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.
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.
They actually do put quite a bit of effort into making sites behave the same as Chrome, and this does actually include site-specific workarounds. My mind boggled when I learned this.