Why Firefox 4′s Default UI Will Suck (And Why I’m Glad I Can Change It Back)

First, I’ll let a Mozilla UI/UE apparatchik make his case:

Now, let me show you the most recent nightly build (4.0-Beta 2-Preview 64-bit under Win7 64-bit) in its default UI config with five of my favorite sites open in tabs.  These screenshots are cropped, but click each image to view its full and complete size:

The same thing when I tell the menu bar to show permanently and uncheck tabs-on-top (you’ll have to press Alt to make the menu bar show, then View -> Toolbars, make sure there’s a check next to “Menu Bar” which there is not by default, then go down and uncheck “Tabs on Top,” which is checked by default):

Now I ask thee, which looks better?

This may be just my old-fashioned self, but I need the menu bar exposed full time to be productive in a browser.  That is why I don’t use Chrome regularly, aside from its lack of useful extensions, and some other annoyances.

Also, tabs on top might benefit Chrome, but it just doesn’t strike me right in Firefox.  The back/forward/reload-stop/home buttons appear glassy and translucent only in the old style of tabs below address bar.  Incidentally, the star button between the home button and the address bar in the default config is the bookmarks button, which is necessary with the default UI config in order to access your bookmarks, now that the menu bar is hidden by default.  You can’t get rid of it unless you get rid of the address bar, too, so in that config, they’re an inseparable Mutt and Jeff.  If you use the old style, you don’t need that extra button.  I guess that’s just another example of the fuddy-duddy in me — In spite of the UI ease arguments, I really don’t find any more or less intuitive with tabs on top than the old way of tabs below the URL bar.  The other big problem is that it wreaks too much of me-tooism with Chrome, and in fact is almost the spitting image of Safari 4/5 default UI under Win Vista/7 — You know how that goes, as Phyllis Schlafly once said, an echo, not a choice.  Except in Firefox, you have a choice:  You can change it back to the old way, which I obviously do — Can’t do that in Chrome.  Google Chrome, tee hee.

You can see that I take away the default Google Search box that occupies about the right one-third of my extra-long URL (address) bar.  I use keyword searches that you can define yourself — E.g. type “g population of montana in 1980″ in the address bar if you want to search Google to find the population of Montana in 1980 — Or “b bbq restaurants in sikeston mo” to search Bing for barbecue restaurants in Sikeston, Missouri — or “wp elena kagan” to search for Elena Kagan’s entry on Wikipedia.  It makes for less mouse movement.  I like an extra long address bar because I can manipulate the URL easier on the occasions that I need to do that, and when I need to do that, they usually involve long URLs.

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