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As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will also be deleted on browser restart. Sure, I can use the developer edition, but why? I am not a web developer. I get Mozilla's arguments about user security, but isn't an about:config tweak obscure enough? It already shows you plenty warning when you open it.

Looking at the mentioned LibreWolf, the changes reminded me of my time using ungoogled Chromium. I left that path, because it seemed like an uphill battle to keep up with upstream changes in the long term. Also you potentially risk using a somewhat outdated browser until all changes are ported to the new version. I was also not a fan of giving Chromium browsers additional market share.

For me switching to FF was primarily about using a browser supporting user choice and privacy, not for its UX or anything else. However Mozilla is losing my trust in this regard. Opt-out telemetry/tracking/whatever you want to call it and user experiments as well as reducing user choice with forced signatures by a central party, this sounds counter to why I switched in the first place. I hate that I have to go into settings after installing it to disable "features", it is not Windows...

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef... (I am also a bit surprised I had to strip an utm key from this URL...)

Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

There are (sadly) plenty of people out there who will install a browser extension & tweak an about:config setting if you set up the right incentives to get them to look past the warnings.

The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.

When you dig deeper, you will indeed find that the public reason for these kind of restrictions is "to keep the user safe".

They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions.

It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.

> It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.

Check out Firefox for Android. It has a Walled Garden of extensions. There is a list of about 20 whitelisted extensions. All others are (falsely) claimed to be "incompatible".

> Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

I absolutely get this argument and this is also what I got from the Mozilla docs. For me the decision for user safety moved too far away from user freedom. I get that this is a tradeoff, I am not happy with the outcome personally. I have no perfect solution to this problem either, I just find the current state runs counter to what I personally would expect.

I see a sliding scale from Apple walled garden to Windows XP wild west. I think I am more on the XP side than the Apple side, so my view likely clashes with what Mozilla has in mind.

> The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.

So what stops these people from downloading a developer version of the browser themselves?

You cannot protect people from themselves. The only cure for idiocy is death after all.

Why doesn't google do the same then? They have the same issue and have a much larger market share.

They don't do it because it doesn't stop those plenty of people from doing what they want to do. This misguided decision from Mozilla only serves to drive developers and tinkerers away from their browser. (No, I will not download the nightly/beta browser just to run my own addons)

> Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system.

Why be vague? Point out some people who were abusing the previous system who couldn't abuse it now.

The signature process for extensions not offered to the public (on addons.mozilla.org) is automated and pretty much instantaneous, and they only verify there is no obvious malware in the extension. I’ve built a handful of extensions for myself and getting them signed is just a small nuisance.

> I am not a web developer.

Maybe not, but you seem to be a browser extension developer.

I agree with your sentiment. To address privacy concerns I decided to use a privacy-oriented fork: LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/. I use it as a daily driver for all my use cases and it works like a charm (inc extensions).

It is frustrating that Mozilla/firefox position themselves as user friendly and privacy-focused but they don't walk the talk. It's all marketing lies so my sympathy for the org is on an all-time low.

> Buttons are small...

I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.

If the buttons are small, they are harder to click. It's also harder to understand what they do, which is important when they have icons that are just cryptic monochrome squiggles.

What's the merit in making the buttons unobtrusive? What are you going to do with all those saved pixels? There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration.

When the browser is covering a sixth of my screen it's already uncomfortably large. There is no reason to save hundreds of pixels when there are literally millions to spare.

Given this line of thought, why doesn't Firefox put every single icon from the menu on the toolbar. Since there is so much space. My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive.

Looking at my toolbar now, I really don't think they are that small. Just the right size. https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png

Your toolbar is a nightmare for people that may have some eyesight problems or are not expert FPS shooters in the latest triple A game and miss some mouse dexterity.

What I'm trying to say is that a large surface is good for muscle memory. And I have a lot of pixels to play with, 4k screens are cheap. Of-course programs have to scale between small and (very) big screens, but making everything very small by default is not the way to go.

>My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive.

Why the half measure? If they are rarely used remove them. If they are used enough to leave them on the UI make them big enough and labeled well enough that I don't need a decoder ring and magnifying glass. Making them small and unintelligible is probably the best way to make them rarely used.

Well if you make something hard to access, of course it won't be used very often.

The buttons are pretty tiny within the context of the entire screen: https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD

Curious to know the set of extensions you've got there

In order of buttons:

Downloads (not an extension)

Firefox Account (not an extension - I really should hide it) uBlockOrigin

Honey (basically coupons)

PushBullet (I use this occasionally to move links or images between the PC and iPhone. Should probably get rid of it since Firefox now supports functionality natively).

Multi-Account containers

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> There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration.

I'm using Firefox on half of my laptop's screen, so I'm glad the menus don't take up that much space.

Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry.

There is a lot of telemetry, but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.

I don't want my applications to dial home and tell Mozilla what I'm doing with them. Doesn't matter what you call it.

It does. “I don’t want telemetry” and “I don’t want tracking” are two overlapping sets of people. Whether or not you care about the distinction, others do.

It doesn't. You're replying to marginalia_nu, who has just clarified their position after you made a point. You're not replying to all those hypothetical people who haven't made a peep.

What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level.

In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.

Telemetry analysis doesn’t care who you are, and makes no effort to find out, even if it’s plausible that one could find out of effort was taken to do so.

Tracking analysis does care who you are, and makes every effort to find out, whether to sell marketing to you or to sell your data to others.

It isn’t necessary to deanonymize telemetry to make use of it, and it’s quite costly to do so (both in PII storage duties to GDPR et al. and in enrichment terms), so tracking isn’t knowingly done by default by lots of telemetry implementers (for example, Homebrew).

Note that telemetry implemented using Facebook clearly does end up with Facebook trying to track you in order to sell you ads and sell your data; implementation decisions are critically relevant when it comes to collecting telemetry, in order to not accidentally cause tracking.

"Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry."

Yes, it is. If you have the ability to track, then tracking is done. It is the nature of risk management.

I appreciate the space saving. Not everyone has a 4K 30 inch display

Why can't a browser exist that makes use of such a display though? Seems like every browser is targeting 12½" monitors to the detriment of proper desktops.

I would not be shocked if 13” was, in fact, the modal display size.

A lot of people work off of laptops or even tablets.

Why is not possible to cater to the needs of more than one group of users?

Windows 95 had the ability to change the size of its icons. Clearly it can be done.

You can scale the whole UI

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_an...

Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration).

Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.

If you want a menu, and you're not on Mac where Firefox supplies a full set of menus by default like any other well-behaved Mac application, hit the "Alt" key on your keyboard. Or right click on the toolbar and show it. Honestly, I wish I could turn it off because I only ever activate it by accident when switching from Mac to Linux and forgetting to switch from Cmd to Ctrl.

> I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX.

You're entitled to your opinion, certainly, but please do be aware that not everyone agrees with you? I quite like Alpenglow, I'm happy with the combined onmibar, I trust them to not to abuse their telemetry. My understanding is that the data suggests that more people use themes than use "regular" add-ons.

It's by no means perfect, but it's a whole lot better than one might expect from reading all the negative comments on pretty much any Firefox thread.

I've used FF for a decade and have literally never noticed a UI change that I gave any thought to whatsoever.

You can change every aspect of the chrome yourself if you want.

This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.

Yeah.

I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.

It’s trivial to increase the UI button size in Firefox, though.

Really? How do you do that?

I can't open it right now but I'm pretty sure you right click anywhere around the bookmarks bar (NOT a bookmark) you get an option to customize the UI/bars and there's a checkbox for icon size

Unless I'm completely mixing this up with Chrome but I don't see that here.

Nope, not getting any of that. If it ever existed, it's another casualty in the war on configurability. There's an option to add more space between the icons, but they're still as tiny as they ever were.

It still exists. Customize Toolbar -> Density (bottom left). There are only 2 or 3 presets, but it is possible to slightly adjust the icon size. Just confirmed on 109.0.1.

Huh, I get two presets. And the density only changes the spacing between the buttons. They're still the same size.

You may be right. I checked before replying, but I may have just been tricked by an optical illusion with the extra padding shifting everything.

By default there are only 2 densities, but there used to also be a "Compact" option which was removed. I believe it is possible to still enable this, though it is officially unsupported at this point.