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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

At this point, I'm thinking it is entirely self inflicted.

Once Firefox is out, Chrome(ium) will be able to ban ad-blocks.

"In addition to that, there are also a few things that Firefox may have done wrong:

    Constantly breaking the user experience with major overhauls"

Ye. One day my Firefox on mobile moved the URL bar to the bottom from the top. I don't even remember doing any update. It broke my muscle memory and it took months before I got used to it.

For current users any UI changes that break the current UI "ABI" is bad. I guess the pressure to do pet projects is big internally as usual.

I had to adapt to it, but I really like it because it is easier to access. And that sums up a lot of Firefox UI changes. TL;DR: People don't like change.

I couldn't be bothered to learn the new place for URL bar so I just went to options and moved it back to top

Not just UI changes. On mobile I lost the ability to block images on metered connections. This was the most important feature for me on mobile :'(

I hate every change like this, and it's the worst thing (imho) about Firefox.

That said, now that I'm used to it, I think that having the address bar at the bottom on mobile is better and I wish they'd had it all along.

Sure, it is better on big screens but it is hardly worth the annoyance of messing with the user's day. They could have had an update nag screen "Do you want our fancy new position of the bar?" at start-up or something for such a big change instead of making it default for current installs.

You can change it to be the top if you want. URL bar on the bottom is half the reason I use Firefox to begin with. It makes 3000x more sense on today's giant screen phones.

Firefox can’t win really. They do anything and half the users complain and half the users state it made the browser finally usable.

While google does whatever they want and people just nod and move along.

I'm a "diehard" firefox user from back when it was Netscape, and just won't use anything else as my main browser until I'm forced to, but

    Constantly breaking the user experience with major overhauls

is what makes me swear under my breath most. I've learned to dread major updates because of time I've spent working around UI changes that apparently do nothing other than satisfy the aesthetic concerns of some random developer.

I gotta say that for me this was a really nice change! It's way more ergonomic to use this way. There's also a setting that lets you choose if it's at the top or bottom so you can revert the change.

> I'm thinking it is entirely self inflicted.

It was 'entirely self inflicted' from the start [0]

From [0]

> Mozilla can live without Google's money, Baker says

> We've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google

Perhaps that was the signal that provoked Google to create Chrome in 2008 since Mozilla was going to walk away from them. Today, Google's millions still makes around 80% of Mozilla's entire revenue. Chrome has become more stronger and Mozilla is still heavily dependent on Google's millions and still haven't figured out how to make money without them 14 years later.

Mozilla needs to find itself some significant revenue by themselves which is compatible with their mission statement before preaching about 'privacy' and taking payment from a 'anti-privacy' company which is their direct competitor.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

If Firefox is out and Chrome bans ad-blocks, Firefox will be in again, reborn from the ashes, just like last time.

People who use add blockers are a strict subset of the people who are capable of using downloaded, non-default code to browse the web.

It isn't like people will ever lose access to old browsers that work as well as they ever did. This isn't a serious threat.

Old browsers don't really work "as well as they ever did".

The web is a moving target, and after a couple of years an old release will be close to unusable.

Firefox is currently the only serious competitor to Chrome, Safari having its known defects and Edge -- well, Edge being Edge.

So it's crucial that Firefox remains in the game, even as a (usable) wavebreaker to Chrome.

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