not sure i like the complete separation of the tabs from the rest of the browser. makes it seem disconnected and thus uncorrelated which tab corresponds to what is being rendered.
To me it still seems fairly clear which tab is being focused since it's the only one outlined.
I think separating the tab into its own bubble may pave the way for more interesting UI in the future. These bubbles could be stacked or displayed vertically while remaining aesthetically consistent.
These tabs also seem to more clearly communicate that they can be dragged around.
I've tried the new design (using flags in about:config) and none of my plugins broke. I'm running Facebook Container, Midnight Lizard, No Thanks, a Medium extension and uBlock Origin.
Have you actually tried it yourself? If not, why post a rather shallow dismissal?
I wasn't a huge fan of most of the UI refreshes lately in both Chrome and Firefox, but this is definitely the least welcome so far. I do not really expect these tabs to grow on me.
(Also, it obviously looks fine, but I really dislike the new trend of adding a bunch of empty space for no real reason other than aesthetics. The first thing I do in Firefox right now is remove the spacers next to the address bar...)
I still hate the new tabs after having used the Developer Edition for a while. There's absolutely no separators between tabs, making it hard to see tab boundaries. Having the tabs on a separate background colour also helps to quickly see which part of the chrome is the tab bar and which is the address bar. Now they're the same colour.
FWIW, Chrome has separators between tabs as well as better contrast between the address bar section and the tab section (1.31:1 for Chrome, 1.08:1 for Firefox).
From FDE, I disliked the new tabs at first, and I still do. They have no redeeming qualities.
They’re not denser, they’re not more readable, and they’re definitely not more usable as they’re floating in the tab bar unmoored from the rest of the browser. They don’t make any sense and they’re visually unappealing.
Those spacers on both sides of the address bar made absolutely no sense, I agree.
But there's some logic to the growth of empty space everywhere. Even laptops have touchscreens these days. Click targets need to be bigger because fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. I just wish they'd keep around a compact option for non-touch devices, but unfortunately another recent trend is to get rid of user-configurable options.
Yeah, this is basically the problem. Similarly, IMO, using GNOME 3 adapted for phones via Phosh feels far more natural than using GNOME 3 on desktop. It really should be an indictment of the insistence that it's possible to make one single design that works well on all form factors, or even just two form factors as disparate as a tablet and a desktop PC. If it's possible, the "state of the art" isn't really selling it.
Windows 10 honestly comes closer than expected, but then misses in such a way that it can feel both awkward to use on a desktop (the settings app is pretty uncomfortable, along with photos and to some extent even calculator) and on a tablet (tablet mode is hard to navigate; I double click an image in File Explorer, it launches Photos. I hit back, it goes back, but the picture remains open. I go back to the photo and try to close it, and now I am all the way back to the start menu. Mission failed successfully. WM_POINTER is also buggy with split panes, so I hope you didn't want to draw while doing something else...)
I guess everything has to be mobile-first now, but it's increasingly close to "desktop-barely."
I don’t know, GNOME 3 on laptops with proper gestures is a joy to use. Also, afaik Phosh is fully rewritten and hardly has anything in common with gnome, even the common apps are inferior to use on mobile.
You need wayland GNOME (actually not wayland per se, but libinput that can properly process gestures, which can be hacked into XOrg, but I haven’t tried that), and there were a few gestures during GNOME 3, but it got revamped into a really productive environment with GNOME 40.
What I like best is the 3 finger swipe up, for the same view as you would get with the Super key, and the 3 finger left right swipe for changing between desktops (this latter may not be showcased in the video I linked)
Basically I disagree. On phone the titlebars actually make sense. Even on a laptop with a touchscreen, which is probably the most ideal desktop-like platform, I still find GNOME 3 annoying.
I’m not necessarily a fan of client side decorations, but with some buttons going into the titlebar, I don’t find it annoying at all. But of course UI/UX is subjective to a point.
Ah yes, we have no money so let's invest a ton of work into something that will do nothing to bring in new or lost users, but, given our track record, has the potential to alienate even more of our ever fewer remaining users.
> Ah yes, we have no money so let's invest a ton of work into something that will do nothing to bring in new or lost users,
In theory Mozilla Firefox is a open-source project and it doesn't need users directly, as much as it needs contributors to help keep the project alive. Deciding if this counts as contributing or not, is an exercise I leave for others ;)
That said, I agree with the criticism that this video (which is supposed to highlight a/the new design) is failing spectacularly at showcasing that very design.
I think I saw one screenshot zap by which showed tabs looking somewhat differently? Otherwise it was just lots of people talking and close-ups of portions of Firefox which already looks the same way? Not very informative.
To highlight the design I would appreciate something slower (less zaps!) and less polished where they would just use the browser and let the design speak for itself.
From a security perspective: hell fucking no. You need those updates.
Even if you're just doing plain-jane browsing, with no finance, commerce, professional, government, or personal interaction, you're putting your entire system at risk.
Then why can't I have separate security updates? I'm fed up with some fashion people breaking my software usability all the time, just because some hot new way to arrange tabs has to be tried out.
You sometimes can, though you've got to know what to ask for, and what you're trading off.
FWIW, this is what platforms such as Debian attempt to provide. It's a challenge, and something of a losing battle, especially with complex and fast-moving tools, notably Web browsers, but also development toolkits (scripting languages, Web development environments, etc.).
Debian stable attempts to provide a stable feature set + bugfixes for all packages. Increasingly, even on Stable, there is the option to install packages which continue to offer feature updates, including for web browsers. Though there is also the option of an LTS or ESR package install.
These are specified versions with extended bugfix / security support, typically called Long Term Support (LTS) or Extended Service Release (ESR) version of a package. You'll find these with the Linux Kernel, for example.
And yes, Mozilla has an ESR programme which "receives major updates on average every 42 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks."
Theoretically, perhaps. But I'm not super worried about it. I only visit a handful of sites and have scripts and third-party resources blocked by default and have HTML5 features disabled. I have Firefox (and all of my browsers) sandboxed in my system.
Most of the important bug fixes from Firefox as of late have been in these areas that I have disabled, such as WebGL rendering, responsive design mode, 3D CSS, custom fonts [1], WebRTC [2], and so on.
I'm more worried about some new feature introducing a security hole through one of these new features intended for modern browsing. Given the number of unfavorable changes that come with every release compared to the number of fixes, though, I'd rather just skip the auto updates for now. I only update when I (reasonably) know that nothing that I'm used to will be irreversibly broken/removed and when I have the time and patience to update my userChrome again to keep things as they are.
I'm pretty excited about this. In general it looks fine, but I really gotta ask - why do browsers always redesign tabs? They don't change in functionality for the most part and yet they always get refreshed. Regardless, excited to try the new design, hopefully they really have streamlined it. I personally find the firefox menu navigation a bit weird and hard to...well navigate through so that's what I'm hoping has been cleaned up.
Because it makes it real obvious that something has changed. Kind of like car headlights. They’re a really prominent part of the entire design that make you want to explore more
I love the new tabs, I found the old ones clumsy and ugly. Design is unfortunately something that is constantly a moving target. If Mozilla stops updating they will surely die - for most users the technical details don't matter, what matters is that their friends go, wow what is the browser you're using? And thus, redesign is just a way of staying alive...
Installed the dev edition that has the new design, and I like it as well. Especially the Alpenglow theme that ships with it looks fresh and colorful.
Will it make me consider trying it again? Who knows, right now I do like that the feel of it a lot. Might use it as my secondary browser for my while to see how it feels
At first i was underwhelmed by the new design. But as soon as i disabled the title bar and added the 'Breeze Duo' extension (i'm on KDE/Breeze) i was hooked. And concerning Pocket - i just removed the icon, works for me.
Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over.
Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these changes" plugins are ready.
Update: Just tried the new design. As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space and even compact mode (now hidden behind about:config) barely helps. Time for more userChrome.css...
Consider yourself lucky there isn't a giant banner ad for Mr Robot in the title bar. Mozilla's CEO really needs another pay rise for overseeing plummeting product market share.
Also "remove clicks" and "remove clutter" are directly contradictory... I want to be able to configure my browser to minimize clicks FOR ME, and I'm ok with having a lot of "clutter" i.e. functionality.
They will go back to the conventional tab design, I am pretty sure about this. Tabs should look like they look in Chrome, not like in Firefox or VSCode. Tab design has pretty much been settled in the 90s, no need for experiments.
I don't understand the hate or why this seems to take so much headspace in so many (or at least here very vocal) minds. It's a single button, not flashy or animated or otherwise annoying. When the rest of the world spies on you or pushes crypto tokens and abuses websites by replacing their ads with own advertisements, that is what bothers you most and makes you consciously choose an outdated version?
I think HN just has hate for certain products and undying love for others. When you hate something then everything bothers you. When you love something you look the other way.
It is hate, but worse than that, it’s tedious to read. I saw their video and thought “yep, top comment is going to be about Pocket integration” and it was. It’s the same in every thread about Firefox - someone complaining about pocket, someone complaining about tree style tabs, someone saying they shouldn’t have changed the plug-in model.
It would be nice to have some new comments for a change.
I've used pocket since it was called ReadItLater and love it, and the original comment didn't seem to be just hate for it.
It seemed mostly criticism of an approach where marketing says X ("we look at what users really use") but the product says Y ("we push feature X cause we like it eve if users don't").
There's one person in this thread complaining about how tree style tabs was taken away from them in November 2017. It was yes, but it's also available now (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...). How can I possibly take this person seriously? They're complaining about how something doesn't exist when it does.
As for Pocket, I fail to see how someone's experience is ruined by the mere existence of a feature. Obviously they could ignore it. But they're complaining and have been complaining for 4 years like the sky was falling. Again, how can I take such people seriously?
Lastly, I'm not a Firefox developer. I don't need to take any criticism of Firefox seriously just because some person said it. No doubt the devs need to say "the customer is always right" or some such. Whereas I'm free to call it like I see it.
In what timeline would you take them seriously? Why would they stop complaining if nothing has changed? Your position is illogical, you’re simply refusing to even entertain the idea that they might have a point.
The thing is that these are anti-features. The world needs a minimalist browser, which is just single rectangular canvas that renders the web. All other features are unnecessary clutter best left to separate applications, because not everybody needs or wants the same.
I'd love a browser like that and we used to have something like that.
If you wanted a specific feature, you'd install an extension / plugin.
Software has been going that way since forever, just think back to Nero Burning Rom. Which went from a very capable, heavily specialized application to burn all kinds of CDs with to a collection of mediocre tools to do everything but burn CDs with.
Aside from being unwanted, it also is symbolic of much of Mozilla's worst behavior. During launch, it was specifically described as not being a paid placement: "There's no monetary benefit to Mozilla from the integration: Pocket didn't pay for placement in the browser"[1]. This way key to the discussion about why they chose Pocket over any other reading list plugins -- but this turned out to be a lie: "Hum. Apparently, _someone_ in bizdev thought that "revenue sharing" doesn't involve money, and spread information inside Mozilla accordingly. :rolling eyes:"[2]
Also, I can't find the reference anymore, but I definitely remember promises of getting a pref to use a different backend. AFAICT, that was another lie.
So multiple lies surrounding this product, along with it being continuously pushed on users (I've had it disabled via pref since day 1, and then it started showing up on the new tab page regardless).
Ok so is your issue that Mozilla makes revenue (which I think is GREAT as that gets them off the google dependency) or that it ignores previously set preferences?
In the latter case 100% agree and Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot as users that actively turned it off probably simply don't want it and will be a tiny minority. But do we know yet whether this happens again with this update?
The button of betrayal is right there in the demo.
Your privacy is not safe with Mozilla. It requires the same level of distrust as other browser vendors, but at least with those vendors people already know. Mozilla luls people in to trusting them and then uses that trust to fund a business model that is specifically about collecting and uploading user data.
I am in agreement. Although you can tweak and customise FF endlessly, however, you shouldn't have to delve into about:config to disable a malignant feature. The comment by [pseudalopex] probably sums up my view.
Revenue is good. Sacrificing privacy for revenue is debatable. Misleading people about sacrificing privacy for revenue is dishonest.
What is the point of firefox if it comes with spyware?
This supposed feature is nothing more than a css tweak that somehow needs to upload your urls to this 3rd party provider that is not bound by the privacy guidelines of Mozilla.
It is makes Mozilla a bunch of liars in a way that Google isn't lying. Actually. Google isn't sharing your data with another party.
I wont be switching back to Firefox until they remove the pocket thing and enact policies preventing this from happening again.
Now it's just a worst chrome, with better promises that turn out to be bigger lies.
I run a large farm of VMs with telemetry turned on. I programmed them to make happy mouse movements whenever Mozilla embiggens their UI elements. My herd of shill-VMs has totally swamped out whatever telemetry-votes you compact-mode people are casting.
The funny thing is I didn't use compact mode before (although I did know it was there), and after upgrading to the new UI, the first thing I did was find it and enable it because of how enormous they made the tabs and buttons.
It looks like Pocket has been moved from the URL bar to where extensions are located. While it is larger, if Mozilla feel they must include it for whatever reason, it makes more sense to have it look like an extension than an integral part of the browser. Hopefully this also corresponds with the ability to remove it from the extension box, as you can do with other extensions.
> As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space
I just tried it, the vertical difference is 5 pixels, horizontally it’s about twice as much with 5 pinned and 9 normal tabs. Amazing? No. But that doesn’t really seem substantial.
Just to provide a contrary opinion, I find the pocket button very useful.
Pocket has out of the box integration with the Kobo ebook readers. This means that the amount of work I need to do to read an article on my device is one click[1]. That seems a lot better than any alternative that I know of.
[1] After, of course, authorizing both Firefox and the Kobo device.
The UI heatmap shows that nobody clicks Pocket, but the video highlights that pocket is "refreshed" and is part of the new design. Dear Firefox, that's not how things work.
- Users are using X feature a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: let's invest time into improving it. Or 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: we need to remove it because it's adding too much friction
- Users are not using feature X a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: users aren't discovering this feature, we need to make it more prominent. 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: no-one is using this old, outdated feature, we need to remove it.
(I'm still upset that they removed FTP and RSS support.)
So basically you're saying the researcher decides the product direction and not the users? feign shocked face
In this case I believe a heat map is a bad way to decide product direction. The amount of clicks don't tell anything about the ease of use, only which UI element receives user attention. If the Pocket feature receives no clicks, it can mean that either users don't find it or they don't want to use it.
Of course, product wise I understand FF might want to push Pocket and increase usage. But the decision about whether or not the UI is suitable shouldn't be gotten from a heat map.
I think a heatmap is a reasonable thing to measure. I just wish UX research was a little more scientific (by for example, coming up with multiple hypotheses and then conducting more experiments to eliminate them).
This was bizarre. Neither the announcement or the video really said what has changed.
I’d rather they focus on performance. It’s third in the list behind Chrome and Safari on my MacBook. I use it only for Jira and Gitlab at work with about 10 tabs and it regularly consumes more CPU than Chrome with about 50 tabs open.
You could install uBlock Origin, then click on its icon in the top bar, then click on the JavaScript icon to disable JavaScript on the current website.
If you want to disable it globally and forever, spending some time in the settings once doesn't seem too annoying.
Firefox doesn't need another UI refresh. It needs performance enhancements and bug fixes. I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for years, and I'm tired of feeling like I'm using second class software.
The people who are making the designs are not the same people who are fixing bugs and improve performance. If you replaced all UX designers with SWE you will gain development speed in the short term and end up with an outdated looking app after a few years.
The funny thing is that I don't use any of the buttons in the browser. I use the URL bar to tell the browser what to show me. Cmd-T for new tap, then Cmd-opt-arrows to view the various things I've asked the browser to show me. Cmd-R for a refresh. Don't need a button for that. Multi-finger swipes for back/forward. My home is set to a blank page, so it's a useless button for me. Seems to me like a simple UI could be had. Got no opions on mobile. Don't use it enough to know what that experience is like. No get off my lawn!!
I honestly don't care. The "outdated look" from 10 years ago looked just fine. My browser is not my outfit. I don't need a new style all the time. I need a reliable, performant, secure, open source browser. The UI can look exactly the same for 50 years, and I would be happy.
Tree style tabs kept me on Firefox for years beyond when I would have otherwise left. Now I use Brave with an extension that does an ok job of imitating TST. I really wish FF were performant enough that I could justify using it.
The biggest problem I find with Firefox under Sway is that its child windows don’t get sane window types. The most significant place where this goes horribly wrong is notifications: whenever a notification arrives, bam! it’s a full tiling window that steals focus and probably takes half the screen, shuffling everything else around, rather than being marked as a notification window, which would make it float in the requested position, get no decorations, and not get focused. And there’s no good way of targeting them properly to work around this: they’re just Firefox windows with an empty title; but so are download prompts and one or two other things. Still, I decided to favour the notifications (at the cost of download windows and the likes) in my current compromise:
I’ve been thinking I should confirm that there’s a bug report for this at some point, though I can’t imagine it’s unknown. But now I look, I actually can’t find anything about it on Bugzilla (though I can find a complaint about it on Reddit two years ago). There is an unacknowledged report about the About Firefox window not floating (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1681158), which I expect is connected. Hmm. Oh, and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1590909 which is fundamentally about this very notification issue, completely unacknowledged after two years. Hmm. Better file something.
Yes, they also need to tackle power efficiency, otherwise laptop users will be forced to use either Edge or Safari. At the moment, as I understand it, it pretty much runs all open tabs at full throttle.
No? Like there is enough surface area to work on multiple unrelated parts of Firefox at the same time.
Also, Rust team is most definitely not killed, Servo is, which frankly, made perfect sense. Developing one browser engine is hard enough as is, let alone two.
There is an increasing amount of Rust being incorporated into Firefox, it is just not Servo.
And while it is possible to develop two browser engines at the same time (though it is not surface area, it is a different module competing for the same spot, so no, I’m not contradicting myself), it is still a dumb decision to split the already few people with the necessary technical knowhow around such an advanced domain. Otherwise you would see thousands of browsers out there, yet all we have (ones that implement a reasonable amount of the web standards) is chrome+edge, safari and firefox.
They dismantled the team who maintained the mdn docs? That’s shortsighted. mdn is a magnet for web devs and helps Firefox to stay in developers’ minds.
Please just bring back pre-Fenix Android Firefox together with performance improvements. There are still only a hand few of addons supported, lot's of bugs that remain unfixed. This is not the time for another redesign
Dear Firefox Mangers: you make it hard to want to use your product. I used to love it. I only like it now. Really the only thing you've got going right now is that you're NOT Chrome.
For me "love" was last felt for Firefox in maybe the 2.x days, at the latest. After that it was back to "why am I still not using Opera? Oh yeah, the banner ads. Back to FF I guess, even though it's slow now". Then it was "Chrome is like FF but crashes less and the dev tools are better, also Google's only probably evil and not yet definitely evil so it's fine, now I'm a Chrome user". Then it was "Chrome and FF both make my system beachball a lot and eat a couple hours of battery life for, apparently, no good reason, guess I'm a Safari user now, sure didn't see that coming". I'm not thrilled that that's where I'm still at, but, it is.
Firefox needs to Phoenix itself to get me to like it again. It's the Netscape Navigator / Mozilla Browser it replaced, now. Or go nuts and incorporate some other Internet protocols. Maybe become the open social network browser? Anything to give me a reason to care about it again. I want to.
Maybe I'm missing something, but the core aspect of browser functionality that everyone uses -- like loading websites, using tabs and windows, press the back/refresh button, saving bookmarks, and maaaybe toggling ad-blockers -- don't seem to require constant design changes.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadI think separating the tab into its own bubble may pave the way for more interesting UI in the future. These bubbles could be stacked or displayed vertically while remaining aesthetically consistent.
These tabs also seem to more clearly communicate that they can be dragged around.
Have you actually tried it yourself? If not, why post a rather shallow dismissal?
Because it amused me to do so. But your single piece of anecdotal evidence is good too. Powerful stuff.
(Also, it obviously looks fine, but I really dislike the new trend of adding a bunch of empty space for no real reason other than aesthetics. The first thing I do in Firefox right now is remove the spacers next to the address bar...)
FWIW, Chrome has separators between tabs as well as better contrast between the address bar section and the tab section (1.31:1 for Chrome, 1.08:1 for Firefox).
They’re not denser, they’re not more readable, and they’re definitely not more usable as they’re floating in the tab bar unmoored from the rest of the browser. They don’t make any sense and they’re visually unappealing.
But there's some logic to the growth of empty space everywhere. Even laptops have touchscreens these days. Click targets need to be bigger because fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. I just wish they'd keep around a compact option for non-touch devices, but unfortunately another recent trend is to get rid of user-configurable options.
Windows 10 honestly comes closer than expected, but then misses in such a way that it can feel both awkward to use on a desktop (the settings app is pretty uncomfortable, along with photos and to some extent even calculator) and on a tablet (tablet mode is hard to navigate; I double click an image in File Explorer, it launches Photos. I hit back, it goes back, but the picture remains open. I go back to the photo and try to close it, and now I am all the way back to the start menu. Mission failed successfully. WM_POINTER is also buggy with split panes, so I hope you didn't want to draw while doing something else...)
I guess everything has to be mobile-first now, but it's increasingly close to "desktop-barely."
Not the best video, but that’s what I found: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku5YRMN8Uzo
What I like best is the 3 finger swipe up, for the same view as you would get with the Super key, and the 3 finger left right swipe for changing between desktops (this latter may not be showcased in the video I linked)
Daddy Google need to keep them alive to avoid a lawsuit, so free money is guaranteed to keep coming.
This is a marketing push disguised as an aesthetic change. Mozilla, please stop trying to make Pocket happen, it's not going to happen.
It was so bad that my main profile (with shittons of addons) at the time took about whooping ~10 seconds to cold-start.
It was not Gmail advertising that pushed people.
In theory Mozilla Firefox is a open-source project and it doesn't need users directly, as much as it needs contributors to help keep the project alive. Deciding if this counts as contributing or not, is an exercise I leave for others ;)
That said, I agree with the criticism that this video (which is supposed to highlight a/the new design) is failing spectacularly at showcasing that very design.
I think I saw one screenshot zap by which showed tabs looking somewhat differently? Otherwise it was just lots of people talking and close-ups of portions of Firefox which already looks the same way? Not very informative.
To highlight the design I would appreciate something slower (less zaps!) and less polished where they would just use the browser and let the design speak for itself.
From a security perspective: hell fucking no. You need those updates.
Even if you're just doing plain-jane browsing, with no finance, commerce, professional, government, or personal interaction, you're putting your entire system at risk.
(TailsOS users possibly excepted.)
Functionality and UI changes breed fear of updates which lessens security.
We're not there though.
And there are an number of bug categories (phishing, social engineering, etc.) which intersect on UI/UX.
FWIW, this is what platforms such as Debian attempt to provide. It's a challenge, and something of a losing battle, especially with complex and fast-moving tools, notably Web browsers, but also development toolkits (scripting languages, Web development environments, etc.). Debian stable attempts to provide a stable feature set + bugfixes for all packages. Increasingly, even on Stable, there is the option to install packages which continue to offer feature updates, including for web browsers. Though there is also the option of an LTS or ESR package install.
These are specified versions with extended bugfix / security support, typically called Long Term Support (LTS) or Extended Service Release (ESR) version of a package. You'll find these with the Linux Kernel, for example.
And yes, Mozilla has an ESR programme which "receives major updates on average every 42 weeks with minor updates such as crash fixes, security fixes and policy updates as needed, but at least every four weeks."
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/
Firefox ESR is currently at release 78.10.1:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/78.10.1/releasenotes/
I believe that's based on 78.0.1, first released in June, 2020: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/78.0.1/releasenotes/
Firefox Desktop is at release 88.0.1, release May 5, 2021.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/88.0.1/releasenotes/
Most of the important bug fixes from Firefox as of late have been in these areas that I have disabled, such as WebGL rendering, responsive design mode, 3D CSS, custom fonts [1], WebRTC [2], and so on.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1... [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2021-1...
I'm more worried about some new feature introducing a security hole through one of these new features intended for modern browsing. Given the number of unfavorable changes that come with every release compared to the number of fixes, though, I'd rather just skip the auto updates for now. I only update when I (reasonably) know that nothing that I'm used to will be irreversibly broken/removed and when I have the time and patience to update my userChrome again to keep things as they are.
Will it make me consider trying it again? Who knows, right now I do like that the feel of it a lot. Might use it as my secondary browser for my while to see how it feels
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these changes" plugins are ready.
Update: Just tried the new design. As expected, the new tabs take up substantial vertical space and even compact mode (now hidden behind about:config) barely helps. Time for more userChrome.css...
It looks great, but it’s not really an inprovement and is clearly designed on a large monitor.
Observation: The Pocket button is used very infrequently
Conclusion: To encourage more usage the Pocket button should be made larger
It would be nice to have some new comments for a change.
It seemed mostly criticism of an approach where marketing says X ("we look at what users really use") but the product says Y ("we push feature X cause we like it eve if users don't").
As for Pocket, I fail to see how someone's experience is ruined by the mere existence of a feature. Obviously they could ignore it. But they're complaining and have been complaining for 4 years like the sky was falling. Again, how can I take such people seriously?
Lastly, I'm not a Firefox developer. I don't need to take any criticism of Firefox seriously just because some person said it. No doubt the devs need to say "the customer is always right" or some such. Whereas I'm free to call it like I see it.
If you wanted a specific feature, you'd install an extension / plugin.
Software has been going that way since forever, just think back to Nero Burning Rom. Which went from a very capable, heavily specialized application to burn all kinds of CDs with to a collection of mediocre tools to do everything but burn CDs with.
Also, I can't find the reference anymore, but I definitely remember promises of getting a pref to use a different backend. AFAICT, that was another lie.
So multiple lies surrounding this product, along with it being continuously pushed on users (I've had it disabled via pref since day 1, and then it started showing up on the new tab page regardless).
And people are surprised when it gets hate.
[1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2930532/reading-service-pock... [2]: https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/2PYq2w8tejs...
In the latter case 100% agree and Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot as users that actively turned it off probably simply don't want it and will be a tiny minority. But do we know yet whether this happens again with this update?
Your privacy is not safe with Mozilla. It requires the same level of distrust as other browser vendors, but at least with those vendors people already know. Mozilla luls people in to trusting them and then uses that trust to fund a business model that is specifically about collecting and uploading user data.
I have done the same. You can use this add-on to remove it from your new tab: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/new-tab-overr...
I am in agreement. Although you can tweak and customise FF endlessly, however, you shouldn't have to delve into about:config to disable a malignant feature. The comment by [pseudalopex] probably sums up my view.
Revenue is good. Sacrificing privacy for revenue is debatable. Misleading people about sacrificing privacy for revenue is dishonest.
This supposed feature is nothing more than a css tweak that somehow needs to upload your urls to this 3rd party provider that is not bound by the privacy guidelines of Mozilla.
It is makes Mozilla a bunch of liars in a way that Google isn't lying. Actually. Google isn't sharing your data with another party.
I wont be switching back to Firefox until they remove the pocket thing and enact policies preventing this from happening again.
Now it's just a worst chrome, with better promises that turn out to be bigger lies.
First party provider. Mozilla owns Pocket.
Only 1% of users are using Pocket: Make it more prominent to increase usage.
Data-driven design!
I just tried it, the vertical difference is 5 pixels, horizontally it’s about twice as much with 5 pinned and 9 normal tabs. Amazing? No. But that doesn’t really seem substantial.
This is with compact mode in both versions.
Pocket has out of the box integration with the Kobo ebook readers. This means that the amount of work I need to do to read an article on my device is one click[1]. That seems a lot better than any alternative that I know of.
[1] After, of course, authorizing both Firefox and the Kobo device.
- Users are using X feature a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: let's invest time into improving it. Or 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: we need to remove it because it's adding too much friction
- Users are not using feature X a lot. 1) the researcher likes the feature: users aren't discovering this feature, we need to make it more prominent. 2) the researcher dislikes the feature: no-one is using this old, outdated feature, we need to remove it.
(I'm still upset that they removed FTP and RSS support.)
In this case I believe a heat map is a bad way to decide product direction. The amount of clicks don't tell anything about the ease of use, only which UI element receives user attention. If the Pocket feature receives no clicks, it can mean that either users don't find it or they don't want to use it.
Of course, product wise I understand FF might want to push Pocket and increase usage. But the decision about whether or not the UI is suitable shouldn't be gotten from a heat map.
I’d rather they focus on performance. It’s third in the list behind Chrome and Safari on my MacBook. I use it only for Jira and Gitlab at work with about 10 tabs and it regularly consumes more CPU than Chrome with about 50 tabs open.
not buried levels deep in settings.
If you want to disable it globally and forever, spending some time in the settings once doesn't seem too annoying.
yes, please! That is exactly what I want. An outdated-looking app which is fast, has no new bugs, does not break randomly upon updates.
I honestly don't care. The "outdated look" from 10 years ago looked just fine. My browser is not my outfit. I don't need a new style all the time. I need a reliable, performant, secure, open source browser. The UI can look exactly the same for 50 years, and I would be happy.
[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134
Edit: OK, filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712681.
Also, Rust team is most definitely not killed, Servo is, which frankly, made perfect sense. Developing one browser engine is hard enough as is, let alone two.
Rust & Wasmtime: https://mobile.twitter.com/tschneidereit/status/129386814195...
Dev Tools & All of MDN: https://mobile.twitter.com/SteveALee/status/1293487542382333...
And while it is possible to develop two browser engines at the same time (though it is not surface area, it is a different module competing for the same spot, so no, I’m not contradicting myself), it is still a dumb decision to split the already few people with the necessary technical knowhow around such an advanced domain. Otherwise you would see thousands of browsers out there, yet all we have (ones that implement a reasonable amount of the web standards) is chrome+edge, safari and firefox.
However, notice how all top tier sponsors are Edge, Chrome, or even Facebook, with mozilla nowhere in sight.
Metrics: few people click this
Managers: MAKE IT BIGGER
Dear Firefox Mangers: you make it hard to want to use your product. I used to love it. I only like it now. Really the only thing you've got going right now is that you're NOT Chrome.
Get good!!
Firefox needs to Phoenix itself to get me to like it again. It's the Netscape Navigator / Mozilla Browser it replaced, now. Or go nuts and incorporate some other Internet protocols. Maybe become the open social network browser? Anything to give me a reason to care about it again. I want to.
https://itdm.com/wp-content/uploads/Mozilla.png
Firefox needs someone with vision, not a bunch of SJW who want to push pocket down my throat.