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I’ve seen several people ask about this so I’ll showcase the workaround here from AskVG and thePlannerGuy: Planner guy said: Firefox 91 – You can stil
[See the full post at: New format to Firefox annoying you?]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
I’ve been using Aris’ custom stylesheets to “fix” the Firefox interface for several years now.
I am not a fan of the Chrome style interface and these stylesheets allow a great deal of customisation of the user interface, which enables me to get to an interface that feels comfortable and efficient.
I just hope that Mozilla never remove the ability to customise the UI in this manner.
Aris and the other contributors to this project have provided a great service to the Firefox community.
Dedoimedo has published a well written explanation and walkthrough with pics of how to achieve the same with extra tweaks for altering tab accent colors, borders and height.
As a long term user of Firefox and Firefox ESR since Phoenix/ Firebird days, across Windows and many Linux distro’s over the years, I’ll be sticking with the 78.xx ESR series until Oct/ Nov, only then, will I look at the 91.xx ESR and call judgement.
Adoption of early Mozilla changes in the past required patience, research and testing before making any jump (no-matter what self proclaimed ‘improvements’ security or gimmicks).
After all, a browser is ONLY the end-users main point of contact with the internet..
ESR 78.xx still gets updates to 78.15 with no fluffware, so no worries here until then.
I’m less interested in Mozilla’s changes to the FF UI than I am in changes to functionality. For example, the new management of cookies and site data only allow you to delete everything for a specific domain. While this may serve to enhance FF’s control over tracking it severely eliminates my ability to target cookies that I want to keep and those I want to delete. Now its all or nothing. Bad move.
Yes, the new format annoys me! And so does the one after that, and the one after that. (Australis, Photon, Proton, respectively).
I used Aris-T2’s “Classic Theme Restorer” extension to get rid of Australis on Firefox <57 and Waterfox Classic, and now that I use Firefox proper, I use the stylesheets by the same author. Works a treat, though not nearly as easy to use as the extension had been.
Keep very close track of the changes you make so you can reverse those you don’t like. It takes some time, but you can use this to make Firefox look the way you want as Mozilla updates the browser again and again.
That was precisely what I was doing with Classic Theme Restorer. I used it to make Firefox look the way I wanted as Mozilla updated it again and again. Then, one day, one of those updates made Classic Theme Restorer stop working, forever.
There is more than a trivial chance Mozilla will do that with the user stylesheets. Chrome does not have user stylesheets, and the Mozilla philosophy of the last eight years plus has been that if Chrome does not have it and Firefox does, it must be eliminated. Why, I remember, back in the day, when having a feature the other guy didn’t have was a good thing!
Now that the ability of Firefox to parse userChrome.css and userContent.css are off by default and hidden behind a pref, that’s a clue that there are plans to get rid of it. They’ve done this many, many times… take a feature, turn it off by default, include a pref to turn it back on, then get rid of the pref.
If it comes to pass, I will have to move on from Firefox.
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I like the new format.
Now, now, put down your torches. Even if I like the new format, experience shows that Firefox will likely “fix” it again into something I don’t like. Whoever is running the user experience portion of Firefox seems to take their cues from whatever is the hot new trend in UI at the moment. It sort of reminds me of teenage girls reading fashion magazines: “Oh, dark mode is SO last year. Everyone’s doing everything flat and white now! Let’s turn everything extra white, and lock all of Firefox into THAT!” And after four hours, my eyes are standing out on stalks. No thanks.
So this is still useful information, even if you like what is there now.
Group "L": Linux Mint
I keep saying if I didn’t like change, I shouldn’t be in tech in the first place.
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Public Service Announcement: We can now stop all further technology development because Wikipedia reports – Everything that can be invented has been invented.
PSA Notice – Correction: The Book of Facts and Fallacies has debunked the famous quote and the U.S. Patent Office is to remain open for a short while longer, and that includes the highly useful AskWoody website also.
Sorry Susan, you will be required to postpone retirement until further notice.
I don’t like change for change’s sake. It doesn’t matter what field of endeavor I am in, tech or otherwise… change that makes things worse is bad. Sadly, most change seems to be of that variety, in tech or otherwise. “Change is good” is an aphorism that is wrong more often than not.
With Firefox, nearly all of the change has been of the “bad” variety for years. There have been exceptions… it’s faster, for one, and the glassy smoothness I enjoy so much when scrolling around with the touchpad has not always been there (and is the one thing that keeps me on Firefox for now, despite the rest of the changes).
I never used Firefox for its speed, though. I used it for its feature set, even though faster browsers were available. Firefox was fast enough, and beyond that point, other attributes made the most difference. But so many new releases of Firefox have brought “oh no, now [x] is gone,” where x was some feature I liked and valued. Others have had the same experience, though often the feature they liked and valued was not one of the ones that bothered me when it was removed. Mozilla’s making sure everyone gets their ox gored at least once in their quest to defeature Firefox to Chrome’s level.
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I must be dense, or oblivious. I’ve updated to FF 91 and I haven’t noticed any particular changes, offensive or otherwise. Could someone indulge me with the changes that are bothering everyone so much? THANKS
It was Firefox 89, released back at the beginning of June, that changed to the new “Proton” UI. This included preferences in about:config that could be used to revert the change. Firefox 91 is significant in that those preferences have mostly been removed, and what remains doesn’t seem to have any effect at all.
Mozilla has been using the ‘chrome’ folder and files called userChrome.css and userContent.css since before there was ever such a thing as Google Chrome. “Chrome” as such is a programmer’s term for the visual bits of a program that don’t change the functionality, like how putting chrome bits on a car doesn’t change how it operates.
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I think the saying – “Growth without control is the ideology of a cancer cell” – could very well be modified to – Change without control is the ideology of a cancer cell.
I’ve been using Firefox for several iterations (automatic update) now, and I haven’t noticed a thing different in the websites that I visit. When I launch Firefox, I don’t see anything but my homepage, which is DuckDuckGo. I don’t ever see “Firefox”.
No problems with the refreshed interface. HOWEVER, I think there should be a simple option or theme to switch between old and new. The last few years, I notice that programmers of open source stuff suddenly feel almighty when the product they work on gets or got successful. It led to the idiotic interface of Ubuntu (luckily there is Mint), pushed user interfaces that some programmers think is perfect without even asking users what they think of it and so on. I think one of the characteristics of open source software is (was?) having respect for what users prefer, about giving options. But big open source projects don’t differ that much anymore from commercial projects nowadays…
I have gotten used to the later FF themes. Yet the one thing I really miss is the status bar which was useful for plugins to display information and toggle buttons. It would have been more prudent for Mozilla have made it an option to display the status bar.
There was such an option initially, but Chrome didn’t have such an option, so away it went.
That said, though, here’s my Firefox 91 right now:
You can have it back with Aris’ CSS. It’s actually the bookmarks toolbar moved to the bottom and with the status bar features added (it’s a proper status bar if you mouse over a link, for example). The URL bar is expanded to two rows, with the second one containing the bookmark toolbar data, if you still want the bookmark toolbar as it has always worked.
There’s also Waterfox G3. It is based on Firefox ESR, and has the status bar restored, along with the options to put tabs “not on top” as Mozilla puts it (as shown in the screenshot). The new tab button on the left and the close tab button on the right are extensions.
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To @Ascaris,
I’m an old Mosaic/Netscape user and then switched to Firefox a long time ago. I’ve worked with whatever FF gave me, but now that I’m aware that some things can be changed, I’m looking into making FF better for me. I’m just learning that there ways to do this. So, if you don’t mind my asking,
1. What are the two up-arrows on the left side of the title bar for?
2. How did you get the name in the title bar centered?
3. How did you get those new symbols for ‘minimize’ and ‘maximize’ on the title bar?
4. What are the middle 3 icons to the right of the URL? I recognize ‘toggle reader view’ & ‘bookmark’, but the others are new to me.
5. How did you get the skinny, non-floating active tab with a yellowish background?
6. What color is a non-active tab, if the cursor is not on it? What color, if the cursor IS on it?
Here are my FF bars now.
1. The color of the title bar is my customized Windows accent color.
2. I am happy with the order of bars. They are in Compact Mode (via AskVG).
3. In the Tab Bar, the first 3 tabs are pinned. I am happy with their width. An inactive tab becomes grey, if the cursor is on it.
4. Believe me, I use those icons to the right of the Search Bar and I use the Bookmark Bar a lot, so I want to leave those in place.
5. The background color of the bars (except for the Title Bar) comes from a FF theme called “Firefox title color”. It doesn’t affect the color of the title bar, but it makes the background color in the other 3 lines a powder blue color. It’s OK, I guess, but I’d like to learn how to change the color, if I wanted to.
6. My main issue right how is making the unpinned Tabs more visually definitive and getting the title in the Title Bar centered.
If you think answering my questions here would take the topic too far afield, you could create a new topic and let me know. 🙂
Thanks.
I use Firefox (and everything else I can) in a native window, so window decoration is handled by the OS. Centered text is how Windows 8.1 and 10 do it.
I should have noticed that your screenshot is not from Win10. I don’t think that Win10 native windows center the text in the Title Bar.
I’ll check out the Aris custom stylesheet, though.
Thank you for answering all of my questions. It’s helped me get a handle on how I can make FF better for me.
You’re right– it is left justified in Windows 10 now too. I haven’t looked much at Windows 10 recently. I do remember it being like Windows 8.1 in those early days! I’ll fix the post for future readers.
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I hate the new interface. Firefox lost me on Android about 1 yr ago with an unusable browser. Have been happy with opera. This finally pushed me over the edge to Brave. (Found out how to save passwords on Brave, which had stopped me before.)
For those who want less space between bookmarks, I stumbled on this userchrome.css modification which worked perfectly well almost immediately after switching to Brave. https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html which gave this change to the userchrome file which worked well:
/*** Tighten up drop-down/context/popup menu spacing ***/
menupopup > menuitem, menupopup > menu {
padding-block: 4px !important;
}
:root {
–arrowpanel-menuitem-padding: 4px 8px !important;
}
For the life me, I don’t understand why big changes in software don’t come with options to change back, but it seems to be a special form of technology arrogance. (Much worse was Gmail changes to compose feature about 5 years ago, which everyone hated but took gmail a long time to mostly roll back)
For the life me, I don’t understand why big changes in software don’t come with options to change back, but it seems to be a special form of technology arrogance.
Indeed, yes. It used to be fashionable to include a lot of options in software, but now we’re in an era of minimalism, where the idea is that having lots of options is an admission of the inability to “get it right,” and that the options are just there to provide users the means to work around the bugs the developer has left in there. Thus, now it’s an affront to the software development prowess of a developer to ask for an option. There’s this idea that there is a singular, unquestionable “right” way of doing something, and that it is their job to discover and impose this thing on all of their users.
The problem with this, of course, is that there is no such thing as a universally right way of doing things that works for all. To some percentage of users, any “one true way” a given developer settles on will be wrong, and the “get it right and you don’t need options” philosophy falls apart. It’s not supposed to be about forcing people to accept things they don’t like… the idea they have is that if you get it right, everyone will like it, and it just isn’t so. So then the developer decides that his own idea of what is right is the one true way, and anyone who sees things differently is wrong, and the answer to that is not to provide options in the software, but for the user to stop being wrong.
Ultimately, the “get it right and you don’t need options” idea boils down to arrogance, as you say. As I have written so many times before, one size does not fit all.
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That’s the go-to excuse, but you’ll notice they never think that way when it comes to the things they like. For example, Firefox has a rather heavy and sometimes intrusive set of dev tools that are in every copy of Firefox, even though there is a separate dev edition that would be a natural home for such a thing, and even though the vast majority of Firefox users are not web developers. No, that’s not going anywhere, but things like the option for whether to select all when the user clicks the URL bar, literally a single line of code, get removed, even though a person volunteered to be the maintainer for that one line (which they probably took as absurd, which illustrates how absurd was their argument that they removed it to make the code more maintainable).
Ultimately, the easiest program to maintain is one that does nothing, in which case no code is needed, and therefore no maintenance or support. Is simplicity of support or maintenance really the goal that software developers should have in mind? Software exists to do things, and the more it does, the more difficult the support becomes. Should all software be weak, de-featured, one-size-fits-none mediocreware? The support and maintenance issue is one that is universal across all genera of software, but doing things on the cheap (from the devs’ end) and doing things well are usually at odds with one another.
In the case of Firefox, the devs could have reduced their own workload by not changing the UI to Australis, or Photon, or Proton. Their browser has lost 95% of the market share it had in 2008, but they keep changing the UI, removing features that have been in there forever (and by now thoroughly debugged), changing their logo, giving their CEO huge pay raises, and making political statements that have nothing to do with browser development.
Their goal to become Chrome has been around for about as long as they’ve been in their user share nosedive, yet they persist, and they do it with an unmistakable attitude of sneering hostility toward the few users their product still has.
It would be easier for car manufacturers to make cars with seats bolted directly to the floor with no adjustments possible than it currently is with the adjustable type. It would make the cars slightly cheaper to make, maintain, and support… but it would mean their product fits only a subset of what it would if the seat remained adjustable. If carmakers had the attitude many software devs do, they’d tell the user that the seat is in the correct position, and if they don’t like it, they must be doing something wrong.
Not all options on cars lend themselves to “on the fly” adjustment like a seat position, but cars still have plenty of options. It would surely be easier for the manufacturers if all cars came with the same configuration, same color, same engine, same transmission, same everything, but we’ve come a long way since “you can have it in any color you like as long as it’s black.”
Perhaps the “one true way” is to have options, not to arrogantly decide that one configuration is the correct one that everyone must accept.
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Windows 11 Is Making It Absurdly Difficult to Change Browsers
https://gizmodo.com/windows-11-is-making-it-absurdly-difficult-to-change-br-1847510904
I use an extension “Cookie AutoDelete” that can be set to whitelist any given domain, and delete them for everything else. It doesn’t refuse the cookies when they come in, which will cause a lot of sites to fail to function… it just deletes them (after a certain amount of time, or when you close the tab or the browser), so there’s no ability to track you from session to session, but the site still works while you’re using it. That way, you can make sure the cookies from domains like disqus.com and google.com get wiped to prevent tracking, but still have those sites work. With the “block or no block” option, you would have to whitelist these to get the sites to work properly, and then you’d be tracked.
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Thanks for this tip. I just tried Cookie AutoDelete out, and like it better than ForgetMeNot, which I had been using as a cookie manager. The advantage of Cookie AutoDelete is that tracking cookies get deleted faster, not just when FF is closed.
Note to others who want to try it out: it is important to read and follow the developer’s instructions. Some people just install it without doing that and then post a one-star review complaining it doesn’t work. It does work as billed, but you have to spend a few minutes reading and setting it up.
SO much to comment on!!!! But this is near and dear to my heart, so here comes both feet….
Ascaris said:
“Now that the ability of Firefox to parse userChrome.css and userContent.css are off by default and hidden behind a pref, that’s a clue that there are plans to get rid of it. They’ve done this many, many times… take a feature, turn it off by default, include a pref to turn it back on, then get rid of the pref.
If it comes to pass, I will have to move on from Firefox.”
To where?
In my opinion, Waterfox has just totally sold out to the corps. G3 uses memory very poorly. MrAlex is now more interested in corporate ad dollars than he was to being a true champion of the people and users. I thank him for all the years of better motivation, a decent community support and an open ear.
Chrome – feh
Pale Moon – stopped staying current to anything
Opera?? I think not.
So where?
After maybe 10 years or more of Waterfox, I am thinking of moving to FF 91 ESR. I find that I cannot find replacements for some extensions, but most are OK or better. A great Session Manager is hard to find. Not happy with current offerings of Cookie Managers.
I have used Aris’ tools since Class Theme Restorer. Was GREAT. Had a GUI. No longer a GUI and a learning curve for sure, but CSS for Firefox WORKS. And Aris is incredibly helpful. That said, I do not update each release. Maybe every 3rd or 4th. And when I do (I am a TWEAK) it takes me 8-10 hours to check all the changes, update the files I have modified and feel complete. So plan to spend some time though likely not as much as I do.
SB9K said:
“I only wish there had been a preference to restore one of my favorites – autocomplete of .net and .org URLs (Shift+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+Enter, respectively)”
I did not realize those were gone I use them so infrequently. If anyone finds a fix, please post. I tried ShortKeys and could not make that work.
Anonymous said:
“I’ve been on Waterfox Classic (2021.07) with a UA string set to FF 60.0. Pretty much works everywhere, except Github — now use Edge for that.”
Polyfil (I have a copy – its been discontinued) fixes Github. Linked In has no toolbar in Classic. Other sites have issues. Try Safeway.com
I am able to get most of what I desire for the way I work from CSS. Your Mileage WILL Vary. But this is FF91 my way:
If you disable Proton the tick marks in settings disappear. This is without a doubt, imho the worst looking browser I’ve ever seen. Mozilla are desperate to get rid of the few remaining customers they have through the same attitude as Microsoft – we’ll tell you what you want and you’ll like it!
I’ve been testing for a week now and every time I open the browser it creates a new profile. After more than 50 attempts at fixing it the only way I could get it to use the profile I had previously built for it was to use about:profiles, create a new profile and set it as default, then restart with the new profile and delete the old one. Nothing else would work.
I have 250 PCs to replace. I’m not going to visit each of them, that’s just insane,
The browser randomly loses the theme. The theme is still installed, but just stops working. Have to reinstall it to get it working again.
Every time I use GPEdit.msc to make a change to the policy it results in some settings getting reset.
The cache keeps getting corrupted, resulting in me having to clear it all and start again.
As for the UI, lots of CSS to try and get it back to some sane usable state.
Three things I haven;t been able to fix is the book marks icon in the urlbar – I don’t want it there and I can’t get rid of it. Tthe sickly yellow filling on pre-filled fields. The code that disabled in in pre-v91 versions no longer works.
The toolbar/tab bar is way too squashed. the few extra pixels of web page height would probably never be noticed by any one. Removing the drag space was just dumb. Have yet to find a way to get more space above the tabs.
Overall, very disappointing. Why is it that developers just keep reinventing the UI-Wheel and forego useful functionality and addressing bugs and security?
I actually had a conversation with my boss about dumping Firefox because of this version. I lost, and was told to “make it work”.
I am on FF 91.0.1 and have not noticed any changes to the UI on my machines, either Windows 7, a Win10 work laptop, or Linux. I have noticed when they eliminated the “Simplify Page” option on printing, but it is now back and that was nearly a deal breaker for me.
The one really inane thing they did is to remove the thin white borderlines of the tabs when in Dark Mode. That took a lot of theme tests to recover. I can still see all my add-on icons and tabs.
But then I hate minimalist browsers and program UIs that mimic smartphone apps.
Try Basilisk. It’s much better than Pale Moon. It does not support web extensions either but they are pitiful anyway. I haven’t found any XUL extensions that don’t work on Basilisk. I gave up on Pale Moon back in 2017 when Basilisk became available. It has been my default browser since then. It is forked off of Fx 52 ESR. CTR works fine on it.
While this wasn’t the reason I initially switched from Firefox, it is one thing I don’t miss. It constantly feels the need to reinvent itself. I know it may sound sacrilegious, but I just use Chrome (or Chromium). There may be a change I don’t like in a newer version, but it will be small. Google gets the idea of iterative change. That’s how you can keep things fresh while not constantly having to do these huge refreshes of the UI or under the hood.
(The reason I initially switched was that Mozilla was making changes that would reduce customization, but was trying to sell it as actually making things more customizable. They would go on about how they were user-focused, but not listen to users’ complaints. Then the big changeover to WebExtensions was coming, so I decided to see if I could replicate my previous extensions with WebExtensions. But Firefox wasn’t ready for them yet, so I tried Chrome. Then I delightfully discovered that there were extensions last updated in 2009 which still worked, which was all part of what I describe in the paragraph above.)
I just came across this due to Susan’s latest newsletter article pointing to instructions for applying userchrome.css to firefox by thePlannerGuy. I specifically want to comment on the mention by PlannerGuy that “Unfortunately, you can’t just download the file (why make it easy for us?). You’ll need to paint and copy the entire file to a text file on your computer — and name the file userchrome.css. If you replace the userchrome.css file in your Firefox profile with this one, you can restore the classic Firefox”.
I guess that’s true, but at https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx/releases/tag/4.0.5, one can download custom_css_for_fx_v4.0.5.zip.
One can then create folder chrome in the firefox profile and unzip the contents of custom_css_for_fx_v4.0.5.zip into folder chrome. This will create in chrome, among other things, userchrome.css which can be customized as outlined by PlannerGuy.
I suppose one should bet rid of any other userchrome.css, but that’s a guess.
I don’t know that this is any better. I’m just addressing an alternative to the “unfortunately, you can’t just download …” portion of the PlannerGuy’s instructions.
Either one of these are a particular iteration/version of the underlying customizations, but I don’t understand navigating github well enough to comment further on that point.
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