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Comment by Ayesh | Hacker News Reader

I love Firefox ethos, Firefox keeps redesigning itself over and over, and this time, for the worse.

I have a 400 LOC userChrome.css file because the new redesign was barely usable since Firefox beta received this makeover.

- There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart. Made worse on sides without Favicons.

- I loved the mic/speaker icon when a tab is playing/listening audio. They had to make it TWO lines in the tab, and made it difficult to notice when you have more tabs.

- I could use some icons in the right top menu. It looks nice and easier to use in Edge, that has icons for every option.

- Compact mode is gone, that was discussed here before.

That said, I like the native elements (buttons, up/down arrows, etc). The new icons in the addressbar look nicer and fits nicely in.

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There is no tab contrast, and very difficult to tell tabs apart.

It seems every UI eventually turns into a featureless sea of white (or black) once enough "modern" "designers" have their way with it.

I seriously do not understand the appeal of "clean" or "sleek", and the ridiculous hiding of everything that's important; the appropriate analogy here is that of a machine shop, where tools and work are everywhere you look --- and a "clean" one with everything put away is a sign of nothing being done.

The speaker one threw me for a loop today and I hate it. So much harder to scan for...

Beyond that, I do not understand why the active tab cannot be "connected" to the browser chrome. I don't hate the strong shadow nor the subdued non-active tabs but the disconnect feels like an unnecessary abstraction.

I use the Tree Style Tabs extension [0], which took some getting used to but is miles better for tab navigation.

Vertical tab sidebar means you can see more tabs at a time, the collapsible tree means you can organize them into logical groups, and it's super customizable.

Tab contrast and audio icons are identical to the way they were in FF 88.0 for me.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

Mind sharing that userChrome.css?

Here it is: https://gist.github.com/Ayesh/16b448f7bdbf76d4e954f48623111c... I excluded some rules that I used to tame the new tab page, but this one mostly brings the proton designs down, and removes a ton of context menu items.

> They had to make it TWO lines in the tab

It's always been on one line for me, and I use the default styling.

Previously tabs always took one line of text, but now they sometimes take two (e.g. to show the currently playing indicator, which is now text and not just an icon)

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