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Comment by l0b0 | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem with almost all open source software: for all the talk of doing one thing and doing it well, they almost all end up being kitchen sinks in the end. The only major success story I can think of was when Mozilla was forked and trimmed down to Firefox. Hopefully the same thing will happen to Firefox, and we can get a browsing experience where the focus is the average user experience, with easy ways to change it into an expert user interface. And even more hopefully something similar happens to every desktop manager, email client and shell tool out there. Make things extensible, then remove the cruft. Continue until the core functionality is all that remains.

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> with easy ways to change it into an expert user interface

Show me one product that could achieve this? Never have I ever seen something that executes that particular step well.

So I vote against 'average user experience' aka dumbed down and locked down crap.

In its early days Firefox had this. And there's no reason any of it would need to be dumbed down or locked down.

VSCode, Firefox, KDE, tilix, cmder, the latest version of blender...

I would agree with VSCode, seems ok in my book.

Firefox of the past maybe, when it allowed unsigned extensions. AFAIK now it isn't possible in non-dev version.

Others I have not heard of/not used.

Some of the best examples are things you might not even think of: keyboard shortcuts, right click menus, long presses, double clicks.

I find Vivaldi (not my daily browser) pretty good at that: by default it's a browser like any other, but you can personalise everything pretty much everything, and unlike something like KDE it feels thoughtful and easy to use

It's not open source, but as counter-example I would offer Directory Opus: loads of features, totally customizable, extendable, complete documentation, while somehow managing to not get bloated (they've been at it for decades, after all). Old Opera was also very good in the same way, and long before Firefox even showed up.

I'd love to have a browser without anything extra for my dad. No plugins, no questions, nothing that would confuse him.

Assuming vanila Firefox is not good enought (it certainly is for my 64 years old tech-clueless mother), you can try epiphany. It's barebone.

I’ve been writing software for 30 years and Firefox still confuses me at times. It is many things but not simple.

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