Firefox 29+ interface and customization

As you know, the 29th version of the Firefox browser received a new interface called Australis for its shell (tabs, search bar, navigation buttons and bookmarks; removing Addon Bar and replacing it with a pop-up under the “tools” button (three horizontal lines, a common mark for many web interfaces)). Consider what we have lost today from the interface control levers that still existed in the form of several browser extensions.

Of course, for developers of interface extensions, this was not unexpected - for two versions, innovations are announced and appear in alpha versions, then they are worked out in beta. This is a good 3 months for the opportunity to prepare in advance (but most of the extensions are supported by enthusiasts who can not always allocate free time for this). It is possible to partially rollback the interface to previous versions by installing the official Classic Theme Restorer extension .

If you look at what users of the new version complain the most:

• disappearance of the reaction to a double click on an empty tab-bar (the default was to create a new tab);
  
• tabs that have increased in area in most OS;
  
• placing the reset button in the address bar, a number of other buttons "not in their places";
  
• I do not like to change the interface all the time ... well, it already was.
  

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Such changes to the interface relatively successfully make up for the Firefox extensions to work with the browser interface. Relatively - because part of their functions, according to the facts at the beginning of the use of the new 29th version, does not work, although most of the main extensions do not have catastrophic losses in the functions.

To start. How to make the new Firefox look like old Firefox

If you have not yet used extensions, most likely, the missing features can be replenished with the official Classic Theme Restorer . If you used it, you have to admit that the “community of extensions” perceived the interface change is not fully armed, and the loss of the usual conveniences may be more than a dozen depends on who considered it as convenience. In addition to the above mentioned ones, the failure of the update button from the address bar, the height of the tab that is not compressible (previously compressed in Hide Caption Titlebar Plus ), the inability to make the “small buttons” anything other than the Classic Theme Restorer (obviously, so far it is impossible, but soon add-ons or new ones will appear ). Someone will be able to add other shortcomings to the list, but some of them could be eliminated by the imposition and reconfiguration of the existing several extensions.


However, the same times of turmoil, and on an even larger scale, were also during the transition from Firefox 3.6 to version 4 and they then lasted for several versions in a row, approximately until the 9th (year and a half). Since that time, a number of popular interface extensions survived and survived, the authors of which firmly follow the policy of supporting their products in new versions. Due to this, we can use them for several years, even if the internal structure and the type of interfaces change.

What extensions continue to help manage the interface?

The good news for supporters of custom interfaces is that, although there are losses of functions, all the major extensions (there are several of them, the list below) continue to work. Does not lead to conflicts and their "interference", i.e. simultaneous use. Some extensions prevail, so even in the case of conflicting settings, you can achieve a manageable result. The difference from the 28th version is that all the existing functions were previously working and were also interfered with, and now some of them have lost influence on the new interface.

We list the main add-ons that control the interface.

• Tab Mix Plus is a long-standing and legendary addon that is constantly ahead of the rest in terms of the number of functions and supporters of its use. In the period of 23-24 versions, incorrect work in Linux was noticed, so I had to replace it with a combination of other add-ons. Also, it doesn't help anything on low and wide screens, if you need to use a lot of tabs on several lines - it eats up a lot of vertical space, therefore it forces you to use alternatives. For illustration - someone's old screenshot from Fx3 with simultaneously acting one of the color addons.
  

  

  
  
• Tree Style Tab with a tree style tabs - saves from the abundance of tabs, without spending vertical space. Complete with Tab Utilities Phoenix creates a good alternative to Tab Mix Plus, while occupying the side window space that other add-ons cannot (or have few functions). At the same time, it did not have bugs in Linux. In the 29th version without Classic Theme Restorer continues to work normally with ColorfulTabs. (Screenshot from Version 29 with ColorfulTabs, without Classic Theme Restorer.)
  

  

  
  
• Tab Utilities Phoenix - the missing control tabs keys and mouse. The extension without the word "Phoenix" is almost the same, but it does not know how to show the contents of the tab by hovering over the tab heading. What is disabled in Phoenix, but convenient enough to use. The presence of 176 settings and the function of their export-import (as in the Tab Mix Plus) will modestly say about its seriousness.
  
• Tab Kit 2nd Edition is an analogue of vertical tabs, but without a tree.
  
• Hide Caption Titlebar Plus Visibly changes and compacts the list of multi-line tabs, menus, title bar (Title bar) and the orange button that has gone down in history. accompanied by bugs in some modes of use, more manifested in Windows, but instead there was no add-on, compacting multi-line tabs, so you have to put up. Now compaction has stopped working. But complete with Classic Theme Restorer, he continues to manage the look of the orange button. New bugs have been added to the menu management. If he is not corrected, his future is in doubt.
  
• ColorfulTabs - color the tab header backgrounds. With many add-ons, sometimes it does not cope with controlling the color of the substrate, even if the setting “aggressive color exposure” is enabled. Until the 28th version, it was possible to manage colors, but the Classic Theme Restorer puts an end to this, because he himself has settings for colorization (more precisely, the imposition of his homogeneous retro theme). Lives hard already on the third generation of the interface. Many of his colleagues-colleagues did not survive the period of 4-9 versions.
  
• FaviconizeTab is an easy-to-use but useful add-on for reducing some tabs (by urla or manually) to the size of an icon.
  
• Minimize AddOn Bar is an addon dying because of Australis because the addon bar concept has ceased to exist. But with the Classic Theme Restorer, the addon bar still exists, and the addon bar modification works, albeit with a loss of the manual folding function. Up to about the 22-24th version, customization of the search bar worked in it, but it was no longer supported.
  
• Speed ​​Dial is the famous patriarch of addons, the answer to the Speed ​​Dial Opera at the time when this interface was revolutionary. It did not lose its meaning - on the contrary, the ideas of the quick-jump interface from the home page captured all browsers in a native, unexpanded form. However, add-ons give the flexibility of such interfaces - and this, and well-made Speed ​​Dial 2 for Chrome, with a number of new ideas.
  
• OmniBar - combines the address and search string (as in Chrome) and allows you to make short search and other commands like "! Y string" - search in Yandex, "! T word" - translate somewhere, etc. (also in Chrome; all this requires the setting of settings, of course).
  
• Menu Editor - customization of the menu in a very arbitrary format. Together with the compaction of the title (title bar) will give excellent results for putting both of them in one line. Unfortunately, in the 29th version of Hide Caption Titlebar Plus it does this with bugs (duplicate the title, if used with the Classic Theme Restorer; without it, it is not duplicated ). There are alternatives, but windows-only addons.
  
  
  
  
• Classic Theme Restorer is the very important addon for the transition period, which allows you to gently abandon the addon bar, postponing its demise, reduce the height of the address bar and restore some control keys on the interface elements.
  
• Status-4-Evar - as another way to install an analog addon bar (not equivalent). (Yes, in the 29th version it is necessary so far to put this beta in order for it to work.)
  

Once upon a time, at the time of Firefox13, there was a review of interface add-ons of that time , 15 pieces. Among them are all listed. In the screenshots of that time, you can see how they looked, but mainly with the goal of assessing how harmoniously everything can work when the turbulent 4-9 versions of the time have passed.

Now everything is not so good, and advising any add-ons for organizing a good interface is early. Now we can only advise what can be used in order not to lose a large share of the comfort that has hitherto been. And wait for 2 months and further fixes and new developments of add-ons already on the new interface, which will eliminate the existing shortcomings and solve the not very significant problems that have arisen.

As soon as a new addon or settings of the old addon that implements the concept of “small buttons” appears , it will be possible to abandon the “crutch” of Classic Theme Restorer , agree to the absence of the addon bar as an atavism, and then forget about the current transition period. Because attempts to combine controls have shown that with the new interface, judging by the screenshot from the Tree Style Tab, you can live. Worse results for Tab Mix Plus. See what came out of trying to adapt it to the collection of other addons. The colorization of the tabs was lost, and there was nothing to adjust the height of the tabs - the Hide Caption Titlebar Plus did it well before, despite its bugs. In addition, quite unaesthetic rounded shadows were added, which, most likely, will force aesthetes to refuse to use this option. But corrections can only be expected from the development of the add-ons themselves, because these are the bugs of the transition period. But the most important thing is that there are no functional bugs in these combinations, or at least new ones are not introduced. We give examples of add-ons combination (without settings, because for whom it is needed - he will make his own configuration; settings are needed). The results show that the “Tree Style Tab camp” is aesthetically winning at the moment. This is all very subjective: perhaps tomorrow someone will make a brilliant find and form a decent Tab Mix Plus. Or give up part of the addons, and with the condition of the thick address bar, everything will start to look decent. These screenshots are a snapshot showing that even now you can work with the custom interface by spending 0.5-2 hours on settings and getting something like this (OS - Win7 and XP).

Camp Tree Style Tab	Tab Mix Plus Camp
Tree Style Tab Tab Utilities Phoenix ColorfulTabs (without Classic Theme Restorer, therefore - a thick address bar!) Omnibar	Tab Mix Plus Menu Editor Hide Caption Titlebar Plus Tab Utilities Phoenix Faviconizetab ColorfulTabs (not working) Classic Theme Restorer Minimize Addon Bar (only makes sense with the previous one) Omnibar

Perhaps, along with the Classic Theme Restorer, the first version would also not be so good with aesthetics and colors. We see that there are many reasons for removing this addon from the used ones. For the rest, we can say that the cohort of add-ons has passed this frontier sufficiently prepared by its authors to start working immediately, from the first day of the official update of the Firefox version 28 to 29.

For convenience, the list of add-ons that have been tested is laid out in

• a selection of interface add-ons Layout Addons Fx29 of 12 pcs.,
  

as the one that was compiled 2 years ago for the 13th version of the browser. Let me remind you that so far, on the 3rd day after a significant change in the browser interface, interface add-ons do not look great. But they are the strong backbone that has been maintained by the authors for a long time, so it is recommended to take it as a basis for this transitional time. In a couple of months, corrections, updates and 1-2 new add-ons that correct existing shortcomings will most likely arise, but some users will be satisfied with the existing functions - everything depends on their needs, a sense of aesthetics and combinations of settings found or not found by them.

About other innovations of the 29th version

Information and translation from traneblow :

• Introduced a new user interface ⇗ codenamed "Australis" (the first sketches of the new design were created in August 2011). The changes touched the tabs, they became rounded as in Chrome, the active tab now stands out better than the background tabs, the menu has skipped from the upper left corner and is at the same level as the address bar, the customization mode of the browser has been improved and improved: additional buttons and items can be dragged, added and removed using drag-and-drop.
  But for some users, there is also bad news: the ability to create your own panels has been removed, the add-ons panel (or the status bar in a different way) has been removed. The content of the add-ons panel also moved and is on the same level as the address bar. Despite the big changes in the interface, the ability to enable the bookmarks bar and menu bar is left. Also, in the browser settings mode, you can enable the display of headers.
  If you absolutely do not like the new design, but you do not have a desire to use another browser, then the installation of the Classic Theme Restorer add-on will help you.
• Added a brief interactive review that introduces users to the new features of Firefox;
• The sync feature has been changed - Firefox Sync ⇗. The new Firefox Sync greatly simplified the process of setting up sync on multiple devices. The new version of Firefox Sync is tied to a single account, which is sufficient to use on all synchronized devices, without a complicated process using pairing codes and recovery keys.
  Firefox Sync is not strictly tied to the Mozilla infrastructure — users who do not want to use the Mozilla sync service can deploy the server-side synchronization and authentication systems on their hardware. The old version of synchronization will continue to work, but the ability to connect new devices will no longer be;
• Continuing work within the project MemShrink ⇗ ( Habr ): a significant increase in performance and a decrease in memory consumption ⇗ when the embedded PDF viewer is running - PDF.js. The decrease in memory consumption is especially noticeable for PDF files containing images, or scanned black and white documents. Also included are general optimizations to the process of parsing PDF files;
• To ensure privacy, the list of plug-ins is no longer available for browsing through the navigator.plugins interface ⇗ (individual plug-ins can still be checked by name);
• Added support for CSS3 variables ;
• Improvements in built-in tools for developers. : Appearance optimization for dark and light themes has been carried out. In the "Network" tab (Ctrl / Cmd + Shift / Alt + Q), the ability to track the load time of different components of the page is added (how much time is spent on css, js, html and images loading) is separately indicated. On the page with the log of network access, the opportunity appeared to copy the link to the image appearing in the request. Added interface for previewing CSS transformations. In the Style Editor (Shift + F7) added support for CSS source map and input autocompletion. Debugger (Ctrl / Cmd + Shift / Alt + S) adds support for inspecting DOM nodes. The editor adds support for folding code blocks, the ability to use Emacs and Vim keyboard shortcuts, support for ES6 syntax highlighting;
• The box-sizing attribute has lost the prefix ⇗ -moz-;
• Added support for HTML5 attributes input type = color and input type = number ;
• ECMAScript Internationalization API is implemented and enabled by default, offering a series of objects in the Intl namespace ( Intl.Collator, Intl.DateTimeFormat, Intl.NumberFormat) to simplify the localization of web applications taking into account the characteristics of different countries;
• Added new string functions defined in the ECMAScript 6 specification: String.prototype.codePointAt () ⇗ and String.prototype.fromCodePoint () ;
• Enabled ⇗ default support for SharedWorker;
• Added Gamepad API support

And in the meantime ... What does Firefox 30 prepare for us?

• What the Firefox 30 prepares for us
• New in Firefox 31 (planned, judging by the alpha version)

UPD (05/10/2014): interesting observation: if the Tab Mix Plus camp option is set up and then the Classic Theme Restorer is turned off, some of its settings are saved - for example, a thin address bar (small buttons), and the colorization of the tabs in ColorfulTabs begins to work , although with an uncritical bug: unrestored pages have a gray background with a color untidy border. But this is, in general, good: unrestored (non-updated after rebooting the browser) pages in their tabs are noticeably different from those viewed.

UPD (06/13/2014): here is the Colorful Tabs for the variant “Camp Tab Mix Plus. Inactive tabs began to color up even without the “Aggressive Mode” setting.