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Comment by KallDrexx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698100

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698171

Thanks for this. I didn't read the comments so that's good to know :)

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.

>(And) probably increased their CEOs annual salary and bonuses.

Please don't post this kind of cynical speculation unless you have something to back it up.

She's in the news every year or two, when she gets another pay raise.

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?

That is the most messed up reasoning I have ever heard. "We will remove this feature because we didn't promote it well."

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.

Yes, that idea is nonsensical. The reason I use FF is because they're fighting tracking and telemetry. Not so they can spy on me.

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.

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid

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 opt out.

Then there was the issue of "studies"[1].

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/bl035o/what_are_th...

Modern telemetry is a plague on power users. Imagine if Vim made product decisions around which features get the most use.

Every new Vim instance would show instructions on how to :q and a million StackOverflow posts would become redundant

Neovim startup page looks like this now:

    NVIM v0.4.3

    Nvim is open source and freely distributable
    https://neovim.io/#chat

    type  :help nvim<Enter>       if you are new!
    type  :checkhealth<Enter>     to optimize Nvim
    type  :q<Enter>               to exit
    type  :help<Enter>            for help

    Become a registered Vim user!
    type  :help register<Enter>   for information

I imagine vim is similar

It is.

You can also hit ^C, and it will prompt you with instructions.

Vim (at least v8.1.1401) already does that.

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.

> 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.

Also the touch scale, also only discoverable through that same UI widget, is not up for removal.

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...

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.

This is the exact same language they used to justify removing RSS support so they could push their Pocket(tm) product.

Glad I left, won’t be back.

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.

"Nobody visited the restaurant that we decided to build in the middle of nowhere and never advertised, so obviously it failed and we closed it down."

Correction:

"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!

Even if they knew how many people are using it they still wouldn't know if more people wanted to use it.

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