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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-07-09)
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Two months ago, I wrote a short gemlog entry about temporarily disabling Chromium's new UI. Unfortunately, with the release of Chromium 125, the methods described in that article no longer worked. To make matters worse, they added even more changes that really irked me, such as making the right-click menu incredibly huge for no reason.
While I was also skeptical of Firefox with that same article, I switched to it anyway because it is easy to install in Void Linux and it works well enough for most cases. From what I can tell, Firefox does respect the user more compared to Chromium, and it has more options for customizing the user interface, including the ability to show the menu bar.
With that said, I did run into two issues so far, which I will describe below.
This seems to be a common problem with Firefox that is documented in many places, but one more place to note this down isn't a bad thing, right?
Anyway in some environments that use X11, some fonts, such as Helvetica, look really ugly. The reason for this is that Firefox is using the bitmap fonts that are included with many X11 installations, while Chromium seems to ignore them. Those fonts are, um, not very good.
If bitmap fonts are not being used in other applications, then the easiest way to fix this problem is to disable bitmap fonts by running the following commands as root:
ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/ fc-cache -f
I did not like how tall the tab buttons are in Firefox compared to Chromium, but luckily there is an about:config option named 'browser.compactmode.show' that enables the selection of 'compact' density within the Customize Toolbar screen.
This also changes the height of the address bar, however. I do not mind that, but if one wants the address bar's height to remain unchanged, there are ways to do
so using user-provided CSS files that affect Firefox's UI. That is beyond the scope of this article, though.
It is so annoying that UI designers assume that everyone has big monitors. My desktop monitor only has a maximum resolution of 1600x900 because a bigger monitor cannot fit on my desk, and my laptop only has a 1366x768 display. I need all the space I can get, and I dislike all this unnecessary padding.
A FreeBSD thread about ugly fonts