Firefox 89.0 update last night and ugh!!!

[ronsmeyer]

Agree. Ugh! I just Timeshifted it out, restored the profile and blocked the update. I need to find some .css to put things where I want them. One thing i hate is the tab bar location. I want the tabs under the bookmark menu bar, where they're closest to the webpage. When browsing I often have quite a number of tabs open, so they are things I use the most. I therefore want the tabs to be the most convenient to get to. With every update, they make the browser harder to configure. It's really annoying. You used to be able to go into customize mode and move the toolbars wherever you wanted them. Now you have to find customized .css to do it. They're going backwards.

[JoeFootball]

Note to all, GUI updates aside, be aware that if you're not updating Firefox, you'll not be getting further security updates as well. For example ...

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/ ... sa2021-23/

[AZgl1800]

That's why I ditched FF years ago and am with Vivaldi. They do add features that I consider as useless, but at least, I don't have to worry that the browser may look very different after an update.

No other browser properly handles Bookmarks like Firefox does.
I use Vivaldi for an eBook reader and that is all it is good for, its' bookmark handling is a piece of crap.

this is my FF Library, I have nearly 10,000 bookmarks sorted into folders.
obviously, this is just a tiny fraction of my bookmarks.

[Pierre]

this particular update hasn't made it this far, as yet,
and there does seem to be a lot of angry folks out there,
judging by the various Tech Writers in their varied responses.

thus, I'll apply some of the various remedies, that have already been suggested.

[Grateful4Linux]

Has anyone figured out how to enlarge the scrollbar? With this new update it is almost completely invisible.

I already reverted back the other changes (I was especially annoyed at the lost vertical space, the lack of tab separators and lowered contrast) but the scrollbar remains impractically tiny.

I hate when developers break a bunch of functionality by "fixing" things that weren't broken!

[AZgl1800]

Has anyone figured out how to enlarge the scrollbar? With this new update it is almost completely invisible.

I already reverted back the other changes (I was especially annoyed at the lost vertical space, the lack of tab separators and lowered contrast) but the scrollbar remains impractically tiny.

I hate when developers break a bunch of functionality by "fixing" things that weren't broken!

that is my one major complaint with it after applying the above fixes.

the scroll bar in FF is about 1/10th the width of the mouse pointer.

looked in about:config for 'width' and not a single reference for 'scrollbar'

looked for scrollbar and changed every default to "80" with no effect what-so-ever.

oops, that is wrong, after I posted this, one of those settings made it huge.
so now, I will revert each on back, singly until I find the one that made it wider.

[Grateful4Linux]

Has anyone figured out how to enlarge the scrollbar? With this new update it is almost completely invisible.

I already reverted back the other changes (I was especially annoyed at the lost vertical space, the lack of tab separators and lowered contrast) but the scrollbar remains impractically tiny.

I hate when developers break a bunch of functionality by "fixing" things that weren't broken!

that is my one major complaint with it after applying the above fixes.

the scroll bar in FF is about 1/10th the width of the mouse pointer.

Same here. It's ridiculous! I can move it by positioning my mouse pointer at the very edge of the window, but what's really annoying is that I'm no longer able to glance at the scrollbar to see the approximate length of the page I'm on, or how far along I am if I'm reading a long article. The scrollbar button is virtually invisible now.

I toggled every scrollbar entry in about:config and increased the size of every numerical entry, but none of that fixed it.

[AZgl1800]

I think, it is this one, but have not rebooted FF yet.

nope, it went back to the thin grey line.

it is NOT single control edit, it must have been a bunch of them, and can't repeat it just yet.

[AZgl1800]

darn,
would like to get it back to the "huge size" again, but not working.

this is what I have done so far, and the scrollbar is about 5 times wider than it was.

at least it is usable for now.

[lsemmens]

I just did the update and cannot see any need for complaint. I did not allow it to change themes when it offered. That said, I use the extension "Group Speed Dial" as my home page and it has not affected my buttons or bookmarks at all, even the scroll bar is the same as ever. Ergo, no change here.

[Grateful4Linux]

darn,
would like to get it back to the "huge size" again, but not working.

this is what I have done so far, and the scrollbar is about 5 times wider than it was.

scrollbar.png

at least it is usable for now.

Darn, I did all that and mine didn't change at all. Then I even tried to toggle all the other scrollbar related options to see if that would help. It didn't.

Oh... wait a second... I just clicked enter as I was typing in this box... and I now have a huge scrollbar in this box and on the side of the page. I wonder if that was from your changes or the ones I made after yours didn't seem to have any effect? It's hard to tell since there was no visible effect until I started typing in this box.

Update: I changed the "160" entries to 40 and it finally got to a more reasonable size when I changed the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size entry. I will probably make it about half that width, but I'm glad it more visible now. Thanks so much for your help AZgl1500!

Update: I changed only the widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size to "30" and now it's a very nice size for me. Thanks again!

[Bob M]

This is weird.

My Desktop running Mint 19.3 Cinnamon updated Firefox to Ver 89.0 and so far I haven’t noticed any difference.

When I read this thread I thought it might be waiting for a reboot so I did that but still no difference.

Hope I haven’t spoken too soon.

[AZgl1800]

One thing that all of us have failed to mention.

Screen Size:

My laptop is a 17" screen in Hi-Res mode

typical fonts are so tiny I cannot see them, I use a Zoom level of 200% just to read this forum.

[AZgl1800]

I just did the update and cannot see any need for complaint. I did not allow it to change themes when it offered. That said, I use the extension "Group Speed Dial" as my home page and it has not affected my buttons or bookmarks at all, even the scroll bar is the same as ever. Ergo, no change here.

are you getting FF from Update Manager?
if so, it never asked, it just does it, and that is what I have.

I remember problems like this a couple years ago, and went to the Mozilla PPA site to get it, just so that I would be asked the questions.

[dave0808]

Strange, I get my FF updates through the normal Mint Update Manager and on restarting FF, I was prompted to select the theme - it had 'dark' pre-selected presumably based on my previous settings, but I went for the 'system theme' and on my Mint-Y-Dark system, it looks OK to me. The "tab" that is in use is obvious as it's a lighter grey than the other tabs and the title bar.

I don't mind the newtab page as such, at least on my main PC with 27" monitor - though I agree about the wasted space, I prefer the use of the site's icons rather than a snapshot of the visited page.

And scroll bars look fine too (Mint 20.1 with Cinnamon desktop). They look the same as any other window that I have open, like Terminal, but thicker and constantly visible compared to Nemo.

I do wonder if I'll feel the same about it on my 13" laptop.

[Alan16]

Whenever the Mozilla developers dare change some visual details, there will be a lot of angry people. No matter whether the Mozilla developers have given good reasons for changing, what they changed or not.
Too many people get angry the same moment they notice a visual change, no matter how minor it may be.
Some people might be fans of total stagnation. But life is change.

P.S.: Does FF 89.0 really look so fundamentally different from FF 88.0.1?

(...)

The only things, which I did was:
+ selecting to keep my current theme, when asked by FF 89.0 on first startup after the upgrade.
+ re-enable the old tab design by setting browser.proton.enabled=false

I agree. I didn't even do anything yet. My screen looks fine and all bookmarks are still there.

[gittiest personITW]

I did the update to 89 last night and FF then wouldn't open when it was Firejailed.
Played with it for an hour but seeing as how I was thinking about changing anyway it just sped up the decision to move to Chromium.

[Flemur]

That's why I ditched FF years ago and am with Vivaldi. They do add features that I consider as useless, but at least, I don't have to worry that the browser may look very different after an update.

I'm using it right now, after going through all the settings (removing or reordering the context menu entries is nice, put "open in background tab" at the top). Vivaldi seems to be the only chrome-based browser which adds a useful feature, namely the sidebar.

[thx-1138]

ff.png (24.46 KiB) Viewed 1420 times

"Trending repositories today"
(i wonder why...ehmm, not really)

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

[Grateful4Linux]

I saw the query about the themes when I restarted Firefox 89, but I declined and kept my previous theme. The frustrating thing is that the contrast is much poorer with this new version, and I'm not sure how to fix it. (The folder icons in the bookmark toolbar also changed.)

Contrast is my main vision issue, so this is a big downgrade for me. It is also much more difficult to see which tab is active now because it no longer has the dark line above it to make it standout.

Below are comparisons with a screencap I made a while back: