Instead of just saying: "Blarrrggh I hate it", I'd like take the time to create a detailed post explaining why Proton has some inherent

Thoughtful and constructive criticism on Proton redesign : firefox

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Style Pass
2021-05-25 06:30:05

Instead of just saying: "Blarrrggh I hate it", I'd like take the time to create a detailed post explaining why Proton has some inherent UX design issues.

They look at websites. That is the primary objective a browser - to view websites. The UI should be unobtrusive and devote as much screen area to displaying content as possible. The UI elements you do see should be able to quickly and clearly communicate important information at a glance.

The Proton interface unfortunately makes regressions at both of these things. It seems to be prioritizing "UI" over "UX".

Let's start with the vertical height of the tabs/menu bar. It's significantly taller - why? What do we gain by having this bar taller? It's not displaying any additional information at all. The only thing it is doing is wasting vertical space. This is a huge issue in the PC space where the vast majority of systems are using 16:9 displays that are already short on vertical space. This is compounded by modern web-design switching to more vertical designs to accommodate mobile. A huge portion of new computers to this day are still being sold with 1366x768 displays. Any additional vertical space used by the browser's UI greatly reduces available website viewing space. This hurts the UX - the User Experience for just about everyone on a 16:9 display - especially low resolution users. The web is already becoming a scroll-fest on 1366x768 displays - this change makes the problem worse.

The floating tabs. This is a big UX issue. The active tab has always been connected to the "active site" going back to FireFox 1.0. This has been a universal constant across basically ALL modern tabbed browsers - Opera, Chrome, Edge, even Safari. To go against this just makes Firefox less accessible and approachable to people familiar with other browsers - especially less computer savvy people. For us computer-savvy people, it makes enough sense and we can figure out - but for many people it may not be immediately obvious that the depressed button has any relationship to the content they're currently viewing. With active the tab being "attached" to the content, it's immediately obvious that it has some connection to the actively displayed content.

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