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Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

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Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#41

Post by kevingadd »

dingdingdang wrote: post #38

The real strength of Firefox vs Chrome is in FF's real (as in not android-"open-source") open source philosophy which makes forked projects like Palemoon possible (I personally prefer Palemoon at the moment due to more conservative release cycle and UI plus strong security focus)

I agree that the freedom to actually maintain viable forks like Palemoon is excellent.

On the other hand, I wish Palemoon didn't exist: It's a compatibility nightmare for anyone trying to build HTML5 apps or games using recent APIs. All his changes tend to cause mysterious memory usage/cpu usage issues or simply break things, and 'use a different browser' is not a great answer to have to give a customer.

I don't know how you could consider Palemoon security focused unless everyone using it is building it from source and they've carefully examined his changelists. At least with trunk Firefox you know the commits are exhaustively reviewed and tested (perhaps too exhaustively; some FF contributors find the extensive review process stifling).

EDIT: Removed complaint about Pale Moon builds not being reproducible; he used to have a big angry rant about how he wouldn't share his build settings with anyone, but he's apparently removed it. Nice move!

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#42

Post by vanderZwan »

rquirk wrote: post #28
Ygg2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree, Australis only breaks visual add-ons like Vertical Tabs, and the like. Not sure where NoScript comment is coming from?

For now Australis only breaks visual add-ons, but I can see a drive to align, i.e. remove features from, the desktop version so it is more like the mobile versions. The thinking being - Australis is visually more like the Android version of Firefox, why not make its add-on model more like the Android add-on model? i.e. Neutered. The NoScript comment is because that is the "killer app" for Firefox for me, and on mobil…

They are doing a major UI overhaul - the design itself is unstable. So there are valid reasons for current visual add-ons not working - the majority of bugs reported by users would be caused by plugins designed for a different user interface, making it useless as feedback. That would defeat the purpose of having an open beta. Meanwhile the plugins should not yet update because the interface can change any update. So for now it's a chicken/egg problem but I'm sure that once the interface stabilises things will be as they used to.

So while it is good to stay on your toes, I don't think you realistically have to worry about this going to be a permanent issue.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#43

Post by Pacabel »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #36
grandpoobah wrote: post #16

I've been patiently waiting for Firefox to fix their ugly UI, I look forward to finally ditching Chrome and returning to a browser made by a company whose primary concern isn't accumulating data on its users.

FXChrome solved the problem for me (chrome-like theme for firefox, its perfect). I am glad someone finally told them their last design iteration was horrendous. Honestly, who makes these decisions over there?

Lots of people tell Mozilla that their recent UI changes are bad. Just read the comments of any blog post Mozilla makes about such changes. Mozilla never listens. Their current approach is always deemed the "correct" one, even if it's seen as totally wrong a mere 3 to 4 months later, and subsequently reworked in some significant way.

These recent moves to imitate Chrome to an even greater extent are not welcomed, even if Mozilla forces them on its remaining Firefox users. Many people use Firefox these days precisely because its UI still retains a few of the vestiges of the more more usable UIs of its pre-4.0 releases. Getting rid of these makes Firefox even less appealing.

Perhaps the only thing keeping people on Firefox is that the UIs of the other browsers have gotten far worse (like in the case of the new versions of Opera and IE), or were never very good to being with (like in the case of Chrome).

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#44

Post by userbinator »

veeti wrote: post #27
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that such an extension exists, and that it may get broken again in later versions, says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

> says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation. Oh? And what is that? "Customization is great and you should have the option to do so"? Try having a "classic theme restorer" with Chromium. > it may get broken again in later versions Future changes may cause incompatibilities in any project. That is why such changes are released in major new versions so that add-on developers have plenty of time to make…

What used to be possible with the stock browser, without any extensions, now needs one or more. They're not quite at the level of Google, but it looks like they're heading in that general direction.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#45

Post by kevingadd »

Pacabel wrote: post #43
hackinthebochs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FXChrome solved the problem for me (chrome-like theme for firefox, its perfect). I am glad someone finally told them their last design iteration was horrendous. Honestly, who makes these decisions over there?

Lots of people tell Mozilla that their recent UI changes are bad. Just read the comments of any blog post Mozilla makes about such changes. Mozilla never listens. Their current approach is always deemed the "correct" one, even if it's seen as totally wrong a mere 3 to 4 months later, and subsequently reworked in some significant way. These recent moves to imitate Chrome to an even greater extent are not welcomed, eve…

I love that the same thread has people complaining that Firefox is simultaneously not enough like Chrome and too much like Chrome.

Mozilla literally cannot win here; no matter what they do people will just get angrier. They should just strip out the whole Firefox UI and make you run it from a terminal.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#46

Post by Pacabel »

zanny wrote: post #31
userbinator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that such an extension exists, and that it may get broken again in later versions, says a lot about what Mozilla really think of customisation.

They didn't make the addon. What, you want them to go back on 15 years of history and make the UI non-customizable? What are they, Google?

I think he just wants them to not screw up the UI so badly in the first place that numerous addons and customization is needed to bring it back to a minimal level of usability.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#47

Post by kevingadd »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #36
grandpoobah wrote: post #16

I've been patiently waiting for Firefox to fix their ugly UI, I look forward to finally ditching Chrome and returning to a browser made by a company whose primary concern isn't accumulating data on its users.

FXChrome solved the problem for me (chrome-like theme for firefox, its perfect). I am glad someone finally told them their last design iteration was horrendous. Honestly, who makes these decisions over there?

UX people and graphic designers, based on extensive user testing. Have you run any user tests lately? ;)

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#48

Post by ctb_mg »

In the linked markup, the difference between the bookmark star when the page is bookmarked (vs not bookmarked) is that the star is filled in grey rather than an outline.

I think this is a subtle design problem that doesn't easily show "bookmarked" vs "not bookmarked" state. I think users may have come to expect the typical yellow star when bookmarking a page. Usually if I want to bookmark a page I glance at the star to see if it's already bookmarked, and the outline vs. grey states don't make that clear.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#49

Post by kevingadd »

moystard wrote: post #8
SquareWheel wrote: post #4

Australis is such an improvement that I'm tempted to come back from Chrome. Everything feels very fluid and fast. I'd be curious to see the latest benchmarks on startup time, Javascript performance and such.

I don't know how long you have been a Chrome user, but Firefox has felt snappy and responsive for a few months now. Australis re-design shows that often speed is more a matter of impression than benchmark results.

IIRC, modern Australis is actually tuned for better rendering performance; older themes used more gradients and alpha transparency in UI elements, which made them more complicated to render. Australis makes lighter use of these elements and this has a measurable impact on how much CPU time gets spent repainting tabs/address bars/etc.

Re: Firefox 29 beta arrives with easy Sync tool....

#50

Post by kevingadd »

rquirk wrote: post #28
Ygg2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree, Australis only breaks visual add-ons like Vertical Tabs, and the like. Not sure where NoScript comment is coming from?

For now Australis only breaks visual add-ons, but I can see a drive to align, i.e. remove features from, the desktop version so it is more like the mobile versions. The thinking being - Australis is visually more like the Android version of Firefox, why not make its add-on model more like the Android add-on model? i.e. Neutered. The NoScript comment is because that is the "killer app" for Firefox for me, and on mobil…

NoScript is unavailable because current NoScript only works with the classic 'everything in one process' Gecko model & associated plugin model.

Firefox for Android isolates content into multiple processes (this is literally a requirement on Android due to their horrible memory management), which means plugins written in that fashion simply can't work. Unfortunately, at present this excludes NoScript. It's possible it could be fixed, though; I'm not sure.

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