Firefox’s CSS just feels very dirty, like its very tricky to figure out how to best change this or that element because of how many moving parts there are between state changes (like :hover) and how variables interoperate. And in some places to make a single change you have to change multiple variables, like if you want to change the height of the URL bar row.

I’ve spent many hours on the CSS, and each time I revisit it, I find that I could’ve wrote this or that better, and I looked for variables that the UI uses, and wonder why I didn’t find them the first time. I’ve been writing CSS on and off for 8 years now, I wonder if I’m just bad it since I’ve never done web dev full time, or it’s actually a lot of work to write good CSS.

  • @MrOtherGuyM
    4•5 months ago

    I think revisiting and finding stuff to improve is pretty normal. But I don’t view it as sign of being difficult, but just that you have now understood what you actually needed to do to achieve x.

    The only thing that is like “difficult” is that userChrome.css is a user style sheet and thus you need to slap !important tags all over and can’t use ::part() selector. These make some things annoyingly complicated.

    Well, I mean of course it’s also pretty dufficult to do some layout hackery where the intention is to break the normal layout flow by I dunno making toolbars vertical or in weird order or stuff like that. To do such things well you would have to be able to control more than just css, so if you are constrained to just using css then obviously you’ll need to come up with some weird stuff.

    All in all I think it’s not so much being difficult, but just that layout is infact a complex process and you have to specify really well what you actually want to change to make stuff happen in a way you want.