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What We're Working on in Firefox

blog.mozilla.org

131–140 of 274 posts

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox was doing fine beating IE on merit once MS was prevented from behaving anti-competitively.

The base of internet users was a lot smaller and more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014

Was it though? This was well after AOL and the Endless September. There were rows of Complete Idiots Guides and For Dummies books on using the internet in major book stores. You've Got Mail made a quarter billion in the box office a half decade before.

This was the time of normies. All the @aol addresses still in use were minted here.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#132
post #78

Lack of PWA / installable apps is why I switched back to chrome after trying to daily drive firefox for a while. Really wish they'd reconsider the decision to drop it.

Untested, but I think this Firefox fork added support back: https://floorp.app/en

I believe a lot of the work comes from: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox

P.S. the project you linked is no longer FOSS.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#133
post #15

> 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.

> FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person.

Yeah... the problem is that these people are frankly never going to use Firefox unless driven to by their techie friends, and Firefox seems to have given up on the power user market that they used to own.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#134
post #52

> 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…

> Getting rid of most extensions

I am still butthurt

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#135
post #52

> 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…

Sounds like they hired GNOME devs.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#136
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Getting rid of most extensions I am still butthurt

Welp. Name checks out.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#139
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the UI paradigm of browsers hasn't really changed for 20+ years (Checks calendar) ugh, it really has been 15 years since they ground up the url box + search box into the big mystery meat mash-up that mostly works but is so damn obnoxious when it doesn't.

I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome : You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with just Ctrl + L, Tab and Enter. You can also launch @search_engine $keyword directly in the bar, search bookmark/history/tabs directly with */^/% symbols.

You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...) This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script :

https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#140
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base of internet users was a lot smaller and more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014

Was it though? This was well after AOL and the Endless September. There were rows of Complete Idiots Guides and For Dummies books on using the internet in major book stores. You've Got Mail made a quarter billion in the box office a half decade before . This was the time of normies. All the @aol addresses still in use were minted here.

> There were rows of Complete Idiots Guides and For Dummies books

Which says that people were trying to learn how to use their computer, right? Nowadays professors need to teach their university students what a file is... I can definitely accept that the users were more technically-inclined in 2004 than in 2014.

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