Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 185 posts

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#91

Post by jzzskijj »

bartvk wrote: post #45
BallCramp wrote: post #3

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?

I was almost going to say something similar, because on Android there are still just 16 add-ons available and it has been a long while. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/search/?type=extens...

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#92

Post by gcommer »

estaseuropano wrote: post #47
gcommer wrote: post #12

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by replacing their ads with own advertisements, that is what bothers you most and makes you consciously choose an outdated version?

Aside from being unwanted, it also is symbolic of much of Mozilla's worst behavior. During launch, it was specifically described as not being a paid placement: "There's no monetary benefit to Mozilla from the integration: Pocket didn't pay for placement in the browser"[1]. This way key to the discussion about why they chose Pocket over any other reading list plugins -- but this turned out to be a lie: "Hum. Apparently, _someone_ in bizdev thought that "revenue sharing" doesn't involve money, and spread information inside Mozilla accordingly. :rolling eyes:"[2]

Also, I can't find the reference anymore, but I definitely remember promises of getting a pref to use a different backend. AFAICT, that was another lie.

So multiple lies surrounding this product, along with it being continuously pushed on users (I've had it disabled via pref since day 1, and then it started showing up on the new tab page regardless).

And people are surprised when it gets hate.

[1]: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2930532/reading-service-pock... [2]: https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/2PYq2w8tejs...

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#93

Post by kaba0 »

jchw wrote: post #35
kijin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those spacers on both sides of the address bar made absolutely no sense, I agree. But there's some logic to the growth of empty space everywhere. Even laptops have touchscreens these days. Click targets need to be bigger because fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. I just wish they'd keep around a compact option for non-touch devices, but unfortunately another recent trend is to get rid of user-configurable option…

Yeah, this is basically the problem. Similarly, IMO, using GNOME 3 adapted for phones via Phosh feels far more natural than using GNOME 3 on desktop. It really should be an indictment of the insistence that it's possible to make one single design that works well on all form factors, or even just two form factors as disparate as a tablet and a desktop PC. If it's possible, the "state of the art" isn't really selling i…

I don’t know, GNOME 3 on laptops with proper gestures is a joy to use. Also, afaik Phosh is fully rewritten and hardly has anything in common with gnome, even the common apps are inferior to use on mobile.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#94

Post by handrous »

dredmorbius wrote: post #73

For the Pocket haters: 1. Why? 2. How would you implement a replacement functionality, whether in or outside the browser itself? 3. If you're using an alternative now, what is it?

FF user (off and on) since Phoenix chiming in.

I'm going to level with you: I've looked at that Pocket button and all the Pocket ads FF throws at me on new tabs and on their obnoxious new-version announcement tabs, for years, but I do not actually know what Pocket does. I think it's some kind of cloud bookmarking or something. Maybe also something like the Reader view? I'm not sure. Whatever it is, I don't miss it on Safari (my daily driver these days, mostly for iOS integration and performance reasons, god knows not for feature-related reasons) and I've never cared enough to figure out what it does on FF when I use it.

I guess my alternative is bookmarks, which are 99.99% just a feature to let me feel safe closing all my tabs (and then never, ever looking at all those "important" bookmarked tabs again, ever—like, I've got many-years-old bookmarked sessions that were so important I couldn't close them without the security of bookmarks to make it feel OK to do so, but I've never looked at those bookmark-folders and very likely I'll die having never looked at them). I diligently export them every time I retire a system disk, so I've got a bunch of bookmark export files sitting on disks that I've also never imported or otherwise looked at. Probably I'd find all kinds of cool shit that past-me was looking at, but who's got the time.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#95

Post by morpheuskafka »

reinforcedpaper wrote: post #48
gcommer wrote: post #12

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…

Only 10% of users are using compact mode: Time to remove it. Only 1% of users are using Pocket: Make it more prominent to increase usage. Data-driven design!

The funny thing is I didn't use compact mode before (although I did know it was there), and after upgrading to the new UI, the first thing I did was find it and enable it because of how enormous they made the tabs and buttons.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#96

Post by kstenerud »

JamesDeepDown wrote: post #15

The UI heatmap shows that nobody clicks Pocket, but the video highlights that pocket is "refreshed" and is part of the new design. Dear Firefox, that's not how things work.

That's exactly how it works. Pocket was unused, therefore move it to the extensions tray where it can be removed if you don't want it.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#97

Post by jansan »

mrweasel wrote: post #38
gcommer wrote: post #12

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…

The new tabs also look nothing like tabs. It’s now a button bar. It looks great, but it’s not really an inprovement and is clearly designed on a large monitor.

They will go back to the conventional tab design, I am pretty sure about this. Tabs should look like they look in Chrome, not like in Firefox or VSCode. Tab design has pretty much been settled in the 90s, no need for experiments.

Re: Behind the design of the fresh new Firefox coming June 1

#99

Post by riffraff »

nindalf wrote: post #85
jansan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw criticism in the original comment, maybe cynicism, but no hate. Hate is a strong word, we should not set the bar too low for using it.

It is hate, but worse than that, it’s tedious to read. I saw their video and thought “yep, top comment is going to be about Pocket integration” and it was. It’s the same in every thread about Firefox - someone complaining about pocket, someone complaining about tree style tabs, someone saying they shouldn’t have changed the plug-in model. It would be nice to have some new comments for a change.

I've used pocket since it was called ReadItLater and love it, and the original comment didn't seem to be just hate for it.

It seemed mostly criticism of an approach where marketing says X ("we look at what users really use") but the product says Y ("we push feature X cause we like it eve if users don't").

Post reply on HN