I’m still unhappy with the MS Office “ribbon”. I don’t care if it’s easier for new people. There’s a planet full of people using the old layout. I liked that almost every other software developed to run under windows mimicked the basic layout of MS office. It made things easy to work with. I didn’t have to relearn the basic functions common to most software.
I like consistency. It’s efficient in an ever changing world to maintain structure even if the new way is a little better. I don’t want the horn button in my car to morph to another location because someone thinks it’s awesome there.
If M-Fox wants to improve their product then add functions and/or streamline the software so it runs faster.
Am I imagining things, or is it the case that the addon icons used to be up there in some previous incarnation of Firefox? This looks very familiar to me.
I just researched this and I was right - around about 2010 or 2011, the add-ons bar was introduced, moving the icons for add-ons such as adblock from their position top right, down to a dedicated bar in place of the Status bar.
Well, sorta. Before, there were two different types of addon buttons: those that went in the toolbar on top, and those that went into the status bar on bottom. Then, at the point you mentioned, they decided to try and get rid of the status bar. But some users and addon developers complained, so they compromised. By default there would be no status bar, but an add-on could use a new “add-on bar” if they so chose. They also stated that the old “status bar” buttons were obsolete, and might be removed. So most add-ons switched over to a button on the add-on bar.
But there has always been the option to put buttons on the bottom toolbar. Not having this means that there is now less space. Originally the plan for the new UI was to combine the search and address bars so that there would be more room–thus making it okay to remove the addon bar. But this fell through for some reason.
Yes, you can add buttons to the new menu, but they take up a lot more space there, since you have to use large icons and can’t disable the text descriptions. Plus it’s really a replacement for menus, not for the toolbar. So any add-on that put an option in the menu is going to have to use that space, too.
I actually think the goal is to get people to use fewer add-ons, because add-ons are what hurt Firefox’s performance. Firefox without addons has actually been tested to be faster than Chrome once you have more than a couple tabs open.
The solution of slowly changing addon specs where they must use multi-threading has not been embraced.
If I wanted a hamburger menu, I’d go to McDonalds.
And I too would use Chrome if I liked it better. I just don’t, that’s all. I’ve tried it several times for weeks on end, but I always wind up switching back to Firefox.
Refusing to “upgrade” has nothing to do with being afraid of the unfamiliar. Every version since 4.0 has meant a loss in functionality, and having to take twice as many steps to accomplish a simple task as it did before. So how is this an improvement? If I have to use IE or Chrome for some websites, that’s not a problem, and it’s still less aggravating than the new hoops they’re demanding users jump through every time a new version is released.
Not to mention the obvious - every new version carries the risk of it causing problems, breaking apps, and losing some favorite add-ons or extensions because the developers are tired of trying to keep up or just because they can’t get them to work with the new version for whatever reason. That’s not what I consider “progress”. Mozilla’s “You’ll do things our way and like it” brand of arrogance makes even Microsoft look good.
What’s especially frustration is that removing most of the functioning buttons from the various toolbars don’t seem to have given users more screen real estate either. That to me is the only justification for removing or burying important functions under two or three more layers of buttons and clicks. So what’s the point?
It upgraded me yesterday and now I don’t have ForecastFox as it’s not compatible. There is another weather add-on and I downloaded it but I couldn’t find it so I got rid of it.
It took me about 30 minutes to get Firefox 29 looking close enough to what I was used to, using the Classic Theme Restorer linked by the OP, and then adding/removing buttons. All my dozen or so extensions still work fine. Not a big deal for me, since they so rarely make such large changes.
(It took me more time than that to tame Windows 8 using Classic Shell, a fine free program, but since then, I no longer ever see its stupid new tiled UI.)
How long has it been since you updated? Those buttons have been in there for a while. You could have moved them yourself, but otherwise that’s where they’d be.
But, yeah, it’s not horrible if you didn’t have a lot of add-on buttons.
You’re right, it just occurred to me that they’d probably been there for a while. Thing is, I had manually put a refresh button on my toolbar and was always using that, and I guess I never really noticed the one in the URL bar before now. Just another example of my *fantastic *observation skills…
Can someone articulate the major differences between Firefox and Chrome to me? I used to use Firefox, and then I got sucked into Chrome a and have been using that as my default browser for the last few years. I still have Firefox installed. The only one I don’t like using is Safari. I haven’t noticed any big differences between the other two, and I can’t remember why I went Chrome in the end. It somehow feels more natural to me. But I don’t use many add ons. Just Ad Block. Is that the main distinction, the ad- on support?
To me, the main differences between Chrome and Firefox are that Chrome sucks at printing, and it is tough to find a tab you’ve closed. Firefox has (had? not sure about the new version) a very handy “recently closed tabs” menu item.
The reason I use Chrome despite those huge (to me) disadvantages is that Firefox is a resource hog that won’t run for more than a few hours on my (oldish) computer before bogging down.
Chrome has “Recently Closed” under History, too. I haven’t noticed anything about the printing, but I don’t print too much from my browser. And, yes, that reminds me–I think that’s why I switched: Chrome seemed punchier and less of a resource hog than Firefox to me. I remember feeling that Firefox bogged down my system after awhile.
I’d agree that Chrome’s “recently closed” could be better, which is why I use the Recently Closed Tabs extension. I’ve never noticed any difficulty with printing from browser.
I also strongly agree that Firefox, as of the last time I used it (admittedly, some time ago) was slow and boggy. That prompted me, then a Firefox fan, to switch browsers, and I settled on Chrome. Safari tends to be slow on Windows, IME, and I refuse to use IE unless forced to by bad website design that fails to comply with standards.
