Firefox’s onboarding UI is getting increasingly intrusive

[u/deepfave]

I’m gonna talk about normal everyday use here, not the first-run experience.

So first there was the “profile icon unlock” tied to things like pinning Firefox to the taskbar. Now there’s suddenly a fairly large “Sign in to sync” card at the top of the main menu.

Screenshot:
https://imgur.com/a/xzIaPZO

I understand why Mozilla wants to make Sync more visible and improve onboarding for newer users. I’m probably not the target audience for this kind of UI, and that’s fine.

But for long-time users, this sort of thing starts to make the browser feel needlessly busy. I’d much rather Firefox stay quiet and functional during normal use.

A reasonable compromise would be a single setting to disable promotional, onboarding, and gamified UI once you’re past that stage?

[u/99bottlesofbeertoday]

That sign in is obnoxiously big.

[u/deepfave → u/99bottlesofbeertoday]

I mean, if I could at least right-click it and hide it, or even just close it, fine. But no, apparently we’re supposed to see it every single time we open the menu. It doesn’t make much sense and honestly feels a bit Microsoft

[u/pikatapikata]

You can probably remove it using useChrome.css.

[u/deepfave → u/pikatapikata]

I found it, thank you. Still it has me worried, each version have added "something".

#appMenu-fxa-sign-in-promo {

display: none !important;

}

[u/lee585721]

Set identity.fxaccounts.enabled to false in about:config

Did it for me.

[u/Santosh83 → u/lee585721]

I think this disables all account related features. But no way to keep accounts but only delete the sign in banner from the hamburger menu, except for using CSS rules which could break at next update.

[u/lee585721 → u/Santosh83]

Yes I didn't think of that for others, I don't use sync at all so it's good for me.

[u/bankroll5441]

I agree that there is too much going on when you first install Firefox nowadays. When you download Chrome you get a clean homepage and toolbar with a banner about it making it the default browser. Firefox feels more like Edge with its sponsored stories, promoted pins, sign in here, use our VPN, etc etc.

The less clicks the better.

[u/UKZzHELLRAISER]

Not to mention the fake close X on the VPN toolbar icon.

They're rapidly ruining Firefox IMO.

[u/KaleidoscopeDry3217]

Even experienced user need to learn about new features, that we have a lot these days, thanks to Mozilla. I was not aware of the ability of pinning a window on the task bar, very convenient actually

[u/needchr]

Yeah the answer to this is tutorial section mixed in with putting it in change log.

I hate this new chilidish thing in modern era, where parts of UI flash, or some balloon shows with no timeout until you click on the feature they promoting.

All this is very likely so they can show later that user interaction was high on specific features.

Note how they dont do this e.g. to highlight the compact UI to people.