My 15 minutes with Firefox 29.01
1. Firefox 28: square tabs show the most text. 2. Firefox 29.01: curved tabs show less text. 3. Firefox 29.01 uses values of my taskbar to set the color of text in inactive tabs to white.
The latest version of Firefox — 29.01 — is being touted as the fastest ever. And that might be true.
At 9:30 a.m I upgraded from Firefox 28.x to Firefox 29.01.
“What the..where the hell? Holy cra… Ahhh-rrrr–gggg!”
By 9:45 a.m. I was back to running Firefox 28 — on and off my machine in under 15 minutes — that is fast!
Firefox 29.01 represents a major refresh of the popular open source Web browser. I can’t tell you what I thought of the changes done under the hood because I couldn’t get past the superficial changes in the user interface.
A dramatic Firefox update? I don’t want drama!
The new Australis user interface attempts to polish the look and feel of Firefox to a (let’s be honest) more Chrome-like finish. The most noticeable change is to the window tabs. The squarish tabs of Firefox 28.x become carefully curvaceous in 29.01. They resemble both real file folder tabs and the slanting window tabs of the Google Chrome browser.
Unfortunately I couldn’t get past those tabs.
The Windows 8 version of Firefox 29.01 links the text colour of inactive tabs in Firefox to what it perceives is the theme of my desktop windows. On my Windows 8 waffle iron that means the text in my inactive tabs is white on a white background and therefore invisible.
Windows 8 grants users the ability to apply global theme changes so that changing the directory window colour style also changes the colour of the taskbar along the bottom of the desktop.
Instead I used a registry hack (that no longer works in 8.1 by the way) so I could have a black taskbar with white text independent of the style of my directory windows, which have black text on a white background.
This bug in Firefox 29.01 — tabs not visible with dark themes under Windows 8.1 — was supposed to have been fixed a week ago and perhaps it was but my hack confuses the fix, giving me the white type of my taskbar against the white background of my directory windows.
It’s so disruptive to useability that I had to downgrade back to Firefox 28. Fortunately that’s easy to do.
The real problem is Firefox sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.
Mozilla, the developers of Firefox, have no business hooking in to my desktop settings. Firefox is an application running on top of my operating system. It is not part of the operating system.
I don’t want the Windows 8 version of Firefox to look substantially different than other versions. I value that Firefox provides a nearly identical user experience across all operating systems, whether Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD…whatever.
And I can’t help but feeling that the Australis UI is less Firefox and more Chrome.
I’m seriously looking at trying Pale Moon, a fork of the Firefox browser for Windows and Linux that is promising the very latest Firefox code wrapped in an interface offering “familiar, efficient, customizable user interface design.” Meaning no Australis. Click the image to enlarge it.
sqwabb 
It was hate at first sight when Iceweasel (Firefox) 29 arrived here too. Once I’d added the Classic Theme Restorer” and movied things around it wasn’t too horrible. I managed to un-Chrome most of it.
It’s a pity about that weirdness with Windows 8. My own Xfce 4.10 theme is a boring black on Motif style grey and I haven’t had any trouble with it.
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Serves me right for sitting on my duff in the clutches of Microsoft. I’m overdue to back up my Windows 8 partition and begin testing Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. I’m positive 14.04 properly supports the Ralink wireless chipset in the g6.
BTW, I liked Xfce a lot — so customizable! So easy to duplicate a Gnome 2 desktop. But Xfce means using Thunar which I do not like. it’s hardwired in so far as I could see and I could never completely bypass it.
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I haven’t had too much trouble with Thunar – but then I haven’t really pushed it very hard. I was coming to it from the Finder in OS X Tiger so by comparison it was absolutely bloody marvellous.
I remember some fruitless attempts to get Thunar running in OS X with X11. Like most non Cocoa/Carbon things it’s possible in *theory*.
I like Xfce. I think it’s mostly inertia that keeps me with it though – I’d really like to switch to something lighter weight but it’s like the old pair of trail shoes I’m wearing right now. A bit crappy and not ideal – but comfortable.
You’re right about customisability. You can go all the way from something that looks like a bare bones *box to a CDE/Motif throwback to the sort of unholy Win 98/2K meets OS X thing I run. I notice a lot of the defaults ship looking like OS X lite but that’s not peculiar to Xfce. At least with Gnome you get the OS X style integration too.
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BTW – try replicating a Xfce desktop in Gnome!
I tried it, succeeded in Gnome 2 after much effort and then swore of Gnome completely when Gnome 3 landed 😉
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