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What We're Working on in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#51

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Kye wrote: post #43
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#52

Post by rurp »

blizdiddy wrote: post #5

> 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 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.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#53

Post by Kye »

kwanbix wrote: post #30

I really love Firefox. I even organized events for them on my home country, so don't get me wrong, wouldn't it be best for the web/devs that they switched to chrome's engine? They can still implement whatever changes to privacy and their changes just like MS does, and devs will only have to target one engine. Or am I missing something? Please discuss it if you agree or disagree, do not downvote. Thanks.

Monoculture in software rarely goes well. Right now Safari and Firefox exist to push back on Google completely controlling the fate of the web. You do not want Google to have the same unquestioned power Microsoft did in the IE6 era.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#54

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tresclow wrote: post #37
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13

> We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we’re prioritizing the features you want most. > Tab Grouping, Vertical Tabs, and our handy Sidebar will help you stay organized no matter how many tabs you have open — whether it’s 7 or 7,500. > Plus, our new Profile Management system will help keep your school, work, and personal browsing separate but easily accessible. Wow, that ... actually is what users have been aski…

I remember around 2012 Firefox did use to have tab grouping, and they dropped the functionality after. I remember a friend of mine being annoyed for that, although I myself didn't appreciate much the functionality.

Oh, it's better than that: They had tab grouping as a native feature, and it was great, then they factored it out into an extension... and then they changed the way extensions worked, and didn't bother porting it. Kind of an insulting way to kill a feature IMO.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#56

Post by dsego »

switch007 wrote: post #28
dbg31415 wrote: post #8

For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management. Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.

Is this a comment from 2018? I thought FF on MacOS was pretty good these days. And are you suggesting Chrome is similar to Safari in terms of power usage? That would surprise me Safari will of course always be better. It's no competition

My experience as well, it used to be bad, it's okay now.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#57

Post by privacyking »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #25

Somewhere in the last two months Firefox Nightly got a massive performance boost on GNU/Linux. Thanks! Nice that vertical tabs are officially coming back, although I've been using them in a DIY manner for years already; sidebar extension with a bit of userChrome.css can do wonders: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif

What do you mean coming back? I don't recall it ever having vertical tabs. Most people have just used treestyletabs for the past decade or two

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#58

Post by nindalf »

Teever wrote: post #50
JohnFen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 t…

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.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#59

Post by luyu_wu »

em500 wrote: post #31
gamepsys wrote: post #14

As a Firefox daily user, this list makes me better understand why Firefox has such a low market share. Reorganizing menus or adding alt text to PDFs won't make any impact on user adoption/churn because users don't care. The alt text specifically sounds like resume engineering for some developers that want "on device generative ai" as a bullet point on this LinkedIn. Bullet points like this wouldn't be a problem if Fi…

How are they stretched for resources? Mozilla's revenue is around a half billion USD per year.

It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#60

Post by mrandish »

blizdiddy wrote: post #5

> 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.

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.

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