Comment by CompuHacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CompuHacker | Hacker News Reader

Where the hell is my forward button? Why does browser.tabs.onTop not mean anything anymore? Where's my refresh button? On the... right side, inside the Awesome Bar? Why isn't a separate button? Why can't I put the Home button back beside the Back button? Why is the back button permanently part of the Awesome Bar? Why does the Awesome Bar change shape and size to allow the forward button to exist? Why isn't the forward button an element that I can move around like the refresh button? Why can't I move the Awesome Bar at all? What happened to the Status Bar? Why can't I replace the Status Bar with the Bookmarks Bar at the bottom of the screen? Why is the Start Button now permanently overlapping with anything displayed in the browser? Why can't I move the Menu Button? Why is your Menu Button right where Google Chrome's menus are by default? Also, when you remove the Title Bar, I can't grab the window because I keep my bookmarks as icons without titles on the Menu Bar.

Why are you messing with everything, Mozilla? Why are you breaking the UI metaphor? With the tabs on the top, all the elements under it are made to appear a part of that tab. There's no reason that I can see for the tabs to be on top. It doesn't look pretty, it takes extra pixels to render the smooth curve where the tab meets the next bar. Even if I'm insane and it's the same width, it still looks awful.

I've got five HD screens, and everyone is taking the tablet friendly, ergonomic approach. I want consistency. Please stop breaking everything. You're the last good browser, Firefox. Don't ruin it.

Please bring back: tabs on bottom, the permanent forward button, the refresh button, the bottom bar anchor, and the separate back button.

http://i.imgur.com/cFMoZ5b.png

They won't "stop breaking everything" because they feel the irresistible urge to constantly "improve" and "reinvent" the UI until it becomes unusable (a.k.a. the Linux desktop syndrome).

BTW, the refresh button is in the 'menu config', you can drag it to the old place. The stop button and other 'classic' buttons are gone. Meaningless 'browser.tabs.onTop' prepares you for your transition to Chrome.

FF is so frustrating and disappointing. I'm not angry, just sad.

> "improve" and "reinvent"

I don't remember any change in the UI in the last two years that was not copying what Chrome does.

So "improve" may be right, but hardly "reinvent".

I very much feel the same.

But to be fair, with Australis, the whole "widgets" thing is new, and I really like how Firefox and add-ons can both use it in the same way.

That's pretty much how I feel.

I was thinking for a second the whole UI might get a shake up, or rather, there would be innovative useful functions, that would set the browser apart.

The bookmark and history managers are still pretty aweful. Some of the UI has been polished, but certainly not all.

The refresh button irritates me, because for some reason it feels smaller.

I feel the whole tab placement is a little moot, as it should follow the OSs style. Quite why we haven't good tab management/redesign/overhaul in modern window managers/desktops yet is beyond me.

Personally I'd rather a tool menu. And a location/search bar, a bookmark manager, and a browser pane. All pretty much separate.

Text input would be a nice centralised overlay/popup as and when needed, which I could make huge or small. In other words help with web forms. Android's Chrome browser kind of does that. In opera I used to be able to float the address bar, but it lost it's 'awesome' qualities - autocomplete etc.

It's OS/UX territory, why reinvent controls and the way we interact with each application? The overall UX ends up feeling like a right hodge-podge.

Where is the refresh button I can drag in to the old place? I can only see a Sync button which looks like refresh but isn't refresh.

Oops sorry, you are right. We are back to F5.

>>Where's my refresh button?

Thank you! This has been driving me crazy. I like my toolbar controls to look like:

back | forward | home | stop | refresh

Yes I know all of the keyboard shortcuts, but I still like to mouse around when applicable and don't want to have to use precision to focus on 1 tiny 8 pixel refresh button on my 28" monitor.

> Where the hell is my forward button?

Forward button appears after you click the back button. It is only shown when it could be used.

This and many other improvements reduce visual noise based on analysis of how frequently people used different pieces of browser chrome.

To me, disappearing and jumping buttons are much worse visual noise.

On Windows at least, you can drop the Home button to the left of the back button using Customize.

The Start menu seems to overlap any maximized application when small icons are enabled, but I guess that's slightly worse without the status bar.

You can re-add the title bar permanently by going to Customize and clicking Title Bar in the bottom left corner.

There's an add-on called "Classic theme restorer". If you install that and fiddle about with its settings, you can get Firefox 99% of the way to how it was.

I didn't know browser.tabs.onTop still worked up to FF28. I wish I had been using it since they removed the setting for it.

Install the "Classic theme restorer" add-on and fiddle about with its settings, and you can pretty easily get your tabs back where they belong.

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