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Provide A Higher Contrast Default Theme (or Themes)
Mozilla reviewing
The new UI design in Firefox 89 reduces contrast a lot and makes it difficult to tell the edges of some UI elements, including tabs, some buttons, and entries in some menus.
When interacting with Firefox, I would like higher contrast interface elements so I can quickly and more easily identify those elements.
edited on Jun 2, 2021 by Asa Dotzler
I have changed the wording on your submission some and promoted it to the community.
Reply 3
I like to have many tabs open at once. as you can see, they just mush together. they could at least alternate in color to make them stand out!
Reply 48
Please provide more contrast. There are people who use the internet (and, therefore, Firefox) who need the contrast because of poor eyesight. Please.
Reply 57
I'm so incredibly angry- Not only at the changes to the UI which are the biggest middle finger to the visually impaired that I've ever seen in my life, but the amount of hoops that I had to jump through to even get to the point that I could "submit feedback"
Changing the default UI's background colour to pure white causes immediate eyestrain. Removing the borders from all the UI elements makes it completely impossible to discern one element from another. I couldn't find the address bar, nor tell it apart from the search bar. All my tabs are now running together like one, incredibly long megatab. Not every website or page has an icon, and it's insanely difficult to tell where one tab ends, and the next begins.
Adding some sort of border or divider to elements has been a tenet of Graphical User Interface design since the 80s or 90s. There's a reason why the upper ASCII characters contain border characters. There's a reason why this solid design philosophy has gone unchanged for 20-30 years. Because it WORKS.
Chrome has extremely streamlined tabs, and even they have vertical bars to separate elements. I've attached a screenshot of a random tab- In this example you can easily see (outlined in red), that ~30% of the tab is in "mystery meat land", where it's impossible to tell if clicking in that area will result in activating the desired tab, or its adjacent partner. That's a flat, raw, 30% drop in user experience for tabs.
And yes, I can tell that you were trying to copy Chrome with the Address Bar- I can see that the vibrance/luminosity is the exact same between the Chrome and Firefox address bars, with Firefox's colour being slightly shifted in hue and saturation. However, by default Chrome has a single textbox that acts as both search and navigation. Whereas, Firefox has at least two, not including plugins. Thusly, Chrome has no other elements to distinguish its Address Bar from, while Firefox has a direct necessity to separate its elements.
As for the bleedingly white background- Even Software Development books from the early 90's explained why off-white background were preferred instead of white. There's a reason why grey UIs became the default in Windows 95. For someone like me, who's eyes have trouble focusing, this strain to my eyes is almost immediate. And, unfortunately, I cannot use dark themes because it aggravates my migraines.
I'm not standing on a soap box to scream, rant, or rave about "Ugh, change bad!" I'm merely imploring you to implement industry standard design philosophies that have withstood the test of time for ~30 years. Add a vertical bar between the tabs. Add borders, vertical bars, or some other method of distinguishing the address and search bar from each other. Change the UI's background from pure white, to a gentle, greyish off-white like it was before.
There's no subjectivity to this. The new implementation causes real and directly measurable usability issues- Reduced usable real estate in tabs due to lack of visual separation; Increased navigation times between the Address Bar, Search Bar, and other elements in that toolbar for the same reason of lack of visual separation; measurably increased eye strain due to a pure white background, which has been researched time and time again in this industry.
These are all objectively measurable bugs that have been mistakenly added as a "feature" with the recent update. Again, I'm not asking for a reversion. Please implement these fixes as soon as possible.
Reply 114
Who ever green-lighted this change to the interface should re-examine their decision. This is terrible. As people are noting, everything bleeds together. It's terrible. Why does Firefox do this so often; they have a solid interface and then they make it a lot worse.
Reply 64
I have difficulty seeing the tabs because the surrounding elements are the same color, and even the highlight is difficult to see. Stronger contrast would alleviate this accessibility issue.
Reply 28
The blue system colour is gone to be replaced by a white-out look for the user bar and tabs. Whoever made this decision needs to revise that decision and quickly. My system colour is a Win 10 Blue, not very light grey. Extremely hard to both look at and distinguish tabs as they all merge together. Impossible to view at night.
Reply 19
I prefer some kind of separation between the tabs. But even more important, using black print description on the pretty dark grey background makes it rather difficult to read.
It is too bad so many "fixes" are made just for the sake of change or cosmetics. Leave well enough alone please!
Reply 18
Thin, Thinner, Thinnest, No choice of icon colors for a long time. Who on earth likes these. I want my colorful icons and tabs back.
Reply 18
Dark and Light are not colors. Allow users to select color of choice rather than imposing this new gray or childish themes as default choices. System theme does not follow system.
Reply 16
As someone that use FF for work, the lack of clear division between tabs makes it visually straining to use for long periods of time. Can't imagine how it affects #accessibility.
Reply 24
I LOVE the new UI that came via FF89. The improved dark mode is a blessing. One tweak I'd suggest is to take the light-colored address bar border that appears on-click in the address bar, and make it on-hover as well. This way, when I hover over it, I see the cursor position, and if I click into it, I know where I am.
I'd also suggest applying the same effect to all clickable elements in the menu. I like the default color and brightness in dark mode, so I don't make any suggestion for changing those at all. I just think it'd be nice to have the on-click effect in the address bar become an on-hover effect, and apply it universally to clickable elements in the menu.
I also agree that the tabs are a bit too flat, at least in dark mode. I'm a fan of flat UI, but a little bit of separation using a 2-sided corner outline on the left of the current tab would be great. I've attached a crudely edited example to show what I mean.
If you wanted to go really crazy, you could use two colors: one for current tab, and a different color for any other tabs. Or you could use the same color but different thickness.
Great work on the new version!
Reply 1
Il ne faut pas chercher très loin les raisons du déclin de Firefox.
Personnellement, je vais me tourner vers Edge ou chrome, qui sont bien meilleurs visuellement.
Reply 6
I use Twitter a lot and have a number of favorite Twitter accounts in pinned tabs. The new v. 89 pinned tab icons are smaller and there's no edges to distinguish them. It's a blur and a nuisance to have to scroll through to find the account I want. I suppose I'll learn to match the tiny icons with their position in relation to the address bar, but heaven forbid I add another pinned tab.
My eyes are old and I need edges on all tabs, pinned or not.
I think I'll look into switching to Chrome or another browser.
Reply 15
I would like to see the larger sized icons brought back for previously visited websites, when you press the "New Tab" button.
Reply 4
The "smooth transition" between tabs is really annoying (and I haven't yet found a theme that doesn't have that smooth transition). Please add back some kind of line/marker between the tabs.
Reply 28
The interface changes make Firefox look so anemic. I am considering abandoning Firefox for Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Go back or at least provide an easy option for people to keep the former interface3.
Reply 25
Compared to the old Fiefox theme, it's now too difficult to very quickly tell which is the active tab, due to the low contrast difference. In Chrome, the contrast difference is also low but it's still easier to tell the difference compared to Firefox 89 due to the thicker folder tab design of the active tab in Chrome. Firefox has even less visual cue elements, so it needs more of a color contrast difference.
And then you add in the extra tab height that reduces the amount of vertical space you have for display content, and that is a big problem especially on 16:9 screens, ie the vast majority of desktop/laptop users.
I hope Firefox gets this right, because user interface is something Firefox needs to excel at given the proliferation of Chromium-based competitor choices available now. In my opinion, there should at least be a menu choice to choose "compact" like there used to be. Making people wade into about:config is going to turn off more casual users who can just easily just switch to Chrome and suddenly have more vertical space again. And I think the default theme should just have greater contrast again because that was one of the major advantages and differentiators that Firefox used to have.
If Firefox just visually turns into Chrome with less vertical space, why would anyone not just use Chromium and get better web compatibility to boot.
Reply 26
I used to love the way texts in Firefox tabs were clean and readable. New version 89.0 brings blur. Never asked for that. Big loss. Text is fading away, not the UX I feel comfortable with.
Reply 27
Note: Upvoting a comment on this page doesn’t update the thumb icon’s color or anything. You just cannot tell if you’ve already upvoted a comment or not. And clicking on it again will remove your upvote. This brings uncertainty to the UX.
Reply 14
Just googled “alternatives to firefox”. Just can’t stand the new UX and I need to work.
I really don’t get it. Until then and for 16 years, Firefox has been my default browser. Blurry tabs are just so obvious a pain. What happened?
Reply 17
Contrast: Tab Titles, Bookmarks, open web pages - all have become faded, dim, very little contrast. Using Bold on the Font would help, but increasing the Font size would be a bigger help for those of us who now need glasses to read the fine print
Reply 15
As a 73 year old with decreasing eyesight the change in Firefox to a reduced contrast and smaller font is a real pain. How can I get back to seeing the screen again?
Reply 26
Horrible redesign. The contrast is too high, my eyes hurt. Changing dark gray for pure black is a bad decision. Now everything is framed in bright white. And that pastel blue ..... It really hurts the sight.
It's the worst color redesign I've ever seen in Firefox; just as bad as Thunderbird, by the way.
I already changed the default theme, but it's still bad.
Reply 15
I want my old interface. Not all of us use the browser on a cell phone.
Reply 20
Having no delineation between where one tab ends and another begins is very confusing. While everything looks very streamlined, the usability has decreased immensely. I don't care if my browser is pretty. I want it to not cause eye-strain, be easy to find what I'm working with, and use as few system resources as reasonably possible.
in terms of eye-strain and use, this update is not a great thing.
Reply 20
I like the new changes, maybe you can add the theme "Mozilla old version" for those who don't like the new UI. The only thing I don't like is the way the dark/light theme works. I have been using Mozilla and the same theme since 2013. I would like to keep the image of the theme but with the dark theme, both combined. I think I just need the context menus in dark mode, to be more precise.
Reply 4
1) Try dark mode, if you can stomach it. It doesn't suffer from the contrast issues
2) You can disable the new UI, Proton, (for the most part). Google "firefox disable proton" - new articles are coming out every hour. You are not alone!
Reply 7