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Will Firefox ever let us return our browser appearance to the old style we knew and loved? Or are we stuck for good with this apple styled layout?

  • 2 replies
  • 2 have this problem
  • 14 views
  • Last reply by Micha1982

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I left on holiday, to come home to find my Firefox had updated itself to a rather unsightly layout. For years I have used the classic theme restorer to make my browser look aesthetically pleasing. Every time I look up anything involving the new themes, the new layouts, I see the same questions everywhere. People want the old theme back, people want the option to revert back visually to the old style, to put the tabs "back where they belong on the bottom" and so on. So I ask, why can't we make that an official option? Why is that request constantly ignored while the visuals keep decaying into the unsightly layout that is reminiscent of school work, utterly devoid of personality. Please, give us options to individually change our layouts back to what they were. Give us better customization to personalize the experience, because sadly, customizing Firefox now feels like pulling teeth, where as over a decade ago it was so easy grade school students had their own personalized browser layouts. So for the question to answer, should anyone involved with Mozilla respond, do you have any plans to ever return to us, the users, the options to change the layout back to how we like it to look, or are we stuck for good dealing with these aesthetically repulsive layouts unless we switch to a new browser?

I left on holiday, to come home to find my Firefox had updated itself to a rather unsightly layout. For years I have used the classic theme restorer to make my browser look aesthetically pleasing. Every time I look up anything involving the new themes, the new layouts, I see the same questions everywhere. People want the old theme back, people want the option to revert back visually to the old style, to put the tabs "back where they belong on the bottom" and so on. So I ask, why can't we make that an official option? Why is that request constantly ignored while the visuals keep decaying into the unsightly layout that is reminiscent of school work, utterly devoid of personality. Please, give us options to individually change our layouts back to what they were. Give us better customization to personalize the experience, because sadly, customizing Firefox now feels like pulling teeth, where as over a decade ago it was so easy grade school students had their own personalized browser layouts. So for the question to answer, should anyone involved with Mozilla respond, do you have any plans to ever return to us, the users, the options to change the layout back to how we like it to look, or are we stuck for good dealing with these aesthetically repulsive layouts unless we switch to a new browser?

All Replies (2)

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Hi, we understand that some users may not be happy, but a lot of work has gone into the new design, and since you used CTR before, you should at least like the square tabs! Incidentally, myself and other contributors on this forum, are mostly volunteers - users like you, so have no say in the development. If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.

If the traditional bookmarks button is missing, open the 3-bar menu > Library > Bookmarks > Bookmarking tools, and click Add Bookmarks Menu to Toolbar - see Bookmarks in Firefox. If you don't see it on the toolbar, go to the 3-bar menu > Customize, and look for it in the palette, from where you can drag it to a toolbar. If the button is still missing, try clicking on Restore Defaults. Whilst there, you can also change the UI appearance in Themes and Density. More Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars.

Many other changes can be made using userChrome.css including putting tabs on the bottom. If you've never used it, take some time to understand the process - it looks daunting at first, but really isn't that difficult once you get your head around it, and you don't need to understand coding - just copy and paste any that you like!

Tutorial: https://www.userchrome.org/what-is-userchrome-css.html

Copy and Paste changes you can make -

https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/

https://github.com/timvde/UserChrome-Tweaks

https://github.com/aris-t2/customcssforfx Written by the author of CTR but you may find tricky to follow until you gain some experience with userChrome.

If your question is resolved by this or another answer, please take a minute to let us know. Thank you.

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"Hi, we understand that some users may not be happy, but a lot of work has gone into the new design" -

thats a really good reason LOL...made my day. And the reason that FF may have no users anymore in a few months if the devs at Mozilla continue to work on things noone want. Just have a look at the down-going marketshare for FF in the last months - this for sure has good reasons.

Some users...some devs should count the "old-design" and "tabs to bottom"-wishes around the net or in their own forum...