[6a68]

I hear your frustration; people inside the company found some of those changes frustrating, too. Test Pilot is a step in a new direction that's more participatory and inclusive of the community, and injects a lot of data into the decision-making process.

As far as web standards go, Gecko's the only open-source browser controlled by a nonprofit. The alternative is a webkit monoculture, a world controlled by Apple and Google (oh, and Microsoft). Within Mozilla, the Firefox and Platform teams are super focused on improving standards compliance and squashing bugs. Things are getting better :-)

[rhinoceraptor]

I really appreciate that, I would hate for the web to be controlled by Google/Microsoft/Apple and Mozilla is in the best position to stop that from happening.

[billiam]

Congratulations, guys! Really glad to see this finally shipped. It will ALWAYS be Ideatown to me;)

[6a68]

Hey Bill! Thanks a lot :-)

I know, the name thing, what can you do? I worked on Persona before this, so I guess I'm not surprised by the Mozilla enthusiasm for reusing project names.

Have you tried the Activity Stream add-on? Captures so much of what we wanted to do with Chronicle. It's amazing what that team was able to crank out in four months.

The Search add-on turned out really well, though I wound up having to rewrite it in XUL after the MVP feature set got trimmed. It took some pretty strange requestAnimationFrame hacks to get highlight stealing working, I blogged about it: http://6a68.net/2016/highlight-stealing-hack/

Let's round up the Chronicle alums and grab drinks in SF sometime!

See you in the comments section ^_^

[SaJaDi]

Well, as long as you do not bring back custom toolbars and a real status/add-on bar and as long you don't re-introduce advanced UI customization like combining different bar elements like tabs with the url field or the ability to move all buttons around where we want to have them, i will stay with Otter Browser and Vivaldi.

If you ever decide to stop being the Chrome users and general less advanced users darling i think about using Firefox again. But until that point, alternatives here i stay.

[CelticSuperhero]

So you finally step back from cloning the Chrome UI and add customization again to the browser? Oh wait, you are implementing the Chrome extension system.

That test pilot is only damage control as you are now not only facing Chrome, also frustrated users move on to Brave or Vivaldi.

[kuschku]

btw, regarding UI and extensibility, a suggestion that many advanced users want to give is: look at Vivaldi ;)

[CelticSuperhero]

Vivaldi has amazing features, yes.

But it is no real browser and only an advanced web app bundled with Chromium. Also, smashing a wrapper on top of Chromium with features and call it a day is one of the most stupid things ever which a group of developers can do.

But Vivaldi shows what guys do when they have respect of power users. They add features we want and we prefer and not only features what simple users or Chrome users want and prefer.

[kuschku]

Exactly. I’d never use vivaldi, but many of its features are awesome. I’d also love if Firefox had a way to adapt the UI color to the current page, if I could have as nicely animated tab previews, and many of the other settings.

Firefox started working on many features for power users (look at testpilot’s vertical tabs), but let’s hope they#ll do more.

[LordLestat]

So comments from people who think that Firefox has to feature again customization are getting downvoted.

Why people value simplicity and minimalism and design more higher today than having customization features and options?