Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
Assuming that "surviving" is good and "reasonable" is... what... 3% and dropping?
I'm sure Google would like a slightly healthier captured 'competitor' but that doesn't mean that they didn't put them in this place through subversive practices.
(Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.
You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...) This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script :
Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.
But yes, it's time to give Firefox another spin. Hey, looks like youtube is un-broken in base FF! Keeping FF "base" for debug purposes is far more important than fixing my petty grievances so I have to pass on the tips, but I appreciate the sentiment. Here's hoping its next stint in the "daily driver" seat is a long one.
Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.
The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)
Aesthetics is a matter of taste, of course, so there's no right or wrong there. Only if you like it or not.
But the trend towards minimalist UIs is something that actively gets in my way and makes the software more difficult for me to actually use. That's why I dislike it.
Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles.
Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.
What?
about:config is right where it's always been, unless I've missed something?
From your link, there are problems that are specific to `about:config` only on mobile, due to Android OS and GeckoView API specifics:
- There are preferences that …is reset when the app restarts.
- There are many preferences that …do nothing.
- There are preferences …which breaks interacting with some websites.
- There are platform preferences that …result in startup crashes …and reinstalling results in the deleting of data like bookmarks, passwords, history, etc.
Look, it’s not like we’re insensitive to the desire for configuration; it’s that we know that on Android there are footguns that don’t exist on desktop!
We want to figure out a way to do this in a way that makes it difficult to break GeckoView. I’m sorry that this isn’t good enough for many of you, but with all due respect, you’re not the ones on the receiving end when somebody breaks their browser because they didn’t know what they were doing!
Kinda reasonable, honestly? It sounds like more than just "page may render funny" types of footguns. Unknown quantities of unlabelled "Lose All My Data" buttons are probably what this site would call an antipattern.
> They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years.
On the above Reddit link, they also explain the extensions thing was because they were "literally not done implementing the APIs yet" and focused on the "highest priority extensions". So, the "big wtf decision" might be why they released it in that state, rather than "getting rid of most extensions".
If some settings can cause a crash (and you don't have a complete list), create a separate launcher that only edits the settings in about:config without ever trying to run other Fenix code, so the user always has a way to revert settings if they're causing a crash on startup.
If some settings can be applied but are reset the next time the app runs, save the setting value itself and then re-apply it on each startup.
Other problems like settings doing nothing or breaking websites are just ordinary bugs. Until they're fixed, the user can just refrain from using those settings, or revert them if they cause problems. These sorts of issues are acceptable for users knowingly mucking around in about:config, it's fine, fix the bugs when you get time. It's no reason to disable access to the other settings that actually work in the meantime.
They just haven't had anybody to spend engineering time doing so yet. Perhaps:
https://codetribute.mozilla.org/projects/fenix
https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/setup/contributing_c...
We may disagree with Mozilla's priorities, but they do have finite resources. E.G. Should the extensions API have been delayed even more than it already was, to first build this separate `about:config` launcher as a kludge?
They're not being wilfully bullheaded in this case, is what I mean. The "P5"/"Enhancement" Bugzilla issue is open, but unassigned.
But this has been the other major criticism of Mozilla. They take the money they get from Google and spend it on not-Firefox when Firefox market share should be their top priority, because if that number goes to zero they're defunct.
about:config already has a warning when you first open it that you'll screw up your settings if you don't know what you're doing. So if someone borks their install as a result, it isn't Mozilla engineer's job to apologize or hand hold them through it.
Every software until the 2010s (Windows itself, with its registry) has had this implicit disclaimer that you forfeit all official support if you dick around with the internals in an non standard way. So why is it now at the other extreme of 'fuck all power users, we will only target those who can't walk and chew gum simultaneously' ?
>While FF is still the best browser for me (barely)
Give Pale Moon a try and ignore the FF fanboy propaganda of it being oLd aNd iNSeCuRe. It isn't, it's regularly updated to keep up with Google dominated web standards and security patches, and runs on an independent fork of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. It is not a mere rebuild like Librewolf, Waterfox etc but a separate browser that retains all the full customizabiity of pre 2017 Firefox with full XUL extension and NPAPI plugin support.
I am still butthurt
What extensions did they get rid of?
I think all in all getting sandboxing as well as making it easier to provide cross-browser extensions was worth the breaking change.
Optional sandboxing can be good because users can have more confidence that something can't hurt them. But it can also be bad because users will have more confidence that something can't hurt them, and then it does anyway.
Meanwhile the ability to exercise arbitrary permissions given the user's authorization is something we've lost. And what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
> what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS. On the other hand, a compromised browser extension could deal an incredible amount of damage to me.
Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to.
> Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS.
In which case the website could have fingerprinted your browser and served you the one that does.
> Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
I'm saying that we should give people the tools and information they need to decide if and to what extent they can trust something, instead of presuming to decide for them.
Requiring them to maintain two completely different extension APIs (the old XUL-based one and Web Extensions) would work too but seems excessive.
The problem is new WebExtensions APIs are not welcome.
And ironically for all the talk of making it more secure, the amount of cross browser malware has only shot up since Mozilla decided to dump XUL in favor of copying Chrome's extension system.
What Mozilla promised would have been worth it. Parity with Chrome's APIs. APIs to support popular features of old extensions. Support for extension developers to develop new APIs. But they abandoned these promises.
And they managed the transition badly. They chose an arbitrary deadline before evaluating scope or designing a migration path. They held the arbitrary deadline as they missed estimates. Extension developers didn't know when or if APIs they needed would be implemented. And no version of Firefox supported old extensions and reasonably complete WebExtensions APIs. These decisions made many problems for developers and users. And this was shortly after many developers spent much effort making their XUL extensions multi process compatible or converting them to sandboxed extensions.
Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.
Or precisely because it was not enough to have the better product? Don't tell me you believe that the better product usually wins. Marketing wins.
This was the time of normies. All the @aol addresses still in use were minted here.
Which says that people were trying to learn how to use their computer, right? Nowadays professors need to teach their university students what a file is... I can definitely accept that the users were more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014.
Microsoft did it to themselves, IE4 was a great browser for its time. It was bundled in Windows, for free, it was anticompetitive, but its technical merits made a big part of its adoption. But as it became old, and Microsoft did nothing to improve the situation. When Firefox came out, it didn't need advertising from a tech giant. It was a godsend for developers (it followed standards!), who advertised for it on their webpages, user tried it and loved the cool new features (tabs!) and installed it on their friends computers, the whole tech world except for Microsoft rooted for Firefox because it was just so much better.
When trade commissions arrived, the job was already done, Firefox had enough critical mass that it couldn't be ignored and IE-only sites were becoming a thing of the past (except for corporate intranets, these have always been the worst). If anything, they helped Chrome more than they helped Firefox as it was just launching during that time.
Marketing alone doesn't win for browsers. It is really easy to switch browsers, all it takes is to have some semi-geek friend to come by and say "hey, try this new browser, it is just like the old one, but better", and if it really is better, that's it. That's how Firefox was winning in 2010. And look how hard Microsoft is trying with Edge, and fail, that's because Edge has nothing over Chrome, unfortunately, Firefox don't have much over Chrome either (yeah, privacy, maybe 5% care).
I strongly believe it was sufficient. Which does not mean that Chrome was not better when it came out. But most people really don't want to try new tech: because you were excited by Chrome back then does not mean, by far, that everyone on the planet was.
Funny how different people's experiences can be. When Chrome came out in 2008 I remember trying it just for fun (more than once), and it never clicked with me, so I stayed with Firefox.
What was harder for me was keeping with all the unnecessary redesigns, empty eye candy, dumbing down, the Fennec debacle (exensions used to work, then they suddenly stopped for a bunch of years; plus, no keyword search for no reason).
By that time staying away from Google had become a goal in itself, but I understand who migrated to chrome.
Anyway, I am firmly convinced Chrome won because of Google's abuse of its web search monopoly. The innovations that its team introduced were groundbreaking from a technical point of view, but Firefox was a perfectly capable browser.
Sure, for the average Joe I might buy this, but also it's the same kind of people who can't tell the difference between the address bar and the search field on the Google homepage, so I'm still kinda skeptical they don't actually refer a UI with as few options and buttons as possible....
> Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
... But I absolutely can't follow you here. What other reasons should there be? That that one or two websites they infrequently visit don't work? If you can't be arsed to just use chrome for these specific occasions and stay with the customizable, powerful alternative for the rest of the time, I don't believe you're someone who'd like a UI with more than three buttons anyways.
(And on that note I've yet to encounter a site that doesn't work in Firefox, but maybe that actually is a thing in places other than Europe...)
"One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue."
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...
I read it as: "If Google says jump we jump".
You can hardly blame them for trying to emulate what's currently working for everyone else when everything you've tried so far has led to your downfall.
People would move back to firefox if it were still anything like firefox.
But I am not convinced most people see it like this. Most of the people I know honestly don't make the difference between Firefox and Chrome: they just use what they know. I think Chrome won those people because Google managed to convince them that "Internet == Chrome", not because they consciously chose Chrome as a better alternative.
And those people are not Firefox's audience. They don't care about their browser as long as it loads facebook.com, so they're just going to use whatever browser is more popular or pushed harder onto them, which is Chrome. If Firefox positions itself as just a Chrome clone, there's no reason to use it over Chrome.
If Firefox wants to survive, it needs to position itself as a niche alternative for people who actually have preferences for what their browser is like, and do not like Chrome. Of course, it won't ever be as popular as Chrome, but that battle was lost a long time ago.
Or... I'm still hoping that the EU Digital Markets Act may help.
Over the years, I have converted people to Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari. The only common denominator is that they all strongly prefer the one they use now.
Put them in sub-menus?
I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).
Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.
The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed.
I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.