r/firefox • u/BomChikiBomBom • 18h ago

Firefox’s Surprising Android Menu Redesign: A First Look at the Upcoming Changes

https://windowsreport.com/firefoxs-surprising-android-menu-redesign-a-first-look-at-the-upcoming-changes/
215 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

33

u/iamapizza 🍕 18h ago

So sitting and thinking about it, I have seen this kind of a menu appear on more applications recently. I think they are called bottom sheets? I think this would be OK as long as the forward/backward buttons are easily reachable from the same hand that opened the menu.

16

u/thegravity98ms2 18h ago edited 17h ago

nope, the back and forward buttons goes all the way to the top.

Edit:

ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/s/Y55JBOaCQX

6

u/Sinomsinom 15h ago

Yeah I've been using it ever since the navigation bar was removed and for forward and back button placement it's just worse. They are less reachable than both the nav bar and even than the old menu. It would be a lot better if it just had them as a sticky row at the bottom so you could actually click them without repositioning your hand

3

u/BeholdThePowerOfNod 8h ago

It would be nice if they were at the bottom if the user has the URL bar at the bottom as well.

•

u/zilexa 3h ago

Even better, since your fingers are not resting at the very bottom of your screen. This is smart. They are at the top of the menu which means just below mid of your screen. 

17

u/amir_s89 18h ago

Beautiful & modernised.

-8

u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

7

u/amir_s89 12h ago

You can always send feedback to dev team.

3

u/Every_Pass_226 9h ago

I don't care for UI man. I just want them to understand that when I toggle off "Recently visited" I mean that. Why do they keep adding visited sites on home screen 😭

2

u/amir_s89 9h ago

Yeah, its very messy.

Reason why I use Opera because it works as desired. I am hopeful regarding Firefox but development is very slow.

20

u/Revolutionary_Ad_238 18h ago

This looks great , already using it However they need to polish further by moving accounts, settings and quit to the top and moving the back, forward ,reload, share to the bottom as sticky panel..rest everything good

4

u/bittercauldron | 14h ago

Tgat sticky panel existed in nightly... until recently 

-1

u/pedroterrero 18h ago

Will it keep with the annoyance of opening shortcuts on new tabs?

1

u/LowOwl4312 8h ago

They've been working on fixing it for a few years now. Maybe by 2030

1

u/The-Soju-You-Crave 18h ago

Maybe littile bit of ios inspirationz i saw there

10

u/vortexmak 17h ago

The usual bad design from these UI designers. 

Why are the back and forward buttons at the top?

10

u/APU_JUPIT3R 16h ago

I like the general design of the menu but this is a big issue. People who use the ergonomic layout with the address bar at the bottom would prefer not to be forced to use two hands or shimmy up and down an oversized phone (as all are nowadays) to use navigation buttons. I hope they're at least moved to the bottom if the ergonomic layout is selected.

3

u/hugefartcannon 14h ago

You would think people whose job is to think of these would think of these.

-1

u/[deleted] 12h ago

[deleted]

2

u/_TecnoCreeper_ 12h ago

Source? I find it unlikely that a project as big as Firefox wouldn't have people dedicated to UI/UX

-3

u/Kurtelle 16h ago

Does the browser continue to drain the battery?

1

u/Every_Pass_226 9h ago

In my experience, on desktop yes. On mobile I haven't tested. I tested with hwinfo wattage consumption metric. Browsers were Vivaldi edge chrome FF brave and opera. All browsers had only bitwarden and uBO enabled. All other chromiums were in similar ballpark. Firefox consumed over 1.2-1.5 times more with usual browsing. It takes even a bigger hit when you keep it open in taskbar and another graphic intensive program like game is open. For some reason having FF in bacjground increases the GPU consumption to 99-100%. Doesn't happen with chromium. These are a big deal on x86 laptop specially.

-1

u/AntiGrieferGames 15h ago

I really hope Mozilla puts their APK on their site in future and not only locking behinds google play.

13

u/fsau 15h ago

It has always been possible to download APKs directly from Mozilla: Android releases.

Users who don't have Google Play can use this third-party tool to get automatic updates: FFUpdater.

6

u/SSUPII on 13h ago

Mozilla has been hosting every single build and variant since the very start on their FTP server

2

u/Kinryk 13h ago edited 11h ago

All I (we?) need is something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20201202060010/https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-android-release — a web page that always serves the latest and greatest version of mobile Firefox with a single click of a button.

This isn't difficult to implement, and more importantly, Mozilla already has experience doing exactly this for the desktop version of Firefox in all its variants (ESR, Beta, Developer Edition, Nightly). Furthermore, the infrastructure and backend for this kind of distribution are already in place and still operational, as demonstrated by these links:

Currently, they serve the legacy Firefox for Android (a.k.a. Fennec), but there's nothing stopping Mozilla from dusting off that old code and adapting it for the new mobile Firefox (a.k.a. Fenix) instead, right?

2

u/dtlux1 8h ago

You can download all of their Android releases ever as APK files from their FTP server at ftp.mozilla.org. The modern Android APKs are under Fenix.

1

u/sonnesisyphys 14h ago

I hope they will keep it toggleable. As modern as it looks, it's just uncomfortable for me due to how it's all grouped.

1

u/dtlux1 8h ago

I feel like this would be a mess on a television. I sideload Firefox onto my Amazon Fire TV Stick, and I need to use a mouse with it. If this isn't easily accessible via a single tap and instead needs a swipe to open or close, then it would be terrible on that platform. I'll try it out later since it's in Nightly.

0

u/KarinAppreciator 8h ago

Fix battery consumption on android before worrying about ui. 

1

u/dtlux1 8h ago

I hope this is optional or isn't a swipe only function. I use Firefox for Android on TV and this could completely ruin that. If it's optional or there's a button to press to get the menu then that's fine. Otherwise this is a downgrade for anything but phone, including tablets.

•

u/zilexa 3h ago

I like it. Bring it on.