61–70 of 185 posts
Firefox doesn't need another UI refresh. It needs performance enhancements and bug fixes. I've been using Firefox as my primary browser for years, and I'm tired of feeling like I'm using second class software.
All I heard was "We're going to break your plugins again, because reasons".
I've tried the new design (using flags in about:config) and none of my plugins broke. I'm running Facebook Container, Midnight Lizard, No Thanks, a Medium extension and uBlock Origin. Have you actually tried it yourself? If not, why post a rather shallow dismissal?
Because it amused me to do so. But your single piece of anecdotal evidence is good too. Powerful stuff.
Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over. Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these cha…
Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over. Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these cha…
Chrome feels sluggish in some cases compared to Firefox. Safari definitely feels lighter, but it's feature set in the rendering and javascript department is lacking compared to FF.
Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over. Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these cha…
I just tried it, the vertical difference is 5 pixels, horizontally it’s about twice as much with 5 pinned and 9 normal tabs. Amazing? No. But that doesn’t really seem substantial.
This is with compact mode in both versions.
Their video on the front page contradicts itself. They highlight the UI coded by "user interaction" and no surprise, the Pocket button in the URL bar has tiny usage. And yet, in the new design? It's bigger and more prominent. And they try to say this is data-driven in the voice-over. Now, yet again, I'll have to just pin Firefox and stop updating it everywhere for a few months until the inevitable "undo all these cha…
I don't understand the hate or why this seems to take so much headspace in so many (or at least here very vocal) minds. It's a single button, not flashy or animated or otherwise annoying. When the rest of the world spies on you or pushes crypto tokens and abuses websites by replacing their ads with own advertisements, that is what bothers you most and makes you consciously choose an outdated version?
Just Googled, actually, and it looks like 3.0 did that. 2008. Sigh.
Also, as a dedicated UI-depth proponent, I find myself in the awkward position of being the "no, not like that" guy re: the new tabs. They're jarring and don't seem like a coherent part of the design. More depth, yes, please yes, but with more purpose & thought behind it.
Tell us what's been added.
Tell us what's been removed.
Tell us how interactions have changed.
I've been using the Web since the mid-1990s, Mosaic and Netscape initially. I've seen a lot come and go. Much of it has been bad. Major revisions strike dread in my heart.
As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback:
[I]n 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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe Archive link)
Firefox is still somewhat relucantly my preferred GUI browser. My first love remains w3m (fast, light, keyboard, terminal), though the hostility of increasingly large portions of the Web, including unexpected quarters (Internet Archive, hullo!?) to plain non-JS HTML is discouraging.
The Nyxt browser looks increasingly appealing:
https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/release-2.0.0.org (HN discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nyxt)
I use and lean heavily on Pocket. If I'm lucky it merely falls over, more usually it explodes in native villages killing thousands of innocents. Pocket still gets worse the more you use it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763106)
Of the list of issues given, only find-in-page (Android app) has been notably added, in over four years.
If the new desktop browser borrows from Fennec, I've got issues there as well, as Fennec:
- Abandons keyboard shortcuts such at ctrl-L (navigation), tab switching, tab close.
- Abandons print-to-PDF.
- Doesn't support reorganising / reordering bookmarks.
- Abandons view-source.
- Bastardises error codes. (A set of 403 errors simply resulted in a blank page, I had to try other browsers to resolve a recent site issue.)
- Abandons the navbar "reader:url=?" hack. (Often sites only intermittently support reader mode.)
- Supports only a small subset (though, yes, a useful one) of Firefox extensions.
As a long-time power user, I want power-user tools and capabilities. I strongly suspect Mozilla will be deprecating these.
As the supporter of users with little technical knowledge, limited vision, mobility challenges, and cognitive impairments, I can assure you that any change is a net negative. (For one, a recent website refresh to their principle site of interest has been a months-long set of frustrations.)
UI should not change. That means getting it right if you possibly can, and where you cannot, owning those mistakes until doomsday. Again, as jwz notes, Apple sticks to its metaphors, no matter how screwed up those might be (the platform drives me nuts, frankly). Apple has seen two UI refreshes in the lifetime of Macintosh, and OSX is now older than Mac Classic was when OSX was introduced. (Hell, I suspect half the people reading this have no first-hand knowledge of the original.)
Seriously, the video didn't even show anything. I have no idea what'll change based on that jump cut fest.