I like it, but I'm seeing some serious similarities to chrome. If I had not seen this announcement and I quickly glanced at those screenshots, I would not think it was Firefox.
yes but believe it or not, the new firefox UI/UX has been in the works for so long and chrome's development so quick that it seems like firefox was inspired by chrome when in fact that didn't happen
I'm a Firefox developer and I don't think this is true. As far as I know, most of the key elements of the Firefox 29 theme redesign emerged after the last major UI redesign (Firefox 4) was released in 2011.
I find a clean install of Firefox to be almost as fast as Chrome, and in some places more responsive - particularly when opening the browser. Chrome will get the basic UI up on the screen very fast but take a moment before you can interact with it, Firefox is usable the moment it is on screen, even though that time is slightly longer).
Chrome does have preloading of certain things which make loading some things faster although there are addons that can replicate that on Firefox.
These people behind Australis are brave, competent and passionate. It shows in the remarkable experience they've built. I am a nightly user and I got to see these changes land one at a time. Hugs and cheers:)
I am not trying to be snarky, but to me a lot of the new UI is "oh, they made it look more like Chrome". I am kind of surprised to hear the word "brave" to describe that.
There are a lot of people who initially did not like the curved tabs and other visual design changes (e.g., the bookmark star is no longer in the 'awesome bar'). It is IMO brave for the designers to take a stand for the users when redesigning a widely used product. I have the same feelings for the GNOME project.
> There are a lot of people who initially did not like ...
> ... take a stand for the user ...
These statements seem at odds. I'm all for change when there's a clear need for it, but when it's done just to keep up with Chrome's aesthetic, it can alienate an existing userbase. If I wanted Chrome, I'd be using Chrome. The reason I stuck with Firefox for so long was the configurability. However, now when a settings is removed or dumbed down the default stance on BugZilla is "just install an addon".
Very much agree with this comment. I'll be sticking to v28 for now and using the Classic Theme restorer to restore the lost features when I have to move up.
Sadly, this will become the fourth extension I run to restore features Firefox has removed.
You are not bringing anything to the table with remarks like that. You may not like the design, but many do. What was "fine" for you was "clunky" for many. Remember that Mozilla projects revolve around the community which you are free to join and make a difference. If you don't, at least don't flame people who worked their butts off to build something. Criticize work, not people.
Is the lack of a unified search/address bar a deliberate choice or the result of some weird IP/patent thing? Every time I switch back to Firefox, it trips me up. AFAIR, it's the only major browser that still does this, right?
Some users are skittish of Chrome's autocomplete since it could potentially send anything you type into the address bar to Google's servers. Mozilla also makes money from selling 'search box real estate' to different providers. So it's more discoverable when the search is in its own designated box.
It's also what some of us frickin' want. I like having a separate search bar, because I can easily control which engine I'm using, and I from the URLbar I can search my history/bookmarks without irrelevant auto-complete results junking it up.
There might be other reasons, but a big one is that having search and address bar in one box means that normal URLs you type into the address bar will get sent to the search engine for autocomplete by default. Since that's a major privacy violation, they're kept separate.
I've removed the search box myself. If DNS doesn't return anything or if what you type looks like a search query, it does a search anyway, so the only thing I'm missing is search autocomplete (there's an addon if you really want that anyway: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/).
The privacy reason honestly seems like a post-hoc justification... you can easily turn off auto search in Chrome. If you were really anal, you could do what IE does and actually _ask_ the user for permission before hitting the search engine. There is really no reason why the search bar has to be kept separate, other than user comfort. And that is not a bad thing: there is no need to start making up excuses for it.
Even if it's turned off you can leak information. Mis-type a local hostname and suddenly your secret URL is public to Google. I've done this more than a few times.
I disagree. When I type something into the search box, I'm explicitly saying "send this to the search provider". I'm more than happy for that box to auto-complete. However when I'm typing into the URL bar, I want different behaviour. That data should remain private.
When I'm saying is that I want both autocompleted search and a private URL bar.
Agreeing with bitsoda, so far as I'm aware the rationale is privacy protection -- either box can actually search, but having a box that automatically queries a search engine as soon as you start typing (rather than when you hit Enter) has privacy implications.
It's still a browser from the people who allowed a mob to push Brendan Eich out because he donated money to support a political cause that was and is not only legal but reflective of the views of a large minority of Americans. It's pretty, but I think I'll pass.
I believe exactly the opposite of this. I use Firefox in no small part due to ideological reasons (ie: I would use it even if it wasn't the best, just because I like the values they allege to stand for), and if they had let the CEO get a pass I would have literally uninstalled it and looked for something else.
im surprised people choose to use or not use firefox depending on the ceo.
the ceo doesnt take many decisions, the whole community does. some of them paid, and many unpaid.
by taking these - IMO - baseless decisions, you're only hurting the thousands of people putting their time, blood and tears without any commercial interest into firefox, not the ceo's you agree/disagree with.
remember that mozilla has no shareholders, the ceos dont get stock options, just a salary. its wholly owned by the mozilla foundation.
Wow, this storm in a teacup would be amusing if it wasn't so sad for a generally well-regarded outfit (Mozilla). They can't win - people with either your concerns or the opposite will dump Firefox.
Meanwhile both sides will continue to use Microsoft products, despite their history of extremely un-ethical business practises; and stand by while their country (pardon my assumption that they are USians) murders people in other countries with drones every day.
It would be nice to see outrage at outrageous things.
Why is it that anti-gay marriage supporters all can't get it through their heads that the man stepped down, and there's no evidence whatsoever Mozilla pressured him to do so? If you want to blame someone, blame the tech community at large, who find such views abhorrent and did the pressuring.
Also, choosing software based on political drama instead of technical merit is amusing.
> Also, choosing software based on political drama instead of technical merit is amusing.
Wish that Eich's vocal detractors had seen it that way, but then again, it's pretty clear that many of them didn't care the least bit about the software or open web side of things anyway. What would one have expected from people to whom Mozilla was only relevant as it touched their social agenda?
In any case, good for anyone who won't be following their example and will be supporting Mozilla in spite of what happened.
I agree, the inactive tabs are not very distinguishable or readable and starkly contrast the active tab's light grey when using a darker color theme on Windows 8.1. Everything else seems great so far, though.
Regarding incremental UI changes, I recall reading that Google staged Chrome's tab style and color redesigns over multiple releases, presumably to avoid upset users. I'm not sure whether to admire their concern for user confusion or to feel like the dupe of some magician's sleight of hand. :)
It is still frustrating that a bunch of plug-ins appear to have been disrupted because of removing the add-on/status bar, though. Not everything has moved to the new location automatically, and it's not immediately obvious how to get some of them back.
I develop a Firefox add-on. In our experience, the transition to Australis was pretty smooth. Our add-on bar icon was automatically moved to the toolbar without any changes on our part, although we ended up changing the icon to better match the Australis UI. The transition might not be perfect for all methods of overlaying the add-on bar, but I think the folks at Mozilla are doing the best they can.
I don't think Mozilla should be holding back functionality to avoid breaking extensions. If an add-on is actively maintained, then the developer will update it, and if the add-on is not actively maintained, then it's going to have to break someday.
I don't think Mozilla should be holding back functionality to avoid breaking extensions.
I respectfully disagree. Extensions are the USP for Firefox, and IMHO breaking compatibility should be considered a serious issue and not something to be done lightly. (See also: all the hate when they switched to doing six-weekly updates and it kept disabling extensions every time for months afterwards.)
In any case, there was no pressing need to remove the add-on/status bar. Arbitrary rearrangement of UIs is generally bad for usability. Ditto for major things like moving tabs (for anyone who isn't using an enhanced tab plug-in anyway) and the burger menu (which is now a tiny area right underneath the close window button, and appears to be completely inaccessible by keyboard).
I just installed JS Switch on Nightly and clicked the Menu(burger) icon, then Customize, and was able to drag the JS Switch button into my toolbar.
(This does not address that it's crappy that icons that were in the addon bar don't, say, automatically get put into the toolbar or trigger a message notifying you how to get them back or anything, but oh well. EDIT: According to another reply this may not be the case with all addons, seems like some automagically get moved.)
Some things seem to have moved automatically up to the toolbar. If that's happened, you'll now find them at the top-right of your window, between the search box and the burger menu.
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen with plug-ins that actually used the status bar for more comprehensive status information, such as the system you illustrated. You could check whether your (Burger)->Customize screen gives you anything you can dump on a toolbar somewhere as 'Osmose suggested, but since it appears you can only have one row of toolbar contents, the new model just seems to be broken for your purposes. :-(
Why have reverse tabs won? Has anyone done any usability test on them?
On OS X, with a space left for the hit area of only 10px tall, it's really hard to drag a window that uses them. For context, 10px is about half the cursor's height.
I can see a reason for them on Win/Linux, but I find them completely unfit for the Mac. I guess people just maximize the window and leave it at that.
On the other hand, I'm glad there's still a distinction between the search box and the address bar. The annoyance of omnibar mistaking a url for a search query and vice-versa, even admitting it's a rare event, is not worth the trouble to me. Besides, educating the user on such difference seems important to me.
I don't care where the tabs go by default, as long as we have an option to move them if we want. Unfortunately, as Mozilla are turning into google, they have decided choice is evil and bad.
I thought about it a bit and decided I prefer reverse tabs (tabs above the address bar, not below) because I see the address bar as part of the page I'm visiting - as I change tabs, the address and page display changes to, so having both of these together on the screen makes sense to me.
To me, as I read the brower window top-down, I have the firefox menu and minimise/maximise/close buttons -> the tabs -> the address bar and back/forward buttons. That follows the logic of application -> 'threads' within application -> status of that thread and forms the more logical tree from general to detailed in my mind.
That's not to say it's better or worse than the alternative, it's just different and makes more sense to me.
The size of the window-drag click target is orthogonal to whether tabs are above or below the address bar. What you really want is a title bar, not necessarily tabs below the toolbar.
And you can get that. In Firefox 29, open Menu > Customize and toggle the Title Bar button at the bottom left. That will give you a normal-height title bar to drag the window with, while still keeping tabs on top to reflect that switching tabs also changes the state of the URL in the toolbar.
1) I'm not running OSX so it's double the size for me.
2) there's a whopping great area to the right of the 3-4 tabs I generally have open at any one time. This is the aformentioned ~20px plus the height of the tab itself. Secondly, there's the area beneath the mininmise/maximise/close buttons and the new hamburger menu button, which can be dragged in a pinch to move the window if tabs go all the way across. Tabs don't overflow to this point and it's 26px in height. Note for reference the "1" in the white box for HTTPS Everywhere is pretty much the height of the cursor. [1]
3) Even if I had a comically sized mouse cursor, I can enable the menu bar at the top to pad a bit of extra space (presuming I can live with the idea of having 'File', etc. across part of it) which bumps it up to ~25px.
Because Chrome. There's no other reason. It's obviously less efficient due to Fitt's law and the comparative distances the mouse pointer must travel, but you'd hear the designers justify it how "conceptually" the address bar should be inside a tab. Not if it hampers productivity it shouldn't.
The killer feature in Chrome was and is the multiprocess implementation. I use Firefox for intranet browsing at work and Chrome for personal browsing: the former is a sloth compared to the latter, and hangs even for seconds when loading a big page whereas Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes and it just doesn't even slow down.
Firefox has had their comparable hack (Electrolysis?) in some prototype stage for a long time but the thing is Chrome actually delivered it... years ago. This turned the roles into a catch-up game where Firefox tries to match Chrome instead of other browsers trying to match Firefox, and the setting has remained as such since then.
The difference is still astronomical and I'm not at all convinced that a new user interface could have much effect there. The browser UI has pretty much standardized 15 years ago.
I tried using Chrome (from a decade+ of using Firefox) and while it is definitely faster in some instances, it is also laggier in others. Tab switching is noticably slower for me, for instance. I also found it frustrating that it would draw an unusable interface before it was done loading, which 'felt' faster, right up until I wanted to actually use it.
Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox.
I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.
This actually might be a fairly uncommon use case - I tend to scroll by clicking the middle mouse wheel and dragging down. On big, multimedia-heavy pages like The Verge (which can clock in at multiple megabytes in size), scrolling on Firefox is laggy, and on Chrome it is smooth.
Designers tend to be extremely annoyed by Chrome's scrolling. I should count the time I've heard this or something similar from a designer: "but let's use css-transitions instead of free-form scrolling, it's so-much-smoother on Chrome than that ugly chunky scroll, and most of our users are on Chrome so let's just move over that ugly free-scrolling, it's so 90's anyway" (if he/she actually got the argument this far, I'm already imagining having a foot on his/her neck and driving a chair foot through his/her skull repeatedly while splashing his/her brains on the walls...)
That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
>That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll
No, that is just designer's dumbness. Scrolling should be a system setting and browsers should not override it but just read and use it (I am looking at you, Firefox). And websites certainly should not override it with at all.
Yeah, but if I randomly pick any 2 Windows apps, the probability that they will scroll the same is very low. Heck, even the bultin Windows Explorer I'm staring at on Windows 8 has nice smooth scroll on the main folder pane and "chunky" scrolling for the folder tree on the left, that's two scrolling behaviors in the same window, for a builtin Windows app (!!!).
Thing are more consistent on Mac OS, but on Windows and Linux these kinds of GUI functionality are still at the "wild west" level, so the only sensible choice is to implement what's "better looking for the user" in your application, which all browsers except Chrome seem to do, btw, and they've arrived at a convergent result while doing it...
And "designer dumbness" is real, but it's root cause is in the fact that lots of good graphic designers are "control freaks", and when they know that something is "technically possible", they don't care how much work it takes, and it takes them a lot to "grok" how detrimental the overall result is for UX.
I solved the problem for myself by staying as far away as possible from "design-driven development" or teams led by designers... but it is a fact that such teams exist at lots of small agencies and startups and that they do shape the field, unfortunately.
> one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser
It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe)
The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
Eh, I still get lockups for whatever reason, and I have to wait 30 seconds for the browser to recover, I can't just switch tab and do other things while I'm waiting like with Chrome.
In the Firefox Nightly channel, you can test Electrolysis (e10s) using the "File > Open e10s Window" menu. Addon compatibility is still a work in progress, but many popular addons like Adblock Plus mostly work today.
In case you want to use Chrome for both, Chrome actually has a built-in multi-user system, so you can have two cookie jars. If your company uses Google Apps this would make even more sense.
> Chrome will happily use as many of my 12 cores as it likes and it just doesn't even slow down.
I spend a lot of time profiling browsers and I don't see a lot of multicore usage when browsing in current engines. Usually layout and painting is happening for one page at the time—the tab you're looking on—and multicore performance for them is really poor in current engines.
I have not seen browsers saturate 12 cores. For example, go to [1] in your browser: no browser engine saturates maybe more than a core and a half as it chugs along struggling to reflow.
I think that Chrome- (and IE-)style per-domain process-based parallelism provides some benefits, but mainly in getting stuff like Gmail and Facebook notifications off the main thread, not really in improving throughput.
I think the main benefit of the multiprocess model is not increased performance on any one website. It is that when a website in one tab decides to calculate pi to a trillion digits, it doesn't bring down the whole browser and all the other tabs along with it.
I read that phrase as "I open as many tabs as I want and Chrome renders them all on different cores." I guess I got that partially from the subsequent mention of Electrolysis as a comparable effort.
Although, does Firefox not use separate threads for each tab? If so, then it would seem like in normal operation, it should be possible to achieve parallelism. Of course, I do still see whole-browser lockups in Firefox, and what I really miss is the ability to actually diagnose misbehaving tabs.
Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
right now my firefox uses 49 threads. Guess what? the kernel scheduler run them on all cores.
chrome uses 5 processes and 7 threads in 2 processes, 11 threads in another, 1 in nacl helper and 27 in the main process. Guess what? the kernel scheduler also run them on all cores ;-)
NoScript might be worthwhile 15 years ago, as you browsed 90s porn sites. Today, you're just making your own web browsing life difficult, hoping the "security benefits" of your paranoia outweighs all the broken functionality you'll be constantly making exceptions for, or flat out missing out on because you don't know it's there.
Other than that, it means people can't mine bitcoin with my CPUs and power bill, I'm immune to ~90% of browser-only exploits (as opposed to ones in things like flash, PDFs, etc., which I am still far less likely to get hit by than a javascript(flash, etc.)-enabled-by-default user), and a few random and generally non-critical things won't work. Even dropdown menus still work as they are generally done in CSS these days.
If a site really needs javascript, I can whitelist it while leaving google tracking scripts, adverts, disqus, etc. disabled.
It's 2014, most sites assume javascript, and the "graceful degradation" is never "graceful".
Me and all people doing front-end work I know of, who even care for any kind of "graceful degradation" (that's a minority of front-end-devs!), always go over "the layout breaks and some fonts are wrong for users with javascript disabled" with "but they cans still click the links and read the text, so we'll just leave it this way" (because the alternative will be putting at least 3x as much work into it, and nobody would pay us for it ...just as nobody would pay for a website without "live filtering" and "ajax loading" and all nowadays).
So you're basically choosing a stone-age-degraded-experience to be able to spare some CPU cycles.
(the security and privacy arguments are valid though, and you're 100% right on these... but as more and more sites become SPAs, you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything)
>you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything
Even if that is the case (which I do doubt), if it means I still have google analytics, advertisers, disqus, and random dodgy sites I've never before visited blocked (e.g. when a site gets compromised by injecting malicious javascript), I don't mind.
NoScript gives you a chance to evaluate a site for trustworthiness. Yes, you have to click 1-2 times when you load a new domain that you trust, but it's worth it for that one site that looks sketchy or that you get mislead into clicking onto. For people who automatically execute JavaScript, it's already too late, but NoScript users have an opportunity to avoid this cantankerous situation.
NoScript will expose phishing schemes immediately, for instance, because it will recognize that the scripts being executed are not coming from the previously-whitelisted domain for Google.
Actually, after trying NoScript not long ago my web experience dramatically improved. Where I need to enable JS I can do it in two clicks, while where I don't have to, everything is faster and not cluttered with useless stuff. I like it!
>Where I need to enable JS I can do it in two clicks
But there's no reliable way of knowing where you need JS.
It's not like every useful component on a site reveals its whole story with JS disabled. There could be a data viz animation that strengthens the topic of an article you're reading. The author refers to "the above visual" but doesn't mention it's an animation (because he assumed everyone would see the animation). All you see is a still image - the fallback to the animation. You aren't aware there's a useful animation showing the schematic of an engine part in motion, for example.
The animation was cool, you totally missed out!
However, if the way you use the web is more about fetching specific content or services from specific places - your favs basically, and you don't like to explore, then if it works for you then I won't judge :)
I'm often using different browsers on different devices and only some of them have NoScript installed, and from my experience I can tell that usually if something doesn't work without JS, it's perfectly visible that it's broken until you whitelist it. I can also tell via tiny toolbar that something is blocked on the site, so if it doesn't include lots of analytics or social media cruft then I usually just unblock it on any pages that focus on useful content.
Before I actually installed it, I had the same concerns like you described, but the reality showed that it's moot, and the advantages were even higher than expected, so I sticked with NoScript :)
This is not an issue of the design. Opera (<=12), a single process browser, had much better performance than Firefox.
Biggest problem with Chrome I see (performance-wise) is that tabs that weren't in use for a while take quite some time to load. My guess would be their memory gets swapped out. I don't know how Opera did it, but switch to any of ~hundred opened tabs is instantaneous.
Whether Opera does it or not I don't know, but in Windows at least you can lock pages in physical memory [1]. It's not really a good general purpose technique, however.
Am I the only one that doesnt like this "feature"? The reason I dont like it is because now, instead of being limited to 25% of my total CPU usage, at times Chrome happily pins all four of my cores. Granted that this is probably a result of poor plugin/webpage interaction (although, I havent been able to determine what combination...being a heisenbug and all), in Firefox, the worst case is still 25% maximum CPU usage.
You're not the only one. I can't remember the last time Firefox crashed on me. I fill those tabs up real good. It does a fine job on both my medium-spec work computer and high spec home gaming PC!
Chrome isn't for me, it's one-core-per-tab thing is not something I need or want. I hate the idea of the browser using too much system resources, I prefer how Firefox does it.
I'm very suspicious about this astronomical performance difference you're talking about.
Like many I run both firefox and chrome all day long.
I literally cannot tell which one is faster.
Firefox does use all the cores like Chrome does btw - it's called multithreading - and both of them seem to do approximately an equal okay-ish job at it (maybe servo does a much better job but thats not useable yet).
The only times where as a user i can see chrome multiprocess model shines is:
- sec vulns where chrome sandbox is not bypassed
- stuff actually crashing or hanging
Needless to say both cases are quite rare on either browser (and when flash hangs in firefox, it does for a few seconds before firefox proposes to kill it - while in chrome it only hangs the current tab)
Note also that:
- electrolysis can be enabled right now by an about:config option
- i run firefox and chromium on linux - i guess your mileage may vary on other platforms (?)
When I do calculations in the browser, opening a second window halves the performance in the first window in FF. In Chrome the performance stays the same.
I do not think there is such difference in FF and CR performance. Both browsers are relatively close. Firefox however hangs in some common cases where as Chrome handles general cases better.
CR however is worse when it comes to multi-tab browsing with over 20 tabs!
Yes, with just a few tabs open Chrome's multi-process architecture shines at cost of being a memory hog. As a result Chrome starts thrashing long before FF.
FF 8-13 really shined in memory usage. Unfortunately even by their own internal benchmarks, it's gone downhill since since 13.
I just tried opening 30 YouTube videos with 15 additional HTML (non-Flash) tabs. My system used 6 GB of RAM (Linux 64 bit). So unless you're watching 100 YouTube videos at a time, or have more than 200 tabs open at a time, I really don't see how that's a problem.
You're ignoring the fact that many users have applications other than a browser open, and that those applications also consume memory. Start hitting the swapfile and any performance advantage disappears. It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has.
> It is in the best interest of everyone to make applications use less memory, since all the applications (and the OS) have to share what the system has.
There is always a trade-off between speed and memory usage. For my use cases, I prefer this particular trade-off for a browser. I realize you might not have the same preference.
I run Firefox and last I tried Chrome it did use more RAM for the same content. However, I wonder: since Chrome runs its tabs as a collection of processes does that mean individual tabs could be swapped out by the OS without affecting the rest?
It's a lot easier to implement multiprocess when you're building a brand new product without a decade-plus old add-on and plugin ecosystem that you need to support.
Has anyone figured out how to get the tabs below the address bar again? This is horrible. I'm not really sure how to describe my hatred of this but it is there. I love FF but if the tab bar can't be moved I think I might have to switch to Safari.
FWIW I use a plug in called "tree style tabs". It puts the tabs in a hierarchy on the left side of the screen. One of the main reasons I like firebox better than other browsers is this feature.
It also allows you to move the tabs to top/bottom/right of the window, although I think top is just the default.
I think I'm in the minority, but I really like Safari. It doesn't use reverse tabs, I find it to be easily as fast as Chrome (and it tends to use a lot less resources: battery, cpu on Mac OS X), and I almost always use the "Reader" and Reading List features.
Thanks for the try. But that doesn't seem to work on OS X. For now I will go back to 28.0 and hope someone comes out with a work-around in the next few weeks.
To reply to my own comment. I thought about it for a bit and bounced back between tabs on top and tabs below. I think my gripe is that the tabs feel detached from the page they represent.
Almost no new features, other than some flexilibility with the new Firefox menu (you can add extension buttons to it, for instance).
Lots of customisation options have been removed (with the justification that it prevents inexperienced users from 'breaking' the browser), like the navigation buttons being locked to the address bar, the inability ability to move the refresh button (urgh) and the addon bar. Most can be restored though the Classic Theme Restorer addon, though it broke another of my addons last time I tried it.
True, the new Firefox menu is much improved, but there still seems to be no way to access it via the keyboard so it will probably remained largely unused by me.
I like the new placement of the real menu bar (when enabled), much better than in the previous versions.
I actually think that the orange 'Firefox' button was an important part of the browser's branding. Sure, it was blatantly stolen from Opera, but it meant you instantly could tell which browser someone was using. I think moving that functionality to the new menu button was a mistake, and it makes the browser look a lot more generic/Chrome-like (and is also against all existing windows conventions which says administrative functions should be in the top left).
But, in terms of day-to-day usage, its location doesn't really matter much.
actually that one button appeared in firefox designs much before opera - there was a big drama about it back then.
opera had the same design but released much faster than mozilla did.
I believe that for (1), the tabs overlap so that they take the same amount of space as the old tabs. It's an illusion that they're larger (which I initially fell for also, until I was corrected).
(2) is the same as Chrome and older Firefox versions - to ensure that there is still some draggable area in the window when it is filled with tabs, and it disappears when the window is maximised.
I noticed that you used to use the URL bar on top layout as I did. Sadly that is gone now but the Classic Theme add-on will give you the option back.
To me it's just more visually intuitive to have the tab right above the content window, not over all the toolbars. I really can't fathom why the reverse has become the default.
In terms of intuitiveness, it actually makes sense to have the tab bar over the address bar and navigation buttons, as their content and functionality are specific to that tab, and not application-specific. That's the reasoning anyway.
Actually I put them my tabs on the left (default option with tree style tab), as I feel that putting them at the top or bottom of the browser waste space.
I put the tabs under the location bar out of convenience, my purpose was to look at the difference in the tab size.
Absolutely right on same space but illusion of more. It's amazing how much small tweaks can make a difference in perception of visual space and faster action: bigger targets, whether actually bigger or seemingly bigger, make users faster in hitting them.
the tabs that arent in the foreground (ie all other tabs except the front tab) are actually square.
im pretty sure the overall layout of tabs and buttons is actually more space efficient
Its hilariously sad how new UI skin is touted as reimagining the whole browser.
Opera had fully customizable UI 12 years ago? And look at us now, somehow we moved back in functionality, even Opera nowadays is nothing more than a bad non-customizable Chrome skin :(
I dread the day most of the web stops working on Opera 12.16. I wont be even able to tune Chromium to my specific needs, after all it requires 16GB of ram to compile now (and that number will probably grow).
Servo’s progressing well (it can render Acid2 now without problems) but it’s missing a bunch of features that are pretty essential for a modern browser. It’s absolutely still at ‘research project’ stage.
"The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant 'improvement', which means 'change' which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before. This does not often happen with Safari. Their UI has been remarkably stable for many, many years."
http://i.imgur.com/Ueqq29i.png is what my current vimperator browsing window looks like (ff27), the new changes make this very difficult to replicate via changes to userChrome.css, but hopefully, as it gets more exposure, these things will get ironed out
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadbecause several features of those images are even similar to the first version of chrome
Chrome does have preloading of certain things which make loading some things faster although there are addons that can replicate that on Firefox.
I am not trying to be snarky, but to me a lot of the new UI is "oh, they made it look more like Chrome". I am kind of surprised to hear the word "brave" to describe that.
These statements seem at odds. I'm all for change when there's a clear need for it, but when it's done just to keep up with Chrome's aesthetic, it can alienate an existing userbase. If I wanted Chrome, I'd be using Chrome. The reason I stuck with Firefox for so long was the configurability. However, now when a settings is removed or dumbed down the default stance on BugZilla is "just install an addon".
Sadly, this will become the fourth extension I run to restore features Firefox has removed.
1: http://people.mozilla.org/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pre...
http://mikemacd.wordpress.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-scree...
The design was just fine, so leave it the fuck alone!
Fully rendered cache with images.
I prefer it as well, but I think it's fine as an option via extensions.
I've removed the search box myself. If DNS doesn't return anything or if what you type looks like a search query, it does a search anyway, so the only thing I'm missing is search autocomplete (there's an addon if you really want that anyway: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/instantfox/).
This seems to come up a lot, but a Mozilla dev already explained it's to protect privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5590988
I'd take their word for it :)
When I'm saying is that I want both autocompleted search and a private URL bar.
by taking these - IMO - baseless decisions, you're only hurting the thousands of people putting their time, blood and tears without any commercial interest into firefox, not the ceo's you agree/disagree with.
remember that mozilla has no shareholders, the ceos dont get stock options, just a salary. its wholly owned by the mozilla foundation.
Meanwhile both sides will continue to use Microsoft products, despite their history of extremely un-ethical business practises; and stand by while their country (pardon my assumption that they are USians) murders people in other countries with drones every day.
It would be nice to see outrage at outrageous things.
Also, choosing software based on political drama instead of technical merit is amusing.
Wish that Eich's vocal detractors had seen it that way, but then again, it's pretty clear that many of them didn't care the least bit about the software or open web side of things anyway. What would one have expected from people to whom Mozilla was only relevant as it touched their social agenda?
In any case, good for anyone who won't be following their example and will be supporting Mozilla in spite of what happened.
Unfortunately, I can find that page now.
It is still frustrating that a bunch of plug-ins appear to have been disrupted because of removing the add-on/status bar, though. Not everything has moved to the new location automatically, and it's not immediately obvious how to get some of them back.
I don't think Mozilla should be holding back functionality to avoid breaking extensions. If an add-on is actively maintained, then the developer will update it, and if the add-on is not actively maintained, then it's going to have to break someday.
I respectfully disagree. Extensions are the USP for Firefox, and IMHO breaking compatibility should be considered a serious issue and not something to be done lightly. (See also: all the hate when they switched to doing six-weekly updates and it kept disabling extensions every time for months afterwards.)
In any case, there was no pressing need to remove the add-on/status bar. Arbitrary rearrangement of UIs is generally bad for usability. Ditto for major things like moving tabs (for anyone who isn't using an enhanced tab plug-in anyway) and the burger menu (which is now a tiny area right underneath the close window button, and appears to be completely inaccessible by keyboard).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_selling_proposition
(for those who were as at sea as I was)
(This does not address that it's crappy that icons that were in the addon bar don't, say, automatically get put into the toolbar or trigger a message notifying you how to get them back or anything, but oh well. EDIT: According to another reply this may not be the case with all addons, seems like some automagically get moved.)
Where is all this stuff going to be displayed? http://img.nux.ro/4RJ-Selection_065.png
I'm not sure what is supposed to happen with plug-ins that actually used the status bar for more comprehensive status information, such as the system you illustrated. You could check whether your (Burger)->Customize screen gives you anything you can dump on a toolbar somewhere as 'Osmose suggested, but since it appears you can only have one row of toolbar contents, the new model just seems to be broken for your purposes. :-(
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-addon-bar...
I can see a reason for them on Win/Linux, but I find them completely unfit for the Mac. I guess people just maximize the window and leave it at that.
On the other hand, I'm glad there's still a distinction between the search box and the address bar. The annoyance of omnibar mistaking a url for a search query and vice-versa, even admitting it's a rare event, is not worth the trouble to me. Besides, educating the user on such difference seems important to me.
What are "reverse tabs"?
http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/107000/107752/safar...
It appears that "Safari-style tabs" are tabs that extend down from the address bar, not up from it.
Safari is just the only one that didn't.
And IE7: http://winsupersite.com/site-files/winsupersite.com/files/ar...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Opera_7.02.png
I don't care where the tabs go by default, as long as we have an option to move them if we want. Unfortunately, as Mozilla are turning into google, they have decided choice is evil and bad.
To me, as I read the brower window top-down, I have the firefox menu and minimise/maximise/close buttons -> the tabs -> the address bar and back/forward buttons. That follows the logic of application -> 'threads' within application -> status of that thread and forms the more logical tree from general to detailed in my mind.
That's not to say it's better or worse than the alternative, it's just different and makes more sense to me.
And you can get that. In Firefox 29, open Menu > Customize and toggle the Title Bar button at the bottom left. That will give you a normal-height title bar to drag the window with, while still keeping tabs on top to reflect that switching tabs also changes the state of the URL in the toolbar.
1) I'm not running OSX so it's double the size for me.
2) there's a whopping great area to the right of the 3-4 tabs I generally have open at any one time. This is the aformentioned ~20px plus the height of the tab itself. Secondly, there's the area beneath the mininmise/maximise/close buttons and the new hamburger menu button, which can be dragged in a pinch to move the window if tabs go all the way across. Tabs don't overflow to this point and it's 26px in height. Note for reference the "1" in the white box for HTTPS Everywhere is pretty much the height of the cursor. [1]
3) Even if I had a comically sized mouse cursor, I can enable the menu bar at the top to pad a bit of extra space (presuming I can live with the idea of having 'File', etc. across part of it) which bumps it up to ~25px.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/KSZ3f6G.jpg
Firefox has had their comparable hack (Electrolysis?) in some prototype stage for a long time but the thing is Chrome actually delivered it... years ago. This turned the roles into a catch-up game where Firefox tries to match Chrome instead of other browsers trying to match Firefox, and the setting has remained as such since then.
The difference is still astronomical and I'm not at all convinced that a new user interface could have much effect there. The browser UI has pretty much standardized 15 years ago.
Chrome has some good points though - its scrolling feels much better, one tab (flash) crashing doesn't take out the entire browser and I can just switch to another tab until it recovers and (obviously) Google products have much better performance. Ultimately though, its slowness in other areas, plus its inherrently broken mouse gestures, meant that I switched back to Firefox.
I do wish Firefox was a bit faster moving. I know there are difficulties in dealing with a huge, old codebase, but I just wish features that Chrome has had for years, like chromeless app windows and multiprocess would just hurry up. Features like window-based private browsing took years to migrate from Chrome, and it's frustrating as you said to be perpetually caught in a game of catch up.
tools > options > advanced > general
It's not as horrible as it was at launch; I'll give it that, but it still just feels wrong compared to Firefox's.
Smooth scrolling is nicer than jumping in my opinion, but firefox gives an option for the latter if people want it.
That's the most detrimental effect of Chrome's scroll I think: it makes designers want to look for alternatives to scrolling websites, and unfortunately for all of us, these "gorgeous" but completely user-hostile alternatives exist. And good luck if you get on such a website with js disabled if it wasn't coded in a gracefully degradable way...
No, that is just designer's dumbness. Scrolling should be a system setting and browsers should not override it but just read and use it (I am looking at you, Firefox). And websites certainly should not override it with at all.
Thing are more consistent on Mac OS, but on Windows and Linux these kinds of GUI functionality are still at the "wild west" level, so the only sensible choice is to implement what's "better looking for the user" in your application, which all browsers except Chrome seem to do, btw, and they've arrived at a convergent result while doing it...
And "designer dumbness" is real, but it's root cause is in the fact that lots of good graphic designers are "control freaks", and when they know that something is "technically possible", they don't care how much work it takes, and it takes them a lot to "grok" how detrimental the overall result is for UX.
I solved the problem for myself by staying as far away as possible from "design-driven development" or teams led by designers... but it is a fact that such teams exist at lots of small agencies and startups and that they do shape the field, unfortunately.
It hasn't been the case for years. Plugins are sandboxed. (plugin-container.exe)
The broken mouse gestures on Chrome are the single most important dealbreaker for me. I will never go back to a browser without good mouse support (which Chrome isn't).
I spend a lot of time profiling browsers and I don't see a lot of multicore usage when browsing in current engines. Usually layout and painting is happening for one page at the time—the tab you're looking on—and multicore performance for them is really poor in current engines.
I have not seen browsers saturate 12 cores. For example, go to [1] in your browser: no browser engine saturates maybe more than a core and a half as it chugs along struggling to reflow.
I think that Chrome- (and IE-)style per-domain process-based parallelism provides some benefits, but mainly in getting stuff like Gmail and Facebook notifications off the main thread, not really in improving throughput.
[1]: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/single-page.htm...
Also, I think the Chrome debugger has surpassed Firefox's, especially with the experimental stack traces in asynchronous flows of control.
chrome uses 5 processes and 7 threads in 2 processes, 11 threads in another, 1 in nacl helper and 27 in the main process. Guess what? the kernel scheduler also run them on all cores ;-)
Letting sites run arbitrary local code on your machine whenever they want is suicidal from a security perspective.
NoScript might be worthwhile 15 years ago, as you browsed 90s porn sites. Today, you're just making your own web browsing life difficult, hoping the "security benefits" of your paranoia outweighs all the broken functionality you'll be constantly making exceptions for, or flat out missing out on because you don't know it's there.
Other than that, it means people can't mine bitcoin with my CPUs and power bill, I'm immune to ~90% of browser-only exploits (as opposed to ones in things like flash, PDFs, etc., which I am still far less likely to get hit by than a javascript(flash, etc.)-enabled-by-default user), and a few random and generally non-critical things won't work. Even dropdown menus still work as they are generally done in CSS these days.
If a site really needs javascript, I can whitelist it while leaving google tracking scripts, adverts, disqus, etc. disabled.
Me and all people doing front-end work I know of, who even care for any kind of "graceful degradation" (that's a minority of front-end-devs!), always go over "the layout breaks and some fonts are wrong for users with javascript disabled" with "but they cans still click the links and read the text, so we'll just leave it this way" (because the alternative will be putting at least 3x as much work into it, and nobody would pay us for it ...just as nobody would pay for a website without "live filtering" and "ajax loading" and all nowadays).
So you're basically choosing a stone-age-degraded-experience to be able to spare some CPU cycles.
(the security and privacy arguments are valid though, and you're 100% right on these... but as more and more sites become SPAs, you'll basically have no choice than whitelist more and more untill you'll have to whitelist everything)
Even if that is the case (which I do doubt), if it means I still have google analytics, advertisers, disqus, and random dodgy sites I've never before visited blocked (e.g. when a site gets compromised by injecting malicious javascript), I don't mind.
NoScript will expose phishing schemes immediately, for instance, because it will recognize that the scripts being executed are not coming from the previously-whitelisted domain for Google.
But there's no reliable way of knowing where you need JS.
It's not like every useful component on a site reveals its whole story with JS disabled. There could be a data viz animation that strengthens the topic of an article you're reading. The author refers to "the above visual" but doesn't mention it's an animation (because he assumed everyone would see the animation). All you see is a still image - the fallback to the animation. You aren't aware there's a useful animation showing the schematic of an engine part in motion, for example.
The animation was cool, you totally missed out!
However, if the way you use the web is more about fetching specific content or services from specific places - your favs basically, and you don't like to explore, then if it works for you then I won't judge :)
Before I actually installed it, I had the same concerns like you described, but the reality showed that it's moot, and the advantages were even higher than expected, so I sticked with NoScript :)
Biggest problem with Chrome I see (performance-wise) is that tabs that weren't in use for a while take quite some time to load. My guess would be their memory gets swapped out. I don't know how Opera did it, but switch to any of ~hundred opened tabs is instantaneous.
[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa36...
I have to agree, I hate it when a fscking browser decides to grab all the system resources it can, messing with anything else I'm running.
Chrome isn't for me, it's one-core-per-tab thing is not something I need or want. I hate the idea of the browser using too much system resources, I prefer how Firefox does it.
Like many I run both firefox and chrome all day long.
I literally cannot tell which one is faster.
Firefox does use all the cores like Chrome does btw - it's called multithreading - and both of them seem to do approximately an equal okay-ish job at it (maybe servo does a much better job but thats not useable yet).
The only times where as a user i can see chrome multiprocess model shines is:
- sec vulns where chrome sandbox is not bypassed
- stuff actually crashing or hanging
Needless to say both cases are quite rare on either browser (and when flash hangs in firefox, it does for a few seconds before firefox proposes to kill it - while in chrome it only hangs the current tab)
Note also that:
- electrolysis can be enabled right now by an about:config option
- i run firefox and chromium on linux - i guess your mileage may vary on other platforms (?)
On my system, there's a noticeable speed difference between Firefox and Chrome, especially if I disable ad-block in Firefox. (Also on Linux.)
CR however is worse when it comes to multi-tab browsing with over 20 tabs!
FF 8-13 really shined in memory usage. Unfortunately even by their own internal benchmarks, it's gone downhill since since 13.
https://areweslimyet.com/
Firefox with 200 tabs can be 1GB or so; chrome with the same load is about 4GB.
There is always a trade-off between speed and memory usage. For my use cases, I prefer this particular trade-off for a browser. I realize you might not have the same preference.
You can work around this (a) vacuuming it by hand or (b) just deleting it (losing all your visited links).
I did this and Firefox is suddenly as fast as Chromium. (Xubuntu 14.04, 4GB RAM.)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512854
I like Firefox and will continue to use it, but I just don't see what good this update is supposed to accomplish.
Lots of customisation options have been removed (with the justification that it prevents inexperienced users from 'breaking' the browser), like the navigation buttons being locked to the address bar, the inability ability to move the refresh button (urgh) and the addon bar. Most can be restored though the Classic Theme Restorer addon, though it broke another of my addons last time I tried it.
I like the new placement of the real menu bar (when enabled), much better than in the previous versions.
But, in terms of day-to-day usage, its location doesn't really matter much.
back in the days they didnt have 6 week releases.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/3895/
http://www.donotlick.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tab-shap...
1. The curves of the 'aerodynamic' tabs sacrifice pixels in the horizontal ramp-off / -on whereas old 'ugly' rectangular tabs can abutt.
2. A vertical void above the tabs, too shallow into which to put icons.
I'll have no choice but to become accustomed to it but I fear my little 12" screen will become even less efficient.
(2) is the same as Chrome and older Firefox versions - to ensure that there is still some draggable area in the window when it is filled with tabs, and it disappears when the window is maximised.
Please note that I normally use tree style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) to put the tabs in a sidebar. It may have messed up the layout a bit. (also, the non-standard colour comes from ColourfulTabs)
To me it's just more visually intuitive to have the tab right above the content window, not over all the toolbars. I really can't fathom why the reverse has become the default.
Opera had fully customizable UI 12 years ago? And look at us now, somehow we moved back in functionality, even Opera nowadays is nothing more than a bad non-customizable Chrome skin :(
I dread the day most of the web stops working on Opera 12.16. I wont be even able to tune Chromium to my specific needs, after all it requires 16GB of ram to compile now (and that number will probably grow).
I read that as F.lux being incorporated somehow, and was very confused :P
The capital F is just the style for titles in English text.
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-...
Further, I have removed the tab-bar and use "b" exclusively for switching tabs.