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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand people complaining about Firefox UI. It barely exists. There’s a url bar with some buttons in each side. If you use vertical tabs, another bar with tiny icons for each tab.

There’s so little chrome I can’t find any fault in it. It’s just grey, out of the way, as it should be.

Edit: https://imgur.com/a/1I4gG22 tell me where the bad/ugly UI is.

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There's too much chrome. There's no way that I've ever been able to find to remove the fat fixed message header in reading view to see more of the message.

There is too little in modern "nice" designs... on VS Code for example all the title bar is filled with junk buttons by default, and you have to search hard for a single pixel to be able to grab that window and move it. Decades of usability research thrown out the window thanks to Mac and web folks dictating the trends.

The new sidebar design was unnecesary, a waste of space, and the rounded corner cutting into the website is flair with no functional purpose.

The fact that I've historically needed to monkey patch the Firefox chrome CSS (and will have to again to remove the unnecessary bar left of tree-style-tabs) would to me imply poor design.

I'm with you and honestly I think most people are. Frankly, I'm pretty certain that for 90% of users of you swapped chrome for Firefox, replacing the icons too, then people wouldn't notice. I'd wager 80% of HN users.

It's such a petty argument when everything is so hackable and Google is eating the internet. I wish people would put half the energy they use to complain to solve the things they are upset about.

Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t ugly for others. Or will you just not allow others to have this opinion?

It’s ugly.

I think his point is that, even if you think it’s ugly, the nature of a web browser makes it irrelevant. The web browser is a window, 99.9% of the surface area goes to the website. Which is good. We could have prettier browsers which showed off more chrome, but that would be bad because we want to see the website.

Also, the UX of most browsers is basically the same. Browser UI has converged on one layout that works, and Firefox has it. It’s really indistinguishable from chrome.

The allergy I have to some web browsers over others, even on iOS, makes that not a true assertion for me.

I do not like the vertical tabs at all

Good thing you don’t have to use them.

It's a bad default, and most people don't dig into settings

It’s not the default. JFC people will use any excuse to keep using chrome it’s insane.

I don't like pickles. So what? No one is forcing me to eat them and no one is forcing you to use vertical tabs. They aren't even the default so wtf is the point of your comment?

Counterpoint: vertical tabs are way better

Vertical tabs are only better because there is more horizontally space on a as screen and listing things vertical allows you to both gauge the list size and keep a mental reference of what slot a tab was. And those tab headers don’t move because of resizing when the width fills up.

But horizontal tabs are still better. Not technically better or ascetically better. Some other immeasurable, indescribable better.

Have you seen the new Nova theme? It’s horrible, especially with vertical tabs.

I took the screenshot with the nova theme enabled. That’s what it looks like. It’s a nothingburger.

That’s not how it looks in mine at all.

If that screenshot is of the Nova theme, then the Nova theme is very ugly.

No, it isn’t.

Also with standard tabs. I mean it probably won't distub someone already conditioned by abhorrent MacOS design... but the lack of visual boundaries of tabs (independent controls), the terrible vertically uncentered close buttons, the whole thing is a visual Chernobyl meltdown... Mozilla working hard to kill Firefox.

edit: just checked, and the most disgusting thing the extra internal horizontal top border of the text contents of the tab titles got removed. Still ugly, but nor instant Alt+F4... now I can bear it until I find about:config.

Nova looks great

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