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by FiveOhThree 1779 days ago
It's a good way to further push away a chunk of your userbase. They're moving towards a touch-friendly UI, but a lot of us just want a compact desktop app that doesn't waste screen space with excessive padding.

The proper solution to this would be to have different modes if this is so critical. To their credit they did put in a "compact" mode after beta, but this is explicitly "unsupported" and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.
3 comments
5e92cb50239222b 1779 days ago
Push where? At least you still can configure chrome padding and element sizes with CSS tweaks, unlike the main competitor and its wooden interface with absolutely zero customization possibilities.

There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.

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kunagi7 1778 days ago
The average browser user doesn't know anything about CSS tweaking. Advanced users may know about it if they're curious enough or work with web technologies. People get pushed around by other reasons, mostly things like OS integration (Edge, Chrome).

> There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.

Thanks to that, Vivaldi also actively supports CSS tweaks like Firefox. They do indeed care about UI performance and work towards fixing it... The 3.7 update really improved its UI responsiveness. Still, it feels slower than Chrome/Brave/Firefox.

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jamienicol 1779 days ago
So they did exactly what you describe as the "proper solution".

> and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.

This is objectively false. Your hyperbole undermines your argument.

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FiveOhThree 1779 days ago
My mistake, there may have been more than two modes in the older builds. Perhaps it was called "Regular" or something, whatever the default was.
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doubled112 1779 days ago
Know what I can do in ESR that I can't in 89+? See my whole bookmarks menu without scrolling.

Know what I can't do on any of my machines? Touch the screen.

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jamienicol 1778 days ago
Have you tried compact mode?

Decreased UI density doesn't just help touchscreens.

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