Recover old visual behaviour of Firefox and Thunderbird ?

[DoubleHP]

My computer crashed today, and after reboot, Firefox and TB had completely changed. From memory, I had rebooted 3 days ago, so the change is recent. I did not update anything, but some updates may have been forced by some daily or weekly system auto updates. Issues are:
- firefox changed the visual of tabs, making individual tabs much harder to distinguish; the box decoration around each tab have gone away, so they are visually merged with the upper menu bar, and, all merged together horizontally. (only current tab is properly boxed).
- Thunderbird moved the top menu bar to the left, now has unreachable buttons at the bottom due to negative interactions with other menus and window manager => tried many forums, but all changes to ./chrome/userChrome.css are ignored.
- the quick filter button was moved from the toolbar to an individual bar, adding one new line above message list, reducing the vertical space for content
- new management of borders have negative interactions with window manager (tried both options, with and without decoration, both are ... BAD). making it impossible for window manager to properly resize window magnet to other windows
- there are large sensibility zones for decoration management catched by TB that make some buttons unreachable in the left bar, and the window manager gadgets i have below (quick launch and desktop management)
- there is a new sensibility zone between the top menu bar and the top decoration of windows that give access to some window manager menu, useless at this place, and it reduced the vertical sensibility zone of the buttons, making the click box smaller, and reducing the effective size of buttons, making them harder to click
- the unread message count which used to be a nice light blue is now white in a dark grey box, catching the eye more than necessary, slowing me down, and increasing my brain work to focus on what i need to do. also this value is unconsistent; my inbox is curretly shown with 411 total messages, and 630 unread. If i unfold the folder in left column, it seems i have only 89 unread in inbox, and 2 in one subflder, but, to me, 89+2 is not equal to 630.
- the file/edit/view menu bar is now BELOW the actions buttons Get/Write/Reply ...

All these changes have an intense negative impact on my work speed. They slow me down.

FF and TB had almost not changed in 20y of use, but these changes, at the same time, with so many consequences on window manager ... I can't stand it.

I have seen only one improvement (bug fix) in TV 113 vs 54: "save all" attachements works now fine from the menu under the message, and we no longer need to use Save All from top menus.

I had fixed that FF tabs issue once 10y ago, by editing some CSS file in my profile, but it was on a different system, with a different user profile.

bullseye
E17
FF 115.7.0esr
TB 115.7.0

[FreewheelinFrank]

Screenshots would be useful. From the description it could be the GUI toolkit is broken. Maybe the crash caused some damage to the system. I don't think there has been any radical update to FF or TB in the last few days: both seem to have been at 115 for a while. Anyway, a picture is worth a thousand words.

[DoubleHP]

Friefox:
before: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/se ... bs-firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/a ... ab-groups/ https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/09/manag ... r-firefox/
now: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tab-stash/ https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/detail ... _tabs.html

./chrome/userChrome.css is now completely ignored.

TB: i don't have any screenshot from previous version for reference. And half issues are bad interactions with E17 about magnetism, and size of click boxes, and this can't be shown on screenshots; even videos would not help if you can't feel it physically, or never used E17 yourself in the past; you can't know how it used to behave.

Also found a new issue: if I roll up the TB windows in the top decoration, any mouse click in the place where the win used to be remains inefficient. So, TB completely broke E17. A shaded win still occupies the screen as if it's unshaded, and more (about 20 pixels below the bottom decoration).

Google shows some similar situations:
before: https://blog.mozfr.org/dotclear/public/ ... 78_rec.png
now: https://osinumterritoires.fr/outil/thunderbird/ https://itshaman.ru/news/software/vypus ... interfeisa (still list of messages on top, I don't like it on the left, but for me it's even worse, I have more lines reduving the list of messages).

[DoubleHP]

It's 20y the message list was aligned on the top message, so I always made that box half a message taller than an exact message line height multiple, so that the half line white space was a proof I was at the bottom of the list. Now, the list is aligned bottom, and the top line is shown half. I now have no way to know if i am in middle on bottom of list (plus lift is now auto hide).

I had work to do tonight. I lost 2h on just trying to stay able to work, and lost it all. Could not fix a single of all issues found 'reported above, or not). 20y of habits lost in one evening. Not something you can change at my age.

Any direct relation with my system crash is excluded, because:
- i have felt a system update in the background
- i have seen a kernel rebuild running
- after reboot, TB opened a new tab in firefox (what it had never done in 20 y) and asked me for a donation.
- /var/log/apt/history.log reports updates for FF and TB today
=> I just meant that I rarely reboot, and my laptop may get uptimes up to 60 or 90 days which sometimes make kernel bug tracking difficult when no less than 3 month past since last reboot, and 2 kernel updates came in between ( Bug#1027085 makes system unbootable ). The carsh of the day felt like Firefox not enjoying at all running live with modified libs stored on disk, a kind of crash i never had in 20y, a very specific way for X to die, obviously related to the update running behind. I usually can feel X coming to crash about 12h in advance (system getting slow, under load); this one came in less than 3mn with very different signs (corrupted video memory, corrupted pointer, something similar to using bad video drivers before 2010).

Also, many forums report Firefox ignoring ./chrome/userChrome.css since 2021.

[FreewheelinFrank]

- /var/log/apt/history.log reports updates for FF and TB today

Please quote the log extracts for FF and TB version updates.

[DoubleHP]

# cat history.log-* history.log | grep -i firefox -B2

Code: Select all

Start-Date: 2021-12-08  00:02:20
Commandline: apt install xinit gpm enlightenment xtightvncviewer mplayer eog rsync nmap libreoffice xpdf pv locate sshfs joe parted gparted xterm eterm firefox-esr rox-filer xinit gpm enlightenment task-laptop
[...]
--
Start-Date: 2022-07-11  00:23:01
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (78.15.0esr-1~deb11u1, 91.11.0esr-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2022-09-11  17:38:17
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (91.11.0esr-1~deb11u1, 91.13.0esr-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2023-05-01  16:50:26
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (91.13.0esr-1~deb11u1, 102.10.0esr-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2023-10-09  11:08:03
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (102.10.0esr-1~deb11u1, 102.15.0esr-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2024-02-11  19:48:58
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: firefox-esr:amd64 (102.15.0esr-1~deb11u1, 115.7.0esr-1~deb11u1)

# cat history.log-* history.log | grep -i thund -B2

Code: Select all

Start-Date: 2022-01-08  22:50:13
Commandline: apt install thunderbird thunderbird-l10n-en-gb thunderbird-l10n-fr
Requested-By: dhp (1000)
Install: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1), libtspi1:amd64 (0.3.14+fixed1-1.2, automatic), hunspell-fr:amd64 (1:7.0-1, automatic), thunderbird:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1), hunspell-en-gb:amd64 (1:7.1.0~rc3-3, automatic), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1), libbotan-2-17:amd64 (2.17.3+dfsg-2, automatic), hunspell-fr-classical:amd64 (1:7.0-1, automatic)
--
Start-Date: 2022-07-11  00:24:43
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:78.14.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2022-09-11  17:39:06
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird:amd64 (1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:91.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2023-05-01  16:40:59
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird:amd64 (1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:91.13.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1)
--
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Install: libotr5:amd64 (4.1.1-4, automatic)
Upgrade: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1), thunderbird:amd64 (1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:102.10.0-1~deb11u1, 1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1)
--
Start-Date: 2024-02-11  19:50:43
Commandline: /usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
Upgrade: thunderbird-l10n-en-gb:amd64 (1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1, 1:115.7.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird:amd64 (1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1, 1:115.7.0-1~deb11u1), thunderbird-l10n-fr:amd64 (1:102.13.1-1~deb11u1, 1:115.7.0-1~deb11u1)

[FreewheelinFrank]

Thank you. Please could you put output in code tags?

From the log it looks like Firefox went from 102 to 115 by a background update. If it's a change in the way that CSS is handled, you would need to ask at

https://support.mozilla.org

Looking at some of the reports there, it might just be a case of changing a folder location or a bit of deprecated code, but only the Mozilla people will be able to help you with that.

[DoubleHP]

I always ask distro first , before the upstream complains the dist changed some things.

FF: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1439545

TB: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1439546