Your browser may look different this Tuesday/Wednesday

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Sometime after Tuesday, April 29, 2014, I suspect that we will get a bunch of dopers complaining about how the UI of Firefox has changed. So I thought I’d give you guys a heads up, and tell you what you can do to get the old UI back, if you so choose.

Firefox 29 will extensively change the UI. If you have a bottom toolbar (aka add-on bar), it will disappear, with all its icons appearing in the top navigation bar. The Firefox button will disappear, to be replaced by a three-line, so-called “hamburger” menu that will contain icons. The tabs will become curved and will otherwise look different. If you use Windows 7, the background of the title bar may be colored weird.

If the Chrome-like change in aesthetics doesn’t bother you, this may not seem like much, but the removal of the add-on bar may disrupt anyone who actually uses it. You’ll probably need to move a lot of icons to the new menu.

Or, as I promised, you can get the old UI back. But it’s still a bit tedious. Once you have Firefox 29, download the extension Classic Theme Restorer. Then, if you want the addon bar back, right click any tool bar to enable it, and use the Customize button in the new toolbar and drag everything back where it was. Be sure to also check out the options for the addon for more UI tweaks, like restoring the bookmark button in the address bar or getting back icons for older extensions like NoSquint.

Previously I would have recommended avoiding the changeover entirely by downloading Pale Moon, a fork of Firefox, but I feel that some basic features have not been ported over. And, unless you know which folders to copy over, you will lose all your customizations. Both ways will be disruptive, so I feel you might as well stay with the official version of Firefox.

2

One more thing: If you want to get the changeover over with, you can download Firefox 29 right now. The only downside is that you will be put on the “Beta” channel, which means you will be testing pre-release versions of Firefox. To get back to the official “Release” channel, just download the release version of Firefox after Firefox 29 comes out officially.

This is what I have done for my parents’ computer a few weeks ago, so I wouldn’t have to “fix” it when Firefox 29 came out.

3

Oh, God!
I just got stuck with Windows 8.1!
How the fresh hell will i use my own computer?

4

Insert Win 7PRO 64bit disk, install.

Friends don’t let friends do Win 8.whatever

5

See, the problem with Mozilla wasn’t whatever the now former CEO did with his own money but the fact that they won’t stop screwing around with the UI. If I wanted to use Chrome I’d open the copy of Chrome on my computer.

6

Thanks BigT!

7

The software people hate us oldsters. Just when I finally get used to something they change it BAR.

8

I froze Firefox at 27, and marked upgrades to Fx as Taboo in Yast. Plus I hunted down, and stored, old versions of Firefox to install if somehow they sneak it past.
It’s been a grand run, and I sincerely believe Firefox was the greatest app ever: but everything dies. Everyone knows that over the last two years Mozilla has just been dumbing down and aping Chrome, whether on orders from Google, their effective owners, or through poor taste; but there is a general tendency in programming designers to make products hideously minimalistic and to remove function and choice, especially from the UI.

And they just keep demanding people take it and go along because it’s Newer. And choice is old-fashioned. And you mustn’t prefer the UX that you actually like. In the fascist mantra of WordPress: Decisions, not Options. Which means designers make the decisions and stop the user from having options.
Which is anathema to the spirit of Open Source, to give all users the tools to do as they wish and accept any consequences.
And they all slide in auto-update to ensure there are no dissenters. Security is as bogus an argument as in the real world.

Anyway, at present I’m using IceCat, the Gnu version of Firefox ( and there are many other forks for Windows, as well, including PaleMoon ) which is up to Fx24; there’s little danger of Dr. Stallman’s crew ever rushing things along…

GMail: designer arrogance and the cult of minimalism from Jono at Mozilla Labs.
*Just today I read this blog post from a Google UX designer about “Change Aversion”, or the supposedly irrational tendency of users to fear change. The underlying attitude here is that users will like the new UI just fine once they try it, but they don’t want to give it a chance because they’re stubborn, like toddlers refusing to try an unfamiliar food.

I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it because it was unfamiliar.

The problem with this attitude is that sometimes the users may just be stubborn, but other times the users are encountering a real serious problem with the design; something they can feel is wrong, but can’t quite articulate precisely. Your users aren’t trained as designers, so they may not be able to argue their case convincingly in the language of design.*

I altered Tabs on Top to Tabs Below using about:config; but how long will they permit such a thing; and how will regular users ever know they can if they never knew how it was before the stupid change ?

Anyway. Maxthon is now available for Linux, so by a circuitous route Mozilla, after having rescued millions from IE, may eventually be herding people back to a form of IE rather than to the pathetic Chrome.

9

Maxathon has used Chromium for their browser for a while now. While the Windows version also still uses the Trident (IE) engine, I would be shocked if the Linux version did so. So they’d be driving people to another form of Chrome.

10

Yeah, looked it up and Maxthon for Linux uses Webkit engine, so I probably won’t be going there. However, Webkit precedes Chrome or Chromium, having been used for Safari, Konqueror ( since it was first a KDE project ) and newly, Opera ( which I would only use for banking ). Chrome now uses the fork Blink.

However that applies only to Linux, the majority use Windows, so those leaving Firefox there for Maxthon would be using Trident, as in a Chinese IE clone.

Sometime Google’s gonna be as annoying as Microsoft.

11

They can change it all they want–I don’t care. I’m still using Firefox 3.6.

12

:dubious: Downloading Firefox 29 also downloads windows 8.1?

13

not for use with 28.

14

I’ve decided to disable firefox update. I’m sick of Firefox imitating Chrome. I’d install Chrome if I liked that browser.

Directions.

15

That was why I said you install it after you get 29. It would totally screw up 28 if it was forced to work there. Firefox 29 undergoes a huge overhaul in how the UI both looks and functions.

Here’s a screenshot of what the new UI looks like on the Windows 8 box after I customized everything, and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like on Windows 7 where I installed the Classic Theme extension.

If you want to know how I have the old smileys, check out this post.

16

Wow, that sucks. Who thought it was a good idea to look like Chrome? Chrome is ok, but I never did like their menu icon. Three horizontal bars. Yeah that means menu to me, and novice users have no chance.

17

No.

I got 8.1 with my new computer.

18

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. Every time they screw with ff, I spend hours customizing it back to what it looked like before. I’ve used it for 10 or so years now and I like it how it is. When you use something for that long, you like it how it is. I tried to use Chrome, but I can’t customize it the way I like. I find it very counter-intuitive as well. When I have to use ff in safe mode, it is a constant reminder why I have it the way I do. It’s getting harder each time to tweak things, nevermind how it breaks half my add-ons.

19

Me too. :cool: Although more and more websites are becoming completely unreadable with 3.62; I have to use Chrome (or FF28, on my laptop) to read Facebook, most news sites, and to leave comments on YouTube.

But yeah, it’s ridiculous how some applications feel as if they MUST change designs simply for the sake of changing designs, from major operating systems to simple programs like the now-extinct WinAmp.

20

It’s been showing up a lot on websites, too. I think it’s actually becoming the universal symbol for menu. Google (or Bing) “hamburger menu.”

I personally tried to get it to be a flattened Firefox icon, so there would actually be some Firefox branding somewhere in the program. They used to care about that sort of thing.