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Comment by Narretz | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that the gif shows the Tree Style Tab extension without the default Firefox tab bar, but at least in FF57, the tab bar can only be hidden with a custom userchrome.css, so the otu of the box experience is flawed at the moment. This is at the moment my biggest gripe with the extension, and I think the interview / article could have shown the default state of the extension, and pointed out that an API for hiding the tab bar is at least being worked on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447

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Thanks for pointing this out, I got excited for a moment thinking they'd finally fixed this. The article seems pretty misleading by leaving this detail out: using this extension shows you two sets of tabs which is kind of ridiculous.

Yes, there's this problem too if you run Tridactyl (Vimperator/Pentadactyl's successor).

You may want to have no address or tab bar given that you enter URLs in a Tridactyl's own field, and you manage tabs as buffers. Even worse, Firefox own address bar steals focus in some scenarios.

You can hide the annoying/superfluous parts of the GUI pretty well with userchrome.css settings.

The worst part now is the "no extensions on special pages" and "no extension may open an about:* page".

In the light of recent advancements on Firefox I feel optimistic these issues get addressed within the next 12 months.

Does Tridactyl suck as much as Vimium-FF on FF57? I would guess so. I used to run VimFX, but I'm out of luck now. It seems we have to wait for the DOM to load before we can use our keyboard shortcuts...

I just tried the userChrome.css hack and it breaks a lot of stuff. Tree Style Tab stops being able to tell which tab is active, my address bar only affects the first tab, and my window buttons are all blank. Looks like I'll have to wait for the tab hiding API to try this out.

edit: Nevermind. I was just using the wrong hack. Using this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15870894 + using Customize to reenable the title bar works great.

This in my userChrome.css works very well for me.

  #TabsToolbar {
        visibility: collapse !important;
      }

There are no real glitches or problems but can't imagine living in Firefox without TreeStyleTab in general over minor issues.

I've been using the following in Win 8.1:

  /* to hide the native top tabs */
  #TabsToolbar * {
      visibility: collapse;
  }
  /* to give the top toolbar a bit of height so the window controls don't dangle off to the right */
  #TabsToolbar:before {
    content: '';
    display: block;
    width: 100%;
    height: 20px;
  }

  /* to hide the sidebar header */
  #sidebar-header {
      visibility: collapse;
  }

For those using OSX, increase the height to 40px

Have you tried the built-in titlebar setting in Customize? There's an option at the bottom to turn on the regular system titlebar so that it displays as a normal window.

I have not. Thanks for the tip! I'll give it a whirl when I have some time.

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xu...");

#TabsToolbar {visibility: collapse;}

#titlebar {margin:0px !important; display:none}

#sidebar-header {visibility: collapse;}

#nav-bar-customization-target {margin-top:10px;}

I use this with titlebar disabled

I don't understand why they don't just create an API that allows extensions to modify userChrome.css. It seems like this would solve a lot of the complaints people have about the new extension framework, and it would be a way better experience for non-tech-savvy users.

Probably because any change to the Firefox UI would potentially break an extension using such an API, and part of the point of switching to WebExtensions is to have extensions that never break.

Also, such an API would allow an extension to make the browser UI unusable, which would make figuring out the problem and removing the offending extension quite hard.

Mozilla basically titled the security vs. versatility balance massively in the direction of security with no sudo-equivalent for AMO-distributed addons.

because they're inconsiderate of Tree Style Tab users. They could really well include a setting to disable the tab bar on top, but they're not doing it.

There are no security reasons for not having such a setting. None.

Tree Style Tabs is used by like half the folks working at Mozilla.

I doubt that's the reason.

For some reason I really doubt that statement.

I work at Mozilla.

The other half use tab center?

shrug lots of folks don't use tab addons. But yes, Tab Center (Redux) is significantly used too.

maybe a bit of dogfooding and getting everyone to try tree style tabs would help make Firefox a better browser.

Then care to explain why we still can't hide the top bar as a setting?

It's happening (as a WE API) but it's taking a while because they're doing it properly, and a lot of the browser expects the tab bar to be visible.

Folks are working on it, I've been part of a couple of discussions about this.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447

This comment kinda sums up why it's a hard problem https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447#c116

There's a major problem with addons doing stuff the users don't want, and the tab strip is a critical portion of the user interface so "just let them hide it" has problems with abuse. So it needs to be something that can still be autoreviewed, and it needs to be something that gives clear indications to the user as to what is going on.

They work on it. The main problem is simply that Mozilla fucked up the transition from legacy addons to the new system. There are so many APIs and functionallity still missing, that most commercial companys would have been killed over it. But with OpenSource this has become kind of normal to accept it. Just Remember KDE 3 -> 4. Python 2 -> 3. Gnome 1 -> 2 -> 3. Breaking things is just to common now.

Agreed. I gave up on the extension because I couldn't get my userChrome.css to work the way I wanted.

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