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Comment by Misdicorl | Hacker News Reader

I'm on nightly on my phone so have had this experience for a while. I very much dislike the new homescreen with collections instead of the 2x4 of most frecently visited sites.

Collections would be ok if it kept the old UI of a 2x4 grid. Instead I get to see 2 sites at first, and have to scroll to see more. If I close a tab, I'm not able to use the bottom 1/4 of the screen for ~2 seconds while the undo popup hangs out. This means even more scrolling. This decluttering really sucks imo.

The other annoying thing is that the upgrade starts up with an empty collection screen. The upgrade should have created a default collection populated with my 2x4 grid for me. Come on Mozilla, stop giving me paper cuts like this.

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Ah, the old "we know what's best for our users" mentality. Take something good away in favor of a worse UX, with no config setting to switch back, even though old and new could co-exist.

I definitely understand them not wanting to maintain two parallel settings here. I think this failure sits squarely on the project manager who decided to couple the new behavior (collections instead of frecency) together with a new ui. I'd bet dollars to donuts that they didn't test the changes independently, and they're probably tightly linked in the code.

I imagine collections were the driving force here. If the new behavior (collections) were shipped separately, I imagine they would have certainly migrated installations to have a default `recents` collection that users could then easily delete (or migrate and maintain manually)! What a nice situation that would have been as everyone would have gotten exactly what they wanted.

If the new UI were tested separately, I can't imagine it would have gotten positive feedback. But maybe I'm just an old grump and most people like it better? It seems like shipping the UI change as a separate feature would have easily identified that the grid view was something a lot of people liked.

Sounds like Gnome. They know better than users.

To make such changes, commercial products I've worked on did these steps:

1. test with some users in 1:1 sessions

2. incorporate the feedback (or consider dropping the alternative, if most all feedback was negative)

3. implement metrics

4. launch to 0.5 - 1% of users. See metrics AND feedback.

5. incorporate feedback

6. gradually launch to more

7. at some point, remove the old way

I agree it's hard to do these with volunteer work. That's how some hard issues are never solved, but Gnome gets new apps or rewrites on existing apps with almost every release -- that's the fun work. It's volunteered, so take it, or leave it, or DYI, or pay somebody.

PS: I've reached out to a few Mozilla staff via LinkedIn with a proposal for a new commercial product, but nobody replied. Anyone has a contact there? Proposal: A Google Suite alternative for businesses, provided by Mozilla both as a cloud service and on-premise. Dual licensing, AGPL and Enterprise: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17czxzh20c8ouhrX-iZPS2BH8...

What's the difference between the office suite you're pitching and Nextcloud?

Basically, Mozilla. Having Mozilla behind it would help with marketing. It would help Firefox too: Google has browser + office, MS has browser + office, both work to decrease Firefox usage.

Also, it would be available as a cloud offer, which Nextcloud doesn't seem to have.

To be honest if I could disable collections I would. If find the feature utterly useless and take screen space for stuff I'd consider more useful, like my list of mobile bookmarks (which I could define add my default pane on Fennec).

This is bad news for me. I'd like at least a 4x4 or 6x4 grid to be able to pin more sites. The Highlights below the grid are not very useful. Four of them take as much space as 4 grid lines and are only 4 sites.

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