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Comment by WizzleKake | Hacker News Reader

Concur.

The design people in Firefox lost me as a user when they decided to re-arrange an interface that had looked the same for the better part of a decade. Re-arrange, not improve. Apparently years of users' visual + muscle memory means nothing to these UX guys.

I persevered with it for a while but eventually I just gave up and switched browsers. Shame, since I'd been using Firefox since its first release (called Phoenix back then, later Firebird, finally Firefox).

FWIW, here's the "original" user interface: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Mozilla_F...

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Well design is always subjective. I think before Firefox 4, the browser looked really stale and old (as does your screenshot)

And I don't think they really changed it much anyways. Many of the GUI elements are in the same position as before, there's nothing new to learn. A lot of them have been integrated, which is nice and reduces the unnecessary chrome.

I like Australis. To me, it looks more modern, even if it does look like Chrome. It feels like a step in the right direction.

I also don't mind them changing the UI of Firefox because most of the time, this is what I look at: http://d.pr/i/iEtP

FWIW, here's my user interface: http://imgur.com/ABi2XVO

which is to say, damn near identical modulo the GTK theme emulation. AND importantly the nightly build linked in the article completely respected my changes.

How were you able to keep the toolbar at the bottom of the window (with the status and add-ons) with the new nightly? I lost mine when I tried the nightly and see no way to add a toolbar at the bottom of the window.

Well SHIT.

Apparently I went off and downloaded the nightly just before the australis drop because trying it again today fucked everything up. I'm pissed too now.

To be honest a lot of the changes from the new UI make sense to me. Specially the dreaded status bar. I much prefer the new tooltip style that doesn't take precious screen space. I also like the contextual forward button, most of the time you don't need it. And the smaller icons ;-)

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