If you want a highly customizable browser, Firefox is it. Chrome is in its infancy when it comes to customization and they often make decisions that prevent power users from taking advantage of their browsing experience.
For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues.
Generally they try to appeal and prioritize regular users (which is fine) but go out of their way to make decisions that ignore power users and not even provide alternatives intentionally.
Finally and the most frustrating part is they don't value feedback. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/ is a joke and a waste of time. The most starred issues are often closed to the public when it reaches a certain level and users are asked to submit a new bug again if the old one is not fixed. This means that if there is still a bug, you have to wait months before other users experience it, find the time to search for the bug and star it, reach enough stars to get attention and then get a response. Bugs are often miscategorized and the wrong team has it in its backlog. It's a mess.
There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver.
Take it from a serious chrome user and extension developer for several years, switch to Firefox if you want to tweak anything that bothers you easily without having to change the damn source code.
> There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver.
Multi-process browsing. It is incredibly annoying when my entire browser locks up because one of the fifty tabs I have open is doing something stupid. That never happened in several years of using Chrome, and it happens several times a day in Firefox.
So imagine you are a person that stopped browser hygiene during a few months while finishing their PhD and now _still_ carries around about 900 open tabs waiting to be sorted into bookmarks and junk. (Yeah, that's me.)
I have to re-start Firefox every 48 hours or else its resource consumption starts affecting the overall system. This is my primary issue with current Firefox versions, although I am aware that I'm an n-sigma outlier.
Intrestingly, however, the Firefox team has been greatly improving memory management, so that currently, even with my completely pathological browser session, Firefox remains usable for 48 hours with 900 tabs open.
Or just close all those tabs. Realistically you're never actually going to get around to reading them and they're just there weighing you down. Seriously, close them. Forget they were ever there. If you haven't looked at them yet it means that they're not that important!
Yeah, this is the only way I keep my browsing sane. Over the years, a kind of "tab garbage-collection" habit has emerged. I find it works really well, since if a tab hasn't been visited in the last 20 minutes, I probably won't open it again.
Additionally, the history-tracking of the browser is good enough and my google-fu sufficient so I can find anything I need that I've previously visited.
I've found Evernote with it's web clipper to be great for this. Anything I figure I might want someday, but I don't know exactly when or why, goes into my EN archive. The full text is searchable, so it's like having Google for only stuff that I've found interesting in the past. (And the clipper can even add results from your library to search engine results, so you can re-find things even when you're not specifically looking.)
You can enable it in Firefox 29 if you like (about:config, browser.tabs.remote=true, restart). I noticed though that navigating to live bookmarks crashed the browser, so ended up disabling it.
Agreed. The multi-process vs single process is controversial. With cheap memory, multi-process would be better.
However, I personally don't experience crashes several times a day.
A crash usually boils down to Javascript taking too long and/or maybe rendering issues with CSS (hardware acceleration). However Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes.
Overall, a crash is not really that dramatic. The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them, you can use Lazarus to auto-save all form inputs and not lose a single point of data and it resumes at the exact position in seconds (no need to scroll either).
Just add NoScript and block the sites where developers can't write decent JS.
>> it happens several times a day in Firefox
If it happens frequently regardless of the sites you're visiting then it must be extensions or hardware acceleration or plugins. i.e a configuration problem and not a FF one
> Chrome is not immune to bad JS and will also slow down your system until the single tab is killed/crashes.
That's true, but with like 8-or-so cores I don't really care or even notice that much (if I notice some tab is eating a lot of CPU power, I just go into the task-manager and kill it, until I need it, at which point I reload it.) No disruption to my browsing experience happens. In firefox, I'll have to close the tab, possibly restart the browser, et cetera.
> The browser restarts, all tabs are still there and only load if you click them
I haven't really used firefox for a while now, but it used to lose tabs occasionally for me. I hope that's fixed nowadays.
So Firefox does support multi-processed tabs through Electrolysis (its IPC layer). From what I understand this is used primarily on Firefox OS to sandbox app runtimes.
Doing one process per tab, which is what Chrome does, comes at a very steep cost in increased memory usage. If you compare a Chrome and Firefox instance holding 20 or 30 tabs, the memory consumption is going to be dramatically different.
His article explains how you can try out the experimental multi-process support in Firefox, but that it works differently to Chrome's. I think Chrome's way of doing it wastes a lot of system resources and that we need to be more clever about how we spend a user's system resources.
> For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues.
Stylish is applied post-rendering in Chrome. It works fine in FF because of the browser API.
In chrome, because of the limitations of the extensions API, it doesn't cover chrome pages, developer tools or source view. If you pick a dark background in Stylish and visit a site with a white background, you will see flashes of light because the extension takes over after the document was created and chrome stylesheet was applied.
I'm sorry but the developer tools in Firefox are a nightmare to use. Sure they have fancy things like 3d view and other awesome functions. But plain old jane stuff, is just easier to do in Chrome.
Nothing too crazy. I have a keyboard shortcut that grabs the URL from chrome, then passes it off to a script that interfaces with pass [0] to have a rudimentary, but secure and cross platform password manager.
tell application "Firefox"
activate
set pb to the clipboard
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "l" using command down
keystroke "c" using command down
end tell
set page_url to the clipboard
set the clipboard to pb
end tell
It’s kind of hacked together and I haven’t tested it with rigor but until now it did its job. If you use it, please let me know if you could enhance it or whether it breaks for certain pasteboard contents.
I'm using mozrepl[1] which exposes all sorts of FF guts over a simple localhost telnet connection to automate stuff that might otherwise be applescripted.
It's a bit of a hassle, but for simple things like 'get url of current tab', 'open new tab', 'switch to tab x', etc, it's reasonably simple and can be scripted.
Flash support. And no, supporting the old deprecated Adobe plugin doesn't count as many sites now require newer versions. This is to support flash games. My kids love the simple flash games on Kongregate and similar sites, so I have to use Chromium on their systems.
Chromium ppapi flash is known inferior to npapi flash (sites like Crunchyroll tell you not to use it; ppapi has higher CPU usage) and npapi flash works fine in Firefox.
I love Firefox -- for what it's done, what it represents, and what it helps guard against. I have fond memories of those early versions of Firefox (nee Firebird) that busted open the IE monopoly, and where hands-down the best browser going at the time.
But it's never felt very good on the Mac to me, and it still doesn't. Here's a few early thoughts on this release, from the perspective of a happy Safari user, w/ a pretty (nit-)picky eye.
* Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
* The address bar is square edged while the search bar is round edged, which is displeasingly visually. (I realize this is because there's a convention of "search bars are rounded," but the inconsistency remains.)
* Tapping the hamburger menu on the far right, it appears with a combined drop-and-fade-in effect, and then disappears instantly.
This is jarring on the Mac, because it is exactly the opposite of native menu behavior, which is to appear instantly, and disappear with a fade. (I also believe the native behavior makes more sense: when you're tapping a menu, you want to do something, so you don't want to be slowed down by an animation -- just show the menu.)
(Addition of a hamburger bar on the far right at all is suspicious; often it's a UI "dumping ground")
* The "what's new" slideshow that appears at the bottom of the screen has to be controlled by clicking small <- or -> arrows, instead of just scrolling, which feels very outmoded
* The scroller applies a fade effect to incoming content, but only to the text, not the image, which is jarring.
* Multi-touch swipe to go back/forward shows no feedback! (Safari does this best, where the whole page slides away, revealing what's underneath; Chrome does a half-assed thing with arrows fading in, which isn't nearly as nice, but at least better than no feedback.)
Pretty nitpicky, I know, but I recently read an article trumpeting this release of Firefox's incredible attention to detail.
On the Mac at least, I think it still falls short.
> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
As a user, I want separate edit bars for separate functions. I don't want Google know everything I type (or mistype) in the address bar. When I type foobar in the address bar please give me anything that returned the web server at foobar or give me an error if there is no foobar or the foobar have no web server. If I want to search foobar then I will type it in the search bar by myself.
I encourage Chrome users to go check the search history attached to their Google account. It exposes a lot of data that you didn't realize you were sending to Google (including letter-by-letter entry of search terms/urls) and may give a newfound respect for Firefox's separation, whether you personally care enough to make the switch or not.
To my knowledge search history is opt-in (as opposed to opt-out).
Reconfirmed this for my Google accounts and in fact it is not storing search history. Ofcourse Google may be tracking it on their end, but I assume very few services don't track, so that's a non-issue (at least for me).
If you don't send them the data in the first place, it doesn't matter what their privacy policy says -- either today or in the future -- about how they will use it.
If you find letter by letter search useful but only want to use it would you are searching, not while using the address bar. Then it can be a good reason.
And, according to your edit, you missed my point. That blog post explicitly states that Chromium has many of the same "phone-home features" of Chrome. That includes the specific one discussed in this thread, "search suggest".
The difference between Chromium and Chrome is mainly that Chromium doesn't include the proprietary featuresets included in Chrome, like the Pepper Flash implementation. Chromium is not a more private build, it's just a more open build. They still send all your data to Google by default, just like Chrome.
Note that even Firefor has at least one kind of phone home "feature" enabled by default - malware protection. It keeps asking Google if the sites you are visiting are OK, thus sending the list of visited sites to Google.
I know that they are supposed not to misuse this information, but I would feel much better if they didn't receive it at all.
The SafeBrowsing implementation does not send every URL you visit to Google. There's a local database of bad URLs, but stored in a way that can have false positives, to improve efficiency. Only if you get a match with the local database does it contact Google to see if it is a false positive or not.
I agree, though Firefox's awesomebar (if it's still called that) already integrates search, and seems to autocomplete to things I've never visited with suggested search queries. This might be related to my use of the DuckDuckGo extension though.
I also use ctrl-L and ctrl-K for navigating and searching, respectively, and I've found the way Chrome handles ctrl-K by focusing on the navigation bar and filling it with a '?' lacking. For instance, it clears my last query, where I often refine queries after quickly inspecting the results I got first time around. The requirement of having a '?' in front of search queries is also annoying, since it hinders a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Most notably, if I change my mind, Ctrl-A doesn't allow me to restart typing a query without manually inserting the '?' again.
There's a setting to disable "recommended" autocomplete (and only autocomplete from local history). Once at the Google search page, there's a separate setting to [en/dis]able autocomplete, and it may or may not actually work.
I've taken to changing my Chrome search engine to "https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&complete=0", which does disable the autocomplete behavior, but also appears to give a slightly older version of the search page.
Obviously the proper next step would be to switch to DuckDuckGo.
Less elements to worry about. I switched from Firefox to Chrome few years ago and now find separate bar being unintuitive. If I stayed on Firefox, I would say that having united bar is intrusive to privacy and illogical.
My final point, letting users decide would be the best option here, and Firefox did exactly this! I managed to reconfigure it into a single address-bar working as search bar too, except search engine auto-completion.
Unfortunately you are not the average user, if you want Firefox to succeed it needs to do what is common, both IE, and Chrome the two most popular browsers have a single address/search bar.
In regards to the whole tinfoil hat comments about Google knowing everything you type, well I hate to burst your bubble but they probably already know everything about you, including but not limited too your inability to spell duck right.
I can't remember the last time I used Firefox intentionally. Chrome replaced it long ago.
As a web dev, I find myself more annoyed at the anomalies of Gecko everyday. I fix more Gecko related bugs than IE11 bugs, and that just feels wrong.
I don't expect this to be a popular opinion, but I have to say based on recent experience that if it wasn't for Chrome, I'd be using IE11 on a PC and Safari on a Mac. Firefox just feels too kludgy every time I use it.
Really? From my experience Chrome has a lot of anomalies/regressions since version 32. And Android 2.3 browser (WebView also in 4x) reminds me of the IE 6.
Gecko and Trident are very good in comparison. Google needs a better QA process, especially after forking Webkit.
The only thing that bothers me with Firefox beside some UI is the single process model.
Indeed. I love seeing Mozilla true to their mission. By separating them, the user knows where their input is going at all times. Only Firefox gets to see what you are typing in your address bar. Moreover, I love you can click ctrl+k in a tab, then type something you are reading on that page and then hit alt+enter to open your search result in a new tab.
I think for some time already you could also just select text on a page, right-click and choose "Search <search engine> for 'Lorum lipsum'" and it will open a new tab for it with your set search engine searching for that term.
I use this all the time, small thing but it's awesome! I'm pretty sure it exists in other browsers as well though.
I agree on the separation of input fields, but wanted to point out that the search functionality you mention exists in Chrome too (Mac equivalent in parens):
ctrl(cmd)+l to focus omnibar, alt(shift)+enter to open results in a new tab
You will then probably also like to set browser.fixup.alternate.enabled to False in about:config, to disable the trying to go to 'whatyoutyped.com' and such when hitting an NXDOMAIN.
For anyone who reads this later, it might be helpful to clarify that the kind of settings you're referring to there are for things like adding missing http://, www. or .com to an address. That is, while they do modify what you type if the initial response is negative, they're quite different to the send-every-character-you-type behaviour used for autocomplete in a search box (or anything at all, in browsers with unified URL/search boxes).
Thanks, that worked for me in Chrome for desktop, but not in my Android mobile browser which messes up intranet site addresses even if I select them from history.
I believe Safari solves this on iOS/Mac by treating the address bar as the "search option" - whether that's your memorised URL, stored bookmarks, google, history or (and my favourite...) the page.
Like the chap above your comment, I absolutely despise having the Firefox differentiation because my habit is to click the address bar and then depending on whether I have realised the mistake before/after hitting enter it's: (1) "S&%^ I have clicked the wrong one, <tab>" (2) "FFS I didn't want http://byron burger locations"
Well, in SeaMonkey (another Mozilla suite), when you type in the address bar (there is no search bar), there is always the suggestion to search for what you are typing at the bottom of the suggestions. But it does not provide you with suggestions.
>Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
Use the customizer. People complain when they change and complain when they don't
> The address bar is square edged while the search bar is round edged, which is displeasingly visually. (I realize this is because there's a convention of "search bars are rounded," but the inconsistency remains.)
Maybe this is just the Mac version. On Linux they both have about a 3px border radius.
>Tapping the hamburger menu on the far right, it appears with a combined drop-and-fade-in effect, and then disappears instantly.
Sounds like a bug, not happening on linux though.
>The scroller applies a fade effect to incoming content, but only to the text, not the image, which is jarring.
Is this only on the slide show or something? That's not really much to complain about. I see web pages with different designs all over the internet.
>Multi-touch swipe
I have multi touch swipe set up for other things, but that sounds like something that needs work.
>> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
> Use the customizer.
Most users-on-street don't want to customise either.
Edit: The moderation on this is baffling. Does anyone genuinely believe users want to customise to achieve reasonable defaults?
HN should ban new users from moderating for a year.
> Most users-on-street don't want to customize either.
Most users on the street aren't on the hacker news forum. Also if you are going to play the "most users on the street" game, then most users on the street aren't going to install a browser that didn't come with the OS.
>That's true. So it's even more important to retain them by having sensible defaults.
Not really. What is wrong with having a product that caters to a power user, or a niche group? Why does everything have to be dumbed-down for the "user on the street"? If you want dumbed-down then use the browser that came with your OS. If want something that isn't dumbed-down then you most likely have the know-how to customize your toolbar.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a product for power users. Again, nobody in the thread said there was.
Firefox is a browser for everyone. It focuses on freedom and privacy. The browser that came with your OS most likely does not. There is no minimum level of technical expertise required. The UX is designed to be simple.
I still have to disagree with you. I don't buy into your "street person" argument at all. I don't think you give people enough credit. Just about anyone born in the U.S. (or any first world country) in the late 80's and after will probably know how to customize a tool bar in a web browser. Even if they grew up poor and didn't own a computer it would be hard to not have this knowledge after going thru a public school system. If your "street person" happens to be a baby-boomer, then maybe.
> Just about anyone born in the U.S. (or any first world country) in the late 80's and after will probably know how to customize a tool bar in a web browser
Agreed, but nobody in the thread is debating whether people know to customise a tool bar in a web browser.
The only thing that has been questioned is whether most people want to customise a browser to achieve defaults they find reasonable.
> HN should ban new users from moderating for a year.
You actually need quite a bit of karma (maybe 500?) on Hacker News before you can downvote things, so anybody downvoting you can't be that new of a user.
> so anybody downvoting you can't be that new of a user.
IME, you can earn a lot of karma quickly with links. I'd say 1/3 of my karma came from links, and initially that's what pushed me over the top. So they're most likely not new users, but anyone with a month of submissions could have crossed that threshold. It makes me wonder if the two karmas, and the features that get enabled, should be separate things.
I think it's that your response sounded like a lazy dismissal. Reasonable defaults are good, yes. That's pretty uncontroversial. But nobody has established that Firefox's behavior is less reasonable than the alternative — for example, the comment you were replying to noted that both approaches have their fans — so your out-of-hand rejection on behalf of "users-on-street" sounded imperious.
The only reason I didn't question the behaviour is that the parent didn't either: they just mentioned that most users could customise. Which, as mentioned, they wouldn't want to do.
Noticing the folk in the conversation there's lots of newish accounts, and some are replying before they've actually read what they're replying to. Downmods for 'I disagree' are more popular now as well.
> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned.
> As a user, I don't want to have to make this
> distinction, and it's hard to imagine most
> users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
Although a UI problem, this is actually a privacy feature.
As you type into the search bar, autocomplete queries are sent to the search provider. This happens even if your intention was not to search, but just to enter URL manually.
In simpler terms: you are telling Google what sites you are visiting even when you don't use Google.
(AndrewDucker mentions this on this thread too, but his comment emphasises the UI aspect, whereas I think the privacy aspect needs to be stressed).
Just make your own custom search keywords (right-click site's search box>Add a keyword for this search). Uses no autocomplete, and is much more time-saving than a separate search box.
I have around 30 set up, from Wikipedia (w) to Google Image Search (gis), etc.
Of course there's always ways around things, but browser vendors have to (unless in specific cases) cater for the general public who don't know about personalisation. These are the people who need safe defaults most.
As power users, we tend to ignore the power of default settings. Their values have to be chosen carefully because only a small part of the public are even aware of them.
Several commenters here seem to imply that they shouldn't be the ones personalising their browsers. Turns out it's the other way around: they are the ones who know how to personalise it, whereas defaults should be about users who don't know how to do it.
> Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
Given the new gTLDs, I'm thankful that Firefox still has a separate search box. Say I'm want to know about the "asdfg.cat" file that showed up on my system. If I put that into the URL bar and hit enter, it's going to say "Oh, I know what .cat is, it's the TLD for Catalan related websites. Let's go to asdfg.cat!"
Same goes for things like "mail.app", which had conventionally referred to Apple's mail client on OS X. I have no idea if they'll end up owning that domain or if someone else will. And either way, I didn't want to end up on the web site if I was trying to search for it.
you can put it in quotes, and it should execute it as search vs address. the only argument for having a separate box i can think of is it you wanted a separate search engine associated to address bar, vs search box.
Chrome's solution is to have ctrl-K move focus to the address bar and fill in a ? at the start, but I'm not a huge fan. Same for having to type in quotes.
Mainly I don't like that it buries the fact that searching is a separate action and that you can pick what you're doing. And I think it's even more of a problem for inexperienced users, because to them the program is saying "Doing this action will randomly either search or go to some webpage, and you don't understand which will happen."
I also like keeping the search provider dropdown. It calls attention to the fact that you don't have to use google (and I don't). Google obviously has motives to prefer burying this in right click, but I think it fits Mozilla's agenda to leave it as a very visible setting.
you can set which search engine used in address bar, just like you would in search bar.
i never use ? or quotes, because in 99.9% cases the search is very different from an address, and it's easy to tell which is being proposed. I also love having search recommendation for 5% searches where i am not sure of exact wording.
and yes, it's more of a power user feature, which is why i like it.
>the only argument for having a separate box i can think of //
I use the address bar primarily (in FF) but the search bar is useful as a "scratch pad" for storing details I want to see briefly. It's certainly an edge case.
"Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned"
Chrome is almost unusable for me because I can no longer type the names of internal websites and have them come up. That single change in its behavior drives me back to Firefox.
If you put '/' at the end of the internal address it will resolve it correctly. Although I switch between both browsers a lot so I don't always remember that trick.
That works - I can't tell you how many hundreds (possibly even thousands) of times I was frustrated by that issue with chrome, before I gave up. I can now come home again.
If there are a few that you frequently access, you could set the URLs as 'search engines' with the hostname as the keyword, or even a shorthand keyword
If you type in the search bar then it automcompletes by sending all of your keystrokes to your search provider. If you type in the address bar then it autocompletes by using your history.
These are two very different use cases, and I appreciate the ability to search my history without notifying google of the name of internal servers.
If you type something that is clearly not a web address, firefox send it off to a search engine as well. It sends mine to whatever search engine is selected in the search bar.
True, but not the same as sending even things you type that are real addresses to the mothership as well. That discloses every site you ever visit (by typing its name, at least) to a third party for no particularly good reason, which is an obvious privacy issue, and it seems unlikely that most users realise this is happening, which makes the privacy issue much worse.
I actually think this is their best effort yet. Firefox on Mac has always felt bloated and foreign to me. But this release pretty much eliminates all of that. While it's not perfect, it's the very first time I've enjoyed using Firefox more than Chrome or Safari. This is an amazing release.
> * Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing.
The big reason I really like this is that the address bar is local to the tab, and the search box is window. If you have a topic you want to dive into on another tab, you can safely transcribe information from multiple current tabs and then create a new tab with the search. Especially when some of the information is in the current url.
* Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
Customize: rip it out, install foobar(1) addon and/or use search keywords for search engines
> * Multi-touch swipe to go back/forward shows no feedback! (Safari does this best, where the whole page slides away, revealing what's underneath; Chrome does a half-assed thing with arrows fading in, which isn't nearly as nice, but at least better than no feedback.)
This is how it works on ChromeOS too. It even has a nice black and white effect on the previous page until it's fully loaded.
>Separate address and search bars is old-fashioned. As a user, I don't want to have to make this distinction, and it's hard to imagine most users-on-street wouldn't find this confusing
umm... I don't know if this works on mac too, but at least in the windows Firefox, you actually CAN use the address bar as a search bar. So why two bars? well the search bar also lets you CHOOSE your search engine, unlike Chrome which hardwires you to google. Yes yes, you might say but why would i want to search anywhere else? Well just like you hate having to actually GO to google to search on google, people hate going to wikipedia or wolfram alpha or ask.com etc etc before searching there. So it lets them query their engine of choice right from the bar. Oh and depending on your version, the address bar automatically searches on the engine selected in the search bar.
Now since you are a fairly old user of FF, i don't really understand the need to tell you all this, ut i just felt your nitpick about the searchbar saw this "feature" as a "design flaw"
Agreed with a lot of the above. The biggest concerns for me...
1. The rounded tabs are simply ugly, and remind me of web design from a decade ago. It's also weird how they go from square to round on rollover. Poor design choice in my opinion.
2. It's far more difficult to find the active tab now. For comparison, the old style (http://static.filehorse.com/screenshots/browsers-and-plugins...). In the new version, I have to scan the toolbar to find the active tab based on the rounded or square edges. It's a lot easier the old way to find a bright active tab on darker, faded out inactive tabs. That's UX 101. It doesn't stop there, the entire toolbar, tabs, search, etc, blends together in a blob of light grey and white right now. Very little distinction between anything.
3. I never liked the orange Firefox button in the top left, it always seemed out of place and forced. Replacing it with an icon and menu is fine, but that icon should be on the left, before the first tab. The menu opening to a grid of icons is also awful. How it transitions to the right when you click something like 'History' is extremely bizarre. I have no idea why they tried to reinvent the wheel here, a typical list menu that everyone is familiar with would work best. That's great you can customize it, but 9/10 people will never use that feature, so it's a step backwards for them.
Overall, I see it as a change for the worse. It's not rocket science here, and nailing down a proper browser interface should be a walk in the park. We're talking about some tabs and a toolbar, there's no excuse for it to be anything but perfect after more than a decade. I'm 100% confident I could knock out a better design, that would be better received by people in a weekend. They have some nice features and design choices, but they got it 90% there, and keep tripping over polishing the remaining 10%.
Ah, right you are, Phoenix (because it was a browser rising from the ashes of Netscape), then Firebird for .5 seconds, and finally Firefox. (Surprised I forgot that, since I actually lived the history. :)
I think it worked out for the best -- Firefox is an excellent name and brand. It's hard now to imagine it being something else!
Really it was Mozilla that rose from Netscape's ashes. Firefox rewrote the UI, but Mozilla never died, it just changed to Seamonkey. It was the best browser for years before Phoenix came along -- for UI and resource problems that I never perceived myself.
The forced menu fade is a poor design choice in Windows too. They completely ignore the Windows appearance/performance settings, where you can disable pointless menu effects that are just a waste of time.
The memory numbers reported on OSX by the system are a little weird, and include shared libraries in some kind of odd way. If you want to see the breakdown of how much memory the browser is actually using, go to about:memory and click on "Measure". You can mouse over the various categories to get a description.
Either that or you have an addon installed that is using a huge amount of memory.
I have no idea - mine uses 184MB. It's been much slimmer than Chrome for me for about a year. Even when I use lots of extensions, it's up to 340MB which is less than Chrome's 400MB.
Firefox uses less memory only on startup and when I have few tabs open. As soon as I start opening more tabs and browsing longer the memory usage is much larger on FF and the whole UI becomes less responsive and so do pages.
Even on startup it isn't that better compared to chrome.
Chrome 11 extensions 1 tab: ~300MB
FF 2 extensions 1 tab: ~200MB
It's not FF 29, it's 28 - but I doubt the memory management improved much in 29.
But to be fair, it's a lot better now than it used to be.
That surprises me even more, since Chrome has a lot more overhead per tab (often a whole process per tab), so I expected Firefox to have a bigger advantage the more tabs you have open. Edit: I just tried opening about 24 tabs of webcomics in each, and Chrome jumped to over 1GB of RAM while FF is about 600MB.
I don't know if it's just the tab count or longer browsing sessions/history (I usually have my browser open for days without closing it) or whatever, so don't quote me on that.
But FF is definitely uses more memory than chrome and with few other resource hungry applications running it becomes practically unusable on my low end laptop.
On my 512MB Raspberry Pi, this used to be FF's greatest strenth. Unfortunately the latest versions are getting nearly as bad as chrome. I wish Mozilla would focus on their strengths and put more resources back into their memshrink project.
I guarantee you that FF29's memory usage is better in general than FF13, because it avoids numerous bad cases where old versions that used to cause memory usage to skyrocket. Those cases -- where memory goes up 10x -- are the ones that hurt. In contrast, you're unlikely to notice 20% higher memory usage during normal use.
20%? Are we even looking at the same charts? After closing 5 tabs 270mb -> 480mb! Those numbers don't lie and your guarantee is worthless to those of us that have seen Firefox's memory bloat over the past year.
When Chrome started to get fat, it was great to have a lightweight alternative like Firefox. But lately even Firefox has been causing my 1GB netbook to thrash. I hate to have to junk a perfectly good machine that is only used for email and browsing just because of software bloat. After doing a factory restore, it looks like that or a lightweight Linux distro(while losing flash and HW accel) are my only options.
You mean memory usage has increased slightly, after being dramatically reduced, while adding new features? They're doing better than most large projects.
areweslimyet is a tool mainly used to prevent regressions during development and shouldn't be interpreted the way you do.
There are many memory usage improvements made in firefox that don't appear explicitly in the areweslimyet tests, and there are many others, like better memory usage reporting accuracy and new features that do, thus the apparent increase in memory usage throughout the latest versions that you pointed.
Monopolies don't require that there be only one choice... just that one choice is vastly dominant. And at its peak, IE had something over 90% of the market. [1]
The IE monopoly was established by effectively killing Netscape Navigator/Communicator. Mozilla existed, but didn't become a major player until Firefox hit the scene half a decade later.
Apparently, you don't remember the Dark Ages. See, there were other browsers, that much is true.
What you're missing is that many, many sites were only developed for IE, and only worked at all in IE. No, not "graceful degradation," not "progressive enhancement," that all came a decade later: if you were not using IE, the sites were very broken, even unusable - and nobody cared: after all, Just Use IE Like All The Normal People Do, right?
This seems to be a recurring thing with Firefox. I really think they should leave the damned UI alone and start fixing some of the killer half decade plus old bugs!
This is the third one I'm aware of that is a basic usability thing. Others include a complete failure to browse to sites that present a duplicate SSL certificate, and an odd breakage that results in downloads getting half completed but the UI saying they're complete anyways.
On Nightly on Linux that fade in and out isn't there on the hamburger menu. Unless that's because my GFX setup doesn't support it. Perhaps it has been addressed in a further release.
There's an extension that gives you a chrome style omnibox. It works fine, except I can't use tab to search within sites like in chrome. If anyone knows how I can get this in FF, I'd be very appreciative.
On Mac OS X, you can remove the search bar from the window layout and just use the URL bar as omnibar too. Sadly, you still don't get the tab to search a page domain option.
As I write this, the story is about one hour old, there are 118 other comments and the top voted comment - the top voted comment - is criticism by someone who doesn't use Firefox. The comment is totally without technical analysis of why Firefox does what it does nor does it mention anything that FireFox gets right. The only positive thing the author says involves dragging out some tired anti-microsoft trope.
That's the problem when stories have this sort of velocity. The quality of comments goes down to the point where "It doesn't try to be an Apple product" is what collects the most upvotes. It's little more than trolling for defenses of FireFox and Safari fan upvotes.
So true. I was hoping for a discussion on improved WebGL support (if any), performance improvements, new HTML5 feature support, etc. rather than whether the address bar and search bar should be merged. The latter is important, but IMO should not be the most discussed item.
Where the hell is my forward button? Why does browser.tabs.onTop not mean anything anymore? Where's my refresh button? On the... right side, inside the Awesome Bar? Why isn't a separate button? Why can't I put the Home button back beside the Back button? Why is the back button permanently part of the Awesome Bar? Why does the Awesome Bar change shape and size to allow the forward button to exist? Why isn't the forward button an element that I can move around like the refresh button? Why can't I move the Awesome Bar at all? What happened to the Status Bar? Why can't I replace the Status Bar with the Bookmarks Bar at the bottom of the screen? Why is the Start Button now permanently overlapping with anything displayed in the browser? Why can't I move the Menu Button? Why is your Menu Button right where Google Chrome's menus are by default? Also, when you remove the Title Bar, I can't grab the window because I keep my bookmarks as icons without titles on the Menu Bar.
Why are you messing with everything, Mozilla? Why are you breaking the UI metaphor? With the tabs on the top, all the elements under it are made to appear a part of that tab. There's no reason that I can see for the tabs to be on top. It doesn't look pretty, it takes extra pixels to render the smooth curve where the tab meets the next bar. Even if I'm insane and it's the same width, it still looks awful.
I've got five HD screens, and everyone is taking the tablet friendly, ergonomic approach. I want consistency. Please stop breaking everything. You're the last good browser, Firefox. Don't ruin it.
Please bring back: tabs on bottom, the permanent forward button, the refresh button, the bottom bar anchor, and the separate back button.
They won't "stop breaking everything" because they feel the irresistible urge to constantly "improve" and "reinvent" the UI until it becomes unusable (a.k.a. the Linux desktop syndrome).
BTW, the refresh button is in the 'menu config', you can drag it to the old place. The stop button and other 'classic' buttons are gone. Meaningless 'browser.tabs.onTop' prepares you for your transition to Chrome.
FF is so frustrating and disappointing. I'm not angry, just sad.
I was thinking for a second the whole UI might get a shake up, or rather, there would be innovative useful functions, that would set the browser apart.
The bookmark and history managers are still pretty aweful. Some of the UI has been polished, but certainly not all.
The refresh button irritates me, because for some reason it feels smaller.
I feel the whole tab placement is a little moot, as it should follow the OSs style. Quite why we haven't good tab management/redesign/overhaul in modern window managers/desktops yet is beyond me.
Personally I'd rather a tool menu. And a location/search bar, a bookmark manager, and a browser pane. All pretty much separate.
Text input would be a nice centralised overlay/popup as and when needed, which I could make huge or small. In other words help with web forms. Android's Chrome browser kind of does that. In opera I used to be able to float the address bar, but it lost it's 'awesome' qualities - autocomplete etc.
It's OS/UX territory, why reinvent controls and the way we interact with each application? The overall UX ends up feeling like a right hodge-podge.
Thank you! This has been driving me crazy. I like my toolbar controls to look like:
back | forward | home | stop | refresh
Yes I know all of the keyboard shortcuts, but I still like to mouse around when applicable and don't want to have to use precision to focus on 1 tiny 8 pixel refresh button on my 28" monitor.
There's an add-on called "Classic theme restorer". If you install that and fiddle about with its settings, you can get Firefox 99% of the way to how it was.
What's this about the status bar / add-on bar gone?
The main reason why I use Status-4-Evar is because when I hover over a link I don't want that link to pop-over the page content, which is what Chrome did first, then Firefox copied like sheep. It's distracting, like a tiny little pop-over in the corner of your eye.
I like having URLs show in a status bar separate to the main web window. It's out of the way, and I just like having my web browser framed by an interface. Is that so wrong?
What's so bad about a status bar? Why is there this idea that everyone wants the full screen web?
First Mozilla forces their CEO to resign, now they're being the soup nazi over the status bar which has been with browsers since day one of web browsers. You call that progress? I call it chopping down an old tree that nobody wanted chopped down.
It's the first thing I noticed changed, and the first thing I tried (and failed) to re-enable. I am part of the "don't like change" crowd, but normally just get used to it can carry on. This is the first functional change which actually made me a little angry!
To me this is basically essential at the moment. Not because I hate change and am stubborn but because many extensions are still completely broken in Australis, and many websites are and will always be broken by badly implemented popup status bars
The one that got me was when they took away 'n' to get to the next search result. Not anything to rage quit over, but it pissed me off. I now use VimFX for a few vim navigation keys, and vim-like search.
It wasn't the n for vim search I was missing, it was the next function with a keypress, which happened to have been done with n in FF's searchbox, and coincidentally n in vim. I didn't know that they replaced it with F3.
I love it. The status bar struck me as weird cruft that was irrelevant the vast majority of the time. I've been using it in aurora and beta for a while now and I quite like the screen real estate.
Okay... but you could always turn if off. I personally like having my 'status' things down there, things like gmail, lastpass, etc. I prefer to have the status items separated from the control-type items on top. I don't see why they had to nuke it.
Activate the "Bottombar Toolbar" by right clicking somewhere on the top space where the bars are.
Now you have a small bar down there. Open the new funky customization menue and drag the "Statustext"-Element down there.
The only problem is that you'll find your Start-Button above the text...
Somehow I find myself installing even more Add-Ons with every major UI "improvisation" to keep a useful UI. I wish it would be the other way around where you got standard and customized from there.
This did not work for me. In fact classic theme restorer broke FF's Customize... menu feature, as well as the hamburger menu at the end of the toolbar - it is now completely inoperable, even after removing it.
... the browser worked properly again. Very peculiar. Of course, this was written into the prefs.js again upon exit, so when restarted the browser was broken again.
Classic Theme Restorer probably wasn't the problem. Probably the problem only showed up because that was the first restart post-upgrade (to enable the extension).
They started following the Chrome screwed-up-statusbar a long time ago. It's like noone in the webdev space knows the basic usability adage, "Don't use popups!". The Chrome-style hover-status thing is a popup. Statusbars are correct.
Disagree. The statusbar is barely useful for me - all I use it for is to peek at where links will take me; it's good to save that real estate for content. Things that default to the statusbar (some app buttons) I put up top in the addressbar, with a wide screen there's plenty of room for a few buttons there.
I can't accept a message popping up over top of existing content, distracting the user to a different part of the screen, based on mouse-hover of all things (so it's sure to jump out all the time). They mitigate this a bit by adding time-delays but that's even worse.
The status bar IMO should have more things e.g. download status, but the browsers chose not go to that direction. OK, then remove the statusbar and put the link-direction in the location bar instead during the hover.
The status bar is excellent for what the name indicates i.e. status. FoxyClocks in a great example - allows me to check the time in different countries at a glance, is too wide to fit on a top-side toolbar and basically something that is always present but not obtrusive.
They're cutting down on unnecessary chrome. I can't say I have a problem with it; less chrome means more room for page content. A bit like why Apple added fullscreen apps.
I run Firefox with a lot of plugins. I rely on the status bar (add-on bar) to keep many of the plugin notification / configuration buttons out of my toolbar.
From my perspective, Firefox is working hard to drive me away, by removing its distinguishing features that make it different from Chrome.
You should keep in mind that the use-case for Firefox is that the default install focuses on the general user, and add-ons are intended for people looking for something extra/different. You can get the add-on bar back easy by grabbing the 'classic theme restorer' add-on. It allows enabling-disabling a variety of features.
I can't say I agree with all of their choices, but I'm running 29 right now and I don't feel like any functionality or customizability is lost from the last version. If you're not looking for the defaults you can change pretty much everything you want with a few add-ons and about 10 minutes or so of configuration.
I felt the same way as you but try putting them in the "bookmarks toolbar". It works similarly and it's quite nice to have everything at the top of the screen after a while.
The bookmarks toolbar is already used by... bookmarks. Who would have known? We shouldn't have to find new places for things that display status just because Mozilla takes away their designated space. "No more status bar. Hey, why don't you stick that in the bookmark bar. You don't use that for bookmarks, do you?"
OS X's full screen apps aren't maximzed windows. If I put Sublime into full screen mode, there's no window, no menu bar. It's a text editor taking up the entire screen.
If I were to maximize Sublime on Windows, Linux, or OS X (green button), you still have the chrome from the windowing system and the OS's menu bars.
Also, the parent comment makes no claim Apple invented anything, he/she is just drawing a comparison people would be familiar with. Frankly, it's more than a little annoying to me that you have to distract from the topic to make completely non-constructive dig at a company you seem to dislike and completely miss the point of the comparison in doing so.
I disagree. The reference why Apple added Full Screen.
Why did Apple make a Full Screen feature in their operating system? Minimalism and simplicity.
Why does Firefox have a fullscreen option? Because most browsers had that option and it's a useful feature once in a while. Not a compelling reference.
Do pay attention. I commented on the need to mention Apple in this sub thread, as Firefox (the main topic here, if I'm not mistaken) had the same functionality. Then, epochwolf stated that the reasons for implementing the added functionality were different, and therefore the mention of Apple added to the original comment. I then commented asking whether or not he had a source for stating the reasons for implementing said functionality, since it seems as though they're unsubstantiated.
Sublime text (and many apps) have full screen functionality in Windows and Linux. Admittedly, Sublime Text leaves a menu bar, but it's about as minimal a menu bar as you could get. Chrome, Firefox, all media players, all games etc. have full screen (no chrome) modes.
They had them well before full screen on OS X became a "thing".
Your reply misses the point that the original comparison was flawed. It was like saying "A bit like why Apple added ASLR" or "A bit like why Apple added CUPS". They invented neither and were first to market with neither.
You're being downvoted because you are incorrect. Ubuntu GNOME does not have an equivalent of OS X full screen build in to the windowing system. It has a maximize button that doesn't remove the chrome, it just makes the window take up the most of the screen. In OS X, there is no window. The app is completely edge to edge similar like an iOS app except without the status bar.
FWIW that F11 transition works the same for me on KDE (4.12.3) on Kubuntu 13.10 - it's been there for quite a time.
I'm using Firefox with the borders set off right now. This gives me a window with no external chrome (no border, no titlebar, no buttons, no scroll area) but set with the standard KDE application bar (which I keep at the bottom a la Win95).
Indeed before Firefox ditched the menubar I used an app to get the same effect pinching a lot of real-estate back (titlebar, menubar, buttonbar). It's interesting that things have moved this way, though not surprising.
Chrome on Elementary OS (Probably consider this Ubuntu 12.04 for this purpose) does a completely chromeless fullscreen on F11 too. Out of interest does OS X support fullscreen on all apps automatically or does the button (it's a window control right?) only show up for supported apps?
Fullscreen mode has been a standard feature of Linux window managers for a long time - it was certainly available in the metacity WM (used by Gnome 2) 10 years ago.
Except fullscreen apps are actually a bit more than maximised windows: They remove both the top of the title bar and other operating system bars, leaving just the control interfaces, and content. For example, chrome would just have the tabs, address bar, and content, without operating system bars, and without the program titlebar.
A maximized window still shows all of the chrome, as well as system menus. Full-screen apps (not that Apple invented them) hide the window chrome as well as the various system menus.
The Customize mode seems fairly flexible, for shuffling things between the three fixed-position bars, ie. the menu, navigation and bookmarks bars (probably the tab bar as well though I don't use tabs myself).
I wonder why you can't just add new blank bars, at either the top or bottom, to fill up to your heart's content with that same Customize mode. That would undo most of the need for things like Status-4-Evar.
This hasn't changed in version 29, by the way. 'Customize' in version 28 also let you juggle controls around any of the menu, navigation, bookmarks or add-on bars pretty generically. In fact, for all the fanfare about how revolutionary a change this new UI is, the only real functional difference in it I can see between 28 and 29 is the removal of the add-on bar, ie. the only one of the bars whose fixed position happened to be at the bottom, rather than the top.
(Of course I don't really believe that this release is specifically intended to troll people who like having some controls at the bottom of their screen, but I must admit that if you did want to do that, then this would be a good way to do it. I'm sticking with 28 until Status-4-Evar catches up. Also thanks for the suggestion of the "Addon Bar" extension elsewhere in the thread, seen and noted.)
Actually, they also removed the ability to disable the navigation bar, which is very annoying for me because I use Vimperator. It can be removed by installing an extension, but I don't understand why they would remove this functionality.
You're right, and having read some other posts in this thread (CompuHacker) and taken another look, I see that the new "Customize" is more diminished in the new version than I previously made out. They're going more towards a fixed default look with permanently fused-together buttons and the like, and this kind of customization further pushed out to extensions.
There's already a newer version with Status-4-Evar which works with FF29, and adds a customizable bar back to the bottom of the screen. It's somewhat hidden away and not the 'stable' version yet, but it's working fine for me - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar...
My mistake, sorry, I thought it was official because it's linked to on the Mozilla support page and I thought the developer "Aris" related to "Australis".
You can put the link preview directly into the address bar with this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-location... Status-4-Evar can actually do the same but it's a bit of a hassle to configure if you don't need its other features.
Originally, exposure of APIs to JS was done using the XPConnect JS/XPCOM bridge in Firefox. Simplifying a little, XPConnect is not thread-safe, so exposing APIs to workers required manually writing code using the SpiderMonkey JS API. This was done in an ad-hoc fashion for a while. Additionally, XPConnect allowed JS code to be written to expose functionality to content on the main thread, but was basically a non-starter on the worker thread because of the lack of XPConnect. (Simplifying slightly again, XPConnect also provided required security protections.)
Between having to write thread-safe code and custom JS exposure, the overhead could be significant. This has now been greatly improved through the use of automatically generated WebIDL bindings, although C++ is still used and threading issues do have to be dealt with (usually by remoting a runnable to the main thread), so worker versions of an API still aren't free.
New Web APIs implemented by the platform team should usually be designed from the ground-up for worker exposure and have worker support land soon-after or at the same time as the main-thread support. Experimental APIs related to Firefox OS and developed by Firefox OS Gaia teams are more likely to be prototypes implemented in JS for rapid prototyping and will need another rev before they can be exposed to workers. This last bit frequently happens as part of an effort to standardize the API informed by the prototype.
We ended up writing a goofy little console.log() replacement that sent messages back to the main UI thread for processing and logging, but that kind of thunking is a might-bit janky.
That's not surprising, but annoying. Please do file bugs as needed; the spec is generally pretty clear about how things should work here, so if browsers don't agree one of them is just buggy.
Overall I love the redesign, but I wish they would have compacted the top chrome a bit so it matches the height of other major browsers. Firefox has slightly taller chrome for no good reason, as seen in this picture:
It's still not as good as Chrome's ability to automatically disable cache while devtools are open, but its way better than what I had to do before, which was override the automatic cache management settings to limit cache to 0 MB of diskspace.
You can reduce it because yes it is useless. Something like this (one of these is pointless but I can't remember which one..)
/* correct titlebar icons position */
#titlebar-content > * {
margin-top: -6px;
}
/* Reduce the padding between the URL bar and the tabs/content */
#nav-bar-customization-target {
margin-top: -2px !important;
margin-bottom: -2px !important;
}
If you want to shrink the top chrome, you can right click on it (getting the menu to choose toolbars), hit customize, then check "Use small icons". With this option, FF is thinner than chrome both fullscreen and floating.
Edit: Actually, just updated and it looks like they got rid of that...
There is a reason for the taller top chrome: it makes the window easier to drag around. Compared with Chrome, there is a larger window drag area above the inactive tabs (but not the active tab). I think this is a pretty neat design.
If you count it by pixel there is 10px of window drag space above the tabs in Firefox, but 11px of window drag space in Chrome. So technically Firefox would be harder to drag around.
The thing that is bigger in Firefox is the fat tabs, and all the extra space above and below the address bar, which seems to be there solely for the purpose of allowing the back button to be larger than the address bar. It's a nice looking design touch, but not that much more usable, just wasteful.
You are looking at the drag space above the active tab. Only the inactive tabs get expanded drag space. You can see this by putting the mouse pointer above an inactive tab and slowly moving it down. The inactive tab doesn't highlight until you are 3 px(?) within the borders of the tab, and until that point, dragging will drag the window. It's not huge, but having that larger drag target does make the window easier to drag. The tab height difference is also only 3 px, so given that Firefox gives 1 px less above the active tab, it's 1 px "wasted" vertical space for a design that looks much more visually appealing IMO.
Good point. Yeah I agree that is a nice feature. Now if Firefox just kept the shrinking of inactive tabs like they currently have, but reduced the size of the back button, and reduced the extra padding around the address bar then they could shrink their browser chrome size to the same size as Google Chrome or even smaller, while making it more usable than Google Chrome.
I agree. Add some bookmarks bar items and it's even taller. Add the 'Title Bar' and it's even taller. And I dont see the short icons option available anymore.
I'm a web developer on mozilla.org, so can provide some information here.
The "mozUITour" API is specific to Firefox 29, and can only be used on mozilla.org, which is a white-listed domain that is hard-coded into the browser.
The API is also pretty basic, in that it can highlight a limited number of target icons, and open a limited choice of menu's. The purpose of the API is strictly for on-boarding flows, such as this. It also only works over https and requires a secure connection.
Actually the page can only be notified when you type a certain message in the address bar and it's limited to ONE message in a browser window so it can't try to watch for a list of strings. When there is a match a new tab will open up so you would notice this if it was being used. This feature was intended for an easter egg so the page could say, for example, "let me know when the user types 'I love Firefox' in the address bar" and then open a tab with an easter egg page. Also note that all tour functionality only applies when the tour tab is selected. Hopefully this clarifies that the page can't really spy on the address bar.
Hello, I'm one of the developers of the tour module on the Firefox team. The whitelist preference adds the whitelisted domains to the permission database when the application is upgrade to today's released (version 29) so changing the preference doesn't change the domains already whitelisted. You can disable the feature using the browser.uitour.enabled if for some reason this feature bothers you. Note that is also requires HTTPS for the whitelist domains too.
Remember, the browser chrome/front-end for Firefox and add-ons is implemented using Web technologies (XUL, JavaScript and CSS) with more or less privileges.
Edit: Fun tip: Choose the Hamburger menu -> DevTools (wrench icon) -> Browser Toolbox and inspect the chrome document like you inspect a web document.
* Where is the "use small icons" option? This should be priority #1 to fix.
* Can't double click top left corner to close on windows.
* How do i get to the hamburger menu with only my keyboard?
* If my mum accidentally removes something from the hamburger menu, like options, and one day i have to guide her to that option over the phone there are like hundreds of steps to go through. First i have to figure out if she actually is looking at the right menu, then i have to figure out if she actually has the icon on her menu or not. When that is done i have to guide her to the customize menu, then pull the icon back, close the customizer, open the menu again and then click the icon. These steps will all be different depending on how your mum customized the menu. Previously i could just tell her click the top left menu and go to add-ons. There is no standard path to follow (except the alt-key, down-key keyboard fallback still using the old menus from version 3). The hamburger menu should be a shortcut for your favorites, not the only way to find an option. Seriously, it's as if Windows forced you to add a control panel shortcut on the start menu before you can access your network settings. This is trying too hard to be too user "friendly".
* How do i find the dropdown menus for my add-ons? Seem like the only path to get there is again to use the hidden alt, down keyboard fallback and then go to tools.
The incessant rearrangement of the UI is why I switched to Chrome. Each time they change the interface, it is unclear to me what the benefit is to the user.
Speaking of things that don't benefit the user, Chrome is proprietary software (dare I say spyware) that sends your keystrokes to Google. I think Firefox's frequent UI changes pale in comparison.
I believe it is that simple. If you can find them sending your keystrokes through any other means, then please download Fiddler and write a blog article with the results of your testing :-)
That argument doesn't really help the discussion.
Except for very sensitive data, usability is generally a bigger factor. And anyway, its not like you have a lot of options to choose from.
Your comment makes it sound like everything I type in Google Chrome is sent to Google. Is this what you meant? If so, do you have a source for this or are you just spreading FUD?
If you have search suggestions enabled, when you type things into the address bar it has to send what you are typing to Google in order to get suggestions. I don't recall if that's on by default.
Even when you type "facebook.com" and hit enter (without using search), it still sends "facebook.com" to Google so they know what you typed every time.
Yes, I agree. Sometimes it feels like Mozilla recruited a bunch of UI/UX designers and told them "The Firefox UI is all wrong - change it until it's fixed. For inspiration look at Chrome and mobile apps". As though "Actually it works well and users understand it" wasn't an option. It's trend-chasing nonsense.
My Firefox still looks pretty much identical to that (except I use tree-style tabs, I hide the bookmarks toolbar, and I have more extensions installed that add more buttons to toolbar and status bar).
I did like it when firefox shrank the space used at the top of the screen. That was my main reason for switching to chrome (I had a netbook and vertical screen space was valuable), and by the time I became frustrated with chrome and google, Mozilla had improved Firefox in a similar manner and I was able to switch back. I agree with you now though... These UI changes seem like a step back. At best, they are simply arbitrary.
I like it. There are a few changes that I will need to get used to, but in a few weeks I doubt I'll notice the difference.
One thing that I think FF doesn't get enough credit for is how efficiently it runs these days. I prefer Chrome's developer tools, but for browsing, FF gets my vote.
I liked the screenshots but I really don't like using it...
* it's no longer possible to open a new tab by double-clicking in the tabs bar, seriously guys...
* I really liked the Ctrl + / status bar, I used it to drop my add-ons icons, it didn't use much space and I was able to use them whenever I wanted, now I can't do this anymore (except if I overload the top bars with icons I use... say once a week ?) // EDIT: I just figured out I can use the sandwich menu to do this, that's pretty cool
* it's not possible anymore to move the refresh button... WHY ? I loved it on the left with the previous/forward buttons, why would it be in the URL bar ?
* and it seems it's no longer possible to add a button to show the bookmarks (Ctrl+b), there's only this awful double button with "add fav" and this useless menu.
It's beautiful but lacks a lot of customizations that were possible before... I'm really considering switching to another browser (maybe Opera ?)
I think it's beautiful. I can't explain exactly what I like (I'm not much of a designer) but I can say that I now find it more visually appealing than Chrome. The only reason I'm staying on Chrome is because of a few extensions and because it syncs so well with my Android phone.
I think there is a lot of hate here with the tone "I liked it the old way because I was used to it!". New designs change things, that's why they're new. If we didn't ever want anything to change, we'd still be looking at this every day:
And just like the old Firefox design, that has more features up front and almost everything today's version has. But I'm glad I see this instead http://cl.ly/image/2d3a0c2h1Z2R.
Maybe I'm an idiot, or not a power user. But I like pretty things and I appreciate Mozilla's effort here. I'll be using Firefox more often.
Not too many critical extensions, but a few: Motorola Connect, Google Hangouts, and Hacker News Enhancement Suite.
The real reason I stick with Chrome is because it works so well with my Google accounts and syncs everything I do to my phone.
I could partially move to Firefox if I could find a good way to do bi-directional bookmarks sync between the browsers. I tried XMarks but it would totally fuck up all of my Chrome bookmarks once in a while.
I have been using Sync ever since it was introduced in FF(4 I think?!?) and I have to say it worked really well for me.
Not only does it sync your usual suspects bookmarks/passwords/history, but it also syncs your installed addons and their settings (if supported). For example it syncs AdBlockPlus's list of whitelisted websites.
Another neat Sync feature is the possibility of seeing the open tabs on all your synced devices. For example I am looking right now on my phone and I can see the add HN comment tab in the mobile version of FF (Android).
On top of that the Sync server is open source so basically you could deploy it yourself if you have privacy concerns, although your data is encrypted before it is uploaded to the server anyway.
I agree. Chrome won because it was faster. Now that Chrome is slow and Firefox is seemingly faster, I'm thinking of switching back. I'm on Mac OSX 10.7.5.
Firefox team, thank you for another great release!
* I just tried and your developer tools don't cause the tab to freeze for 1 second every time I switched into the tab.
* Wanted to see the addons I had, clicked the menu > nice icon that said Add-ons - massive UX win.
I feel at home with this browser. You stand up for privacy and for that you deserve so much more praise than you get. I'm switching to Firefox and see how it goes. The only thing keeping me on Chrome are the Dev Tools, and I want to give Firefox another try.
I'm not sure if you're part of the Firefox team, but either way sorry I don't remember exactly the circumstances. But it was on Firefox 27 - Mac OSX 10.8 - any page.
Any page that had the dev tools open froze for about 1 to 2 seconds when switching back to it.
Want to try on the latest release? I can't reproduce with Release (29) or Nightly (32) on 10.9. If you can give some solid STR and a test case we can investigate further, but as it is now, this isn't very actionable from our end :-/
I expect that this release will mark the point of rapid decrease of Firefox usage. Lets wait a few months and see. Such UI changes are. The best way to irritate the users who actually used the browser and got used to the placement of the controls. It seems as the designers themselves at the same time used Google's Chrome and now "unified" their own experience. Well at least now they removed some reasons for users to not switch to Google's browser.
* Menu bar is hidden by default on Linux and can be opened with Alt (that didn't work before).
Bad:
* Menu ("Firefox") button is still not movable for no obvious reason.
* Reload/Stop button is now forced to be in the URL bar (before users had a choice where to place it). That's pretty annoying, it's very uncomfortable when Back/Forward and Reload buttons are so far apart.
* Bookmarks button is now outside the URL bar and looks bulky.
> Reload/Stop button is now forced to be in the URL bar (before users had a choice where to place it). That's pretty annoying, it's very uncomfortable when Back/Forward and Reload buttons are so far apart.
My ONLY issue with FF 29. I prefer my back/forward buttons near stop/reload and for both groups to be near the middle after the URL/awesome bar.
I felt the same. I recommend you grab Classic Theme Restorer. I'm not sure how to modify the URL bar (Which is the issue with the bookmarks and reload button), but the add-on will allow you to move the menu and adjust other various settings.
Thanks, that's much better. Now I just need to figure out how to reduce space between toolbar buttons (it's way too wide). Startup time with this add-on is pretty long though.
I didn't notice any start-time issues, but I only have Firefox 29 currently installed on a higher-end laptop so that might be part of it. I'll be interested to see how this fairs when I put 29 on a netbook that I have (Intel Atom, single core).
I had the same gripe you did, if you grab 'classic toolbar buttons', it'll give you the smaller layout with the 'enable small buttons' option on.
I've always had a bookmarks bar of single and double letters, like R for Reddit, Y for YCombinator, F for Facebook, $ for stocks, etc. Now with FF29 I have these blasted file folder icons next to each of my little codes, cluttering up the whole bookmarks bar.
I can't find any way of getting rid of the file folders -- not even thru Customize. Anyone found a way?
Firefox 28 had been crashing at least once a day for me (which is rare, I didn't have any crash logs since 2011) so I'm hoping they squashed whatever bug was causing that.
Gamepad API enabled! Cool! I used that API with Chrome, shame the browser prefix... my old games* won't work with Firefox without changing the source code :(
Um, just wondering how people feel about actually using FF 29, rather than talking about what it isn't? A really great browser is being obscured by a bikeshed.
Agree that it is really good. I think Chrome has gotten all the cool kids' attention without them having a respect and understanding for the mission and value of Mozilla and Firefox. That being said, Mozilla and Firefox could probably do a bit of a better job at selling themselves and their features.
I am not sure what you mean by a bike shed, but it's now a pretty nice bike shed, no?
Can Firefox get a sandbox for tabs already? It may be the more privacy-friendly browser, but it's far from being the most secure, it seems, and that's mainly because of its lack of a sandbox:
FWIW using the Add-Ons tab's search for "tree style tabs" gives 9 results, none of which include this add-on.
But when I click "269 more results", then Tree Style Tab is the first result on that addons.mozilla.org page.
(This isn't the first time I've found add-on search to be a bit wonky. Maybe "everyone" knows to ignore the first results (?), but I don't search for and install add-ons frequently enough to have learned that, quite yet.)
Except Tree Style Tabs makes Firefox 29 look very bad. For some reason, it causes the top part of the chrome to be two shades of gray. The area with the title, and minimize maximize buttons, its one shade, and then the area with the address bar and buttons is another shade of gray. With a harsh line where the two areas meet and are a different color.
Do I have to install an add on to get narrow tabs?
This is like the 3rd or 4th time that minimum tab width settings have been changed. I understand the motivation to change the experience for the typical user. I don't understand the constant churn in what is customizable. If I customized the location of the reload/stop button last time it was moved, is the thought really that I won't want to this time?
I guess there is some argument about the amount of code that needs to be maintained, but if things go the way they go, there will be incremental changes for a year or 2 now, and then a big jarring shift to the new thing that is more fashionable.
Shucks, I can't open a new tab with double-click on the empty area when tabs are vertical on the left ... maybe it was a function of Tab Mix Plus, but it doesn't work in any case.
I really don't like the new UI. I miss the good old menu bar on top of the screen and i don't understand why firefox is trying to copy chrome :/. I wish there were an alternative to firefox and chrome, s it looks today I don't want to use either of them.
I must say I am impressed. When I saw the screenshots of the new UI I thought that I would not like it but now that it's finally landed in stable I find it really nice. I was afraid that the new tabs would behave too much like Chrome's (when a lot of tabs are present they all become smaller), I'm glad this is not the case. I also think that making only the selected tab curved and keeping the rest a straight shape was a good call.
Apart from the UI changes I noticed that memory usage went down considerably. But we'll see how it behaves after some prolonged usage.
The one weird thing I noticed was that my bookmarks are gone. I'm not sure if this happened in this release, or some previous one, or whether I accidentally deleted them somehow.
We have CPU profiling now, but we are in the process of reworking the UI to make it more useful and include a better presentation for events and how they fit into that picture.
Very useful to track down where some, sometimes pesky, JavaScript code has bound events to the DOM.
This is a big debugging pain, to track down why events are being triggered, or not working, in a certain way and what JavaScript code is responsible for it.
>How can I see the whole data available to the browser in FF, similar to ChromeDev Tools
It's a lot different than what chrome does, but I believe they're integrating the resources with the network tab: (scroll to the bottom where the pie charts are.)
> It's a lot different than what chrome does, but I believe they're integrating the resources with the network tab: (scroll to the bottom where the pie charts are.)
Thanks for the link. What about IndexDB, Web SQL and Local Storage?
> Do your customers develop web pages? If so why are they paying you to install a browser?
They surely do. My employer does Fortune 500 consulting and many times we get to use what their IT allows us to.
besides the ever-growing list of powerful features (async stack traces?!), I would add usability, I regret clicking "Inspect element (Q)" every time, also the only reason I have a chromium running I prefer firefox otherwise ;)
It always amuses me when people think the Firefox Developer Tools are equal to the Chrome DevTools. They really can't be using either of them very much.
I've been on nightly for as long as I can remember and at this point I'd say I can't find any feature that Chrome has that I really need (as a web dev). I guess once you get used to one toolbox it's hard to switch. I'm also amazed at the speed at which firefox has caught up to chrome in this area. Chrome dev tools have some features that aren't in firefox yet, but firefox has some tools that aren't in chrome.
The built in dev tools are really quickly catching up to and passing Firebug in some areas--I'm not sure how far they are in 29, but in the Aurora/Nightly channels they've just about made me uninstall Firebug (so far, old habits are still dying hard, though).
The birth year (while signing up for Sync) is a neat feature. It doesn't ask your exact date of birth but only the year. Further, it doesn't ask for your DOB if you are born 1990 or earlier.
In the screenshot, they misspelled Mozilla as "Mozila" in the tab title. (At least on OSX... maybe they tailor the screenshot depending on your user agent.)
Hmm, I think the separators between tabs in the new tab bar are too subtle, and overall it is too dark. The curved appearance of the selected tab also seems out of place.
edit: also, transparent elements with text on them? Noo! Maybe I am just sensitive.. I don't have the best eyesight, and I don't have the best monitors. In any case, I am thankful for Classic Theme Restorer, which someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
What I find weird about the design is the idea of "Getting the other tabs out of the way" idea. I don't care about the selected tab as I can see what page it it. When I go looking for another tab to go to they make it harder to read! The hell?
That's a very good point. I wonder if that design decision came from user studies, and if so I wonder if the study was flawed, because I can't identify with that need at all.
Just made the switch from Chrome to Firefox. I noticed that even on a high-end Macbook Pro, when I opened a large amount of tabs in quick succession Chrome would lag intolerably. It did so on earlier releases of Firefox but I just tried on 29 and it opened 40+ tabs with without a hick-up. Very pleased indeed
Edit: I just noticed that the text selection now works as it does in text editors with blinking cursor and all. Great feature!
The text selection thing probably means you turned on caret browsing; press F7 to turn it off again if you need to. That's been there ~forever (like, Firefox 1.0 or earlier).
Pentadactyl is unfortunately messing with userChrome itself (shrinking size of tab bar), which the devs really should not do across the board (it breaks a lot of unrelated addons).
Which I hate to say as a diehard Pentadactyl user.
Have you tried the Nightly builds of pentadactyl? Those usually work upto and including Fx30, and usually are updated to work with whatever is on Aurora.
Just a question, but why is the interation cycle so extreme with Mozilla? Version 29? What is so different from version 3.x.x ... where we had normal interations I could wrap my head around. The whole number upgrades are insane. I know its such a simple thing, but trying to relate with software interation steps on such a fast moving number, just is mind boggling.
I believe it prevents people from accumulating on old versions. Upgrading version becomes a routine thing. Windows XP is an example of what you get with longer release cycles. XP was out so long people began to rely on it in a big way and upgrading becomes a laborious process.
OS X doesn't have that issue, I suspect in part because they are have a more rapid release cycle.
Another possibility might be usability, since whole numbers are easier to deal with than longer version names. Otherwise, I find Paul-ish’s theory above the most plausible one.
actually the changes since version 3.x are mindblowing.
if you had least picked 28 to 29 i don't know.. but theres a million lines of code change between 3 and 29. the js engine is like 50x faster, theres hundreds of new things supported, etc.
The area above the is too large, takes up too much space.
When you hover over the close button ('x') on a tab the red outline is square and looks weird on the rounded tab. Why not make the outline rounded or make the 'x' bold on mouseover.
Why use the hamburger icon and not the Firefox logo or the old Firefox button (and keep it on the left side)?
the lack of options is what kills me, also the UI is filled with clear design flaws, and i still need an addon-bar, now i have to use even more add-ons just to make it work like it used to... ohh but we still have the weak performance, thats far from a priority...
I really want to like firefox, but it is just so much slower/unresponsive than chrome. Is this something specific to my setup? I tried this new version out on a clean profile and compared it to chrome: http://fixme.se/pub/chrome_vs_ff.flv
Vanilla Google Maps is not a lot slower on Firefox than on Chrome for me, but third party apps that build upon GMaps, like Garmin Connect (Running / Biking tracking tool for Garmin GPS watches) are definitely much slower and less responsive for me on Firefox than on Chrome.
Not super relevant to the design, but does anyone know which browser (Chrome or Firefox) uses less memory on a Mac these days? Not talking about base footprint, but let's say I have 25 tabs open. Chrome uses ~100MB per tab, more for long-running tabs with a lot going on like GMail. Seems totally insane to me, a website that's not a complicated web app should have a tiny memory footprint. If Firefox could significantly improve this I'd move.
I currently have 62 tabs open (in this tab group; more in the background, but they're not loaded), and Firefox is using 1.41 GB, which is ~23 MB/tab. That also includes a bunch of videos, pictures and Flash.
Been using it for a few hours now. I hear a lot of complaints about the address bar having gotten bigger by a whole 10 pixels and the addons bar being gone, but honestly I think it's a great update. On a full hd screen I can't be bothered by the 1.1% increase in height and the addons bar has only annoyed me. Actually, it's a bit ironic to complain about 10px while at the same time complaining about an entire toolbar having disappeared.
It's not ironic at all. People are complaining about adding 10 useless pixels, and about removing a feature they were using, only to save 15 pixels.
Many people liked addon bar, which was hidden by default anyway.
I use vimperator and had the location/search bar disabled/removed until now. It looks like I can no longer do that and have to have them visible. <Sigh>
It's a fat binary; it includes both 32-bit and 64-bit compiled code. Normally only the 64-bit code is used, but it can restart in 32-bit mode for compatibility with legacy plug-ins.
I kind of wish they would focus on building out the bookmark functionality with some easier workflow, e.g., fixing functionality issues like only being able to accept auto-complete suggestions in tags with the right arrow keyboard button.
I definitely think bookmarks are highly undervalued. To a certain extent, I think curated and cultivated bookmarks even have monetary value.
Depends on the distro. Firefox reports that I'm behind on ArchLinux with Firefox 28. I don't know if that's a thing that Mozilla has worked out with some big vendors or if they've just patched it to always pretend to be healthy.
I've never been a big fan of distro meddling, which is a reason I've been an Arch loyalist for workstation Linux since 2007.
On an iOS device this page informs me firefox isn't available for iOS. There is no link to view the contents of the page, so I'm locked out of finding out what's new in Firefox 29 until I'm off mobile. Consider adding a "full site" link, or a "view desktop version" link.
Fwiw I've been using Aurora (Firefox 30) Beta full time on OS X for the past few weeks, and it's more stable than Chrome under my tab & memory-abusing ways (20 browser windows open, god knows how many tabs, 4 Haswell cores and 8GB memory available). Great work Mozilla.
With all the UI hate, I guess I'm lucky that F29 didn't break Side-Tabs, my favorite addon ever. It does look weird, though, to have the nicely rendered foldertab graphic for only one tab, and with nothing around it to continue the metaphor.
Where is the reopen last closed tab menu entry ?
VERY helpful when you close an old tab inadvertently !
And no, the history does not cut it if a don't remember the tab content and/or if it's one or two day old ...
I love Firefox, but gosh - when I have many tabs and windows open it's a major memory hog. Maybe all browsers are like that, but it feel particularly worse on Firefox, despite all their efforts to fix memory leak issues.
Compared to what, IE? Memory leaks are about memory being left claimed when isn't actually used. It doesn't just mean using more memory than you think it ought to.
One of the first things I notice after installing, the text on the Gmail buttons is blank (I can see the button outline but can't see the text so I have to rely on the tooltips). Kind of a deal-breaker.
Overall I like the new UI but it doesn't play well with custom themes on windows 7. There's a weird cutout where the window controls are that doesn't adjust to different sized controls.
I was very happy with the way Firefox was before, and this is definitely an improvement. Gotta say, bravo to Mozilla on this one. I love the changes and customization.. much better UI.
I feel like Mozilla's UIs always look amazing in the high-res vector mockups they post, but at 1x resolution they just look sloppy. Maybe I just need a 2x resolution display!
Most likely it is your extensions. I have the same issues when I load one particular extension which I can't live without. Unfortunately Firefox's major weakness is its major strength.
<input type="number"> will mean I won't write broken apps in Firefox using that control and then open them in Chrome and notice they don't work, which has happened to me more than once now.
Open new tab. The recent sites are displayed. Enter a url and hit return. The website is displayed. Now try and click the back button to return to the recent sites list... You can't, the back button is disabled. Despite the profession of attention to detail this speaks otherwise.
one feature that I like is the "Tab Groups" - I can organize my open tabs into groups and only open the group I want. Comes with a tab search functionality too..
Why I do have to install an addon, which restores something, what IMO everyone on this thread and probably most people out there would love having as native? Namely not flat-design visually easy to parse tabs!
Any occurence of flat-design stuff on software, which is used day by day, was and is awkward, because it causes displeasure and it is more time- and eye-consuming.
Fucking idiotic morons. Completely ruining what used to be a good browser. I've had enough of this shit. Every single updated has to fuck up my Pentadactyl experience. That's it. I give up. If I can't use Pentadactyl, I have 0 reason to use Firefox. Goodbye. I'm removing it from all my computers and never looking back.
I use Pentadactyl with it just fine in the Aurora channel and have since it first landed.
Part of the problem, though, is that the guys at Pentadactyl messed with userChrome.css as part of the newest pentadactyl builds, which causes a TON of issues with other addons (especially anything that adds a toolbar). Vimperator doesn't do it, but ew Vimperator, so.
Definitely. I assumed it was an issue of the sites not maintaining good user interfaces, but that excuse doesn't work when every FF update breaks pentadactyl's ability to select search fields on Google...
I just like its defaults more. Not trying to autocomplete files, not trying to be pretty instead of fast, and more consistently working how Vim does in general (along with just other tiny interface things). I can use Vimperator , I just prefer to not.
"Omnibar" is how Chrome calls it. "Awesome bar" is the name Firefox had given its own, even before then.
The main difference is that the Omnibar logs all your keystrokes to Google's servers. The Awesome bar searches through the data it already has locally (bookmarks, history, open tabs), and it makes a Google search if the data you entered isn't a URL. Not logging your keystrokes is a privacy feature. On the other hand, the dedicated search field does, and that's its feature.
I personally can't see the difference in usage between the Omnibar and the Awesome bar, apart from the fact that the search suggestions make more sense in the Awesome bar, since it only uses my past searches. Follow my advice: use the brand new interface customization UX and remove the dedicated search field.
Note that you can't remove reliably the suggestions from the Omnibar bar, used an "embarrassing" website in non-anonymous mode?
Too bad for you, because your wife can see the suggestion..
Highlight the suggestion and hit delete. This works reliably for me. This was basically the only awesomebar behavior I didn't like, it became much more usable for me after that... not even embarrassing sites: I'd typo a URL and awesomebar would help me typo it forever more.
I wish the delete feature were more discoverable, however.
Privacy.
If you type something in the search bar, this get sent to your search provider to provide suggestions. Instead everything you type in the url bar doesn't get sent over the internet.
With an omnibar everything you type in your url bar gets sent to the search provider. Lots of people don't like that (I'm personally okay with it, so I use Chrome).
Are you also okay with it giving it to every party the search provider gives it to? Business partners (?), employees snooping, government agencies (with or without lawful process), hackers who've compromised the provider's business?
Are the people who's sites you're using also okay with you passing URLs on their sites to your search provider? Do you ever accidentally paste confidential text in the wrong field?
Because there is no way to tell if the data is being logged (or, importantly, to prove that it isn't) it is prudent to assume it is, with an infinite retention— will your opinions about sharing todays data change if the search provider's behavior changes tomorrow? if some relevant government changes policy tomorrow? Does the fact that you can't ever take it back concern you?
These are some of the things I think of about it— and are why I wouldn't intentionally use such a feature regardless of how positive I feel about my search provider. And because of these thoughts— especially that I can't really make any binding commitment to future policy, or really guarantee that my policy is being followed (e.g. intelligence agency plants on staff) if I were a search provider I would not run such a service, unless I could figure out a way to build it such that I _couldn't_ turn evil, knowingly or unknowingly today or tomorrow.
Lets not pretend that every keystroke you type into the Omnibar being sent to Google is the same as using Fastmail. They're extremely different from a privacy perspective.
Let's not pretend that Chrome forces you to send every keystroke to Google. It's a feature controlled by a check box that most people find convenient.
It's exactly like using Fastmail. It's a convenience over self-hosted mail that sends all my email to Fastmail. Just like Omnibox, you have a choice to use it, and just like Omnibox, it sends a lot of personal information to a third party.
When I use gmail for mailing lists it doesn't result in Google getting my self hosted personal mail or my work mail. It's not really analogous at all. And even if it were— a different privacy leak doesn't make other ones irrelevant.
The point is it isn't a privacy leak at all, and we were never talking about mailing lists. We're specifically talking about whether Omnibox is a feature that should never be implemented by anybody, as you originally claimed, because it gives away too much information. By that same argument, hosted email shouldn't be implemented by anybody because it gives away even more information.
The reason people don't complain about hosted email is the same reason it's ridiculous to complain about Omnibox. Even though it gives information to the service provider, the service provider provides value on top of that information that makes a vast majority of people prefer it to the alternative, which people also have an option to use (by unchecking a check box or by running their own mail server).
For example, they've disabled custom stylesheets in recent releases despite a clear indication that people were sharing themes, they have very old bugs that don't get resolved (like the stupid white flashes on dark themes), major accessibility issues.
Generally they try to appeal and prioritize regular users (which is fine) but go out of their way to make decisions that ignore power users and not even provide alternatives intentionally.
Finally and the most frustrating part is they don't value feedback. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/ is a joke and a waste of time. The most starred issues are often closed to the public when it reaches a certain level and users are asked to submit a new bug again if the old one is not fixed. This means that if there is still a bug, you have to wait months before other users experience it, find the time to search for the bug and star it, reach enough stars to get attention and then get a response. Bugs are often miscategorized and the wrong team has it in its backlog. It's a mess.
There isn't a feature in Chromium or Google Chrome that Firefox doesn't deliver.
Take it from a serious chrome user and extension developer for several years, switch to Firefox if you want to tweak anything that bothers you easily without having to change the damn source code.