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Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I agree. I'm still waiting for completion of the wayland support tracking ticket [1] that was opened a decade ago.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

I've been using Firefox on Wayland for the past year or so. There are still some minor hitches here and there, but it's very usable right now.

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:

  no_focus [app_id="firefox" title="^$"]
  for_window [app_id="firefox" title="^$"] border none, floating enable, move position 79 ppt 88 ppt

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.

Edit: OK, filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1712681.

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!!

> an outdated looking app

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.

> outdated looking app

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.

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.

This extension helps immensely: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/

I think it needs Vertical tabs at least

Tree Style Tab does that quite well. Does it need to be built-in?

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.

Firefox has at least 2 tree style add-ons right now.

Sidebery is a pretty nice extension for that

What OS are you on? IME it's the best browser on windows particularly with ublock origin.

Is there a Godwin's law for Firefox yet?

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