| Ugh. Tell us what's been added. Tell us what's been removed. Tell us how interactions have changed. I've been using the Web since the mid-1990s, Mosaic and Netscape initially. I've seen a lot come and go. Much of it has been bad. Major revisions strike dread in my heart. As jwz has noted, UI is different, in that changes to it provide relatively little payback: [I]n the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software. https://web.archive.org/web/20120511115213/https://www.jwz.o... (HN-safe Archive link) Firefox is still somewhat relucantly my preferred GUI browser. My first love remains w3m (fast, light, keyboard, terminal), though the hostility of increasingly large portions of the Web, including unexpected quarters (Internet Archive, hullo!?) to plain non-JS HTML is discouraging. The Nyxt browser looks increasingly appealing: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/article/release-2.0.0.org (HN discussions:
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nyxt) I use and lean heavily on Pocket. If I'm lucky it merely falls over, more usually it explodes in native villages killing thousands of innocents. Pocket still gets worse the more you use it: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763106) Of the list of issues given, only find-in-page (Android app) has been notably added, in over four years. If the new desktop browser borrows from Fennec, I've got issues there as well, as Fennec: - Abandons keyboard shortcuts such at ctrl-L (navigation), tab switching, tab close. - Abandons print-to-PDF. - Doesn't support reorganising / reordering bookmarks. - Abandons view-source. - Bastardises error codes. (A set of 403 errors simply resulted in a blank page, I had to try other browsers to resolve a recent site issue.) - Abandons the navbar "reader:url=?" hack. (Often sites only intermittently support reader mode.) - Supports only a small subset (though, yes, a useful one) of Firefox extensions. As a long-time power user, I want power-user tools and capabilities. I strongly suspect Mozilla will be deprecating these. As the supporter of users with little technical knowledge, limited vision, mobility challenges, and cognitive impairments, I can assure you that any change is a net negative. (For one, a recent website refresh to their principle site of interest has been a months-long set of frustrations.) UI should not change. That means getting it right if you possibly can, and where you cannot, owning those mistakes until doomsday. Again, as jwz notes, Apple sticks to its metaphors, no matter how screwed up those might be (the platform drives me nuts, frankly). Apple has seen two UI refreshes in the lifetime of Macintosh, and OSX is now older than Mac Classic was when OSX was introduced. (Hell, I suspect half the people reading this have no first-hand knowledge of the original.) |