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After upgrading to FF47 on FreeBSD, there are problems with the scroll bars and the tab bar.

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  • Last reply by James

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I upgraded from (I believe) Firefox 43.0.1 to Firefox 47.0.1 on FreeBSD.

After the upgrade, I see that the scroll bars - both appearance and behavior - have been changed, and for the worse.

the fact that the scroll bar is narrower is annoying, but can be worked with. Though making a smaller space to grab the scroll bar indicator and move your viewport to where you want to be on a page is more difficult and more likely to cause frustration, it would be nice if the width could be restored.

Second, the "up" arrow and the "down" arrow used to click one line[ish] up or down have been removed. I can only see this as a decision to reduce the usability of the browser.

The major problem, and this may be a "look for a functional browser" problem, is that when you click in the scroll bar, instead of the expected behavior of scrolling up one "screen" if you click above the current position or down one "screen" if you click below the cursor, the behavior is to unexpectedly click to where the mouse cursor is. If you're on a short page, this isn't much of a problem, but if you are on a large page, the makers of Firefox have just made reading web pages incredibly difficult, as you have to fight with a narrow scroll bar to try to move an indicator a tiny bit by carefully dragging it - and in come cases, moving just a pixel or two down or up could cover several screens of a page. On any long page, firefox has just become unusable as a means of effectively reading that content.

In addition, double clicking on the blank space in the tab bar no longer opens a new tab. Instead, it does nothing.

Is there any way to get these two major usability issues addressed?

I upgraded from (I believe) Firefox 43.0.1 to Firefox 47.0.1 on FreeBSD. After the upgrade, I see that the scroll bars - both appearance and behavior - have been changed, and for the worse. the fact that the scroll bar is narrower is annoying, but can be worked with. Though making a smaller space to grab the scroll bar indicator and move your viewport to where you want to be on a page is more difficult and more likely to cause frustration, it would be nice if the width could be restored. Second, the "up" arrow and the "down" arrow used to click one line[ish] up or down have been removed. I can only see this as a decision to reduce the usability of the browser. The major problem, and this may be a "look for a functional browser" problem, is that when you click in the scroll bar, instead of the expected behavior of scrolling up one "screen" if you click above the current position or down one "screen" if you click below the cursor, the behavior is to unexpectedly click to where the mouse cursor is. If you're on a short page, this isn't much of a problem, but if you are on a large page, the makers of Firefox have just made reading web pages incredibly difficult, as you have to fight with a narrow scroll bar to try to move an indicator a tiny bit by carefully dragging it - and in come cases, moving just a pixel or two down or up could cover several screens of a page. On any long page, firefox has just become unusable as a means of effectively reading that content. In addition, double clicking on the blank space in the tab bar no longer opens a new tab. Instead, it does nothing. Is there any way to get these two major usability issues addressed?

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Never used FreeBSD however if it is like Linux in changes then there has been a big change since Firefox 46.0 Release.

Firefox 45.0 and earlier on Linux only needed GTK2 and GTK2 themes as minimum and as of Firefox 46.0 and newer it now requires GTK 3.4 or preferably newer and as a result needs a GTK3 theme.

If you have a GTK2 theme in use then Firefox can look unthemed and things may be affected like say the arrows on scroll bars be missing.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/46.0/releasenotes/ GTK3 integration (GNU/Linux only)

Modified by James