Mozilla hides Compact Mode in Firefox for new users
ghacks.net
ghacks.net
I still miss vimperator and a few other XUL era add-ons by the way.
(Though to be fair, UX research like that does indeed highlight what causes friction, not necessarily how many people are strongly attached to features like compact mode.)
Maybe Firefox usage is really like 25% power users, but most of those disable Telemetry, causing the priorities to be all screwed up (See the ALSA example!).
tl;dr Telemetry indicates ALSA is no longer used. Firefox removes ALSA. Said Firefox version reaches release. Audio completely stops working for all users of some distros...that were yanking out the Telemetry.
From https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware Linux users are about 3% of the userbase, so that's 0.1% of total users.
Don't be dishonest.
Maintaining things requires time and effort. Time and effort are limited resources.
* Nobody was maintaining ALSA support
* Nobody from the community stepped up and offered to maintain ALSA support to prevent it from being removed
* The ALSA backend poked a massive hole in their sandbox, which hurts users. Rewriting the ALSA backend to make it compatible with sandboxing would have required a lot of time and effort for little payoff. That hurts users by wasting developer time that could have been spent more productively.
* You cannot compare a Free Software project removing support for something that nobody volunteered to maintain to anti-semitic persecution, don't be ridiculous. If Gentoo (or whoever) wants to keep ALSA support then they can carry the patch to do so.
> Maintaining things requires time and effort. Time and
> effort are limited resources.
The difference between users self-reporting how they use software and what they actually do when you observe them using it is often massive, even amongst technical users.
It sounds like the bus network reorganisations in the city where I used to work. They killed my usual route, by shutting down one line; so I had to resort to a backup route, where the travelling conditions on the last part were horrible at peak hour and during holidays. And 2 or 3 years after that, they modified one line of the backup route (the first part), so that the buses of that line also had to go through an horrible motorway interchange which is always locked at peak hour. After the second change, I had to wonder if they wished me harm :-)
Perhaps it looks better now on an organisational map. But they have suppressed lines and possibilities of transfers, thus possibilities of choosing a route that suits you, and concentrated the traffic on some main lines which were already heavily loaded. Yeah, there are definitely some common points.
Do note that Tridactyl is terrific now. I don't even miss viperator anymore.
I just downloaded Nightly, which already has the Proton UI, and indeed compact mode is hidden behind an about:config option and it's a bit taller than the one featured in the current UI. I really can't fathom why this has to be the case.
I mean, just remove compact mode if you don't want to maintain it, but playing around after removing it invalidates any excuse that has something to do with reducing maintenance burden.
Proton, ha.
Uh, I'm pretty sure that's just MacOS
If the argument is that users can’t find it shouldn’t the solution be to make it easier to find? Perhaps that’s not the problem and future UI changes are making managing multiple modes more work for designers.
According to the bug tracker the plan is to run an experiment (including defaulting Compact mode) and see which combinations are actually retained by users: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698171
There's another bug that I can't find right now that talks about defaulting Compact mode on low-res devices. The whole thing seems to be totally unsettled pending more data.
There's a bug on file suggesting an experiment. Whether there is a plan to actually run one is another matter. (I don't know the answer; just wanted to point out that issues in bugzilla are not by themselves evidence of product plans.)
Which says that the current Telemetry is not usable (and talks about the defaulting on).
I'm personally not hopeful after Mozilla's track record in recent history. But then again, there is no alternative...
I feel like human response to changes like this isn't linear: make a thing slightly worse, and most people won't be annoyed enough to do the research, find and change the setting. If it's not a huge step back they'll just live with it, and maybe complain to their IT-savy friend, who will just nod and say "I know".
On the other hand, people doing the experiment will see that most of their test subjects don't switch away from the change - mission accomplished, full steam ahead!
A/B testing UX, basically?
Moving the compact mode setting into the same space as the telemetry switches not included in about:preferences#privacy seems like a great way to cook the statistics.
Hanlon's Razor only stretches so far. It's become an established pattern of hiding a feature over next to the telemetry switches, explaining that they'd measure the results with lazy load telemetry - gently defining an unspoken void that's shaped a lot like "well if they wanted the feature maybe they shouldn't have turned off telemetry?".
And yes, I know that some linux Distros that believe in software freedom have negotiated to be able to provide Firefox without this lock-down (ie, Debian), and that if you use the well hidden unbranded builds available in no repos it's possible too.
But 37 was when Moz decided that users shouldn't get a choice and it's been downhill ever since.
This is a very weak argument given that it works in the Developer version.
Except those builds don’t have an updater, which is kind of a major QOL problem in a web browser.
Better than just yank it out of existence.
That said I agree with comments in this thread to the effect that the option will be removed from about:config in short order, and so don't know what my solution to the problem will be.