[wufocaculura]

I especially liked the reduced padding part here.

I really hate the trend of increasing padding in various apps / websites. One of the first things I usually do is search for "how do I make more condensed view here".

I am probably in minority here - most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets) but there is still a group of people who have bigger screens and would love to see more data than empty space.

[alxlaz]

> most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets) but there is still a group of people who have bigger screens and would love to see more data than empty space.

They do/might but adding all that empty space in the desktop version of Firefox is quite pointless, considering that it has a mobile version.

I get that there are people with Surfaces and whatever. There are also people with 30" screens. A mobile UI that fits a phone's screen but not a tablet's is considered poorly-designed. It's high time we acknowledge the same thing is true on non-mobile systems.

That being said, things are not as easy to fix as they seem. Paddings have been getting bigger as the use of contrast in UI designs has decreased, and as UI elements have gone increasingly fatter. Without either of these visual cues, the only way to "isolate" pieces of information is by keeping it apart from other pieces of information -- i.e. by whitespace. If you just took one of these interfaces and reduced all padding values by 50%, you would get sane spacing, but the whole thing would be a jumbled, unreadable mess.

(Edit: obviously, adding some visual cues like borders, if not full-on 3D frames, or at least using colours that people over 30 can differentiate on a cheap monitor in a well-lit room, does fix the readability issues, but it also gets you burnt at the design stake for being a heretic so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

[mech422]

having some padding is nice to have a spot to 'grab' when you want to move windows around. Firefox chrome has gotten so small its a hard to find a 'safe' place to grab.

[alxlaz]

> Firefox chrome has gotten so small its a hard to find a 'safe' place to grab.

That might suggest that having no titlebars on systems that can display more than one window at a time isn't the best idea, either ;-)

[orbital-decay]

The lack of vertical space on modern 16:9 screens makes them do that. You can make it 9:16 by rotating it 90°, but it isn't common so the default is no bar. Keyboard-oriented browsers often go further than that, offering just a plain page with little to no visible controls.

Anyway, at least you can easily turn the title bar back on.

[alxlaz]

I know this was the original argument 10+ years ago when this trend started, but it has long stopped any sense. Firefox' tab bar is now 48px. If you add in the insane padding of the address and search boxes, that's practically the same size -- if not thicker -- than the old titlebar + tab bar + address bar combo. No space has been saved in this manner for years now.

[mech422]

yeah - the huge chunk of space between 'home' and the address field is just wasted..It's plenty big enough to shrink it a bit and add some 'outside' padding to the ends of the bar.

[mech422]

I'd be happier if there was just more padding on the 'ends' of the address bar, and less padding 'internal' to it. The space between 'home' and address bar would be a lot more useful if it was split between the to ends and gave you someplace to grab.

[mech422]

yeah. I'm blind as a bat, so I only get 1 window per monitor anyway - so the extra space wouldn't be an issue.

P.S. Am I the only one losing the fight with smaller pixels? As monitors get higher res, I keep having to increase the font size to be able to read them. Even on 4K, twenty-mumble inch monitors, I can only get one 'visible' window at a time.

[ziml77]

You can give yourself that space by showing the menu bar and/or the title bar. I wouldn't be surprised if they take those options away but at least for now you can do it.

[wufocaculura]

that's valid reason, didn't think of that as I got used to moving windows with win+cursor keys

[userbinator]

I hate increasing padding and the removal of borders, leading to UI elements that just seem to run into each other. It looks like an unfinished mess.

Even with this fix it's still ridiculously tall --- in the space it manages to show only 3 lines: tabs, address bar/controls, and booksmarks bar, my current browser has 4 lines: a title bar (which shows the full title of the page, not these horrid cut-off fragments), a menu bar, tabs, and controls/address bar.

most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets)

...running Windows? I doubt that.

[wufocaculura]

>> most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets)

> ...running Windows? I doubt that.

of course not, windows 10 mobile is already dead. I am talking about general trend - a lot of people are fine with just smartphone and/or tablet and do not really need to use windows pc/laptop

[edit: formatting]

[grishka]

> most people use touchscreens (phones / tablets)

The problem here is that for some bizarre reason, most designers try to come up with a single solution that fits both mice and touchscreens. That should never happen. And that especially should never happen with something that is supposed to run on platforms where touchscreens are a gimmick — which they are on all those Windows laptops.

And, I mean, phones and tablets don't even run the OSes that desktop Firefox runs on. This particular redesign thus makes zero sense.

[hules]

Vertical padding make me so angry, vertical space is a scarce resource that is already wasted with giant title bars on top, a dock on the bottom, layers of toolbars stacked on useless icons. If most screens where using a 9x16 ratio it would not be a problem, but they are 16x9 ...

[Tagbert]

Why do you leave your dock on the bottom? The sides are better places for that on most screens.

[GekkePrutser]

I wonder if we really are that small a group. I'm in the same boat and I hear this all around me more and more.

[jl6]

I expect current UI trends are informed by focus group testing that starts with the application in a blank state and adds small amounts of data. You’d get very different results if the focus groups concentrated on using the application in a mature state with ~months worth of data in it.

[bityard]

My hypothesis is that UI designers optimize towards "pretty" at the detriment of functional because pretty is much easier to show with a screenshot in a portfolio or on Twitter.

[gostsamo]

The decisions are made based on shared telemetry which many power users turn off. I keep my deliberately on for this exact reason.

[wufocaculura]

I keep it on as well - just hope that they can see that after 89.0 was releases there was an increase (not big, but still) in changes to default look'n'feel and make some conclusions :)

[mech422]

I'm the opposite - I have 4K monitors, but it seems like there is no chrome left to grab when you want to move windows in 'modern' apps. Anyplace you click - does something you probably didn't want to do.

[unethical_ban]

I'm not arguing with you, but I like the "feel" of the padding for the tab area, as someone with a 27" 1440p screen. I /don't/ like padding on repeated elements like lists (gmail, reddit, etc.) that are cumulative when evaluating dozens of items on a page, though.

OTOH, I don't see why they couldn't have kept things adjustable with a ratio. And I miss the Status Bar on the bottom.

[iruoy]

You can get a condensed version of the new UI by setting browser.uidensity to 1 in about:config.

[wufocaculura]

true, but that works only with one app, as I see in this thread there is a group of users (likely - very small) that would like to see it in other apps / part of the system.