Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/
Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:
We are bringing back compact mode as well
We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.
Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.
I absolutely get the Mozilla hate. What I don’t get is the dwindling numbers. I recently had to switch from Zen back to Firefox on my corporate laptop due to policy. Firefox really still is an excellent browser and would recommend it over Chrome. I occasionally have to open chrome and that’s starting to feel more and more like explorer.
What I don’t get is the dwindling numbers.
Mozilla do not operate a pervasive network of internet monopolies that can relentlessly push for Firefox adoption and sabotage compatibility of other browsers. If Mozilla had any sense, they might dedicate some more budget to advocating antitrust and campaigning other counter-monopolistic policies, but instead… they want to make the corners rounder. And flip back and forth on supporting a compact layout, while deliberating over whether they need more AI or even more AI.
I couldn’t care less tbh. Still a fine browser, still a great daily driver, still blocks all the ads with ublock.
Why on EARTH did they move the FUCKING BACK BUTTON and replace it in its prior position with some FUCKING BULLSHIT USELESS sidebar button
If I give up and become a supervillain, my primary hand-to-hand combat weapon will be a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines laser-etched onto stainless steel plates and somehow bound in a physicalized representation of the tattered remains of these peoples’ abandoned dignity
There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here.
Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author:
Firefox’s new redesign is—at least to me—a welcome one. It no longer looks like a browser from 2015.
What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?
At least you can remove all the sidebar crap: right-click > remove from toolbar.
I really didn’t need rounded everything, not every tool needs to be Fisher-Priced.
Was unaware of change and thought I had a virus. Looks very stupid.
@rhamph “The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser’s audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates[…]” For fucks sake, no. Thats firefoxes core audience and if anything they should be leaning into it more. Trying to lure normies will only drive away the core audience (we’re already seeing this to an extent), And normies dont seem to care for anything that isnt ran by a company (if it is a carbon copy of what they’re familiar with it’s an irrelevent less popular knock off and if it’s anything else that means it must be completely innaccessible unless you’re some kind of tech god). Its like when applebees tried to start being a club at night, no one who wanted to go to a club wanted to go to applebees and applebees core audience didnt like that it became a club at night.
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the worst part of using Firefox is mozilla
the second worst part is mozilla fans
This is why I use Zen. I don’t even care about most of the extra features, I just like not having to disable the sponsored shortcuts and stupid pocket articles on my new tab page every time I install the browser
To disable the new design, simply uncheck the “Enable the Nova redesign” option (Settings > Appearance > Browser theme).
Alternatively, set
browser.nova.enabledtofalsein about:config.And part of this is made possible by AI tools, to be honest with you. We are able to do a lot more.
People want to feel like they’re in a modern browser—things that match the design language of the operating system. So that’s part of it. We are bringing back compact mode as well…
firefox isnt competitive enough. @grok bring back compact mode. checkmate, chromium
Duh. Obviously the logo is what’s wrong, better redesign that too.
No, wait, it needs AI!
No, wait, it needs to tell me about some VPN.
Support the specifications, be secure. Perhaps try that.
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I mean, can’t several things be worked on at the same time?
When funds are tight? No, they can’t. There are finite engineering resources. The more new features you add, the more bugs are introduced, and the less resources there are to fix any of them (old or new).
Which is why frontend designers should start working on backend specifications
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Yes, but you need to be careful not to give the impression that all you are doing is work on round borders again, and not on supporting more web features.
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Well, to me this is yet another redesign; still no support for WebUSB. I worry and rant because I care, as I don’t ever want to use a Chromium-based browser. So, Firefox should really put focus (as well as focus in blog announcements) on the true important aspects of the web.
I think thats an intentional choice, because the security and privacy over the current implementation (which is designed around chrome fingerprinting as always)
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Moaning about missing features from a nonprofit, and volunteer project doesn’t look good.
Mozilla Corporation, whose CEO was paid six million dollars last year, and 6.9 million in 2022, is a nonprofit volunteer project?
Of course the CEO gets paid that, if they don’t do that they run the risk of running a profit, gotta get rid of the money somehow. /s
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I’m sure they don’t make silly decisions for no reason.
Ah, I see you’ve never used Firefox or paid attention to any of the decisions that Mozilla’s leadership makes.
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@cristian64 @victorz hey! They’re also working on AI AI AI AI
I got the update today and I’m so tired boss. We had almost settled on something visually calm and organized, and leeeettzzzgooooo back to floaty rounded shit with no choice left to the user !
Blender does interface right, please for the love of Cthulhu take some inspiration: it’s got a “roundedness” property for every UI widget that goes from perfectly square to perfectly round, a “widget emboss” property that can be tuned to your liking or disabled entirely, a “widget underline” property, it lets you disable button decorations as well so your toolbars are only floating icons, etc. Every combination is possible and it’s very easy to tune. Please do something like that and never touch it again.
I really can’t wait for Servo to get into a usable state and have alternative browsers being build on top of that.
How do I start using this, is it something an end user can support through adoption?
no, it’s very much not up to web standards yet. it has a super fast html renderer and css engine that support something like 70% of properties, a very barebones js runtime that has basically no browser apis, and a frontend that (i think) only takes urls via command-line.
When was the last time you looked into servo because this is dated at best, bordering on misleading. The js support has increased massively over the past year with things like intersectionobserver, shadow dom, and dozens more apis. Stylo supports many newer and advanced css features, of note recently is grid support. And the frontend servoshell has taken urls for a rather long time. If you try it out today with experimental features enabled you’ll find that most websites mostly work.
Honestly that description kinda makes me want to target servo for all of my hobby browser-backed UIs. Html5 with forms can do a surprising amount (albeit not always as effortlessly as just including a JavaScript library) - though I expect something like IndexedDB isn’t at all available?
EDIT: well, the servo repo has a bunch of code in a
storage/engines/indexeddbfolder, but the repo aussi has about 30 open issues relating to “IndexedDB” in one way or another.I’m currently targetting CSS 2.0 for one of my projects. I’m trying to make it work right on a 3DS, Netscape Navigator, IE and, of course, Servo, without serving custom files to each other.
It’s been incredibly annoying, but also fun to learn about standards from 1998, and how browsers handled them.
It’s also disheartening to learn that the modern web is, at its core, designed not to run on basically anything older than 2016.
i don’t know if they’re going in version order with implementations either so that’s an extra complication
The less APIs the better, some of the information my phone is giving out currently to evwry site I visit is ridiculous
some of them are, y’know, needed for the sites to do anything at all.
I know I am only joking, lynx ftw
You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess.
Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.
I like it.
gosh i hate this. gotta play with userchrome again…
gosh please no, my current one hasn’t broken for over a year.
What Firefox needs is to fire everyone responsible for the UX, if they have such people on their payroll & put all their ehm “limited” resources on improving performance & some effort is also needed to become more Chromium compatible, perhaps even on a site by site basis. Alas as long as Google is the main revenue source for the project, all this is a pipe dream.
Firefox never had other issues. Poor performance -especially JS- compared to Chromium & some websites just don’t work anymore.
@rhamph silver lining, of sorts: compact mode is back!
it never went away, it just had to be ‘enabled’ in about:config (search: compact). note this still has to be done if you disable ‘nova’ redesign.
