Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> Transforming itself to be visually nearly indistinguishable from chrome hasn't really worked in its favor.

Chrome changed its style more recently and ended up being more similar to Firefox.

Is that the timeline here? In that case it was Chrome using its market position cleverly and Firefox not responding adequately. I can only speak for linux interfaces btw.

Small "bullshit" interface changes can have dramatic user and marketshare impact. We can all sit around and wish the world didn't work this way but it's not going to change.

Firefox has alternatively had closer-to-curved-rects or boxy tabs for practically its whole lifetime. Chrome went heavy on diagonal-edged tabs early on, and relatively recently they've been undoing that.

they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.

> they're even mimicking Firefox's scrollable tab-bar since it's such an obvious win over a million super-narrow tabs that you can't possibly identify.

The non-scrollable tabs are what I miss most about Chrome. I know I'm not in a majority there, but I wouldn't call it an obvious win.

about:config has `browser.tabs.tabMinWidth` :) just set it to 0.

Though I firmly believe that about:config is in no way a user-viable option (as useful as it can be, for dev purposes), so I don't intend to imply that means "firefox has that too". It doesn't, it just has a workaround.

Thanks, but I know about the about:config string. Especially with very low values, it had some weird behavior last time I tried it.

yea, doesn't really surprise me. most about:config is pretty hit or miss. out of curiosity tho: was that before the UI overhaul (i.e. have you done it since it became HTML+CSS instead of XUL)?

personally I'm loving Tree Style Tab, so I don't really pay attention to the tabbar any more.

I only started using FF after some bigger release this year, it was too slow for me before.

And good point about Tree Tabs. I've been wanting to try it for a while, might as well do it now :)

It was within a month or so after the official release of Firefox's new theme that it became publicly known that Chrome was working on a new theme, too. So, there was no way they could have adequately responded to that. You just can't rebrand twice within a year.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com