That's awful. This is one of the reasons I use Firefox, because its UI is customisable and not massive.
Mozilla seems to be intent on taking away the power user features. I didn't even know this redesign was coming, but those screenshots look horrendous. Why are the tabs "floating" as giant blobs? The current design looks much more cohesive and less distracting.
Sad to see Firefox succumb to the "must design everything every few years" mentality.
I honestly don't get it. I mean, i also like "pretty, light" whatever interfaces, and i also use glasses - still i can easily read an information dense website and it feels way more alive to me.
Well, now I'm upset because I didn't know this setting existed, and I prefer the tighter layout!
How, exactly does Mozilla measure user engagement of these features? And if they are using telemetry, how are they accounting for the users that disable telemetry out of privacy concerns? (Which, I assume is a sizable amount of FF users)
Yeah, I had no idea about it, but flipped it on solely because of this story and I like it. I even enabled telemetry because I'm sick of stuff like this.
Personally, I hate the current fad of low-density, white-space-filled UIs. Sure, it might be suitable for some airport kiosk that I'll use exactly one, but for the things I use frequently I want their UI to be as compact and information dense as possible.
The problem is FF had once been that "1000% of all features you can imagine most of which are used by at most 1% or 2% percent of users" browser.
This was so because of the huge customizability of XUl and other parts.
But this became a maintenance nightmare the moment it was put in context with requirements like stability (there where many extensions which made FF unstable) and security (how extensions are sandboxed, how likely they can escape, what damage they can do without an sandbox escape), change (new internal engine, changed rendering pipeline etc.).
A Company of Googles size could probably have maintained it, but for FF it became increasingly more infeasible to go on like that.
So they switched to remove XUL and support mainly the parts most users use, sometimes adding new features but also removing them if they don't gain any traction in the user base.
I personally see little use for the compact density as it just removes some spacing which is mostly vertical. So (at least in my case) using compact spacing doesn't at all create more space for tabs or similar it just adds a view more pixel to the vertical axis of the websites view.
But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
> But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
That's the most baffling argument to me in this whole discussion. People invest in screen real estate and then devs decide to just fill it with more UI-chrome. How is my bigger screen an open invitation to waste it on buttons, margins etc?
But people bought those bigger screens in order to use them -- for more Web page content, more spreadsheet cells, more word processing, well, words -- not in order to not use them and have a bunch of UI designers appropriate them for whatever "aesthetic" white-space waste they feel entitled to.
I've thought this on a lot of projects. Even seriously looked for it. Haven't found much yet. There's profound staggering levels of incompetence and regression on some of these larger projects.
LOL today when i installed fresh firefox and tried to customize I found the compact density and I really love it.
I think Mozilla claim is invalid. I think its just not discoverable easy and hidden. If they give ability to setup compact density I believe many user will choose compact over fat tabs.
Mozilla has mutilated Firefox trying to chase after Chrome's market share instead of holding onto its users who already liked it. They're going to end up with no users at all.
It all started with version 37 when they decided that software freedoms didn't matter and only allowed users to install/use extensions approved by Mozilla. Then dropping their entire extension ecosystem and burning it to the ground made everyone realize what was happening. Now there is no XUL, 1/20th the amount of add-ons, and the ones that do exist don't have the power to restore features of the GUI Mozilla removes. All that's left is a relatively quick (but crashy, because low level features) chrome-clone-in-spirit.
It's also very difficult to keep two separate Firefox installations from interfering with each other, so a lot of people like me switched to using Chrome for 90% of their browsing and kept an old version of Firefox for some use case they couldn't do without.
Yeah, I've been using it pretty much since introduced.
This is surprising to me, after all the drama their telemetry has caused, they don't even know if people are using a pretty visible feature? What are they even recording then?
Also this Proton redesign looks worse in every manner. Tabs are replaced by buttons at the top. Why would there be buttons? This is just strange. Also it is huge. I am not a child.
The computing market is ordered like this, from top dog to underdog:
Smartphones -> laptops -> tables -> desktops
Smartphones tend to have their own UI and desktops are slowly but surely dying off except for gaming and certain categories of tech professionals (some developers, some graphics artists, etc.).
So that leaves the middle: laptops and tables. Which are slowly converging towards each other. Already in Windows-land many laptops are becoming 2-in-1s, both laptops and tables, so the screen is a touch screen. Tablets are moving the other way, adding keyboard accessories and multitasking features. So laptops are getting touch-friendly UIs and tablets are getting some keyboard-friendly features.
It's a slow slog which will probably continue for decades, but pure desktops will be squeezed to less than 5% of marketshare at some point.
Another disgruntled user of the compact view here. I don't understand why every design update seems to insist upon adding padding these days, but removing the option entirely feels like a real kick in the teeth.
Well, obviously the Visionary Leader wanted this feature removed. They’ll push against user feedback, quote Ford (”If I asked what the customers want, I would still be selling horses”).
We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
The thing about leadership is it only makes you the leader; a leader is no such thing without a good team.
Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
If you have romantic notions of what leaders and leadership is, then sure, that’s a wonderful definition!
Thing is, if you’re in a position of leadership, you’re a leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then you’re a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done guy and protect others in your group from fallout; this could be called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you.
The President of the United States is a leader. He’s elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader of the government’s civil service and diplomacy corps. as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if there are people in their ranks that voted for a different guy.
Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a good leader are entirely different questions. You don’t have to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be leaders.
It is an election in which members of the government and Armed Forces can expressly choose a different guy to follow and lose, whilst still having their top leader not only replaced, but empowered to replace every member in the chain of command replaced by the person they didn’t choose.
Which is totally legitimate, the President is elected through a constitutional process which is our law. That’s also why I think it makes a great counterpoint to your original assertion: you can choose who you want to follow, but who you actually follow isn’t always who you would choose.
If you join a company either because you like the CEO or you like the guy you’ll be immediately reporting to, everyone else in that chain was chosen by someone else. Your lack of choice in the matter does not absolve them of their responsibility to be leaders, the question becomes whether they have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. And if you are the CEO or directly report to him? Great! You win! Now you’re the guy others are looking up to and hopefully you have good leadership qualities yourself because people will look to you for leadership whether you want them to or not.
How many people chose to follow Jobs, though? If you got hired by Apple, you worked for him. Apple didn't have a democratic vote with every single employee every year and Jobs turned out to be the winner...
Or are you saying that Jobs wasn't a leader either?
Or maybe you mean that a leader is someone who people follow, and would choose to follow if they were given a choice?
Sorry, maybe kind of nitpicky, but I feel like you're on the edge of saying something important and accurate, but this isn't quite it.
I don’t mind looking for a better way to express the idea.
We don't call people with no choice followers usually. So I think following someone is a choice even when going where they tell you isn't.
It can be ambiguous. Some people joined Apple to work for Jobs. And he was famous for his management style. But I don't know how many people saw him as a leader and how many saw him as the boss.
> Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place.
> >The Engineering team is well aware of the community > feedback.
>
> Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now are potentially reevaluating it.
Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be reasonable.
Through I also would guess the group of people using that feature is also likely to have analytics disabled...
Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
> Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
You know, I’m generally a privacy conscious consumer and default to opting out of analytics, but if a company asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always going to pass on dragnet surveillance.
I’ve never seen this though. Perhaps I’m naive to certain business interests or statistical techniques, but it seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance gathered analytics for a product that doesn’t earn money by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by tracking users, I understand why you might not care about users who prevent it, but even then with the power of network effects I’d expect a business would at least want a finger on the pulse)
I mean, I don’t have a degree in stats, but from what I do know this is the kind of due diligence that the foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I’m just confused and someone can correct me, but I’ve come to see the selective enforcement of good statistical practices as one of the major problems in the world today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting to truth.
> It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place.
There is no maintenance cost as they are keeping the "touch" option. Unless checkboxes are somehow easier maintain than drop-downs.
> Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
It's a bit worse than even this suggests. Using any feature is correlated with having analytics disabled, because the more of a power user someone is, the more they'll use "advanced" features (anything beyond "clicking in the URL bar and typing a search term"), and obviously power users are the only people disabling analytics.
So if anything there's an all-encompassing metrics bias saying "users want fewer features and less complexity".
(tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with support for the feature)
Marco Bonardo [:mak]
Comment 67 • 2 days ago
Hello everyone.
Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker.
Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always welcome.
Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we don't like to do that.
The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback.
As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they already are) nor does it add anything constructive.
Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too" or similar.)
This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying the same thing. If they don't want that thread being spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the feature .
> This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge,
Only, If the Bug tracker would be the only source of feedback. But it isn't. It's not even meant to be a source of feedback, but a place to report technical bugs.
And if you have some people giving feedback over the bug tracker and many many more giving feedback over other channels (like HN, Twitter, etc.) then there is very little value in any [EDIT: spamming] additional feedback [EDIT: which doesn't add anything to the discussion]. And yes it would not matter if 20 or 200 people comment with "me too" in the bug tracker if they already got much feedback from other sources.
Also spamming a BUG tracker because you don't like something which is not a bug is never going to change anything and just not helpful for anyone at all. It's like a "soft"/"harmless" DOS attack on the issue of the bug tracker preventing any proper discussion, i.e. not helpful at all.
So if feedback from a small number of people is discarded for being a minority, and feedback from a large number of people is discarded for being spam, how can users make product managers understand they are unhappy with the removal of functionality?
I really wish Bugzilla had a “down vote” functionality. Right now one can only vote for a bug, not against it. Or maybe we can create a counter-bug to collect votes?
Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change
The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway
A stark and infuriating contrast from all the democratic-sounding marketing "you can help build the browser of the future/etc." doublespeak that Mozilla loves to evangelise in a lot of places to recruit developers, but then...
Something I've been saying for a long time is that there's a split in open source software, between projects that are true community projects in the spirit of open source (KDE, Deluge) and projects run by an insular organization that happens to release the source code with an open source license because it suits their interests (Android, Windows Calculator).
They both may accept contributions in theory, but in practice the latter projects are exclusively managed by a tiny group of stakeholders in service of their own interests.
Mozilla was increasingly becoming more like the latter type of organization for many years, and is now, I would argue, all the way there. Putting ads in the browser chrome was in some sense the nail in the coffin, because it's not something a community would ever have done to the browser it created and uses.
Personally, the first type of project is what I want to spend my time contributing to.
Unfortunately, nc has become a slightly less user-friendly web-browser after the HTTPS everywhere movement. It's tricky to do the math in your head before the timeout hits.
In all seriousness, very few power-user browsers exists, to the point where QuteBrowser is the only fully-functional one I can think of... Which is sad.
Brave is "just" a completely regular browser owned by someone else + a few bonus features.
Browsing is one of the most crucial software on one's system, I wouldn't trust Brave's track record with their affiliate linking, url-forwarding and blockchain sheanigans.
I use Brave on Windows and am happy with it - but I don't see how it's the "power users' choice". At the end of the day it's just Chromium with a couple of privacy- and blockchain-oriented features bolted on.
I have to assume the bean counters aren't happy with Firefox's user numbers, and they're throwing any strategy they can think of towards getting those numbers up, even at the risk of the current user base.
I want more people using Firefox, that'd be awesome, but Mozilla could really do with more compelling arguments for changes like these, and while they're at it a better approach to engaging with the community.
It would be nice to get some kind of official confirmation that the ability to add custom CSS isn't going to go away, given that the justification for dropping compact mode seems to basically boil down to it being hard to discover, and Mozilla assuming (without user metrics) that nobody uses it.
How much harder is it to discover the ability to write custom CSS? Do we know that Firefox won't apply the same logic to that feature?
given this trend of removing little usability and customization abilities here and there, one can only assume the custom CSS will be removed as well. especially seeing as its label has "legacy" right in it's name: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
they'll give some reason like "only 1% of users use it" or, "it'll take too much time to make it work with our new, annual UI redesign/overhaul"
that being said, I'm sure someone (either on github or on reddit in /r/FirefoxCSS) will have the necessary custom CSS written to reproduce as soon as the version removing it hits the stable release
I use Firefox for multi-row tabs. First it was an extension but now you can accomplish the same thing with CSS.
Of course, every major redesign of the browser breaks the CSS for multi-row tabs and I need to find people who have fixed it and hack it back together. One of these days they'll probably break it completely and I'll switch to another browser.
This! I got this feature enabled, it works fine, why remove it. How much dev work is saved by removing a compact view? Mozilla is straying further and further from the open source icon it was, death by management....
I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to achieve. They've been randomly removing features, or even plain butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile update) for several years, and all they probably achieved is to lose more and more users.
Yet with their tiny market share they aren't exactly in a position to lose users.
Exactly this: recent Firefox mobile update. It is the worst happen to software I like to use and I use it on daily basis. It went bad. And I don't understand why they removed so many helpful features. It is time to (again) depart from Firefox and choose Chromium again.
Please don't. Anything but Chrome based browsers. Chromium based browsers already have a monopoly, giving Google a huge weight when it comes to the web.
The other option is IE --- I will continue to fight its deprecation because it still works damn well for the majority of non-JS sites, and MS continues to release security updates for it (contrary to what a lot of propaganda is saying.) Of course it doesn't have all the (site-facing) features of other browsers, and especially Google's behemoth, but I'm of the opinion that the web is already too bloated and needs to stop "moving forward" anyway.
(My main browser is IE. My secondary one is Firefox.)
That's what I meant by not having as many site-facing features. But, as someone who has written and used quite a few very usable sites when HTML4 and CSS2 was the norm, maybe it's not really a problem; and writing simple code and not trying to trendchase is good for both accessibility and browser diversity:
Hey, I was around in times of not even having inline-blocks at our disposal too. It was horrible and I don't want to go back to it. I mean I don't even disagree with you entirely, but I don't really think flexbox or grid (which I know ie supports if you're willing to do the whole thing twice in two different syntaxes, which I'm not) is just a cherry on top, if anything they should have existed years before they did. Especially these days with responsive layouts being a thing, and if you don't want to just cheat and use javascript/browser detection to do it, they are pretty important to support different devices. That's where IE support can really step on your toe
by the way, I read that article at the time and opened my site in safari 6 on an old second generation ipod, and it worked hilariously well. Believe me, I'm not part of the problem, but I still can't wait for ie11 to fucking die so I can just write my layouts without having to worry about it's various idiosyncrasies, and finally use grid without impunity.
Doesn't Microsoft have an end-of-life date set after which they will only support Edge? It seems like the IE horse is guaranteed to drop out of this race.
After the Firefox mobile upgrade, I dropped Firefox on all platforms and switched to Vivaldi. So far it's pretty good. It's Chromium based too, can sync settings, passwords, etc. to all platforms and, important for me, has a built-in ad blocker on mobile (unlike Chrome).
I completely disagree, I think the new Firefox mobile is great. It's significantly faster, and while there were initially some problems with the extensions I was using, they're all supported now.
A side effect of using the Vimperator extension for many years was that it provided a stable interface unaffected by upstream UI tweaks, while still benefiting from other feature and security updates. I couldn't imagine switching away from Firefox for any reason, but when Vimperator was no longer supported, I realized I didn't like what remained and evaluated alternatives. Eventually, I stopped installing Firefox on my machines because I no longer open it.
This is a 100% failure by Mozilla foundation management.
They are non technical people who only care about own salaries and sjw issues, while ignoring their core product.
Meanwhile the developer team does whatever they want: they mostly do greenfield projects that are used to boost their CVs. Those projects get 0 users and usually are cancelled at 70% completion so nothing hard needs to be done anyway (no bugfixing which is unsexy work).
Here a developer probably does not want to code the compact option (or possibly: does not know how to do it) so they just want to remove it. Because the new firefox motto is "fuck our remaining users". Mozilla management does not care.
Then they will wonder why firefox has a 3% market share.
I want to agree, I really prefer the new layout, but everytime I open a link from another app it just hangs for at least 30 seconds and I am not on a resource constrained device.
I have no such experience on several devices and android versions. Perhaps clear cache / reinstall and see if that helps clear the bug? Otherwise it might be device specific.
I'm also surprised to see this strongly negative feedback.
For me, Firefox/Android is something I've always wanted to use very badly, because I'm a staunch Firefox desktop user and wanted the bookmarks sync, but I kept reaching for Chrome because of the superior performance and UI refinement anyway.
The major upgrade of Firefox/Android made it dramatically better on those fronts for me. And now that UBlock is back, I think it's ready for a serious attempt at switching. It definitely wasn't before.
Lots of little things that might not matter much individually, but still add up significantly when taken together:
- tabs can't be reordered any more
- bookmarks/history/recently closed tabs/top sites... are more cumbersome to access
- no "recently closed tabs" for quite a few months after the initial release
- bookmarks always force-open a new tab
- search suggestions needlessly take up more space (apparently by design, because these days information density is baaaaad), so you can't see local history/bookmark results without closing the keyboard or scrolling down
- using a search engine other than the default one requires two extra click at least, whereas previously they were directly accessible at the bottom of the screen
- Can't install search engines any more, instead you manually need to enter the correct search URL, which isn't fun (and then the manually created engine is of course lacking a proper icon)
- bookmark keywords and keyword searches aren't supported
- you used to be able to open a new tab by simply tapping the "tabs" button twice because the "new tab" button in the tabs list was suitably aligned – this is no longer the case (at least with the URL bar in classic on top mode)
- the tab queue for tabs opened from other apps doesn't exist any more
- the share sheet – you used to be able to share a URL to Firefox and then directly bookmark it or send it to another Firefox instance via Firefox Sync without having to actually open the URL in Firefox locally. Now you can't – any shared URLs are automatically opened and you need to wait for the full browser to actually load before you can bookmark/send the tab (and then you also need to close it again)
- view page source doesn't exist, not even if you manually prepend view-source: to the URL (supposedly there's an addon that works, but due to the blasted add-on policy you can't actually install it)
- can't view/browse local (HTML) files any more
- can't install themes anymore
- various small bugs introduced by the fact that this was a total rewrite
- despite having to rewrite the whole UI from scratch anyway, they didn't fix the "XKCD" bug and make long <img "title"> attributes scrollable instead of truncating them
- and probably quite a few more things I'd notice if I was actually regularly using the current version…
And of course the whole add-on thing: Even on the previous iteration of Firefox, the Webextension API implementation was somewhat half-hearted once you got to APIs that required special handling on the Android version, and the fact that this was a total rewrite hasn't helped in significantly expanding the coverage there, because instead the dev time largely had to be spent on re-implementing things.
Then there's of course that absolutely infuriating policy of only allowing a very limited selection of add-ons to be installed (unless you're on Nightly and jump through about half a dozen hoops, and even then you can only install the current version (and only the current version) of add-ons actually published on AMO). If you're lucky (or basically only using uBlock), maybe your add-on needs are actually covered by that, but the long tail of unsupported add-ons starts very early.
This also makes life more difficult for add-on developers (even if your add-on is actually one of the selected few), because you can no longer permanently install a testing version of your add-on or heaven help distribute a Beta version to your users (no, not even on Nightly and not even if the add-on is signed) – the best you get is temporary installation as long as your phone is connected to your computer and that's that.
Actually you can. You need nightly and you need to setup some account and set your extensions there. This is just so they can show you that they still work and they have disabled them because reasons. Nicely played.
The stable version of Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox for Android) also supports custom extensions through this method if you don't want to use Firefox Nightly:
Before if I was on a page and wanted to go to a site pinned on the homepage (i.e basically all the ones I use on mobile) I just had to click on the address bar which would display the homepage and I could click it, now it doesn't work, it shows nothing instead (why?) and god do I still hate it.
Also not exactly related the the new version but tab sending from desktop to mobile is basically not working these days.
I actually really like Firefox Mobile. The old Firefox on Android was a dumpster fire. But I'm one of those types that used to use Firefox Focus as my main mobile browser. My main concern on a mobile browser is that it's so difficult to deal with cookies and tracking etc. Firefox Focus really earned my trust there and I like that the new Firefox Mobile is continuing that.
My only real "complaint" is trivial and it isn't really their fault--it's that there are some dumb websites/apps that require a pass through Chrome to login and I haven't found a super quick way to do that (it's not difficult but it used to be super easy and obvious in Focus).
My main complaint about Firefox mobile is the menu locations - three dots on the upper right, hamburger on lower right, page select on bottom. With the issue being that there's nothing intuitive around what lands in the dots or the burger, so I not-so-rarely find myself randomly clicking on one or the other looking for e.g., the share menu.
It doesn't stop me from using it, but it's annoying.
Hmmm, I have my toolbar on the bottom and don't have anything in the upper right at all. Dunno what that could be. The location of the toolbar (menu/address/etc) can be set top or bottom in preferences (Settings >> Customize >> Toolbar).
I have my toolbar set to auto hide to maximize screen space for reading and bottom works better for me because when you scroll to the top, the hidden toolbar reappears at the bottom before pulling further to refresh. It seems like hiding/unhiding the toolbar at the top would be super annoying because it would either jump over the top of the page or jerk the page up and down under my finger as it hides/unhides.
(FWIW: I'm on a Pixel running Android 11 so dunno if there could be an Android version level or manufacturer overlay issue causing your menu to split, or maybe it's an iOS feature)
I used Firefox on Android on my tablet and it was perfect for my needs. Since the change, I went from using it every day to never using it. The reviews on the play store are brutal now.
The problem with Mozilla is that there aren't giving users what they want: Empowerment. Instead Mozilla wants the empowerment for themselves and to heck with giving users any control over the experience.
After the switch the reviews were extremely negative. Now looking at recent reviews it's like 50/50. There are still some people complaining about the new UI but you're not going to keep doing that months later. Those people are just gone.
The rating is increasing so the positive ratio is far higher than 50/50. There was an extremely vocal minority who left lots of negative reviews after the switch, and yes many of them may now be gone. But clearly new users are happy with it.
I have never used FF mobile, but so far no one has gone into detail about what changed about FF mobile that made it so much worse. Can you elaborate a little?
Perhaps the most disruptive change was that the update was not compatible with the vast majority of extensions. Given that, for "power users", the ability to install extensions was THE killer feature of Firefox for Android, this change was controversial.
This is what I've come up with off the top of my head, and if I was actually regularly using the new version, there'd probably be quite a few more things to add:
I've gone from a diehard Firefox advocate to not even recommending it to friends and family for exactly this reason. The amount UX churn and functionality regressions over the past half decade is absurd and a huge turnoff.
I use Firefox Beta on android. One can change about:config options to improve pivacy. There is something called 'encrypted client hello', which was discussed here on HN, which lets me access many blocked sites in my country.
I use the about:config options in this guide [1] plus enable encrypted DNS and encrypted client hello in about:config (on FF Beta android).
A few days ago, there was an HN page showcasing a cool webpage which can read the position angles of your phone (whether it's flat, inclined etc in detail). That page works well on regular FF Android. But on the FF Beta with the config options enabled as above prevents the page from reading the angles. I also have telemetry upload disabled on FF Beta, but maybe a bit something is still uploaded, idk.
Edit: If one trawls through some recent past threads, one can see that FF cares about privacy. They have official extensions to isolate sites (or cookies?) to prevent tracking, on desktop. (Facebook Container and Firefox Multi-Account container). They are working on something like per site isolation by default (Project Fission [2]). Yeah Chrome has it but then they try to log you into the whole browser when you just wanna log in to gmail. And they are not doing something scammy plus impactful like AMP, FLoC [3] like Google. These AMP links are everywhere, many times it looks like it's the official site link.
The device angle can be used for fingerprinting. I suspect that resetting the “ privacy.resistFingerprinting” preference to “false” will fix the device angle website.
For several years now it has seemed like every notable change in Firefox has been about removing a reason to use Firefox instead of Chrome. (There are certainly reasons for the opposite case, including but not limited to the fact that every single website is certainly tested to work in Chrome.)
Now, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since before it was called Firefox, and I'm quite used to it and unlikely to switch to anything else, but boy are they (at the Mozilla Foundation) trying hard to make me.
One could almost hazard a guess that Google has people inside Mozilla deliberately sabotaging the browser, to drive people to Chrome, while keeping Firefox around for the sole purpose of avoiding anti-trust lawsuits...
Honestly I really like the mobile update, the interface feels more intuitive and modern. The only complaint for me is the "recommended" plugin restrictions.
Or you know, there is a bias towards the negative for some backward-ass reason and there is this much engagement over some random clickbait UI feature, and almost none about actual technical advances in the renderer and the like that happen regularly, which is kind of saddening on HN.
It would be nice if the community would have more acceptance towards the last remaining browser fighting the good fight, with the many welcome, recent (!) advancements regarding privacy.
I don't get it. The wording of the bugzilla specifically says
> The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar" view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets low engagement.
So not only do they not have telemetry for that, they aren't even attempting to make it more discoverable to test if there's a correlation between "hard to discover" and "low engagement"?
I would use this but never knew this could be changed.
Firefox has telemetry, it just doesn't gather data on this feature. It does gather:
Interaction data includes information about your interactions with Firefox such as number of open tabs and windows, number of webpages visited, number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons and session length, as well as Firefox features offered by Mozilla or our partners such as interaction with Firefox search features and search partner referrals. [0]
I don't think telling if the compact UI was enabled is more invasive than this data.
I opt out. I assume people inclined to tweak their FF settings are more likely to opt out than those who don't. By definition, I guess. So that's gonna spoil whatever statistics you want out of this.
I wish gecko/servo were separated enough from Firefox that we had other browser options built around it, with features like native sidebar tabs and compact mode. I've tried to stick with Firefox because I don't love Google owning the hugely dominant browser engine, but Mozilla isn't making it easy for me.
Looks increasingly nice across the pond with Edgeium, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.
Is servo even still in development? I know bits and pieces of the project have made their way into Firefox, but I'm not sure where that stands after the layoffs last year.
They fired all the Servo devs. (And) probably increased their CEOs annual salary and bonuses.
At this point, Mozilla is just hell-bent on a path to completely destroying whatever's left of Firefox. It being the only non-Blink browser alternative left is no longer a valid excuse.
I've contributed to Servo, compiled it, used it, etc.
The parts of Servo that were not already merged into Firefox (like Stylo and WebRender) had no clear path to being merged into Firefox within the next few years.
I'm really, really sad that they were laid off, but in terms of the future survival of Firefox, it wasn't a catastrophic decision.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where the underdog in some area develops a kind of self-doubt about the ways they are different. Unique advantages get mistaken for liabilities and then the underdog degrades into a weak immitation.
On this note, anyone have thoughts on Waterfox and Palemoon? My mental picture of them is basically “forks of old Firefox versions” but I don’t know how accurate that is. Web compatibility issues or anything else to know about?
I can only speak for Pale Moon. It gets updated frequently, but it does have trouble with a lot of websites. I use it in conjunction with NoScript, so I'm used to the web breaking regularly, but there are sites that I can't make work correctly even opening NoScript up completely. For instance, it doesn't work with the SSO solution we use here at work. I do use it for some web browsing (I'm using it here) but I wouldn't recommend it to new users who aren't nostalgic about the old firefox.
I would say that many of the issues with Firefox for Android (Fenix) come from the fact that there are a lot of modular components that get managed by different teams. My experience is that whenever I've encountered a bug in Fenix that has a dependency on a GeckoView issue, it doesn't get fixed for at least a couple of months. Examples include the inability to copy magnet links and the inability to download images that need cookies attached to the request, like the ones for Cloudflare's DDoS protection. There is literally nothing I can do in those cases except use a Chromium-based browser. I may be biased, but in my experience having more than one repo with their own separate PRs and commit processes slows down bugfixes by an order of magnitude, even more so when they're managed by different teams.
For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.
I think that Mozilla has good intentions, but they pushed out Fenix way, way too early, which broke the experience for users of previous version of Firefox for Android. And it seems that their mobile team is understaffed and overworked. I don't blame them, since they're essentially trying to create an entirely new browser (minus the rendering engine). But should be labeled as a beta, if not an alpha, in the state it's in - not "release-ready" as the version on the Play Store. It's proven that web browsers are too important in this era to get wrong when so much of our lives depend on them. If the experience is even slightly inferior to Chrome, the average user can easily switch and never end up using Firefox again.
> For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.
Is this related to me typically not even getting the password manager popup? Or that even when I do get it, sometimes it just flat doesn't work?
I use this feature as the UI takes a lot of space, and it would be bother me quite noticeably were it removed. However, I understand that maintaining features & options can incur costs, which may not be worthwhile if they're not widely used. So I'd be happy to accept the inconvenience if I knew that I was in a minority.
Stunned to see that's not the case, and completely baffled at how contradictory and indicative of incompetence this stated reasoning is.
Same here. I also find this reasoning very disturbing and discouraging, even though I can live without this feature, and will most likely continue using FF after this change lands.
However, I understand that maintaining features & options can incur costs,
Don't be persuaded by that argument unless you have a good idea of what the actual costs are --- especially when the one making the argument is also spending what is almost certainly a lot more on new features that almost no one cares about.
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Yes and if touch mode remains a simple "x times more padding" variant (like it's today) it's a bit hard to see how ditching compact mode would save much code complexity...
Same here. I didn't know this was in Firefox, saw this article, went and tried it. I think I'll leave it that way (until the feature goes away) because I prefer leaving space for content. I use the keyboard to focus on the url bar anyway, so the smaller size doesn't hurt me.
"We built a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and never advertised it. We don't have the numbers but it seems fair to assume that nobody goes there so we'll be closing it down."
The important missing part in your analogy is that they don't even know if people use it or not!
It seems no one really read through the bugzilla ticket. Three days ago after this got attention Mozilla both added telemetry to collect usage stats [1] and plan to run an experiment with the new proton UI [2] to determine what density users prefer and make discovery easier.
This is not yet finalized/decided and a great big thanks to the Firefox devs for listening to the feedback and collecting real information before making a final decision.
I had read that that's not really true, here on HN. I think the thing is that FF refuses to implement some things they think would be bad for security and privacy. They are not saying no to all PWAs. Chrome on the other hand doesn't give a damn and is trying to make the browser an OS.
Take a look at 'encrypted client hello' on FF. I'm on FF Beta android, which supports 'about:config'. Now I can access many blocked sites because of the ECH.
This was about removing the feature (which IIRC wasn't completed yet) that would allow you to "install" a PWA. I'm as disappointed as you that they removed it, but calling it "they removed PWAs" is just FUD.
First, browser remove more and more chrome to give back space to the actual website content, then they remove the option to remove even more chrome. Oh the irony.
Firefox has been on a steady trajectory of declining usability for a while now, and I'm left with the impression that the people responsible for these decisions either have no experience in the field or have never used Firefox.
This "compact density" drama may not be a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but the paper cuts are adding up fast, and will only accelerate the migration to Chromium forks (and Chrome itself.)
Maybe it would have been more constructive to give concrete examples and suggestions for improvement, but I've done that plenty over the years and it seems it's always fallen on deaf ears. So I'm just sharing my impressions, not making statements.
Their product has been bleeding out users for years.
Everyone knows that Firefox was supposed to be "the customizable" browser. Everyone apart from Mozilla.
Mozilla wants to make Firefox a Chrome clone.
In every thread users write how they want addons and customization (especially in UI), and in every thread Mozilla apologists talk how the foundation should drop the "tech savy" group for some other group. That other group doesnt seem to materialize - they are losing users fast.
Also explain to your grandmother that the UI needs to change for 10th time just because someone from Mozilla says so. Chrome is in fact stable in this regard (although they like to change settings all the time what is same problem).
Firefox gained all the popularity in the "primitive ages" when it was the first one to offer a decent ad-blocker.
It basically spread when tech-savvy users recommended it to others ("Don't want to see those popups? Get Firefox with ad-block add-on") or straight out installed it to their relatives, because they didnt want their granny to click those ads.
Mozilla foundation works very hard to shake off this "power user" group (people who want and can customize their browser), while pursuing some undeclared group of other users. Those other users never materialized.
They probably use Chrome, because it "just works" and doesn't do the batshit insane things that Firefox tea, did repetitively.
Here is just a short list of things that Firefox did to shake off their core group (people who want to customize the browser):
* requiring a signature for add-ons, what killed many of them (many niche were not signed, since their authors didn't care about some small add on with few hundred users)
* One year later after requiring every add-on to be signed, it turned out that MOZILLA FOUNDATION forgot to renew their signature, so all add-ons stopped working... the incompetence here is incredible
* Then they "changed the technology" what meant killing all the existing add-ons. Lots of the popular ones could not be rewritten, since the new (and supposedly better /s) Firefox does not have proper APIs. Why? Because writing those APIs is hard and the Mozilla developers didn't want to do it. Please note: it is not that they work for free, they earn 200-300k USD per year, get 12month golden parachutes when fired and whole foundation burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. So dont say they didnt have the money to write a customizable browser. They just didnt want to do it (in fact we could argue that they already had it with Firefox up to version 56, but bug fixing it is not sexy; while writing new stuff that nobody wants is a great boost for your CV)
* adding things that users dont want or need - e.g. updates via telemetry, despite supposedly being the "not spying" browser
Now Firefox is basically a Chrome clone that claims to offer privacy, which it doesn't (telemetry). Also if you use it on mobile, it will kill your (last few) add-ons again. I think at some point it only allowed 7 add-ons?
Why use unstable and unpredictable turd? Chrome is disappointing (due to lack of customization, messing with address bar in order to promote AMP...), but at least predictable. So users switched. With Firefox you don't know what they will break next.
Bonus comment: go and explain to your grandmother that "new and better" Firefox team does not allow you to customize UI anymore, since API that allows to select options on right click does not exist anymore, because 300k USD per year programmers don't know how to write it.
Yes, there was that add-on to customize right click (90% of options are not needed for anyone) - and there is no such add-on in new Fireox. Classic Theme for Firefox - which made it look the same (so predictable for old people) -> impossible as well.
We are in a thread that some UI option is killed just because it gets killed.
And I talk here about random users. Power users had a lot of more niche add-ons, which did what they wanted. All those add-ons are lost now. There were thousands of them.
For those who want to use Firefox without all the Mozilla Foundation fuckups, Waterfox and Pale Moon are viable, usable, and security-updated forks who could use your support.
I don't know about the name origin, if that's what you mean, but I can say that it's a great browser, in my top five in daily use, and truly in the spirit of Mozilla before their stupidity phase.
+1 for Palemoon, they do a good job of maintaining what to me feels like Firefox, before Mozilla started making all these bizarre and unwanted changes.
The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively invisible.
When I saw this article I checked the Customize Firefox page to confirm I had compact layout enabled. I did not see the toolbar. I compared the UI density with a screenshot, and it seemed I had already set it to Compact, which I vaguely remembered doing. Puzzled, I returned to Customize Firefox, and still failed to see the toolbar.
I then checked about:config (which was also sabotaged recently to make it slower and remove features), and found browser.uidensity set to 1, so I really did have Compact density enabled. I returned to Customize Firefox, and only then, on my third attempt, did I see the toolbar.
> The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively invisible.
Exactly!
I have been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days and I had never seen this option until I read about this on HN today.
I then checked about:config (which was also sabotaged recently to make it slower and remove features),
For many years I've lamented the usability of about:config and wish they'd turn it into a tree structure and/or at least provide useful descriptions of the options (if something as space-constrained as a mobo BIOS can provide some descriptive help text next to each option in the setup screens...), only to find the next big change they did was that abomination of "designer-ism" (for lack of better term.) That felt like a punch to the face.
I'm surprised how Firefox is becoming more and more unusable, without much improvement. I live in a country that is not my mother tongue, and I'm not a fluent reader/speaker yet. I need the inline site translation feature to navigate things I'm unsure about, say government sites, tax office stuff. Firefox is not usable in such a scenario (make no attempt at convincing me, I looked far and wide for a good solution. The available plugins are not a substitution, as they trigger bot and spam filters).
Mozilla have been promising Chrome-like inline translation for a decade now, without any signs of actually working on it. I kept waiting for much of that decade, but 2 years ago I switched to Chromium. I now do not recommend people to use Firefox, even though I advocate for free software in my circle of friends and acquaintances.
Maybe this will change, but I do not really expect much from Mozilla's current leadership.
I'm in the same situation. It's not as convenient as Chrome, but if you get the Google translate function, you can right click and say "translate page". It will open up the page in Google which does inline translation. It's not as convenient as the Chrome Ui but at least it's something.
I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. There used to be an XUL extension to do this, before XUL was killed off.
Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.
Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain.
Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point, what's the sell?
Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature.
I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.
at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.
Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.
Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally.
I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.
Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.
Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
Actually not Firefox, but Konqueror. From conqueror came KHTML which was later the base for webkit which evolved in chrome and the rest is history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Uh, no? That argument would only make sense if IE were better than every alternative but died because people merely chose to not use it... in fact, it wasn't until the big lawsuits against Microsoft caused IE to stagnate and then better browsers existed that people switched to--first Firefox targeting developers / power users and then (later) Chrome laying waste to the entire field on performance--that IE was dethroned. We thereby need the same thing today: an arrow in the leg of Chrome (though I sadly don't know if we could even pull off an anti-competition suit against them with the current landscape... I am bullish always on such and I am not even seeing the argument :/) and some game-changing competition (which is hard to predict, but doesn't seem to be coming from Firefox the more they try to just emulate Chrome).
Konqueror was worse than most popular browsers of the era but users and developers did not gave up on it. It was enough for KHTML eventually evolve in webkit which eventually powered most popular browsers these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML .
People sticking to their principles and willing to use a less advanced browser just to guarantee its improvement is what gave us the fast browsers we have today.
I also use this feature. I suspected I did but I had to go and look at the settings. I took two screenshots in normal and compact density. The difference on my 15.6" laptop is very small. A few vertical pixels of spacing in the tab bar and address bars. I'd rather keep compact mode but I'll hardly notice the difference.
Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that direction.
I have noticed this trend across many different applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.
Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).
A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice.
I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.
Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path
> Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path
I accidentally discovered that the mouse's scroll wheel works for this too.
> Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).
Gtk seems to optimized for the higher-end of not-hdpi-yet displays (100-120 dpi, at @1X), i.e. 1600x900 to 1920x1080 at 14". Fullhd at this size, the sizing is great, it doesn't need hidpi support yet, which would also explain the sad hidpi support in many apps (not the toolkit! just some apps; e.g. virt-manager/spice-gtk only recently got it supported).
> In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.
That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo, and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just looked and scaled so much better.
If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have reached a tenth of its popularity.
Much of the excess padding in GTK apps comes from the Adwaita theme more than from the apps or GTK itself. After applying a GTK theme that cuts the padding down to more reasonable levels, I find that GTK apps are actually pretty nice and generally handle whitespace better than their Qt counterparts (which often go the opposite direction, packing controls too tightly or arranging them somewhat haphazardly).
Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C implementation. The myriad language bindings available for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.
There’s a number of themes that cut down padding (just take a look at the GTK Themes section of gnome-look) but two where it’s more obvious are the Nordic and Mcata themes:
Because I don't need the launcher. I start most of the programs I need on boot and they go on for weeks until the next reboot (emacs, terminals, browsers, Thunderbird, keepassx, Telegram and 32 GB of RAM.) I use a virtual desktop (a Gnome activity?) per project so I have very few windows open per desktop and I alt tab between them. One browser window per desktop, one terminal per desktop, one emacs frame per desktop, Slack, etc. BTW, I wish that desktop Slack had an option to display multiple windows. Doing it in a browser is obvious but the desktop app is better than the browser one, so I drag it into another desktop when I change project.
I run the other programs by pressing the windows key and typing their name, not every day or week. What I use my bottom bar for is to access the icons in the notification bar. Glance at the time, open or close a VPN, take a screenshot with Flameshot. I also placed the favorites menu there (some extension?) to start the file manager. I'm using Nemo instead of Nautilus because I like to predictably access files and folders with type ahead. I occasionally use the bottom bar to click on the name of a dining program and it's nice to have see them side by side as in old Windows versions.
Does Chrome have a vertical tabs mode?! Because the primary reason I use Firefox is because it _does_ have a vertical tabs mode, via use of TreeStyleTabs and some userChrome.css hacks.
IIRC tab bars are optimized for the most-common usage scenario where you only have two or three tabs open. In that case, running horizontally across the top/bottom of the screen means each tab gets to be wide-enough to show a large amount of text, maximizing the amount of context the tab can give for what it's about.
Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar has to fight with the main content for screen real-estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description text for each tab.
When you have a lot of tabs, a tab sidebar shows more per-tab context than a tab top/bottom bar does. But having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.
It’s less “having only a few tabs open at once” and more “having a few tabs per window, in many windows.” People who exclusively use tabs are rare compared to people who mostly use windows and sometimes use tabs.
Remember, the default behaviour in all major browsers is to open external links from other applications in a new window. So, if you’re the regular “go with the flow” kind of computer user who presumes the defaults are defaults for a reason — and are a bit lazy in cleaning up your windows, and you use at least one external app (e.g. a mail client, a piece of collaboration software, etc.) — then even if you yourself prefer to open tabs, you’ll end up opening new windows quite frequently as well.
And, if you don’t care where you open each new tab, you’ll just end up opening it against whichever window was most recently opened; rather than having a dedicated “tabs I opened” window.
(As a person who bothered to install the “Merge Windows” Chrome extension to replicate the feature in Safari, I genuinely don’t get these people — but they really do exist, and are even seemingly in the majority.)
Not only Firefox but AFAIK most browsers -- at least on Windows -- have interpreted "target=new" as new tab, not window, for several years now. "Open in new tab" is also the first alternative on the right-click menu, before "Open in new window".
Also, BTW, Firefox has had a Tabs menu for years now; both vertical and hides itself away automatically. (Though perhaps you still can't save any vertical space with it: AFAICR it lives on the tab bar, so if you hide that you lose the menu too.)
I recently tried to revive a Netbook. It has very limited vertical space.
I had to get rid of almost all programs that used modern GTK.
One major problem was dialogues windows, typically options setting dialogues. They were too big and the buttons were out of the screen (below the screen), because of too much white space everywhere, because of badly organised layout, and because of too many things being packed inside the same dialogue.
But the most infuriating was the bloody CSD (Client Side Decoration). They pretend it saves spaces, because it fuses a menu bar and the window bar (window manager bar).
But firstly, they made it so big that this single bar is only a couple pixels shorter than a traditional set of menu bar + window bar.
And secondly, on a traditional application, with the WM I had, I could (simply pressing one shortcut key) hide both the window bar of the current application (from the top), and the WM task bar (from the bottom), making the entire vertical space available from the current application content (including its menu bar). But with CSD, I cannot hide the window bar, since there is no window bar; so I am forced to keep their huge menu+window bar combo fusion and as a result there is less space available for the content...
> I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.
You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js:
> Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature.
They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving product feedback which are likely read by product people and not engineers fixing bugs.
Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases, preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there), their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff.
> Most sites don't work as well
Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken?
What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.
I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".
> Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken?
Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that I don't have hard data to back this claim up.
> What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.
Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla marginally more with my user data than Google.
But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right now.
> I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".
I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend.
I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web and all that).
Literally the top comment on each of these was something along the lines of "this is 1) not true 2) not a big deal"
> "Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR."
> "CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security team. The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors."
I switched to FF on Windows 10 as my daily driver a year and a half ago in order to adopt a multi-account container workflow. MACs aren't perfect [1] and overall I definitely sense that FF is not as power-efficient as Chrome, especially when in a Meet call, but overall I'm very happy with it and the power thing is not a huge issue if I'm sitting wired in all day anyway.
On FF, Spotify frequently freezes for a minute or more with 100% CPU utilization, Amazon won't play videos in higher than 720p, and a lot of sites only show alternate text instead of graphical buttons. I switched over to Brave for a few weeks, and was suprised at how much smoother major websites run on a chromium based browser.
Not when they constantly change the general way it's used. I am personally tired of having to relearn how to use a tool. Address bar, lockwise, shared passwords, to start.
Exactly. If the interface in my car or the layout of my keyboard changed constantly, and even lost functionality regularly, it would drive me crazy. Fortunately, that doesn't happen. Unfortunately, I use Firefox so my interface to the internet is an ever changing mess.
The most obtrusive recent UI change was the new tab switcher that tries to mimic the OS app alt-tab overlay bar. It was taking 30 seconds (not an exaggeration!) to load the first time I hit ctrl-tab on my fast desktop, and would randomly pause up to 5 seconds after that. It also turned what was a rapid-fire muscle memory action with an ergonomic behavior, into a slow and unpredictable chore. To top it off, it would always display full-screen, outside of my never-maximized browser window. Just glad it could be disabled.
If you work on Firefox, or are new to development -- this is not Luddism, and don't let this attitude discourage you. Let it be a lesson that you need to understand your users and not just assume that everybody uses a maximized window on a 13-inch laptop screen with all day to wait for slow code to load.
I think it's about:config -> browser.ctrlTab.recentlyUsedOrder set to false. If that doesn't work, try searching the web for "firefox disable new tab switcher" or similar.
I also saw a browser.engagement.ctrlTab.has-used key in there; didn't know the config store was also tracking usage...
The killer Firefox feature for me are multi-account containers. I haven't found another browser with that feature, and they make it SO much easier to deal with multiple accounts on the same site (Google, Facebook, AWS/GCP/Azure, etc.).
To me, they’re a worse version of People in Chrome. I had two windows open, one for work and one personal, one light one dark, easy to distinguish. Never any issue with multiple accounts.
With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container has a terrible default shortcut, and you can’t remap it to anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).
I’m sticking with Firefox because I want to support them, but I miss Chrome dearly.
With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container has a terrible default shortcut, and you can’t remap it to anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).
Just out of curiosity, have you tried creating a shortcut based on the menu name in the macOS global settings? As a Linux user who sometimes works for companies that issue Macs, that functionality goes a long way to preserving my sanity, but sometimes apps just hard-code a shortcut instead of using the OS.
My electricity provider has absolutely no trust from me after a number of experiences which I won’t describe here. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to find they’ve overcharged me. The process to deal with them in any regard is always byzantine. So, I suppose it depends on what you mean by “have to.”
I find it odd that anyone would give permission to a third party (any third party) to at will withdraw money directly from your bank account (and if I'm understanding correctly how it works in the US without even being able to set limits on it, neither in frequency nor amount).
> Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my country's biggest energy provider.
I've had similar experiences with various bills over the years (though fewer recently), so these days I default to dealing with those by 'pushing' the payment from my bank to the utility rather than having the utility 'pull' a payment from the bank.
It would be nice if the bank could poll a utility to discover the payment amount rather than having to enter the amount manually from reading the bill, but as inconveniences go that's fairly small potatoes.
> Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases [...]
Yes indeed... until not anymore. And will this be an enormous change? Oh no but an annoying one for some people, and completely switching browsers might be perceived as only marginally less familiar than just having some of your settings suddenly disappearing in FF.
This is my problem. If there was a real option to go to I probably would leave Firefox because of the things they've removed or haven't added. But then I look at the alternatives, and they are all worse.
Chrome has an addon that's closed sourced but claims to emulate containers feature from FF. I've forgotten the name since I never bothered checking it out.
> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.
Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by, but no one is going to write an article about each new feature and change.
...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.
Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to make me dislike them?
That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay $15 a month for it, maybe $25.
A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in my current position.
FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by someone.
My guess is everyone has a different definition of unbroken. And with the Chromium-monoculture one can't reliably use some parts of the web with any other browser. Or even a too-old Chromium-based browser for that matter.
Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much much much more in order to make me switch to a different browser because there's simply no competition there - everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single instantaneous crippling.
I find myself in a similar situation, they keep removing more and more features that made me choose Firefox over the alternatives for the last 15 years. Recently I've been using Brave a bit and it seems a good Chrome-based alternative, I still prefer Firefox as my main driver, but in the direction they're headed at some point there'll be just no reason to keep using it.
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.
I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.
it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle with browsers for long periods.
example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day.
It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset.
The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes.
Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.
I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site, with no distractions, that does the right thing when self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window, restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive administration and maximize useful uptime.
I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself.
https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.
it says something like "we need to restart to keep going" and you have to reload the browser, without warning, and it's hard to turn off without fucking around in about:config
They even have a special page for it. I keep it handy because this seems to be the only response anyone ever makes when I bring it up:
"Firefox has just been updated in the background. Click Restart Firefox to complete the update."
It would at least be a minor improvement if they'd open a new tab to show you that information. Instead you're refreshing the page wasting everyone's time because it doesn't always tell you that's what's going on.
IIRC this only occurs if you are using your distro's firefox package. If your package manager upgrades firefox out from under it, things break and you have to restart Firefox to get back in a sane state.
If you use Mozilla's build of Firefox and it's built-in update system I think this won't happen.
Unlike Microsoft and Apple, on Linux you're never forced to upgrade. Thus, when you do upgrade, you should really be checking what packages are upgraded. The alternative to such a page would be to require you to stop Firefox before the updates start. So it is still a trade off.
It's bad UX but how far should Firefox go out of its way to support the situation where a (from its perspective) third-party package manager just deleted all its files, replacing them with subtly different/newer ones?
I'm using two different profiles at work simultaneously with the Firefox Developer Edition. When Firefox updates in the background, sometimes new tabs just don't work anymore and keep loading indefinitely.
But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen all the time.
That’s more of an issue with the package manager that most likely deleted the actual executable underneath.
Firefox’s in-built auto-update doesn’t do so.
This actually only happens when you update Firefox through your distro's package manager when its running (or your distro updates automatically in the background).
That makes more sense because I've never encoutered this bug but my distro doesn't have a Firefox package, I use the "Windows" distro from Microsoft. Very stable and highly compatible anymore.
Unfortunately your distro decides when software updates and leaves very little in your control. Not very stable if it is updating things without your permission.
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.
I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on Chromium.
It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.
100% agree with the default layout wasting too much space. I like this user also wish there was even a more compact layout. This is most certainly a abandon software breaking change for me.
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain.
I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now wants to remove support⁰ for user.js, supposedly to save a stat() call :-/
> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout.
Ditto, I hate programs wasting space with these things. The compact design matches really good with other toolbars and stuff in KDE.
(however, there could be an option to make it bigger, for touch displays, but it should'nt the only choise)
I haven’t used Firefox since they introduced The Australis interface. I hated it. It broke all the extensions I used, the ones I developed, and took away my ability to put the buttons where I wanted. I figured if I had to learn a new browser I’d go with Chrome. Now I mainly use Edge and I really like it.
I gave up to Firefox about a month ago and switched to Vivaldi. So far I'm not looking back.
I would certainly have preferred to stick with a non-blink browser, but Mozilla won't stop remove features I like and making harmful changes.
How many pointless UX revamps have they done in the last decade? Meanwhile everyone is still waiting for the many unkept promises, including mobile extensions.
> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.
Ditto ... I am not clear why we need eight pixels' padding around the location bar and what looks like 15 pixels' padding around the icons alongside. It looks like the location bar is around 32 px on this admittedly ancient 1280x800 laptop screen and I'd be happy with 20 px.
I'm an 18+ year non-stop Firefox user and have always routinely checked out the competition (once every few years). Just did my latest comparison last night in fact. What I appreciate about a browser has changed over the years, I'm less of a privacy expert or some sort of Gecko diehard, and more about features and performance.
Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync.
Opera- dedicated search bar, with no way to set a hotkey to focus it. Disqualified as that makes it a non-power user's browser for me right off the bat. This browser's closed source and Chinese ownership does give me pause.
Vivaldi- dedicated search bar and hotkey (yay!), but no way to sync tabs with iOS.
I've already determined for a while now that Firefox (best on features) and native browsers, Edge and Safari (best on performance) were my 3 browsers of choice, and that remains unchanged. Edge on Windows 10 is truly great, and has a decent start at sync, even if it doesn't come close to how well Firefox does there. It just needs fleshed out more.
To answer your question on what the sell is, it's really dependent on the user, and native browsers have huge advantages (most people should probably just use Edge/Safari IMO), but I see Firefox as the only non-native browser worth using due to the best-in-class feature set. I'm not going to draw this post out further detailing all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for me to demonstrate how much Firefox outclasses the competition there. It's a very mature browser.
Touchscreen laptops exist, which means those who use keyboards and mice — the overwhelming majority of desktop OS users — must suffer. Always loved this logic.
480 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadMozilla seems to be intent on taking away the power user features. I didn't even know this redesign was coming, but those screenshots look horrendous. Why are the tabs "floating" as giant blobs? The current design looks much more cohesive and less distracting.
Sad to see Firefox succumb to the "must design everything every few years" mentality.
Huge text, huge icons, huge boxes, lots of scrolling, everything hidden behind sub-menus.
I honestly don't get it. I mean, i also like "pretty, light" whatever interfaces, and i also use glasses - still i can easily read an information dense website and it feels way more alive to me.
How, exactly does Mozilla measure user engagement of these features? And if they are using telemetry, how are they accounting for the users that disable telemetry out of privacy concerns? (Which, I assume is a sizable amount of FF users)
Our data shows people typically use the defaults, so lets get rid of all configuration!
I'm guessing the feedback they provided in the ticket means they will be keeping this option, thankfully
Personally, I hate the current fad of low-density, white-space-filled UIs. Sure, it might be suitable for some airport kiosk that I'll use exactly one, but for the things I use frequently I want their UI to be as compact and information dense as possible.
This was so because of the huge customizability of XUl and other parts.
But this became a maintenance nightmare the moment it was put in context with requirements like stability (there where many extensions which made FF unstable) and security (how extensions are sandboxed, how likely they can escape, what damage they can do without an sandbox escape), change (new internal engine, changed rendering pipeline etc.).
A Company of Googles size could probably have maintained it, but for FF it became increasingly more infeasible to go on like that.
So they switched to remove XUL and support mainly the parts most users use, sometimes adding new features but also removing them if they don't gain any traction in the user base.
I personally see little use for the compact density as it just removes some spacing which is mostly vertical. So (at least in my case) using compact spacing doesn't at all create more space for tabs or similar it just adds a view more pixel to the vertical axis of the websites view.
But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.) due to other reasons.
That's the most baffling argument to me in this whole discussion. People invest in screen real estate and then devs decide to just fill it with more UI-chrome. How is my bigger screen an open invitation to waste it on buttons, margins etc?
They measured screen resolution and are assuming that only people with low res screens use this feature.
And they probably don't measure those who disable telemetry.
I think Mozilla claim is invalid. I think its just not discoverable easy and hidden. If they give ability to setup compact density I believe many user will choose compact over fat tabs.
This has already happened. I'd be surprised if there were a single month they gained users over the last five years.
This is how it looks with compact https://i.imgur.com/MXppXq2.png
This is surprising to me, after all the drama their telemetry has caused, they don't even know if people are using a pretty visible feature? What are they even recording then?
Also this Proton redesign looks worse in every manner. Tabs are replaced by buttons at the top. Why would there be buttons? This is just strange. Also it is huge. I am not a child.
The computing market is ordered like this, from top dog to underdog:
Smartphones -> laptops -> tables -> desktops
Smartphones tend to have their own UI and desktops are slowly but surely dying off except for gaming and certain categories of tech professionals (some developers, some graphics artists, etc.).
So that leaves the middle: laptops and tables. Which are slowly converging towards each other. Already in Windows-land many laptops are becoming 2-in-1s, both laptops and tables, so the screen is a touch screen. Tablets are moving the other way, adding keyboard accessories and multitasking features. So laptops are getting touch-friendly UIs and tablets are getting some keyboard-friendly features.
It's a slow slog which will probably continue for decades, but pure desktops will be squeezed to less than 5% of marketshare at some point.
I have a small screen (1280 x 800) - I need things like compact density to make the screen more usable.
Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to reach out through bugzilla.
Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be removed?
We should have a name for the fallacy of ”Jobs/Ford/etc ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore users, I’m a genius”
Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the company until someone finally convinced him it was actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to back down because his team is right.
Thing is, if you’re in a position of leadership, you’re a leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then you’re a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done guy and protect others in your group from fallout; this could be called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you.
The President of the United States is a leader. He’s elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader of the government’s civil service and diplomacy corps. as well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if there are people in their ranks that voted for a different guy.
Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a good leader are entirely different questions. You don’t have to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be leaders.
A contentious election is still an election. We have words like dictator and ruler for unelected political bosses.
Which is totally legitimate, the President is elected through a constitutional process which is our law. That’s also why I think it makes a great counterpoint to your original assertion: you can choose who you want to follow, but who you actually follow isn’t always who you would choose.
If you join a company either because you like the CEO or you like the guy you’ll be immediately reporting to, everyone else in that chain was chosen by someone else. Your lack of choice in the matter does not absolve them of their responsibility to be leaders, the question becomes whether they have the qualities necessary to be good leaders. And if you are the CEO or directly report to him? Great! You win! Now you’re the guy others are looking up to and hopefully you have good leadership qualities yourself because people will look to you for leadership whether you want them to or not.
Accepting someone has power over you isn't following them. We don't call prisoners followers for example.
I think giving out titles only when people earn them encourages responsibility.
Or are you saying that Jobs wasn't a leader either?
Or maybe you mean that a leader is someone who people follow, and would choose to follow if they were given a choice?
Sorry, maybe kind of nitpicky, but I feel like you're on the edge of saying something important and accurate, but this isn't quite it.
We don't call people with no choice followers usually. So I think following someone is a choice even when going where they tell you isn't.
It can be ambiguous. Some people joined Apple to work for Jobs. And he was famous for his management style. But I don't know how many people saw him as a leader and how many saw him as the boss.
It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many "hardly used" features are left in place.
> >The Engineering team is well aware of the community > feedback. > > Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now are potentially reevaluating it.
Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be reasonable.
Through I also would guess the group of people using that feature is also likely to have analytics disabled...
Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate problem.
You know, I’m generally a privacy conscious consumer and default to opting out of analytics, but if a company asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always going to pass on dragnet surveillance.
I’ve never seen this though. Perhaps I’m naive to certain business interests or statistical techniques, but it seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance gathered analytics for a product that doesn’t earn money by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by tracking users, I understand why you might not care about users who prevent it, but even then with the power of network effects I’d expect a business would at least want a finger on the pulse)
I mean, I don’t have a degree in stats, but from what I do know this is the kind of due diligence that the foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I’m just confused and someone can correct me, but I’ve come to see the selective enforcement of good statistical practices as one of the major problems in the world today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting to truth.
There is no maintenance cost as they are keeping the "touch" option. Unless checkboxes are somehow easier maintain than drop-downs.
It's a bit worse than even this suggests. Using any feature is correlated with having analytics disabled, because the more of a power user someone is, the more they'll use "advanced" features (anything beyond "clicking in the URL bar and typing a search term"), and obviously power users are the only people disabling analytics.
So if anything there's an all-encompassing metrics bias saying "users want fewer features and less complexity".
So I did.
(tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with support for the feature)
Marco Bonardo [:mak]
Comment 67 • 2 days ago
Hello everyone.
Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker. Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always welcome.
Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we don't like to do that.
The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback.
How can you express your opinion then?
You can continue commenting in the Reddit/HN threads that made this bug viral, both are frequented by Mozilla employees. Or you can chat in real time with us, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix, and join https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill....
As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they already are) nor does it add anything constructive.
Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too" or similar.)
Highlighting quotes as such is nice ... but reading them properly is so too ;=)
This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying the same thing. If they don't want that thread being spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the feature .
Only, If the Bug tracker would be the only source of feedback. But it isn't. It's not even meant to be a source of feedback, but a place to report technical bugs.
And if you have some people giving feedback over the bug tracker and many many more giving feedback over other channels (like HN, Twitter, etc.) then there is very little value in any [EDIT: spamming] additional feedback [EDIT: which doesn't add anything to the discussion]. And yes it would not matter if 20 or 200 people comment with "me too" in the bug tracker if they already got much feedback from other sources.
Also spamming a BUG tracker because you don't like something which is not a bug is never going to change anything and just not helpful for anyone at all. It's like a "soft"/"harmless" DOS attack on the issue of the bug tracker preventing any proper discussion, i.e. not helpful at all.
1. PMs don't use bugzilla, just engineers [2]
2. Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently the engineer in question) don't like the change
3. The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway [3], they're a bit buffered from the feedback in a non-public JIRA.
4. It is the same engineers involved in the r/firefox thead as the ticket.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
[3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36
The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway
A stark and infuriating contrast from all the democratic-sounding marketing "you can help build the browser of the future/etc." doublespeak that Mozilla loves to evangelise in a lot of places to recruit developers, but then...
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Contribute
"Thanks for your interest in contributing to Mozilla! The Mozilla Project welcomes contributions from everyone who shares our goals"
In other words: "do what we say, or fuck off."
Something I've been saying for a long time is that there's a split in open source software, between projects that are true community projects in the spirit of open source (KDE, Deluge) and projects run by an insular organization that happens to release the source code with an open source license because it suits their interests (Android, Windows Calculator).
They both may accept contributions in theory, but in practice the latter projects are exclusively managed by a tiny group of stakeholders in service of their own interests.
Mozilla was increasingly becoming more like the latter type of organization for many years, and is now, I would argue, all the way there. Putting ads in the browser chrome was in some sense the nail in the coffin, because it's not something a community would ever have done to the browser it created and uses.
Personally, the first type of project is what I want to spend my time contributing to.
I miss using Firefox, but I don't miss the dread-churn of notices like this.
Brave seems more like the "consumer disliking ads/google" choice.
In all seriousness, very few power-user browsers exists, to the point where QuteBrowser is the only fully-functional one I can think of... Which is sad.
Brave is "just" a completely regular browser owned by someone else + a few bonus features.
https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
I want more people using Firefox, that'd be awesome, but Mozilla could really do with more compelling arguments for changes like these, and while they're at it a better approach to engaging with the community.
https://i.postimg.cc/6w46fmWF/image.png
How much harder is it to discover the ability to write custom CSS? Do we know that Firefox won't apply the same logic to that feature?
given this trend of removing little usability and customization abilities here and there, one can only assume the custom CSS will be removed as well. especially seeing as its label has "legacy" right in it's name: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
they'll give some reason like "only 1% of users use it" or, "it'll take too much time to make it work with our new, annual UI redesign/overhaul"
that being said, I'm sure someone (either on github or on reddit in /r/FirefoxCSS) will have the necessary custom CSS written to reproduce as soon as the version removing it hits the stable release
Of course, every major redesign of the browser breaks the CSS for multi-row tabs and I need to find people who have fixed it and hack it back together. One of these days they'll probably break it completely and I'll switch to another browser.
Yet with their tiny market share they aren't exactly in a position to lose users.
I guess the other option is WebKit which is now independent from Chrome so has influence over the direction of the web.
(My main browser is IE. My secondary one is Firefox.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25915313
It's not about the tool but how you use it...
by the way, I read that article at the time and opened my site in safari 6 on an old second generation ipod, and it worked hilariously well. Believe me, I'm not part of the problem, but I still can't wait for ie11 to fucking die so I can just write my layouts without having to worry about it's various idiosyncrasies, and finally use grid without impunity.
https://www.netsurf-browser.org
They are non technical people who only care about own salaries and sjw issues, while ignoring their core product.
Meanwhile the developer team does whatever they want: they mostly do greenfield projects that are used to boost their CVs. Those projects get 0 users and usually are cancelled at 70% completion so nothing hard needs to be done anyway (no bugfixing which is unsexy work).
Here a developer probably does not want to code the compact option (or possibly: does not know how to do it) so they just want to remove it. Because the new firefox motto is "fuck our remaining users". Mozilla management does not care.
Then they will wonder why firefox has a 3% market share.
This still stings. The Firefox mobile update was a huge step down in every way.
For me, Firefox/Android is something I've always wanted to use very badly, because I'm a staunch Firefox desktop user and wanted the bookmarks sync, but I kept reaching for Chrome because of the superior performance and UI refinement anyway.
The major upgrade of Firefox/Android made it dramatically better on those fronts for me. And now that UBlock is back, I think it's ready for a serious attempt at switching. It definitely wasn't before.
What are some things they broke/dropped?
- tabs can't be reordered any more
- bookmarks/history/recently closed tabs/top sites... are more cumbersome to access
- no "recently closed tabs" for quite a few months after the initial release
- bookmarks always force-open a new tab
- search suggestions needlessly take up more space (apparently by design, because these days information density is baaaaad), so you can't see local history/bookmark results without closing the keyboard or scrolling down
- using a search engine other than the default one requires two extra click at least, whereas previously they were directly accessible at the bottom of the screen
- Can't install search engines any more, instead you manually need to enter the correct search URL, which isn't fun (and then the manually created engine is of course lacking a proper icon)
- bookmark keywords and keyword searches aren't supported
- you used to be able to open a new tab by simply tapping the "tabs" button twice because the "new tab" button in the tabs list was suitably aligned – this is no longer the case (at least with the URL bar in classic on top mode)
- the tab queue for tabs opened from other apps doesn't exist any more
- the share sheet – you used to be able to share a URL to Firefox and then directly bookmark it or send it to another Firefox instance via Firefox Sync without having to actually open the URL in Firefox locally. Now you can't – any shared URLs are automatically opened and you need to wait for the full browser to actually load before you can bookmark/send the tab (and then you also need to close it again)
- view page source doesn't exist, not even if you manually prepend view-source: to the URL (supposedly there's an addon that works, but due to the blasted add-on policy you can't actually install it)
- can't view/browse local (HTML) files any more
- can't install themes anymore
- various small bugs introduced by the fact that this was a total rewrite
- despite having to rewrite the whole UI from scratch anyway, they didn't fix the "XKCD" bug and make long <img "title"> attributes scrollable instead of truncating them
- and probably quite a few more things I'd notice if I was actually regularly using the current version…
And of course the whole add-on thing: Even on the previous iteration of Firefox, the Webextension API implementation was somewhat half-hearted once you got to APIs that required special handling on the Android version, and the fact that this was a total rewrite hasn't helped in significantly expanding the coverage there, because instead the dev time largely had to be spent on re-implementing things.
Then there's of course that absolutely infuriating policy of only allowing a very limited selection of add-ons to be installed (unless you're on Nightly and jump through about half a dozen hoops, and even then you can only install the current version (and only the current version) of add-ons actually published on AMO). If you're lucky (or basically only using uBlock), maybe your add-on needs are actually covered by that, but the long tail of unsupported add-ons starts very early.
This also makes life more difficult for add-on developers (even if your add-on is actually one of the selected few), because you can no longer permanently install a testing version of your add-on or heaven help distribute a Beta version to your users (no, not even on Nightly and not even if the add-on is signed) – the best you get is temporary installation as long as your phone is connected to your computer and that's that.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
The stable version of Fennec F-Droid (a fork of Firefox for Android) also supports custom extensions through this method if you don't want to use Firefox Nightly:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
It's just that they're not guaranteed to work yet due to all the changes they made to the browser engine.
Also not exactly related the the new version but tab sending from desktop to mobile is basically not working these days.
My only real "complaint" is trivial and it isn't really their fault--it's that there are some dumb websites/apps that require a pass through Chrome to login and I haven't found a super quick way to do that (it's not difficult but it used to be super easy and obvious in Focus).
It doesn't stop me from using it, but it's annoying.
I have my toolbar set to auto hide to maximize screen space for reading and bottom works better for me because when you scroll to the top, the hidden toolbar reappears at the bottom before pulling further to refresh. It seems like hiding/unhiding the toolbar at the top would be super annoying because it would either jump over the top of the page or jerk the page up and down under my finger as it hides/unhides.
(FWIW: I'm on a Pixel running Android 11 so dunno if there could be an Android version level or manufacturer overlay issue causing your menu to split, or maybe it's an iOS feature)
The problem with Mozilla is that there aren't giving users what they want: Empowerment. Instead Mozilla wants the empowerment for themselves and to heck with giving users any control over the experience.
Nope, they are obsessed about how tabs and [x] button look like. Is that 6th big change on the panel in 5 years?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/26/firefox...
Perhaps the most disruptive change was that the update was not compatible with the vast majority of extensions. Given that, for "power users", the ability to install extensions was THE killer feature of Firefox for Android, this change was controversial.
I still use Firefox 68.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26470454
I use the about:config options in this guide [1] plus enable encrypted DNS and encrypted client hello in about:config (on FF Beta android).
A few days ago, there was an HN page showcasing a cool webpage which can read the position angles of your phone (whether it's flat, inclined etc in detail). That page works well on regular FF Android. But on the FF Beta with the config options enabled as above prevents the page from reading the angles. I also have telemetry upload disabled on FF Beta, but maybe a bit something is still uploaded, idk.
[1] https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/
Edit: If one trawls through some recent past threads, one can see that FF cares about privacy. They have official extensions to isolate sites (or cookies?) to prevent tracking, on desktop. (Facebook Container and Firefox Multi-Account container). They are working on something like per site isolation by default (Project Fission [2]). Yeah Chrome has it but then they try to log you into the whole browser when you just wanna log in to gmail. And they are not doing something scammy plus impactful like AMP, FLoC [3] like Google. These AMP links are everywhere, many times it looks like it's the official site link.
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission
[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
Now, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since before it was called Firefox, and I'm quite used to it and unlikely to switch to anything else, but boy are they (at the Mozilla Foundation) trying hard to make me.
For instance, Chrome loses to Edge and Safari, on metrics like memory or power consumption.
Does that mean Apple and Microsoft have infiltrated Google Chrome team?
The more options you support the harder is to fix/change things.
It would be nice if the community would have more acceptance towards the last remaining browser fighting the good fight, with the many welcome, recent (!) advancements regarding privacy.
> The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar" view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets low engagement.
So not only do they not have telemetry for that, they aren't even attempting to make it more discoverable to test if there's a correlation between "hard to discover" and "low engagement"?
I would use this but never knew this could be changed.
Same here, but since it affects both the toolbar and the tab bar, I'm inclined to keep the density set to Normal except on small screens.
It might be a crazy idea, but maybe we could add telemetry and see if people actually use it despite it being hard to discover.
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
Then there was the issue of "studies"[1].
[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bl035o/what_are_th...
Looks increasingly nice across the pond with Edgeium, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.
Is servo even still in development? I know bits and pieces of the project have made their way into Firefox, but I'm not sure where that stands after the layoffs last year.
At this point, Mozilla is just hell-bent on a path to completely destroying whatever's left of Firefox. It being the only non-Blink browser alternative left is no longer a valid excuse.
The parts of Servo that were not already merged into Firefox (like Stylo and WebRender) had no clear path to being merged into Firefox within the next few years.
I'm really, really sad that they were laid off, but in terms of the future survival of Firefox, it wasn't a catastrophic decision.
Please don't post this kind of cynical speculation unless you have something to back it up.
For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.
I think that Mozilla has good intentions, but they pushed out Fenix way, way too early, which broke the experience for users of previous version of Firefox for Android. And it seems that their mobile team is understaffed and overworked. I don't blame them, since they're essentially trying to create an entirely new browser (minus the rendering engine). But should be labeled as a beta, if not an alpha, in the state it's in - not "release-ready" as the version on the Play Store. It's proven that web browsers are too important in this era to get wrong when so much of our lives depend on them. If the experience is even slightly inferior to Chrome, the average user can easily switch and never end up using Firefox again.
Is this related to me typically not even getting the password manager popup? Or that even when I do get it, sometimes it just flat doesn't work?
Stunned to see that's not the case, and completely baffled at how contradictory and indicative of incompetence this stated reasoning is.
Don't be persuaded by that argument unless you have a good idea of what the actual costs are --- especially when the one making the argument is also spending what is almost certainly a lot more on new features that almost no one cares about.
You can also hit ^C, and it will prompt you with instructions.
type :q<Enter> to exit
type :help<Enter> or <F1> for on-line help
type :help version8<Enter> for version info
As the sibling comment noted, neovim also has something similar.
"We built a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and never advertised it. We don't have the numbers but it seems fair to assume that nobody goes there so we'll be closing it down."
The important missing part in your analogy is that they don't even know if people use it or not!
This is not yet finalized/decided and a great big thanks to the Firefox devs for listening to the feedback and collecting real information before making a final decision.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698100
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698171
Glad I left, won’t be back.
More information: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593
Not only did they remove PWA support, they currently have "no plan for PWA support in Firefox" at all.
Take a look at 'encrypted client hello' on FF. I'm on FF Beta android, which supports 'about:config'. Now I can access many blocked sites because of the ECH.
I guarantee you that the people working on FF are both very experienced and do use their own product.
Everyone knows that Firefox was supposed to be "the customizable" browser. Everyone apart from Mozilla. Mozilla wants to make Firefox a Chrome clone.
In every thread users write how they want addons and customization (especially in UI), and in every thread Mozilla apologists talk how the foundation should drop the "tech savy" group for some other group. That other group doesnt seem to materialize - they are losing users fast.
Also explain to your grandmother that the UI needs to change for 10th time just because someone from Mozilla says so. Chrome is in fact stable in this regard (although they like to change settings all the time what is same problem).
Wait what? Where?
It basically spread when tech-savvy users recommended it to others ("Don't want to see those popups? Get Firefox with ad-block add-on") or straight out installed it to their relatives, because they didnt want their granny to click those ads.
Mozilla foundation works very hard to shake off this "power user" group (people who want and can customize their browser), while pursuing some undeclared group of other users. Those other users never materialized. They probably use Chrome, because it "just works" and doesn't do the batshit insane things that Firefox tea, did repetitively.
Here is just a short list of things that Firefox did to shake off their core group (people who want to customize the browser):
* requiring a signature for add-ons, what killed many of them (many niche were not signed, since their authors didn't care about some small add on with few hundred users)
* One year later after requiring every add-on to be signed, it turned out that MOZILLA FOUNDATION forgot to renew their signature, so all add-ons stopped working... the incompetence here is incredible
* Then they "changed the technology" what meant killing all the existing add-ons. Lots of the popular ones could not be rewritten, since the new (and supposedly better /s) Firefox does not have proper APIs. Why? Because writing those APIs is hard and the Mozilla developers didn't want to do it. Please note: it is not that they work for free, they earn 200-300k USD per year, get 12month golden parachutes when fired and whole foundation burned through hundreds of millions of dollars. So dont say they didnt have the money to write a customizable browser. They just didnt want to do it (in fact we could argue that they already had it with Firefox up to version 56, but bug fixing it is not sexy; while writing new stuff that nobody wants is a great boost for your CV)
* adding things that users dont want or need - e.g. updates via telemetry, despite supposedly being the "not spying" browser
Now Firefox is basically a Chrome clone that claims to offer privacy, which it doesn't (telemetry). Also if you use it on mobile, it will kill your (last few) add-ons again. I think at some point it only allowed 7 add-ons?
Why use unstable and unpredictable turd? Chrome is disappointing (due to lack of customization, messing with address bar in order to promote AMP...), but at least predictable. So users switched. With Firefox you don't know what they will break next.
Bonus comment: go and explain to your grandmother that "new and better" Firefox team does not allow you to customize UI anymore, since API that allows to select options on right click does not exist anymore, because 300k USD per year programmers don't know how to write it. Yes, there was that add-on to customize right click (90% of options are not needed for anyone) - and there is no such add-on in new Fireox. Classic Theme for Firefox - which made it look the same (so predictable for old people) -> impossible as well. We are in a thread that some UI option is killed just because it gets killed.
And I talk here about random users. Power users had a lot of more niche add-ons, which did what they wanted. All those add-ons are lost now. There were thousands of them.
When I saw this article I checked the Customize Firefox page to confirm I had compact layout enabled. I did not see the toolbar. I compared the UI density with a screenshot, and it seemed I had already set it to Compact, which I vaguely remembered doing. Puzzled, I returned to Customize Firefox, and still failed to see the toolbar.
I then checked about:config (which was also sabotaged recently to make it slower and remove features), and found browser.uidensity set to 1, so I really did have Compact density enabled. I returned to Customize Firefox, and only then, on my third attempt, did I see the toolbar.
Exactly!
I have been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days and I had never seen this option until I read about this on HN today.
That's 20+ years!
For many years I've lamented the usability of about:config and wish they'd turn it into a tree structure and/or at least provide useful descriptions of the options (if something as space-constrained as a mobo BIOS can provide some descriptive help text next to each option in the setup screens...), only to find the next big change they did was that abomination of "designer-ism" (for lack of better term.) That felt like a punch to the face.
Maybe this will change, but I do not really expect much from Mozilla's current leadership.
Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.
Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain.
Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point, what's the sell?
Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature.
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973
Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is just way too unnecessarily large.
A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my personal hardware covers).
Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.
I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.
Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets.
Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
People sticking to their principles and willing to use a less advanced browser just to guarantee its improvement is what gave us the fast browsers we have today.
"Moral cause" = many people will walk right away from even expensive software over these kinds of things.
Just saying.
Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that direction.
Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).
A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice.
I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.
I accidentally discovered that the mouse's scroll wheel works for this too.
Gtk seems to optimized for the higher-end of not-hdpi-yet displays (100-120 dpi, at @1X), i.e. 1600x900 to 1920x1080 at 14". Fullhd at this size, the sizing is great, it doesn't need hidpi support yet, which would also explain the sad hidpi support in many apps (not the toolkit! just some apps; e.g. virt-manager/spice-gtk only recently got it supported).
That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo, and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just looked and scaled so much better.
If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have reached a tenth of its popularity.
Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C implementation. The myriad language bindings available for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/
https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1381832/
The taskbar can be moved easily, but Firefox doesn't come with a vertical tabs option. Both Chrome and Edge seem to now.
Actually, the screen of my laptops got only slightly wider in the last 25 years but considerably shorter. 16:9 is bad on laptops.
This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.
That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.
> That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.
Why not use the autohide option with the launcher on the side?
BTW, the Gnome's name for favorites is Places.
Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar has to fight with the main content for screen real-estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description text for each tab.
When you have a lot of tabs, a tab sidebar shows more per-tab context than a tab top/bottom bar does. But having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.
Remember, the default behaviour in all major browsers is to open external links from other applications in a new window. So, if you’re the regular “go with the flow” kind of computer user who presumes the defaults are defaults for a reason — and are a bit lazy in cleaning up your windows, and you use at least one external app (e.g. a mail client, a piece of collaboration software, etc.) — then even if you yourself prefer to open tabs, you’ll end up opening new windows quite frequently as well.
And, if you don’t care where you open each new tab, you’ll just end up opening it against whichever window was most recently opened; rather than having a dedicated “tabs I opened” window.
(As a person who bothered to install the “Merge Windows” Chrome extension to replicate the feature in Safari, I genuinely don’t get these people — but they really do exist, and are even seemingly in the majority.)
Also, BTW, Firefox has had a Tabs menu for years now; both vertical and hides itself away automatically. (Though perhaps you still can't save any vertical space with it: AFAICR it lives on the tab bar, so if you hide that you lose the menu too.)
I had to get rid of almost all programs that used modern GTK.
One major problem was dialogues windows, typically options setting dialogues. They were too big and the buttons were out of the screen (below the screen), because of too much white space everywhere, because of badly organised layout, and because of too many things being packed inside the same dialogue.
But the most infuriating was the bloody CSD (Client Side Decoration). They pretend it saves spaces, because it fuses a menu bar and the window bar (window manager bar).
But firstly, they made it so big that this single bar is only a couple pixels shorter than a traditional set of menu bar + window bar.
And secondly, on a traditional application, with the WM I had, I could (simply pressing one shortcut key) hide both the window bar of the current application (from the top), and the WM task bar (from the bottom), making the entire vertical space available from the current application content (including its menu bar). But with CSD, I cannot hide the window bar, since there is no window bar; so I am forced to keep their huge menu+window bar combo fusion and as a result there is less space available for the content...
https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bars-smaller/
https://blog.samalik.com/make-your-gnome-title-bar-smaller-f...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36869701/decrease-the-ta...
Your CSS must go to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js:
user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);
They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving product feedback which are likely read by product people and not engineers fixing bugs.
Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases, preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there), their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff.
> Most sites don't work as well
Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken?
What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.
I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".
Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that I don't have hard data to back this claim up.
> What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me.
Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla marginally more with my user data than Google.
But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right now.
> I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".
I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend.
I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web and all that).
Seems you have trouble keeping count. Let me remind you how many features FF has nuked in recent times
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25589177
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24554393
> "Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was similarly replaced by DXR."
> "CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully functional security team. The source for this is an unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not seem like a good venue to hash out rumors."
> Kind of misleading title – what isn’t planned to be supported is installing PWA:s as standalone apps on desktop Firefox: https://twitter.com/englishmossop/status/1344428028315590656...
Try harder.
That is still something that I very much wanted.
I had stuck to firefox 68 because after that https over ssl could be disabled remotely for corporate computers but now I switched to Chrome.
I think the end result will be Firefox removing itself from the browser pool.
[1]: My criticisms: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/1...
Not when they constantly change the general way it's used. I am personally tired of having to relearn how to use a tool. Address bar, lockwise, shared passwords, to start.
If you work on Firefox, or are new to development -- this is not Luddism, and don't let this attitude discourage you. Let it be a lesson that you need to understand your users and not just assume that everybody uses a maximized window on a 13-inch laptop screen with all day to wait for slow code to load.
I also saw a browser.engagement.ctrlTab.has-used key in there; didn't know the config store was also tracking usage...
I have to say that the name doesn't explain what it actually does. Thank you for the assistance.
With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container has a terrible default shortcut, and you can’t remap it to anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).
I’m sticking with Firefox because I want to support them, but I miss Chrome dearly.
Just out of curiosity, have you tried creating a shortcut based on the menu name in the macOS global settings? As a Linux user who sometimes works for companies that issue Macs, that functionality goes a long way to preserving my sanity, but sometimes apps just hard-code a shortcut instead of using the OS.
(Extensions can do it, but they only take effect after the current tab is loaded.)
Cite me. Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my country's biggest energy provider.
Silent errors on many sites.
FF-esr on Debian
I've had similar experiences with various bills over the years (though fewer recently), so these days I default to dealing with those by 'pushing' the payment from my bank to the utility rather than having the utility 'pull' a payment from the bank.
It would be nice if the bank could poll a utility to discover the payment amount rather than having to enter the amount manually from reading the bill, but as inconveniences go that's fairly small potatoes.
Yes indeed... until not anymore. And will this be an enormous change? Oh no but an annoying one for some people, and completely switching browsers might be perceived as only marginally less familiar than just having some of your settings suddenly disappearing in FF.
Until they remove the feature you used for years. But hey, they are the champion of the Free Web so anything goes.
This is my problem. If there was a real option to go to I probably would leave Firefox because of the things they've removed or haven't added. But then I look at the alternatives, and they are all worse.
I use it almost entirely for containers. Do any other browsers have the same functionality either built-in or via plugin?
Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by, but no one is going to write an article about each new feature and change.
I agree. They need an emulate chrome option: Match keyboard shortcuts, menu, and compact layout.
Tree Style Tabs on the desktop and and uBO on Android.
Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to make me dislike them?
That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay $15 a month for it, maybe $25.
A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in my current position.
FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by someone.
A fork would of course need to be kept up to date with the base (until everyone switches :-).
Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much much much more in order to make me switch to a different browser because there's simply no competition there - everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single instantaneous crippling.
The designers before them went for different metrics.
Designers need to design.
And this is how the circle of UX paradigms is powered.
Like fashion, it will cycle.
The current trends are current, until they aren't.
I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.
example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day.
It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset.
The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes.
Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.
I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself.
https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-enterprise-kios...
"Firefox has just been updated in the background. Click Restart Firefox to complete the update."
It would at least be a minor improvement if they'd open a new tab to show you that information. Instead you're refreshing the page wasting everyone's time because it doesn't always tell you that's what's going on.
If you use Mozilla's build of Firefox and it's built-in update system I think this won't happen.
(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)
But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen all the time.
Panorama Tab Groups
I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on Chromium.
It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.
I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now wants to remove support⁰ for user.js, supposedly to save a stat() call :-/
⓪ - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752
All these people complaining about a free browser, and one that isn't selling your soul to pay for it.
Please check your behavior, and set a better example in the future.
I would certainly have preferred to stick with a non-blink browser, but Mozilla won't stop remove features I like and making harmful changes.
How many pointless UX revamps have they done in the last decade? Meanwhile everyone is still waiting for the many unkept promises, including mobile extensions.
Ditto ... I am not clear why we need eight pixels' padding around the location bar and what looks like 15 pixels' padding around the icons alongside. It looks like the location bar is around 32 px on this admittedly ancient 1280x800 laptop screen and I'd be happy with 20 px.
Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync.
Opera- dedicated search bar, with no way to set a hotkey to focus it. Disqualified as that makes it a non-power user's browser for me right off the bat. This browser's closed source and Chinese ownership does give me pause.
Vivaldi- dedicated search bar and hotkey (yay!), but no way to sync tabs with iOS.
I've already determined for a while now that Firefox (best on features) and native browsers, Edge and Safari (best on performance) were my 3 browsers of choice, and that remains unchanged. Edge on Windows 10 is truly great, and has a decent start at sync, even if it doesn't come close to how well Firefox does there. It just needs fleshed out more.
To answer your question on what the sell is, it's really dependent on the user, and native browsers have huge advantages (most people should probably just use Edge/Safari IMO), but I see Firefox as the only non-native browser worth using due to the best-in-class feature set. I'm not going to draw this post out further detailing all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for me to demonstrate how much Firefox outclasses the competition there. It's a very mature browser.