1937177 - Graduate Variant B to Default layout

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, enhancement)

Description

[Maxx Crawford [:maxx]]

• Remove "Variant A/B" class names, logic
• Move Variant B classes to default places throughout the SCSS
  • Note that Variant B shares lots of classes with Variant A, so be diligent.
• Remove Nimbus prefs for VA/VB

Questions:

• Do we want to preserve the default layout as an alternate class? For current users if they want to keep their current layout?
• Is there any sort of call out / spotlight that we want to surface for users for this change?
• Release notes?

Comment 1

[Maxx Crawford [:maxx]]

See also: https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/HNT-294

Comment 2

[Dave Glowny]

Since the FF 134 rollout, the new behavior has caused problems for users who prefer the old-style larger shortcut icons.

Somehow there should be a way for users to toggle back to the old behavior, without these new variants.

Comment 3

[BelFox]

See

• https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/firefox-134-new-tab/td-p/82999

• https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1hx412x/new_tab_shortcuts_ff134/

• Making the Firefox logo visible at all times: great.

• Widgets to the side: logical.

• More columns for cards: nice.

• Smaller shortcut icons and too much vertical space between rows: not an improvement, seems unfinished.

Please get this sorted out before rolling out in release!
This will anger users. The old shortcuts were (almost) perfect. At least offer the choice between small and large shortcut icons.

Thanks!

Comment 4

[BelFox]

Hi again,

Following up on my previous comment ... I'm not part of the layout experiment study, but when I set browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.newtabLayouts.variant-b=TRUE, there seems to be way more spacing between top site rows (if rows >1) than the 24px mentioned in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1915705 (I measured it at 80px). Especially when shrinking the size of the top site icons, this seems too much.

And answering your question "Do we want to preserve the default layout as an alternate class?", I believe many users (especially those who disable the sections below and people with vision problems) would appreciate it a lot being able to restore the old, bigger top site icons to make better use of the available space. I think you want to avoid complaints of people having readability issues with the smaller top site icons.

Thanks again for considering.