[HN Gopher] Mozilla plans to remove the Compact Density option f...
___________________________________________________________________
Mozilla plans to remove the Compact Density option from Firefox's
Customize menu
Author : 0x_rs
Score : 293 points
Date : 2021-03-15 11:15 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ghacks.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ghacks.net)
| cute_boi wrote:
| LOL today when i installed fresh firefox and tried to customize I
| found the compact density and I really love it.
|
| I think Mozilla claim is invalid. I think its just not
| discoverable easy and hidden. If they give ability to setup
| compact density I believe many user will choose compact over fat
| tabs.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I'm one of the 11 remaining FF users, and I use that setting, and
| it matters to me non-trivially, so of course, F me.
| username91 wrote:
| Love compact mode; use it all the time. I guess there's always
| userChrome.css
| Causality1 wrote:
| Mozilla has mutilated Firefox trying to chase after Chrome's
| market share instead of holding onto its users who already liked
| it. They're going to end up with no users at all.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > They're going to end up with no users at all.
|
| This has already happened. I'd be surprised if there were a
| single month they gained users over the last five years.
| superkuh wrote:
| It all started with version 37 when they decided that
| software freedoms didn't matter and only allowed users to
| install/use extensions approved by Mozilla. Then dropping
| their entire extension ecosystem and burning it to the ground
| made everyone realize what was happening. Now there is no
| XUL, 1/20th the amount of add-ons, and the ones that do exist
| don't have the power to restore features of the GUI Mozilla
| removes. All that's left is a relatively quick (but crashy,
| because low level features) chrome-clone-in-spirit.
| Causality1 wrote:
| It's also very difficult to keep two separate Firefox
| installations from interfering with each other, so a lot of
| people like me switched to using Chrome for 90% of their
| browsing and kept an old version of Firefox for some use
| case they couldn't do without.
| jholman wrote:
| Dear Mozilla,
|
| I've been an evangelist for FF for 15-ish years, since before
| Chrome existed. I teach computer science, which means my
| evangelism is multiplied by the hundreds of students I see every
| year.
|
| Why is it that every time we interact, you're ruining something?
|
| This removal of Compact will not be the straw that breaks my
| back, but it's still one more straw. Why are you playing chicken
| with your userbase?
|
| Yours, jholman
| kccqzy wrote:
| In other news, Safari in Big Sur is also engaging in this kind of
| egregious vertical space wasting [0]. The toolbar becomes taller,
| with no way to customize.
|
| This is not a Firefox problem. This is an industry-wide UI/UX
| problem.
|
| [0]
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqz1bn20pu9j4v3/big%20sur%20safari...
| Yizahi wrote:
| Typical modern Mozilla. After they have forced Uglybar on us and
| said that we better like it as is, I'm not surprised about this
| news. If only there were more than 2 browsers for Windows...
| renewiltord wrote:
| I do not believe that any number of commenters here are in a camp
| that will move one way or the other on this issue. Probably fine.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Is management at Mozilla completely rotten? They've had a couple
| rounds of big layoffs in the last year. I worry it's turning into
| a Hunger Games situation there, where every senior level person
| feels the need to assert their existence or else get the cut.
| Hopefully someone remembers to fight for the users...
| xnx wrote:
| Mozilla should embrace it's niche browser role and cater to power
| users. It will always be a worse choice for the typical user.
| aftergibson wrote:
| I have to assume the bean counters aren't happy with Firefox's
| user numbers, and they're throwing any strategy they can think
| of towards getting those numbers up, even at the risk of the
| current user base.
|
| I want more people using Firefox, that'd be awesome, but
| Mozilla could really do with more compelling arguments for
| changes like these, and while they're at it a better approach
| to engaging with the community.
| anotherhue wrote:
| At this point Brave is the power-user choice. And Mozilla show
| no signs of slowing down their self inflicted decline.
|
| I miss using Firefox, but I don't miss the dread-churn of
| notices like this.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Browsing is one of the most crucial software on one's system,
| I wouldn't trust Brave's track record with their affiliate
| linking, url-forwarding and blockchain sheanigans.
| rataata_jr wrote:
| Brave seems like a scam with their coins and ads.
| arghwhat wrote:
| QuteBrowser is the power-user choice.
|
| Brave seems more like the "consumer disliking ads/google"
| choice.
| llimos wrote:
| This is starting to sound like https://xkcd.com/378/
| arghwhat wrote:
| Unfortunately, nc has become a slightly less user-
| friendly web-browser after the HTTPS everywhere movement.
| It's tricky to do the math in your head before the
| timeout hits.
|
| In all seriousness, very few power-user browsers exists,
| to the point where QuteBrowser is the only fully-
| functional one I can think of... Which is sad.
|
| Brave is "just" a completely regular browser owned by
| someone else + a few bonus features.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Ironic, since xkcd is another awesome thing from the
| Internet of 2005-2015 that is now a mere husk of its
| former glory - just like Firefox.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I use Brave on Windows and am happy with it - but I don't see
| how it's the "power users' choice". At the end of the day
| it's just Chromium with a couple of privacy- and blockchain-
| oriented features bolted on.
| jepper wrote:
| This! I got this feature enabled, it works fine, why remove it.
| How much dev work is saved by removing a compact view? Mozilla
| is straying further and further from the open source icon it
| was, death by management....
| rozab wrote:
| As a power user, you can just write a little CSS and have it
| look however you damn well please:
|
| https://i.postimg.cc/6w46fmWF/image.png
| wvenable wrote:
| I use Firefox for multi-row tabs. First it was an extension
| but now you can accomplish the same thing with CSS.
|
| Of course, every major redesign of the browser breaks the CSS
| for multi-row tabs and I need to find people who have fixed
| it and hack it back together. One of these days they'll
| probably break it completely and I'll switch to another
| browser.
| danShumway wrote:
| It would be nice to get some kind of official confirmation
| that the ability to add custom CSS isn't going to go away,
| given that the justification for dropping compact mode seems
| to basically boil down to it being hard to discover, and
| Mozilla assuming (without user metrics) that nobody uses it.
|
| How much harder is it to discover the ability to write custom
| CSS? Do we know that Firefox won't apply the same logic to
| that feature?
| shbooms wrote:
| for now.
|
| given this trend of removing little usability and
| customization abilities here and there, one can only assume
| the custom CSS will be removed as well. especially seeing as
| its label has "legacy" right in it's name:
| toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
|
| they'll give some reason like "only 1% of users use it" or,
| "it'll take too much time to make it work with our new,
| annual UI redesign/overhaul"
|
| that being said, I'm sure someone (either on github or on
| reddit in /r/FirefoxCSS) will have the necessary custom CSS
| written to reproduce as soon as the version removing it hits
| the stable release
| cosmotic wrote:
| I shouldn't have to hack Firefox with custom CSS to get it to
| behave in a reasonable way.
| afrcnc wrote:
| Just because it's hard to discover doesn't mean you have to
| remove it. It's not the users' fault Mozilla's designers are
| useless.
| sgarrity wrote:
| I suspect there's a kind of selection bias in a discussion like
| this. People who care about this feature are motivated to
| comment. People who don't care aren't.
|
| Interface variations have a cost as a complexity multiplier,
| adding another variation to consider and test when making
| improvements and testing.
| nearmuse wrote:
| I am using it, and I always hated gratuitous redesigns or feature
| cuts. It doesn't even seem to be the kind of feature that
| requires enormous attention to maintain, on the other hand though
| regular browser users stick with it for a long time and it can
| take some of it or some power user posts about "that great
| feature I've been using and you should too" for it to become
| popular and later mainstream. I don't see how a fat bar isn't a
| downgrade and I sure hope it is not some kind of hamfisted
| attempt to differentiate Firefox from it's competition that puts
| content first by reducing UI around it.
| caskstrength wrote:
| What a terrible decision. I use compact density and, if anything,
| I would prefer them to introduce something like "even more
| compact density".
| djhworld wrote:
| This will be really sad if they go through with this, I've always
| turned Compact mode on, on every machine regardless of screen
| dimensions (although it's impact is much better felt on my 13"
| macbook laptop)
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Turns out, I was using default density. I thought I was using
| Compact, so I suppose it isn't personally a big deal to me.
|
| I do agree with most of the complaints, however.
|
| It is apparent to me that there is a faction within
| Mozilla/Firefox that have an explicit directive to trim low-use
| features, no matter how passionate the users of those features
| are. I wish Firefox looked to the GNOME project to see how people
| feel about removing low-use features ideologically (hint: it
| sucks).
|
| Chrome does a lot of things correctly, and it has its core
| competencies. Firefox should have its own, and optimize towards
| that. The only large group of people advocating for it anymore
| seem to be skilled users. Why piss them off?
|
| Separate but related: My parents explicitly wanted off FF because
| it kept on changing its layout. Casual users don't like UI
| changes.
| SilverRed wrote:
| > looked to the GNOME project to see how people feel about
| removing low-use features
|
| I like it and its the main reason I use gnome. Gnome does
| everything I need and is pretty close to my ideal use case.
| There are a few minor things I don't like but they are easy to
| deal with. The DE is very stable and nice looking and is
| typically first on new tech like Wayland. I assume a large
| chunk of this speed and stability comes from not being bogged
| down with 1000 options and alternative workflows.
|
| At work we have to support so many obscure workflows and
| options and its a constant source of bugs when you forgot there
| is a toggle that changes the way things work and your new
| change doesn't support that. Or that a feature has 5
| alternative workflows making your change 5x harder so its not
| worth starting at all.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's unfortunate that they are trimming the low-use, killer
| features that enthusiasts love. But I suspect they have limited
| developer resources, and given their declining market share, it
| makes sense that they would focus their efforts.
|
| Unless a group of independently wealthy developers want to take
| up the mantle of maintaining the enthusiasts features, we
| should anticipate more cuts.
| freebuju wrote:
| Except they recently renewed a cool $400M a year [0] Google
| search deal.
|
| [0] https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/mozillas-renewed-deal-
| with-go...
| jjordan wrote:
| You underestimate the ability of Mozilla's leadership team
| to piss away money.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| And that's how you force your users to NOT install any updates.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| I agree that it's hard to discover, as I haven't been aware of it
| until today, despite the thickness of firefox's UI being the most
| major grip I have with it as an otherwise ardent user. I've added
| it to my configs and will find a CSS solution if the option goes
| away.
| xmdx wrote:
| Just bike shedding. I don't understand it.
| [deleted]
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| This would be my last straw with Mozilla. I've been peeved about
| Chromium forks for ages, but if Firefox isn't going to even _try_
| to be a good alternative, neither should I.
| throw111116 wrote:
| Hope you please reconsider. Firefox has many things going for
| it, see my comment [1].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26467749
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| I've stood in defense of Firefox for a _really long time_ ,
| it remains my primary browser. And my hope is that in light
| of the publicity about this travesty of an attempt, Mozilla
| will backtrack. But I'm sick of Firefox being absolutely
| unwilling to support the needs of their already niche
| userbase.
| II2II wrote:
| As a Firefox user who uses this feature, I am going to
| emphatically declare _I don 't care_.
|
| We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and about
| 0.5% to 1% of typical screens. Much more screen real estate can
| be regained by entering full screen mode and much more screen
| real estate is lost to the typical design of web sites. While
| there are problems with how the project is managed, this case is
| a poor illustration of developers ignoring users since the users
| who are complaining are making a mountain out of a molehill. If
| the developers expend their energy addressing small things they
| would be able to accomplish little else.
| cge wrote:
| >We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and
| about 0.5% to 1% of typical screens.
|
| While that is true _now_ , it's worth noting that this removal
| is meant to coincide with a redesign that will also make the
| toolbar and tabs take up much more vertical real estate to
| begin with.
| postalrat wrote:
| 2% of pixels or vertical space?
| Sharlin wrote:
| > Much more screen real estate can be regained by entering full
| screen mode
|
| Ironically, they already butchered full screen mode years ago
| by not hiding the browser chrome anymore, making any real
| estate gain rather minimal at least on macOS.
| SECProto wrote:
| > We are talking about approximately 2% of a small screen and
| about 0.5% to 1% of typical screens
|
| My (corporate-issued) laptop has a 1366x768 screen. The
| proposed changes will result in Firefox wasting 12% of my
| screen. It's an additional 3-4 percentage points, which is
| 30-50 percent more.
| fleaaaa wrote:
| This is #1 reason to use FF for me..
| mrob wrote:
| The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is
| enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox
| page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating
| footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen
| space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively
| invisible.
|
| When I saw this article I checked the Customize Firefox page to
| confirm I had compact layout enabled. I did not see the toolbar.
| I compared the UI density with a screenshot, and it seemed I had
| already set it to Compact, which I vaguely remembered doing.
| Puzzled, I returned to Customize Firefox, and still failed to see
| the toolbar.
|
| I then checked about:config (which was also sabotaged recently to
| make it slower and remove features), and found browser.uidensity
| set to 1, so I really did have Compact density enabled. I
| returned to Customize Firefox, and only then, on my third
| attempt, did I see the toolbar.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't know why firefox has so many different places to change
| settings
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > The main problem with discovery is that Compact Density is
| enabled from a toolbar at the bottom of the Customize Firefox
| page, which looks looks like one of those annoying floating
| footers that badly designed web pages use to waste your screen
| space. It is affected by "banner blindness" and is effectively
| invisible.
|
| Exactly!
|
| I have been using Firefox since Phoenix/Firebird days and I had
| never seen this option until I read about this on HN today.
|
| That's 20+ years!
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Holy shit I just found _dark mode_ next to _density_ in
| _customize!_ When did they add that??
| madeofpalk wrote:
| It was enabled by default for me - I presume it just took my
| OS appearance settings?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| You could find it in themes in about:addons, and that's where
| I expected to find option like density too.
| sp332 wrote:
| On Windows, the default theme now follows the OS setting. So
| if you turn on "Dark mode" for apps, Firefox will
| automatically go dark.
| ObscureScience wrote:
| I'm not invested in this feature specifically, even though I
| always enable it. I'd rather have a general way of scaling the ui
| and reducing padding/margins. So I hope it's removed for
| architectural reasons, not to prevent ui customizations.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Why are designers unquestionable dictators and tyrants these
| days?
|
| You get vast seas of "NO!!" and the projects are like "well
| sorry, mr art school over here moved some jpegs around. This is
| what we're doing!"
|
| I mean what on earth, stop this insane nonsense already. Listen
| to the users.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Why are developers unquestionable dictators and tyrants these
| days?
|
| You get vast seas of "NO!!" and the projects are like "well
| sorry, mr engineering school over here used a UI framework at
| some point and liked that and also blah blah blah technical
| limitations blah, and wooh, abstractions that let you apply and
| reuse components in a programmatic manner or whatever blah blah
| blah. This is what we're doing!"
|
| I mean what on earth, stop this insane nonsense already. Listen
| to the users.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Equally stupid.
|
| I call it abstractolish when someone is tasked with say
| writing some code to order pizza on the internet and they
| approach it acting like they're Bertrand Russell writing
| JavaScript.
|
| Everyone can get caught up in their own bullshit.
|
| Be stupid and make obvious things. It's an art, sure.
|
| Door handles, toilets, faucets, showers, hammers, physical
| world assets provide great analogies for what works and
| doesn't.
|
| Much love for the design of everyday things but I think
| Norman missed the boat by not making the connections more
| explicit between the Fred Brooks pure thought stuff and you
| know, the tea kettle on the cover of his book. Maybe it's
| just my projection
| RobertKerans wrote:
| It's not normally "being caught up in their own bullshit"
| though. Design + development + user research + user testing
| of software is expensive (in time, in thought, in arranging
| coordination, in cash). In this case, the thing in question
| is a product whose funding has been drastically -- why are
| you making the assumption a. this is a change driven by
| designers and b. isn't completely practical from a software
| design PoV (with the trade-off being that a few users don't
| like the change -- I don't for example, but it's no biggie)
| gsk22 wrote:
| If you read the Bugzilla ticket, there is no indication this
| change is driven by a designer on a crusade. No need to be
| condescending to an entire profession.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Is it designers' or is it the designers' manager?
|
| Designers know who pay them and can try and shape a
| conversation but ultimately they have to do something the
| paying client wants.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's an industry generality. Aesthetics over usability,
| imagined users over real ones, minimalism over functionality,
| naive users over power users, wizards over tools.
|
| It's not everybody but it's way too many.
| SilverRed wrote:
| Take a look at almost every successful product and find the
| hacker news post where it was originally announced. Dropbox is
| useless because ftp exists, the iphone is useless because its
| too big and will get fingerprints, airpods are stupid because
| they look ugly and will fall in the drain, everyone will just
| use a strap to tie them to their phone.
|
| If product managers listened to hacker news users our computers
| would be a faster version of Windows XP machines since that is
| the UI that most HN users prefer.
| iaml wrote:
| I've been exploring ff ui architecture lately and what I've
| found is the css inside is kind of inconsistent and messy. I
| believe this change could be beneficial if that means they'll
| have a chance at refactoring it. Also, now that I think about
| it they could be also saving some resources on testing all the
| variations.
| rlpb wrote:
| > Listen to the users.
|
| To be fair, this tells you what the vocal users think, and this
| is sometimes very different from what the majority of users
| think. For something with a shrinking market share, you also
| have to consider what potential users think, not just existing
| users.
| kristopolous wrote:
| That's the "don't listen to real people. Imagine people
| instead" defense.
|
| It allows people to justify whatever they want without any
| confirmation or feedback on reality. They can always imagine
| some future user that permits them to ignore every single
| existing one.
|
| It's a closed loop justification to do whatever they want
| without listening to anyone while pretending they're making
| it better for everyone.
| passivate wrote:
| You have a very fair point, but I have a different read on
| the situation. I would characterize the situation a bit
| more charitably - "Mozilla is implementing a larger UI
| change, for X, Y, Z reasons, and will benefit the users in
| A, B, C ways. Unfortunately, one casualty of that is
| feature e will be discontinued".
| bobthepanda wrote:
| This is supposed to be what A/B testing with KPIs is for.
|
| There are plenty of times when stated preference
| contradicts actual behavior (e.g. more search results per
| page resulting in less successful searches on Google) due
| to other countervailing factors (additional latency causing
| abandonment before the page finishes loading)
| kristopolous wrote:
| That's not what this is.
|
| The quantitative model has its own problems. It's why
| youtube, for instance, looks like it's designed for
| toddlers using tablets.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Removing options is just silly. Not having the budget to
| support it is one thing but removing choice because you think
| you know better leaves you susceptible to becoming the next
| Ubuntu/Snap debacle.
| wvenable wrote:
| They're chasing potential users by trying to be exactly what
| potential users _already have_. This gives potential users no
| reason to switch and existing users a good excuse to jump
| ship.
|
| I've already completely stopped using Firefox on Android
| because it literally stopped being useful for me.
| mariusmg wrote:
| I'm using it Mozilla, so move the option itself if you want to
| satisfy your UI designers but DO NOT entirely remove it.
|
| This is how it looks with compact https://i.imgur.com/MXppXq2.png
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, I've been using it pretty much since introduced.
|
| This is surprising to me, after all the drama their telemetry
| has caused, they don't even know if people are using a pretty
| visible feature? What are they even recording then?
| juusto wrote:
| Nice, can you list your extensions please?
| antihero wrote:
| Man, I didn't know about that - this is amazing!
|
| Also this Proton redesign looks worse in every manner. Tabs are
| replaced by buttons at the top. Why would there be buttons?
| This is just strange. Also it is huge. I am not a child.
| oblio wrote:
| Touch UIs.
|
| The computing market is ordered like this, from top dog to
| underdog:
|
| Smartphones -> laptops -> tables -> desktops
|
| Smartphones tend to have their own UI and desktops are slowly
| but surely dying off except for gaming and certain categories
| of tech professionals (some developers, some graphics
| artists, etc.).
|
| So that leaves the middle: laptops and tables. Which are
| slowly converging towards each other. Already in Windows-land
| many laptops are becoming 2-in-1s, both laptops and tables,
| so the screen is a touch screen. Tablets are moving the other
| way, adding keyboard accessories and multitasking features.
| So laptops are getting touch-friendly UIs and tablets are
| getting some keyboard-friendly features.
|
| It's a slow slog which will probably continue for decades,
| but pure desktops will be squeezed to less than 5% of
| marketshare at some point.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| Actually just moved from compact to touch (the other extreme) a
| couple of weeks back. I don't miss it but the appeal is obvious.
| I don't get why you'd just remove the option altogether.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I think the reason Firefox has been making all these horrible
| decisions lately is quite clear if you think about it. Everybody
| on the Firefox team knows they're on a sinking ship, and
| therefore each person's top priority is to not be fired in the
| next round of layoffs. How do you avoid that? You do stuff so you
| have a record to point at and say "look at how much I've
| contributed to Firefox". Doesn't matter if your changes are
| idiotic so long as you personally seem important.
| lukewrites wrote:
| Thanks to this article I discovered and now use this feature.
| Crud.
| acheron wrote:
| Same, I didn't know this existed. But I turned it on and it's
| nice.
| [deleted]
| sseneca wrote:
| PWAs, Compact Density, what's the next useful feature they'll
| remove?
| tomcooks wrote:
| They remove PWA use on FF? More information?
| sseneca wrote:
| Yes, they removed PWAs from desktop FF.
|
| More information:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1682593
|
| Not only did they remove PWA support, they currently have "no
| plan for PWA support in Firefox" at all.
| throw111116 wrote:
| I had read that that's not really true, here on HN. I think
| the thing is that FF refuses to implement some things they
| think would be bad for security and privacy. They are not
| saying no to all PWAs. Chrome on the other hand doesn't
| give a damn and is trying to make the browser an OS.
|
| Take a look at 'encrypted client hello' on FF. I'm on FF
| Beta android, which supports 'about:config'. Now I can
| access many blocked sites because of the ECH.
| detaro wrote:
| That argument doesn't really apply very well to the
| linked bug.
| BadInformatics wrote:
| This was about removing the feature (which IIRC wasn't
| completed yet) that would allow you to "install" a PWA. I'm
| as disappointed as you that they removed it, but calling it
| "they removed PWAs" is just FUD.
| ancarda wrote:
| For fuck sake really? Is it making Firefox hard to maintain or
| something?
|
| I have a small screen (1280 x 800) - I need things like compact
| density to make the screen more usable.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar"
| view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume
| gets low engagement. [1]_
|
| This is a nice illustration of why telemetry is important: if
| Mozilla knew the feature usage they could make a much more
| informed decision.
|
| [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028
| skratlo wrote:
| I don't even care anymore, there's just one browser and that's
| the reality. I stopped using Firefox long time ago when they
| stopped caring about performance and stability. UI stability too.
| stuaxo wrote:
| The what now?
|
| If I knew this was there I might have used it.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think something a lot of the comments are missing (rather than
| just realizing it's a well hidden setting these days) is this
| line:
|
| "The upcoming Proton design refresh of the Firefox web browser
| could increase the default size of that interface significantly."
|
| There is a UI redesign due in a few versions and in the previews
| at the moment it increases the UI size quite a bit. Compact is
| being removed as part of "making that new UI code simpler" so
| even if you think normal is fine today it's going to get larger -
| doubly so for those that used the compact feature on the old UI.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Yup. I'm using Firefox in Compact mode already, but the Proton
| tabs look even taller than the current Normal size. Not looking
| forward to this redesign.
|
| I'll try it, but decent odds that this is the straw that pushes
| me to switch browsers. One of my computers I've done the
| jumping through hoops of browser customization to set up Tree
| Style Tabs with no tab bar up top, and I'm just not interested
| in going through more of that to figure out if there's a way to
| hack the Proton UI down to a size I like. Hell, I don't even
| know if Proton still lets you do apply custom CSS to the UI at
| all, it seems like the kind of feature that they'd want to drop
| to keep it "simple to maintain."
|
| What's even sadder is they're keeping Normal and Touch, so it's
| not like this lets them take out the system for changing the
| sizes of all these UI elements. They're just taking away the
| small size. "People have vertical pixels, and damn it we're
| going to use as many of them as we can!"
|
| As if I wasn't using that space for displaying webpages in my
| web browser or anything.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Mozilla this is a mistake. If anything, I wish you'd offer an
| ultra-compact setting as well.
| kdmytro wrote:
| I wish it was cool again to not remove features and keep
| backwards compatibility.
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a
| lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there
| was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.
| There used to be an XUL extension to do this, before XUL was
| killed off.
|
| Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla
| removing or crippling some feature I care about.
|
| Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well,
| and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going
| to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better
| website compatibility out of the bargain.
|
| Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point,
| what's the sell?
|
| Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0]
| with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this
| feature.
|
| 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973
| masklinn wrote:
| > I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite
| a lot of space with the default layout.
|
| Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is
| just way too unnecessarily large.
|
| A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every
| monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my
| personal hardware covers).
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where
| screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able
| to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high
| end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as
| problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.
| limeblack wrote:
| > Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's
| Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.
|
| I agree. They need an emulate chrome option: Match keyboard
| shortcuts, menu, and compact layout.
| jbluepolarbear wrote:
| I haven't used Firefox since they introduced The Australis
| interface. I hated it. It broke all the extensions I used, the
| ones I developed, and took away my ability to put the buttons
| where I wanted. I figured if I had to learn a new browser I'd
| go with Chrome. Now I mainly use Edge and I really like it.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.
| SirLotsaLocks wrote:
| at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not
| leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse
| experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to
| earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think
| firefox going after the general public makes sense but when
| it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users
| they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they
| don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome
| and edge.
| marcodiego wrote:
| If it weren't for those 'using a browser with a worse
| experience because of some futile moral cause', IE would
| still be king.
| spijdar wrote:
| Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction
| because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems
| off to me, although I wasn't around at the time
| personally.
|
| I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because
| I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The
| web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were
| extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it
| had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI.
|
| Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is
| gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's
| less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just
| not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the
| good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross
| platform support has withered with all the Chrome
| components like Skia and dependencies on tools like
| node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript
| engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target
| triplets.
|
| Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but
| now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch
| up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging
| behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web
| standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
| saurik wrote:
| Uh, no? That argument would only make sense if IE were
| better than every alternative but died because people
| merely chose to not use it... in fact, it wasn't until
| the big lawsuits against Microsoft caused IE to stagnate
| _and then better browsers existed that people switched
| to_ --first Firefox targeting developers / power users
| and then (later) Chrome laying waste to the entire field
| on performance--that IE was dethroned. We thereby need
| the same thing today: an arrow in the leg of Chrome
| (though I sadly don't know if we could even pull off an
| anti-competition suit against them with the current
| landscape... I am bullish always on such and I am not
| even seeing the argument :/) and some game-changing
| competition (which is hard to predict, but doesn't seem
| to be coming from Firefox the more they try to just
| emulate Chrome).
| toyg wrote:
| Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and
| Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there
| was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would
| have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that
| anything can be corrupted.
| shock wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as
| well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm
| going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get
| better website compatibility out of the bargain.
|
| I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now
| wants to remove support0 for user.js, supposedly to save a
| stat() call :-/
|
| 0 - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752
| m463 wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| All these people complaining about a free browser, and one that
| isn't selling your soul to pay for it.
|
| Please check your behavior, and set a better example in the
| future.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'll never understand why designers hate dense interfaces so
| much.
| dynamic_sausage wrote:
| > I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the
| "compact" layout.
|
| You can make the url bar smaller by setting the
| layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value
| between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following
| line to your user.js:
|
| user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);
| m463 wrote:
| or just get a 4k monitor and realize things are too small and
| you need the extra space for readability.
| dandellion wrote:
| I find myself in a similar situation, they keep removing more
| and more features that made me choose Firefox over the
| alternatives for the last 15 years. Recently I've been using
| Brave a bit and it seems a good Chrome-based alternative, I
| still prefer Firefox as my main driver, but in the direction
| they're headed at some point there'll be just no reason to keep
| using it.
| aembleton wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Tree Style Tabs on the desktop and and uBO on Android.
| trulyme wrote:
| ...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most
| of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually
| install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird
| procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no
| technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.
| bachmeier wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as
| well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.
|
| I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart
| your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a
| sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us
| hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students
| and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those
| that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.
| pitaj wrote:
| This has never happened to me.
| foepys wrote:
| I'm using two different profiles at work simultaneously
| with the Firefox Developer Edition. When Firefox updates in
| the background, sometimes new tabs just don't work anymore
| and keep loading indefinitely.
|
| But I cut Mozilla some slack for it since this is a pretty
| unusual setup and the Developer Edition is updating quite a
| lot compared to the release branch and it doesn't happen
| all the time.
| kwk1 wrote:
| This is a fairly common occurrence for anyone running a
| Debian-family Linux distribution with unattended-upgrades
| turned on.
| serf wrote:
| it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle
| with browsers for long periods.
|
| example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day.
|
| It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few
| times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset.
|
| The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab
| to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-
| restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with
| something advertising firefox changes.
|
| Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the
| competition in most cases.
| derefr wrote:
| I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application
| purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site,
| with no distractions, that does the right thing when
| self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window,
| restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This
| app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee
| Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you
| run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive
| administration and maximize useful uptime.
|
| I mean, you can _kind of_ use Electron for this, but it
| 's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-
| customized as a long-running service with hot updates.)
| It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps
| with, not as an app in-and-of itself.
|
| https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform,
| and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded
| market either.
| PostOnce wrote:
| it says something like "we need to restart to keep going"
| and you have to reload the browser, without warning, and
| it's hard to turn off without fucking around in
| about:config
| bachmeier wrote:
| They even have a special page for it. I keep it handy
| because this seems to be the only response anyone ever
| makes when I bring it up:
|
| "Firefox has just been updated in the background. Click
| Restart Firefox to complete the update."
|
| It would at least be a minor improvement if they'd open a
| new tab to show you that information. Instead you're
| refreshing the page wasting everyone's time because it
| doesn't always tell you that's what's going on.
| sciurus wrote:
| IIRC this only occurs if you are using your distro's
| firefox package. If your package manager upgrades firefox
| out from under it, things break and you have to restart
| Firefox to get back in a sane state.
|
| If you use Mozilla's build of Firefox and it's built-in
| update system I think this won't happen.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Mozilla but not on this)
| prionassembly wrote:
| Would you agree it's still bad UX if it only happens to
| people who haven't gone out of their way to get a "good"
| Firefox?
| dastx wrote:
| Unlike Microsoft and Apple, on Linux you're never forced
| to upgrade. Thus, when you do upgrade, you should really
| be checking what packages are upgraded. The alternative
| to such a page would be to require you to stop Firefox
| before the updates start. So it is still a trade off.
| addicted wrote:
| I believe this also happens with certain pre release
| editions (Nightly, which I use) which is absolutely
| reasonable.
| lukewrites wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| I use it almost entirely for containers. Do any other browsers
| have the same functionality either built-in or via plugin?
| freebuju wrote:
| Chrome has an addon that's closed sourced but claims to
| emulate containers feature from FF. I've forgotten the name
| since I never bothered checking it out.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0]
| with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this
| feature.
|
| They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker
| with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving
| product feedback which are likely read by product people and
| not engineers fixing bugs.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| They said that engineers are well aware of the feedback, that
| implies they don't care about the other channels either to me
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pmontra wrote:
| I also use this feature. I suspected I did but I had to go and
| look at the settings. I took two screenshots in normal and
| compact density. The difference on my 15.6" laptop is very
| small. A few vertical pixels of spacing in the tab bar and
| address bars. I'd rather keep compact mode but I'll hardly
| notice the difference.
|
| Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look
| like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different
| names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if
| Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each
| cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is
| only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that
| direction.
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| I have noticed this trend across many different
| applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially
| bad offender.
|
| Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is
| wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many
| web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely
| usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).
|
| A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI
| elements according to what platform is being used. In an
| ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and
| have all my applications respect it. Then the people with
| touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice.
|
| I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's
| cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-
| common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these
| design trends have become popular in the open source space.
| vetinari wrote:
| > Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are
| barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display).
|
| Gtk seems to optimized for the higher-end of not-hdpi-yet
| displays (100-120 dpi, at @1X), i.e. 1600x900 to 1920x1080
| at 14". Fullhd at this size, the sizing is great, it
| doesn't need hidpi support yet, which would also explain
| the sad hidpi support in many apps (not the toolkit! just
| some apps; e.g. virt-manager/spice-gtk only recently got it
| supported).
| klyrs wrote:
| Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop
| with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap
| at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the
| discoverable path
| toyg wrote:
| _> In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender._
|
| That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a
| thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo,
| and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very
| much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just
| looked and scaled so much better.
|
| If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have
| reached a tenth of its popularity.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Much of the excess padding in GTK apps comes from the
| Adwaita theme more than from the apps or GTK itself.
| After applying a GTK theme that cuts the padding down to
| more reasonable levels, I find that GTK apps are actually
| pretty nice and generally handle whitespace better than
| their Qt counterparts (which often go the opposite
| direction, packing controls too tightly or arranging them
| somewhat haphazardly).
|
| Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C
| implementation. The myriad language bindings available
| for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.
| ectopod wrote:
| I don't know why tabs and taskbars go at the top and bottom
| of the screen by default. This is exactly where the space
| isn't. Every screen is wide.
|
| The taskbar can be moved easily, but Firefox doesn't come
| with a vertical tabs option. Both Chrome and Edge seem to
| now.
| pmontra wrote:
| This is very true for monitors especially with affordable
| 24+ inches high density models.
|
| Actually, the screen of my laptops got only slightly
| wider in the last 25 years but considerably shorter. 16:9
| is bad on laptops.
|
| This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side)
| should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need
| to display two windows side by side.
|
| That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar
| to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also
| autohide it to gain some space.
| md5wasp wrote:
| Does Chrome have a vertical tabs mode?! Because the
| primary reason I use Firefox is because it _does_ have a
| vertical tabs mode, via use of TreeStyleTabs and some
| userChrome.css hacks.
| derefr wrote:
| IIRC tab bars are optimized for the most-common usage
| scenario where you only have two or three tabs open. In
| that case, running horizontally across the top/bottom of
| the screen means each tab gets to be wide-enough to show
| a large amount of text, maximizing the amount of context
| the tab can give for what it's about.
|
| Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar
| has to fight with the main content for screen real-
| estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting
| shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the
| main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs
| open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description
| text for each tab.
|
| When you have _a lot_ of tabs, a tab sidebar shows _more_
| per-tab context than a tab top /bottom bar does. But
| having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| If anything I'd like it even more compact in >= 2k screens.
| nevster wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Panorama Tab Groups
| simias wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as
| well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case.
|
| I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla
| routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross
| overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser
| (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally
| stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on
| Chromium.
|
| It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not
| "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.
| dosenbrot wrote:
| > I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite
| a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto, I hate programs
| wasting space with these things. The compact design matches
| really good with other toolbars and stuff in KDE. (however,
| there could be an option to make it bigger, for touch displays,
| but it should'nt the only choise)
| Paul-ish wrote:
| > Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's
| Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about.
|
| Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read
| the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by,
| but no one is going to write an article about each new feature
| and change.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases,
| preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there),
| their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The
| fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is
| figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff.
|
| > Most sites don't work as well
|
| Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision,
| you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you
| have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality?
| Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web
| sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at _all_ the
| internet, so I 'm curious - what's broken?
|
| What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off
| doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't
| need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled
| Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox
| options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best
| for me.
|
| I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by
| a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has
| no value or no "sell".
| ProAm wrote:
| > Lots of reasons: familiarity
|
| Not when they constantly change the general way it's used. I
| am personally tired of having to relearn how to use a tool.
| Address bar, lockwise, shared passwords, to start.
| rurp wrote:
| Exactly. If the interface in my car or the layout of my
| keyboard changed constantly, and even lost functionality
| regularly, it would drive me crazy. Fortunately, that
| doesn't happen. Unfortunately, I use Firefox so my
| interface to the internet is an ever changing mess.
| alcover wrote:
| >> Most sites don't work as well >Citation definitely needed.
|
| Cite me. Impossible to pay my elec bill w/o chrome on my
| country's biggest energy provider.
|
| Silent errors on many sites.
|
| FF-esr on Debian
| foepys wrote:
| "This site works best on Internet Explorer 6 at an
| resolution of 1024x768."
| Y_Y wrote:
| I find it odd that anyone would have to manually pay an
| electricity bill these days.
| alcover wrote:
| I refuse to get auto-debited. This thing is obscene : you
| let a company debit _any_ sum at will from your bank
| account.
| neiman wrote:
| The world is big my friend, it happens where I live.
| cgriswald wrote:
| My electricity provider has absolutely no trust from me
| after a number of experiences which I won't describe
| here. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find they've
| overcharged me. The process to deal with them in any
| regard is always byzantine. So, I suppose it depends on
| what you mean by "have to."
| charlesdaniels wrote:
| > Citation definitely needed. This is worded without
| precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly
| anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance?
| Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't
| encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I
| also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's
| broken?
|
| Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that
| I don't have hard data to back this claim up.
|
| > What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is
| off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I
| don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some
| de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-
| build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I
| see, FF is best for me.
|
| Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla
| marginally more with my user data than Google.
|
| But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right
| now.
|
| > I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used
| by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that
| FF has no value or no "sell".
|
| I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend.
|
| I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that
| value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if
| not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web
| and all that).
| [deleted]
| freebuju wrote:
| > I'm not changing because they removed _one_ tiny feature
| used by a very vocal minority
|
| Seems you have trouble keeping count. Let me remind you how
| many features FF has nuked in recent times
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25589177
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24231017
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128865
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24554393
| toyg wrote:
| The XUL argument is the only significant one; and it was
| years ago, and there were very clear technical trade-offs.
| addicted wrote:
| And security trade offs.
| dralley wrote:
| Literally the top comment on each of these was something
| along the lines of "this is 1) not true 2) not a big deal"
|
| > "Some of these are a bit spurious. I mean, Venkman was
| replaced by Firebug, which was much better. MXR was
| similarly replaced by DXR."
|
| > "CNET (and Mozilla)[1] say that Firefox still has a fully
| functional security team. The source for this is an
| unsourced tweet. I'm going to flag it because HN does not
| seem like a good venue to hash out rumors."
|
| > Kind of misleading title - what isn't planned to be
| supported is installing PWA:s as standalone apps on desktop
| Firefox: https://twitter.com/englishmossop/status/134442802
| 8315590656...
|
| Try harder.
| hn8788 wrote:
| On FF, Spotify frequently freezes for a minute or more with
| 100% CPU utilization, Amazon won't play videos in higher than
| 720p, and a lot of sites only show alternate text instead of
| graphical buttons. I switched over to Brave for a few weeks,
| and was suprised at how much smoother major websites run on a
| chromium based browser.
| cle wrote:
| The killer Firefox feature for me are multi-account
| containers. I haven't found another browser with that
| feature, and they make it SO much easier to deal with
| multiple accounts on the same site (Google, Facebook,
| AWS/GCP/Azure, etc.).
| robertlacok wrote:
| To me, they're a worse version of People in Chrome. I had
| two windows open, one for work and one personal, one light
| one dark, easy to distinguish. Never any issue with
| multiple accounts.
|
| With Firefox, opening a new tab in a non default container
| has a terrible default shortcut, and you can't remap it to
| anything sensible (like cmd + some letter).
|
| I'm sticking with Firefox because I want to support them,
| but I miss Chrome dearly.
| temac wrote:
| > Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases
| [...]
|
| Yes indeed... until not anymore. And will this be an enormous
| change? Oh no but an annoying one for some people, and
| completely switching browsers might be perceived as only
| marginally less familiar than just having some of your
| settings suddenly disappearing in FF.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I switched to FF on Windows 10 as my daily driver a year and
| a half ago in order to adopt a multi-account container
| workflow. MACs aren't perfect [1] and overall I definitely
| sense that FF is not as power-efficient as Chrome, especially
| when in a Meet call, but overall I'm very happy with it and
| the power thing is not a huge issue if I'm sitting wired in
| all day anyway.
|
| [1]: My criticisms: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-
| containers/issues/1...
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to
| make me dislike them?
|
| That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox
| and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay
| $15 a month for it, maybe $25.
|
| A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in
| my current position.
|
| FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains
| tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox
| but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the
| software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today
| someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get
| them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by
| someone.
| zenincognito wrote:
| 100% agree with the default layout wasting too much space. I
| like this user also wish there was even a more compact layout.
| This is most certainly a abandon software breaking change for
| me.
| testesttest wrote:
| I only use them on mobile at this point (for adblock). For
| desktop, they are just worse than Chrome.
| fastball wrote:
| Brave has better adblock on mobile in my experience anyway.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| > Why bother using FF at this point?
|
| Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much
| much much more in order to make me switch to a different
| browser because there's simply no competition there -
| everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my
| browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single
| instantaneous crippling.
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| For crying out loud Mozilla I want to see web pages not empty
| parts of the user chrome, especially because vertical screen
| real-estate is at a premium on most monitors.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to
| achieve. They've been randomly removing features, or even plain
| butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile update)
| for several years, and all they probably achieved is to lose more
| and more users.
|
| Yet with their tiny market share they aren't exactly in a
| position to lose users.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I'm not very mobile savvy, but I use FF on mobile what did they
| mess up? I'm using 86.1.1 (Build #2015794881)
| Macha wrote:
| Extensions, there's a whitelist of about 10.
| everdrive wrote:
| >butchering their products (eg the recent Firefox mobile
| update)
|
| This still stings. The Firefox mobile update was a huge step
| down in every way.
| dralley wrote:
| Hard disagree, it's an improvement in nearly every respect
| for me.
| conradfr wrote:
| Before if I was on a page and wanted to go to a site pinned
| on the homepage (i.e basically all the ones I use on
| mobile) I just had to click on the address bar which would
| display the homepage and I could click it, now it doesn't
| work, it shows nothing instead (why?) and god do I still
| hate it.
|
| Also not exactly related the the new version but tab
| sending from desktop to mobile is basically not working
| these days.
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| I want to agree, I really prefer the new layout, but
| everytime I open a link from another app it just hangs for
| at least 30 seconds and I am not on a resource constrained
| device.
| sgc wrote:
| I have no such experience on several devices and android
| versions. Perhaps clear cache / reinstall and see if that
| helps clear the bug? Otherwise it might be device
| specific.
| oblio wrote:
| They dropped support for every extension sans 5-6 of them.
| And some of the extensions were incredibly useful.
| dralley wrote:
| You can use any plugin you want on Nightly.
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-
| extensio...
|
| It's just that they're not guaranteed to work yet due to
| all the changes they made to the browser engine.
| throw111116 wrote:
| They got 18 extensions on android now. Including Ublock
| Origin, HTTPS Everywhere (by EFF), BitWarden, NoScript.
| oblio wrote:
| They don't have the main one I care about, and you can't
| install external extensions (not from their website).
| trulyme wrote:
| Actually you can. You need nightly and you need to setup
| some account and set your extensions there. This is just
| so they can show you that they still work and they have
| disabled them because reasons. Nicely played.
| oblio wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand, you mean I need to use nightly
| and I need to publish the extensions to AMO myself?
| Neither of that is going to happen.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'm also surprised to see this strongly negative feedback.
|
| For me, Firefox/Android is something I've always wanted to
| use very badly, because I'm a staunch Firefox desktop user
| and wanted the bookmarks sync, but I kept reaching for
| Chrome because of the superior performance and UI
| refinement anyway.
|
| The major upgrade of Firefox/Android made it dramatically
| better on those fronts for me. And now that UBlock is back,
| I think it's ready for a serious attempt at switching. It
| definitely wasn't before.
|
| What are some things they broke/dropped?
| benrbray wrote:
| I have never used FF mobile, but so far no one has gone into
| detail about what changed about FF mobile that made it so much
| worse. Can you elaborate a little?
| oftenwrong wrote:
| There were a number of major changes that were poorly
| received:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/26/firefox.
| ..
|
| Perhaps the most disruptive change was that the update was
| not compatible with the vast majority of extensions. Given
| that, for "power users", the ability to install extensions
| was THE killer feature of Firefox for Android, this change
| was controversial.
|
| I still use Firefox 68.
| MikusR wrote:
| They have a very clear vision: drive as many users to other
| browsers.
| tomcooks wrote:
| Things tend to go that way when your major sponsor is also
| the owner of your main competing product.
| johnvaluk wrote:
| A side effect of using the Vimperator extension for many years
| was that it provided a stable interface unaffected by upstream
| UI tweaks, while still benefiting from other feature and
| security updates. I couldn't imagine switching away from
| Firefox for any reason, but when Vimperator was no longer
| supported, I realized I didn't like what remained and evaluated
| alternatives. Eventually, I stopped installing Firefox on my
| machines because I no longer open it.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| I actually really like Firefox Mobile. The old Firefox on
| Android was a dumpster fire. But I'm one of those types that
| used to use Firefox Focus as my main mobile browser. My main
| concern on a mobile browser is that it's so difficult to deal
| with cookies and tracking etc. Firefox Focus really earned my
| trust there and I like that the new Firefox Mobile is
| continuing that.
|
| My only real "complaint" is trivial and it isn't really their
| fault--it's that there are some dumb websites/apps that require
| a pass through Chrome to login and I haven't found a super
| quick way to do that (it's not difficult but it used to be
| super easy and obvious in Focus).
| wittyreference wrote:
| My main complaint about Firefox mobile is the menu locations
| - three dots on the upper right, hamburger on lower right,
| page select on bottom. With the issue being that there's
| nothing intuitive around what lands in the dots or the
| burger, so I not-so-rarely find myself randomly clicking on
| one or the other looking for e.g., the share menu.
|
| It doesn't stop me from using it, but it's annoying.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| Hmmm, I have my toolbar on the bottom and don't have
| anything in the upper right at all. Dunno what that could
| be. The location of the toolbar (menu/address/etc) can be
| set top or bottom in preferences (Settings >> Customize >>
| Toolbar).
|
| I have my toolbar set to auto hide to maximize screen space
| for reading and bottom works better for me because when you
| scroll to the top, the hidden toolbar reappears at the
| bottom before pulling further to refresh. It seems like
| hiding/unhiding the toolbar at the top would be super
| annoying because it would either jump over the top of the
| page or jerk the page up and down under my finger as it
| hides/unhides.
|
| (FWIW: I'm on a Pixel running Android 11 so dunno if there
| could be an Android version level or manufacturer overlay
| issue causing your menu to split, or maybe it's an iOS
| feature)
| wvenable wrote:
| I used Firefox on Android on my tablet and it was perfect for
| my needs. Since the change, I went from using it every day to
| never using it. The reviews on the play store are brutal now.
|
| The problem with Mozilla is that there aren't giving users
| what they want: Empowerment. Instead Mozilla wants the
| empowerment for themselves and to heck with giving users any
| control over the experience.
| jamienicol wrote:
| The reviews on the play store are extremely positive
| eMSF wrote:
| For several years now it has seemed like every notable change
| in Firefox has been about removing a reason to use Firefox
| instead of Chrome. (There are certainly reasons for the
| opposite case, including but not limited to the fact that every
| single website is certainly tested to work in Chrome.)
|
| Now, I've been using Firefox as my primary browser since before
| it was called Firefox, and I'm quite used to it and unlikely to
| switch to anything else, but boy are they (at the Mozilla
| Foundation) trying hard to make me.
| Valmar wrote:
| One could almost hazard a guess that Google has people inside
| Mozilla deliberately sabotaging the browser, to drive people
| to Chrome, while keeping Firefox around for the sole purpose
| of avoiding anti-trust lawsuits...
| trulyme wrote:
| Not sure why you are being downvoted, this seems like a
| pretty plausible explanation. Certainly better than any
| other I have seen.
| agilob wrote:
| >I don't think Mozilla has a clear vision of what they want to
| achieve.
|
| Nope, they are obsessed about how tabs and [x] button look
| like. Is that 6th big change on the panel in 5 years?
| rvba wrote:
| This is a 100% failure by Mozilla foundation management.
|
| They are non technical people who only care about own salaries
| and sjw issues, while ignoring their core product.
|
| Meanwhile the developer team does whatever they want: they
| mostly do greenfield projects that are used to boost their CVs.
| Those projects get 0 users and usually are cancelled at 70%
| completion so nothing hard needs to be done anyway (no
| bugfixing which is unsexy work).
|
| Here a developer probably does not want to code the compact
| option (or possibly: does not know how to do it) so they just
| want to remove it. Because the new firefox motto is "fuck our
| remaining users". Mozilla management does not care.
|
| Then they will wonder why firefox has a 3% market share.
| wejick wrote:
| Honestly I really like the mobile update, the interface feels
| more intuitive and modern. The only complaint for me is the
| "recommended" plugin restrictions.
| rurp wrote:
| I've gone from a diehard Firefox advocate to not even
| recommending it to friends and family for exactly this reason.
| The amount UX churn and functionality regressions over the past
| half decade is absurd and a huge turnoff.
| throw111116 wrote:
| I use Firefox Beta on android. One can change about:config
| options to improve pivacy. There is something called 'encrypted
| client hello', which was discussed here on HN, which lets me
| access many blocked sites in my country.
|
| I use the about:config options in this guide [1] plus enable
| encrypted DNS and encrypted client hello in about:config (on FF
| Beta android).
|
| A few days ago, there was an HN page showcasing a cool webpage
| which can read the position angles of your phone (whether it's
| flat, inclined etc in detail). That page works well on regular
| FF Android. But on the FF Beta with the config options enabled
| as above prevents the page from reading the angles. I also have
| telemetry upload disabled on FF Beta, but maybe a bit something
| is still uploaded, idk.
|
| [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/firefox-privacy/
|
| Edit: If one trawls through some recent past threads, one can
| see that FF cares about privacy. They have official extensions
| to isolate sites (or cookies?) to prevent tracking, on desktop.
| (Facebook Container and Firefox Multi-Account container). They
| are working on something like per site isolation by default
| (Project Fission [2]). Yeah Chrome has it but then they try to
| log you into the whole browser when you just wanna log in to
| gmail. And they are not doing something scammy plus impactful
| like AMP, FLoC [3] like Google. These AMP links are everywhere,
| many times it looks like it's the official site link.
|
| [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Project_Fission
|
| [3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-
| terrible-...
| cpeterso wrote:
| The device angle can be used for fingerprinting. I suspect
| that resetting the " privacy.resistFingerprinting" preference
| to "false" will fix the device angle website.
| throw111116 wrote:
| Yeah that's what I meant. The page not working is a
| feature.
| gitowiec wrote:
| Exactly this: recent Firefox mobile update. It is the worst
| happen to software I like to use and I use it on daily basis.
| It went bad. And I don't understand why they removed so many
| helpful features. It is time to (again) depart from Firefox and
| choose Chromium again.
| dralley wrote:
| I completely disagree, I think the new Firefox mobile is
| great. It's significantly faster, and while there were
| initially some problems with the extensions I was using,
| they're all supported now.
| trulyme wrote:
| Which Firefox is that? It seems to me there are more of
| them than Nokia had OSs back in the day.
| laurent123456 wrote:
| After the Firefox mobile upgrade, I dropped Firefox on all
| platforms and switched to Vivaldi. So far it's pretty good.
| It's Chromium based too, can sync settings, passwords, etc.
| to all platforms and, important for me, has a built-in ad
| blocker on mobile (unlike Chrome).
| dastx wrote:
| Please don't. Anything but Chrome based browsers. Chromium
| based browsers already have a monopoly, giving Google a huge
| weight when it comes to the web.
| asddubs wrote:
| so firefox
| kevincox wrote:
| Unfortunately yes. I really do wish we had more options.
|
| I guess the other option is WebKit which is now
| independent from Chrome so has influence over the
| direction of the web.
| odc wrote:
| Don't remove it. Please. I'm begging you ;_;
| sp332 wrote:
| Can you expand on this? What's so bad about the defaults?
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| First, browser remove more and more chrome to give back space to
| the actual website content, then they remove the option to remove
| even more chrome. Oh the irony.
| gbrown_ wrote:
| Another disgruntled user of the compact view here. I don't
| understand why every design update seems to insist upon adding
| padding these days, but removing the option entirely feels like a
| real kick in the teeth.
| GhostVII wrote:
| All I want from Firefox is the ability to autohide the address
| bar. The main reason I switched to Firefox is because you can
| write custom CSS to hide it. 99% of the time the address bar is a
| waste of space, and on a 13 inch screen with a tiling window
| manager it is actually a significant amount of space when I have
| multiple firefox windows open.
|
| Current compact mode seems somewhat useless since it isn't that
| big of a change, if they could have compact mode actually hide
| the address bar and show on hover that would be huge for me. If
| chrome did that, I would switch.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| There used to be an extension that did this; it would collapse
| everything but the actual tabs bar unless you moused over it.
| It was beautiful for getting the most out of your screen real
| estate. Naturally, it died in the... first(?) great extension
| purge.
| antattack wrote:
| I just enabled it! Looks good.
| rychco wrote:
| I had genuinely forgotten there were alternative options to
| compact. I understand the point of larger options for preference
| and accessibility, but I feel for the majority of people that
| compact is likely the best viewing experience in terms of
| conserving screen space. I hate exaggerating or sounding
| alarmist, but this will likely cause me to migrate to another
| browser.
| shmerl wrote:
| This is seriously nasty. I always use compact mode. I don't need
| this _" it's a tablet"_ design on my desktop.
| grishka wrote:
| Touchscreen laptops exist, which means those who use keyboards
| and mice -- the overwhelming majority of desktop OS users -- must
| suffer. Always loved this logic.
| clon wrote:
| Just found out about this feature, enabled it and it is
| brilliant. This ought to be the default. So I'm happy and sad at
| the same moment :)
| batterylow wrote:
| I use "compact density" on every machine...
| emaro wrote:
| I agree with the majority here. Removing this option would be
| really bad.
|
| In addition, personally I'm open to most UI changes (I really
| liked the FF Quantum update). But the screenshots of the Proton
| UI look awful. Seems very touch-centered and (background) tabs
| blend into each other. Please don't do it.
| dathinab wrote:
| > I agree with the majority here.
|
| Are you sure it's the majority?
|
| I would argue that people which don't care if it is removed are
| quite unlikely to comment on this thread.
|
| I for example really don't care if it's there or not, and
| besides maybe 720p screens I have a really hard time to see any
| value in the feature TBH. (and yes I tried it out).
|
| EDIT: To be clear what I tried out was the compact layout which
| is scheduled to be removed. I honestly wonder why they do
| change the view in the proton update because, this isn't adding
| any value for anyone at all. Not for touch users and not for
| desktop users, it just annoys people because they need to get
| used to a new view and for some people fits less into their
| general desktop design...
| dathinab wrote:
| Now I have tried out the actual nightly proton UI:
|
| - It still seems to be in flux, the one I see (slightly)
| differs from the one in the pictures which differs from the
| one in pictures in other articles.
|
| - I never cared about the compact density at all, until I
| used the proton UI which feels quite a bit bulky and grabs to
| much attention. It's similar to how gnomes "large" title bars
| (with potential other) features feel clunky. And they where
| definitely one of (multiple) reasons I'm not using gnome...
|
| - Ironically it looks all fine on my HiDPI laptop screen, I
| have no complains about proton on it at all. But on my
| 1080p24" monitor it a different story.
|
| - The music playing/muting feature is now more discoverable,
| at the price of having multi line tab text. I'm not sure this
| is worth it tbh. And while (on my 1080p24" screen) tabs feel
| like they are wasting a lot of space tabs which play music
| feel squished together. Worse when muted they write "MUTED"
| there but let's be honest a muted symbol is much faster
| visually recognized, not sure if that matters.
|
| - I'm worried about tab bar customization being hidden behind
| "More Tools.." being able to e.g. remove that annoying
| spacers before and after the tab bar and being able to remove
| all the symbols I don't use matters for me. (As a side not I
| would love if the "in tab bar symbols" are removable, I don't
| need a screenshot symbol there, I'm doing screenshots with my
| OS).
|
| - The reader mode is gone, you are probably meant to use
| pocket for this?
|
| - In default style the current tab is close to not
| highlighted at all, this seems to be a bug as in light and
| dark default themes it is highlighted properly.
|
| - The background behind the tabs and the one behind the
| buttons/uri-bar is different leading to a visual line which
| makes the UI feel more bulky/attention grabbing(in a negative
| way) then it should be. Merging both areas visually likely
| would improve the feeling of the proton UI and would fit
| better with the new look of the tab bar I think.
|
| As a side note does anyone know if there is any explanation
| about why they changed the tab bar in the way they did? It
| seem to add a little but not much improvements for touch
| screens while braking common design rules about tabbed views.
| I do not believe it has any chance to attract new users while
| it has a lot of potential to scare away old users.
|
| I mean doing a lot of work for negligible improvements for
| touch "PC's" and music icon/mute discoverability while having
| a good chance to lose users seem to be a somewhat strange
| decision to make tbh. Or differently formulated a big UI
| change (feels big) should also have big improvements for most
| users, which I'm not seeing anywhere.
| natch wrote:
| I wish they would remove the unwanted Pocket spam instead.
| canada2us wrote:
| Very good choice. People simply make decisions without much
| consequences in 2 scenarios:
|
| 1. They have too many users, the users have to accept it. 2. They
| have too few users, the users are neglectable to care.
|
| Firefox is exactly in the second scenario.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| My dream browser would completely separate the UI from the
| engine. I would specify a UI plugin from the command line, and if
| I didn't like it, or the provider started working against my
| interests, I could specify or create a different one.
|
| It'd be cool if the browser engine took commands over unix
| sockets or other IPC mechanism instead of being intimately melded
| at all with any UI.
|
| The Uzbl browser was very close to this I believe; it used
| Webkit.
|
| Would it be that hard to do that with the Firefox codebase?
| Firefox already has to work under multiple operating systems so
| some of the plumbing ought to be there.
| butz wrote:
| Firefox is one of a few applications that still has pretty decent
| customization options, especially if you can get into editing
| some CSS. They should find a way to work them into convenient UI,
| so other, less tech savvy users, or just users who don't have
| time to tinker with config files, could easily customize their
| browsing experience.
|
| It is sad, that in this day and age of various display sizes (4K,
| widescreen) and scaling (not only retina 2x screens, but 125%
| scaling on Windows too) Firefox designers are still working with
| pixels. How about using some of that modern CSS magic and
| building truly responsive UI, that works not only for desktops,
| but tablets and phones (e.g. Pinephone)?
| bhauer wrote:
| I am _very_ opposed to the removal of the compact density option.
| I adjust to compact on all of my computing devices because any
| screen real-estate recaptured for content without the loss of
| functionality is a good thing. On any device with a mouse, the
| compact layout is easy enough for me to target. As others have
| said here, I would opt for even more compact if it were an
| option.
|
| What do we think is the best way to engage with the Mozilla
| decision-makers on this? I feel instinctively reluctant to spam
| the linked Bugzilla issue, but perhaps that is best. Other
| thoughts?
| kokx wrote:
| Thanks Mozilla. This literally just directed me to this feature.
| Turned it on and actually feels quite good. Now I'll have to get
| back to make sure I don't get too used it before its taken away
| again.
| soapdog wrote:
| Instead of flocking here to complain, go to bugzilla at
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c64 and
| complain there.
|
| Mozilla is not reading HN threads, you want something you need to
| reach out through bugzilla.
| djaychela wrote:
| They specifically say to go here:
| https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-community:mozill...
|
| So I did.
| kleer001 wrote:
| From that bugzilla thread:
|
| (tl;dr they're asking to stop spamming the bug thread with
| support for the feature)
|
| Marco Bonardo [:mak]
|
| Comment 67 * 2 days ago
|
| Hello everyone.
|
| Even if you care a lot of about his feature, please don't post
| me-too comments or opinions in this engineering bug tracker.
| Technical insight, like comment 53 or comment 58, is always
| welcome.
|
| Otherwise, we may have to limit commenting in the bug, and we
| don't like to do that.
|
| The Engineering team is well aware of the community feedback.
|
| How can you express your opinion then?
|
| You can continue commenting in the Reddit/HN threads that made
| this bug viral, both are frequented by Mozilla employees. Or
| you can chat in real time with us, see
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix, and join
| https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fx-desktop-
| community:mozill....
| edoloughlin wrote:
| There's also a thread on Mozilla discourse:
| https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/please-dont-remove-the-
| compa...
| dathinab wrote:
| > How can you express your opinion then?
|
| As you quoted they are well aware of the feedback, given that
| it makes little sense to spam the bug tracker anymore (at
| this point in time) as this wouldn't add any value for
| anyone. It wouldn't make them aware of the feed back (they
| already are) nor does it add anything constructive.
|
| Or in other words, your opinion is already fully expressed
| through other people. (If you planed to only comment "me too"
| or similar.)
| Macha wrote:
| That question is also from the quote
| dathinab wrote:
| Wups, yes.
|
| Highlighting quotes as such is nice ... but reading them
| properly is so too ;=)
| sthnblllII wrote:
| >nor does it add anything constructive.
|
| This is false. The difference between 20 people speaking up
| versus 200 or 2,000 is huge, especially if they are saying
| the same thing. If they don't want that thread being
| spammed then they should reverse the decision to remove the
| feature .
| dathinab wrote:
| > This is false. The difference between 20 people
| speaking up versus 200 or 2,000 is huge,
|
| Only, If the Bug tracker would be the only source of
| feedback. But it isn't. It's not even meant to be a
| source of feedback, but a place to report technical bugs.
|
| And if you have some people giving feedback over the bug
| tracker and many many more giving feedback over other
| channels (like HN, Twitter, etc.) then there is very
| little value in any [EDIT: spamming] additional feedback
| [EDIT: which doesn't add anything to the discussion]. And
| yes it _would not matter if 20 or 200 people comment with
| "me too" in the bug tracker_ if they already got much
| feedback from other sources.
|
| Also spamming a _BUG_ tracker because you don 't like
| something which is not a bug is never going to change
| anything and just not helpful for anyone at all. It's
| like a "soft"/"harmless" DOS attack on the issue of the
| bug tracker preventing any proper discussion, i.e. not
| helpful at all.
| russdpale wrote:
| what a waste of resources and man hours for a company worried
| about their bottom line.
| Macha wrote:
| There's more in the r/firefox thread [1]:
|
| 1. PMs don't use bugzilla, just engineers [2]
|
| 2. Engineers are aware and raised that people (and apparently
| the engineer in question) don't like the change
|
| 3. The unnamed product manager has decided to go ahead anyway
| [3], they're a bit buffered from the feedback in a non-public
| JIRA.
|
| 4. It is the same engineers involved in the r/firefox thead as
| the ticket.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/m3fizq/i_want_you_...
|
| [3]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c36
| gbrown_ wrote:
| This would seem contrary to what Mozilla are saying
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67
| ancarda wrote:
| >The Engineering team is well aware of the community
| feedback.
|
| Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular this is, but
| are going to go ahead nevertheless?
|
| Is there even a single person who wants this feature to be
| removed?
| x0x0 wrote:
| I bet the QA team won't be sad. This looks like one of
| those features that requires a complete repass on a ton of
| UI.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Is there even a single person who wants this feature to
| be removed?
|
| It's about cost of maintenance not people wanting a feature
| to be removed. And while this feature specifically doesn't
| have to high of a cost (I think) it will sum up if many
| "hardly used" features are left in place.
|
| > >The Engineering team is well aware of the community >
| feedback. > > Does that mean Mozilla is aware how unpopular
| this is, but are going to go ahead nevertheless?
|
| I think it means they decided it, then got feedback and now
| are potentially reevaluating it.
|
| Also maybe the group of people using it isn't very high but
| very vocal/loud, in which case going ahead anyway would be
| reasonable.
|
| Through I also would guess the group of people using that
| feature is also likely to have analytics disabled...
|
| Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that
| specific feature" is always a major problem for data driven
| decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to estimate
| problem.
| riversflow wrote:
| > Having "analytics disabled" correlate with "using that
| specific feature" is always a major problem for data
| driven decisions, worse it's a well hidden and hard to
| estimate problem.
|
| You know, I'm generally a privacy conscious consumer and
| default to opting out of analytics, but if a company
| asked me to do a survey about how I use the product I
| absolutely would! I enjoy giving feedback, but am always
| going to pass on dragnet surveillance.
|
| I've never seen this though. Perhaps I'm naive to certain
| business interests or statistical techniques, but it
| seems like such a survey would be a necessary part of a
| robust decision making process based on mass-surveillance
| gathered analytics for a product that doesn't earn money
| by directly selling that data. (if you only make money by
| tracking users, I understand why you might not care about
| users who prevent it, but even then with the power of
| network effects I'd expect a business would at least want
| a finger on the pulse)
|
| I mean, I don't have a degree in stats, but from what I
| do know this is the kind of due diligence that the
| foundation of trust in statistics is based on. Maybe I'm
| just confused and someone can correct me, but I've come
| to see the selective enforcement of good statistical
| practices as one of the major problems in the world
| today, because a) I see it so much, b) it gives certainty
| where little is deserved, c) it prevents us from getting
| to truth.
| nikanj wrote:
| Well, obviously the Visionary Leader wanted this feature
| removed. They'll push against user feedback, quote Ford
| ("If I asked what the customers want, I would still be
| selling horses").
|
| We should have a name for the fallacy of "Jobs/Ford/etc
| ignored user requests and they were geniuses. If I ignore
| users, I'm a genius"
| SllX wrote:
| The thing about leadership is it only makes you the
| leader; a leader is no such thing without a good team.
|
| Jobs actively fought against the App Store within the
| company until someone finally convinced him it was
| actually worth doing. A bad leader would have just
| overruled his team, but a good leader will know when to
| back down because his team is right.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| A leader is someone people choose to follow. Most bosses
| aren't leaders.
| SllX wrote:
| If you have romantic notions of what leaders and
| leadership is, then sure, that's a wonderful definition!
|
| Thing is, if you're in a position of leadership, you're a
| leader. If people answer to you and you are in charge of
| them in any capacity, office, battlefield, whatever, then
| you're a leader. Sometimes even in an unofficial capacity
| if you take it upon yourself to be the get shit done and
| protect others in your group from fallout; this could be
| called assuming leadership, and if you do it well, people
| might turn to you as a leader and choose to follow you.
|
| The President of the United States is a leader. He's
| elected in a contentious election, and he is the leader
| of the government's civil service and diplomacy corps. as
| well as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, even if
| there are people in their ranks that voted for a
| different guy.
|
| Now whether a leader practices leadership, or is a _good_
| leader are entirely different questions. You don't have
| to respect your leaders, or like them, for them to be
| leaders.
| turbonoobie wrote:
| "Visionary leader fallacy"
| rapnie wrote:
| "Visionary overreach"
| username91 wrote:
| fwiw, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693028#c67
| requests the inverse - asks people with non-technical feedback
| to keep-out of bugzilla and instead comment in places like
| this.
| soapdog wrote:
| I know, but making noise on bugzilla appears to be the only
| way to get people to notice stuff. Those other channels are
| too easy to ignore.
| GNOMES wrote:
| I have been switching between Chrome and Firefox almost every
| other day past few months to see if I could make the switch away
| from Chrome or not. This was one of the benefits for me. While
| it's on a few pixels in comparison to my external monitors, it's
| almost a necessity on a laptop.
| ilmiont wrote:
| That's awful. This is one of the reasons I use Firefox, because
| its UI is customisable and not massive.
|
| Mozilla seems to be intent on taking away the power user
| features. I didn't even know this redesign was coming, but those
| screenshots look horrendous. Why are the tabs "floating" as giant
| blobs? The current design looks much more cohesive and less
| distracting.
|
| Sad to see Firefox succumb to the "must design everything every
| few years" mentality.
| kossTKR wrote:
| This is in line with the stupid whitespace-hell trend only
| worsening over the last years.
|
| Huge text, huge icons, huge boxes, lots of scrolling,
| everything hidden behind sub-menus.
|
| I honestly don't get it. I mean, i also like "pretty, light"
| whatever interfaces, and i also use glasses - still i can
| easily read an information dense website and it feels way more
| alive to me.
| mrloba wrote:
| Removing things because of relative low usage often seems like
| flawed logic to me. Sometimes it makes sense (most users only use
| the most used features), but quite often a piece of software will
| consist of a large number of low-usage features. Take them all
| away and you've lost most of your users. Basically zipf's law in
| action. So the value provided by the software is in flexibility
| and customization. How should we decide if a feature is worth
| keeping in such software?
| dlbucci wrote:
| Man, I hadn't heard of this feature before, and tried it out
| after reading this. It's so much nicer!
| jasonjayr wrote:
| Well, now I'm upset because I didn't know this setting existed,
| and I prefer the tighter layout!
|
| How, exactly does Mozilla measure user engagement of these
| features? And if they are using telemetry, how are they
| accounting for the users that disable telemetry out of privacy
| concerns? (Which, I assume is a sizable amount of FF users)
| marcos100 wrote:
| For this feature, apparently then don't measure.
|
| They measured screen resolution and are assuming that only
| people with low res screens use this feature.
|
| And they probably don't measure those who disable telemetry.
| ljm wrote:
| Data-driven design like that is really just going to get you to
| a lowest-common-denominator product.
| marcos100 wrote:
| It's only data-driven when they remove features.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Wasn't that the whole point of Firefox? To be the browser
| with 10% of the features that 90% of the users need?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not to my knowledge? Chrome was the "browser engine with
| his little fluff as possible", Firefox was "power tools for
| power users".
| dathinab wrote:
| The problem is FF had once been that "1000% of all features
| you can imagine most of which are used by at most 1% or 2%
| percent of users" browser.
|
| This was so because of the huge customizability of XUl and
| other parts.
|
| But this became a maintenance nightmare the moment it was
| put in context with requirements like stability (there
| where many extensions which made FF unstable) and security
| (how extensions are sandboxed, how likely they can escape,
| what damage they can do without an sandbox escape), change
| (new internal engine, changed rendering pipeline etc.).
|
| A Company of Googles size could probably have maintained
| it, but for FF it became increasingly more infeasible to go
| on like that.
|
| So they switched to remove XUL and support mainly the parts
| most users use, sometimes adding new features but also
| removing them if they don't gain any traction in the user
| base.
|
| I personally see little use for the compact density as it
| just removes some spacing which is _mostly vertical_. So
| (at least in my case) using compact spacing doesn 't at all
| create more space for tabs or similar it just adds a view
| more pixel to the vertical axis of the websites view.
|
| But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I guess it
| might matter if you are still on a 720p screen or
| alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size etc.)
| due to other reasons.
| Schlaefer wrote:
| > But then I'm only using 1080p and HiDPI screens. I
| guess it might matter if you are still on a 720p screen
| or alternatively have a high layout scaling (font size
| etc.) due to other reasons.
|
| That's the most baffling argument to me in this whole
| discussion. People invest in screen real estate and then
| devs decide to just fill it with more UI-chrome. How is
| my bigger screen an open invitation to waste it on
| buttons, margins etc?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Data-driven design like that is really just going to get
| you to a lowest-common-denominator product.
|
| Our data shows people typically use the defaults, so lets get
| rid of all configuration!
| chrisan wrote:
| I had no idea this was even an option to change. I love it
| already.
|
| I'm guessing the feedback they provided in the ticket means
| they will be keeping this option, thankfully
| tablespoon wrote:
| Yeah, I had no idea about it, but flipped it on solely
| because of this story and I like it. I even enabled
| telemetry because I'm sick of stuff like this.
|
| Personally, I hate the current fad of low-density, white-
| space-filled UIs. Sure, it might be suitable for some
| airport kiosk that I'll use exactly one, but for the
| things I use frequently I want their UI to be as compact
| and information dense as possible.
| globular-toast wrote:
| One of the first things I try to do with all software is reduce
| the number of pixels used by toolbars etc. as much as I can.
| Needless to say I've been using compact with Firefox for years
| now. I just looked at standard again and can't see why I would
| want to use more pixels for the exact same interface.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Please don't do this. I set this option straight away every time
| I install.
| supernes wrote:
| Firefox has been on a steady trajectory of declining usability
| for a while now, and I'm left with the impression that the people
| responsible for these decisions either have no experience in the
| field or have never used Firefox. This "compact density" drama
| may not be a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but the
| paper cuts are adding up fast, and will only accelerate the
| migration to Chromium forks (and Chrome itself.)
| zapt02 wrote:
| What a typical HNews comment - full of hyperbole, handwaving
| and bike shedding.
|
| I guarantee you that the people working on FF are both very
| experienced and do use their own product.
| tubularhells wrote:
| Signed - Salty Mozilla Employee
| supernes wrote:
| Maybe it would have been more constructive to give concrete
| examples and suggestions for improvement, but I've done that
| plenty over the years and it seems it's always fallen on deaf
| ears. So I'm just sharing my impressions, not making
| statements.
| rvba wrote:
| Their product has been bleeding out users for years.
|
| Everyone knows that Firefox was supposed to be "the
| customizable" browser. Everyone apart from Mozilla. Mozilla
| wants to make Firefox a Chrome clone.
|
| In every thread users write how they want addons and
| customization (especially in UI), and in every thread Mozilla
| apologists talk how the foundation should drop the "tech
| savy" group for some other group. That other group doesnt
| seem to materialize - they are losing users fast.
|
| Also explain to your grandmother that the UI needs to change
| for 10th time just because someone from Mozilla says so.
| Chrome is in fact stable in this regard (although they like
| to change settings all the time what is same problem).
| jcastro wrote:
| > Everyone knows that Firefox was supposed to be "the
| customizable" browser.
|
| Wait what? Where?
| throw7 wrote:
| Accessibility is fairly hard to discover and it gets low
| engagement. It too should be removed.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Might as well remove the ability to type full URLs, because our
| user research indicates that most users use a search engine.
| natch wrote:
| Yikes, don't give their tone-deaf product managers ideas like
| this, they might take you seriously...
| mywittyname wrote:
| Oof, I know this sarcasm, but I do have concerns that FF will
| eventually ditch the split view for search and address bars.
| I hate the unified bar, but I suspect that I'm in the
| minority here.
| dathinab wrote:
| Hm, they might.
|
| Funny thing is I had been using the address bar as search
| bar (removing the search bar using customization) even
| since before it was really supported (it just happened to
| work, somewhat, unreliable).
|
| But I still hope they wouldn't do so as there are clearly
| situations where a combined bar just doesn't work well at
| all (like searching a URL or domain name in your search
| engine).
|
| And if I wouldn't be using mostly a laptop and 1080p24"
| monitor my setup might have been different.
| hnaccy wrote:
| > which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume gets
| low engagement.
|
| >We want to make sure that we design defaults that suit most
| users and we'll be retiring the compact mode for this reason.
|
| >The word from Product Management is still that we should remove
| this, for the reasons listed in the User Story.
|
| After tens of polite comments with reasoning in support of
| feature the FF dev throws up hands as Product says it has to go.
|
| What happened to Mozilla?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Add another voice to the I'm using this feature, please don't
| take away my functionality that costs you nothing to run or
| maintain.
| tubularhells wrote:
| I'm surprised how Firefox is becoming more and more unusable,
| without much improvement. I live in a country that is not my
| mother tongue, and I'm not a fluent reader/speaker yet. I need
| the inline site translation feature to navigate things I'm unsure
| about, say government sites, tax office stuff. Firefox is not
| usable in such a scenario (make no attempt at convincing me, I
| looked far and wide for a good solution. The available plugins
| are not a substitution, as they trigger bot and spam filters).
| Mozilla have been promising Chrome-like inline translation for a
| decade now, without any signs of actually working on it. I kept
| waiting for much of that decade, but 2 years ago I switched to
| Chromium. I now do not recommend people to use Firefox, even
| though I advocate for free software in my circle of friends and
| acquaintances.
|
| Maybe this will change, but I do not really expect much from
| Mozilla's current leadership.
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| I'm in the same situation. It's not as convenient as Chrome,
| but if you get the Google translate function, you can right
| click and say "translate page". It will open up the page in
| Google which does inline translation. It's not as convenient as
| the Chrome Ui but at least it's something.
| tubularhells wrote:
| You didn't read carefully, I'm afraid.
| seany wrote:
| Arg. I've been looking for a way to make this smaller for a long
| time. How have I just discovered this right before it goes away?
| KallDrexx wrote:
| I don't get it. The wording of the bugzilla specifically says
|
| > The "Compact" density is a feature of the "Customize toolbar"
| view which is currently fairly hard to discover, and we assume
| gets low engagement.
|
| So not only do they not have telemetry for that, they aren't even
| attempting to make it more discoverable to test if there's a
| correlation between "hard to discover" and "low engagement"?
|
| I would use this but never knew this could be changed.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I wish gecko/servo were separated enough from Firefox that we
| had other browser options built around it, with features like
| native sidebar tabs and compact mode. I've tried to stick with
| Firefox because I don't love Google owning the hugely dominant
| browser engine, but Mozilla isn't making it easy for me.
|
| Looks increasingly nice across the pond with Edgeium, Vivaldi,
| Brave, etc.
|
| Is servo even still in development? I know bits and pieces of
| the project have made their way into Firefox, but I'm not sure
| where that stands after the layoffs last year.
| freebuju wrote:
| They fired all the Servo devs. (And) probably increased their
| CEOs annual salary and bonuses.
|
| At this point, Mozilla is just hell-bent on a path to
| completely destroying whatever's left of Firefox. It being
| the only non-Blink browser alternative left is no longer a
| valid excuse.
| smolder wrote:
| I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where the
| underdog in some area develops a kind of self-doubt about
| the ways they are different. Unique advantages get mistaken
| for liabilities and then the underdog degrades into a weak
| immitation.
| dralley wrote:
| I've contributed to Servo, compiled it, used it, etc.
|
| The parts of Servo that were not already merged into
| Firefox (like Stylo and WebRender) had no clear path to
| being merged into Firefox within the next few years.
|
| I'm really, really sad that they were laid off, but in
| terms of the future survival of Firefox, it wasn't a
| catastrophic decision.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| On this note, anyone have thoughts on Waterfox and Palemoon?
| My mental picture of them is basically "forks of old Firefox
| versions" but I don't know how accurate that is. Web
| compatibility issues or anything else to know about?
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I would say that many of the issues with Firefox for Android
| (Fenix) come from the fact that there are a lot of modular
| components that get managed by different teams. My experience
| is that whenever I've encountered a bug in Fenix that has a
| dependency on a GeckoView issue, it doesn't get fixed for at
| least a couple of months. Examples include the inability to
| copy magnet links and the inability to download images that
| need cookies attached to the request, like the ones for
| Cloudflare's DDoS protection. There is literally nothing I
| can do in those cases except use a Chromium-based browser. I
| may be biased, but in my experience having more than one repo
| with their own separate PRs and commit processes slows down
| bugfixes by an order of magnitude, even more so when they're
| managed by different teams.
|
| For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do
| with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not
| restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo,
| haven't been fixed for even longer.
|
| I think that Mozilla has good intentions, but they pushed out
| Fenix way, way too early, which broke the experience for
| users of previous version of Firefox for Android. And it
| seems that their mobile team is understaffed and overworked.
| I don't blame them, since they're essentially trying to
| create an entirely new browser (minus the rendering engine).
| But should be labeled as a beta, if not an alpha, in the
| state it's in - not "release-ready" as the version on the
| Play Store. It's proven that web browsers are too important
| in this era to get wrong when so much of our lives depend on
| them. If the experience is even slightly inferior to Chrome,
| the average user can easily switch and never end up using
| Firefox again.
| lucideer wrote:
| I use this feature as the UI takes a lot of space, and it would
| be bother me quite noticeably were it removed. However, I
| understand that maintaining features & options can incur costs,
| which may not be worthwhile if they're not widely used. So I'd
| be happy to accept the inconvenience if I knew that I was in a
| minority.
|
| Stunned to see that's not the case, and completely baffled at
| how contradictory and indicative of incompetence this stated
| reasoning is.
| binwang wrote:
| Same here. I also find this reasoning very disturbing and
| discouraging, even though I can live without this feature,
| and will most likely continue using FF after this change
| lands.
| cout wrote:
| > I would use this but never knew this could be changed.
|
| Same here, but since it affects both the toolbar and the tab
| bar, I'm inclined to keep the density set to Normal except on
| small screens.
| danjac wrote:
| "Nobody visited the restaurant that we decided to build in the
| middle of nowhere and never advertised, so obviously it failed
| and we closed it down."
| kilburn wrote:
| Correction:
|
| "We built a restaurant in the middle of nowhere and never
| advertised it. We don't have the numbers but it seems fair to
| assume that nobody goes there so we'll be closing it down."
|
| The important missing part in your analogy is that they don't
| even know if people use it or not!
| postalrat wrote:
| Even if they knew how many people are using it they still
| wouldn't know if more people wanted to use it.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Modern telemetry is a plague on power users. Imagine if Vim
| made product decisions around which features get the most use.
| jsty wrote:
| Every new Vim instance would show instructions on how to :q
| and a million StackOverflow posts would become redundant
| andrewzah wrote:
| Vim (at least v8.1.1401) already does that.
|
| type :q<Enter> to exit
|
| type :help<Enter> or <F1> for on-line help
|
| type :help version8<Enter> for version info
|
| As the sibling comment noted, neovim also has something
| similar.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Neovim startup page looks like this now:
| NVIM v0.4.3 Nvim is open source and freely
| distributable https://neovim.io/#chat
| type :help nvim<Enter> if you are new! type
| :checkhealth<Enter> to optimize Nvim type
| :q<Enter> to exit type :help<Enter>
| for help Become a registered Vim user!
| type :help register<Enter> for information
|
| I imagine vim is similar
| Macha wrote:
| Also the touch scale, also only discoverable through that same
| UI widget, is not up for removal.
| olejorgenb wrote:
| Yes and if touch mode remains a simple "x times more padding"
| variant (like it's today) it's a bit hard to see how ditching
| compact mode would save much code complexity...
| kevincox wrote:
| That is the most messed up reasoning I have ever heard. "We
| will remove this feature because we didn't promote it well."
|
| It might be a crazy idea, but maybe we could add telemetry and
| see if people actually use it _despite_ it being hard to
| discover.
| klyrs wrote:
| Yes, that idea is nonsensical. The reason I use FF is because
| they're fighting tracking and telemetry. Not so they can spy
| on me.
| spijdar wrote:
| Firefox has telemetry, it just doesn't gather data on this
| feature. It does gather: Interaction data
| includes information about your interactions with Firefox
| such as number of open tabs and windows, number of webpages
| visited, number and type of installed Firefox Add-ons and
| session length, as well as Firefox features offered by
| Mozilla or our partners such as interaction with Firefox
| search features and search partner referrals. [0]
|
| I don't think telling if the compact UI was enabled is more
| invasive than this data.
|
| [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/telemetry-clientid
| klyrs wrote:
| I opt out. I assume people inclined to tweak their FF
| settings are more likely to opt out than those who don't.
| By definition, I guess. So that's gonna spoil whatever
| statistics you want out of this.
| [deleted]
| mmcdermott wrote:
| Same here. I didn't know this was in Firefox, saw this article,
| went and tried it. I think I'll leave it that way (until the
| feature goes away) because I prefer leaving space for content.
| I use the keyboard to focus on the url bar anyway, so the
| smaller size doesn't hurt me.
| russdpale wrote:
| Is it even worth the man hours to get rid of this?
| sgarrity wrote:
| An option like this adds time and complexity to all other
| interface changes, so removing the option could save
| development and testing time in the long run.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Yes for testing. But developers said it won't save
| development time because they still have to provide an even
| less dense layout for touch. And maybe the UI should change
| less anyway.
| vimacs2 wrote:
| I had switched to Brave a few months ago once I saw the writing
| on the wall (the writing being that Mozilla clearly want to
| "diversify" from their browser).
|
| Despite being unable to have certain extensions, I have not been
| missing Firefox much at all. Really, the only thing that I really
| miss is the containers functionality but that can be sort of
| emulated through profiles (though that's not a perfect match
| admittedly).
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| For those who want to use Firefox without all the Mozilla
| Foundation fuckups, Waterfox and Pale Moon are viable, usable,
| and security-updated forks who could use your support.
| torstenvl wrote:
| Is the Pale Moon team really into Rescuers Down Under or
| something?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I don't know about the name origin, if that's what you mean,
| but I can say that it's a great browser, in my top five in
| daily use, and truly in the spirit of Mozilla before their
| stupidity phase.
| vocatus_gate wrote:
| +1 for Palemoon, they do a good job of maintaining what to
| me feels like Firefox, before Mozilla started making all
| these bizarre and unwanted changes.
| Hard_Space wrote:
| Sad, and a deal-breaker for me. Have disabled updates and
| notifications via a JSON file, pending the possibility of a turn-
| around or other solution. When will the white-space mania end?
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| I'm a dire hard Firefox fan. I won't switch to Chrome, but I may
| start giving Qutebrowser and others a look. All Mozilla has been
| doing is playing catch-up with Google, chopping away at excellent
| (even if mildly used) features (RSS anybody? now this, plus
| others before), and occasionally embedding 3rd party, proprietary
| addons. Ok, sure, Mozilla ended up buying Pocket, but that wasn't
| the case when it was first added to the browser from the user's
| perspective... I remember Firefox before it was Firefox -
| phoenix, firebird....now we have a pretty decent Chrome clone
| with some legacy features left (about:config), but not much else.
| Other browsers are looking better every day.
| anoncake wrote:
| I'm starting to think someone inside Mozilla is getting paid by
| Google to fuck up. This level of incompetence is incredible.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| i have been sure of it for a while. it would not be difficult
| with only a few "collaborators".
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Mozilla is only still alive because of Google you know?
| kristopolous wrote:
| I've thought this on a lot of projects. Even seriously looked
| for it. Haven't found much yet. There's profound staggering
| levels of incompetence and regression on some of these larger
| projects.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-03-15 23:00 UTC)