161–170 of 274 posts
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…
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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.
>something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages Get pissed at tax law, not Mozilla. Mozilla Foundation cannot legally funnel tax-exempt donations into the development of products for a for-profit entity (Mozilla Corporation). That would be a crime.
> 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.
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)
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PWAs, as in "File > Save Website As... > website.exe" on a PC?
The "PWA support" that people are clamoring for is the option to open a web page shortcut in a browser window without an address bar.
For example it has facilities for caching the web application so that it can work offline. They can also register URL handlers on the system, which is very useful.
> 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.
> 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.
Put them in sub-menus?
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).
The way I see it, there was a time when FF had the chance to not accept the google contracts and go 100% independent with their own search engine or something similar. This would have resulted in FF actually siding with users. It would have resulted in FF radically rejecting ads, and this would have changed the entire web because people would have flocked to Firefox. But Mozilla leadership did not have an interest in…
Is a successful search engine such an easy thing to produce?
Yes, I run my own independent search engine[0].
> successful
Now that's the challenging part, especially since Mozilla needs to fund browser development. The initial differentiation for a Mozilla search would have been difficult, but at their peak they had 30%+ market share, and if the default search on Firefox was Mozilla Search then they might have been able to make it all work financially. DuckDuckGo makes over $100 million in revenue per year[1], if a Mozilla Search made as much money annually, then even though it's below their current $500 million search contract with Google, with some fiscal responsibility they probably would have had enough to support a search engine and browser development concurrently.
[0] https://ichi.do/
[1] https://techreport.com/statistics/software-web/duckduckgo-st...
> 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…
What extensions did they get rid of?