> I haven't really been using Firefox all that much mainly due to how busy the interface is

Firefox UI is as busy as you make it[1]. It's very customizable without much effort. Not that it couldn't use a refresh but I quite like it the way it is.

EDIT: The commenters below get it right. Tree Style Tab[2] add-on is responsible for the tabs and you can remove the clutter by right-clicking the refresh button for example, choosing "customize..." from the context menu and just dragging all the unused stuff away into the box (a window that will appear). Toolbars can be hidden from View → Toolbars. Enabling integration with Ubuntu also thins it a bit.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/zdIy63Q.png

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Oh snap, now that's a UI overhaul. How's that tab interface working out?

At a glance I can imagine how much more effective it is at displaying a large number of tabs in the same window.

In fact, I'm finding it quite brilliant. The web at large takes advantage of vertical scrolling, so why shouldn't browsers? All of my bookmarks are already arranged in vertical lists.

Even when faced with the input procedure of navigating my cursor to a browser tab, vertically stacked tabs have a clear advantage (for trackpad/thinkpad nipple users like myself):

To move my cursor up and down (again, with a trackpad) all I have to do is bend a finger at the knuckle. When moving the cursor a substantial distance left or right, I torque my whole wrist slightly or reposition it entirely.

Maybe that's splitting hairs... I'm rather starry-eyed at the moment seeing your Firefox interface. Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages?

> How's that tab interface working out?

I've been using it for years, I can't see myself go back to tabs on top. That's why I can't switch to chrome.

Tabs on the left (or right) is how it is supposed to be ! Websites nowadays have a lot of horizontal space because of our new big wide screens. We don't have 4/3 anymore and all the websites were conceived for that kind of resolution (800600 or 1024768).

Also it's more practical because you can open so many tabs at the same time, you can use nesting etc...

I really don't understand why it's still not the default, or at least a native option of the browser.

Agreed, I would never consider using another browser unless they had vertical tabs. My Firefox typically crashes once per day but treestyle tabs make it worth it.

Once a day? Any idea why? For a while, mine was due to memory issues but they did some seriously awesome work fixing it somewhere in the high teen updates, ever since then it's been solid.

I had the same problem - tree style tabs would make the browser crash constantly. I eventually gave up.

You can make your tabs vertical in Opera without even having to install an extension, though they don't indent like they do in TreeStyleTabs.

The new Opera (using Chrome) lacks vertical tabs unfortunately. Can't seem to find any info on whether it'll come back

> Perhaps I'm missing some disadvantages?

Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order). Some pages will be too wide, at least on a small screen like mine, forcing you to scroll horizontally. Also, after every (major) update you need to (re)move the new buttons.

But those are all very minor. Otherwise, it's smooth sailing.

>Drag and drop sometimes stops working and you lose the ability to move those tabs around (change their order).

I haven't had that happen for months, so I'm hoping that it was a long standing bug that just got fixed.

Those bugs never happened to me. I've been using the add-on for years on the beta.

When was the last major update where buttons got re-added? Are you speaking from actual experience or just postulating?

> When was the last major update where buttons got re-added?

Not so much re-added as just added. The download button (arrow) for example was added in Firefox 20.

Add-ons also tend to insert their buttons. Or even reactivate the add-ons bar. But it takes seconds to fix.

Firefox 4-20 hasn't had any toolbar button changes. You really can't count third-party addons as something that Mozilla changes to the toolbar.

> Firefox UI is as busy as you make it

For almost all Firefox users, the UI is as busy as Mozilla makes it.

1. I don't believe Firefox UI is busy

2. We always had those kind of "busy" UI since IE, Netscape, Opera and Firefox.

3. Chrome comes around, makes a very simplistic UI and now many people assume that it's the only way.

IMO Chrome is just too simplistic, It's beautiful yes but is it efficient? For example, the first thing I do when I install Firefox on a machine is to display the menu bar. And I think it's a shame there is no more status bar as well.

>it's a shame there is no more status bar as well

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...

This is one of the most shameful things to have happened to Firefox. The status bar is core functionality. It should be included by default, and it should be enabled by default.

Now, if they really felt the need to play design games with the UI, they could have at least disabled the status bar by default, and allowed it to be quickly re-enabled (like can be done for the menus).

Forcing users to go through the hassle of installing an extension just to get back core functionality is truly unjustifiable and very shameful.

Thanks, just installed it, working wonders!

Beautiful! Hardly. Just de-cluttered on the face of things. Trying to select an encoding is about as difficult as pinning the tail on the donkey.

I think that for almost all Internet Explorer and Safari users the UI is as busy as their developers make it.

I expect the average user of Chrome and Firefox to be able and willing to at least get to the "View" menu (or similar) and configure the interface as he/she sees fit.

Indeed, I find vimperator's interface exceedingly minimal.[1]

[1] http://imgur.com/MkGwZZ5

if you enjoy vimperator I suspect you'll appreciate the tree style tabs mentioned above.. also if you `:set tabnumbers` you can easily switch between numbered tabs, which can be very useful

http://i.imgur.com/3x8nF0J.png

Just saw your post after posting myself. Please share how you got rid of some of the clutter.

Menu > Customize. This puts the chrome in "edit" mode where you can add and remove UI elements.

What are you using for those side tabs?

Probably 'Tree Style Tab': https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Or the Vertical Tabs add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

vertical tabs is one of the main reasons I still use FF as my primary browser.

Why does it seem like everyone is moving to those curved tabs? They've always seemed like a waste of space and the overlapping bits make for an inconsistent tab UI.

Non-vertical tab edges make it easier to see which tab is on top.

Note that only the active tab is curved; the other tabs have nothing but a line between them. Here's a comparison using the latest UX Nightly:

Old: http://cl.ly/image/221j3J1j3R2Q New: http://cl.ly/image/1b1j1m2K2k24

The old one is showing 13 tabs, the new one is showing 12 tabs and the edge of the 13th one. However, the new one is way less cluttered and easy to read IMO.

I'm not sure what you mean by inconsistent, but I imagine the point is to give a slight depth -- better highlight the foreground tab.

The inconsistency is based around a scenario like this.

Open 4 tabs. click tab 1 and then tab 3. What order do you display the tabs in? Does tab 1 overlay tab 2? If closing tabs don't to the last open tab this now means that the visual stack is not accurate to how the program operates.

I understand the depth but there are better ways to show it that don't take up as much space nor have to deal with issues like visually showing the tab's z-order

The Australis inactive tabs don't overlay. Take a look at the mockups. Only the active tab has a background and border styling.

Chrome stacks away from the currently focused tab. If tab 6 of 10 is focused, 6 will be in front of 7, which is in front of 8, and so on; similarly 6 is in front of 5 which is in front 4, and so on. There is a subtle visual lead to the focused tab. If you then select tab 2 for example, tabs 3 to 6 will be restacked for consistency.

I loathe that behaviour, it was one of the things that bugged me about Chrome. If I close a tab, I want the focus to go back to the previously viewed tab, not the previous tab in the z-stack.

You are assuming tabs are a stack. They aren't.

This is Chrome's definitive legitimation as the standard browser UI.

I personally think it sucks (on OS X, that is). How anyone can think that a 10px window dragging area is fine is beyond me.

I just hope Apple can step up its game with Safari.

FYI, these demos only work properly on Firefox.

And the point of having curved tabs is... ?

Imitating Chrome, of course.

> I haven't really been using Firefox all that much mainly due to how busy the interface is, so maybe leaning it out will make me a regular user again.

Those mockups are busier than the current interface, at least for OSX. The new OSX UI gains some vertical space in exchange for losing horizontal and making the UI more cluttered.

EDIT: Actually it only gains about 4 pixels of vertical space despite all the downsides, including the loss of the title.

Its really basic things like not lining the window management buttons with the rest of the icons that really piss me off as a designer.

Is this really too much to ask for? http://imgur.com/zD8lUYW

Those tabs look nice when you have 3 or 4 of them.

But I have 26, and it won't look so good then. (I tweaked my chrome to shrink the minimum tab size, so I can get lots of them without having to scroll the tab bar.)

Try Tree Style Tab, it displays tabs on the left. It's a bliss.

I tried it about a year or 2 ago and my browsers wouldn't stop crashing. It also had a memory leak.

Maybe it's better now and I should try again.

I love firefox and use it daily on all platforms. What bothers me a bit (just a bit) about the design is that only on linux the menu bar row sticks out [1], while on Windows or Mac they were able to collapse it or hide it quite well. I suppose this is due to the GUI implementation constraints on the platform, but it is still very noticable when I switch from my mac to ubuntu.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/qDUuOXH.png

I'm not on ubuntu right now, but this should be done by an ubuntu specific extension that places the menu bar in the global menu bar area that unity creates in essentially the same place it is on a mac. Should be installed by default on untuntu+unity, perhaps you disabled it?

Right-click on your Home button and uncheck the "Menu bar" :)

Yeah, check if you have the firefox-globalmenu apt package installed. If so, check for "Global Menu Integration" in extensions.

Looks fine to me.

http://i.imgur.com/82cxpwA.png

http://i.imgur.com/PPDqyZw.png

I'd say let them switch to using Qt on Linux instead of GTK, and that problem could be solved.

It's not a GTK issue.

I would guess that it's possible that the way X works prevents this from happening. At least, easily.

I use an offbeat windowing manager (WM) (aka, the client to Xorg that actually draws the base-level windows for the GUI). The WM gets to present titlebar as it pleases, and given how my WM works, there's 0 chance that Firefox would be able to draw it's own stuff up in there.

Given that, perhaps some WMs can allow the client window to draw up there and some can not. I get the impression that, at a minimum, the titlebar is not guaranteed to be fair game.

It's as B-Com said. The window manager. I used to use Emerald. There was no way you could consistently draw in the titlebar across all the themes available for it.

I think Firefox should switch to Qt, since it allows more flexible management. For example GTK prevents it from drawing in the title bar.

That's called client side window drawing and GTK has it. Needed for Wayland. Maybe good to investigate a little bit before saying things that aren't true.

Not in GTK2 which Firefox uses. It doesn't use GTK3 yet. Qt port of Firefox already exists anyway, but Mozilla didn't find much interest to support it.

Also, I'm not sure how Wayland is going to solve that, since Wayland protocol doesn't mandate for the window manager to use client side decorations. May be you are talking about Weston (which is a reference compositor of the Wayland project). But in practice each major DE will probably create their own compositors which won't necessarily use client side decorations.