[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).