The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before. This does not often happen with Safari. Their UI has been remarkably stable for many, many years.
The constantly-changing Firefox UI is by design. They believe that user-experience bugs are just like all other bugs, and you can manage them in the same way: toss them into Bugzilla and "more eyes make all bugs shallow", etc. (Google takes this even further: all of their UI decisions are made statistically.) Apple doesn't believe that, and they develop their UI in dictatorial secrecy.
Here's a 50-minute talk by Alex Faaborg, Principal Designer at Mozilla, about how they do UI and why they think they should do it that way. It's interesting.
Maybe the Firefox team is right, and you can develop a better UI that way. Well, they haven't yet proved this, because Apple's UI is better.
Look, in the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. The Firefox crew believe otherwise. Good for them, and we'll see.
Meanwhile, I'm going to use the app whose UI works best, not the app whose development methodology most fits my political preconceptions.
If you read the soure, note that Jamie plays games with HN referrers. You may want to copy/paste this instead, hence the non-link.
