> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker
Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.
The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting.
I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.
I would love for applications and even web sites to have an expert mode. Maybe when the UX teams aren't looking devs could add a mode that puts Everything back in the UI.
The implication of what you're saying is that it somehow isn't friendly and approachable to your average non-techie person, which doesn't make sense because the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years and Firefox has been just fine for technies to switch their parents/grandparents over to for years now.
The problem with Firefox isn't the UI, the problem with Firefox is mismanagement by the board that has been captured by Google and the lack of proper antitrust action against Google by the US and EU.
First time I’ve heard Google being blamed for Mozilla’s self inflicted problems. Google is highly incentivised to make sure Mozilla survives with some reasonable market share. Without Mozilla antitrust enforcement becomes much more likely. That’s why Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine provider. That’s the main source of revenue for Mozilla.
If Mozilla could maintain 10% market share in perpetuity and also keep signing search licensing agreements with Google that works just fine for Google. Sadly it has a lot less than that.
First time huh? That's surprising. It's only mentioned every time Firefox and Mozilla come up.
I'm sure Google would like a slightly healthier captured 'competitor' but that doesn't mean that they didn't put them in this place through subversive practices.
> the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years
(Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.
I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome :
You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with just Ctrl + L, Tab and Enter.
You can also launch @search_engine $keyword directly in the bar, search bookmark/history/tabs directly with */^/% symbols.
You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...)
This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script :
I dislike the "awesome bar" quite a lot. Fortunately, as you say, you can disable a lot of its "awesomeness" (enough that I can live with it), but not all of it. You do have to do a bit of research to find out the various magic "about:config" settings you need to change.
Sure, but that's a bit different. What I'm talking about is that I want the "awesome bar" to be just a plain URL bar and not be overloaded with other functions like search. You can get very close to this with a few setting changes.
Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.
But yes, it's time to give Firefox another spin. Hey, looks like youtube is un-broken in base FF! Keeping FF "base" for debug purposes is far more important than fixing my petty grievances so I have to pass on the tips, but I appreciate the sentiment. Here's hoping its next stint in the "daily driver" seat is a long one.
I like the approach where it’s configurable which items are available in menus and toolbars. The application can come with a default configuration that is suitable for the average and novice user, and power users can change the menus and toolbars to their needs. When not all items are shown, the respective menu or toolbar can have a “More…” item that opens the configuration dialog. That way it’s discoverable.
> FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person.
Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.
I'm also for user choice but this consistent notion that uncluttered UIs are only for non-techie people is very annoying. I'm a software developer by trade but that doesn't mean I want every UI to look like the inside of an airplane cockpit or a 90s teletext.
The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look back to the time where every interface cramped 20 buttons in a tiny space and five of the buttons did the same thing. (looking at you, KDE settings menus)
> The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional.
Aesthetics is a matter of taste, of course, so there's no right or wrong there. Only if you like it or not.
But the trend towards minimalist UIs is something that actively gets in my way and makes the software more difficult for me to actually use. That's why I dislike it.
It's a bullshit trend that goes away from the past where the UI was customizable to whatever level of simplicity or complexity one preferred to now where the developer decides what's good enough for you (in this case a totally dumbed down and limited UI targeted at the great unwashed, who despite all this effort continue to stay with Chrome). Don't like toolbars? Hide them. Remove buttons you don't want. This used to be the norm with all desktop apps until the 2010s when UX mandarins decided that nobody but smartphone users with their constrained screen space and system resources mattered anymore.
The amount of regressions Mozilla has inflicted on Firefox in recent years blows my mind. One of their few big advantages over Chrome is better user control, but they have been working continuously to destroy that.
Getting rid of most extensions and removing about:config are two big wtf decisions. All that does is piss off power users, which are the main advocates for this browser. Plus so many other baffling changes to remove or worsen existing features, along with the pointless UI reshuffles.
Edit: I should clarify that about:config has only been removed from mobile Firefox, so far at least.
They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years. Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it).
> Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it).
From your link, there are problems that are specific to `about:config` only on mobile, due to Android OS and GeckoView API specifics:
- There are preferences that …is reset when the app restarts.
- There are many preferences that …do nothing.
- There are preferences …which breaks interacting with some websites.
- There are platform preferences that …result in startup crashes …and reinstalling results in the deleting of data like bookmarks, passwords, history, etc.
Look, it’s not like we’re insensitive to the desire for configuration; it’s that we know that on Android there are footguns that don’t exist on desktop!
We want to figure out a way to do this in a way that makes it difficult to break GeckoView. I’m sorry that this isn’t good enough for many of you, but with all due respect, you’re not the ones on the receiving end when somebody breaks their browser because they didn’t know what they were doing!
Kinda reasonable, honestly? It sounds like more than just "page may render funny" types of footguns. Unknown quantities of unlabelled "Lose All My Data" buttons are probably what this site would call an antipattern.
> They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years.
On the above Reddit link, they also explain the extensions thing was because they were "literally not done implementing the APIs yet" and focused on the "highest priority extensions". So, the "big wtf decision" might be why they released it in that state, rather than "getting rid of most extensions".
These seem like bugs that could be fixed, but it also seems like there should be relatively simple ways to work around them without disabling about:config, e.g.:
If some settings can cause a crash (and you don't have a complete list), create a separate launcher that only edits the settings in about:config without ever trying to run other Fenix code, so the user always has a way to revert settings if they're causing a crash on startup.
If some settings can be applied but are reset the next time the app runs, save the setting value itself and then re-apply it on each startup.
Other problems like settings doing nothing or breaking websites are just ordinary bugs. Until they're fixed, the user can just refrain from using those settings, or revert them if they cause problems. These sorts of issues are acceptable for users knowingly mucking around in about:config, it's fine, fix the bugs when you get time. It's no reason to disable access to the other settings that actually work in the meantime.
We may disagree with Mozilla's priorities, but they do have finite resources. E.G. Should the extensions API have been delayed even more than it already was, to first build this separate `about:config` launcher as a kludge?
They're not being wilfully bullheaded in this case, is what I mean. The "P5"/"Enhancement" Bugzilla issue is open, but unassigned.
> They just haven't had anybody to spend engineering time doing so yet.
But this has been the other major criticism of Mozilla. They take the money they get from Google and spend it on not-Firefox when Firefox market share should be their top priority, because if that number goes to zero they're defunct.
>you’re not the ones on the receiving end when somebody breaks their browser because they didn’t know what they were doing!
about:config already has a warning when you first open it that you'll screw up your settings if you don't know what you're doing. So if someone borks their install as a result, it isn't Mozilla engineer's job to apologize or hand hold them through it.
Every software until the 2010s (Windows itself, with its registry) has had this implicit disclaimer that you forfeit all official support if you dick around with the internals in an non standard way. So why is it now at the other extreme of 'fuck all power users, we will only target those who can't walk and chew gum simultaneously' ?
Yes! FF PMs and designers seem to HATE user customization, add-ons and power user capabilities yet those are the main reasons I came to FF and why I still use it. While FF is still the best browser for me (barely), it's only achieved this by all the alternatives enshittifying and dumb-ifying their browsers even faster than FF. As it is I have to spend significant effort under the hood customizing UserChrome scripts just to maintain minimal usability. (...and thank the heavens for Lepton (https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix), a regularly maintained, well-curated, all-in-one collection of essential Firefox fixes (which can each be turned off individually via flags.)
Firefox has enshittified itself if your reference point is the original Firefox of the early 2000s that unseated Internet Explorer's dominance. User customization has steadily eroded since version 4 when they started copying Chrome, from multi-process to removing the statusbar to introducing the hamburger menu to the insane practice of incrementing major version numbers into the triple digits.
>While FF is still the best browser for me (barely)
Give Pale Moon a try and ignore the FF fanboy propaganda of it being oLd aNd iNSeCuRe. It isn't, it's regularly updated to keep up with Google dominated web standards and security patches, and runs on an independent fork of Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. It is not a mere rebuild like Librewolf, Waterfox etc but a separate browser that retains all the full customizabiity of pre 2017 Firefox with full XUL extension and NPAPI plugin support.
They changed the extension model which broke the extensions using the old model. Many of the developers didn't have the resources to rewrite the extension from scratch, or the new model had restrictions that made what the extension was doing difficult to impossible, so they disappeared.
Mandatory sandboxing increasingly seems like a misfeature. Now you can't install an extension that does a lot of things that are useful, ostensibly to protect you from malware.
Optional sandboxing can be good because users can have more confidence that something can't hurt them. But it can also be bad because users will have more confidence that something can't hurt them, and then it does anyway.
Meanwhile the ability to exercise arbitrary permissions given the user's authorization is something we've lost. And what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges. This vastly reduces the blast radius of an extension publisher takeover or an insider attack, for example.
> what have we gained, when the user just runs how_to_actually_uninstall_mcafee.avi.exe and gets the malware regardless?
Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS. On the other hand, a compromised browser extension could deal an incredible amount of damage to me.
Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
> No, you can still grant permissions to web extensions, but the difference is that it's now explicit, and it is at least possible to design extensions with minimally-required privileges.
The problem is the reverse. Some permissions are now considered "too dangerous" for the extension, so there is no facility to grant them even if the user wants the extension to do that and it has a good reason to.
> Nothing would happen if I double-click that file, since it doesn't run on my OS.
In which case the website could have fingerprinted your browser and served you the one that does.
> Are you saying that because we can't protect all users from all harm, we should just give up?
I'm saying that we should give people the tools and information they need to decide if and to what extent they can trust something, instead of presuming to decide for them.
If XUL were to continue as it does on Pale Moon, here is no need for Web Extensions given they are a reduced subset in terms of functionality compared to the previous XUL/XPCOM versions.
And ironically for all the talk of making it more secure, the amount of cross browser malware has only shot up since Mozilla decided to dump XUL in favor of copying Chrome's extension system.
WebExtensions is Chrome based not standards based. And Firefox had sandboxed and unsandboxed extensions before.
What Mozilla promised would have been worth it. Parity with Chrome's APIs. APIs to support popular features of old extensions. Support for extension developers to develop new APIs. But they abandoned these promises.
And they managed the transition badly. They chose an arbitrary deadline before evaluating scope or designing a migration path. They held the arbitrary deadline as they missed estimates. Extension developers didn't know when or if APIs they needed would be implemented. And no version of Firefox supported old extensions and reasonably complete WebExtensions APIs. These decisions made many problems for developers and users. And this was shortly after many developers spent much effort making their XUL extensions multi process compatible or converting them to sandboxed extensions.
I hope they don't put more of the menu items into unremovable buttons in the address bar (which already contains four icons: tracker protection, certificates, containers, bookmark) or next to it (both an overflow menu for extensions and an overflow menu for ..other things? and a hamburger for ..other-other things? in addition to the buttons I actually do want there). On my laptop I can hardly read the domain name of the url unless I fullscreen the window.
My cognitive style in using computer interfaces is to remember where things are, so features that move things around (or hide them) based on some algorithm are not only annoying but slow down my workflow and increase cognitive load.
Hopefully, they'll offer some way to turn this off.
IDK, they're just following what Chrome has been doing forever now, and it has worked there. I guess that really is what the vast majority of normal people want. And considering how even among my most tech-savy friends and colleagues Chrome appears to be the browser of choice, it seems even these folks don't really care...
That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia. Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
Firefox certainly didn't help by becoming a bloated mess. Firefox was bad when Chrome came out. All Chrome did was the same thing Firefox did to IE in the same situation: take advantage of complacency. Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.
Funny how different people's experiences can be. When Chrome came out in 2008 I remember trying it just for fun (more than once), and it never clicked with me, so I stayed with Firefox.
What was harder for me was keeping with all the unnecessary redesigns, empty eye candy, dumbing down, the Fennec debacle (exensions used to work, then they suddenly stopped for a bunch of years; plus, no keyword search for no reason).
By that time staying away from Google had become a goal in itself, but I understand who migrated to chrome.
Anyway, I am firmly convinced Chrome won because of Google's abuse of its web search monopoly. The innovations that its team introduced were groundbreaking from a technical point of view, but Firefox was a perfectly capable browser.
> Google's heavy and sometimes ethically questionable promotion of Chrome was an amplifying force, but not sufficient.
I strongly believe it was sufficient. Which does not mean that Chrome was not better when it came out. But most people really don't want to try new tech: because you were excited by Chrome back then does not mean, by far, that everyone on the planet was.
Yeah, that was always funny to me too... Google built a browser that was actually faster and more secure, and then decided to be anti-competitive instead of just letting it win. Of course, they didn't actually get destroyed in court for it, so I suppose being evil works in this case.
They did fine even before MS was prevented from behaving anti-competitively. When Microsoft had to put its browser choice banner in the EU, Firefox was already at its peak.
Microsoft did it to themselves, IE4 was a great browser for its time. It was bundled in Windows, for free, it was anticompetitive, but its technical merits made a big part of its adoption. But as it became old, and Microsoft did nothing to improve the situation. When Firefox came out, it didn't need advertising from a tech giant. It was a godsend for developers (it followed standards!), who advertised for it on their webpages, user tried it and loved the cool new features (tabs!) and installed it on their friends computers, the whole tech world except for Microsoft rooted for Firefox because it was just so much better.
When trade commissions arrived, the job was already done, Firefox had enough critical mass that it couldn't be ignored and IE-only sites were becoming a thing of the past (except for corporate intranets, these have always been the worst). If anything, they helped Chrome more than they helped Firefox as it was just launching during that time.
Marketing alone doesn't win for browsers. It is really easy to switch browsers, all it takes is to have some semi-geek friend to come by and say "hey, try this new browser, it is just like the old one, but better", and if it really is better, that's it. That's how Firefox was winning in 2010. And look how hard Microsoft is trying with Edge, and fail, that's because Edge has nothing over Chrome, unfortunately, Firefox don't have much over Chrome either (yeah, privacy, maybe 5% care).
Was it though? This was well after AOL and the Endless September. There were rows of Complete Idiots Guides and For Dummies books on using the internet in major book stores. You've Got Mail made a quarter billion in the box office a half decade before.
This was the time of normies. All the @aol addresses still in use were minted here.
> There were rows of Complete Idiots Guides and For Dummies books
Which says that people were trying to learn how to use their computer, right? Nowadays professors need to teach their university students what a file is... I can definitely accept that the users were more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014.
> That doesn't necessarily follow; a person could easily argue that Chrome won because Google abused its search monopoly to push it, then kept winning because of inertia.
Sure, for the average Joe I might buy this, but also it's the same kind of people who can't tell the difference between the address bar and the search field on the Google homepage, so I'm still kinda skeptical they don't actually refer a UI with as few options and buttons as possible....
> Unless your friends specifically prefer Chrome because of UX reasons, it could be unrelated.
... But I absolutely can't follow you here. What other reasons should there be? That that one or two websites they infrequently visit don't work? If you can't be arsed to just use chrome for these specific occasions and stay with the customizable, powerful alternative for the rest of the time, I don't believe you're someone who'd like a UI with more than three buttons anyways.
(And on that note I've yet to encounter a site that doesn't work in Firefox, but maybe that actually is a thing in places other than Europe...)
IMO the vast majority of users cannot make the difference between Chrome and Firefox. They just use whatever they are used to and like it because they are used to it.
Over the years, I have converted people to Firefox, Chrome, Brave, Safari. The only common denominator is that they all strongly prefer the one they use now.
Yes, but the current design and direction are very clearly not working.
You can hardly blame them for trying to emulate what's currently working for everyone else when everything you've tried so far has led to your downfall.
Their downfall came when they changed everything that they were doing, and subsequently nuked every reason why someone would prefer firefox other than that they weren't google. They transformed firefox into wonky chrome, even copying superficial UI stuff. And then got very hostile about any criticism of this project, actively destroying all of the goodwill they built up. That alienation of their stubborn, fanatical base took years to accomplish.
People would move back to firefox if it were still anything like firefox.
Not that I disagree with the alienation of their fanbase. I personally use Firefox mostly because it is not Google, certainly not because it is Mozilla (and to be fair I like the Firefox Containers).
But I am not convinced most people see it like this. Most of the people I know honestly don't make the difference between Firefox and Chrome: they just use what they know. I think Chrome won those people because Google managed to convince them that "Internet == Chrome", not because they consciously chose Chrome as a better alternative.
> But I am not convinced most people see it like this. Most of the people I know honestly don't make the difference between Firefox and Chrome: they just use what they know.
And those people are not Firefox's audience. They don't care about their browser as long as it loads facebook.com, so they're just going to use whatever browser is more popular or pushed harder onto them, which is Chrome. If Firefox positions itself as just a Chrome clone, there's no reason to use it over Chrome.
If Firefox wants to survive, it needs to position itself as a niche alternative for people who actually have preferences for what their browser is like, and do not like Chrome. Of course, it won't ever be as popular as Chrome, but that battle was lost a long time ago.
Before someone flags the above comment as trolling, read on:
"One thing Mozilla does have going for it is a lot of money—more than $1 billion in cash reserves, according to its latest financial statement. The primary source of this capital is Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine on the Firefox home page. Those payments, which started in 2005, have been increasing—up 50% over the past decade, to more than $450 million, even as the total number of Firefox users has plummeted. In 2021 these payments accounted for 83% of Mozilla’s revenue."
I really don't see what's bad about doing user research and organizing feature discoverability by importance (rather than, say, profitability, which a for-profit browser might be tempted to do).
Every time someone complains about "clutter" I suspect they're trying to turn users into lusers --- stunting their chance of growth by removing everything that could possibly catch their attention, so they can be lead blindly and exploited for whatever is most desirable.
Meanwhile monitors and their resolutions have grown tremendously, so there's a lot more space for things. Yet they'd rather you give up control and argue that the tiny extra amount of space you get is a good idea.
I don't know if you know this, but you can still get the traditional kind of menu if you tap the Alt key. It won't stay permanently visible if you change focus back to the content page though.
And all the old documentation/forum help to change settings is obsolete, but google still has them Indexed.
The only company worse for this is Microsoft. Any google search for a setting has been outdated, the location has changed, the wording has changed.
I'm completely convinced that there are FAAMG plants in FOSS company that have 1 job: Make pointless changes to waste engineering hours. Firefox and LibreOffice convinced me of this.
Oh no, more of this.
What about less used options? How much slower? How much less discoverable?
Desktop applications are already for power users almost by definition, let’s not slow them down for the sake of reducing “clutter”. Absolutely annoying trend of the last 15 years or so.