I just updated my software on my desktop and have to say that I don’t like the new extra rounded look for the tabs and menus. Searching for ways to disable the new FF UI came up with hits for Final Fantasy as well as previous UI choices that weren’t very popular for Firefox. Even reducing it to just things posted in the last week didn’t give the answer.

But searching for “disable nove UI firefox” made the solution pop up in the AI summary. I was skeptical whether it even existed, but it worked: open about:config (literally just type that in the address bar if you never have done this before), click past the warning (be aware that just messing with settings in here can break your FF install), then search for “browser.nova.enabled” and click the button on the right side to toggle it off. Then close any FF windows you have open and relaunch it and you should see the more rectangular UI again.

Hopefully this nova disabled mode continues to work going forward. If not I might finally move to one of the forks.

Anyways, enjoy.

  • muhyb@programming.dev
    3·
    20 days ago

    So, tomorrow will be the day I try to fix my Firefox setup, again. I have heavily modified CSS and Sidebery vertical tabs. I hope it won’t take long. Definitely not in the mood for this. -_-’

    • kbal@fedia.io
      2·
      19 days ago

      Good luck! It went surprisingly well for me, still a happy CustomCSSForFX user despite it not getting updates any more. All I noticed was rounder corners on toolbar buttons (I don’t care), and one or two extra pixels of wasted vertical space beneath the url bar. The tabs and everything else seem unaffected.

      It’s tempting to imagine that this might mean Mozilla have started to care about those of us with custom CSS when they do UI redesigns, and done it in a less disruptive way. Or maybe I was just lucky this time.

      Edit: Somehow in my initial test of the new version I failed to notice that the autocomplete results in the urlbar were messed up pretty badly. The css I had to reduce the font size and hide all the other bullshit that would be in there was still working but the formatting was bad. For one thing there was a ridiculous amount of space between each item. Only took me half an hour of fiddling with css to get it back to reasonable. Not too bad but I guess it’s still a hard life being a Firefox (or Librewolf) user if you don’t enjoy css hacking. I mention it to avoid anyone seeing this in future thinking that it means CustomCSSForFX is still trouble-free despite being discontinued. It’s not, as of this latest version for my config. It used to be the easiest and best way to give Firefox a truly customizable UI.

      • muhyb@programming.dev
        2·
        19 days ago

        Thanks! It went well for me too. They brought back compact density option by the way, we don’t have to go to about:config for it anymore.

        Well, the last two UI changes were a disaster for me so I was expecting something bad honestly. This one wasn’t a headache. It was just… too round. :)