It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!
I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...
Also, Mozilla Corporation's sole "shareholder" is the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation.
IMO right clicking and selecting translate/summarize/OCR/etc. is that choice. It doesn't translate pages by default, and the translation models are not downloaded until you choose to do so.
I feel what you're asking is for the option to see the option to also be disabled by default. But, it's a useful feature for many people and hiding it in this way would harm discoverability.
Luckily it can simply be switched off.
> It's sure hard to make everyone happy.
But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake people make is to just ignore power users and act like that just because they're a small percentage of users that they aren't important[0].
I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that computers aren't really a product designed "for everyone," instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into a thing that anyone needs. Which is why your power users become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and that's the only way you can truly build something that works for everyone.
This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is when you create something for everybody you end up making something for nobody.
[0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not the average "user" but the "power user". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc
At 13:00 he quotes Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) and I think it captures the thesis of this talk
In the age of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be successful. If you can just find 1000 people who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year, that's $100k/yr.Clawbot: I understand what you need, drones dispatched.
Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...
Also a few of the menu items are new since the latest ESR (the AI stuff in particular), so you won't see them if you are running v140.
You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an image (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)
TMPPROF="$(mktemp -d /tmp/ff-tmp.XXXXXX)"
/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -no-remote -profile "$TMPPROF"So there's a lot of noise and resetting things can be unclear. Especially given that when you reinstall things not all uninstalls clear out settings. It could definitely help if the about:config page tells you about the user.js file and directs you to more information. Why doesn't editing things in about:config generate the user.js file? Maybe tell people about prefer.js and where it exists?
The other thing I'd suggest, documentation. Like what is "browser.translations.chaos.errors"? There's a million things like that that are hard to learn about and explore. In an ideal system there would be a wiki with every option documented and when hovering over the option you'd get a short explanation and a click is a link to the documentation. But that's also a big undertaking (if you're building a new browser, would be nice to do this from the get go!)
I don't think there's a perfect solution and certainly these things are not easy to implement, but if you're asking how it could be easier for the user, then yeah, I think these things would be major improvements and help prevent the blindly following of random blog posts and copy pasting of things like betterfox (I'm sure it is, but how do I know?)
doesn't even need to be a wiki, because programs should contain their own help files! Like how commandline programs are encouraged (by command arg parsing libraries) to include the documentation in the very code that parses it.
Whoever that added those config option should also document it, preferably right in the code so that automatic generation of docs for the UI is possible (and ensures that it matches the version you're using).
While adding tooltips or references to about:config could be a community project, I anticipate friction based on nothing more than than the seeming reluctance to implement community feedback over internal or consortium interests.
Something like that.
And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.
Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.
To each their own; glad it's an option :)
It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.
Just kidding, but it does illustrate that there's always a tradeoff with these things. (I would like to have the ability to customize the context menu too, fwiw, though it's not as straightforward as the other customizable bits of UI since the context menu is, well, contextual.)
considering that it is already fully customizable, yet you are still complaining about it, i dont think so
i use (or have used) most of them. other people in this thread have said they used all of them at one point or another.
just because you dont use it does not make it "bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for". thats why you have the option to remove them :)
whats the next complaint?
This is the same mistake they made with Pocket and I'm guessing it was done for the same reason (money) since they went with a Google product and not Bing Visual Search or for that matter letting users configure what service they'd like to use for image searches. This was pure bloat. It's no different from Windows adding candy crush to the desktop by default where the same argument "Some people play it and it can be removed!" does nothing to change what it is: bloat that nobody asked for.
The professional interface is a complete mess. flat not nested, functionality duplicated all over the place, widgets strewn across the screen like a toddler just got done playing legos. Exactly what one needs when they will be working with it for hours at end.
Contrast with the casual interface, nested, one way to do things, neat compartments for everything. What is needed to gently guide the user through an unfamiliar task they may only do once a year.
And this is ignoring the dark side, the "designer" interface. Where it just has look good functionality be damned. Take note. The big lie about design is that it exists in a vacuum, that there can be an independent design title. Real design is fundamentally a holistic process that has to consider and integrate all aspects. Including deep engineering. A real designer is an engineer with taste, a rare find to be sure.
Neovim users disagree.
no, it fits.
It had one fixed menu entry called "advanced menu" this replaces the menu with one that has everything (except from "advanced menu" which is replaced with "simple menu").
One of the menu entries is "configure simple menu". This opens the same looking menu as "advanced menu" only clicking any functionality toggles a check mark in front of it.
If a sub menu had less than 3 options it is merged into the parent menu.
One plays with it for a bit and before long it becomes a Japanese celebration of emptiness.
It even had a bunch of sort of redundant options. The sms submenu had something like 8 options of which I only really used "new message" and "all messages" but you could go for "unread messages". It's not like the rest of the menu is gone, its all under "advanced menu".
If the right click menu worked like that some would bother to further configure the simple menu and one could share their config.
To make it clear it is not a "more" button "advanced" could fold out the hidden entries like a harmonica.
Easy customization with thoughtful defaults is an easy way to make everyone happy
> how it deprives functionality from power users.
That's already the case, so nothing changes here to justify the current situation
Completely useless. Thanks for showing me every feature you’ve ever shipped
Otherwise you get "where is X? It was here yesterday!" issues, and those are practically impossible to figure out if you don't already know why it behaves that way. At least a disabled entry tells you "this exists, it just isn't applicable" rather than "lol what? maybe we removed it".
In fact, I've read several such rants about Firefox removing functionality from other parts of their UI.
It's sure hard to make everyone happy.