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Comment by encom | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated.

Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.

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Users are just different, I’ve been a happy Firefox (and pocket) user for many years, and wouldn’t be happy with these so called improvements. I don’t need customizability, just need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don’t feel that Firefox is at war with me.

> Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time

Every upgrade?

I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.

Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl.

And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them.

I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.

Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant

This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.

I still use FF, but I do miss how customizable its UI used to be. I even made it look like Chrome back then!

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years.

citation fucking needed.

Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851, where the primary source for encom's opinions (encom himself) says that it's his opinion.

Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be proven or disproven.

The citation is right there: "In my opinion"

I would like actual facts to back up this opinion.

Fine, here's the one of the last changes that put me over the edge:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128

Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that trash heap.

As mentioned, this has been a repeating occurrence. "View Image" was a tiny thing, but I happened to use it many times per day. And many MANY such tiny things just wears you down eventually.

Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later....

Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.

And 99% of the time it's not what I want. I'm sure there's an extension that fixes it, but why remove it in the first place? It's a pointless change. There are probably extensions that "fix" all the other myriad things Mozilla broke or removed, but now I have to rely on the good will of a third party to develop it and keep it up to date. There are only so many times I'll tolerate Mozilla breaking my workflow, so I have to spend time on either fixing the problems or adapt to their nonsensical changes.

well knock yourself out. Turns out things change that we personally do not like all the time. Some of those things are worth caring about, some of them are not. I salute you for dieing on the hill of 'one more click'. To me this falls well elow the ar of user hostile in a world where google chrome farms you and prevents you from using ad blockers.

Individually, each of those things is not worth caring about. But in aggregate, a thousand small cuts is extremely unpleasant.

You keep arguing as if I deleted Firefox because of this one issue. I'm not going to repeat myself any more.

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