Firefox 2.0 available [LWN.net]

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 10:56 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

Also, typing a non-URL in the address bar returns the Google search page now and not the first "hit". Now I wonder what purpose the search box (to the right of the location bar) has? Both of these misfeatures breaks functionality for no reason, I wonder who designs these things.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 10:57 UTC (Wed) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link]

I've always been a CRTL+F4 sort of person.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 14:10 UTC (Wed) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link]

Ctrl-W is easier to type and works just as well. :)

Also, forcing the user to find and click a button when a keyboard accelerator exists for the same task is only a mild usability problem. Having a button detached from the thing it is acting on, however, is actually a fairly serious one. I haven't done testing, obviously, but I'm willing to bet that novice users routinely failed to understand what that close button was doing at the right side of the window. Putting the button on the tab removes all ambiguity.

And no one else has mentioned it, but note that the close button has been replaced with a drop-down list of all the tabs in the window. This is a great example of a simple addition that greatly improves usability for people like me with zillions of tabs open.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 14:49 UTC (Wed) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link]

If there is only one close button for multiple tabs, then you can have a race condition where a new tab is being opened at the same time that you are trying to close a tab, and focus might or might not switch to the new tab just as the close button takes effect. (I had this problem all the time, actually.)

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 22:05 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

It all depends if I'm currently holding the mouse/trackball or not. If I have my hands on the keyboard then the problem does not exist (actually, then a completely different problem exists: that it's impossible to know which part of the web browser has focus, but that's a whole different story and shows Firefox is really designed to navigate with the mouse).

Having the close buttons on the tabs has other usability issues. It is very easy to close a tab my mistake instead of selecting it, especially when you have many tabs open. It's also not very good that the buttons move as the tabs change their width. I guess they had a reason why they changed to having a fixed button position before.

I'm not against change in itself, but changing and then changing back seems a bit unmotivated.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 11:43 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Get the All-in-One Gestures extension. I use only four gestures and clear the rest: L for back, R for forward, UL for close document, UR for new blank tab. I really couldn't live without it.

The thing that bothers me with tabs in 2.0 is that when you have a bunch open, and middle-click a link to open a new one in the background, it appears off-screen and you have to scroll over to get it.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 12:34 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

The worst thing is that the preferences for tabbed browsing contain several settings, but not what most users would want to change (or those who want to change something). Having too many options is considered confusing, but breaking long time functionality and not allowing to revert easily is considered OK.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 13:00 UTC (Wed) by chaneau (subscriber, #6674) [Link]

At least the button 3 click still works to close the tabs

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 16:06 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

There's an about:config setting to put it back to the way it was.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 18:43 UTC (Wed) by jsavage (guest, #7299) [Link]

To get back the old (and better) style of tabs with one close button on the far right, type "about:config" in your address bar and press enter.

Scroll down to "browser.tabs.closeButtons" and change the value from 1 to 3.

You're done!

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 25, 2006 22:08 UTC (Wed) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

I love the way cleaning up the option screens makes it so much easier to use!

(Thanks, by the way, it was appreciated!)

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 26, 2006 1:51 UTC (Thu) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

thanks for the info (I've been useing the 2.0 betas at home and this has annoyed me to no end)

however, if you hadn't posted this, how could I have found out the meaning of these different values? (other then wadeing into the source)

David Lang

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 26, 2006 8:05 UTC (Thu) by job (subscriber, #670) [Link]

When looking around the web for more information about this, I found a recent blog post called Firefox config tweaks which documents this, and more. Read the comments as well because there are some additions and corrections there.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 26, 2006 15:23 UTC (Thu) by kbob (subscriber, #1770) [Link]

This page describes how to revert the tab close buttons back to the 1.5 behavior, among other good things.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/firefox-2/geek-to-live...

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 26, 2006 16:47 UTC (Thu) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

> Going back to the previous design with a close button on each tab is a big
> drawback usability wise, in my opinion. Closing tabs using the mouse is
> suddenly a process you have to aware of.

<sarcasm>
I know what you mean. It's like when window managers started putting close buttons on the windows that they close. I was really confused when that happened. It just didn't make any sense to attach a button to the object that the button would affect.
</sarcasm>

> I think there was a reason so many other projects copied Firefox design
> with one close button in a fixed location.

I think the reason is that most projects don't have people who are well versed in, or care about, usability. They end up copying an example implementation from a high-profile program.

Firefox 2.0 available

Posted Oct 28, 2006 18:55 UTC (Sat) by h2 (subscriber, #27965) [Link]

Yes, copying features from high profile programs that actually seem to grasp what useability means. As opposed to the firefox kids, who just seem to make stuff up at random, then claim it's the result of useability tests. While I have used and loved FF and its predecessors for years, since early Mozilla days, I'm finding that what passes for useability research just seems like some recent college graduate's half formed concepts.

While I know that this tendency will reverse in time, in the meanwhile I have to do increasingly arcane research to find out how to restore functionalities that the ff developers have removed visible gui controls for.

Then, while chiming in on how great the new FF useability is from one side of the mouth, the other side speaks: well, you just type in this obscure about:config command, or change line x or y of some buried js config file...

Useability is more than just picking what works for a certain type of average user.

I'm hoping that the firefox devs will at some point in the future relearn the joys of 'Advanced' options. Keeping the surface level configuration choices very simple is something that clearly is a good thing, but pulling out more and more configurations and forcing me to learn more and more obscure commands to fix the latest defaults is about as far from my idea as useability as it gets I'm sorry to say.

These problems, by the way, are becoming increasingly noticeable on the GTK based Linux FF.

While I still consider the core Gecko engine to be probably the best out there, the wrapper for it is currently only salvaged by the great work of all those extension developers who are willing to spend their time restoring core functionalities [while I haven't checked out ff 2 yet, is it actually true that 3rd party cookie blocking is now removed as an option?]