News I hate Chrome browser's new design with a burning passion. Here's how to revert to the classic one.

[Findecanor]

I still miss the triangular tabs.

Material You Too, Google!

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Switching to Firefox is hardly a solution. Mozilla screws around with settings that irritate their user base quite often, and without any concern. Having to dig around the web to find settings which may end up getting removed, to try and restore functionality or behavior to status-quo, isn't a great way to use software long term.

 

[apiltch]

The other thing I didn't mention in the story, because I'm not sure if it's just me, is that the fonts on menus and tab titles don't look as sharp in the new design. It's like they are a little blurry.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Google's new Material You design is fixing something that wasn't broken. Changing one setting reverts to the classic look.

I hate Chrome browser's new design with a burning passion. Here's how to revert to the classic one. : Read more

Another vote for Firefox.

 

[JeffreyP55]

Switching to Firefox is hardly a solution. Mozilla screws around with settings that irritate their user base quite often, and without any concern. Having to dig around the web to find settings which may end up getting removed, to try and restore functionality or behavior to status-quo, isn't a great way to use software long term.

Sounds like you have issues I have never experienced. Firefox IS the best solution.

 

[Darkoverlordofdata]

"Old man yells at clouds..."

 

[Amdlova]

My main browser on phone is brave. Desktop barely uses. When windows decide open edge I use it

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Switch to Edge, which you seem to hate with a passion for no reason, or even switch to Firefox, because Google will at some point (likely in the near future) force Material You into your life like they did with Android even though it means reduced functionality.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy, despite being called one on here, but Chromium with a Microsoft skin is Chromium with a Google skin.

 

[Brian D Smith]

BING for the Win!!
Seriously, it is growing on me...

 

[Giroro]

Well Firefox 68 can still open pages (I've opened some with Firefox 47 on old VM installs before getting it updated to current version), however, somethings don't work correct due to required security updates. Overall a 3 year old version of a browser is a massive security risk regardless of the which company made it. I've used the Firefox mobile for a while and it is alright. Some things aren't as intuitive as they could be, but I am able to use adblockers unlike in Chrome.

Its Firefox mobile version 68 where I'm particularly having problems. I believe the last version of Firefox Desktop with the better and more customizable interface is 88.0.1 from May 2021.
Chat gpt doesn't work in the desktop browser tho. I don't know what's weirder: Major pages are so unstable they can't run a glorified text box on a slightly out of date browser, or how Firefox has burned through 33 full-numbered releases in only 2.5 years.
I would love to update, but there's still no way to make the new versions work like the old versions because they killed most ways to fix the major issues through user customization. So downgrading to the newer/limited versions is a non starter for me.
Even changes to mobile as simple as switching automatically to an "open in new tab" instead of opening it in the background makes my style of multitasking (or even checking sources on Wikipedia) completely non-viable in the new versions. That's bad design choice of many.
Like on mobile, if I wanted the new tab to immediately load in and be active (and immediately be forced to scroll through my tabs to get back to the original page), I already have a faster way of doing that: by clicking on the link normally and hitting the back button when I'm done. So they essentially broke a major feature to create a slower way of doing something we could already do. Bad choice, so it's very frustrating everybody is blocked from just choosing which behavior they prefer.

It's a major pain to switch between versions too, especially on Android. So at this point I'm no longer going through the hour-long data-destroying process of occasionally updating to check if they fixed the interface (they never do), before reverting back.

Mozilla is just being a trend chasing follower, though. I have a feeling every app interface is going to continue being an inefficient, derivative cliped-corners nightmare until the covid era of bad OS design is finally ended. Meaning Google stops recycling it's worst ideas from Android 12, and Microsoft completely clears house of its Windows 11 design leads - who are either high level execs, or are continually being moved between different software products.

 

[mitch074]

Surprised to see all the "install Firefox" comments. What year is this? Firefox hasn't been good for 2 decades.

This was exactly my point. I'm not young at all but I can't imagine being this averse to change. Material design is actually great from a user experience perspective. That feeling of immediate aversion to anything new is an indicator you have an inflexible mindset and it's not exactly healthy.

If Firefox hasn't been good for 2 decades, having come out in 2004, it means it's never been good, according to you - why? You a former IE fan? You do know that before they came out with Chrome (which is a forked Safari, itself a forked KHTML/Konqueror, which was itself a "lite" reimplementation of Mozilla's Gecko engine), Google couldn't get enough of Firefox...

Firefox was one of the best browsers available (along with Opera) up until version 3 - then they got stuck on feature creep, and took a lot of time getting Firefox 4 out, and it sucked. But right then they switched to a fast release model, and by Firefox 6/7, it was again very good. If you don't want to upgrade your UI constantly, they're the last to provide a "slow" release with Firefox ESR - maintained with only bug fixes for a year.

Firefox allows me to actually block ads. Chrome is trying to prevent that. Also, Privacy mode actually disables all trackers (Privacy mode can't access 'normal mode' cookies, cache, history, or storage) and saves nothing to disk - Chrome's incognito mode still allows Google to track me. So, no dice. Finally, I can store my passwords in the cloud in an encrypted manner without having to have it linked with my email account, Chrome won't allow that.

I do some web development sometimes - I do it on Firefox, then I cross-test on Chrome. While Firefox isn't bug-free, Chrome reminds me strongly of IE 6/7 - back when Microsoft didn't want to fix bugs 'to not break compatibility'. And it causes UI sluggishness when popping up context menus in Linux.

So, yeah - I don't like Chrome, nor Chromium, nor Opera, nor Edge - the UI may change, and I don't care about that much, but the engine itself simply sucks.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

BING for the Win!!
Seriously, it is growing on me...

Cortana
Bing
"Copilot"

 

[thestryker]

I learned my lesson with the downloads flag so I'll either learn to live with the changes that don't make sense to me or move on to a different browser. Google will eventually just shut it off and no longer let you revert to better UI.

I tend to just use my Firefox, which is rather locked down, for anything with payments so switching over to it as primary isn't really an option.

I've noticed some (very few) websites don't work properly on Firefox which just reminds me of the IE6 days. This is exactly what a lot of experts warned about with the proliferation of Chromium.

 

[das_stig]

Mozilla needs to get off it's collective backsides, sack it's $6m a year CEO ???? and stop being a Chrome wannabee. Go back and rediscover the true Firefox/Thunderbird origins and give us back the secure and privacy focused browser, we all preferred to use back in the day. I would even go far as to say, go cosy up to Microsoft and develop the browser with them.

 

[LolaGT]

If the mozilla guys weren't worse jerks than google, and it(FF) had a smaller footprint and was faster, I'd still be using it. I'm not, mainly for the latter two things.
I was big into FF for years, along with greasemonkey and the plethora of scripts that ran inside my games and other places.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Even changes to mobile as simple as switching automatically to an "open in new tab" instead of opening it in the background makes my style of multitasking (or even checking sources on Wikipedia) completely non-viable in the new versions. That's bad design choice of many.
Like on mobile, if I wanted the new tab to immediately load in and be active (and immediately be forced to scroll through my tabs to get back to the original page), I already have a faster way of doing that: by clicking on the link normally and hitting the back button when I'm done. So they essentially broke a major feature to create a slower way of doing something we could already do. Bad choice, so it's very frustrating everybody is blocked from just choosing which behavior they prefer.

If I understand you correctly, your desired behavior is for "open in new tab" tabs to be opened in the background, with the originating tab remaining in focus? Particularly in the mobile/android version? Because that's exactly how things already work in Firefox Android.