[kiryin]

The criticism that people in these communities come up with is limited to button placement and pixel-to-pixel tab bar height, I wouldn't take any of it seriously. Especially in the current web browser climate, it's laughable. It's our moral obligation, as people with knowledge on the subject, to use Firefox.

I've expressed my distaste for the way Mozilla is managed again and again, and I hate the stupid stuff they do from the bottom of my heart, but there simply is no other choice.

[theHIDninja]

That is a ridiculous strawman if I have ever seen one. There are MANY reasons to be critical of Firefox's development.

What about them putting ads in the URL bar suggestions? What about them (temporarily) putting ads into the new tab page that you couldn't opt out of? What about them removing the ability to customize the new tab page? What about them making it all but impossible to install your own (unsigned) browser extensions?

The complaints about the UI are that they also made it impossible to customize, not that the defaults are asinine (which they are).

[rndgermandude]

>What about them putting ads in the URL bar suggestions?

Not great... at least they ask you at least once to allow this, and let you disable it at any point, something that cannot be really said for some of their major competitors.

>What about them (temporarily) putting ads into the new tab page that you couldn't opt out of?

I honestly do not remember them doing that? The only thing I remember was these self-promotional things like "Try Firefox for Android" stuff, but not "real" (i.e. paid for) ads. Maybe I just forgot?

>What about them removing the ability to customize the new tab page?

Customize in what way? I can customize my new tab page just fine, edit and pin and remove things. Change the number of rows, disable "sponsored shortcuts" aka ads and Pocket (aka more ads), remove the search bar...

>What about them making it all but impossible to install your own (unsigned) browser extensions?

This indeed was not a great move. But I kinda get where this was coming from a little. There was in fact a substantial number of malware extensions out there, and somebody in my family even fell for one (IIRC it disguised itself as a video codec update).

That there is no hidden setting or "cheat code" in the release browser to override the signature requirement bugs me, tho. The rational here was that if there was an override, people would just disable checks based on recommendations on "power user" sites and/or tutorials and/or disable it because a malware author told them to, or that an external malware could override this silently to bug the browser (but that argument does not count for me; if you have some malware running on your machine already capable of flipping such a setting, you lost already, anyway). I'd say, just make it blatantly obvious that turning off signature checks is rather risky[0] and enable those users to make an informed decision (and if they do not inform themselves and just click around, that's honestly their bad).

Compared to Chrome tho, this is all still very low-level annoying. Chrome never let you permanently install unsigned extensions in the first place, and you have to use their "store" to host your extensions.

Ads... Google...

And the new tab page is also more customizable in Firefox than in Chrome.

That Firefox made and keeps making some not-so-great decisions is surely something we can and should criticize and ask them to do better. But also let's not forget here that you and me are the not the only users, and they have find a balance of features and available customization that suit most users without overburdening their own developers with the design, implementation and most importantly maintenance costs associated with such features.

Something like menu icons seems small, easy to implement and put behind a setting, but then you realize that there is a lot of maintenance cost associated with it. You have to maintain a good icon set, and do additional testing to ensure everything looks fine with the setting on and off, etc. And that's just one feature out of thousands, and each of those comes with costs, and then you need to prioritize because you don't really have the developer power to pay all of these costs. (And now we can quibble about which features to implement or to keep or to remove and so on, based on our personal preferences, but that isn't really helpful most of the time either)

At the same time, we shouldn't forget about the larger picture that Google and their Chrome browser are not "nice", but a company and their tool to enact mass surveillance for profit, which quite often behaves very unethical aside from that, maybe even with outright illegal practices, if you e.g. believe the court docs unsealed and in the news this week, or if you ever glanced at the GDPR and compared that with what Google is actually doing.

[0] I know, I know, a lot of the signature checks are just security theater, as the signing is automated after some automated checks, and therefore it is entirely possible for malware authors to get past those checks and get signed. It will stop some non-malicious extension writers from releasing their thing with known-vulnerable code patterns. On the other hand, mozilla still know what it signed, so at least they can consult their archives and rather effectively block retroactively the spread of such malware once they become aware of it. That does not undo any damage already done, but it stops further damage. If a piece of malware is targeted at single users or small groups, it may remain undiscovered and hence unstopped indefinitely. But at least this may help stop nondiscriminatory large scale malware campaigns in it's tracks.

[theHIDninja]

I used to be able to set the New Tab Page to an arbitrary URL. Now I have to use a browser extension to do that. Moreover, it used to be possible to have that point to an HTML file that was stored locally, which they have disabled from even allowing browser extensions to point to. I used to have a really cool new tab page that I hand wrote with custom CSS and everything. Firefox killed that overnight.

Here's an article about the ads in the new tab page: https://www.neowin.net/news/firefox-640-is-now-showing-a-boo...

[cpeterso]

You don’t need a browser extension to change Firefox’s home page. There is a UI setting to specify an arbitrary URL:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-to-set-the-home-pag...

[theHIDninja]

Your homepage is not your New Tab Page.

[cpeterso]

Looks like you're right. I didn't realize the home page setting didn't also apply to the New Tab page.

I skimmed through about:config and didn't find any alternate way to change the New Tab URL other than a browser extension, like you said.

[tsimionescu]

Honest question: what is the difference? Why would you want a custom home page but not a new tab page?

[papito]

Wow, even Opera is much less pushy. I know people might have major issues with new Opera ownership, but I've come to love it, whatever. It's Chrome, but way more productive and user-friendly.

[grishka]

> It's Chrome, but way more productive and user-friendly.

That's Vivaldi. It barely changed its UI in the ~6 years I've been using it, and even then, the changes that did happen were necessary to accommodate new features.

[celsoazevedo]

Firefox won't survive if only the HN crowd uses it and moral obligation alone isn't enough to convince the average person to switch to Firefox.

[MomoXenosaga]

How many people browsing HN work in the advertising industry or indirectly receive their paycheck from it?

Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.

[dragonwriter]

> Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.

Er, in what alternate history were there “hippie days” (except maybe as some kind of retrospective event) in the 1980s and 1990s?

[buzzwordninja]

Up until the mid 90s, the culture of and on the Internet was academic, and any commercial activity was fairly harshly frowned upon.

This slowly faded as more people and companies got connected, but until then it was definitely a thing.

[Nicksil]

>Important to keep in mind that the old hippie days from the 80s and 90s are long gone.

What does this mean?

[Barrin92]

exactly. It's like the house is on fire and people start to complain because they don't like the tapestry on the wall.

Would be nice to live in a utopia where we have so few problems this stuff matters but as it stands you have the choice between software that is technically independent and is at least reasonably aligned with privacy and user freedom and a bunch of chrome clones or derivatives that are run by dystopian megacorps

[megous]

> It's like the house is on fire and people start to complain because they don't like the tapestry on the wall.

People don't like tapestry being changed by Mozilla when the house is already on fire...

[Seirdy]

There is choice: people can use Webkit instead. Webkit and Blink have diverged significantly since Blink forked Webkit: Blink is as old now as Webkit was when the fork happened.

[MikusR]

Completely covering up bookmark bar when clicked inside address bar is nothing? Limiting length of text in address bar is nothing? Removing icons from menus - so everything looks like gray mess is nothing?

Firefox is full of these types of changes.

[kiryin]

Yes, they amount to absolutely nothing in this context.

When you use Firefox, your bookmarks bar gets covered up while you're typing an URL. When using chrom(e|ium) or its plethora of derivatives, you're actively contributing to browser monoculture, sharing your browsing habits with a predatory corporation, and supporting anti-user changes such as the manifest v3 webextensions, which cripple content blockers and disempower you, us, the user.

If the choice is difficult for you, I really don't know what to say.

[marginalia_nu]

My experience using Firefox for a long-ass time has been marred with seemingly arbitrary changes that have frustratingly broken my workflow, since way back when they redesigned the URL bar in Firefox 2 and complaints were met with an irreverent "sucks to be you I guess."

It's made me reduce the amount of features I use in Firefox because I feel I can't trust the features will be there anymore or work the same in the next release.

Often the benefits are small, and the changes seem to be for the sake of changing things rather than to bring tangible improvements.

Workflow-breaking changes are incredibly frustrating for the user, and something a mature project should only do with extreme reluctance. Yet Firefox seems to do it haphazardly.

I would honestly be happy to use a browser that looked and worked like Netscape 1.0 as long as it supported modern web standards and didn't keep moving buttons around.

[HeckFeck]

> I would honestly be happy to use a browser that looked and worked like Netscape 1.0 as long as it supported modern web standards and didn't keep moving buttons around.

Have you tried SeaMonkey? It may be what you seek: https://www.seamonkey-project.org/

[HelloNurse]

Most of these changes are misguided initiatives to copy Chrome. Firefox is getting worse, but Chrome is already worse than Firefox can become.

[marginalia_nu]

I think Firefox has identity issues. It used to be defined in terms of Internet Explorer, but now that IE isn't the dominant player anymore, I don't think Firefox has really found what it wants to be, so the last decade it's sort of been floundering.

[megous]

The worst to the morale is that the changes sometimes seem to be in effect purely anti-user. How could have ever a change that makes active tab look almost identical to inactive one pass a design review. It's not even a subjective thing. Contrast between elements is objectively definable and measurable property. Tabs are critical to everyday use.

[danschuller]

This account matches my own experience as a firefox user.

[MikusR]

They covered the bar when you weren't typing. They reversed the change after many complained.

[megous]

Firefox is shedding users left and right. If you want to complain about people who're staying with the browser and are just complaining about changes to the browser that make their life harder, I think you've picked the wrong group...

Maybe go complain at people who have already left.

[account-5]

I think the difference is that these changes are overt. And generally user changeable.

FF tends the take flak about things people just accept from other browsers.

Don't want pocket, disable it. Don't want address bar suggestions disable it. I don't agree with everything that goes on with FF but there is no alternative to what MS dreamed of with IE and Google seem to be achieving with Chrome.

Out of interest, why do you need to see your bookmarks bar if you are typing in the address bar? Genuine question.

[thiht]

Did you purposefully list stuff no one in their right mind would care about for more than 5 minutes after the update or were you actually trying to make a point?

Because yeah, all of this is literally nothing. There are things going on with Firefox which are not nothing, but none of what you cite is.

[RileyJames]

In respect to the destructive nature of continued support for googles monopoly over search, online advertising and their desire to ‘own the web’, yes, those issues sounds pretty minor.

They’re also sound like quite achievable goals for a fork.

[glenstein]

I wish there was a word for this process, because it repeats itself in comment threads over and over. People getting absorbed by debates over idiosyncratic details and gradually losing sight of the big picture.

Deciding that support for Firefox lives or dies depending on details about how long the text and the address bar is, is completely absurd. Because meanwhile, everything else is increasingly based on chromium which is developed by Google. Having the web depend on a single rendering engine where all the major trends and development effort and support maintenance comes from one company is catastrophically short-sighted.

[aerique]

Isn't it just derailing by Google astroturfers?

[glenstein]

You can hardly ever be sure when astroturfing is really happening, so all I have to offer is speculation. I feel that this is not Google astroturfing, because Google astroturfing takes on a different flavor.

This is speculation on my part and I want to be very clear about that, but whenever I see something that looks like Google astroturfing, what happens is they frame controversial decisions as technical necessities, like it's just an easier way of solving a technical problem. And they keep trying to reframe questions in technical terms, and try to turn questions of right and wrong into questions where they're simply elaborating on how the technology works, and it's a matter of you not understanding the technology. This was my experience in HN threads about AMP, for instance.

That's my sense of how that works. In this case, I don't think we're seeing anything other than the typical short attention spans.

[Arch-TK]

The house is on fire, but at least when you sit on the sofa it doesn't make a weird squeaking noise.

[Macha]

> Completely covering up bookmark bar when clicked inside address bar is nothing

How often do you click the address bar, then change your mind and navigate to the bookmark bar instead?

You know the address bar searches your bookmarks too if you do change your mind and don't want to change focus?

[gxnxcxcx]

> How often do you click the address bar, then change your mind and navigate to the bookmark bar instead?

The address bar click behavior combined with the new padding became so intrusive for me that this was the thing that finally got me into mapping caps lock to escape for quicker hiding action (already used it for control, thanks to Karabiner-Elements/AutoHotkey I can get both).