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Comment by vast | Hacker News Reader

Just yesterday I thought it is really annoying that mobile browsers put the address bar on top, even worse if it is moving in and out. That way it is impossible come close to a native look and feel. Now FF puts the address bar on bottom. Quite a suprise but I think it is a pretty smart change.

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Exactly. I wanted to use Firefox on mobile but Brave is so much more convenient since it puts the bar at the bottom. Reaching my hand up becomes annoying since I might have to use two hands to not drop my phone.

Another thing that annoyed me about the previous mobile Firefox was the 'x' in the URL bar closed the bar instead of clearing it like Brave. I had to unlearn months of muscle memory since it was a habit of mine. Maybe it doesn't matter since it's just an issue after switching.

I love the address bar at the bottom. It feels so much better on a mobile device. As a whole, this version is much nicer to use than the previous versions.

My two main gripes are the default search engine and telemetry. Both of these options should be set by the user on first launch. I don't want to use Google and I don't want to send data to Mozilla.

I can't understand how UX designers come up with the idea that putting stuff on the top of the screen* is a good thing, and even keep reiterating through that. That's an honest question, anybody knows what's the motivation behind that?

* or, places that are hard to reach for most users

1) It's entirely rational on a desktop to have the URL at the top.

2) same browser gets put on a mobile phone, wants to "feel natural"

3) url bar goes in the "familiar" place.

Legacy design and use patterns. The top of the screen used to make more sense than today.

Mobile-first design really hasn't taken hold for many UX web designers (and/or the organizations haven't adapted). Relatively speaking, large phones where it's difficult to reach the top weren't popular until recently. Even mobile apps are just starting to put navigation towards the bottom.

They are thinking like letterhead.

In addition to familiarity as others have mentioned: when you scroll a site, it feels natural to "scroll away" the UI on the top. If you have UI on the bottom, and you want to hide it when scrolling, that doesn't feel as natural.

It's an unbelievably untapped aspect for differentiating browsers. However, instead of the address bar what would be the best experience would be to have navigation buttons on the bottom. Speed dials, back and forward, tab management should be front and center and at the bottom, since that's actually what you're using the most when browsing on mobile.

But then when you go to enter a URL it jumps to the top. That was annoying as I was pasting in all the URLs from my other browser.

> That way it is impossible come close to a native look and feel.

What "native look and feel" are you talking about?

Well Edge on Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile also puts address bar on the bottom.

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