The new style of the address bar is extremely jarring, and (imo) ugly. It breaks all kinds of UI conventions, drawing itself over other UI elements like the tab bar and the toolbar to the left and right of it.
For this reason alone, at least I've found that setting `browser.urlbar.update1` to false in about:config reverts to the old code--mostly. Firefox 75 still seems to have changed the click behavior of the bar to be totally unlike any other program too; it highlights the entire text by default, without putting it in the selection buffer, and in general makes handling it with the mouse a lot more tedious than it used to be.
I'm ragging on this a lot, but seriously, it's a major regression in UX.
Fully agree that this change is needless, gratuitous and downright ugly. But it gets worse...
The pref that disables the ugly behaviour is going away. Indeed, in some sense it's already gone: ["Remove the megabar pref"](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1627969) is already marked as `closed`.
I think the UI change is not merely ugly, but actively harmful. When the user's attention is elsewhere, but the focus of the urlbar changes there's a nasty UI animation that occurs in the user's peripheral vision. As any real UI designer should know, human peripheral vision is primarily for motion detection, directly tied to fight-or-flight stress reactions and triggers an adrenal stress reaction which in this case is not merely "undesirable" but downright harmfully misleading. The last thing the world needs is more stress just because some delusional UI designers thought an animation upon receiving/losing focus was a good thing to implement.
This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough.
I'm guessing this change was pushed forward after a Mozilla employee noticed the new Chrome and Google Search design [1] (click on the search bar to see it pop out and expand in a similar way), and nobody found the power to protest against it internally. This was a deliberate move by Google to reduce the visual distinction between Chrome's browser frame and the search site, and it was copied by Firefox without consideration.
Experimentation is needed, but there should be more checks along the way, and feedback should be requested from the target audience, so that a designer's fever dream does not land on hundreds of millions of devices, to the bemusement of everyone.
I understand Mozilla's need to target base users in this losing war against google, so I'm forgiving when they make Firefox more like Chrome, but I just wish that in their releases they could say "hey, loyal Firefox fans - just disable this, this, and this to keep the previous behaviour".
That way they can pander to the masses as much as they want and still keep their fan base. Right now it feels like the fanbase is being ignored.
You (and others in this thread) are way, way underestimating the cost of configuration options in software used by lots of people. There's the cost of having to support that huge fractal in the code. And there's the cost of things being broken for users who don't understand the options and broke things for themselves. Configuration options are bad news for software not intended exclusively for technical users.
Alienating some of your most loyal users whom have spent decades advocating for Firefox has its costs too, and there are always ways to safeguard or hide configuration options, such as about:config.
Personally I wouldn't mind a slight expansion to highlight the search bar, but the current design is crude and over the top, and it has led to usability issues.
As someone who is one of those most loyal users and has been using Mozilla since they were releasing milestones of the app suite after the 1998 open-sourcing, then moving on to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox... I can say I just don't care about this change. I run beta channel, and it was a weird jarring surprise when I first saw it a month or so ago, but within a few hours I just stopped noticing it, and stopped caring.
I just don't get why people end up in arms about such trivial changes to software. Admittedly I used to be like that, to some extent, but at some point I realized this sort of thing doesn't actually affect my life in any meaningful way and so there's no point worrying about it.
Change your mindset. This sort of thing is not worth even the tiniest raise in blood pressure. It's a waste of time and energy to even give it a second thought. Doing so provides no value to anyone, especially yourself.
I don't like this change but haven't publicly remarked about it until now. What about the vast majority of people who don't browse hn or haven't been provoked into making their opinions heard? Dismissing opinions you don't agree with as vocal minority won't help you and certainly won't help Mozilla.
Mozilla like other companies providing user-centric products must conduct focus groups to see what works and what doesn't. Relying on designers' ideas without proper validation is a recipe for disaster.
> but within a few hours I just stopped noticing it, and stopped caring
> there's no point worrying about it
So continuing that logic, people should not care about, or notice about something mozilla spent time and resources on, and made a risk on. Bad project management IMO then.
> Change your mindset
why? if it's not worth the frustration, why is it worth the change?
I'll admit, I didn't directly notice it immediately, but it felt off. What annoyed me was reading the reasoning - "Focused, clean search experience that's optimized for smaller laptop screens", yeah, I don't want that optimization. This "help you focus" crap (in general, for years) is ridiculous. I like density, but not stupid density. I didn't pay for screen real estate to get "beautiful" whitespace.
It would be nice if Firefox stayed friendly to technical users then. They have a large market factor that Chrome does not have in that it's favorable to us techies; we then contribute to Firefox in return. Shooting tinkerers in the foot loses the value we provide.
and companies copying features no user asked for from the top competition is even more expensive and dumb.
it's like gnome giving up all its good differentiating features during the great rewrite just to mimic osx, no matter they were in a cargo cult mindset copying even the flaws, shortcomings and bugs.
here Mozilla is copying Chrome's abusive forceful use of google's services from the UI, no matter if the user wants or not
I loved firefox actually for the ability to style the UI using user styles. IMHO they need to bring back the old way of customizing. In constrast to Thunderbird (which allows it but has even less of a community) allowing webextension experiments and unsigned addons in any version might bring back freedom even in the times of webextensions. I really hate how they started patronizing their loyal users with all its colateral damage. It has become easier to customize chrome than firefox, strange times...
Ah I'm not using Google anymore so I did not notice it, but the recent Slack update has the search box behaving kind of the same.
So there's a trend (fad?) here in design language, and I would be fine by it... if it wasn't clashing with every other part of the UI language, from Material cards to good old desktop windows. But this way, the extra Z value, size and color flash attention grab is just cognitively dissonant.
I place the new pointer support on iPad OS on the same trend, as the pointer moves, the target has varying physical changes and hints the user with a little poppiness on the Z axis (parallax as the pointing device is operated, extra box around), but it's 1. a hint, not shovelled in your face and 2. consistent with the surrounding design language.
The same weird design can be found on the updated confluence search box too. This is like websites implementing their own smooth scrolling with Javascript. We all know how that worked out.
(Quite a few people think my language was overly harsh. I'll reply to this one, but take it as read that it's much the same reply to all similar comments. Nothing personal, just this one seems to best sum up the (perfectly valid) criticism.)
Yes, indeed, it is a (very small) crime against humanity. (Not a BIG Crime Against Humanity, which sounds almost like a game of some sort.)
To be human is to have a hardwired hormonal stress response to this changed UI. It's something that evolved when we still lived up in trees. It's not something we can learn our way out of or train ourselves to not experience. And it is unnecessary, nay, inappropriate in a world already over-filled with stressors and noise.
And I would expect UI professionals to know about this and to avoid it except in places where a stress-response would be appropriate (time critical warnings, for example).
So I'll stick with the harsh language, thanks. As pointed out by some, it was not (and never intended to be) personal.
At the very least they could retain an option to disable to it, but no...
Sometimes I really miss my pre-internet computers, with software that was exactly the same every time I used it, until I decided that I wanted a new version.
The about:config flag only ever existed so people running beta and nightly builds could easily switch for testing purposes. According to Mozilla employees, a big part of the new URL bar behind the scenes was cleaning up a mess of legacy code, so I can totally understand why they're not going to keep the old code around indefinitely.
Good for Mozilla on the code cleanup, I just wish they hadn't also felt the need to make the URL bar expand...
I'm willing to accept that as the original purpose. However it is now used to cover up and patch over poor design, missing features and unwanted sponsored content features.
> This abomination has to die, and today would not be soon enough.
Please don't use this kind of language. It's software, and a lot of people work hard on it. Sometimes they make decisions you disagree with. There's no need to be rude.
Working hard on something doesn't make it exempt from criticism. And they didn't even say anything about the devs, just the feature. It's not like you can be rude to a web browser.
No one said it was exempt from criticism. Saying that someone else's work is an "abomination that has to die" is rude and an inappropriate way to express your opinion.
If that were true, they wouldn't have released it. I don't understand why you are so eager to defend that choice of words. I don't think it is too much to ask that conversations remain cordial, even when people disagree.
Because those words perfectly describe how I feel about those changes to address bar.
And they released it for the same reason Slack released their input box update https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647. Some manager wanted to leave a mark and nobody was there to oppose them.
Your feelings are valid, and understandable for a piece of software which is so intimately integrated into your daily life. However, allowing those feelings to influence the way you discuss this software seems unwise, especially if you intend to convince the software's developers to change their minds about it. When people feel that core parts of their identity are being attacked, they tend to shut down and stop listening. Developers of complex software like a web browser, who have dedicated large parts of their professional lives to the nitty-gritty details of its creation, surely feel as emotionally attached to it as you do, and they are likely to perceive an attack on it as an attack on themselves. If the impact of this change is so great, then you have a responsibility to present your criticism of it in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of it being received and accepted.
I'm not sure if "responsibility" is the right word. Perhaps there's a responsibility to HN to avoid such language. But I don't think disgruntled users have a responsibility to pose their feedback in a constructive way.
s/you have a responsibility to/it would be most effective if you were to/, perhaps.
Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.
(And hey, I work for Mozilla, though not on UX stuff. When I saw the original description of poor UX, I was planning on checking it myself and possibly filing a bug if I agreed. But once the thread got into "abominations", I lost interest and subconsciously recategorized the complaint as coming from the subset of users who complain loudly and whose opinions I generally find too unrepresentative of more than a small niche. Which could be right or wrong in this case, but I have found it to be a very useful heuristic to consider the constructiveness of criticism as a signal of how useful it would be to examine further.)
Yikes, posting like this will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN only in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.
We don't want mindlessness either. The scorched earth of internet flamewars, which is the direction your GP post pointed in, is truly mindless. That's the fate we're hoping to avoid here. To maximize signal/noise we need to minimize indignation/information.
Ah, well... I've thought about this, and if i should waste your, or others time by making even more 'noise', or saying nothing at all. There are a few sides to this, one would be that it is a free product, even open source and one is free to either deliver patches or fork it, otherwise there should be no feeling of entitlement at all.
BUT... i've read the whole thread, and the other too, and the only 'signal' between all the 'noise' of annoyed users is more or less: take it or leave it (because we say so)
This is arrogant. And politeness and politically correct speech under all circumstances leads to nothing but mediocrity, while the groupthinking celebrates the emperors new clothes, over and over again. I think sometimes it is necessary to bang the fist hard on the table, to recalibrate the signal processing. If this is too stressful for all the special snowflakes to bear, they maybe should stay in their safe spaces and don't babble about niche minorities. Or maybe smoke less weed?
> If that were true, they wouldn't have released it.
I was with you until this. "Abomination and needs to die" is too colorful and dramatic for my tastes. But the new address bar's design is indeed (mildly) offensive from a design perspective. It's visually jarring and, as I said elsewhere in this thread, it simply looks broken. When a long-time Firefox user first sees it, they might think their Firefox installation has gone haywire (I certainly did). This is an off-putting feeling often coupled with a bit of dread about having to rebuild your browser profile to fix whatever caused the chrome-layout to break. Yuck!
Mozilla is not alone in releasing features or design changes that cause users to get upset. Some might even call the features abominations. Here's hoping Mozilla reads this thread and considers some reversal.
On a related note, I recently started my first dev job. I found an issue and told one of my mentors "I wonder if something stupid is going on in <insert library name>". She called me out in front of the entire office saying "I don't appreciate you calling our work stupid, we worked really hard on these libraries for years". What? Are most developers this sensitive about wording? I should have said "weird" or "strange" instead of "stupid", but give me a break. I obviously wasn't attacking anyone, it was just a figure of speech and we all have moments of stupidity.
It's just a figure of speech. It's not meant to be taken literally. It's a valid description of a lot of people's feelings for this user-hostile feature.
It may be a figure of speech but it is a ridiculous overreaction to call it an abomination. You may not like it but it’s nowhere near enough to describe that way. What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?
Did you think the GP meant that Firefox "has to die"? Because that's not how I took it. I think he means just this new feature needs to die.
And yeah, it's a bit over the top (I haven't looked at the new feature yet, just read descriptions of it), but I didn't feel like it needed a "don't talk like this" response.
I'd agree on a lot of things in life, but UX is an exception because decisions made about how we interact with something have an area of effect.
I've railed against Google's UX approach for years. Their UX approach requires too many steps between states. Where does this get dangerous, even potentially lethal? Android Auto.
If one lock screen is too distracting while driving, Android Auto adds one more. None of your non-Google App notifications will appear on your dashboard, but Android Auto doesn't let you access your notifications unless you completely exit the app. You can't open Messages in Android Auto, even when the vehicle is not in motion. Android Auto disables all touch controls when the vehicle is in motion, and if you disabled Google Voice on your phone, you won't know until you're going 80MPH down a highway and need to adjust your GPS that you can't use touch, you can't use Voice, and you'd have to exit Android Auto just to re-enable it, and it can't just be enabled for Android Auto, it has to be enabled for your whole device... and Google owns any data you generate with the Voice Assistant, and you have no right to restrict how Google uses it, including the sale of that data to a third party.
So, I agree on most things to not be rude. But with UX, the goal is to prevent conflicts by modeling features around our most likely approach to using said features. When professionals at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, force end users to use features in a specific (rather than intuitive) way, the consequences are wide and deep and the terms of service make it impossible to hold them accountable to change it.
I, for one, am absolutely fine with this. I have updated FF recently and didn't even notice any changes, had to look up what had changed after stumbling on this comment. I interact with address bar a lot, copy-pasting parts of URL all the time.
As long as they don't by default hide https:// and parts of URL from the address bar itself in Safari/Chrome style , I'm ok with it not shown in suggestions.
(I have a big 24" screen though, maybe that affects somehow).
I don't know what you're talking about. Here's what I see [1], I actually like highlighting on main domain. If they'll remove https:// from my URL box, I'll grab a pitchfork myself, but for now I see no signs of it happening.
That patch seems to remove the option of striping the http(s) from the url bar. That is, you always get the http(s) and there's no option not to view that anymore.
It’s really not bad. It is a change. You might consider keeping it enabled for a couple of weeks and see if you still hate it so much after the new wears off.
I barely noticed it even after reading HNers whine about it. They said it covered other UI components. In reality it grows a few pixels. I wouldn't have noticed it had I not read HN, that's for sure.
I still legitimately don't see what people are describing about the address bar. I haven't noticed a change the entire time I've used Firefox (about year). Could someone post a before-and-after screenshot or something? (I've been using Firefox Developer Edition too if that makes a difference?)
One of my most common action sequences in Firefox is:
Open new tab -> Click on one of the links in the Bookmarks Bar [1]
But now, when I open a new tab, the address bar is expanded and partially hides the Bookmarks Bar. So it's hard to click on my favourites. Needless to say, I disabled the new address bar straight away.
[1] I'm pretty sure that I do this more often compared to typing something in the address bar.
Can't answer for parent post, but I do my living room browsing on a 1360x768 dumb TV and having the bookmarks toolbar open in any tab other than a blank new tab eats a noticeable amount of screen real state, so I default to new tab & click on bookmark.
It's a bummer that Firefox is not respecting its own compact layout by needlessly enlarging the address bar while on focus, but the shadow dropped from the new monstrosity obscures the bookmarks toolbar in my desktop with default layout, too, and that's a real usability concern.
That's interesting, it doesn't auto-expand for me. When I make a new tab, the URL bar is active, but it doesn't expand the dropdown thingy. If I start typing, or click on the URL bar, then it shows the dropdown. Maybe it's a platform difference (I'm on Linux), or some configuration tweak (I use the "compact" layout option), or buggy for one of us :)
On Linux with FF 75 for me, clicking in the URL bar (or Ctrl+L) sets focus to the bar (as it used to), but also causes the bar to expand downwards (open) with suggestions.
FF 74 didn't use to do this, neither does Chrome for me.
The dropdown list of suggestions/search results is not the expanding thing that people are complaining about. The URL box itself expands. Maybe you wouldn't have been so dismissive of people's complaints if you had fully understood what this change does.
You've called people rude for feeling strongly about their objections to this change, you've denied that Mozilla would have shipped a negative change, you've accused the detractors of this change of not understanding that it could pose a maintenance burden to keep it optional, and you've asserted that said maintenance burden outweighs the usability benefit of letting existing users keep the existing behavior.
You've done everything except provide an actual argument in favor of why Mozilla should introduce this new UI behavior that breaks existing conventions and interferes with other features in ways that are as-yet unresolved.
And you're doing similar stuff elsewhere in the thread about other questionable Mozilla UI decisions.
Can you provide a screenshot? For me, the address bar partly overlaps the bookmarks bar but not the actual bookmarks. Also, the increased size of the address bar is purely visual and the clickable area of the bookmarks did not change at all. You can verify that by hovering the bookmarks while moving the mouse pointer inside the address bar. The bookmarks are still clickable even when the pointer is visually within in the address bar.
Hardcore Firefox fanboy since its humble beginnings.
Since 60/Quantum, I can't think of a single UX change which hasn't been detrimental. Someone up top is souring the entire product in a misguided attempt to recapture market share. But all they're doing is continuing to bleed out remaining users, the majority of whom are likely somewhere between the casual and power user.
> Hardcore Firefox fanboy since its humble beginnings.
Same here. And although I may stick with it due to my loathing of the alternatives, I'm increasingly sick of it. The complaints about the new URL bar/bookmarks toolbar were exactly my experience, but what's worse is Mozilla just doesn't care[0].
They also have a mobile browser called Firefox Lite which after a recent update displayed sponsored ads as top sites on the home screen.
Not a problem though, just remove them and put your own chosen sites, right? Wrong. It's not possible.
Repeat: Mozilla forces unremovable advertising as top sites on the home screen of one of their mobile browsers, used by millions of people.
On the download page for this product[1] Mozilla modestly promotes itself as:
"dedicated to keeping the power of the internet in people's hands"
The splintering of their mobile platform into several overlapping apps is its own hot pile of garbage, if you ask me. I haven't even tried Firefox Lite but if they do that with Focus then I'll be pretty incensed.
And I can't for the life of me even understand what the purpose is! The URL bar already had a very noticeable focus state outline. Are there users who couldn't tell it was in focus?
People on reddit have been complaining about how the bookmarks bar is harder to access now. The developer response has been something to the effect of "it's only covering the bar by a few pixels, it's really not a substantial difference."
I'd be inclined to agree with the evelopers, except, what is the advantage of that trade-off? Sure, you're only making the bookmarks bar very marginally harder to use, but, it's still something, and if users aren't getting anything out of it in return... why do it?
I should google the design process but maybe they're doing it to make the input box match the padding of the drop down menu. I don't remember how it worked in FF74 (it's one of those things that I don't notice if they just work) but disabling the new behavior with browser.urlbar.update1 false makes the drop down menu expand to the full width of the window, so no problems with padding. The new menu is as narrow as the URL box and padded, so they had a problem.
I don't like moving interfaces (I disabled all the movable parts in Gnome Shell, extensions authors be blessed) so I'm sticking with browser.urlbar.update1 false until it goes away in FF 77.
I was confused at first and did not like it. But a few hours later got used to it. Perhaps the reason being I'm mostly interacting with a keyboard instead of mouse.
The thing I like about this change is when you press Cmd+L it immediately expands most visited list and you can quickly select with the keyboard.
Completely agreed. When this first landed in Firefox Developer Edition, I thought something was broken with the layout. It looks especially broken to me when using the "compact" layout mode. It took me some time to find the "browser.urlbar.update1" setting that disabled it, and it was a relief to finally see the address bar return to normal size.
I've historically found the address bar in Firefox superior to all other browsers precisely because it is not biased toward being a gateway to search engines. It has always done a superb job of finding what I am looking for from my history and bookmarks. I worry that the new algorithm will reduce the utility of the address bar for me, making it similar to other browsers'.
> it highlights the entire text by default, without putting it in the selection buffer
That selection buffer inaction is desired behaviour IMHO. Changing the selection buffer should only happen with explicit user selecting. GTK screws this up and constantly clobbers my selection buffer, which is a real pain. That's one reason I stick with KDE and Qt applications whenever possible.
Automatically putting highlighted text into the clipboard is an old, old Unix convention. I personally hate it, along with the middle-click to paste action. AFAIK neither of those behaviors can be disabled, and I find them both extremely surprising, unintuitive and harmful. I guess some people like it, but if I could turn all that off, I'd be thrilled.
Manually highlighted text going into the selection buffer for quick middle-click pasting is great, and makes me much more efficient at manipulating text on Linux than Windows. If you don't like it, you can just ignore it: don't click the middle mouse button on text areas. The selection buffer is independent of the explicit cut-copy-paste clipboard (if you have some program running that's trying to synchronise them, you can turn that off).
Yeah yeah, it's totally a preference thing. I can't ignore it, because I use the scroll wheel a _ton_ (have you ever used the middle-click autoscroll thing in Firefox? it rules). So sometimes the scroll wheel gets accidentally clicked and I paste some junk into the middle of the document I happen to be scrolling through. I'd much rather have a strong, confirmative action like pressing Ctrl-C and V to interact with the clipboard, rather than overloaded functions like highlighting text or interacting with the scroll wheel. It sucks, but after 10+ years on X11, I've mostly gotten used to it.
This feature predates scrollwheels multiplexed with middle buttons. You could source a scrollpoint mouse to split the behavior. The "modern" ones with the large saddle are a nicer experience than the laptop erasers.
Oh trust, me I've tried. That setting only affects Gnome/GTK applications. Some applications that use other toolkits, or no toolkit, have direct support for middle-click paste, which then can't be disabled at all. It's just a platform convention I dislike; I know it won't be going away.
i actually like middle-click paste, but there's no denying that having two distinct OS-level copy/paste buffers with subtly different semantics is a rough edge.
It's not just the tab bar. I use Tree Style Tab and so have tabs down the left side of my window and the horizontal tab bar hidden. However, my bookmarks toolbar is right under the URL and search boxes, and that toolbar is probably my most frequently used interface to the browser, with the search bar not far off. The URL bar is a distant third, but now a slight misclick opens the ohmygoditshuge URL bar area and then the bookmark toolbar I was probably aiming for is mostly obscured. Not only that, but clicking in the area above the URL bar then has different results depending on exactly where you click, but they range from not closing anything to closing the drop-down but still leaving the oversize URL bar partially hiding the bookmarks. None of them just closes the whole thing again, the way you would expect an expandable control to do when you move the focus elsewhere.
"Infuriating" is not an adequate description for this change in something I use hundreds if not thousands of times per day. It really is as annoying as when MS Office switched to the ribbon UI.
> They changed it to behave like one other program: Chrome.
Oh man, I recently had the displeasure of using Chrome on someone else's computer and was driven absolutely insane by that behavior-- it made it extremely hard to edit a url.
Do you have any idea what the justification for this behavior is? (surely it's not just "be like chrome")
The justification that the most common task when clicking the address bar is typing a new one. Now it's just one click -> type new url. I love it, there was a about tweak you could do to get this before that I had to do over and over on every new new FF install. They made the right choice making this a default.
As for editing a url: just double click the part you want to change, then type to change it.
> Do you have any idea what the justification for this behavior is?
I don't know, but I would hazard a guess that the most common action in the URL bar is to copy the URL to paste elsewhere. Highlighting the text automatically gives the user the opportunity to immediately hit Ctrl-C. I think it's an improvement.
Do you have the URL and search bar separated or the same input box like Chrome? I've got them as separate input boxes and text selection still works with a single click for the whole URL string.
> It never acted like any other program. Double-click selected everything while normally it would select a word.
Maybe, but at least a single click (in Firefox 74) brought a text caret to type at a location, just like any other GTK text box on my system.
> They changed it to behave like one other program: Chrome.
If I wanted Chrome's bizarro NIH-induced UI fantasies, I'd use Chrome. I like that Firefox had a semblance of sanity and consistency with the rest of the world (even if not perfect).
>changed the click behavior of the bar to be totally unlike any other program too
I am using Firefox Developer Edition, and I was also stunned at first a while ago. But now as I'm getting used to it, I tend to like it more and more. It was really hard to select just one part of the path (word) before this change, and now I can just double-click those parts to delete them then (useful when you want to cleanup the URL from some mess).
Also here is the description and justification for this change from OP link:
On Linux, the behavior when clicking on the Address Bar and the Search Bar now matches other desktop platforms: a single click selects all without primary selection, a double click selects a word, and a triple click selects all with primary selection
Since people are posting their opinions (although presenting them as facts), I would like to share mine:
I actually like the new address bar. It makes it clear it's selected, it makes it larger, which improves readabilty and I find the dropshadow aesthetic.
The new address bar is a disaster for me since I use i3wm and give Firefox half of my screen. Given half the screen the new address bar drop-down menu is very small and struggles to efficiently display the possible completions when it is selected.
I think there's a great market niche for Mozilla - they could be the browser for people who want more control and configurability than the competition. People who don't want an "intelligent" URL bar. I have a feeling they could capture a lot of the developer market that way.
Unfortunately, that's not the direction they seem to be taking.
They might still get a bunch of Manifest V3 refugees in the near future though.
Aren't there already multiple forks that move slower than Firefox and resist change? Presumably the people who call minor feature changes "abominations that need to die" (seen in these HN comments) don't actually care enough to use those forks, so I'm not very convinced that there's any market in being a niche.
All the HNers who pile on modern browsers couldn't even agree on the features their ideal browser should have, yet these same users are quite hostile in comments sections. Talk about a thankless niche.
The top comment thread so far are people seemingly emotional because the new URL bar expands a few pixels when selected and selects all its text upon focus like Chrome's and Safari's UX teams have already decided is most useful to most people (including myself).
> Aren't there already multiple forks that move slower than Firefox and resist change?
Not really. Pale Moon is much, much more than just a UI change at this point—their goal is to maintain compatibility with the old extension system, which is a much bigger deal.
And it's increasingly incompatible with the modern web as a result.
I agree the new experience is poor, and "select all" part is the worst. I haven't needed or wanted that feature since 1993 and I don't know why someone thought it was the thing for me in 2020. Every desktop environment I've used provides an easy way to select lots of text (double- or triple-click). That's still how every other application works, so what's the point here? Who really needs to select-all-and-copy the URL bar all the time?
Here's why selecting the entire URL is good.
The most common action performed with the URL bar is to search for something or to navigate. Selecting everything helps you type your search query without having to double click or triple click.
Can you describe your use-case? Why do you need to place the caret inside the address bar and not have it all selected? In the few cases where I want to copy/delete a part of the URL I can do a 2nd click after I clicked once.
Ever since I saw this behavior in Chrome I wanted it in all my browsers. I'm very glad Firefox copied this feature.
> The most common action performed with the URL bar is to search for something or to navigate.
Ctrl-K or Ctrl-L followed by the search text or address. If I'm pointing with the mouse, it's because I want to point to a specific location on the URL bar, not fat-fingering the whole bar.
I can tell you my interactions with FF's URL bar are now always: click once, type, realize I just deleted everything, furiously ESC ESC ESC, curse, click once, twice, wrong double click, wait to be able to single click, deep breath, curse, click again.
Getting the user to curse twice is the hallmark of successful UI design!
> I can tell you my interactions with FF's URL bar are now always: click once, type, realize I just deleted everything, furiously ESC ESC ESC, curse, click once, twice, wrong double click, wait to be able to single click, deep breath, curse, click again.
This doesn't add up. After "furiously ESC ESC ESC, curse, click once" you would already have put the cursor.
It makes the feature useful if you only use your web browser. If you use a variety of applications on your computer in combination with each other, it’s also useful that they follow certain consistent UI design patterns so you don’t have to learn and remember how each different application works. That’s part of what makes PCs so much more powerful than the sum of the individual programs you run on them.
I agree. The vast majority of all cases were I click on the URL bar is because I want to replace or copy what's there. In the few cases when I want to modify the address I can just click an extra time. Select all optimizes for the common case for me and probably most users.
I also like that the list of previous visited sites are shown wherever I click now, the down arrow wasn't really necessary. But I don't have anything under the URL bar, I have all my bookmarks next to it.
Replace www with old on reddit. Removing some large query parameter before submitting to HN, removing the last parts of the URL to get to a higher section of a web site.
On Linux, selecting text normally places it in the X buffer (a clipboard, but not!). This change apparently selects the text while avoiding the buffer unless you click more, which is really odd.
I'm also surprised (well, maybe not really) that people have never learned about the Alt+D shortcut.
This is just my opinion :) but, clicking in the address bar in order to type a URL seems pretty inefficient. Why not activate the address bar with the keyboard, which you will need to use to type the URL anyway?
It's similar to typing a URL in the address bar and instead of typing Enter to navigate, you grab the mouse and click the little 'go' arrow on the right.
99% of people who use web browsers don't use shortcuts like ctrl-L, they just use the mouse to click.
It's kind of like asking why people don't just run irssi on ec2 if they don't want to be disconnected from IRC when they close their laptop: it just fixes it for a few nerds, not for anyone else.
I think the comparison is a bit exaggerated. People generally know how to use ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Keyboard shortcuts aren't that nerdy, some of them are explained in the Windows 95 User Guide.
Meanwhile UI consistency is useful for everyone, not just nerds. I think optimising software for some minimal set of lowest-common-denominator use cases like this is a slippery slope.
I don't need default select all, but it's convenient for me. My top two uses of the address bar are to
1. enter a new url
2. copy the url
The first step of both is to select the entire url, so this is good for me. I have a few programs that automatically copy on selection, but thankfully, firefox isn't one of them. That behavior really irritates me.
I restarted Firefox because I thought it was crashing...then I noted the new version and came here. Yeah this address bar UI change is both jarring and disorienting.
For this reason alone, at least I've found that setting `browser.urlbar.update1` to false in about:config reverts to the old code--mostly. Firefox 75 still seems to have changed the click behavior of the bar to be totally unlike any other program too; it highlights the entire text by default, without putting it in the selection buffer, and in general makes handling it with the mouse a lot more tedious than it used to be.
I'm ragging on this a lot, but seriously, it's a major regression in UX.