Completely covering up bookmark bar when clicked inside address bar is nothing? Limiting length of text in address bar is nothing? Removing icons from menus - so everything looks like gray mess is nothing?
Firefox is full of these types of changes.
Firefox is full of these types of changes.
When you use Firefox, your bookmarks bar gets covered up while you're typing an URL. When using chrom(e|ium) or its plethora of derivatives, you're actively contributing to browser monoculture, sharing your browsing habits with a predatory corporation, and supporting anti-user changes such as the manifest v3 webextensions, which cripple content blockers and disempower you, us, the user.
If the choice is difficult for you, I really don't know what to say.
It's made me reduce the amount of features I use in Firefox because I feel I can't trust the features will be there anymore or work the same in the next release.
Often the benefits are small, and the changes seem to be for the sake of changing things rather than to bring tangible improvements.
Workflow-breaking changes are incredibly frustrating for the user, and something a mature project should only do with extreme reluctance. Yet Firefox seems to do it haphazardly.
I would honestly be happy to use a browser that looked and worked like Netscape 1.0 as long as it supported modern web standards and didn't keep moving buttons around.
Have you tried SeaMonkey? It may be what you seek: https://www.seamonkey-project.org/
Maybe go complain at people who have already left.
FF tends the take flak about things people just accept from other browsers.
Don't want pocket, disable it. Don't want address bar suggestions disable it. I don't agree with everything that goes on with FF but there is no alternative to what MS dreamed of with IE and Google seem to be achieving with Chrome.
Out of interest, why do you need to see your bookmarks bar if you are typing in the address bar? Genuine question.
Because yeah, all of this is literally nothing. There are things going on with Firefox which are not nothing, but none of what you cite is.
They’re also sound like quite achievable goals for a fork.
Deciding that support for Firefox lives or dies depending on details about how long the text and the address bar is, is completely absurd. Because meanwhile, everything else is increasingly based on chromium which is developed by Google. Having the web depend on a single rendering engine where all the major trends and development effort and support maintenance comes from one company is catastrophically short-sighted.
This is speculation on my part and I want to be very clear about that, but whenever I see something that looks like Google astroturfing, what happens is they frame controversial decisions as technical necessities, like it's just an easier way of solving a technical problem. And they keep trying to reframe questions in technical terms, and try to turn questions of right and wrong into questions where they're simply elaborating on how the technology works, and it's a matter of you not understanding the technology. This was my experience in HN threads about AMP, for instance.
That's my sense of how that works. In this case, I don't think we're seeing anything other than the typical short attention spans.
How often do you click the address bar, then change your mind and navigate to the bookmark bar instead?
You know the address bar searches your bookmarks too if you do change your mind and don't want to change focus?
The address bar click behavior combined with the new padding became so intrusive for me that this was the thing that finally got me into mapping caps lock to escape for quicker hiding action (already used it for control, thanks to Karabiner-Elements/AutoHotkey I can get both).