Some hopefully helpful perspectives on problems with the mobile UI redesign

[KelpTheGreat]

I originally posted this on the Firefox subreddit, but I thought it'd be helpful to the development team if I also posted it here, after adding and revising a few things. I looked through the existing discussions and there didn't seem to be one that would be a good place to post the text below as a comment rather than making a new discussion, but I may have missed something, in which case I apologize for the inconvenience.

There have already been many posts and comments critiquing/complaining about the Android mobile UI redesign, some of them very helpful, some of them decidedly not so. But I haven't seen anyone mention a few specific things, so I'm doing that now, and also adding my two cents on things others have said.

1. The "new tab" button in the top toolbar is unwanted/unnecessary. I like being to see as much of the address bar as I can. There are already three other things there that get in the way that I never use (although I'm sure others do) that I wish I could remove: the home button, the little shield that lets you know you're protected, and the button that toggles the site to be text-only (or close enough). I'm perfectly fine needing to tap one button before I can tap another to make a new tab. I appreciate that the new tab button replaces the home button, and if it were just that, it might be a welcome change. But between the new, more rounded (and IMO, uglier) address bar, and the buttons being further apart, I can now see even less of the URL. With the old design, I can read 18 characters of the URL, and on the same page, with the new UI, I can only read 13. (This number will obviously change depending on what characters are in the URL in the first place, whether the site you're on has the text-only button at all, etc.) Ideally, IMO, the address bar wouldn't be rounded, the buttons would be nice and close together, and you'd be given the options to have either the "new tab" button, the home button, both, or neither, visible.

2. The new menu takes up too much of the screen when open. With the old menu, I can still see a significant chunk of the page to the left of the drop-down pop-up. This helps me remember why I opened the menu in the first place, in cases where I get distracted or my brain is having an off day. The new menu allows for barely half an inch at the top, which is just not helpful.

3. Personally, even though I'm right-handed, I almost always use my phone with just my left hand, like maybe 85% of the time. But when I am using it with my right, the forward and back buttons in the drop-down menu are already a little hard to reach, even with my quite large hands (why have they never been swapped with the refresh button and the share button? do people not use forward/back more often than refreshing and sharing?). With the new menu, they - especially the back button - are next to impossible to hit without contorting your hand in an awkward and possibly painful fashion.

4. In grid view, the individual tabs in the tab manager are too tall. The ratio of visible information on open tabs to how many tabs you can see at a time in grid view was already perfect. With the old UI, in the list of open tabs, I can see 6 tabs at most. Each one has a little icon in the top left to represent the website, some text representing the content of the site, and an X in the top right. Below that is a little thumbnail of the web page in miniature. I find this to be a perfect ratio. The thumbnails are just big enough to see what the page looks like, and small enough that you can see a lot of tabs open at once, which I prefer. With the bigger thumbnails, for the admittedly brief time I tried it out before reverting to the old UI, I found that the thumbnails were now big enough that I couldn't see as many tabs as once, yet still small enough that you can't (in most cases) see any actual useful information in the preview. It felt like in your attempt to show more information at once, you managed to do the exact opposite. It's like if you have enough wall space and you want to hang 6 paintings in that space, and they all fit fine, but then someone came along and taped a sheet of paper to the bottom of each painting: it doesn't add anything to what you already could see, and the new bottom extension blocks the view of some other paintings. Also, maybe this was just a side effect of the tabs being curvier, but they felt narrower, and it made me kinda weirdly claustrophobic. 

5. Perhaps most significantly... and this is definitely not something I've seen anyone else mention yet... giant redesign changes like this, without opting-in and without warning, that can only be disabled through secret settings that can only be accessed if you know the "secret code," are bad for people's mental health. I have several neurodivergent friends, and they all use Firefox, because it is simply the best browser. On desktop, particularly, it's hugely customizable, and incredibly stable - one guy I know on the autism spectrum has his desktop browser customized to his exact specifications, and there's only been like 1 change in the last 5 years, if not longer, that minutely changed how the browser is laid out. He loves it because change is really hard for him, and enough in his life is difficult enough for him to deal with, so it's very grounding to have his technology be as static as possible, since he uses it as escapism. When his phone updated this morning to have the completely redesigned UI, he was almost apoplectic. I had to quickly go online and figure out how to revert it and walk him through it before he calmed down. And he's still really nervous that this is only a temporary fix and the new UI, which he hates, will be mandatory and rolled out permanently. And after testing it out myself, as mentioned above, I really don't like it, either.

From my perspective, Firefox is entirely about freedom, choice, and usability. Forcing a radical UI redesign that (subjectively) doesn't look as nice and (more or less objectively) doesn't work as well, that seems to go against everything Mozilla stands for. I've wished for a long time that the mobile version of Firefox was more customizable, like the desktop version, but it's always worked well enough that it wasn't a serious issue. If it updates to this new UI, well, it'll become a serious issue. At the very least, please keep the old UI that users have the option of using if they prefer. But even more than that, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask why the mobile UI isn't as customizable as the desktop UI in the first place? On desktop, all the behind the scenes stuff have been updated for speed, security, and features, but as mentioned above, my buddy's layout has remained the same. He has complete control over where each and every button goes. Why can't that be the same on mobile? Why does only the mobile version force people to accept that it has to be one way and if you don't like it you can leave? 

[kidchthonic]

Seconded to all of the above. The three-dot menu is a particularly atrocious, and all they would have had to ask themselves was "Would Windows 11 to this?" If yes, don't do it.

[emjaykay]

here's how to disable it

1. go to settings, about Firefox, then click the Firefox logo 5 times to activate debug settings

2. go back to the settings menu and then scroll down and you should see the secret settings menu

3. inside the secret settings menu, toggle these four options off

Enable Composable Toolbar
Enable Redesigned Toolbar Options
Enable Toolbar Customization
Enable Tab Manager enhancements

Then go back and everything should be back to how it was. If it doesn't close or force stop the app and reopen it. 

[KelpTheGreat]

I know how to revert to the old UI, thanks. I figured that out before I posted on reddit. This is a feedback post about what I don't like about the new UI and why, and suggestions on what to do instead.

[odnankenobi]

Thanks, I was looking for that

[monser]

thank you very much 

[WaggleDance]

I love you @emjaykay 

Thanks for the secret path to sanity.

[JMAC1978]

Enable Tab Manager enhancements                    (is not there)

[WhyMustIDoThis]

"Tab manager enhancements" does not exist in that menu.

[Taseen]

Also, now to close the tabs menu you can't just swipe down, you need to do a back action, which is a lot more annoying.

[Tisaku]

And now the fix no longer works. Gee mozila, it's like you don't want people to keep using your program.

[JMAC1978]

I am using iceraven and fennec, tired off this ui, firefox beta well status uninstaled, i miss the firefox ver.67 ui, 2% using firefox, the dont care about the user exprrience, sad days ahead (-_-)

[vleo]

It's incredible that these threads existed on here of countless people pissed off about the UI changes months ago, but at least they were able to disable them in configuration settings and then Mozilla went ahead with making it mandatory anyway.

[liria]

I switched to firefox from chrome because it kept having UI changes that I hated and stressed me out. I loved how customizable things were. Now every other time I open firefox there's something new that I hate. (Why the new layout for tabs? I'm a list view person, but now they're gross, cluttered, and harder to close.) 

I really appreciate all of your points, because you addressed so many of the things I hate. (Let me see the url!)Ah well, thanks for helping me feel better about suffering with other people. Off to go look at different browsers. Any recommendations?

[WhyMustIDoThis]

Honestly I loved the way it was before. I had no complaints. A simple, one toggle option to revert  back to what we had before would be a much better solution than compromising my security by going back to an old APK, but accepting that risk is something I'm strongly considering. It boils down to muscle memory. For example, in the previous version, I could tap the top right corner twice to reload the page. Now if I do that, it takes me to the "sync" page of the tabs menu, something I will never use.

[WaggleDance]

Please vote on this issue here:

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/give-us-the-option-to-use-the-redesigned-3-dot-menu-and-tab/idi...

Mozilla's community manager has accepted it as a vote,  whilst these discussions seem to go ignored.