When will the navigation buttons be unlinked from the location bar in 29.x?
I've been upgraded to 29.0.1 and I'm not very happy with the linking of the navigation buttons to the location bar. I've had my navigation buttons on the right side of the location bar for as long as I can remember and now that they've been moved back to the left of the location bar, I'm going nuts. As I often use the scroll bar on the right side of the browser, the menu is now located on the right, and many of the add-ons I use are maintained on the right side, I'm not sure why I would want the navigation buttons all the way over on the left side of the screen. It's bad UX to have these two linked, please fix.
Chosen solution
I'm not aware of any plans to undo that decision. Firefox 32.0a1 still has the Back/Forward, address bar, Stop/Reload/Go buttons as a single element that cannot be moved or modified. I don't know why you thought Firefox 29.0.1 wouldn't. Minor releases like that fix urgent stability and usability issues that weren't foreseen. See the release notes for details on what's new or changed in each Firefox version.
This change was intentional, and it went through the Nightly, Aurora and Beta testing cycles before reaching the release state. Open the Help menu and choose Submit Feedback if you want to send comments to Mozilla.
Anyway, to get Firefox set up the way you want,
- Install Classic Theme Restorer and restart Firefox when prompted.
- Open the Add-ons Manager (Ctrl+Shift+A; Mac: Command+Shift+A), then the Extensions category.
- Next to Classic Theme Restorer, click the Options button.
- On the Main tab, make sure "Movable back-forward button" is checked. You may also want to check "Hide urlbars stop & reload buttons" and "Combine stop & reload buttons". Close the options window when done.
- Right-click (or Ctrl+click) an empty area of the tab bar and choose Customize.
- Drag the Back/Forward, onto the navigation toolbar. You can also drag the Stop and Reload buttons provided by Classic Theme Restorer if you like.
- Click the Exit Customize button in the lower right corner when done.
All Replies (3)
Chosen Solution
I'm not aware of any plans to undo that decision. Firefox 32.0a1 still has the Back/Forward, address bar, Stop/Reload/Go buttons as a single element that cannot be moved or modified. I don't know why you thought Firefox 29.0.1 wouldn't. Minor releases like that fix urgent stability and usability issues that weren't foreseen. See the release notes for details on what's new or changed in each Firefox version.
This change was intentional, and it went through the Nightly, Aurora and Beta testing cycles before reaching the release state. Open the Help menu and choose Submit Feedback if you want to send comments to Mozilla.
Anyway, to get Firefox set up the way you want,
- Install Classic Theme Restorer and restart Firefox when prompted.
- Open the Add-ons Manager (Ctrl+Shift+A; Mac: Command+Shift+A), then the Extensions category.
- Next to Classic Theme Restorer, click the Options button.
- On the Main tab, make sure "Movable back-forward button" is checked. You may also want to check "Hide urlbars stop & reload buttons" and "Combine stop & reload buttons". Close the options window when done.
- Right-click (or Ctrl+click) an empty area of the tab bar and choose Customize.
- Drag the Back/Forward, onto the navigation toolbar. You can also drag the Stop and Reload buttons provided by Classic Theme Restorer if you like.
- Click the Exit Customize button in the lower right corner when done.
I haven't been participating in the beta channel for some time so I was unaware of this design decision. Based upon the amount of people who had taken issue with other items being linked to the location bar - including the navigation buttons - in previous builds, I foolishly thought a fix may be in the works. I'll add the release notes to my stack of reading material in the future.
Thank you again for the instructions on how to revert, I much prefer the flexibility of the "Classic Theme." I will submit feedback as well as I assume that the ability to revert to the classic theme is only temporary as the luddites such as myself are slowly converted to the more restrictive, new theme.
b3nmo wrote:
I assume that the ability to revert to the classic theme is only temporary
Mozilla doesn't have any connection to the Classic Theme Restorer add-on (well, aside from hosting it and having a user-edited support article about it). As with all add-ons, it will continue working for as long as its author supports it.