Working hard on something doesn't make it exempt from criticism. And they didn't even say anything about the devs, just the feature. It's not like you can be rude to a web browser.

No one said it was exempt from criticism. Saying that someone else's work is an "abomination that has to die" is rude and an inappropriate way to express your opinion.

"abomination /əbɒmɪˈneɪʃ(ə)n/ noun: a thing that causes disgust or loathing." It perfectly describes that new address bar.

If that were true, they wouldn't have released it. I don't understand why you are so eager to defend that choice of words. I don't think it is too much to ask that conversations remain cordial, even when people disagree.

Because those words perfectly describe how I feel about those changes to address bar.

And they released it for the same reason Slack released their input box update https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647. Some manager wanted to leave a mark and nobody was there to oppose them.

Your feelings are valid, and understandable for a piece of software which is so intimately integrated into your daily life. However, allowing those feelings to influence the way you discuss this software seems unwise, especially if you intend to convince the software's developers to change their minds about it. When people feel that core parts of their identity are being attacked, they tend to shut down and stop listening. Developers of complex software like a web browser, who have dedicated large parts of their professional lives to the nitty-gritty details of its creation, surely feel as emotionally attached to it as you do, and they are likely to perceive an attack on it as an attack on themselves. If the impact of this change is so great, then you have a responsibility to present your criticism of it in such a way as to maximize the likelihood of it being received and accepted.

I'm not sure if "responsibility" is the right word. Perhaps there's a responsibility to HN to avoid such language. But I don't think disgruntled users have a responsibility to pose their feedback in a constructive way.

s/you have a responsibility to/it would be most effective if you were to/, perhaps.

Otherwise, I agree with everything you said.

(And hey, I work for Mozilla, though not on UX stuff. When I saw the original description of poor UX, I was planning on checking it myself and possibly filing a bug if I agreed. But once the thread got into "abominations", I lost interest and subconsciously recategorized the complaint as coming from the subset of users who complain loudly and whose opinions I generally find too unrepresentative of more than a small niche. Which could be right or wrong in this case, but I have found it to be a very useful heuristic to consider the constructiveness of criticism as a signal of how useful it would be to examine further.)

Constructive criticism was being given during beta and ignored.

Yikes, posting like this will get you banned here. If you wouldn't mind taking a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN only in the intended spirit, we'd appreciate it.

With https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron in my hands i stand my grounds and refuse to be disciplined into mindless tribalism.

We don't want mindlessness either. The scorched earth of internet flamewars, which is the direction your GP post pointed in, is truly mindless. That's the fate we're hoping to avoid here. To maximize signal/noise we need to minimize indignation/information.

Ah, well... I've thought about this, and if i should waste your, or others time by making even more 'noise', or saying nothing at all. There are a few sides to this, one would be that it is a free product, even open source and one is free to either deliver patches or fork it, otherwise there should be no feeling of entitlement at all.

BUT... i've read the whole thread, and the other too, and the only 'signal' between all the 'noise' of annoyed users is more or less: take it or leave it (because we say so)

This is arrogant. And politeness and politically correct speech under all circumstances leads to nothing but mediocrity, while the groupthinking celebrates the emperors new clothes, over and over again. I think sometimes it is necessary to bang the fist hard on the table, to recalibrate the signal processing. If this is too stressful for all the special snowflakes to bear, they maybe should stay in their safe spaces and don't babble about niche minorities. Or maybe smoke less weed?

How can they stop listening if they didn't listen in the first place?

Just because you know words to perfectly describe what you think of a person or thing doesn't mean you should use them.

> If that were true, they wouldn't have released it.

I was with you until this. "Abomination and needs to die" is too colorful and dramatic for my tastes. But the new address bar's design is indeed (mildly) offensive from a design perspective. It's visually jarring and, as I said elsewhere in this thread, it simply looks broken. When a long-time Firefox user first sees it, they might think their Firefox installation has gone haywire (I certainly did). This is an off-putting feeling often coupled with a bit of dread about having to rebuild your browser profile to fix whatever caused the chrome-layout to break. Yuck!

Mozilla is not alone in releasing features or design changes that cause users to get upset. Some might even call the features abominations. Here's hoping Mozilla reads this thread and considers some reversal.

"North Korea's missile program is an abomination and has to die."

"That eyesore art project that my local city paid too much for is an abomination and has to die."

On a related note, I recently started my first dev job. I found an issue and told one of my mentors "I wonder if something stupid is going on in <insert library name>". She called me out in front of the entire office saying "I don't appreciate you calling our work stupid, we worked really hard on these libraries for years". What? Are most developers this sensitive about wording? I should have said "weird" or "strange" instead of "stupid", but give me a break. I obviously wasn't attacking anyone, it was just a figure of speech and we all have moments of stupidity.

It's just a figure of speech. It's not meant to be taken literally. It's a valid description of a lot of people's feelings for this user-hostile feature.

It may be a figure of speech but it is a ridiculous overreaction to call it an abomination. You may not like it but it’s nowhere near enough to describe that way. What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?

> What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?

So you are saying it would be OK to call some feature of a piece of software "an abomination" if it were "something truly bad", then?

Well, then why should mikro2nd be prevented from calling this feature "an abomination" if that is an accurate description of how he feels about it?

> What term will you use when something truly bad comes up?

Surely you can imagine genuinely offensive overreactions, plain use of 'abomination' is nowhere near over the top.

Consult some of Linus Torvalds' famous rants for examples.

unusable

Is it a valid description of people's feelings, or is it hyperbole? I struggle to see how it can be both at once.

Subjectivity is a bitch ain’t it?

Did you think the GP meant that Firefox "has to die"? Because that's not how I took it. I think he means just this new feature needs to die.

And yeah, it's a bit over the top (I haven't looked at the new feature yet, just read descriptions of it), but I didn't feel like it needed a "don't talk like this" response.

I'd agree on a lot of things in life, but UX is an exception because decisions made about how we interact with something have an area of effect.

I've railed against Google's UX approach for years. Their UX approach requires too many steps between states. Where does this get dangerous, even potentially lethal? Android Auto.

If one lock screen is too distracting while driving, Android Auto adds one more. None of your non-Google App notifications will appear on your dashboard, but Android Auto doesn't let you access your notifications unless you completely exit the app. You can't open Messages in Android Auto, even when the vehicle is not in motion. Android Auto disables all touch controls when the vehicle is in motion, and if you disabled Google Voice on your phone, you won't know until you're going 80MPH down a highway and need to adjust your GPS that you can't use touch, you can't use Voice, and you'd have to exit Android Auto just to re-enable it, and it can't just be enabled for Android Auto, it has to be enabled for your whole device... and Google owns any data you generate with the Voice Assistant, and you have no right to restrict how Google uses it, including the sale of that data to a third party.

So, I agree on most things to not be rude. But with UX, the goal is to prevent conflicts by modeling features around our most likely approach to using said features. When professionals at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple, force end users to use features in a specific (rather than intuitive) way, the consequences are wide and deep and the terms of service make it impossible to hold them accountable to change it.

Surely arguing that it's ok to be sensitive is the only self-consistent position.

Complaining people are sensitive denotes sensitivity.

That comment would be rude if it personally insulted the developers.