu that had been eluding them, hidden away in the top left.
The menu includes a âoeCustomizeâ tool that transforms Firefox into a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature, service or add-on.'
All it needs is to say "Don't Panic!" in large friendly letters.
According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?
The video is deliberately misleading and the claim of "a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature" is a complete lie.
A few examples:
Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. First, they removed the menu item a while back. No problem, I can just go into about:config and change it. But just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't enough. With Australis, even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Firefox says: Fuck You. You're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not.
There are only 2 toolbars - Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension doesn't work because there's no place to put it. Firefox says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You. Sure there's probably some hidden fiddling you can do to work around the problem, but that just proves my point -- A user should not have to spend copious amounts of effort just to restore the standard and expected UI.
In Australis the Back and Forward buttons are now glued to the URL Bar, so you can't arrange your buttons any way you like. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is glued to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved, and the Stop Button is gone completely. Want text labels with your buttons? Firefox says: Fuck you.
There's a lot more, but I give up. If I wanted a browser with a lousy UI that can't be changed, I would use Internet Explorer or Chrome.
Just as I feared -- Firefox has joined the growing list of applications that can never be updated because the new version sucks.
you're just not ready for a future dominated by retards.
but resistance is futile. you will be UXed.
Yet not one "feature" gives me what I really want, the ability to leave my UI the same while upgrading all the "under the hood features" and security fixes.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Can't wait for Cinnafox and FireMate forks! Why do design guys always want to follow everyone else? For a while, everyone made a car that looked like a Honda. And that helped Honda. Suddenly these new cars come out that do not look like Honda and they do very well. Now it is Follow the Chrome. Guess what? If people want a browser to look like Chrome, they will download... (Wait for it) Fucking Chrome! This UI fascination with playing "Hide the Menus" is not appreciated. And much like the infamous "Hide the print button" Microsoft played with the original Office ribbon, guess what is back?
You might like the Classic Theme Restorer addon. Tabs back down, multiple bars, back/forward separated and arbitrarily movable, reload next to them, addon bar back at the bottom, and text labels on everything.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Two things:
1) So, Firefox et al haven't "solved" a damned thing, they've just assumed that RAM is cheap and plentiful? I hope nobody is taking credit for that bullshit reasoning.
2) It's my fucking memory, and I may or may not be using it for other things. I've got 8GB on my machine, and every day or so I need to shut down Firefox to reclaim the memory it's been leaking. Firefox starts at around 300MB of RAM, and grows to 1GB if I let it.
Oh, and 3), go fuck yourself.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And that's exactly what it is, the dumbing down, making the Internet a TV set.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not a UI/UX designer so I have to ask, why have designers hidden these basic menus in most browsers these days? Is it because they want their browser to be "cleaner" by default? For me the 20 or so pixels that are saved by hiding the menu bar isn't worth the inconvenience of always having to turn these menus back on. I can't recall anyone I know mentioning how they hate the file menu and wish it were hidden by default on a PC.
If they actually cared what users did with it we would never have had, KDE 4, Unity, Gnome Shell, Windows 8, and so on... They simply don't care how you use it. They are alone in their echo chamber looking at the new shiny, going "Ohh... We should do that." Then they wonder why they are suddenly abandon and running out of money. http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
I actually love the lack of status bar
And until recently people like you could simply turn it off, while people like me could turn it on.
This seemed to be working fine for both of us. What was improved by changing this status quo?
According to the video... great, well, I just updated and tried it. Turns out my tabs now have a dark grey background with black text which is completely and utterly unreadable. I managed to get my title and menu bar back, but my status bar appears to have permanently fucked off. I'd like to imagine given that we have a great big ad here on Slashdot about how awesomely customisable it is that I can do something about the horrendously shit dark grey background that is too close to the black of the tab text, but I'll be damned if I can see any option whatsoever to actually do that.
But here's a better question, why rather than a browser update working for me, making things better, does it instead mean I have to dick around figuring out how to make it work like it's always worked and like I want it to work? Why do I have to fear updates wondering what the fuck they've broken now, or what the hell I'm going to have to get used to this time?
> It's easy to see what tab you're currently visiting
> and the other tabs fade into the background to be
> less of a distraction when you're not using them.
I swear, if I ever meet a guy in a bar and he says he's on the UX team at Mozilla, I'm going to punch him in the dick as hard as I can. Now that all the background tabs are a mushy mass of grey, it is HARDER to tell them apart and jump to the one you want next. WHY DO YOU THINK TABS EXIST?!?!?
"when you're not using them" -- do you know what constitutes USING tabs? FINDING THEM AND CLICKING ON THEM.
Gee assholes, why don't you just put all my tabs behind that bullshit menu icon in the top right? That's be SUPER clean and easy-to-use! Out of sight, but right there when you need them! >:-|
If I wanted to know the title of the page I'M LOOKING AT RIGHT NOW -- not usually needed because I'M LOOKING AT IT RIGHT NOW -- I can glance at the title bar OH WHOOPS WAIT THAT'S FUCKING GONE TOO. Fucking retards.
Yes, I got the fucking extension to un-fuck-up the theme, but I shouldn't have to do this all the time.
Now, if they actually FIXED the sync, so you can just log in and not jump through the bullshit hoops of having a DIFFERENT instance of it open so you can type in the stupid PIN (WTF are you supposed to do if you want to sync two non-portable computers in different places?), *THAT* will be some progress.
For everything else, click here and tell them how much they suck.
And finally, a note to ALL browser makers: "View" -> "Source" should be a top-level menu, not buried behind some "developer tools" bullshit. FF, Safari, Chrome -- you're all guilty. "View source" is what made the web great. It SHOULD be easy to get at.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Yes. This addon was specifically developed for FF29 to deal with the new GUI.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
There is a way to get FF to stop using that memory. Go get a screwdriver, open your machine, then remove one of the RAM chips. Put the RAM in your desk drawer and reboot the machine. That memory is now guaranteed to be unused.
The developers could not sleep because you changed the defaults and the great UI they designed.
Now they can sleep well without nightmares of users configuring the software to their needs.
I love Firefox and have used it for years. I've put up with all the updates and changes and ridiculous behaviour since they started this rapid development cycle.
There's been some improvements. But every couple of releases my plugins break because they've removed some functionality or changed something. I can put up with that; software changes and needs maintenance.
This is the first upgrade I've done where my interface has been changed this significantly.
The Add-on bar is gone. Can't replace it without an extension. I have (well, had) tools in that I used daily.
Tabs now on top. Can't move them back to the bottom. Here's a two year old Bugzilla filled with people pleading that it remain an option.
There appears to be extensions to fix all this. But what's the fucking point any more? I'm sick of fighting to keep Firefox looking and working like Firefox if all they're going to do is take away the things that I actually use it for. It's just too much effort.
Mozilla, you used to be a leader. Now you're a follower. I know so few people that are still using Firefox - most people I talk to are surprised that I don't use Chrome - why are you going out of your way to alienate those of us that are left?
What we need are window managers that handle the "tabbing" natively. This whole thing with every application having to implement its own non-standard tab system is completely stupid. Not only will it simplify applications, but they'll also all be the same. Right now the way tabs works is equivalent to every application using a different window decorator with the minimize/close buttons in random places.
For a traditional UI in Mozilla plus all the other goodies you miss, Look no further
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I forgot to mention Pale Moon, an interesting version of Firefox. It has adult supervision! What! Where did they find an adult?
Two examples: In Firefox the "Find in page" field is on the left and the "Highlight All" and "Match Case" buttons are on the right. In Pale Moon they are together so that you immediately see if something is chosen from a former search.
Pale Moon has a 64-bit version. Firefox doesn't. The 64-bit Pale Moon uses the Firefox add-ons; no problem there except with some unusual add-ons.
Pale Moon is completely independent. Pale Moon is in no way associated with Mozilla Foundation.
There is no such thing as a UX professional. They're all idiots. OMG, make it orange!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am old enough to remember when UI's were very good. text on green screen terminal that were made to do exactly what was needed and were as simple as possible. Then computers got more powerful and people started designing GUIs that did in fact suck because the keyboard functions people had learned no longer worked or worked differently. Everything was quirky and ran very slow. Then hardware caught up and design got much better. Then web apps started to take off and the UIs sucked because of limited browser features and rookie web developers. Then programming tools and browser features improved and "web 2.0" UIs took hold and they got much better. Most of this evolution in design was driven to create the "next big thing", to wow users into wanting your design.
Now we are in a stagnant period where no new ground breaking PC technology has come along for a while. Tablets and smartphones took off so they appear to be getting all the attention. Designers and developers hungry to be on the verge of the next big thing are focusing on tablets and copying the big players like Google and Apple. At these companies design decisions are being made based on revenue streams rather than testing and user feedback. How do we make our product maintain it's branding? How to we guide the user into our revenue stream? It is no longer about what the users want tor need it is about forcing users into a tranche that can be exploited.
With all respect, it didn't really have other uses anymore,
Thats sort of buying a van, and then having the dealer gradually remove all the doors and windows from a van and then declaring that you don't need all that cargo space either because it doesn't have any uses since you can't get to it, and then removing the removing the space too leaving you with a nice little 2 seater smart car.
But the whole reason I bought this car in the first place is because I wanted a VAN. Doors, windows, cargo space.
There are a LOT of things you could do with a status bar. You could display status... like WHAT THE FUCK IS THE BROWSER IS DOING RIGHT NOW now aka "STATUS"? I mean sure there is a spinning green circle in the tab icon space and that's all we get for feedback?
Download speed, how many items are in the download manager queue, dns look ups, time outs, server errors, do I have internet access, page validation status, plugins starting up, encryption characteristics, extensions / addon messages, what is it doing with cookies... I can imagine more things to do with the status bar then will FIT in 5 status bars. Do I want or need all of those all the time? Hell no... but I'm using firefox because I want more advanced feedback than a spinning circle.
So, the new FF finally implemented a more userfriendly sync functionality. Apparently less than 1% of its users was using the old (but very secure system). The new sync system is (unsurprisingly) similar to Chrome's sync system: you create an account, when you log in your info is encrypted based on your account password and uploaded to Mozilla's servers.
What I cannot get my head around is that Mozilla claims they cannot access your data (as they don't know your password) but that they are able to reset a lost password... how can that be a secure system??
Also, in the new version it's no longer possible to use a master password... if you want to use sync all your password will be in plaintext (well, obfuscated) in FF's password file. Any malicious or vulnerable application can get access to ALL your passwords. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=995268
Doesn't sound like an improvement to me...