As a partial workaround for the height, you can enable Compact Mode. See:
https://support.mozilla.org/kb/compact-mode-workaround-firefox
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Everytime i come to firefox my starts paining now. Temporarily i switched everything to chrome (i hate chrome when it comes to privacy). And i’m someone optimistic that mozilla will understand this serious concern raised on the the new proton ui and provide options to fallback. I check this page every few hours. It’s time for mozilla to decide between Standards Vs Usability.
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I have been spending the morning migrating to another browser. I do not pay for Firefox, so I guess I have no right to complain that the developers are making themselves happy rather than me. It makes me sad, though.
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I could not agree more. What were they thinking? Were they thinking at all?
Certainly it would appear not — at any rate, not about the actual impact of their decisions on their users.
I sit down to work and instead of getting something useful done I have to spend half the morning trying and failing to find a way to make my browser useable again.
Thanks, Mozilla developers. I’m with those who voiced their views above – I’m off now to find an alternative, since you have taken it upon yourselves to decide on my behalf what I ought to like and what works best for me. It’s really disappointing after supporting FF and Netscape before it for my entire Internet-using life, but I can’t take this random enforcement of dreadful design decisions any more. I’ll come back when you start putting your users first rather than the arbitrary whims of your developers.
Is anybody listening? Somehow I doubt it.
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Winaero has a step-by-step tutorial on how to (more or less) revert to the pre-Proton UI. It doesn’t look terribly complicated. I am contemplating giving it a try. I have been using a different browser for the past day, and it’s okay (I like it better than Protonic Firefox), but I definitely prefer pre-Protonic Firefox.
I am so sick of Mozilla making changes to things which don’t need changes. Seriously, the redesign is terrible. Removing icons from menus spits in the face of the most basic usability rules. Changing keyboard and menu shortcuts which have been in use for over a decade is unforgivable.
Honestly. I can’t express strongly enough how much I despise these changes. And as a software developer myself, I find it genuinely inexplicable why they are being allowed.
Shame on you, Mozilla and Firefox developers.
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<Edit: small update for adding color tweak of tab scroll buttons also>
@jscher2000, here is a CSS sequence I extracted directly from FF 90 CSS (with a bit of comparison with an FF 89 version to fine tune).
If you are willing to include that in your page, triggered by a “Dynamic window bar colors” checkbox or whatever you want, I believe many people should appreciate 
/* Dynamic window (tool / menu) bar */
#toolbar-menubar:not(:-moz-lwtheme):-moz-window-inactive {
color: ThreeDShadow !important;
}
@media (-moz-windows-accent-color-in-titlebar: 0) {
:root[sizemode=normal][tabsintitlebar] {
border-top: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,.7) !important;
}
:root[sizemode=normal][tabsintitlebar][always-use-accent-color-for-window-border]:not(:-moz-window-inactive) {
border-top-color: -moz-accent-color !important;
}
:root[tabsintitlebar]:not(:-moz-lwtheme) {
background-color: hsl(235,33%,19%) !important;
color: hsl(240,9%,98%) !important;
}
}
@media (-moz-windows-accent-color-in-titlebar) {
:root[sizemode=normal][tabsintitlebar] {
border-top: 1px solid -moz-accent-color !important;
}
:root[tabsintitlebar]:not(:-moz-window-inactive, :-moz-lwtheme),
:root[tabsintitlebar]:not(:-moz-window-inactive)[lwt-default-theme-in-dark-mode] {
background-color: -moz-accent-color !important;
color: -moz-accent-color-foreground !important;
}
:root[tabsintitlebar][lwt-default-theme-in-dark-mode] #titlebar {
--toolbarbutton-icon-fill: currentColor !important;
--toolbarbutton-icon-fill-opacity: .7 !important;
}
}
.toolbarbutton-animatable-box,
.toolbarbutton-1 {
fill: currentcolor !important;
}
#scrollbutton-up,
#scrollbutton-down {
fill: currentcolor !important;
}
The last ones restore a fine concern of toolbar buttons visibility, sometimes too close to their background color when using some Windows colors like gray.
Hope this will help others, it does for me … I am now able to activate proton 
(but too bad I had to spend a few hours for that, as expressed by other people above 
)
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Simple example of why FF 91 is unusable: try paying bills from your Wells Fargo account. Click on “Transfer & Pay Bills”, and the list drops down as a pixelated unreadable mess with just a few dots where the words are supposed to be.
Aesthetically, it is unattractive – completely mis-renders a reasonable Google Sites web site under earlier FF, Chrome, or Safari into something amateurish.
The UI makes it difficult to see buttons or tabs – it’s difficult to navigate sites that you previously used routinely but impossible to navigate on a new site.
I’m not a browser specialist – I just use what’s in front of me and work around the problems rarely paying attention to the minor differences – FF, Chrome, Safari. But I can’t work with FF 91.
I’ve spent the last few days waiting to see if the developers will come to their senses and update to include a Preferences option (not some obscure text setting!) to restore the old UI.
It looks like that’s not going to happen. Any reasonable software developer – these days anyway, one not working for Microsoft – would offer a “new, improved” UI as an option but with the ability to easily revert to the old interface for those who want it. FF developers seem determined to kill FF. Their arrogance and disrespect for their users is appalling, particularly for those of us who have been FF users for years (Netscape was my last primary browser) and tolerated previous “improvements”.
I’m not happy with the Safari or Chrome alternatives I’m most likely to use, but I reluctantly have decided I have to switch, after all these years, because FF 91 simply doesn’t work for me – all because of the arrogance of FF developers in developing and then forcing on its users an unusable system.
Or is there some other reason they’re determined to kill FF?
Coming to you via Chrome, by the way.
2 Likes
New UI is just awful, and the worst of all things is the size of the new bookmarks folder and context menus. I just can’t organize all my bookmarks and have to scroll too much to find what I need. Making these changes irreversible is just disrespectful with users, and i’m ready to switch browsers after several years using only firefox.
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Proton shouldn’t affect in-page items. There must be something else going on there.
It sounds like you are on Mac. Could you check this issue:
Firefox 91 now automatically enables High Contrast Mode when “Increase Contrast” is checked on MacOS. (release notes)
Is it possible you have that setting?
If so, please try one or both of these two options:
(1) Disable High Contrast mode in Firefox. See: Disable high contrast mode in Firefox.
(2) Turn off the system-level setting. This appears to be the most effective workaround. More info: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-display-preferences-for-accessibility-unac089/mac
For both changes, you might need to Quit Firefox and start it up again to see the normal display.
Any difference?
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If you need a workaround, see:
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Jefferson,
Thanks: just disabling High Contrast in FF fixed both the Wells Fargo dropdown issue and the mis-rendering of text boxes on other web sites.
Might be a good idea for the FF developers to set that option to “Never” in the distribution.
I’m mildly amused by the discord over square vs rounded tabs, floating tabs, etc – I just work past those. But if I can’t read the text to pay bills, that’s a deal-breaker.
So, thanks! I’ll continue to try to use FF 91 a bit longer.
David
This linking of “High Contrast” web rendering to system mode is old news on Windows, but seems to have been much more unwelcome on Mac. Maybe “Increase Contrast” should NOT be understood to refer to how users want web pages to render, but I don’t know whether the linkage will be reversed in a future update.
You know there was a time Firefox focused on user choice: extensions, bookmarks, themes, etc. Now you are forced to use these new tabs which a large portion of people do not like. I will be keeping my eyes open for an alternative web browser.
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Go with Safari (Mac) or Vivaldi (cross-platform)
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Give a try to Bookmark Search Plus 2 add-on, you can even change the spacing between bookmarks and font size, to make things compact or spaced as you desire. Let me know if any problem …
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You must love Proton. It has been ordered by The Committee.
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But it’s not just their height. And it’s not just their disconnected appearance.
It’s also that things like icon for “Playing” is gone and now there’s a huge piece of text to interpret below the tab text. For instance.
Altogether it is just a freakin’ mess.
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I’ve been using Vivaldi next to FireFox for a long time. I’m switching over to using it more and more now.
Unfortunately I’ve ran into a few websites that do not work properly on Vivaldi.
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Now posting from the Waterfox browser.
Back to good old days of Firefox with good UI.
Although perhaps the Firefox ESR release would get security fixes faster.
But at least I’m off Proton UI for a little longer.
1 Like