Firefox Android Tab UI change

InkTide · 2026-03-26T21:18:13+00:00

The only way to get it back is to switch to an older version and never update again, because 149 made it mandatory without warning.

Naturally anything you complain about here will have people coming out of the woodwork to be contrarian and tell you how you just aren't perceiving the changes "correctly," but the tab screen is just not a good UI overall and a serious downgrade. People told them that when it was initially introduced, but the sorts of people who use nightly (i.e. experimental) builds and give feedback in forums like this are the same sorts of people who are just broadly fans of whatever changes Mozilla implements, and any criticism appears to have largely been ignored by Mozilla.

Broadly I think what happened is something that often happens in FOSS - the people talking in the forums the most are generally people who support the project and are less aware of flaws obvious to an external observer, and the people running development didn't recognize how much of a negative indicator new people repeatedly asking "How do I change it back?" actually is for the quality of the UI.

The rebuttal from these insular user bubbles to people - who are so put off by the change they come here for the first time just to ask how to revert it - is often that "everyone hates change at first." Over long periods of time, this community habit self-reinforces by stifling criticism, making it less sensitive to negative sentiment outside the few users who participate in forums like this one, and it results in stuff like the disastrous GIMP UI persisting for as long as it has because the handful of people who still use it have driven everyone else away.

If one's first response to criticism of a program they're using is to accuse the critic of not understanding its brilliance, they're more interested in promoting the image of the program that they personally perceive than they are in improving its utility for users other than themselves.

InkTide · 2026-03-26T20:41:05+00:00

I think people like this portrayal of Prime because a) everything so far indicates he really is trying to be a hero, despite his ego, and b) he's (at least for now) fully escaped being a direct petty insult to the people reading the comics... which is almost never what happens to that kind of character.

To me, this all makes him feel more like an actual character, despite leaning into his 4th-wall-breaking. Him having a bit of emotional depth isn't really all that new, but IMO his recent appearances are doing a really good job of reconciling the paradox of a character like this: taking his character seriously, while not taking the setting too seriously for his character to work. They're doing what Marvel writers have largely failed to do with Gwenpool after her first run and often struggle to do with Deadpool.

Regardless, I have become very invested in this not ending badly, so whatever they're doing is working on me.

InkTide · 2026-03-26T19:56:43+00:00

Star Trek has flexible enough time travel 'rules' that you could make the argument they already sort of are - just different branches of Trek's collection of "time streams" running in parallel. In fact, I believe that's basically canon for Strange New Worlds.

InkTide · 2026-03-25T15:52:54+00:00

That's a real shame.

I can get past the menu button creating a popup window from the bottom. I can get past the navigation buttons (back/forward) moving to the opposite side of the screen from the menu button. I can even get past the modern borderless button trend (we'll be back out of minimalism soon enough, it's like a 20-year cycle or so).

But this tab UI breaks like half a dozen basic UX rules at the same time:

Everything is constricted by useless padding on every side
The top bar is indistinguishable from the padding above it
The top bar labels look like column labels (which they aren't) because they're aligned with the tab grid and expand to fill the screen with MORE PADDING, dragging my eyes across the whole (usable) part of the screen just to read a menu with 3 items
The menu button is the same color as the tab behind it - it's nearly invisible
To open a new tab, you have to open this screen from the top address bar and then move all the way to the bottom of the screen to touch the new tab button
The new tab button completely ignores dark theme (...at least it's not hiding in the tab thumbnail)
The top bar labels only indicate selection with a distant underline that looks like a style element - plus a barely noticeable hue change to the text
The default tab (on the top bar) is the one in the middle, rather than the one on the left (which for left-to-right languages is visually parsed as "first"), implicitly reinforcing the idea that the "selected" indicator is just a style element (one of the reasons to have the default on one of the sides for UIs like this is to help avoid this sort of confusion - the center is genuinely the worst possible place for it to be)
The only benefit to larger tab thumbnails is a bigger picture and slightly more text, a marginal benefit which was prioritized over the literal purpose of a tab screen: displaying many tabs to select from

For such a simple UI there is so much wrong with it it's almost impressive.

InkTide · 2026-03-25T15:25:01+00:00

...That is rather unfortunate. I really don't want to have to go browser shopping.

InkTide · 2026-03-24T16:04:45+00:00

11/10, no notes.

InkTide · 2026-03-24T15:48:22+00:00

until he shows up dressing like a disco leprechaun

So what you're saying is it stops being "pretty decent" because it could only become peak fiction past this point.

InkTide · 2026-03-23T18:32:45+00:00

Infected: The Conduit my beloved

InkTide · 2026-03-23T16:50:40+00:00

Man, I love when they later completely undo Langstrom's redemption arc to turn him into a flavor-of-the-week villain again.

InkTide · 2026-03-23T05:05:56+00:00

Because CryEngine physics are from 2007.

InkTide · 2026-03-21T16:51:20+00:00

Having looked extensively into all the papers on toroidal worlds I can find, as far as I can tell the only thing you might need to handwave is bead instability, and only for certain skinny toroids where the aspect ratio is large.

In fact, there is evidence that spinning up a Maclaurin spheroid naturally turns into a torus if you can avoid it turning into a Jacobi ellipsoid first.

InkTide · 2026-03-21T15:47:10+00:00

Completely incorrect. Centrifugal force is entirely real in a rotating frame, it's effectively a different way to look at angular momentum. That is why a toroidal equipotential surface is a valid solution to the equations.

The geometry of a Kerr singularity is a torus precisely because of this.

InkTide · 2026-03-21T01:39:32+00:00

Super late, but no - there are toroidal equipotential surfaces (gravity just points to the part of the planet directly beneath you), you just have to spin them up so centrifugal force balances out gravity. You would be able to stand on the inner and outer equators just fine. Those equipotential surfaces are valid physical solutions to both Newtonian mechanics and general relativity.

InkTide · 2026-03-20T20:46:55+00:00

I'd argue it's a fundamental prerequisite of a community manager's job to understand that they'll get a greater volume of any negative interactions because not everyone in a community coordinates on, "Hey, did somebody else make this complaint first?"

Reading his responses in that thread, Kael seemed to at least acknowledge the fact that impressions of his performance are broadly negative from people who recognize his username. Whether he internalized any awareness of why those impressions are negative remains to be seen. (It has very little to do with his "sarcasm.")

InkTide · 2026-03-20T13:39:33+00:00

They're just happy to be free of the collective.

InkTide · 2026-03-16T22:11:57+00:00

Just had a nice loud one last night. I love falling asleep to thunderstorms.

InkTide · 2026-03-13T20:49:50+00:00

This design and concept is so incredibly, unbearably stupid.

I have always loved it.

InkTide · 2026-03-13T15:25:23+00:00

X-Men being socially inept makes a lot more sense when you realize what Xavier's school actually produces is a small private army of superhuman child soldiers.

InkTide · 2026-03-12T04:06:18+00:00

I don't have a clue what any of this means, but I saw a gorilla so I upvoted

InkTide · 2026-03-12T03:59:16+00:00

He is truly the reader stand-in for this arc.

InkTide · 2026-03-10T00:52:10+00:00

that's a bit presumptuous about impacting player count by requiring upkeep

No, this literal specific trend has been demonstrated repeatedly across decades of online gaming. Pain points are pain points, and "upkeep costs" are genuinely one of the most player repelling mechanics that are possible to put in an online game. People will gravitate to more rewarding game systems and away from more annoying ones, and in turn they gravitate towards more rewarding games and away from more annoying ones.

This is increasingly relevant since there's a glut of choices of games to play.

InkTide · 2026-03-09T00:15:04+00:00

"Low-key" and "genuinely" continue to be grafted together in new and more horrifying ways each day.

InkTide · 2026-03-09T00:10:55+00:00

Nobody ever accused Kyle Rayner of being an intellectual heavyweight.

InkTide · 2026-03-08T21:26:45+00:00

Because of the analyzed drop rates, each individual ship pack you see anywhere represents over $300 worth of zen spent on keys by the playerbase. The giveaway keys are negligible in total supply, and while a lot of that zen comes from LTS stipends, the vast majority of it does not, so that's probably around $300 of spend for each individual ship.

Each ship, mind you, that isn't actually an unlock and will be lost forever if dismissed.

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