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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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

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.

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 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.

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