| HN's disdain for redesigns in very short-sighted. Nobody will be using your cool backend algos if they are not exposed to the user in some meaningful, user-centric, consistent way. We should be thankful so much effort is put in UX development, otherwise all the cool backend algos would be pointless. Especially since Firefox did not just say "hey let's make this button bigger and this button green“. They did empirical research, heatmaps etc., to analyse how the UX could be made objectively, measurably better. I invite everyone to read this article about how Wikipedia took several years to implement the "show preview when hovering a link" feature. This is how much thought needs to be given to UX to not make it half-assed https://diff.wikimedia.org/2018/04/20/why-it-took-a-long-tim... |
But we are talking about Firefox not Wikipedia. I would be happy to read a full article about mozilla's choices.
Overall the design seems better, but there are some points of this new design that are widely questioned such as the new tab design.
Moreover we don't use Firefox as we use a web page like Wikipedia. A browser in my opinion must be as discreet and customizable as possible in the user experience, whereas this is not the case for a website that offers a fixed user experience for all users. The removal of the compact mode for example goes against my vision of what a browser should be.