Exciting changes are coming to Android: a new navigation bar designed to make your browsing experience faster and more intuitive. We have streamlined the navigation with back and forward arrows right on the toolbar so that you can move between pages effortlessly. Plus, the new toolbar and address ba...
Less screen real estate for the website and we get... Let's see... A back button that is already handled by the system? A new tab button that saves an entire click?
Sure hope there will be an option to keep the current design...
Though if they're smart about this, they'll remove that the back gesture goes back a webpage, and instead make it go back a screen (say back into settings or home or out of the app), so it's consistent with other apps.
I hate it when it's covering up a change which is objectively bad for users. But in this case, they're looking to improve the user experience, so I do hope they're excited about it in some capacity.
Wonder I'd they'll allow reordering the buttons and possibly adding other items from the ... Menu or extensions. I kinda doubt it since customization on mobile has always been limited, but then again, the old UI had no extra space to work with in the first place.
I've been using this for a bit on Nightly, and though I'm wary of sacrificing website screen real estate to the browser, I must say that I found out that I'm using the new buttons quite often. Or rather, I had been using them a lot via the menu, and it's actually pretty nice having them easily available.
Turns out I use the forward button a lot because I've enabled gesture navigation, and often accidentally move back. Ironically I use gesture navigation to save on screen real estate, so maybe I should stop using that 😅
Other than that both refresh, share and new tab are in very heavy rotation, and it now feels like a slog to have to open a menu for them. I say, give it a shot!
Honestlly, I'm ambivalent on the navigation bar change. It is quite tall but sometimes helpful.
As for the url bar, thank GOD they put the full URL back. I think this all "better against phishing" is BS and most users aren't looking anyhow. If you need to at all differentiate it, but the domain in bold and let the rest of the url be in normal font. But for the love of cake don't have ONLY the domain. I can't even explain how frustrating that is. Please keep the full URL mozilla.
I'm pretty sure that's just Firefox for Android, but without some of the proprietary and telemetry stuff
So you'll get it around when the stable version of Firefox does
I asked for the features. Having to go in a submenu to go forward is not good. Also not hiding the browser UI when not scrolling taking up space being useless was not good. Hiding all but the domain in the URL bar when not interracting with the URL bar is also a good thing to make phishing attempts harder