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Firefox 57 Will Hide Search Bar and Use a Uni-Bar Approach, Like Chrome (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Mozilla will drop an iconic section of its UI -- the search bar -- and will use one singular input bar atop the browser, similar to the approach of most Chromium browsers. This change will go live in Firefox 57, scheduled for release on November 14, and will be part of Photon -- the codename used to describe Firefox's new user interface (UI) -- also scheduled for a public release in v57. Mozilla engineers aren't removing the search bar altogether, but Firefox will hide this UI element by default. Users can still re-enable it by going to "Preferences -> Search -> Search Bar" and choosing the second option. The current Firefox search bar is redundant since most of its features can be performed by the URL address bar.
Unless Firefox 57 does something better than Chrome why use Firefox?
Chrome.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I only want to send a a query to a search engine.
Mozilla keeps giving me more reasons to abandon Firefox.
Can we stop this, just post an article once and for all, that 'zilla is turning Firefox into Chrome-by-Mozilla (you know, exact same look, but with an html-engine that sucks (compared to blink), killing all addons in the process to suck even more).
Posted with Firefox ESR - 'til i find time to migrate to Pale moon.
... but we polished that sieve to a nice chrome finish.
I'm not happy that Firefox has been trying to morph into Chrome, but I don't care about the search bar.
The first time I use a browser on a new installation (usually Konqueror or Firefox) one of the first things I do is remove the search bar.
For me, a search engine is still a website.
Stop removing features and start fixing the bugs and improving performance, Mozilla. You might still have a chance against Google if you kicked out your UX team and just started doing some basic engineering. The browser is not meant to be any playground where UI elements are moved and changed around. Browser should be an application which stays off the way and just shows the web pages efficiently. But of course according to UX people, eg. the search bar is a distracting element which is way too hard for their stupid users to understand so it must be removed. Surprisingly the Pocket, reader mode and other useless buttons are there to stay just in case somebody clicks them by mistake.
why bother using firefox.
That stupid search bar is archaic and literally the first thing I remove when I install FF. With things like search bangs in DDG, there's just no reason to have it.
How many people work there? On the browser, programming and the UI? Is there a list, a register, a "phone book" of sorts, to see their names? At least the "managers", the people who decide the way forward for firefox, the "firefox management team" basically.
Do these people have a name or are they anonymous? Mozilla is a non-profit after all, I think.
that so fucking annoying and it's not like our PC monitors are getting smaller and screen real estate are at a premium.
Just give us a browser that doesn't spy on us and is stable. This was the Firefox mantra 14 years ago and before that they cared about user control.
What the actual fuck has happened to software?! These last few decades have shown that they don't care about performance, privacy, or anything but the bottom line for their own profits. Fuck that! And fuck you too!
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Dear Mozilla,
I'm the only person I know that still uses Firefox. Are you trying to make me give it up, too?
-One of the last people on earth that still uses Firefox
I keep hearing about things Mozilla is doing that is upsetting much of is key Firefox User base (I was an early early adopter and back then a friend of the "tree"). At one point Mozilla was an open company that listened and talked to its key users. Now they can say they are open source all they want, but that does not mean they are open to other ideas. Not even sure they are even open to the ides that made them popular.
As a long time Firefox user I want key Mozilla staff to come out and truly explain their logic and clearly answer some of the very logical and specific concerns that have been brought up. Mozilla staff (not marking) need to step up and listen and reconsider some steps. I know the search bard can be turned back on, but all in all just seems like will be getting a Chrome by Mozilla instead of Firefox by Knowledgeable Users.
Some people won't ever go out of their way to use different web browser. They will use Internet Explorer, Edge, Safari, or whatever was on the desktop at the beginning. So the fight is really to get the people that actually make choices and have some knowledge about choices.
This is it. With every shitty update I kept using firefox because 'FOSS'. Fuck 'FOSS' if it wants to be worse than internet explorer.
I want functionality because I'm not a 90 year old grandma; I stayed with firefox because it used to respect my intelligence; it's not doing that any more.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
With the search box you can click the spyglass and select at search time from any enabled search engine. This is handy to search directly within wikipedia or so.
Is that ability still included with the unified field?
Is there any other functionality lost? Any cases that are now ambiguous?
Anything else I type into the URL and expect Firefox to handle it correctly: expand keyword bookmarks, just load URLs and hand everything else over to the default search engine. I kinda like how Seamonkey handled this: Whatever you typed into the URL bar, the bottom "autocomplete" option was to search for the thing you entered. A quick cursor up and return was all it took to tell the browser: No, don't go there, search for it. If they can bring that back, it would be an actual step forward. I remember explaining how a separate search bar was a superfluous waste of space.
My Firefox hasn't had a dedicated search box for several years now. And why should it?
Firefox is heading toward a single gesture user interface
A raised middle finger.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Well that's where you're wrong bitch!
Firefox 57 won't be a thing on my computers.
No, it's not redundant. The search bar/URL address bar split permits some level of privacy as what's entered on the URL bar isn't sent to a search engine, and what's placed in the search bar is, in real time.
That's a significant difference, significant enough that it absolutely should be removed from the Slashdot summary, because the summary re-enforces the idea that getting rid of it is OK because "they're the same" when they're not.
Mozilla just has to fuck up tabs now and I'll switch to Chrome. I cannot believe the level of contempt these idiots have for their own users - if you're trying to compete with another browser, you don't build a clone of it, especially when that means ditching every feature that makes your browser better, because the only time you can compete when building clones of rival products is on price, and Chrome is already free.
In practice, making Firefox a clone of Chrome is giving users of Firefox the middle finger, not extending an invite to those who prefer Chrome already.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I hope they will also fix search from that bar, then. Once upon a time, typing stuff into that bar did a search with your default search engine. Later, I believe sometime well after they implemented the separate search field, the address bar searches started to use the currently selected engine (in the search field) instead of your default. This is completely, absolutely, and in all other ways idiotic, and only a complete numbfuck could have thought it up. If I wanted to search with my currently selected search engine, I would type into the search field, not the address bar.
I'd really like to know who made that decision, because I want to know what the face of stupidity looks like.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If we wanted to use something like Chrome, we would use Chrome. This desire to copy Chrome is going to kill Firefox.
It seems, that you are mixing up search engines with search bars...
Search engine might be a website, BUT search bar, that prepares search link to browser IS NOT. It is still quicker to get search results by entering query in search bar, than LOADING websites and then entering query. And if you are doing multi-search across diifferent engines, then it is at least 3 times as fast by doing it from search bar.
If you have no experience of using search bars, why would you even bother to comment about them...
My preference would be for FF devs to focus on increasing speed, stability and standards compliance instead of adding new features, unless the community indicates they really want a particular feature (or, possibly, if a given feature is trivially easy to implement).
I mostly want my browser to not crash, to render pages and perform DOM-manipulation correctly, and to do everything as quickly as possible.
On its face this isn't much, but taken in context of the last decade it seems like another step into the grave. Seems astounding, but the guys at the top of Mozilla making the design direction / decisions just seem to want to duplicate Chrome. Yeah, good idea...Once you do that, why use Firefox (to the normal uninformed user)? And you keep driving off your user base (like has been happening the last decade?). Duplicating Chrome in structure and UI, is not a good path.
I wish the guys in charge of Vivaldi could take over the jobs of the Mozilla guys making design decisions...then Firefox might have a chance to exist long term,....Firefox marketshare is almost destroyed, yet they keep trucking towards a duplicate of Chrome like its a good idea. I'm expecting marketshare to eventually get down low enough and they announce they're going to use the Chrome (or good lord Safari) engine for cost reasons...that'll be the true end.
Mozilla, you are losing ground so you decided to lure users by providing equal or less features than the competitors?
At least the search in address bar is configurable. Personally I prefer Chrome's approach but I think that Firefox should make the old separate search bar be the default.
If Firefox wants to position itself as an alternative to Chrome, it should try to be an alternative to Chrome and that means that it would have to be different, it has to be its own thing.
Otherwise Chrome Users will just see it as a copy - an inferior copy - to Chrome and they will go back to the "real thing".
Google chose to unify the search and address bar so as to make word or misspelled URL lead to a Google search. But that is not always what the user intended.
If Mozilla wants to provide a search as a backup, they should put a pre-filled search form in the "Server not found" message page so that a search could be done from there with a single click.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I usually use the URL bar for search anyways. This will free up a bit of space for maybe a few icons. I'm a bit surprised to find that people are seeing performance issues with FF these days. Runs fine on my systems.
I'm not 100% sure but I guess you want to have a look at
Lowest common denominator is not the way to gain market share when there is already a dominant normalfag product.
You can't complete for total market share, but you can hold a niche which will be an unassailable strong-hold because the mass market product is undesirable precisely because it is mass market.
Normalfags will not switch back to Firefox, but power users will bail, greatly fragmenting the market and making it impossible to build even one decent browser that isn't horribly out of date.
Have you ever actually looked at Firefox's privacy policy?!
Anybody who claims that Firefox protects their privacy probably hasn't actually looked at Firefox's privacy policy.
Below are some excerpts from the Firefox privacy policy that is dated July 31, 2017.
Be sure to notice the type of information being collected and possibly even transmitted to third parties (including Google, some "Leanplum" company, a "mobile analytics vendor", and "certain developers"). We see terms like:
Here are the excerpts:
Something Something Bad
Mozilla: do what you can to arrest your declining market share! Hint: it's not continued attempts at emulating Chrome.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I can kind of sympathize with the removal of the status bar and menu bar, but only for people stuck on rubbish 1280x720 and 1366x768 screens... Horizontal screen real estate is not what's at a premium here, seriously. Why not just sell it off to Google at this point, so they can gut it and finish butchering it?
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
for memory training. I have dozens of search engines installed, now I'm supposed to distinguish them by icon alone. Of course some of them have the same icons or no icon at all. Thank you Mozilla, you've outdone yourselves.
It has been right under your noses for almost 20 years now. Three guesses what it is... I really don't understand all the complaining.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Also, does the Apple iCloud web site support Chrome. I seem to recall that it didn't (as in, they refuse to supply web content to it. They do the same with Palemoon, even when it claims to be Firefox). I hate that Apple is forcing me to use particular browsers, Once Mozilla finished f'ing up Firefox, I may have to either switch to a Mac or move my calendars/contacts/etc to Google. Neither seems like an appealing solution.
Recently there was a pathetic debacle where the Pale Moon lead developer decided to blacklist the AdNauseam extension, mainly for personal ideological reasons.
When confronted by the community, Pale Moon's users were effectively told to fuck off. When it became very clear that the Pale Moon users were not happy about this unwanted change, the discussion topic was locked, and the users were effectively told to fuck of and die.
This is the same sort of bullshit that Firefox was pulling on its users, forcing unwanted changes on them. This is the same kind of behavior that drove many of these victims to Pale Moon to begin with.
It should be up to users whether or not they want to use an extension like AdNauseum.
I will never use Pale Moon again after that debacle. It's the kind of incident that can't be excused.
Chrome will n-e-v-e-r support an in-browser FTP capability. So I am with Firefox forever, as long as it supports such features as FireFTP! I maintain websites, and it is such an incredibly easy tool to use, no extra steps, just two clicks and I'm connected via ftp to any of my websites. I use Chrome sometimes, but Firefox is my BFF because of FireFTP!
I would use chrome. That's why I use FireFox. Stop the @#!\?$^& chromifacation!!!
Yep, the autocomplete for searches should be completely separate from the autocomplete for URLs.
Anybody who thinks differently is an idiot.
No sig today...
Pale moon tries, but we need a browser that gives everything Slashdot needs. Then we can stop complaining about Firefox and let it wallow in the SystemD and Pulseaudio filth that it created.
'These two things don't belong together!'
Neeahh!
-Scarry Terry
Good thing I gave up on both of them long ago.
I am a Firefox beta user who was selected to participate in the trial of the uni-bar and I actually like it. I did not expect to, though. I had always hated that about Chrome (one of the reasons I don't use Chrome), but it works pretty well. I like being able to search my URL history, my search history, etc, all right there from one spot. It puts the "autosuggest" completions from your default search engine in the "right" spot -- not too high and not too low.
Overall, though I am usually a "get off my lawn" person w.r.t Firefox, I am okay with this change!
Will
remove nospam. to email!
not Firefox. Failing that, Chromium or even Chrome itself.
Actually, I do have Ice Dragon installed. Mostly as a backup for the - hopefully nonexistent - day PaleMoon dies. I've found Firefox unusable for both technical and UI reasons for years.
Thanks for the reminder to donate to PaleMoon!
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
This is much less of a problem than other firefox developments. The browser asked some time ago (only on one of my Ubuntu machines) whether to enable auto-completion in the URL bar. I said no -- none of anyones business which URLs I go to directly. In the search bar it goes to Google or DuckDuckGo directly anyway, no harm in enabling auto-complete. Now I have to decide whether to send all my URLs to my search provider while typing, or not get suggestions. Oh well.
The second issue is with visiting local servers in the configured search domain. E.g. say my desktop has configured search domain example.com, and I want to visit foo.example.com. I could usually type just foo in the address bar, and it would take me to foo.example.com. Now in my experience, this is already hit and miss, depending on which browser I have and whether I have visited before. Just hope that now when I go to "boston", it takes it to my server boston, not a useless page of search results. On the other hand, how would it know what I wanted...
The good thing is that we get to see more of the URL. This is almost worth the problems right there. URLs can give lots of info, like better descriptions for clickbait articles, signs of scams, bugs, etc
I use FF at home and Chrome at work. I like FF's traditional menu (you know, File, Edit...) at the top, especially "Bookmarks" which I access regularly.
In general, UI designers seem to be hipsters and fancy themselves as artists (or "ahhtists"), but they're really part of the herd trying to stay atop of the trends. But that doesn't necessarily translate into more usable products, it just makes them sleeker or whatever.
Going back months, I've made several attempts to get Firefox devs to put together some stats they gathered through telemetry, to tell me how many Firefox users out of the total, are running plugins that will become unusable once FF 57 is released. They will fob you off with every manageresque excuse possible, to avoid giving out this one single stat - in a way which displays clear contempt for the request, and for the general userbase of Firefox. The public need to directly engage through official Firefox communication channels, and make themselves heard, in large numbers - and demand (extremely loudly) proper public engagement and transparency - and for an actual primary voice/influence, on the future direction of Firefox (not just a secondary/tertiary "we'll consider what you say (but ignore you completely)" voice).
The corporate LAN I have at work has an internal DNS where every internal site is a single word like 'hr' or 'training' or 'whatever.' The URL keywords feature has to be turned off so that when I type 'hr' to get to the HR page, it doesn't search for 'hr' on the open internet or try to go to 'www.hr.com.' Didn't think this one through, did they?
I dislike the unibar in Chrome. I often want to check out the validity or trustworthiness of a site before connecting to it. One work around that I've found in Chrome is to type the URL into the bar followed by a space. Though it likely depends what your default search engine is, it usually pops up an option to search for the address. DuckDuckGo has that option already available without needing to type a space.
I don't care as long as it's still possible to disable the auto search. I never use the search bar and prefer it to be hidden so I can see more of the urls
They need to fix the issue of the browser being absolutely unusable. Takes 30+ seconds to start then says "Not Responding" when you click on it. So sad what's become of my favorite browser.
You can pry my gopher:// protocol from my cold head hands!
What I would not give for a URL bar that only went to hosts actually entered into URL bar and NOTHING more.
One that did not try and autocomplete hosts beyond the hosts DNS local domains list. One that never under any circumstance sends queries to search engines. I mean what's the point of having a separate search field if the system is going to ignore the original intent of the URL bar?
The other day I was screwing with a browser I don't remember which one... I entered a local hostname http://myserver/ even prefixed with http and the piece of shit went and did a Google search. I'm just so tired of the bullshit and systems with all kinds of heuristics to try and read minds and or rake in a few more $$$ on search traffic that it's impossible to predict what will occur. Oh http://mysite/ happens to be down...surprise this means browser should hit up http://mysite.com/ because??? or do a google search for term "mysite"....because? It assumes? What? Why?
Is it really that hard...that difficult...that outrageous of a request to have URL bar go to what was actually entered and a search bar run searches?
If I mean to paste a URL into the URL bar but paste some text by mistake, that gets leaked to whatever my default search provider is. I've never been a fan of this approach.
Congratulations on fucking up a once great product, as you once did with Crashscape. Die now please.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
I'm on WinXP so I can't use v57. Anyway, I set the search bar to Wikipedia. Also, I organise my bookmarks with tags. For tags, I use common English words. So when searching in a unified bar, I will get a mixture of bookmarks, history, and Wikipedia entries. Lovely.
I know the old search bar can be re-enabled, but it doesn't sound promising. I think they will kill it in a later version.
"...since most of its features can be performed by the URL address bar."
Does that include the feature of being able to quickly go in and rip out Yahoo (default) and Bing as search providers? Otherwise they're just making this necessary first step an even bigger PITA than it already is.
You know, maybe if Firefox wants to gain its users back it should stop alienating them by giving them a royal "fuck you" as it continues its downhill spiral to be as shitty as Chrome is. If I wanted to use something that looked and behaved like Chrome, I'd fucking use Chrome already.
Really. I've been using it for ages. But starting with the 55 release it just sucked. At least on Mac. I think it might work sufficiently well on Windows 7/64bit for now (I'm using that one at work, but it starts to suck, too), but really, I don't trust on that -- on my Mac, it's plainly ... crap. Some popular extensions I've got accustomed to no longer work, I've lost my "Favorites" toolbar, and I've just realized that the (abandoned/old/outdated/whatever) plugin API isn't working anymore (Java?!? Who cares?), so I can't use Firefox for some work-essential tasks. WTF? Why should I still use a browser that's incompatible with virtually everything?
I've switched to Chrome two weeks ago. No regrets. At all. Heck, even Safari is better than this pile of ... whatever.
Ok, I knew. In my mind the most useless piece of real estate in the window. It works just fine to use the address bar as a search field. The dedicated search area is the first thing I remove on a new install.
Part of the reason of switching to webextensions is to get a massive performance boost while at the same time limiting the damage that plugins cause such as lockups and memory leaks.
At the cost of losing my data. Sometimes when reaching for Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab, I accidentally press the adjacent Ctrl+Q. This activates the Quit or Exit command, which closes all tabs in Firefox for Linux. When I reopen the browser and click Restore Previous Session, the tabs come back, but data entered into unsubmitted forms is lost. I haven't tried it for every site in existence, but it never restores a comment form in a Slashdot D2 page correctly.
In the old days of Jetpack extensions, the Keybinder extension was useful for disabling Ctrl+Q. But Keybinder will not be ported to WebExtensions, and the comparable WebExtension Disable Ctrl-Q and Cmd-Q doesn't work in Linux because of bug 1325692, which will not be fixed in time for Firefox 57.
I type in LAN IP addresses all the time. By default in Chrome is just works as expected.
I expect doing so in Chrome to send the LAN IP address to Google. I expect this but do not desire this.
If you have an intranet, with a local DNS server, you won't be able to access your intranet, because your URLs will all be exported for Google (or nearest equivalent scumbags) to do the lookup. They obviously do not have access to your private internet (unless you really have no security at all).
Of course, its Chrome's job to be evil, but it is not compulsory for Mozilla to copy them. The reason their market share is dwindling is not because they have not cloned Chrome, its because they keep removing features users want (or hiding them so users think they are removed).
If they do it, it will probably be the end of Firefox for good.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I can kind of sympathize with the removal of the status bar and menu bar, but only for people stuck on rubbish 1280x720 and 1366x768 screens
Or for people on laptops with 1920x1080 screens that have such a high pixel density (DPI) that the fonts need to be cranked up to the point where there's no more usable space than on a 1366x768 screen.
Like SeaMonkey, Palemoon, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So that was the last bit of uniqueness Firefox had going for it which who would even use? So Firefox will become the lookalike Chrome browser, which again few will want. Sadly Firefox is fighting more with Edge then Chrome.
who cares lol...
the main problem is dropping xul addon support.
that will kill firefox not this...
every release they remove features and make the browser more like chrome
firefox will die because it will be exactly like chrome, so everyone will use that.
Providing a URL and searching for a keyword are two distinctly different interactions. It's like putting the Print button into a Save dialog claiming that both are about preserving output. Mozilla needs to go back Firefox 3 and patch it up with only security and browser tech relevant changes, but leave the UI as it was. Aping Chrome is just that, aping Chrome. Rather sad now that the world direly needs a strong non-megacorp backed browser.
This is not satisfactory. KISS factor applies. Provide a good browser not a Cxxxxx clone, otherwise we just shift en-masse to Cxxxxx
Regards Eion MacDonald
They're completely rewriting their CSS engine which is probably more interesting than some of the visual side-effects.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-engine-quantum-css-aka-stylo/
That is probably coming out in November hence changes in their UI.
The current latest version of FireFTP won't run in PaleMoon.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fireftp/versions/?page=1#version-2.0.19.1-signed
Use version 2.0.19, in the meantime ...