The UI for Fenix is dated. Some things need a little bit of love and others just don’t make sense at all, like when you paste a URL, you can’t see the URL or the Paste and Paste & Go options because the system pop up gets in the way.
Material Design and by extension Android moved away from pop ups and toasts and adopted elements like bottom sheets.
The custom share sheet is a nuisance and there’s not even a way to get to the native share sheet.
Firefox for Android works, but it doesn’t look or feel like a modern browser that was designed for modern Android.
So being that Android design has evolved so much since Fenix last got a lick of paint, I’m wondering, has anyone heard of anything in the works? Seen any commits or mockups? Screenshots? A mention on Matrix or the mailing lists?
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Material Design was awesome, IMO. Really cool haptics, clean fonts, simple recognizable shapes, a UI that had style but didn’t get in the way.
Material You otoh… Oh boy. An insanely wide font, rounded corners and excessive whitespace galore so even tablets feel like 4" phones again, everything has the same color and expression and just looks the same. It’s the least design a design could be. Like they fired everyone but one intern who then just gave up.
I’m exactly with you on everything you said.
I like the concept of a unified look between apps. IMO Google hit the right spot in design. Apps should always look familiar and easy to use based on your experiences with previous apps, something which is only possible through a unified design like Material You.
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I honestly don’t remember any app that actually lost their brand or individuality. People complain that MD makes app all look the same, but the only apps that actually implement MD are the ones that don’t have a very strong UX/UI Design in the first place. Spotify, Firefox, Meta Apps and such are never actually going to implement Material Design itself, at most they are going to read the guidelines and go “yeah, that seems fair” and implement their own solutions based on Google’s idea.
tbh i just want tablet mode
Aye. At least give me keyboard shortcuts!
Mouse middle button support (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Yeah, having multiple tabs visible and slidable was a feature I loved in old firefox
I’ve given up hope. The burden of maintaining the engine has left them with no bandwidth to pursue any major UI-related improvements. Check the comments on the “Idea” I posted to Mozilla Connect
Those custom/unusual UI elements are probably there for backwards compatibility. Firefox’s latest android release supports Android 5.0, whereas Chrome’s latest release supports Android 7.0
A lot of new Android UI elements are simply missing from the older versions, especially 5.0, so Firefox re-implements them itself AFAICT. Because of this I can’t see Firefox updating the look/feel of their app, more custom components will just have worse performance on older devices as time goes on
This is not right, the material libraries are a part of AndroidX, which has the current minimum SDK version 14 (Android 4.0.1), and will soon move to minimum SDK version 19 (Android 4.4). Compose, which is completely feasible to build the UI for Firefox for Android, has the minimum SDK version 21 (Android 5.0) iirc.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the Firefox for Android simply has not prioritized adopting Material You.
Good information. Thank you for the clarification!
That’s super interesting. One of my friends on mastodon is still using Android 7, so the necessity for backwards compatibility is definitely a thing. An unfortunate thing but a thing nonetheless. That said, doesn’t Android itself provide the backwards compatibility enabling designers and developers to focus on modern apps? Otherwise wouldn’t everything just look like a throwback?
Google does this via Play Services, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same devices they’re worried about compatibility with don’t have Google Play either.
Look at the other response, all the recent UI components are available even for Android 4. Android 6 user here with no intention to ever upgrade past 7 (because of enshittification of the OS), a bunch of apps are available and working (in F-droid) that use recent UI design
Slightly off topic, but are you not concerned about OS level security threats?
I’m careful with what apps I install and what websites I visit, other than that a newer android version won’t protect me against attacks that come from the cellular network operator.
A UI refresh is needed? Maybe.
Material You? Absolutely not. Absolutely not me, and never has been.
It can have “you” in the name when the UI becomes customizable, and not just dark/light/whatever, but the silliest things everything after Material 1 (the true Material) has brought: rounded corner radiuses and margin sizes.but it doesn’t look or feel like a modern browser that was designed for modern Android
I don’t know but that’s for sure it has become as slow as what people call modern android. It’s literally slower with 0 addons than old firefox with loads of tabs and addons, which I still have in parallel.
But the things you dislike about Material You are the things that my mum loves, the larger tap areas, the ease of reading, etc.
Take Sync for Lemmy for Example or Auxio, these are beautifully designed Material You apps that look good and function well.
Ok, but I’m not your mum. I guess there are multiple demographics with different needs. I want to fit more on my screen, not less, and I don’t want to bring a 22" display with me for that purpose.
Take Sync for Lemmy for Example or Auxio, these are beautifully designed Material You apps that look good and function well.
I’m happy that you like them.
As I said, material you will only deserve it’s name when it will mandate adapting to the user. Until then, it’s just a marketing name, a huge lie.
I just want a black/oled theme
Saw someone open a PR with this fully implemented a couple of months ago.
Goddamned PM faffed about “UI research necessary before we make changes”, linked them to a bugzilla post closed in favor of a JIRA ticket only internal users could view…
And then closed the PR, denying the change. And we wonder why Mozilla has been struggling so much lately.
I’m confused, what type of research is required by Mozilla to implement an OLED friendly theme in Firefox? I don’t like them myself, but it doesn’t seem like something that needs masses of research hours.
You can read about why they have the current share sheet instead of the native one in this GitHub issue. There doesn’t seem to be activity on the issue, but with the expanded functionality of the share sheet in ?Android 14? maybe the decision can be re-evaluated.
As for the design, I don’t really see the issue. Could you share screenshots to explain the issues?
The share sheet definitely needs to be revisited. Look at what’s possible now.
Sure, you could make a new issue to start the discussion again!
Issues like this one
Can we please get bookmarks to remember your most recently used folder? Whenever I want to open a bookmark, I’m forced to start at the root folder and navigate around to find the folder and bookmark I want. If I just used a bookmark from some subfolder of my bookmarks, then I go to open a new one, the bookmark folder should be the last one I used. Instead it always starts at root.
It’s incredibly annoying. All other browsers (including Firefox on iOS) get this right. There have been multiple requests / bugs filed for this for years, but so far nothing.
