Firefox 29 has been released, and the most prominent new feature is an entirely new user interface. It’s smoother and less angular, and has clearly been designed to somewhat resemble Google Chrome. Hence, I personally think it’s a major step forward – except for Firefox’ version of the Chrome menu, which uses a grid of icons instead of a list (?!) – but I’m nearly 100% convinced many Firefox users will not like it. It’s change, after all.
Luckily, Firefox is customisable to the point of insanity, so I’m pretty sure you can revert to the old look with the right themes and extensions.
I noticed you can no longer move the reload/stop back to the old position beside back & forward.
Edited 2014-04-29 15:25 UTC
Nor can you move the menu button from the right end of the bar.
Classic Theme Restorer addon is my friend (and maybe yours, too – YMMV). If I wanted my Firefox UI to look like Chrome’s, I’d just use Chrome
Yep, just installed it to fix some Australis annoyances. Enforced Reload button in the URL bar was one of them.
Edited 2014-04-29 17:04 UTC
You mean this one?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/
Yes, that’s the one. You can keep rounded tabs, but make other things more flexible (movable menu button, bookmark star button back in the URL bar and etc.).
Edited 2014-04-30 01:57 UTC
Don’t know about you all, but I’m getting really sick and tired of having to relearn how to use my fricking browser OVER AND OVER again every few weeks when these clowns decide it’s necessary to change everything.
By DEFAULT, it should give the user the option to keep the current interface and just replace the under-the-hood components that need replacing… I think I’m just going to stop using FireFux henceforth and chose a different browser that I don’t have to keep relearning because I HAVE OTHER, BETTER THINGS TO DO WITH MY TIME THAN LET SOME GROUP OF IDIOTS TELL ME WHAT I AM OBLIGED TO DO!!! While I’m aware the product is basically free, at the same time they are CHOOSING to change the interface, and making learning the new interface the price of being able to know your browser is up to date and safe (or at least safe-ish) to use.
If you don’t feel that, let me translate it. Imagine if someone kept rearranging the controls on your car. “I swear officer, yesterday the BRAKE PEDAL WAS ON THE LEFT!” Or maybe someone moves the switches around in your bedroom, or rearranges the furniture while your asleep. You wake up and can’t find the light-switch… say goodbye to your little toes.
Better still, I can use a computer-computer analogy. Imagine if someone decided to try to IMPROVE *YOUR* PRODUCTIVITY by swapping out the positions of the keys on your keyboard. Any day you go to work, all of a sudden you notice that the positions of the ENTER key and SPACE key were swapped. Imagine what a pain in the ass that would be. And WHY did they do this? WHY? Was it NECESSARY? That should be a test, actually, for any software designer. Let me borrow from the authorities during WWII:
Is this trip really necessary?
That test should be applied to any interface change between versions: is this CHANGE really necessary? If not, DON’T CHANGE IT!!!
If I wanted to be forced to do things by dolts for reasons that are stupid and counterproductive, I would still be in THE ARMY! That said, I guess FireFux loses ANOTHER user. I am putting Mozilla on my list along with Misrosoft of companies I don’t use garbageware from anymore.
Seriously, the changes in 29 are just cosmetic ones.
Maybe you should consider the notion that the source of your problem is not Firefox….
Edited 2014-05-01 06:23 UTC
Uhhhh…you DO know that if you like the Gecko engine but hate the pants on head retarded way that Mozilla is trying to become an ersatz Chrome you DO have choices, yes?
If you need a jumping off point Comodo IceDragon and PaleMoon are both really good and VERY conservative with UI changes, in fact I don’t think Comodo Icedragon has ever changed a UI element. Then there is Seamonkey, Waterfox, or if you need to run it on an older system (even has support for Win9X) and don’t mind a barebones UI there is kmeleon.
Point is VOTE WITH YOUR FEET and ditch the company that refuses to listen to you! I did, I switched to PaleMoon and am quite happy. No reason to hack the UI just to get something usable, not when you have choices.
if you use a browser solely for its UI you’re kinda missing out on more important stuff.
That sucks. I never unstood the reason why they moved it in the first place. I used to move it back so that its’ position is always fixed relative to the window.
You can no longer do anything 😐
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?p=13350353&sid=cee01d76…
Luckily, Firefox is customisable to the point of insanity
Coming from Opera 12, Firefox’ customizability is a huge disappointment, even with extensions.
Edited 2014-04-29 15:28 UTC
And yet i could never create a keybind that allowed me to jump directly between tabs like i can with ctrl(windows)/alt(linux)+1-0 on Firefox.
Go into Preferences -> Advanced -> Shortcuts and check [X] Enable single-key shortcuts.
You can now select the tabs by pressing the numbers 1 to 9.
I see that i can jump back and forth by using 1 and 2, but that is not quite what i was talking about.
What i mean is that in Firefox i can go to tab 1 by hitting alt+1, tab 2 by hitting alt+2 and so on. Meaning that i can just directly between any of the 10 first tabs i have open.
I’ve been finding the same thing. With the demise of Opera (as anything other than a crippled Chrome re-skin) I’ve been trying to customise Firefox to meet my preferences.
Even with various extensions and tweaks there are lots of things from Opera that I miss. It just isn’t possible to get quite the same combination of efficient space usage and functionality that Opera offered.
Firefox’ version of the Chrome menu, which uses a grid of icons instead of a list (?!)
I think using a grid instead of a list isn’t bad per se. The problem is that the icons aren’t grouped naturally in the grid.
The irony becomes complete in that they changed to a grid menu, while creating a menu button that looks like a stylized list menu (those three horizontal stripes) in the same revamp. Who got the idea of creating an image of a list menu to represent a grid menu? Fire him.
I don’t think it looks bad, actually. But I’m really against this trend of removing a program’s identity from it’s chrome (ie “title bar”). Windows 8 desktop flatness & dull colors already make the window borders harder to see. I never liked the lack of context in metro apps, but having this lack of context is coming into style on desktop apps is a bit much IMHO.
Luckily I’ve only seen this style in a few apps (chrome, thunderbird, and now ff), but I would cringe if all my apps were to start using it.
I can only imagine the additional pain this will cause me in phone support with users, including my parents, unable to identify with certainty what they’re looking at.
I like the improvements on the developer tools.
As for the new UI, it is not a big issue for me, except the still unfixed bookmarks dialog, frozen at Firefox 3.5 dimensions.
I refuse to use firefox because they’re anti free speech.
What?
http://xkcd.com/1357/
Yet another solid XKCD, even the alt text makes a strong point.
Another point sort of related to the alt text is the “disagreement hierarchy” http://qc.createdebate.com/img/blog_article_images/disagreement-hie…
This hierarchy needs to become the law of internet debates.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4074189/aw_jeez_not_this_shit_ag…
I dumped FF for that same reason. Chrome has taken a bit to get used to, but I think I might like it better than FF.
Looking at the downvotes you received, it looks like this site is anti free speech also.
Surely it means precisely the opposite? People are free to agree or disagree with your point of view, and can show this by voting a post up or down respectively. It just seems in this case that the majority disagree. Just because your opinion is in the minority doesn’t automatically mean the majority are against free speech. It just means the majority have the same freedom of speech as you.
You’re not trying to suggest that those who disagree with your opinion are not entitled to express this?
Are you a communist? because whether you realize it or not you are arguing AGAINST the free market.
What happened at Mozilla was the most pure example of the free market in action we’ve seen in years, 1.- Company makes asshat CEO, 2.- main demographic customer of company doesn’t like asshat, 3.- Customers vote with their wallet by uninstalling product, urge others to do so as well, 4.- Company sees userbase dropping like flies, thinks “wow maybe having an asshat CEO isn’t a good idea”, 5.- Asshat CEO goes away.
Frankly you can’t get any more pure free market than that, Mozilla had the right to keep the asshat, the userbase had the right to vote with their wallet and walk away, the market spoke and asshat went bye bye, can’t get any more free market than that.
Oh and just FYI but Mozilla had just cause to fire him if he didn’t leave since he refused to do his job the entire time he was CEO. the CEO is the public face of a company and part of their job description is PR and dealing with the press, guess what the bigot refused to do? that’s right HIS JOB. Frankly if he would have simply held a press conference and explained his positions a lot of it might have blown over, his “none of your business” attitude made the whole thing into a press buffet. good riddance to bad rubbish.
mozilla ceo hasnt been fired
and mozilla isnt exactly a pure capitalist corporation.
its a not-for-profit org that owns a corp. theyre only doing that to pay ppl to work on what they wanted to work on.
so yeah, most people are pissing on basically one of the most morally and ethically correct company – the one that has no other benefit than trying to help the users (and ofc you cant satisfy everyone, bob likes blue – you like red)
Now that you mention it, Mozilla always had kinda communist leanings ;P …especially in their imagery / promotional images, often almost socialist realist in style.
According to messages on Mozilla Input, the Australis redesign was indeed a communist plot:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/dashboard/response/4382636
It is also a conspiracy of Nazis and German gays:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/dashboard/response/4382751
…who, apparently, were working together with the Jews:
https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/dashboard/response/4382869
Who’d have guessed the awful truth that lay concealed behind that seemingly friendly and cuddly dragon…?
Edited 2014-05-04 17:11 UTC
Let’s see how long it takes until I get this via Fedora updates. A week? Two?
I already got the update pushed on all my Ubuntu boxes. Still waiting on Fedora.
Having fun trolling [1]?
– Gilboa
[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/thunderbird-24.5.0-1.fc20,xu…
While I do use the “Classic Theme Restorer (Customize Australis)” extension for the various things I wanted to keep (menu in the top-left corner, add-on bar, etc.), this mostly formalized tweaks I was already using via addons and XUL userstyles, so I don’t mind it too much.
However, I will argue that the new menu is objectively inferior since one of the core goals of the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm is discoverability and the fat finger-compatible “toolbar in a popup” menu design is objectively worse at making keyboard shortcuts discoverable and visually distinguishing commands from submenus so you’ll have the confidence to explore.
(Not to mention being worse than Chrome at feeling Desktop-native… which is the excuse Mozilla used to trim away or avoid adding various other features over the years.)
Thanks for the heads up about the extension!
I run FF Nightly and first tried the “Australis” UI a month or so back, I found it just turns Firefox’s UI into a mediocre clone of Chrome’s UI – without any noticeable benefit (at least, speaking as someone who’s been using Firefox since the days it was still called “Phoenix”). As others have said: if I wanted to use Chrome, I’d just use Chrome.
Fortunately, the combination of Clasic Theme Restorer + Classic Toolbar Buttons + disable tabs on top (along with restoring the add-on bar via View > Toolbars) is fairly effective at reverting FF to the old UI.
That’s weird. I have never found the customize button in chrome. Where is it?
I’m detecting high levels of sarcasm, but my sarcasm-detector is having difficulty honing in on an actual point. Are you contending that the ability to customize the FF toolbar makes Australis not a clone of the Chrome UI…?
Yep. The second you customize the look of Firefox you can’t call it a Chrome clone anymore. I am under the impression that clone means ‘the same’.
On top of that is that the only thing in Australis that is the same as chrome is the menu button. All the other buttons are different. When you open the menu it is even more different.
Ok, granted – “clone” was probably an overstatement. That said, there’s an obvious distinction between the traditional style of browser UI (most pre-Chrome browser UI were essentially tweaks/additions to conventions that were established AT LEAST as far back as Netscape 2 or 3) – and the recent versions of Firefox’s UI clearly draw more inspiration from the Chrome style of browser UI than earlier versions of Firefox (or their Mozilla/Netscape predecessors), and have for some time now.
Australis also has tabs on top by default; though, granted, I believe FF has been doing that for a while now – can’t remember for certain, as that’s typically been one of the first things I’ve turned off in FF and TB releases from the past year or two. The aesthetic style of the tabs is also obviously more similar to Chrome than it is to the traditional squared-off Firefox tabs. The “menu” bar also isn’t visible by default, ditto for the status/add-ons bar – though, again, I’ll grant that those changes have been there for a while; Australis certainly isn’t the first/only example of Firefox’s UI designers playing “mee too” to Chrome.
I just updated today and to be honest I barely notice the difference. Sure, the tabs are rounded and there’s a grid menu but it’s not really anything I notice while using FF.
I dunno, maybe it’s because Ubuntu’s global menu that I don’t notice this stuff much.
The changes are probably much less noticeable if you’ve stuck with the defaults/new UI changes from the past year or two of Firefox updates. I had previously disabled all of the more Chrome-y UI changes via options & about:config tweaks, but the update that introduced Australis ALSO removed/disabled all of those options.
Firefox is on life support and Google has the hand on the plug, so, it just a matter of time before it vanishes.
Edited 2014-04-29 17:30 UTC
Google owns the plug and its in their house running off their electricity. But the place has plenty of wall sockets left over, their friends compliment them for leaving it there, its responsible for a negligible amount of the quarterly bill and its behind a bookshelf they can’t be arsed to move. That’s a pretty safe plug.
We disagree.
How so? Two percentage points behind Chrome is hardly a death knell.
http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpc…
The problem is the tendency, it keeps going down insted of the contrary.
IMO new UI is much worse then the old one. And my problem is not baby duck syndrome: I stumbled upon this change while experimenting with Windows 8 and Metrofox (back when this UI was only in nightlies, as well as Metrofox), and I didn’t use Firefox before. Still, previous IE-inspired UI looked and behaved like native application in Windows, while the new one – as well as Chrome’s – looks alien. Not that I care – I don’t use Windows anyway – but I regard this change as a huge step back.
I took a quick glance at the comments and it looks like I’m pretty much the only one who doesn’t hate the new UI. I think it looks just fine, the change to what I had before is pretty small and I don’t think it’s to the worse. Some of the icons changed place and the menu is now easier to grasp at a quick glance — not really worth all the outcry, IMHO.
Oh well..
As long as I have the old menu bar still, I’m good. I am visually impaired and so run all of my apps maximized, in a low resolution. In Remote Desktop, Chrome is pretty much useless for me, because the RDP title bar completely covers at least two tabs.
Nope, not the only one.
I like it.
I think the complaint is it looks like Chrome, so why not just use Chrome? I feel the same way about Metro, if I have to learn a new UI why would I stay on windows instead of just switching to iOS or Android or ChromeOS or OSX?
The problem is it is REALLY making Mozilla look like an also ran ersatz of the front runner and that really isn’t a good place to be. From ripping off the breakneck Chrome release schedule to now ripping off the UI it really does feel just like a cheap knock off and folks generally don’t care for knock offs, especially when the “real thing” doesn’t cost anymore than the ersatz.
the only good about the whole situation is that FF has been forked enough times that if Moz loses users like flies there is a chance one of the other gecko browsers might pick them up, Personally I like Palemoon but there is Icedragon and Waterfox and Seamonkey so its not like we don’t have choices.
Oh god I hate that menu already.
Icons in a grid was fine in the mid 80’s to represent two or three files on a disk. After that, it has sucked sphincter everywhere it has been used from Windows 3.1 to iPhone. A simple list is by far a superior layout for anything where the user is supposed to pick a named item.
Menu layout aside, they managed to screw up on most of the icons so prominently shown in that menu:
– “New window” and “New private window” icons are nothing alike, even though they clearly should be somewhat similar.
– “New private window” icon is the same as “Privacy” settings icon.
– “Save page” icon is the same as “New document” icon in every application that deals with documents, but there is no sense that a saved web page is anything like a new document.
– “Add-ons” icon has been randomly flipped just of the heck of it.
– All of those icons are hard to recognize and ugly as sin in the name of flat design fad. Why oh why do we have to have icons that look like they were designed for monochrome CGA displays. Please UX designers, let users at least have some colors to assassinate with those uniformly boring hieroglyphs.
Most of this basic usability stuff was worked out in the freaking 70’s. Imagine if engineering in car companies worked like “UX designers” in software companies. We’d get Ford adds where their physics experience designers proudly showed off the ways they poorly reinvented Newton’s laws of motion.
CGA displays had 4 colours if I remember correctly.
According to Wikipedia CGA could do 16 colors, so way more than modern UX design needs.
I wonder if there’s a display standard for 640×200 resolution that can only do white and light gray. That would be perfect for flat design.
Hercules.
Hercules did 16 colors.
I think you might confuse it with the later Hercules Color Card model, which did add support for color in a CGA compatible way.
The first Hercules was surely monochrome.
Oh, my bad.
I owned an XT with a CGA card, and it was later upgraded with a hercules card. I remember it doing color, even emulating CGA.
Read closer that Wikipedia article, CGA was able to do 16 colors but only in *text* mode, when in *graphic* mode the maximum was 4 colors at a time (albeit, you could choose one of the 4 palettes).
That was in text mode, in graphics mode you had 4. It don’t change the fact that so many UI designers seem to be huffing the same can of paint and trying to turn UI 2014 into AOL 96…ugh AOL 86 was ugly in 96, why so many hipster designers want to go back to that flat shaded fugly?
I call this the easy-lazy-selfish design path. Easy, because it is generally straightforward to get things sharing “consistent look” when you “glyph-ify” them. Lazy because it is the path of less resistance, as it takes lots of hours get the things smooth if you have variabilities on shapes and colors. It is also well known that designers love to control all aspects of the interface they are working on, they also do not have infinity time and, as so, we have the current situation.
Truth be told, it is also a reaction against the “over exaggeration” (sorry for the pleonasm) we had before on interface elements on toolbars, arrows with all shapes and dimensional aspects and so on and so forth.
Shapes and colors are helpful when you need to spot a functionality for quick access but if you use too much of them things can speedily get awkward (from a design POV).
I hope a middle term will be achieved soon, like we almost had on OS-X of past (don’t know the current situation as I don’t use macs anymore and have contact with old systems only).
Edited 2014-04-30 15:00 UTC
The basic UI is fine, but what happened to the send link to page feature? That’s what my parents use a lot to share articles they are reading, and it seems to have disappeared. Great. If I can’t find it in 5 minutes then there is no hope for my parents to find it.
Edit: found it, under customize. Yep, no chance they would have every discovered that.
I really liked the old Firefox menu. Very clear, in the right spot, and very prominent. It was a much better solution than Chrome’s stupid menu button on the right. Now they’ve given up that advantage.
That short tutorial that you get when you update Firefox is too difficult to understand? The big customize button in the menu is too difficult? Or the drag and drop menu is too difficult?
If your browser requires a tutorial for existing browser users, you’ve already lost.
They copied Chrome. Again.
And what did they improve? Let’s look at one thing. Instead of a menu list, it’s a menu grid.
SNORE
8 of your last 10 comments are used for trolling.
I was looking at the Pale Moon browser project just last week and bookmarked the site. After this clusterf**k with Firefox I will be downloading it and using that instead. At least it’s what Firefox should still be instead of trying to be Chrome.
There’s no need for that. You can use extensions to get firefox back to exactly how it was, even in the firefox 1.x days.
You can also customise your userchrome.css file, to completely change the UI, because it’s all HTML and CSS.
Or I can fritter away my time in dozens of other, much more fun ways.
But the new version of firefox is pretty much identical to the old one… it just has bigger arrows, bigger tabs, and some fixed button positions.
Installing one of the addons that changes the theme back only takes like 20 seconds.
At first I thought it looks like horseshit, but then I looked closer – it’s just Chrome lookalike.
Polished horseshit, lol
Joking aside, i like the new UI. However, that being said, there was nothing wrong with the old one.
It’s just a UI change. All the stuff is there, just in different places. Since I don’t use Chrome (except a bit of Chromium in some Linux distros) and I prefer to use the drop-down menus, accessible with Alt, maybe it doesn’t affect me as much.
I read it helps on touch enabled devices. I really think it does, isn’t that hard to see that the new menu is more usable that way.
As for being a Chrome look-alike, so what? Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. And it helps with Chrome users that want to try Firefox.
As for the rest, what I want is that it can display pages properly and fast, while being standards compliant.
I been using it for 10 mins and I just don’t see what the fuss is all about.
I just used apt-mark to hold FF at V28. Loathe Chrome, Chromium, and all Chrome derivatives and wannabees.
Only the looks are a bit similar to Chrome/Chromium. The new menu doesn’t look like anything in Chrome/Chromium, as I remember it. All the same functions are there, only the layout of UI and visual menu changed. If you use the text menus (pressing Alt) they are exactly the same as before.
It seems to me that it looks more and more like its mobile version, rather than trying to look like Chrome. The colors, curves, and new menu all hint at the theme mobile Firefox has had for a long time now.
The important thing is, it’s still Firefox and so far is still rock-solid. None of the weird crashes on certain sites, bookmarks rearranging themselves, and font rendering issues I’ve had with Chrome/Chromium across multiple versions and OSes.
1. Why is chrome (not Chrome) or the space at the top edge of the browser evil now? It makes it hard to tear of the app from maximise and snap it to the side when the tabs are tight on it. Isn’t abuse of white space the height of bad design.
2. Tabs are generally above content that is associated with that tab only. So address bars, searches are ok with that. However Firefox really mixes all that badly. You have global next to tab specific.
3. Seems very me too rather than wanting to bring any real benefits.
Many computer, in particular laptops, now have wide screen that are not very “tall”. One way to maximise screen usage is to remove any rows that can be removed if at all possible. The chrome, in particular the title bar, can be removed without significantly affecting people’s ability to use the browser. For a browser, more screen space is always a good thing. chrome (and now firefox) in its default configuration has very few user interface elements that stretch right across hte screen and use up valuable screen real estate.
Wow.
Autoupdate just came in. This is how firefox looked after launching: http://imgbin.org/index.php?page=image&id=17299
The ungraceful handling of the theming and plugins is terrible. The addon system spends ages at every updating wasting my time supposedly checking this stuff…
Seamonkey is now officially my gecko browser I think. Firefox is getting uninstalled.
On my system this new release performs horribly. Tested on both Debian Wheezy and Windows XP x64 and scores 2249 Points in futuremark’s HTML5 suite. (http://peacekeeper.futuremark.com/results?key=8v6X&resultId=4528315) Same benchmarks on FF27 gave 2800+ points, opera 12.16 was at 3100 points and opera-next/chrome/chromium all benchmarks at ~3600.
This might be system specific, but it is also visibly slower for some reason on this machine. Is the new UI using some Vista+ only features that was not used in FF27? (and if tat is indeed the case, why did the performance also suffer in Debian?)
The problem is mozilla doesn’t support embedding gecko into applications anymore. Otherwise people would use mozilla runtime and create browsers with native looking GUIs.
This is why Gnome adopted webkit and left gecko for their browser.
Having said that, i still use firefox and will still use it on my KDE installation till something better comes along.
I like some features such as sync which synchronizes my bookmarks and history between my devices.
At this point it seems to me that 3 major browsers never looked closer in UI design: http://i.imgur.com/mhjtZA8.png
At the same time users diverge in using multiple browsers in everyday life.
I like the improvements on the developer tools.
As for the new UI, it is not a big issue for me, except the still unfixed bookmarks dialog
http://orbitaldownloads.com/firefox/
Edited 2014-04-30 18:56 UTC
Brilliant update. The new UI is much more intuitive and allows you to focus more on the task at hand. Also, all my add-ons work without issues. People are such whiny bitches when it comes to change.
There is also an important feature for those who use the Firefox password manager. New about:config key signon.overrideAutocomplete will allow to ignore any web sites which use autocomplete=off for login forms to disable password manager.
IE and Safari already had this, so it was about time for Firefox to get this too.
Fedora has it now. Thanks to the above mentioned Classic Theme Restorer, the I’ve been able to undo the UI changes that bug me.
Start-up time is god-awful, though. It loads with a blank tab or nothing, sits for a full 20 seconds doing nothing, then my tabs appear and stuff starts to happen, though that process takes 3 seconds on it’s own.
And, this is with 9 pinned tabs plus the three that were opened when I closed the browser to run the test.
Though, closing Firefox seems faster, though. While there is a new delay of about a second and a half between hitting the close window button and the window actually disappearing, so far it seems the firefox process exits faster after the window is gone. Haven’t used the browser nearly long enough to know if this will always be the case.
I think I’ll go through the process of erasing my old profile and creating a new new one, just in case.
And, after going through the brief hassle of making a new profile, and adding my several extensions and pinned tabs, Firefox startup times are normal again.
if firefox takes 20s to start you have a problem somewhere and its not firefox itself.
addons, your pc, what not.
use chrome or anything else long enough while putting a bunch of shitty extensions in it and its terribly slow as well
This… is fucking atrocious. Absolutely fucking abysmal. 😐