Firefox Mobile toolbar redesign needs a compact mode

[TheFeelSage]

As of July 11, the main toolbar has been replaced in Firefix Android Nightly. It now takes up twice as much space, and that was just to add the forward and back buttons to it. Please add an option to return to the single row compact UI with the tab and menu button inline with the nav bar. The forward button is so rarely needed, and the back button is pointless because that's baked into android navigation buttons/gestures. The new toolbar is just so big with so much wasted space now.

[KellyClowers]

Agreed, we need to be able to revert this in options. This has two problems, one is that it is no good even if you have the URL bar at the bottom, and two, it *only* appears at the bottom, even if you have the URL bar set to be at the top.

This is a very bad redesign, either scrap it or at least offer it and the old system as options - and indefinitely, not just for a while.

I have already gone back the v129 apk of nightly, and will have to stay with it until this is fixed. I have to use the different channels as effectively different browsers since Android FF doesn't support profiles. And FF is the only mobile browser that decently supports ad block and noscript, so...

[Emmic]

ah, I guess that's why I suddenly have an empty black strip at the bottom of my nightly window today. came here to submit a bug about it but I guess it's deliberate.

I use nightly on a tablet 90% of the time, so my new toolbar doesn't look like OP's - my refresh and home buttons have been moved, and I now have a "share" button in the URL box for some reason - but it does now hide most of the current page's URL. is this also happening in the phone version of nightly android? it's driving me crazy.

[GottHeit]

Oh yes, please make this at least optional.

I'm my opinion it is just wasted space and the tabs button is less reachable now.

As said, please make a compact mode or let it just disappear. Otherwise make a long press on the tabs button or two phase up and down, but it is really unnecessary to always show this extra strip

[pmontra]

I have my toolbar at the top and now I have another one stuck at the bottom. My phone is quite small for being 2024 but there is enough space to put all the buttons at the top as they used to be. The back button is already a standard button in Android and there is no need to have it duplicated in Firefox. The forward button could be a nice to have feature but not if the price for it is a toolbar worth of wasted space.

Edit: after having used the browser for my morning routine, the main inconvenience of this new toolbar is that it's always visible when the page doesn't scroll, which is when I'm filling in some form or playing some web based game. It reduces the screen size and in at least one page cuts in half horizontally one of the buttons I have to press. For the sites that adapt to the height of the page, I have a shorter page now. I rather undo this feature. I'm sorry for whoever designed and programmed it but it was a failed experiment.

[Shoe]

There was a fix posted by someone on Reddit:

Enable the debug settigs menu: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/mobile/android/fenix/Secret-settings-debug-menu-instructions...

In the secret settings, disable the navigation toolbar.

I really hope the devs don't tryto make this permanent...

[pmontra]

Thank you so much, it's back to normal now.

[caylin]

Since it's a secret setting and enabled by default I certainly won't count on it staying around. I'd hate to have to find another browser to switch to but this change will push me away if made permanent.

[DailyDriverBeta]

Thankyou.

[Apocalyptrix]

Thank you so much. I hate when developers change something and then remove or hide the option to change it back.  So rude!  Like someone rearranging your furniture without asking. 

[xw33xx]

You're awesome! Thank you so much!

[BiORNADE]

Thanks, it actually worked! Now I have everything in the topbar

[Plainest]

This feels really bad.

Consider for android devices that most of them use either: bottom navigation buttons or bottom gestures (single or triple)

Adding permanent, bottom navigation to Firefox only clutters the space more, especially when there's a dedicated back button as stated above. Thus the only useful buttons are forward, home, the tabs menu, and the settings menu. All of which were expressed in the old layout compactly except for the forward button. If the forward button is of such a priority that it must be there permanently, why not simply add it to the existing top bar by reducing less used elements of it?

[eternalfloof]

Another horrible side effect of this change is the address bar only shows the domain, not the full URL.

It's annoyed me to no end. I can't easily spot redirects. I can't easily see e.g. social media handles, or which GitHub repo I am on.

If you select the nav bar it auto scrolls to the end, where the most useless part of a URL is.

[Jaoh]

The only good thing about this change is that it removes the annoying home button that is to the left of the url bar, everything else is bad.

[uz]

This is all downside for no upside.  Eating up my precious screen real estate, adding visual clutter, all for actions were already previously available and supported with an appropriate amount of accessibility and priority. 

What problem is this trying to solve?

> "Now it's easier to go back"

Nope, gestures are already easier and don't take up screen real estate.

> "Now it's easier to go forward"

The need for this is extremely rare.  Does the data say that people dig in the menu for this so often that it deserves this much more prominent treatment?  (It doesn't.)

> "Now you can share without going through a menu"

The idea that the "share" button deserves persistent prime real estate in the address bar is bonkers.

> "But you can just scroll and it goes away"

Many sites, such as google images, and many others that are "apps" more than pages -- put their content in a full height container that itself scrolls if need be.  In these sites, you can't scroll away, and so you're stuck with toolbars upon toolbars.

Even in the sites where you can scroll away, it's still strictly worse than it was before.  Now I have things animating at the top _and_ bottom of my screen with more noise, more visual clutter, all for zero benefit.

Please, please roll this back.

[uz]

Wow, just realized that included with this update is that the address bar NO LONGER CONTAINS THE FULL URL!  It moves to just containing the domain, with nothing else.  I cannot fathom why anyone thinks this is a good idea.

What problem does _this_ solve?

> "Users are complaining that they don't like all that gobbledygook in the address bar"

Said no one, ever, because it didn't happen.  The URL is part of the user interface, sillies.  This move is user-hostile, since it takes away useful information and literally replaces it with blank pixels.

Aside from that, it's also just confusing.  In this new world, let's say I've browsed to an article on NYT, and I'm actually allured by that new top-level "share" button.  Well, wait, the share button is now next to simply "nytimes.com", not "nytimes.com/article/title".  I want to share the article, but now it looks like I'm going to share just the whole site, not the specific article.

My mom is going to be confused by this.  Can we not just leave well enough alone?

[Emmic]

it doesn't even go away why I scroll, so that "benefit" doesn't even work! plus, I don't want my tabs and 3 dot menu buttons to go away when I scroll....

[acewing]

This post absolutely nails all the problems with this whackjob of a redesign 

Really sucks if this becomes permanent, because I do want to use Firefox rather than yet another flavour of Chromium. But I'll have to settle for that if this dual toolbar nonsense can't be disabled in the future

[Kaloka]

This is all around awful to use as many users here have pointed out. I would like to emphasize the "only showing the domain" part of this. It makes a lot of sites so confusing to use, especially if I want to edit part of the url for whatever reason. Please revert this and do not merge into mainline. I love your browser, pls fix.

[Emmic]

I truly don't understand why this is helpful - there's already a back button at the bottom of all android device's screens already. plus we are all VERY used to the rest of the buttons being up the top, so it's actually slowing down using the browser due to existing muscle memory. *and* I keep accidentally hitting the tab button when I'm trying to tap one of the android nav bar buttons.

allowing us to customise the existing toolbar would have be a much better way to make more buttons available - I don't use the home or reader buttons, so if I wanted a share or forward button I'd rather it replace one of them than have a whole new extra toolbar added to make a share button available.

I have a small phone by modern "flagship" standards. my phone screen doesn't have space for extra toolbars - that's one of the reasons I like Firefox (pretty sure chrome has a toolbar at the bottom, I don't want firefox to feel like chrome). when I use my tablet, especially in horizontal mode, I want a more desktop style browser experience, not a more mobile one. that's why I was so pleased to get the desktop style tab bar recently..... but this the polar opposite of that.

[Honeebunny]

I hate this update so much, for the reasons mentioned by others, as well as the inconvenience when trying to switch tabs. I don't want my tabs button at the bottom, right next to my phone's change app button. I don't like having browser navigation bars at the bottom of the screen at all, hence why I always set them to be at the top, but this takes that choice away. Literally don't see any positives to this forced change, please make it optional at the very least.

[reukiodo]

Thank you for the fix! I have no idea why Firefox keeps getting worse and worse UI. It used to be simple, and therefore the best. KISS principle always wins.

If FF keeps doing stupid UI crap like this, is there a fork which maintains the simple compqct UI?

[anarchaeopteryx]

Came here to agree with everyone else. The new bar doesn't even seem to work properly - it doesn't disappear when scrolling (and I hate it when things do that anyway) and when for eg I open the keyboard to type, like now, there is the address bar and then a blank rectangle above it. As others have said, I have a "small" phone (on purpose, I have small hands and don't want a giant tablet) and I already have a hard time with some sites (like this one) not taking smaller viewports into consideration. I am going to resent even a pixel increase in the size of the nav bar, nevermind doubling it. And I won't even get into the misguided url shortening in the address bar. I know Nightly is intended for experiments and I hope this one can be scratched up to a failure very quickly.

[SaratogaCx]

I'd like to echo the statements from those above.  The toolbar changes seem a bit misguided in what problems they're trying to address.

I rarely use the toolbar buttons.  Back is covered by the OS by button or gesture, forward is rarely used, refresh can be done by pull down gesture and share doesn't need to be always stuck on my screen (do people really share that much?).  I don't like my UI moving around so I have my URL bar set to be always-on.  Now it is twice as tall with the bar itself farther away and is surrounded by navigation buttons which could, on a missed tap, cause me to navigate away from where I'm at leading to a really frustrating experience.  Making these dynamic and having them slide in and out of view wouldn't be acceptable as a space saver as now I have a bunch of stuff moving about on my screen as I try and read the content on a page. 

As for the URL bar.  It has been a thing for 30 years and doesn't need to be endlessly simplified and reduced.  The information there is useful to seeing where I'm at, not just the site but to where on the site I'm on.  For sites like reddit, hacker news, Wikipedia, etc. the URL is also a way to quickly see where you are (like subreddits or HN's Active discussions) and to potentially navigate to other places.  The UI has dedicated space to show this, it makes no sense why you want to replace useful info with empty space.

If these changes are already on a way-way train into the product please make them both optional. 

For now, I've disabled them because, for me, they're both very unwanted.

[LWO]

It is not helpful to constantly change the UI. If these changes are also bad, it is better not to make these changes. At the very least, however, it would be necessary to let the user choose in the settings. This way you can try something new without annoying the power users. Unfortunately, there is not enough space on the display to accommodate information and functions at the top and bottom. what would it cost to implement a few new selection fields in the settings in the next version? Some of the messed up UI can be improved with the secret settings, but unfortunately not everything.

[Lakay]

I am adding my complaint on the "Tool Bar" now stuck at the bottom.  I am agreeing the "Forward and Backward" buttons are not needed based on the way the Android screen works.

I would like an option in "Settings" / "Customize" to have the tool bar at the top, combined with the address bar the way it was before.

This new GUI does not work for me at all.  It goes very contrary to the way I use my phone screen.
It concerns me, the developers have not commented here, at least that I can see.

[Lakay]

Nightly Dev Team, Thank you for moving the tool bar back to the top.

[BiORNADE]

Many people got familiar with sort of a topbar since Commodore 64 programs, DOS programs, also Lotus 1-2-3, Macintosh and the UNIX development ideas, Windows, Games, CLI Terminal, to even iPhone/Android native apps in some aspects back in its early days and Opera Mini

I'm requesting to bring back the old one, but bringing an option for the other one just like what Brave (and some other browser) does

[mrwm]

Another pain point this toolbar creates is that it interferes with the find in page function. Searching for text works the first time, but users will need to exit search again to search the next term. The find next and previous arrows will be covered by the navigation bar.

[KellyClowers]

So are you guys (Mozilla) going to respond on here? Or at least fix outstanding bugs like breaking find functionality?

But seriously this had better not go to production without a way to turn it off in normal settings at least. In fact it shouldn't even get turned on for existing users by default. Maybe new users/new installs, if you really hate new users that much. But if it ships to beta and release with the only way to turn it off being in the secrete debug settings, I am going to assume you might remove that at any time and start looking for a usable fork. It's a deal breaker.

[john-mcarthyyy]

I totally agree with you, it feels so discomforting trying to get used to the new toolbar layout. It’s like they added unnecessary bulk to something that was working just fine before. Hopefully, they bring back an option for a more compact design soon because this change just doesn't feel user friendly.

[Skywind]

It seems that most of the people don't like the new bottom navigation bar. I actually really like it, as it means extra space for customization. I think the current problem is not the bar itself, it's about option.

Just make the bottom bar optional in settings, so that people who like it and those who don't can all be satisfied. Besides, please allow customization for the bottom bar buttons. With this feature, I believe the usability will be enhanced to a higher level.

I'm using Samsung Internet and I must admit that they really do better than Mozilla in terms of mobile browser customizability. In Samsung Internet, the highly disputed tab strip, bottom navigation bar buttons are all customizable. You can just customize them to your heart's content.

As different people like/dislike different features, it is always a good way to make changes optional in settings. Customization matters.

[acewing]

I'm fine with it being an optional thing for those who want it  
The thing is, just hiding the bottom UI isn't enough. The option will have to bring back the old top UI as well
But the way Firefox is going now, I don't know if the devs even care enough to bother supporting two different UIs for long 

[Lakay]

I absolutely do not like it on the bottom.
Please give me the option of having it back on the top.

FWIW, I use "pull down" to refresh and "Swipe" to "go back".
Putting the "refresh" button in place if the "tab", does nothing for me.