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How to restore the correct look and feel?

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For whatever reason my FF 3.6.x decided to "upgrade" itself to FF12. This "upgrade" ruined the previously fine user interface, e.g the top menu bars and tabs are now in a wrong order. Even worse, the tabs *still* fail to obey my tab width settings in about:config.

Simply: How do I restore the look and feel of FF3.6.x with a single click, ie. without spending endless time on chasing kludges and workarounds to get something remotely similar?

Whose idea, exactly, was it to start messing with the look and feel of the user interface which many, many people have spent a lot of effort to make it work exactly the way they like?

For whatever reason my FF 3.6.x decided to "upgrade" itself to FF12. This "upgrade" ruined the previously fine user interface, e.g the top menu bars and tabs are now in a wrong order. Even worse, the tabs *still* fail to obey my tab width settings in about:config. Simply: How do I restore the look and feel of FF3.6.x with a single click, ie. without spending endless time on chasing kludges and workarounds to get something remotely similar? Whose idea, exactly, was it to start messing with the look and feel of the user interface which many, many people have spent a lot of effort to make it work exactly the way they like?

All Replies (5)

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You're 16 months late to this debate!

I don't know whether there is a 1-click solution to changing the UI to your preference, but you could start by right-clicking a blank area of the tab bar or navigation toolbar, and unchecking the "Tabs on Top" setting as well as turning on/off other toolbars.

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"You're 16 months late to this debate!"

The reason for this is that I declined to "upgrade" to FF4/5/6 etc when they came out so I have stuck with FF3.6. Now the support for it has stopped and it pretty much insists on upgrading to FF12, and did that on one of my computers.

I was hoping that the UI would get sorted out in this time but it hasn't. The situation is still as bad as it was a year ago: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/838486 "Why are you trying to trick me into downloading an inferior version?" I do hope that I am not yet alone unhappy with the situation.

Thanks for the tips, but if there are a number of ticks and switches to make FF12 more FF3.6-like why are they not enabled by default when *upgrading*? I have spent a lot of time customising FF3.6 to my taste and I think it is extremely arrogant to just throw that effort into bin.

And the tabs bar: I do want my narrow tabs back, NOW!

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Tab width can be modified using a style rule. You can apply style rules to the interface either in a settings file or using the Stylish extension. There also is at least one add-on that addresses this feature: Custom Tab Width.

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