Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Reinterpretable content is necessary for control, but it's not sufficient: the browser needs to provide users with levers by which to control their experience.

...says the organisation that is continuously removing functionality, especially whenever they feel like redesigning the UI. Mozilla has been saying stuff like this for a long time (and "puts users in control" was the Firefox slogan for a while, before they did s/users/individuals/), but what they've done to Firefox is clearly in a different direction. I still use Firefox because it's the "least bad" of all the alternatives, but that's a pretty low bar and their continuing hypocrisy is definitely irritating.

"Actions speak louder than words."

View on HN

Firefox provides, by far, more options for customizing the UI then any other browser. Don’t like the redesign? Then download Sidebery and have tree-style tab navigation, or change userChrome.css to remove tabs completely. Don’t act like Firefox has personally assaulted you just because you don’t like their redesign.

or change userChrome.css

The fact that you now need to set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets in order for userChrome.css to work, and that it has "legacy" in the name, is already a sign that route might disappear in the future.

More "then[sic] any other browser" is a really low bar, especially when the others are far worse.

This is an excellent, key point.

I use Waterfox these days, and occasionally Firefox if there's a problem.

It's now significantly harder to customise either of them to the way I used to like pre-Quantum Firefox. A few more steps down this path and I won't be able to at all.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork...

Firefox provides, by far, fewer options for customizing the UX than the same browser a few years ago. Don't act like that loss of control is irrelevant just because you don't use it.

What functionality was removed?

They broke extensions, removed RSS bookmarks, removed bookmark descriptions, removed "compact" controls... And those are only the ones I remember because I used them, they've removed more things.

Normally I'd say "you must be kidding" but I've learned that people here often don't know stuff that seems very obvious.

The big change for millions of us was Firefox Quantum, which came out in November 2017.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

Mozilla is proud of this because it involves some Rust stuff, but it was a massive loss for the extensions world. It removed (or disabled) XUL, Netscape's extensions language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL

To quote from the Classic Addons Archive:

« This catalog contains 93,598 versions of 19,450 Firefox add-ons created by 14,274 developers over the past 15 years using XUL/XPCOM technology before Mozilla decided to ruin the classic extensions ecosystem and go exclusively to WebExtensions. »

https://github.com/JustOff/ca-archive

For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.

It destroyed my browser and drove me away from using Firefox after nearly 20 years, dozens of computers and ½ dozen different operating systems.

Other cut functionality:

The best cross-platform FOSS email client, by far, is Mozilla Thunderbird. Mozilla has repeatedly tried to kill it.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/30/mozilla_thunderbird_h...

Mozilla also has cut off Seamonkey, the original Mozilla Internet Suite.

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

Mozilla code is the one remaining FOSS WYSIWYG HTML editor, as included in Seamonkey.

It threw it out.

So far the following forks tried to maintain it:

Kompozer: https://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer/

NVu: http://www.nvu.com/

BlueGriffon: http://bluegriffon.org/

Mozilla has no real idea why people use Firefox or what they want. It has forced wildly unpopular new features on people, such as the Australis theme.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/974802

It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/18/foxstuck_firefox_brow...

And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.

Mozilla's Boot2Gecko became FirefoxOS which became KaiOS, the fastest-growing mobile OS in the world.

https://www.kaiostech.com/

Mozilla abandoned FirefoxOS.

KaiOS is proprietary. Mozilla licensing should make that illegal. Is Mozilla enforcing it? No. Who wrote the license? Mozilla CEO Mitch Baker.

Salary: $3 million in 2020.

Also 2020: Mozilla fired 250 people, quarter of its workforce. https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/11/mozilla_staff_layoffs...

Summary – cut functionality from Mozilla products this century:

• XUL extensions

• Email, both integrated and standalone client

• Newsgroup reading

• FTP support

• XMPP Chat

• Web editing

• Native FOSS mobile OS

• Multiple themes.

And so on.

> For me, before Firefox 57, it worked superbly for me. Afterwards, of my 13 essential addons, only 2 still worked and one of those was trivial and unimportant.

What are those extensions? I myself use 16 extensions, and I don’t think it has ever happened that I wanted to use an extension that wasn’t compatible with post-57 Firefox.

> It's forced telemetry that kicked the entire browser offline for millions … And yet it includes a huge complicated "developer mode" that 99.9% of users never want and never see.

My question was, what features were removed? What does that have to do with telemetry and devtools?

Offhand, from memory of 4+ Y ago...

Vertical tabs.

Flat bookmarks.

Unified sidebar.

DownThemAll + DTA Anti-Container.

Status4ever.

Downloads Tab.

BugMeNot.

AutoPagerizer.

Readability.

All stuff that tweaks the browser UI. WebExtensions mostly can't do that: they're trivial little things.

`about:config` on the Android version.

Frankly most of the functionality was removed on the Android version. You can't even change your user agent anymore. All you get is that pathetic "show desktop version" checkbox which not only still tells websites you're on a mobile browser but breaks if you check it, tap a link, and then hit the back button. I still have to do half my mobile browsing in Chrome because it may be an ad-riddled mess but at least it doesn't constantly break.

You can access about:config and change your user agent if you use Firefox Beta or Firefox Nightly. The latter is annoying since you get constant updates, but the former is about as stable as normal Firefox.

Which about:config settings would you like to modify? Maybe those settings should be exposed or enabled with a proper UI instead of full about:config. Most about:config settings were not designed for end users to tweak and can break your Firefox in fatal or subtle ways.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com