Firefox 89 Beta Released With UI Changes

[loganj]

i guess its not enough that they totally fked up android version. now they want to ruin this one too.
btw has anybody notice that recently the android garbage version has picking up the score. it was 3.8 a month or two ago and now is 4.6. makes me wonder how many accounts did they had to use to make that high. cause the review are still 1-2 stars most of the time

[Duff~]

I'm starting to get a bit paranoid, is Microsoft or Apple secretly paying them to sabotage their UX? It just seems so counter-productive. I'd like Mozilla et.al. to at least try to empirically justify their decision to make their UIs fatter and more simplified, because most of us seem to object to this, and we have been objecting to it since probably the release of Gnome 3.

I wouldn't go that far, sometimes similar ideas, are influenced by common institutions/places. And well... critical thinking is not that common anymore. I am sure they not only may think you're not getting their features, but they (gnome etc) will tend to push even harder their ideas in order to make whatever their point is (which I assume is something abstract, non practical, perhaps aimed towards people that will never use their software, segregating also the few folk that still do use their software).

[omer666]

Since everyone in here seems to link this issue with Gnome, keep in mind Gnome is a DE and you can pick or fork whichever you like.
Even then, there are people who actually dig it, so it proves they aren't doing it all that wrong if you ask me.
But in the case of Firefox, it's the only viable alternative left and the new design doesn't make sense at all.

I am already irritated by tabs on top, but now they aren't even tabs anymore, and putting colour gamuts in the main menu is just tasteless branding if you ask me. Also the new toolbar icons look too thin, which hampers readability.
If you compare it to Gnome's Web, you will see the difference. No tabs bar when there's just 1 tab open, tabs below the toolbar, cleaner drop-down menu with less redundant options, auto-hide scrollbar, and the UI overall just gets out of the way.
I wish Mozilla would correct these berfore final release...

[Alexmitter]

Did no one at Mozilla realize how extremely ugly this design is? With Quantum they finally had a design that I really loved. It was clean, no curves anywhere on the tab bar.

This is for the first time in a while a clear step backwards in UI design, basically a second Australis.

[idash]

I don't know how I feel about this, but I hope it can still be customized using userChrome.css file.
If so, then I don't really care much what they do with the UI as long as I can fine-tune it.

[bug77]

I find the changes rather minor. Not a fan of losing some real estate, but I don't think it's that bad either. My huge 4k monitor may have something to do with that.

[fenixex]

I might be out of loop, but aren't most of you using keyboard navigation?

[NateHubbard]

I might be out of loop, but aren't most of you using keyboard navigation?

Interesting question. I worked at a Linux shop for over a decade until last year, and only ever saw one guy really doing that. I'd bet keyboard navigation on a desktop is an edge case, but I could be wrong.

[Paradigm Shifter]

i guess its not enough that they totally fked up android version. now they want to ruin this one too.
btw has anybody notice that recently the android garbage version has picking up the score. it was 3.8 a month or two ago and now is 4.6. makes me wonder how many accounts did they had to use to make that high. cause the review are still 1-2 stars most of the time

Before they completely messed up the mobile version, I had left a review on the Play Store for it - four stars.

After they screwed it up, I edited the review (with full explanation and leaving the old review underneath) to two stars.

About five updates later, they'd fixed one thing that had really annoyed me, so I went to change my review to three stars.

I couldn't, because it had vanished.

So I left them a one star review explaining why.

And that vanished.

So I left another one star review.

And that vanished too.

So I did it again.

Seeing a pattern yet? Well, the pattern continued. This continued a few more times.

The last one I left hasn't vanished - yet.

Time will tell.

Wouldn't surprise me if part of the score improvement is because they're deleting the bad reviews.

[Mez']

The "proton" redesign is a very nice and welcomed refresh. It's been a long time coming as it started with v85 with bits here and there.

I've already adapted my CSS, although it seems to be conflicting somehow and I've lost the current tab highlight...

But I quite like the changes and the most important thing is I can still do everything I want through my CSS (tabs below the URLbar being essential to me) even when I don't like what Mozilla did.
Which means it's still a first-class browser (Edge 2nd class, Chrome 3rd class), and a refreshed one at it.