Fire your UI-designers

[WereCatf]

My Firefox just updated to 157 and my eyeballs were assaulted by one of the most hideous UI-designs I've seen lately, what with a ghastly gradient from left to right in the toolbar and tabs now being super-rounded pills that can only fit half as much text in them as previously.

Who even comes up with these ideas? How does any of this improve usability? Less text and more wasted space is not an improvement and an ugly gradient that doesn't look like any other application is just distracting. Sure, fine, give the users the opti...oh, wait, the option has already been there for a long time now! But now the option to not use a gradient is apparently completely gone unless you hop into about:config -- every single theme I tried is now a gradient!

Where are the days when UI-designers actually cared about improving usability instead of reducing usability in exchange for flash?

[MCakici]

Should we start a petition asking Mozilla to bring back the previous design?

[QuentinM]

I agree with all the points you made, but I think there are a simple changes that could make the new UI much more usable without completely changing the new design.

Here are the changes to make :

- Vertical tabs spacing: The spacing between vertical tabs is too large. It make the sidebar unnecessarily tall and means fewer tabs can be displayed at once. I think the previous, more compact spacing should be brought back, or better, a density option allowing users to choose between compact, normal, and spacious tabs.

Toolbar icon spacing: The same issue applies to the icons in the toolbar, especially those in the bottom-right corner. They are spaced too far apart horizontally, taking up unnecessary space. As a result, fitting more than four icons on a single line becomes difficult, forcing some icons onto a second row or into a folder. I prefer to keep all the icons on a single line, so a more compact layout would make the toolbar cleaner and more practical.

- Gradients: Personally, I don’t like gradients in Browsers. I prefer a uniform background because it looks cleaner and less distracting. I think gradients can be a nice optional visual style for people who like them, but there should be an easy way to switch back to a completely uniform background.

More generally, I don’t think the solution is necessarily to remove the new design entirely. Keep the new UI, but give users more control over it: compact/comfortable spacing, adjustable corner radius, and solid/gradient backgrounds.

That way, people who like the new aesthetic can keep it, while users who prioritize information density and a cleaner interface can configure Firefox accordingly.

One thing that always causes frustration is when users aren’t given enough options.

[retro77]

I agree, worse update ever. As a long time FF user, this is horrid. My drill instructor would use the word heinous. Oh you want to change your theme? Install one of the built in ones, click enable. Nothing happens. Bounce the browser. Still nothing. Fail Mozilla!

[SAP]

I like the new design! Change the theme to "Ash", a silver color and it looks even more beautiful. 

One thing that is catching my eye; the blue stripes above the tab bars (Pills). Are they necessary? In private mode, the stripes are not visible and I think it looks a lot better this way. 

[pshem]

I didn't notice the gradient, but the rounded tabs feel smaller and more spaced out. It's not a good vibe.

I use tab containers and color-code tab groups. In Nova, this color coding moved from being above the tab text to clipping with taller page icons.

With nova 

Without nova 

[hjvt]

I support this message. I am genuinely considering switching to some other browser.

It feels like all this rounding is wasting additional 10-20% of the screen space. Do your designers all use 4k displays and nobody checks how the result looks on a 17" laptop screen?

And also it clashes very hard with the system UI style.

[idontwantto]

Love this idea.  Also fire whoever's decision it was to have the "Nova theme" or whatever it's called be enabled by default.  Nobody wants their browser to just randomly change without their permission.  Have the Nova theme disabled by default and give users the option to turn it on.  And don't hide the option to turn it off in about:config where nobody knows how to find it, instead make it an easily accessible button in the settings for people to turn on and off.  I don't know where you guys got the idea that people want things to be difficult rather than easy.

[tsg1zzn]

I don't see a gradient here, but the UI design is not visually pleasing. E.g., the curvature of the menu items isn't matching as the curvature of the menu area itself. And context menus and the main menu have yet another curvature.

 The curvature of drop-down menus makes the menu look detached from the button.

[greyquinn]

I do want to congratulate the designers on the worst downgrade I've seen in a long time.

[NoneNone]

I couldn't agree more. I'm not one for giving a lot of feedback, but the two top comments are spot on. The gradient background was very very distracting, and the rounded tab focus just doesn't feel right. I was able to find a theme to fix the colors, but it didn't fix the tab focus shape - even though the theme picture made it look like it would.

It would be great if you made an internal requirement that when new visual styles are introduced, the old style remains an option, easily found in the settings menu - for those of us that still wear classic Levi jeans. Some styles don't need changing.

[NoneNone]

Yes and yes.  The gradient and pill-shaped tab focus are both so annoying that I created a login to this forum so I could give this comment a thumbs up. I even looked up how to create my own style where I could fix the gradient, but there's not a way to fix the tab focus. Please change it back!

Why isn't it a requirement that when you roll out some new styling you have a button in the settings for the classic style? And I really hope you collect metrics on how many people switch to a new non-gradient theme. 

[SeishinHermy]

My sentiments exactly. This improves exactly nothing while alienating users. It's now way less clear which tab is active, screen real estate is being wasted left and right, and things no longer are where my hand naturally drifts to when looking for them. A new button appeared on my menu bar that I never asked for and do not want, forcing me to go out of my way to remove it, and the Other Bookmarks folder which used to behave on the toolbar like any other folder is now forcefully pinned to the far right of it with no option to change that back even in about:config.

For the record, I already hated the Proton design when it was introduced. It looked like the entire cohesion of the UI had been bugged. But I gritted my teeth and endured it back then. Now with this "Nova" monstrosity it's the last straw.

This is change for the sake of change, forced down user's throats instead of optional, a waste of development time and resources that could have been spent on actually improving the experience, and an insult to good design. My IM client changing for the worse every single week is already bad enough, I don't need the same from my browser.

I want software that gives ME the choice. I'll move to Waterfox and never look back.

[gyorokpeter]

Not only that but they changed the positioning of the mute icon for pinned tabs such that it completely covers the message counter for apps like gmail and discord, and put a huge opaque circle around it for good measure. This is a real usability issue because I can't check the number of messages at a glance (the main point of having that tab pinned) while also keeping the tab muted due to discord's incessant beeps that can't be disabled.

[Josem]

I set the density to the highest possible level (touch) because the others seemed too small to me, but now, when I click on the address bar, the font size of the drop-down history list is excessively small.

The whole thing with themes and colors was a huge mistake...

[asdf_]

Yes, please please stop changing the UI for no reason.This is hideous and unusable.