Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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My experience using Firefox for a long-ass time has been marred with seemingly arbitrary changes that have frustratingly broken my workflow, since way back when they redesigned the URL bar in Firefox 2 and complaints were met with an irreverent "sucks to be you I guess."

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.

> 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/

Most of these changes are misguided initiatives to copy Chrome. Firefox is getting worse, but Chrome is already worse than Firefox can become.

I think Firefox has identity issues. It used to be defined in terms of Internet Explorer, but now that IE isn't the dominant player anymore, I don't think Firefox has really found what it wants to be, so the last decade it's sort of been floundering.

The worst to the morale is that the changes sometimes seem to be in effect purely anti-user. How could have ever a change that makes active tab look almost identical to inactive one pass a design review. It's not even a subjective thing. Contrast between elements is objectively definable and measurable property. Tabs are critical to everyday use.

This account matches my own experience as a firefox user.

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