Firefox 57 Will Hide Search Bar and Use a Uni-Bar, like Chrome

Megalith

Megalith

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Mozilla is taking another page out of Chrome’s playbook by dropping an “iconic” section of its UI: Firefox 57 will use a single bar for searching and navigation. While the search bar will not be removed altogether, it is now considered redundant and will be disabled by default. Most Chromium-based browsers, such as Opera and Brave, have already adopted this configuration.

Besides dropping the search bar and launching a new browser UI, Firefox 57 will also come with other major changes. The biggest of these is that Firefox will drop support for add-ons built on its legacy Add-ons API. Only add-ons built on the newer, Chrome-compatible WebExtensions API will work in Firefox 57. Currently, about a fifth of all Firefox add-ons have been ported to the new WebExtensions API. Further, Firefox 57 will also prevent accessibility apps from spying on users.
 
Bleh, Firefox ESR 52 FOREVER!!! :D

Not liking the changes, not liking them at all so I'll be using this version of Firefox ESR for as long as it continues to function and I'll modify it as required to keep it going I suppose. There is simply no other browser in existence today (and not likely in the future either) that offers the level of customization that Firefox has offered up till version 57+ which will be out soon enough.

I won't get into the newer versions so all I can do now is hope for the best and see what happens when it happens.
 
A recent version of Firefox I tried out was pretty nice. I've been using Chrome for the last 6-7 years (?). I'm keeping my eyes on FF.
 
I'll give it a look but I've been using Chrome forever it seems. I always try new browsers but Chrome just always seems to work best at least for me needs.
 
AFAIK, the current awesome bar incorporates the search engines, so you can get rid of the search bar. I suppose that firefox 57 will remove the search bar because it is not needed at all.
 
For the record: Firefox's "Awesome Bar" has been doing this for many years now, since all the way back in the late 20-versions were released, but I'm a diehard (as someone else just kinda pointed out in another thread) and I prefer to have the separate search box. YMMV, of course, but that's my personal preference.

I'm not saying getting rid of the discrete search box is a bad terrible thing, but since it's already there then there's no real reason to remove it - disable it with an about:config setting and let the end user have the choice to have it.

Mozilla is turning Firefox into Chrome more each day and making it less customizable which is why it got popular in the first place. I hope someone at that damned company comes to their senses and points it out to all the other people working there that just don't seem to have a fucking clue. Anytime popular products CHANGE their original concepts and ideas it's always a bad thing.

New Coke, anyone?
New Pepsi, anyone?

Nope.
 
What I would like to see is navigate from the address bar allowed mulitple adresses over 20 at least for fast navigation to most visited. I count 10 addresses on the address bar. Tried to add more no luck. I like to drop down and immediately navigate to sites for current news. Unfortunately I have to click through multiple addresses which is clickbait. Even using a bulging bookmark/favorites tab wastes my precious time.
 
As someone who (mis)types in IP addresses a lot, I hope I don't have to re-enable this feature after every new version of FF, or at least I hope the option to re-enable it is easy
 
I use the unibar when searching Google but for everything else I use the search box.

However, just because it's in nightly doesn't mean it will become default or put into production.
Tiberian said:
Bleh, Firefox ESR 52 FOREVER!!! :D
Click to expand...
I get that, but FF 57 is really fast. And you can re-enable it.
 
FF used to be different from IE and Chrome (and others).

Not anymore.

FF just lost its uniqueness & identity.
 
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Hallucinator said:
FF used to be different from IE and Chrome (and others).

Not anymore.

FF just lost its uniqueness & identity.
Click to expand...
A search bar made it unique to you? I've been running the nightly build of FF57 and I think it is great. A true Chrome alternative that is pretty fast. The only downside is obviously losing lots of addon support, but hopefully that will be rectified with addon authors updating their extensions. Frankly with all the added privacy and security features of firefox plus a faster sleeker browser of 57 i don't see myself ever going back to chrome.
 
bigdogchris said:
I get that, but FF 57 is really fast.
Click to expand...

Been discussed before but, in my own testing of Firefox ESR 52 vs the developer builds of Firefox 57 I got better results with 52 so, I know they're changing a great deal of the code base but for me even now 52 is still better performing on my machines. Not sure why considering how many addons and user scripts and the heavy duty customization I've done over the years but, that's still my experience.
 
gigaxtreme1 said:
What I would like to see is navigate from the address bar allowed mulitple adresses over 20 at least for fast navigation to most visited. I count 10 addresses on the address bar. Tried to add more no luck. I like to drop down and immediately navigate to sites for current news. Unfortunately I have to click through multiple addresses which is clickbait. Even using a bulging bookmark/favorites tab wastes my precious time.
Click to expand...

in URL bar type: about:config
search for: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
set the value there to 20 and your URL/address bar drop down will show a lot more results for commonly visited sites. Hope that's what it is you meant.
 
Why don't I just install Chrome, and finish this whole thing? I like Firefox for where it is NOT chrome.
 
Tiberian said:
Been discussed before but, in my own testing of Firefox ESR 52 vs the developer builds of Firefox 57 I got better results with 52 so, I know they're changing a great deal of the code base but for me even now 52 is still better performing on my machines. Not sure why considering how many addons and user scripts and the heavy duty customization I've done over the years but, that's still my experience.
Click to expand...
Horsehockey. Unless all your machines are single core rigs then that is utter BS. The multicore nature alone would see large net gains in a lot of cases and certainly helps the program ITSELF stop being a sluggish hog, especially with lots of add ons. Sauce of this is certainly required, 57 is so much faster than 52 it's almost laughable, especially on the program responsiveness front, pages can load faster than I can lift off the mouse button at times. They arn't doing this because it makes them sleep better at night, it's real results with feedback from the community at large. Not to come off so confrontational but what you say is literally impossible from everything I can see.
 
Tiberian said:
Bleh, Firefox ESR 52 FOREVER!!! :D
Click to expand...

Silly question perhaps, but if you don't want to go with Firefox 57, then why not just stay with Firefox 56? Why stay with 52? 56 has support for legacy add-ons. Isn't the version 52 ESR build mainly meant for those still stuck on Windows XP?
 
Vercinaigh said:
Horsehockey.
Click to expand...

I just ran Octane for shits and giggles with my heavily excessively customized Firefox ESR 52 (portable, 26 addons enabled + 14 user scripts plus heavy UI alterations as well) vs Firefox 57 Nightly 57.0a1 (brand new, fresh, absolutely no alterations to anything, a pure clean extracted portable installation). I did 5 runs of each browser on a Core i7-2650m 2 core/4 thread machine with 8GB of DDR1333 and a 5400 RPM hard drive (yeah, I know, old and slow mechanical shit, but it's a Hitachi drive so it's not like it'll fail or anything) and then averaged the scores:

Firefox ESR 52: 19461
Firefox 57.0a1: 19031

Close, but no cigar, and 57 only had a better overall score in 1 instance and that was basically a handful of points, and yes I realize that a ~430 point different on a scale of nearly 20K points isn't a great deal but the point remains that in my testing (at least that test), 52 still eeks out the win.

So, what, Octane is deprecated and Google doesn't even recommend using it anymore, you say? Ok, so, since Sunspider is old and nobody cares about it then we move to Jetstream, a more modern Javascript benchmark. Again, average of 5 runs (each run has 3 iterations and it's a lot more intensive and varied so it takes much longer) results:

Firefox ESR 52: 110.1
Firefox 57.0a1: 107.3

Again, 52 eeks out the win and the different there based on the overall scale of the scores is greater than the ~430 point different from Octane's results.

As for testing the multiprocess aspects that 57 supports, I haven't found anything that does that well and in my own experience - which all of this is, so I can't speak for other people with other machines running other OSes, etc - the multiprocess stuff proves basically useless to me. Sure, my Firefox ESR is multithreaded as most software is nowadays but it doesn't have the multiprocess crap for each tab running in it's own process. But then again, my Firefox ESR hasn't had an actual crash since October 2013 according to the Firefox Health Report and this "install' is portable and has been used and upgraded with each ESR version for years now so it's all in the same folder and upgraded as new versions of Firefox ESR are released, downloaded directly from Mozilla's FTP server, extracted, then the contents shifted to the proper folder for use.

Sure, when I fire up 57 clean and fresh it sure feels like it's faster, but that's because they've made a lot of improvements in the UI responsiveness vs older versions, they're handling hardware acceleration better now as well compared to older versions of Firefox. Even with all the addons/extensions and user scripts, 52 loads in about 3 seconds on this reliable 5400 RPM hard drive, it does everything that I require as fast as I require it to happen, so, it works for me just fine.

All I've said - again - is that in my experience Firefox ESR 52 has proven to be faster in the popular and even not so popular browser benchmarks, that's it.

GotNoRice said:
Silly question perhaps, but if you don't want to go with Firefox 57, then why not just stay with Firefox 56?
Click to expand...

Because... what I have already works? :D
 
Tried the pre release of Firefox 57. It totally removed my roboform toolbar and made just about every plugin i use obsolete. I don't have a lot of use for it since I actually like my Roboform toolbar.
 
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I'm walking from PC to PC at work disabling updates.
Never go full retard. They did not heed that. I hate mozilla more than Microsoft.
 
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Tiberian said:
-Lots of Details-
Click to expand...
Fair enough but that certainly wasn't my experience. I actually went to Vivaldi over it and that's off a SSD. I miss some add-ons right now sure but they'll all get replaced as they continue to convert the legacy API functionality into the new one, which takes time. But for me it is notably more responsive, it may not actually load a page faster or not, but it responds to me telling it to do so faster, it loads up the program quicker, the UI responds faster. Everything about the program itself faster, and handles a lot more pinned tabs and open pages as well as add-ons much more gracefully. It also has some new opened media tab and pinned tab loading behaviors that are wonderful. This was needed.
 
I have never figured what people are doing that takes more than three or four tabs open and that requires the UI to work a couple milliseconds faster. Even doing research for the laboratory I only have a few tabs open at any one time, if I find something I might read later I just bookmark it and come back later. If a page doesn't load the moment I click the button it is normally because the internet connection is too slow, not the browser itself and no browser changes will speed that up.

I totally got rid of IE when they went to the combined bar because once I started searching I lost the site history which was replaced with the search history instead and if I tried to actually type in an address it would instead run it through the search engine and display the search page instead of the actual page I wanted to go to. Chrome also seemed odd to me when it first came out so I just stayed with FF. Heck I would still use Netscape Navigator if it still existed, that was good enough for me.
 
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jedijeb13 said:
Heck I would still use Netscape Navigator if it still existed, that was good enough for me.
Click to expand...

Hence, SeaMonkey, what was once Netscape Navigator and the rest of the Netscape Suite now exists and is developed as that project. Yes it's got a Firefox core but it's still pretty damned nice overall.
 
I'm still using 44, so I can run whatever the fuck useful addon I want, without having to enable it each upgrade.
FFX forcing walled garden addon bullshit can take a hike.
Any other options out there beside (((chrome))) and variants?
 
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