If things are being removed due to low engagement, I guess it’ll soon be time to just remove Firefox altogether, huh?
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The best thing is, people have been ushered out of the Bugzilla (that’s how I know of this place at all — because like everything, it’s entirely inobvious from merely using Firefox, where to do what), and now it’s a perfect place to get user voices ignored completely.
Tbh I am just baffled that this feature would be removed for no apparent reason, especially considering it works perfectly via browser.uidensity 1…
Thanks @AlpaNecron for that tip btw.
Just got the update and had to find this thread to fix it, wasting at least 15-20 mins that I could be spending on my work…
Remember when Internet Explorer used to have those annoying extension bars? They would eat up your precious vertical space, and it was super annoying, we were all glad when those types of plugins/extensions went the way of the Dodo.
This feels similar, but this time you can’t remove the thing that is wasting space. Vertical space is precious, and taking it away from us is incredibly annoying. Even on a 1440p screen, the tabs and URI bar feel super huge and intrusive. I will admit, the theme looks nice, and it feels new where the old FF theme was feeling really dated… But why remove such a loved and such a widely used feature?
The fact that I have to use about:config to make that button appear makes no sense to me.
“The reason that Mozilla gave for the removal was that the option was “hard to discover” and that it believed that “it got low engagement”.”
This makes no sense. Why hide it deeper instead of making it a more obvious option? Why not make it part of the first run wizard?
Edge on first run offers different levels of distraction. You can choose what you want shown on your new tab, focussed, not, etc. Why not do something similar with the size of the header?
This really just seems like another case of fixing what wasn’t broken in a way that actually breaks the experience.
Edit: Really annoyed I had to spend part of my workday figuring out how to undo this change in FF.
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Please stop designing everything to have huge amounts of empty space everywhere wasting my screen space. I am not working on an touch based computer.
Please do ui testing with a Firefox window resized to 1/4 of your screen.
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I agree too, it is too much space wasted, I’ve been using compact density from the moment the UI started to get bigger.
I understand keeping track of too many features and customization makes very complicated and expensive to provide support and updates, so it is “natural” for software developers to drop support for the less used ones. But compact density is very useful and I think it is one of the reasons that many who choose Firefox on its early days are still choosing it.
Don’t scare your followers away, Mozilla!
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Is there an existing enhancement to restore compact density?
I’m also joining in to call to not phase out compact mode. It has always been the default mode for me and I’ve been sticking with it ever since the tabs moved to the titlebar, since version 4.0.
Over the years I upgraded from 1280x768/1280x1024 - 1600x900, 1920x1080 and now 2560x1440 and never did I think it’d improve my experience with more vertical space or whitespace in general, and always reset the mode to compact and removed all the whitespace.
It’d be a fat shame if it disappeared, though I have a feeling it will in the next major version bump, it’s marked as [Not supported] after all.
Also a word on telemetry - most people who’d stick to the compact layout probably also opted out of telemetry. I certainly do, and from the complains it seems more people are in a similar situation.
Anyway, all I can do is just add my voice on top of all the other comments and hope Mozilla acknowledges there is a decent user base for this feature.
For now I’ll just stick with the Photon theme while it’s still enabled.
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@jscher2000, I have followed the instructions in that article and I can see that it makes the tabs smaller but it doesn’t fix everything.
The main problem for me is the bookmarks menu; I’ve a lot of bookmarks which are split up into child folders. Before the update they everything fitted on the screen, but afterwards the menu has sprawled so that I’ve got to keep scrolling up and down to try and find things.
To be honest this looks like change for the sake of change because there is no advantage to the end user. All the additional vertical spacing just takes space away from the browsing - the very task I’m trying to perform.
Suggestions for this issue here: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html#menuspacing
That’s a bit of black magic, the the results are so much better :- D
This needs to be an option in the main UI
I did, but frankly it makes nearly no difference. On my laptop screen, it’s still well over 1 inch. It’s almost as if they’ve never looked at it / tried to use it on a screen with lower pixel density. I’m sure it’s fine on a 38 inch wide screen, or in 4k, but some of us are in less than HD.
Yes, Compact mode makes only a small difference, as illustrated below. You can look at tab restyling to make more of a difference: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html#tabstyler
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Yeah, probably a lot of the same people who use compact mode have telemetry turned off, including me.
I would be very disappointed if compact mode was phased out - please support it Mozilla.
If Mozilla doesn’t take user feedback onboard for this issue, I will be very worried about the Firefox’s future
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That would in my opinion fix all the problems in Proton
You’ll use Proton without compact.
And you’ll be happy.
Yup. I’ve switched to the Brave browser, I’m really sad that Firefox did this, but it was the last straw, and honestly now there is just no reason to stay.
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I agree that Proton is now creating a serious problem of compactness. Compared to other browsers / competition, it has now a clear disadvantage.
Instead of us saying “please keep compact mode”, why not “ask for a compact mode”, as it is clearly missing in Proton, and get Proton fix itself its own problems ?
=> there is already a bug on bugzilla for that, or close to that: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1707686
I voted on it, and I would encourage anybody who desire a more compact mode of Proton to vote also or contribute (a patch has been proposed I believe, but is declined for now)
Or create another bug if you believe that one is not the good one, and let us know …
I think firefox should consider asking user about proton compact or not after first install or update especially on windows. On Linux Gnome it seens good, but on Windows, I want to kill myself. at least now userChrome.css been here to help with lepton style from Github. I think firefox should reconsider this condition… really…