Seen that this morning, this is very far from “listening to the community”. Even in compact mode it’s taking more vertical space than before.
And of course, we don’t have the liberty to choose if we want the quantum UI back (with the color strip on top of the selected tab which they broke for a few days).
I don’t know which browser to use… I guess I’ll move away from nightly so I have some space weeks…
I need the compact mode! Do not remove it!
In fact, it’s not even compact enough!
While I appreciate the latest change on the devs’ side (moving the compact option to about:config), I am dismayed by the associated signalling that the compact mode is unsupported and recommended against. It seems like quite a few users are fans of the option, and quite intensely so - I, for one, clicked around on Bugzilla for half an hour before finding this forum and registering, to make this comment - and I am surprised and saddened that the option would be treated this way.
The new Proton default density is huge. Please do not hide or remove compact density, and especially don’t hide it for new users. And if you want to make default density what people should normally use, bring it closer to what current Proton compact density is. Default density takes up too much space.
I tried my hand at a user style to mitigate some of the pitfalls of Proton. Of course, this is just my opinion and feedback is very welcome:
I am worrying wide proton tab with removing compact density mode. It causes many users to leave Firefox since chrome and other browsers have narrow tab designs.
That’s actually a good point. We literally have no clue what the results from the telemetry even means. Mozilla could just be spitting out numbers to give the perception that their decision is justifiable but we, the community, have no clue what it is they actually see.
I for one don’t send telemetry so I don’t understand how they can generalize when they only pool sample data from a few thousand at best.
The worse thing about this telemetry to measure the usage of compact, is that with compact mode pushed in oblivions of about:config + the “not supported” tag, we will have, de facto, less people using it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the justification of its complete removal in the future, e.g.: “Well, we introduced telemetry to get an accurate number of users using compact mode. Seems like almost noone does…”.
Please don’t remove it. The new spacing is too big already.
You can still use compact density.
Go to about:config and change the value of browser.uidensity to 1.
Regards.
Of course, but I’m afraid that option might be removed sooner or later as well. Seeing that compact mode is already unsupported and doesn’t have such a clear playing indicator as normal mode does.
Hi,
It is absolutely astonishing that the people at Mozilla have simply failed to learn anything at all from the exodus of Firefox users caused by the changes to the Firefox UI, they still fail to realise we don’t want a Chrome clone.
They are continuing to lose browser market share and yet still seem hell bent on alienating the small percentage of Firefox users left.
Firefox is on its deathbed and decisions like this will kill Firefox even faster.
If things are being removed due to low engagement, I guess it’ll soon be time to just remove Firefox altogether, huh?
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.
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.
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!
Is there an existing enhancement to restore compact density?