OMFG! Look at the massive amount of space between the stupid pill shaped tabs - this is the exact opposite of what I want as a tab hoarder! If I wanted to use a shitty safari UI that sacrifices usability for cutesy looks, I would use Safari.
I am still having to use an extension (Sidebery) because Firefox failed to implement vertical tabs half as good. On my MBP, I have two rows of small panel icons to switch between 2 rows of 8 different categories of tabs (16 panels). Below that, I have 3 rows of pinned tabs on each panel (24 pinned tabs). Below that, I can see 24 open tabs without scrolling. That's 48 visible tabs per panel and with a single panel click, I can see a different set of 48 tabs. That makes a total of 768 tabs accessible via a single click. [edit] I should add that I can see 32 characters of the tab title so it is easy to know at a glance what the tab is about. [/edit] Now that is an amazing UI/UX - not some designer pill shaped tabs (that Safari has had for years).
Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX? Instead of copying Apple's bad decisions - innovate!
p.s. I don't get why in the hell anyone who has more than 10 tabs open at once isn't using vertical tabs? Especially when most monitors have more horizontal pixels than vertical.
I don't buy that. I would guess there are plenty of "joe/jane users" that are tab hoarding using horizontal tabs because they don't know better. Since Sidebery already built it, it would be reasonably easy for mozilla to implement a vertical tabs solution that matches its functionality and would seem innovative as hell to joe/jane. Instead, they decide to copy Apple's bad UI/UX.
Setting my browser up the way I did was a serious PITA and it didn't have to be.
Sideberry is GOAT, nothing can beat its flexibility.
I wouldn’t really expect base experience to match what it offers, so as long as Firefox doesn’t break extensions for power users, I am more than happy to see them experimenting with stuff that could help to win back some of the audience.
> so as long as Firefox doesn’t break extensions for power users
You mean, as long as they don't break them any more than they did a few years back? Yes, I'm still salty about that loss.
But to your point, I agree with you. The native Firefox UI hasn't been one I loved for many years, and isn't getting any better. But I am still able to (mostly) massage it into something I'm OK with. As long as I can do that, then I'm fine with them doing whatever they need to do with the default look-and-feel.
{Adding to my above discussion}
I installed the update on another macbook that's not my daily driver and browser.nova.enabled defaulted to false. Maybe because I have Sidebery? I switched to true and it didn't mess anything up, just added some strange minimal rounding to things. Whew. Keeping it off, but relieved that I can update the SW...
The UI was tidy and nearly perfect, now it's all over the place: weird paddings, different border radiuses even within a single element, clashing background colors, and boy, do I love rainbow gradients everywhere.
Update: for those unhappy with the changes, you can roll them back for now:
You can browse the Themes to try to find one you like better. But yeah it'd be nice if one of the default built-in themes was super plain. Closest they have available by default is a grayscale gradient ("Ash").
Then separate UI updates from security updates. No need for them to be bundled. Gradients and insane padding pushing people to not update make them inherently less secure!
I daily drive multiple Apple products, but this is one of those things where I disagree with Cupertino. I find that pill-tabs are bad design and that the way they mesh with Liquid Glass is strange. Tabs should look like tabs.
Meanwhile, support for Firefox from web developers seems to keep on sliding.
Whenever I have to fill out a new web form on a random site, there is about 50% chance that it will break. Regrettably and unsurprisingly, they do work perfectly in Chrome-based browsers.
I don't have a case right now. I usually report such problems to site maintainers while I'm at it.
But your comment motivated me to discover the "hamburger" > "Help and Report" > "Report Broken Site" menu. Will use it next time I come across a broken form.
Is it really 50% of the time you visit a site you have a problem? That seems crazy high for you to be encountering when my rate is approximately 0% across decades. Possibly you have an extension interfering?
I should qualify that 50% is the figure for new websites I've never used before. They typically belong to smaller non-tech organizations who probably outsource the web work and don't get around to fix things unless they are broken for virtually everyone.
My first reaction is to disable adblock and other extensions, but lately that has not been helping. I blame the lack of testing/support from web developers.
What kind of breakage is it? I feel like these days the devs would have to go way out of their way to create a breakage. Web standards and frameworks are so well designed & supported today that I'm baffled how they could screw things up so badly that they break it in one browser but not another. I could see it if they're getting into advanced features like direct hardware access (USB, hardware graphics acceleration), but it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about.
Out of curiosity, if you use the split view, why? I never understood what it can do that my window manager cannot, but maybe I am overlooking something?
I do it sometimes for highly related work (referencing on tab against the other) that will be a longer running task (30+ minutes).
It means that both tabs get maximized and minimized at the same time, and the two tabs are always side by side. Which means if I need to jump to another task, like answering a message or joining a video call, I can get back to my work faster. It’s a small thing that helps with context switching.
I do it when I consider both side of the Split View one unified context I am working on. I do it not only with browser tabs, but sometimes terminal tabs. I most commonly do it with IDE tabs.
I don’t use split view much, but I can understand the appeal.
It makes a lot of sense if one uses subject-based browser windows (e.g. 1 window == 1 subject); it keeps all tab organization within the browser and makes it easy to minimize it, move it to different screens/desktops, save/restore it, etc consistently with less overhead (no secondary organization system [such as that of the window manager] involved).
This becomes even more valuable for cross-platform users who sync and can’t rely on their favorite uberleet-haxor-wm package being available everywhere.
The big selling point is that everything stays in the same window.
- The split view is a special looking tab you can come too easily.
- You can have several split views in the same window.
- Selecting what tab you want in the split view is much cleaner than tearing off tabs into windows.
- No conceptual switch between "tab" and "window".
I suppose that depends what your window manager is and how it's configured? Most don't have an easy way to lock two windows together as they are moved as one though - especially on corporate devices.
Practically, it's most useful when I have two references for the same thing I want to move together as I work on that thing. E.g. Jira + Functional Spec as I do things related to them.
I think the key here is that split view makes one tab show two sites. So when you switch the tab, you switch both views at the same time. You can't achieve this with a window manager, unless you already (instead of tabs) used only windows that your window manager rendered as tabs, and then comes also with this feature. Does any?
I use a tiling wm, but the split view is more compact because it doesnt have two (vertical) tab bars. Useful on a cramped laptop, less so on a large screen
For a non technical user it is much easier to right click a link (for example a reference in a news article) and choose Split View than arrange two windows (which may involve 2 different monitors).
For a Teams/Zoom screen where you are sharing only one app rather than whole desktop, again split may help.
Also good for mental switching, as you can open a link to the side and either promote to it's own tab/close and carry on with same page rather than have it open separately and break the flow
This is horrible. I still can't find out how to disable the new border radius. The compact option kind of saves it but this is absolutely horrible.
Are they forcing this? You have got to be kidding me. Why force a change like this instead of adding this as an additional UI customization feature? Why is this happening? Is this making them money or is this to cater to the ego of some product manager?
The "Ash" theme saves the theme for me. The sidebar is easily disabled by clicking the settings icon on the bottom of the sidebar and selecting the easily spottable option. I cannot find how to disable this border radius. "about:config -> browser.nova.enabled -> false" only slightly fixes it, does not disable it.
I can't believe they're forcing these pills. What a fucking hostile, brazen change. Yeah, fuck you too Mozilla. Looks like I can't do anything about it! You punked me!
I struggle to use UIs like in the image shown under "Compact Mode". I can't tell what is/isn't clickable, since there are no bevels or other visual indicators (maybe something changes on mouse-over? but that's too late to indicate that I should try mousing-over!)
Thankfully user-chrome still seems to work, so these things can be overridden (and LLMs make those overrides easier to write & maintain).
Who says they don't? They've pushed 23 new releases since 2025 with thousands of updates that include exactly the bug fixes, performance improvements and security fixes you're talking baout. This latest release, v157, includes the built in dark mode you're asking about (I just saw it on the popup on first launch when installing this new version) and the release notes describe improvements to tabs. v156 included huge performance improvements and they're regularly pushing tons of CSS updates across practically all of the releases.
I don't understand why people claim these things aren't happening when they're regularly documented on their release notes page.
Right, I had an option to choose it (I think I chose device default, though I'm not exactly sure what it means on Windows but I assume it's like "system theme" on Android).
The whiplash from seeing that selectable on my screen to seeing someone claim it's not there in the same 60 seconds is really something.
There's a lot of HN users who are just absolutely furious about Firefox and will jump into any thread to scream about how much they hate it and everyone involved in making it. The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion it would be comical if they weren't targeting real people. It's baffling to me the scale of negativity people have to this actually pretty good piece of software existing in an unbelievably hostile product space.
I definitely think it's partly that, but I do think visual redesigns also really strike something primal in the brains of an internet user for whatever reason.
This will expose my internet user age but I remember Marcos Moulitsas talking about DailyKos redesigns, and he noted, correctly I think, that regardless of what you do, a visual redesign will be interpreted as an apocalyptic event to approximately 1/3 of the user base. But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.
Or for another version: there was a time in the history of Facebook where redesigns to the desktop version caused user outrage and mass organization into aggressively titled Facebook groups, protesting for a change. Now I personally think that in many significant respects Zuckerberg is a fool, his investment in meta and VR has been a joke and his perspectives on AI are naive. But I actually think the design and iteration of Facebook itself has been a savvy series of careful iterations, and going this long without shooting himself in the foot is not something to be taken for granted.
Anyway, my point is as a going concern whenever you do a redesign you have to price in a certain amount of recreational outrage from a percentage of the user base that burns bright but brief.
On the other hand, I've noticed that posting anything even vaguely complimentary about FF will often get a bunch of upvotes, so I suspect there's a large base of silent supporters who are similarly baffled by all of the noisy hostility.
Sadly, I think some of the heat is driven by culture war issues so people feel the need to pick a fight rather than simply ignoring something which doesn't suit their needs.
Meanwhile in this thread, the current top comment is:
> OMFG! Look at the massive amount of space between the stupid pill shaped tabs ... If I wanted to use a shitty safari UI that sacrifices usability for cutesy looks, I would use Safari. ... Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX?
and just a few top-level comments downthread:
> Are they forcing this? You have got to be kidding me. Why is this happening? Is this making them money or is this to cater to the ego of some product manager? ... What a fucking hostile, brazen change. Yeah, fuck you too Mozilla.
Something about Firefox makes people behave like absolute maniacs.
Yes, I could have been more precise. It has a poor dark mode implementation that doesn’t allow per-page toggling (unless I’m missing something). A lot of the things I mentioned are half baked. In my opinion, properly building those features should be higher priority than the bi-annual theme update.
Are you talking about the color scheme of the webpage, not the browser UI? The thing reported by the prefers-color-scheme hint[1]?
Building a whole user interface to declare the setting of that preference per-site seems like a pretty high cost for something that won't be used by very many people. Most people just want the site to match their current preference. Instead, websites usually provide a way to override the setting which is stored as a cookie or whatever. I think overriding that value belongs in an extension, not as a core browser feature.
Yup. They can only offer limited built-in protection due to their revenue source, but important to note that unlike Chrome they don't dictate on what extensions can offer.
So they are practically speaking the only game in town (Brave being the exception on Chrome as they are keeping support for UBlock Origin)
Firefox Nightly on Android also allows desktop extensions to be used.
Try out the Compact UI mode (Settings -> Appearance -> Window Density), which I didn't know about until I read this blog post. Tightens things up nicely.
Ooof, it's definitely not just you. I definitely root for Mozilla to succeed and think they're critical in the grand scheme of the browser wars, but that video is rough. It's practically Cocomelon.
FF has been my primary browser for 20 years. But in the past 6 months it spawns so many FF processes from a single web page with advertising like yahoo - 60 FF processes or more - that it's unusable. The X button to stop it doesn't work, and going to another website can take upwards of 10 seconds. I am looking for an another browser.
They’ve done this so many times I’m just numb to it. These designs aren’t how I use a browser. The existing UI required no work, it was fine.
Vertical tabs are the dumbest thing they are wasting effort on. That firmly belongs as an extension, not a browser feature. Same problem as Pocket and the VPN garbage.
I disagree. When done right, tab management can make or break the browser. Extensions can't do all the things a native UI can. See Arc for example. Aside from amazing tab management story that made it hugely popular, it was a pretty uninspiring Chrome clone overall.
I'm currently using Zen since it's the closest thing to Arc with full MV2 support. If native Firefox with the new UI can do what Arc/Zen can do, I'll switch to it probably.
I gave it a few minutes of trial and then disabled it.
With memory prices increasing, many people unable to afford new machines, and web browsers being one of those things that can potentially take a lot of system resources, I wish the Firefox team would prioritize CPU and memory performance of the core engine for users with lots of tabs.
I have stuff like 'Auto tab discard' installed but it seems to break other things, like 'Close Duplicate Tabs'.
Lol, there's enough people out there with hundreds of tabs open that there's clearly a real usecase for it, but I have just never understood this usage model. Feels to me like complaining you get bad gas mileage in your car because you're carrying around 15 years' worth of discarded McDonald's wrappers. The car isn't the problem! :)
Haha - if you read my post above, I detail my setup. I didn't cover usage there. Essentially, in my most used panels, I open a bunch of tabs that may be interesting in the AM, when I designate ~30mins to perusing sites like HN. I dedicate some reading blocks of time later in the day where I actually look at what I opened, usually kill a bunch of low info tabs quickly and maybe read/kill a few big info tabs. Others that I want to dedicate real time to float to the bottom of the list until I have time to read them. It stays fairly evergreen because I am a systematic reader...
Seriously, are you proud of the new look? SHOW IT TO ME. Even the video was mostly themed mock-ups that didn't show what the actual design looks like. Just post a screenshot of the whole browser.
I like the idea of Firefox, but the UI has always been awkward on macOS. It looks a little better, but I don't like the huge tab pills in the window header, or the popups if you linger for more than a moment on the tab pill or favorites.
Firefox needs to start adding actual embedded functionality improvements rather than constantly tweaking the UX. Chrome's integration with Googgle Pay for example (which lets you generate virtual card numbers on the fly) is what allowed Capital One to replace their browser agnostic extension. Now I cannot use Capital One virtual card number generator in my checkout workflow if I don't move to Chrome.
It's edge case, but I think it's an example of how Firefox is not keeping up with demand for more functionality. Firefox is slowly becoming obselete and Mozilla won't acknowledge it.
Yes, no doubt over the years it has not been well run from a business perspective, and it is of note that the browser that was created by it's ex co-founder is found above it in the download charts on app stores.
Mozilla have been terrible at marketing and strategy and innovating technically from a end user experience perspective. With the amount of guaranteed money from the Google deal they had annually, they should have done so much more.
OMFG! Look at the massive amount of space between the stupid pill shaped tabs - this is the exact opposite of what I want as a tab hoarder! If I wanted to use a shitty safari UI that sacrifices usability for cutesy looks, I would use Safari.
I am still having to use an extension (Sidebery) because Firefox failed to implement vertical tabs half as good. On my MBP, I have two rows of small panel icons to switch between 2 rows of 8 different categories of tabs (16 panels). Below that, I have 3 rows of pinned tabs on each panel (24 pinned tabs). Below that, I can see 24 open tabs without scrolling. That's 48 visible tabs per panel and with a single panel click, I can see a different set of 48 tabs. That makes a total of 768 tabs accessible via a single click. [edit] I should add that I can see 32 characters of the tab title so it is easy to know at a glance what the tab is about. [/edit] Now that is an amazing UI/UX - not some designer pill shaped tabs (that Safari has had for years).
Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX? Instead of copying Apple's bad decisions - innovate!
p.s. I don't get why in the hell anyone who has more than 10 tabs open at once isn't using vertical tabs? Especially when most monitors have more horizontal pixels than vertical.
> why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX?
Because you're a "long tail case" tab user? Your case might be the poster boy for an active extension ecosystem that caters to niche needs.
I don't buy that. I would guess there are plenty of "joe/jane users" that are tab hoarding using horizontal tabs because they don't know better. Since Sidebery already built it, it would be reasonably easy for mozilla to implement a vertical tabs solution that matches its functionality and would seem innovative as hell to joe/jane. Instead, they decide to copy Apple's bad UI/UX.
Setting my browser up the way I did was a serious PITA and it didn't have to be.
Sideberry is GOAT, nothing can beat its flexibility.
I wouldn’t really expect base experience to match what it offers, so as long as Firefox doesn’t break extensions for power users, I am more than happy to see them experimenting with stuff that could help to win back some of the audience.
> so as long as Firefox doesn’t break extensions for power users
You mean, as long as they don't break them any more than they did a few years back? Yes, I'm still salty about that loss.
But to your point, I agree with you. The native Firefox UI hasn't been one I loved for many years, and isn't getting any better. But I am still able to (mostly) massage it into something I'm OK with. As long as I can do that, then I'm fine with them doing whatever they need to do with the default look-and-feel.
{Adding to my above discussion} I installed the update on another macbook that's not my daily driver and browser.nova.enabled defaulted to false. Maybe because I have Sidebery? I switched to true and it didn't mess anything up, just added some strange minimal rounding to things. Whew. Keeping it off, but relieved that I can update the SW...
> Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX?
Because Mozilla is basically owned by Google, neither of them care about you or your UX, and Ladybird isn't ready yet.
The UI was tidy and nearly perfect, now it's all over the place: weird paddings, different border radiuses even within a single element, clashing background colors, and boy, do I love rainbow gradients everywhere.
Update: for those unhappy with the changes, you can roll them back for now:
I'm glad we can roll it back, but wonder how long that will be the case.
I cannot find a setting to disable the gradient. It's very annoying indeed.
You can browse the Themes to try to find one you like better. But yeah it'd be nice if one of the default built-in themes was super plain. Closest they have available by default is a grayscale gradient ("Ash").
Here you go: add this to your userChrome.css file.
/disable gradient
/ 1. Remove the toolbar/tab bar gradient completely /
:root:not([theme-image-in-toolbox]) body,
:root[theme-image-in-toolbox] #navigator-toolbox {
}/ 2. Strip Nova purple accent color/focus outlines from the URL & search bar */
:root {
}.urlbar-input-container, #searchbar {
Bonus:
/* Hide Kit mascot illustrations from menus, dialogs, and in-app alerts */
.mascot-icon,
.panel-header-mascot,
[mascot="kit"],
.onboarding-mascot-container {
The gradient is part of the theme. Updated the post with how to roll back the UI changes for now. After rolling back, select an old theme.
I just turned off auto-updates after reading this. Safe for now.
Naive and outright dangerous advice, every release fixes important security issues.
Then separate UI updates from security updates. No need for them to be bundled. Gradients and insane padding pushing people to not update make them inherently less secure!
I want the page headings to look like tabs, not pills. You don't have to be different for the sake of it
It's not different, it's just what Apple is doing (Safari uses pills).
In fact, I propose that all computer User Interface design proceeds as:
Where c is some constant, A is what Apple is doing and N is random noise.I daily drive multiple Apple products, but this is one of those things where I disagree with Cupertino. I find that pill-tabs are bad design and that the way they mesh with Liquid Glass is strange. Tabs should look like tabs.
Safari does almost everything wrong. They’re not a good role model.
My model is not a value judgement on quality. It simply is.
Let me guess: even more whitespace, hiding stuff for a "clean" look like a baby toy.
Meanwhile, support for Firefox from web developers seems to keep on sliding.
Whenever I have to fill out a new web form on a random site, there is about 50% chance that it will break. Regrettably and unsurprisingly, they do work perfectly in Chrome-based browsers.
Can you provide an example? I don't think I've ever encountered this, I'd be curious to see what it's like.
Firefox would probably be interested in a report if you have an example of it: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/report-breakage-due-blo...
I don't have a case right now. I usually report such problems to site maintainers while I'm at it.
But your comment motivated me to discover the "hamburger" > "Help and Report" > "Report Broken Site" menu. Will use it next time I come across a broken form.
Is it really 50% of the time you visit a site you have a problem? That seems crazy high for you to be encountering when my rate is approximately 0% across decades. Possibly you have an extension interfering?
I should qualify that 50% is the figure for new websites I've never used before. They typically belong to smaller non-tech organizations who probably outsource the web work and don't get around to fix things unless they are broken for virtually everyone.
My first reaction is to disable adblock and other extensions, but lately that has not been helping. I blame the lack of testing/support from web developers.
What kind of breakage is it? I feel like these days the devs would have to go way out of their way to create a breakage. Web standards and frameworks are so well designed & supported today that I'm baffled how they could screw things up so badly that they break it in one browser but not another. I could see it if they're getting into advanced features like direct hardware access (USB, hardware graphics acceleration), but it doesn't sound like that's what you're talking about.
Out of curiosity, if you use the split view, why? I never understood what it can do that my window manager cannot, but maybe I am overlooking something?
I do it sometimes for highly related work (referencing on tab against the other) that will be a longer running task (30+ minutes).
It means that both tabs get maximized and minimized at the same time, and the two tabs are always side by side. Which means if I need to jump to another task, like answering a message or joining a video call, I can get back to my work faster. It’s a small thing that helps with context switching.
I do it when I consider both side of the Split View one unified context I am working on. I do it not only with browser tabs, but sometimes terminal tabs. I most commonly do it with IDE tabs.
Sometimes is just nice to have a tab related to an activity, which might involve having two web sites open
I don’t use split view much, but I can understand the appeal.
It makes a lot of sense if one uses subject-based browser windows (e.g. 1 window == 1 subject); it keeps all tab organization within the browser and makes it easy to minimize it, move it to different screens/desktops, save/restore it, etc consistently with less overhead (no secondary organization system [such as that of the window manager] involved).
This becomes even more valuable for cross-platform users who sync and can’t rely on their favorite uberleet-haxor-wm package being available everywhere.
The big selling point is that everything stays in the same window.
- The split view is a special looking tab you can come too easily. - You can have several split views in the same window. - Selecting what tab you want in the split view is much cleaner than tearing off tabs into windows. - No conceptual switch between "tab" and "window".
I suppose that depends what your window manager is and how it's configured? Most don't have an easy way to lock two windows together as they are moved as one though - especially on corporate devices.
Practically, it's most useful when I have two references for the same thing I want to move together as I work on that thing. E.g. Jira + Functional Spec as I do things related to them.
I think the key here is that split view makes one tab show two sites. So when you switch the tab, you switch both views at the same time. You can't achieve this with a window manager, unless you already (instead of tabs) used only windows that your window manager rendered as tabs, and then comes also with this feature. Does any?
Every 15 years, MDI gets re-discovered and then deprecated.
I use a tiling wm, but the split view is more compact because it doesnt have two (vertical) tab bars. Useful on a cramped laptop, less so on a large screen
Well, for one I use it to watch two videos at the same time.
Convenience.
For a non technical user it is much easier to right click a link (for example a reference in a news article) and choose Split View than arrange two windows (which may involve 2 different monitors).
For a Teams/Zoom screen where you are sharing only one app rather than whole desktop, again split may help.
Also good for mental switching, as you can open a link to the side and either promote to it's own tab/close and carry on with same page rather than have it open separately and break the flow
It's just another tool.
[dead]
I think this is the first Firefox redesign that I actually dislike.
Why is every border completely rounded?, on the tab bar it's almost touching the favicon, with container groups it looks even more busy.
At least the colors for the tab groups are better than before.
This is horrible. I still can't find out how to disable the new border radius. The compact option kind of saves it but this is absolutely horrible.
Are they forcing this? You have got to be kidding me. Why force a change like this instead of adding this as an additional UI customization feature? Why is this happening? Is this making them money or is this to cater to the ego of some product manager?
The "Ash" theme saves the theme for me. The sidebar is easily disabled by clicking the settings icon on the bottom of the sidebar and selecting the easily spottable option. I cannot find how to disable this border radius. "about:config -> browser.nova.enabled -> false" only slightly fixes it, does not disable it.
I can't believe they're forcing these pills. What a fucking hostile, brazen change. Yeah, fuck you too Mozilla. Looks like I can't do anything about it! You punked me!
iOS, macOS, android and GNOME have massively increased corner radiuses over the last couple of years, so it must be good, right?
If you find a solution to this, please come back and post.
I struggle to use UIs like in the image shown under "Compact Mode". I can't tell what is/isn't clickable, since there are no bevels or other visual indicators (maybe something changes on mouse-over? but that's too late to indicate that I should try mousing-over!)
Thankfully user-chrome still seems to work, so these things can be overridden (and LLMs make those overrides easier to write & maintain).
the ui fix still works, nice
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
Grabbin' Pills.
I wish Firefox would stop rolling out redesigns, color themes, and other visual tweaks every couple years and instead focus on features and bugs.
Improve Adblock capabilities, better tab and session management, improve sync, improve site css and js management, built in dark-mode.
Hell, just look at the list of most used extensions, it’s a great place to start understanding what users want.
>and instead focus on features and bugs
Who says they don't? They've pushed 23 new releases since 2025 with thousands of updates that include exactly the bug fixes, performance improvements and security fixes you're talking baout. This latest release, v157, includes the built in dark mode you're asking about (I just saw it on the popup on first launch when installing this new version) and the release notes describe improvements to tabs. v156 included huge performance improvements and they're regularly pushing tons of CSS updates across practically all of the releases.
I don't understand why people claim these things aren't happening when they're regularly documented on their release notes page.
They should also improve the bookmarks and history UI, it's unusable. They redesigned the history sidebar now and it takes a lot longer to show up...
The Add Bookmark popup is so small and cramped trying to choose which folder to place the new bookmark.
A lot of what you are asking for is already there.
> built in dark-mode
It has built-in dark mode, check out the Themes in your settings.
Right, I had an option to choose it (I think I chose device default, though I'm not exactly sure what it means on Windows but I assume it's like "system theme" on Android).
The whiplash from seeing that selectable on my screen to seeing someone claim it's not there in the same 60 seconds is really something.
There's a lot of HN users who are just absolutely furious about Firefox and will jump into any thread to scream about how much they hate it and everyone involved in making it. The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion it would be comical if they weren't targeting real people. It's baffling to me the scale of negativity people have to this actually pretty good piece of software existing in an unbelievably hostile product space.
I definitely think it's partly that, but I do think visual redesigns also really strike something primal in the brains of an internet user for whatever reason.
This will expose my internet user age but I remember Marcos Moulitsas talking about DailyKos redesigns, and he noted, correctly I think, that regardless of what you do, a visual redesign will be interpreted as an apocalyptic event to approximately 1/3 of the user base. But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.
Or for another version: there was a time in the history of Facebook where redesigns to the desktop version caused user outrage and mass organization into aggressively titled Facebook groups, protesting for a change. Now I personally think that in many significant respects Zuckerberg is a fool, his investment in meta and VR has been a joke and his perspectives on AI are naive. But I actually think the design and iteration of Facebook itself has been a savvy series of careful iterations, and going this long without shooting himself in the foot is not something to be taken for granted.
Anyway, my point is as a going concern whenever you do a redesign you have to price in a certain amount of recreational outrage from a percentage of the user base that burns bright but brief.
On the other hand, I've noticed that posting anything even vaguely complimentary about FF will often get a bunch of upvotes, so I suspect there's a large base of silent supporters who are similarly baffled by all of the noisy hostility.
Sadly, I think some of the heat is driven by culture war issues so people feel the need to pick a fight rather than simply ignoring something which doesn't suit their needs.
Meanwhile in this thread, the current top comment is:
> OMFG! Look at the massive amount of space between the stupid pill shaped tabs ... If I wanted to use a shitty safari UI that sacrifices usability for cutesy looks, I would use Safari. ... Mozilla: why in the hell do I need to trust some extension builder to give me an amazing UI/UX?
and just a few top-level comments downthread:
> Are they forcing this? You have got to be kidding me. Why is this happening? Is this making them money or is this to cater to the ego of some product manager? ... What a fucking hostile, brazen change. Yeah, fuck you too Mozilla.
Something about Firefox makes people behave like absolute maniacs.
Yes, I could have been more precise. It has a poor dark mode implementation that doesn’t allow per-page toggling (unless I’m missing something). A lot of the things I mentioned are half baked. In my opinion, properly building those features should be higher priority than the bi-annual theme update.
Are you talking about the color scheme of the webpage, not the browser UI? The thing reported by the prefers-color-scheme hint[1]?
Building a whole user interface to declare the setting of that preference per-site seems like a pretty high cost for something that won't be used by very many people. Most people just want the site to match their current preference. Instead, websites usually provide a way to override the setting which is stored as a cookie or whatever. I think overriding that value belongs in an extension, not as a core browser feature.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...
they can't focus on adblock because most of their money comes from google
Yup. They can only offer limited built-in protection due to their revenue source, but important to note that unlike Chrome they don't dictate on what extensions can offer.
So they are practically speaking the only game in town (Brave being the exception on Chrome as they are keeping support for UBlock Origin)
Firefox Nightly on Android also allows desktop extensions to be used.
I just updated. I think it looks great overall, but there is way too much lost space on the horizontal tabs.
Try out the Compact UI mode (Settings -> Appearance -> Window Density), which I didn't know about until I read this blog post. Tightens things up nicely.
Lots of pooh pooh, lots of blah blah, almost nothing on show.
Hey! That's essentially Zen browser's UI?
As a long time Zen user should I give this redesign a try?
"We have Arc Browser at home".
More seriously, it's nice to see this UI finally copied by a major browser, but sad that there's still no real replacement for Arc.
Which in turn is essentially the Arc browser's UI
Except Zen’s is more consistent and in my opinion, cleaner looking.
I think Firefox is doing a good job overall.
Is their overview video doing it for literally anyone at all? I would love to not be infantilized.
Ooof, it's definitely not just you. I definitely root for Mozilla to succeed and think they're critical in the grand scheme of the browser wars, but that video is rough. It's practically Cocomelon.
I wish the best for Mozilla.
Donate to Ladybird!
They're trying to regain mass market appeal because the only people using it now are diehard nerds, the video isn't for you
FF has been my primary browser for 20 years. But in the past 6 months it spawns so many FF processes from a single web page with advertising like yahoo - 60 FF processes or more - that it's unusable. The X button to stop it doesn't work, and going to another website can take upwards of 10 seconds. I am looking for an another browser.
“Warm, but still precise” is an interesting goal. I wonder how much users actually feel that difference, though.
I still have hilarious memories of "aerodynamic tabs" in that era of Firefox design docs.
True
Finally, the one thing users have been asking for! The N+1 Firefox redesign!
I keep trying to switch from Chrome to Firefox. I had been trying pretty hard this last time but now this... >sigh<
Change for change's sake is so damn tiring.
They’ve done this so many times I’m just numb to it. These designs aren’t how I use a browser. The existing UI required no work, it was fine.
Vertical tabs are the dumbest thing they are wasting effort on. That firmly belongs as an extension, not a browser feature. Same problem as Pocket and the VPN garbage.
I disagree. When done right, tab management can make or break the browser. Extensions can't do all the things a native UI can. See Arc for example. Aside from amazing tab management story that made it hugely popular, it was a pretty uninspiring Chrome clone overall.
I'm currently using Zen since it's the closest thing to Arc with full MV2 support. If native Firefox with the new UI can do what Arc/Zen can do, I'll switch to it probably.
I gave it a few minutes of trial and then disabled it.
With memory prices increasing, many people unable to afford new machines, and web browsers being one of those things that can potentially take a lot of system resources, I wish the Firefox team would prioritize CPU and memory performance of the core engine for users with lots of tabs.
I have stuff like 'Auto tab discard' installed but it seems to break other things, like 'Close Duplicate Tabs'.
so sad you have to use the surveillance enabled chrome browser now, I feel so sorry for you
Don't feel sad or sorry :) There are other options, like Orion that runs uBo just fine. I haven't used it enough to say either way though.
768 tabs open. Total suspender works great.
Lol, there's enough people out there with hundreds of tabs open that there's clearly a real usecase for it, but I have just never understood this usage model. Feels to me like complaining you get bad gas mileage in your car because you're carrying around 15 years' worth of discarded McDonald's wrappers. The car isn't the problem! :)
Haha - if you read my post above, I detail my setup. I didn't cover usage there. Essentially, in my most used panels, I open a bunch of tabs that may be interesting in the AM, when I designate ~30mins to perusing sites like HN. I dedicate some reading blocks of time later in the day where I actually look at what I opened, usually kill a bunch of low info tabs quickly and maybe read/kill a few big info tabs. Others that I want to dedicate real time to float to the bottom of the list until I have time to read them. It stays fairly evergreen because I am a systematic reader...
Remarkably few images of design on this page about design. No I'm not going to watch a video.
Seriously, are you proud of the new look? SHOW IT TO ME. Even the video was mostly themed mock-ups that didn't show what the actual design looks like. Just post a screenshot of the whole browser.
There are remarkably few examples in the video as well
Most of them are creative renderings too, not actual screenshots.
Besides the fake macOS window controls for some renderings, I don’t see how one would close, minimize, or zoom windows with this new design.
I like the idea of Firefox, but the UI has always been awkward on macOS. It looks a little better, but I don't like the huge tab pills in the window header, or the popups if you linger for more than a moment on the tab pill or favorites.
> or the popups if you linger for more than a moment on the tab pill
You can turn that off in the settings if you like. Settings -> Tabs and browsing -> Disable "Show an image preview you when you hover on a tab".
Thank you, but there's still a popup with the page title and site name.
Ha, yeah. If you really want to get rid of those almost entirely, you can tweak "ui.tooltip.delay_ms" to something really big like 10000 (10 seconds).
Ah, that sounds promising!
Firefox needs to start adding actual embedded functionality improvements rather than constantly tweaking the UX. Chrome's integration with Googgle Pay for example (which lets you generate virtual card numbers on the fly) is what allowed Capital One to replace their browser agnostic extension. Now I cannot use Capital One virtual card number generator in my checkout workflow if I don't move to Chrome.
That's an edge case is it not?
99% of users don't need to generate virtual card numbers on the fly, so won't be a high priority item.
It's edge case, but I think it's an example of how Firefox is not keeping up with demand for more functionality. Firefox is slowly becoming obselete and Mozilla won't acknowledge it.
Yes, no doubt over the years it has not been well run from a business perspective, and it is of note that the browser that was created by it's ex co-founder is found above it in the download charts on app stores.
Mozilla have been terrible at marketing and strategy and innovating technically from a end user experience perspective. With the amount of guaranteed money from the Google deal they had annually, they should have done so much more.
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