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Comment by yesenadam | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to update, when the update is to something that looks horrible. (Last update I spent hours googling for scripts to reverse the appearance changes. Seems there were 1000s of people looking for the same thing!) But in FF preferences there are only 2 choices.

1. Automatically install updates (recommended)

2. Check for updates but let you choose to install them

You would think I'd choose option 2, since I don't want updates, but I tried that, and I got a popup several times a day saying INSTALL UPDATE NOW OR LATER—no way to say "No I don't !%$@ want to update!" ... so after putting up with that for a while I changed to option 1 to avoid the neverending update popups. Not at all what I want though. Talk about a dark pattern. "let you choose to install them" indeed! Not "choose whether to install" but "bombard you with update popups until you crack and choose to install".

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Not wanting to install browser updates is no different to asking "how do I turn this yellow light in my car's dashboard? I know! I'll put tape over it!". Granted, the update might come with UI changes. Changing oil in your car won't do that. That can be annoying, but whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective. That's fine. You can rely on userChrome.css[1] to customize things more in Firefox than in any other browser.

Personally, I've gone from "customize every last pixel" to just using things the way the designers wanted me to use things. I like having flexibility and configuration toggles, that I use often, but I'm much happier now without trying to customize things for customization's sake.

[1]: https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html

I take issue with almost everything you said. Sorry my reply is too brief. It's "no different to"..what?! I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective. I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do? Not sure. I used userChrome.css once I think, and as I didn't know about its existence beforehand, it took me hours to fix FF.

> It's "no different to"..what?!

Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.

> I don't agree that whether something looks "horrible" is completely subjective.

Let's agree to disagree.

> I've never tried to customize things for customization's sake, if you're implying I do?

I'm not saying you have, I'm saying I have customized things for change's sake, and since I stopped doing that and being overly annoyed and fighting changes "forced" on me, I adapted to most of those changes. I dislike when customization options are taken away. But I also understand that customization comes at the bottom of priorities of developers, and that is likely the right call to make for most applications.

It is a problem that upgrades aren't always an improvement on every axis, but staying on old network connected applications is manifestly not a reasonable solution.

> Having an out of date browser is as "dangerous" to you and those around you as driving in a car with flat tires. Declining to upgrade software because of aesthetic changes seems shortsighted to me.

If the browser designers think it's so important for people to update, then perhaps they should stop driving people away with relentless, needless, irritating aesthetic changes! They're the short-sighted ones here.

I have also given up tweaking the interface, long ago. I wish Mozilla's devs could learn the same lesson.

You might tape over the warning light on your car's dash too, if you knew there was a good chance it would come back from the shop painted a different color and having had a racing spoiler bolted onto the trunk.

I had exact same experience. changed the registry settings in windows and am fine. Didn't have the nerves to find how to do on my mac and am just clicking discard every time. Annoying indeed. i wonder most of this shit is probably from the mozilla funding requirements to nerf the browser.

For eg. why tf would you put a separate scroll menu on tab right click to close tabs on left or right, it saves literally 1 row. and increases every single tab change to two clicks. UI disaster!!

i hope some group forks firefox and i will happily donate. But, due to current mozilla ceo siphoning money, not gonna donate a penny.

Sniff your browser traffic to figure out which url they use to poll for updates and block that on your router or firewall. If that doesn't work, maybe you can redirect it in hosts file, and spoof the response to say there's no new updates.

Thank you.

I think you can also do it with an enterprise policy flag

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

FWIW forums like reddit's r/FirefoxCSS usually have solutions as soon as changes roll out on Developer Edition, which is months ahead of the release. It was like that for the ugly new tabs, for instance, which I never had to deal with.

Thanks, yeah, that's where I ended up last time hehe. I should've just asked about it on HN, of course.

Have you considered their extended support release (ESR)?

> Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) is an official version of Firefox developed for large organizations like universities and businesses that need to set up and maintain Firefox on a large scale. Firefox ESR does not come with the latest features but it has the latest security and stability fixes.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switch-to-firefox-exten...

You can create a policies.json file with these contents:

  {
    "policies": {
      "DisableAppUpdate": true
    }
  }

Place it in the platform specific place: "On Windows, create a directory called distribution where the EXE is located and place the file there. On Mac, the file goes into Firefox.app/Contents/Resources/distribution. On Linux, the file goes into firefox/distribution, where firefox is the installation directory for firefox, which varies by distribution or you can specify system-wide policy by placing the file in /etc/firefox/policies."

from https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

EDIT: alternatively, you can install the ESR version for 91, use the userchrome link in the sibling comment, and forget about it for 18 months, wich is what I'm currently doing. And good thing too, apparently 92 broke some UI again, because of course it did.

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