Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lqdc13 3134 days ago
Firefox keeps getting less and less usable for me. I'm considering switching to chrome for the first time in a while.

Things that bother me on desktop developer edition:

    * no usable mouse gestures extension
    * constantly changing UI
    * hid really useful things like file/edit/history/bookmarks/tools menu behind
      holding alt button on Ubuntu. 
      Pretty sure that whole menu will be gone soon.
    * it's impossible to clear for example last week, last month  etc of browsing data (not sure if you could do it before).  
      In fact, I'm not sure if I can clear cookies but not site history anymore after spending 5 minutes in the settings.
   
    * tree-style tabs turned into something unusable
    * getting rid of all the rare extensions that worked previously and are no longer supported by the original author
    * tons of greasemonkey userscripts broken
    * greasemonkey a lot less usable now (still can't figure out how to write a custom script from scratch)
Android (Mobile) Quantum takes forever to load pages. As in 5x-10x longer than Android Chrome. Some things like videos from twitter simply don't load at all. Some websites no longer load. Cannot enter data into some text boxes. But don't take my word for it: https://www.androidauthority.com/mozilla-firefox-quantum-and...

Unfortunately, on desktop I'm stuck between this new FFX and Vivaldi. On mobile, I already switched to Brave even though it's terrible because you can't easily google for selected text or select a part of a paragraph easily.

4 comments

I also begrudge the loss of many useful extensions in my workflow. It is a sad loss.

But couple of your annoyances can be fixed rather easily:

1. Get back the toolbar back: View (or Alt-V) - Toolbars - Menu Bar

2. To clean recent history: Ctrl-Shift-Del will give you the clean recent history dialog box. It can be accessed from toolbar too: History - Clear recent history.

These are good. Thanks.

Weird that the only way to get to that menu is through a toolbar that's not visible by default.

I don't think they will remove the menu bar any time soon. I always put it back to always visible, just click view->toolbars->menu bar.

What's unusable about the new tree style tabs? I use it constantly.

If you want old greasemonkey scripts to work without changes, use violentmonkey.

There must be a bug with the new greasemonkey that I can't find the editor either. Use violentmonkey for that too for now.

What's unusable about the new tree style tabs?

I'll grant that the new responsiveness of FF makes TST feel much better. But there's one thing that's constantly giving me headaches. I don't feel like the highlighting given to the currently-selected tab is in-your-face enough, so that I'm always scanning up and down the tree trying to see which one it is. The other formatting options it used have were nice, but being able to at least make the selected tab's title bold was a big deal for me.

I realize that this is technically possible in the new regime via userChrome.css. However, the element classes are completely undocumented so I have no idea how to accomplish it.

Adjust the gamma of your screen. I see a distinct shade of grey-ish blue that I can see even when looking at the other side of the window. If that's not the problem, ask TST author since that should be fixable in the addon.
My screen is calibrated, it's not that anything is displayed wrong. I just want it to be more obvious.

Before FF57, I was able to set the font and background color for tabs depending on their status (current, inactive, unread, etc.), and that's what I want now. IIRC, this was actually a feature of Tab Mix Plus.

It's clear that this is still possible even without TMP, but requires putting code in userChrome.css. That would be fine with me, if I could just find any documentation on what element classes (or whatever would be the most appropriate selectors) I need to reference.

I did some digging for you in the browser console. userChrome.css can't touch TST's content. TST is in a separate document (sidebar.html). I'm sure the tabs in TST aren't the actual browser tabs, but they're made to look exactly the same as before. Talk to TST's author, or modify the addon yourself, it must have a CSS file, the tabs are "li.tab" (<li> elements, tab class). The active one is "li.tab.active".

    document.querySelector('#sidebar')._contentWindow[0].document.querySelectorAll('.tab.active')
Thanks. Actually, it turns out that the latest version contains a mini-editor for the appropriate file (whichever it is). And it includes a link [1] to further documentation about what to do with it.

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Toolbar thing is my fault. And violent monkey seems like a good alternative.

With tree style tabs I didn't realize there is a CSS hack to remove the top tabs.

On Windows [Alt] shows menu bar still, [F10] too. Try [F10] on your system.
Have you tried pale moon?