| Preface: I wrote the following from a more general perspective. Perhaps Mozilla can and will speak to the specific changes under discussion in this thread (e.g. keeping the majority of "non-technical" users on the right/current release). A bit like the so-called "Chromification" of the UI: I don't want to see too much "power" obscured or sacrificed for the sake of usability. Keep things sane, also, for the "power users". ---- When I see patterns like this, too often as I look further, I become convinced they are deliberate. I suppose one can argue as to motive and intent. Nonetheless, they seem to be forcing all users toward a more dependent and opaque pattern. Therefore, I consider them "dark patterns". If you want to label that as my personal perspective ("you're weird"), then so be it. If say 5% of your users want a stand-alone installation package, is that too low to add the description and/or provide a link to "stand-alone installer"? Is it really going to destroy usability if you do so? And that's where, once again, I -- in my opinion -- start to bump up against today's "designers". Where pages and everything else have to be "streamlined" to the point of excluding any and all minority usage patterns. "The web" used to be about choice. TIMTOWTDI. Some of us have atypical patterns, sometimes for good reason. In my opinion, that diversity breeds robustness. Things get examined from different angles. And no single pattern becomes irreplaceable. |
It's only natural that an application that's designed to communicate live with servers on the internet would, at some point, have to pull more and more of its configuration and application logic from the same internet. The browser's still open source, so if it bugs you, you're free to compile a build yourself and gather all the dependencies manually.
The fact is that there are still stand alone installers available for all sorts of configurations, right there on the Mozilla FTP where they've been for something like a decade. If you're a power user and you're saying you can't figure out how to hit an FTP server or type 'firefox standalone installer' into a search engine, I don't know what to tell you.
Calling this a dark pattern is absurd. Nobody's being tricked, you're not being conned into opting something other than what you intended. The same Firefox gets installed either way, the install process is just streamlined in ways that increase success rates and simplify it for most users.