Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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I'd like to address your three separate points...

> Each update contains more "Sign in to your browser" stuff plastered everywhere. Eye candy is added. Useful configuration options are removed.

- First of all, each update cannot possibly contain more "sign in to your browser". Are you talking about Firefox Sync, of which similar-yet-poorer functionality used to be in an incredibly popular extension (by your own rules, that should go in the browser!)?

- Eye candy is nice. Not everyone lives in the 90s and wants a clickable version of Lynx.

- Configuration options are as useful as the users make it. There was a massive outrage on here when Firefox removed the javascript switch, yet that is one of the best decision they made for their userbase. Google sure did remove a lot of options over time, some of it has infuriated me as well (the removal of http: was a big one for me). But most of the time, users do not actually know what they want which is why they just want a bazillion options to be able to change their mind all the time, as if they're not using a browser but playing Wedding Tie Choice Simulator 2015. As Randall Munroe put it: https://xkcd.com/1172/

>- Eye candy is nice. Not everyone lives in the 90s and wants a clickable version of Lynx.

Then why are Mozilla removing everything? I like eye candy too. A metro-ified, totally bare browser without even a status bar is the complete opposite.

Oh, and links has mouse support via GPM.

>- Configuration options are as useful as the users make it. There was a massive outrage on here when Firefox removed the javascript switch, yet that is one of the best decision they made for their userbase.

Because everyone switched to NoScript instead.

What do you mean by "without a status bar"? What change is that in reference to? Sounds important...

This thread. Firefox is removing the <s>status bar</s>'addon bar'* in australis along with most of the rest of its customisability.

*Their preferred term even though everyone just installs Status4Evar and still has a status bar.

I'm pretty sure the number of people installing Status4Evar is pretty far away from "everyone".

Firefox Sync was in the browser before, you just didn't need to sign in to your browser online to use the previous version. (It also let you sync through your own server rather than Mozilla's which I don't think the new version does yet, but even if you used their server you still didn't need a Mozilla account of any kind.)

I run my own firefox sync server, and have since it was introduced. It's working fine for the current version of sync. There's a rather helpful guide for setting it up and there were a handful of alternative server implementations which have unfortunately fallen by the wayside.

https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html

Unfortunately this server is not compatible with the new sync protocol. It will continue to work while there is still old-sync support in the browser (a few versions after FF29 at least) but will eventually need to be upgraded to the new system.

> It also let you sync through your own server rather than Mozilla's which I don't think the new version does yet

This is possible with the new version, but it's not (yet) as simple as it was with the previous one:

   https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-fxa.html
   https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync-1.5.html

(edit: actually IIRC there's an open bug around allowing android devices to use a custom sync server; desktop devices definitely work fine with it via some about:config settings)

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