Thank you FF team!
I am a Firefox user since Firefox 4 (2011). The thing is, that negativity was not there prior to 2017.
I'm guessing they are making the assumption that if they keep approximating towards a Chrome clone, that it will somehow reduce the friction of new users joining. This a colossal strategy mistake from corporate/product people.
They cannot compete with Chrome/Edge on a massively unleveled playing field. They either have some giant corporate deal to come pre installed on devices other than linux distros or they accept that it will be a niche browser that wins users over by having killer features privacy/foss ethos etc.
The decision of removing things that were previously customizable or remove features because only a few hundreds of thousands of people use, is alienating users. In the discussions I always read Mozilla staff arguing that this is a vocal minority but the reality is that irrespective of which statistics you look at they lost a huge chunk of marketshare last year.
The way they are refusing to engage with the community on this matter is creating a lot of frustration. WONTFIX is pretty much a meme in Bugzilla at this point.
Firefox needs to refocus on being Firefox instead of half-trying to compete with other browsers. We need browser diversity and we absolutely need non chromium browsers in particular. I hope they will turn this around and engage with the community and user voice.
Plus for Firefox to grow in popularity/stay relevant you need people to care, and you need the browser to improve. Complaining is better than silence in that context.
> Plus for Firefox to grow in popularity/stay relevant you need people to care
Yes, and people care more when the browser developers care about them. Mozilla is intent on showing that only their design vision matters and customizability will go as soon as it slightly inconveniences them.
> and you need the browser to improve
But not all changes are an improvement.
uBlock works best in Firefox, and that is enough reason to keep using Firefox.
Haters gonna hate, that’s just how it is.
This is true for many UI changes, but I'm not convinced it applies here. This blog post points out many specific deficiencies in Proton: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/firefox-89.html
The first? Newer display technology and processing power, allowed for more complex menus, decision trees, and visual effects/feedback.
The second? Computing was new, and we were still learning how to build basic, usable UIs.
Yet ever UI change distracts, causes lag for users, and the above two points are long factored in.
No one needs a fork to change. No one needs their remote control's volume button to change.
Worse, no one need it to change from one day to the next, on a weekly or even yearly basis.
Many users would be beyond overjoyed, if their browser UI didn't change for the rest of their life.
The back button doesn't need to move, become something else, leap from the top to bottom of the window, look wildly different as a default, behave differently.
Worse, almost every UI change I've seen in Firefox in the last decade, has been tiny little tweaks without any real value for the end user, yet alienated people.
And worse, forced on people. Way to keep market share.
Firefox could be #1 again, simply by firing every UI person, hiring developers with that cash, and just optimise, merge in new web standards (without creating or taking part in them), and fix bugs.
But I feel I must be critical, and loudly, else firefox may disappear.
It is criticism born from love.
I think that is the wrong end of the stick. People complain about Firefox not because they hate it. They complain because they care. It is the same thing with Apple or in fact any other brands. They want it to be better, they want to come back or keep using Firefox. And they want more people to use it ( for one reason or another ).
So the saying good there is no such thing as bad publicity. Firefox still getting the upvote to front page or being complained is a good sign many user or potential user still give a damn.
I still love Firefox, I just dislike Mozilla's management.
I use and love FF, but FF's market share is very low and shrinking. If they can't do anything to turn that trend around, web developers will ignore it, and it will become useless for many sites.
FF users have to wish/hope that FF rights this ship, and that means they can't afford to lose any more users (and really, that they must somehow reverse course and acquire new users). So every update feels really important - the shrinking user base is an existential threat to the browser.
Overall FF is just as usable as the decade before in my opinion. And I kind of like the new tab design. The old super rounded tabs looked great for a while but it was time for a change.
I'm not a designer, but in my experience it helps to change up user interfaces now and then. However I wish we as users had more control over that. Color themes are not enough.
Why? I mean if users are used to the interface, can use without any friction and there's no real need to, why change it just for the heck of it?
So don't force them to change? Or has Mozilla really forgotten that they got their users by making the most customizable browser in the first place?
Twenty three years of churn has brought what UX benefits exactly? Hiding the protocol, hiding details about secure connections, hiding the status bar, hiding the text on tiny buttons, hiding the menus: https://mk0ghacksnety2pjrgh8.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/upload...
and for what? Optimising for people on 1366x768 laptops and people who don't want to do very much but search and click one result?
Firefox 2 looked fine in my opinion, I would be happy if they just kept it as it was back then.
ctrl+shift+n to reopen the last window.
The funny thing is that I just tried to find the "shortcuts" list for Firefox and is is nowhere to be found in their menu or in Preferences! Do I need to find it on some webpage?!?
With most things, if you want to completely avoid eventual, inevitable UI changes, you need to just never upgrade.
UI changes in general are something to expect, but if you're just going to disregard user feedback then you can't claim to respect users.
Personally every other release they remove features I like and make arbitrary UI changes. The only reason I'm still complaining and not using something else is because I don't like the alternatives either.
I was just pointing out that the grandparent was conflating their opinion being ignored with all users' opinions being ignored
The proper solution to this would be to have different modes if this is so critical. To their credit they did put in a "compact" mode after beta, but this is explicitly "unsupported" and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.
There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.
> There's Vivaldi, and it too uses HTML for its interface, but the team doesn't seem to care about UI performance at all.
Thanks to that, Vivaldi also actively supports CSS tweaks like Firefox. They do indeed care about UI performance and work towards fixing it... The 3.7 update really improved its UI responsiveness. Still, it feels slower than Chrome/Brave/Firefox.
> and even then still has more padding than "large" mode in the old UI.
This is objectively false. Your hyperbole undermines your argument.
Know what I can't do on any of my machines? Touch the screen.
Decreased UI density doesn't just help touchscreens.
This sounds like a counter-argument. What the Gnome team did (during the 2->3 transition) was a huge overhaul while completely ignoring the habits and wishes of their users. I understand they had to rewrite the old code, that's perfect. I also understand they wanted to "refresh the UI" at the same time. But you can't just change everything and think your users will be happy. If you act against the wishes of your users, who do you write your software for? It simply made no sense and that's why people turned to MATE.
Not sure what your argument is supposed to be but not everyone liked GNOME's new UI. That's why you've gotten forks such as MATE.
The real negativity can be seen in the market that largely rejected this garbage browser.
Thank you Mozilla for making a browser that respects me.