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Mozilla IT Technology

Mozilla Launches Ideas Platform To Improve Communication With Its Userbase (ghacks.net) 80

AmiMoJo writes: Mozilla Ideas is a new platform by Firefox-maker Mozilla to improve communication with the Firefox userbase. At its core, Ideas works similarly to Uservoice and other services of its kind. Firefox users and developers may post new content on the platform, and everyone else may comment and vote on the idea. Users may access the latest, top voted, most discussed or even random topics on the Ideas platform. Current ideas include re-adding the compact interface option, improving the master password protection, or providing a higher contrast default theme.
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Mozilla Launches Ideas Platform To Improve Communication With Its Userbase

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  • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:14PM (#61463578) Journal

    A better idea - stop removing the ability to use the browser the way we want to, make Firefox the fastest most customizable browser and more people will use it.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:28PM (#61463632)

      A better idea - stop removing the ability to use the browser the way we want to, make Firefox the fastest most customizable browser and more people will use it.

      Exactly right. Nothing more needs to be said.

      The retards at Mozilla have spent the last several years butchering Firefox and destroying everything that made Firefox popular in the first place.

      It needs to stop. Just. fucking. stop. it. Put the UI back the way it was a few years ago and only make changes "under the hood". And only things that are actually needed. Fix bugs. Patch security problems as they are found. Improve performance when possible. But other than that, just leave it the fuck alone.

      The web browser is a solved problem There is no need for constant tinkering.

      • by slaker ( 53818 )

        They could ditch their whole effort and just give a bunch of money to the Palemoon guy. Palemoon isn't the fastest thing in the world but it does behave the way I want it, and that's a damned lot better than I can say for Firefox or any of the Webkit browsers.

        • Palemoon isn't bad my only issue is, last time I tried it I was all set to change then NoScript would not install and I did not have time to sort it out. If someone knows if NoScript works on Palemoon I would make time to check it out again as an FF replacement.
          • I've been using Pale Moon with NoScript for years, that's what I'm using now. I actually haven't installed NoScript for years, though. Maybe there was a problem with the installer?
          • Palemoon isn't bad my only issue is, last time I tried it I was all set to change then NoScript would not install and I did not have time to sort it out. If someone knows if NoScript works on Palemoon I would make time to check it out again as an FF replacement.

            I use Palemoon almost exclusively. Moonchild, (its developer), claims that NoScript was the cause of too many support requests because it effectively breaks a lot of site functionality - that's why you can't get NoScript as an addon from Palemoon. But you can install the NoScript XPI from a file, (as you've probably done once or twice already with other addons either in Palemoon or in earlier versions of Firefox), and it works just fine.

            Palemoon will still give you a warning that "NoScript is known to cause

      • by Anonymous Coward

        The web browser is a solved problem There is no need for constant tinkering.

        Sure but how will they justify the existence of all their developers if they don't constantly tinker with shit? That donation money isn't going to spend itself.
        This problem is in no way unique to non-profits. People justifying their existence and their spending budgets by doing meaningless changes is as common as herpes.

      • This is actually quite puzzling, for at least the past ten years the Mozilla philosophy has been to actively ignore and alienate its user base, so why are they pretending to care now?
    • by Merk42 ( 1906718 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:45PM (#61463700)
      The customization to the nth degree was largely the cause of the memory leaks.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Is there another modern browser that is more customizable than Firefox?

      There are some old forks of Firefox but everything else is either Chrome or Safari.

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        The problem is when through a combination of lazy thinking and dick swinging options are removed.

        For example, tabs on top, I was told the feature was removed because Mozilla didn't want to support the option. That is a really bad anti-user move especially since I've learnt that technically tabs on top still works if you muck about and make a change to a CSS initialisation file. So it could have been an option all along. Why force tabs on top when it isn't necessary?

        The other mistake is permanently breaking

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          If you can come up with a way to support the old extensions in a multi-threaded sandboxed browser I'm sure we would all love to hear it.

          By the way, what extensions are you missing?

          • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

            So how do new extension work in a multi-threaded sandboxed browser? You tell me how that works and I'll have a go at telling you how the old extensions would work.

            Missing: most of them, except I'm using Waterfox so, they work and the browser looks the way I want it to look with the tabs and everything else where I want it to be, which really is the point. I get to continue using the browser the way I want to use it rather than how some prat at Mozilla thinks I should be using it.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Well the new ones use a very clearly defined API that lets the interact with one process at a time and in an asynchronous way that doesn't force the browser to halt and wait for them. Obviously that means they can't just arbitrarily reach in and re-write parts of the UI because that is outside the scope of the per-tab process.

              Essentially they moved to providing services via an API, instead of just patching the browser in Javascript by overloading functions (which also tends to lead to nasty conflicts, and m

              • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

                I think the problem is they didn't give developers adequate time to update extensions and they just upped and broke many of them before there were replacements. Maybe some time in the future I'll go back to Firefox but I'm not in a hurry to spend the time it takes to get the browser back to the way I like it with tabs-not-on-top and the URL bar on the same line as the file menu along with a separate search box and compact bookmarks etc etc.

                Waterfox just took all my Firefox settings and it works well.

                There a

                • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                  Perhaps. The Firefox extension system is more or less compatible with the Chrome one, although it has some extras. So on day one most Chrome extensions would work with only trivial changes (namespace was "browser" instead of "chrome").

                  By that time Chrome had been around for years and any extensions that could have been ported probably would have been already.

                  Is tabs on top really the dealbraker for you? You haven't mentioned any other extensions you are missing.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @06:37PM (#61464226)

      , make Firefox the fastest most customizable browser and more people will use it.

      Firefox is already pretty damn fast, but let's talk about customizability. That my friend is a major two edged sword. The wonders of customisability is that it creates incompatibilities, it creates a documentation hell, it makes sure that you will not be able to find help, it also makes it completely jarring to use another computer, and even more of a mess if you ever have to reset your user profile or if an update breaks something.

      Yes mother click button X, it's next to button Y on the top right? What do you mean you have no buttons in the top right? Left? Why are they all on the left? Do you have a button that looks like three dots? Oh your buttons are all various pictures of cats. *Presses Alt+F4*, *sends textmessage saying that internet is dead so we can't skype anymore*.

    • by shanen ( 462549 )

      Well, not as bad as some FPs, though I sort of disagree for three reasons:

      (1) Most people don't want to be bothered by customizing things (though a few people disagree).

      (2) Most of the time the bottleneck isn't in the browser, but on the server or in the network (though there are times when it happens).

      (3) Someone needs to pay and Mozilla's business model reeks like the big dog's m0e (so they are mostly guessing at random as to what users might pay for and as a result NOT getting the donations they imagined

      • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

        Number 3 there - Mozilla make their money from the search engine contract, it's been $hundreds of millions in the past, that's pretty much their only business model.

        Mozilla has tough competition - a rich advertiser that makes it's own browser and advertises it heavily and pushes it on the search page and Microsoft who regardless of previous anti-monopoly actions still heavily pushes it's browser and search engine by forcefully installing them. Did Mozilla ever really stand a chance?

        Other browsers have diffe

        • by shanen ( 462549 )

          Good points, but as far as I know, the CSB approach has never been tried. There are a couple of half-steps on crowd-funding websites, but all of the ones I've looked at were pretty obviously flawed and the results seem to bear out my assessments.

          My basic take is that as long as the costs are covered, let freedom ring. But that would still only cover the costs, so I guess the idea can't compete with the aggressively greedy folks creating profit-driven corporate cancers. I don't even care enough to strongly a

        • Mozilla has tough competition - a rich advertiser that makes it's own browser and advertises it heavily and pushes it on the search page

          Don't forget that the rich advertiser is also the owner of some of the most visited websites and if they break on firefox every so often well too bad so sad.

          Did Mozilla ever really stand a chance?

          In a word, no. Despite all the whinging about FiReFoX dId SoMeThInG BaD it's basically better across the board about all the things people complain about. The competitors change U

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • Gosh yes.

              I have had this argument. I mean he literally paid money to strip rights from people. The bUt ItS jUsT pOlItIcS crowd seem to think that somehow stripping rights using the force of law (i.e. politics) is somehow better than just being just the normal sort of homophobic.

              • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                • So... my criticisms of Mozilla for promoting him to CEO in the first place, and sitting on their hands afterwards, still stand.

                  Oh right, fair enough yes,

                  Firefox is still the best browser though, ugly redesign and all.

                  I use it for sure. Honestly redesigns kind of wash over me these days without much notice. Just looks like a browser to me. I used to really really care, one day I realised I'd stopped noticing. I think maybe I've worked on so many different systems and seen so many designs that I've stopped

                  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                    • Yeah the situation in the US is somewhat different. The nearest thing we have to major competitors to Amazon are... Walmart, which is as terrible or worse when it comes to treating employees like garbage

                      Yeah I hear Walmart is not great. Don't you have any other online shops?

                      eBay, which is great if you like auctions I guess. I mean, ethically or morally I guess eBay isn't bad as far as I'm aware.

                      I was mostly referring to ebay stores rather than auctions. If I want strange oddments it's usually the place to g

                    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
                    • Britain is different. You can get on a bus, be in the city center within 10 minutes, check Dixons, Curries, and WH Smiths (well, those were the stores 22 years ago, I assume it's a similar range today even if not the exact same ones) in the space of 10 minutes, pick up some milk while you're out, and be home 20 minutes later. I'm not sure you need to drive or go online for an HDMI cable.

                      Dixons took over curries then rebranded as curries.digital presumably to try and lose the reputation of a bunch of really

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        One of the reasons that modern Firefox and Chrome feel so much faster than older versions is that they managed to reduce the network latency considerably. Paralleling up requests and splitting up the network side and things like decoding and layout into separate threads prevents bottlenecks and serial processing too.

        • Sounds like you are describing speculative prefetching and caching, which is fine. But you didn't say much that might justify an "Informative" mod. I even think it would be relatively easy to get me to contribute towards supporting that kind of project. Maybe I'd contribute to a project to make it better, but mostly it's one of those things that can be paid for once and then replicated to lots of users without additional costs.

          However my primary point is that someone has to cover the costs. Right now Mozill

  • Been wondering what is the absolute minimum needed in a browser.
  • by frith01 ( 1118539 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:19PM (#61463592)

    It's not like they didn't have lots of feedback before that there user design changes were horrible, and that leaving behind a thriving infrastructure of add-ons was a bad decision.

    Now they need a new place to completely ignore user feedback ?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      That pretty much sums it up.

      They have completely ignored user feedback for 10+ years. All complaints from users were met with nothing more than a thinly veiled Fuck You. And now they have single digit market share because of it.

      I've been using the Palemoon fork for a few years now. It looks/works the way that Firefox should.

      • by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:59PM (#61463740)

        Amen!

        Here is one of the reasons why FF sucks. While I use Ctrl key shortcuts not everyone does. Look at the buttons on the same line the URL is displayed:

        * With Firefox (and Chrome) the Back, Forward, and Reload buttons have NO EDGE. It isn't EASY to tell where the button ends the background begins. These "UX" designers need to STOP blending buttons into the background!

        * Now look at Palemoon [palemoon.org]. There is a clear distinction between the buttons and the background.

        The user shouldn't have to jump through hoops of playing a pointless "guess the button size" game when you want to press a button! Firefox "dumbing down" the UI, change for the sake of change, is stupid. It serves no purpose but to add confusion.

        Combined with pointless breaking of all the addons -- these two "features" drove almost everyone away. Is it any wonder that Firefox's usage is down in single digits?

        • This kind of thing is a blight on UI design. Mac went the same way with trying to make windows blur together, apparently not realising that there are very good reasons to have overlapping objects distinct from each other.

          If I want a soothing and indistinct UI I can slather Vaseline over my screen and take a Valium.

        • I've got to agree - and now, the tabs don't have borders ("Look! Its clean!") - so if you open a tab without a favicon, it's almost invisible.

          The only tab that had a border is the tab I care about the least - the one I have open. When I want to click another tab, it's hard to see where it is - but I can easily see the only tab in the list that I don't want to click.

          Otherwise, apart from needing to turn up the contrast on absolutely everything (light grey on white? Come on, that's daft!), the new UI isn't so

    • The suggestion box exists to keep people from annoying the manager.

    • by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @04:23PM (#61463828)

      Mozilla folks are deeply in love with telemetry (aka, spyware). And when users complain, they say "but our data shows no one uses this!". Then, when we point out that every Linux distribution disables the spyware, Mozilla devs respond "that's your fault, we don't care about users that don't give us telemetry".

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @04:44PM (#61463898) Homepage Journal

      "Power users" complained that they were being ignored because they opted out of the built in feedback mechanisms like anonymous telemetry that would have told Mozilla about the features they valued.

      Leaving behind the old add-ons was necessary. Look at the old forks that maintained compatibility, they are slow and unstable. Insecure too, and security problems in the add-ons affect the whole browser. If you have a technical solution to those problems then please share it.

      • First off, people telling you exactly what they like, don't like, and want is far more valuable than trying to divine it from telemetry you know a large portion of your users opt out of. Especially if you draw the wrong conclusions from it. Like just because an option is rarely used, doesn't mean you should go yanking it out. Not to mention there's nothing in telemetry that could have possible justified half the crap they pull.
        If you absolutely have to replace the old add-on system, and I'm still unconvin
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The decision to remove features is always going to be based on cost of maintenance vs. number of users. Sorry but when it's a free product and hardly anyone uses a feature that costs money to maintain... Well, Firefox is open source so you could pay someone to maintain that feature for you if you really want it.

          As for speed, particularly on mid range machines Palemoon is extremely slow. Even on the high end there are big pauses and massive lag as every tab is running on the same thread. Because everything i

      • by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @08:24PM (#61464514)

        Forums and polls very much informed Mozilla what power users wanted, so there was no need for forced telemetry. Mozilla completely ignored all those people anyway. The problem is not that people are opting out of telemetry, but that Mozilla doesn't give a damn.

        Telemetry is used to optimize the business model, not the user experience.

        Look at the old forks that maintained compatibility, they are slow and unstable.

        Bullshit. PaleMoon works just fine for me. The main issue with PaleMoon is that it doesn't have all the latest trendy crap that Google is trying to force down our throats, so not all of the newest web sites work correctly. That's not the fault of the browser, but the fact that web developers don't care about graceful degradation and just hard-code everyting for Chrome.

        Really, almost all problems in society boil down to the people in charge not caring. Shocker.

        • Forums and polls very much informed Mozilla what power users wanted,

          I'm sure Mozilla has an employee dedicated to reading the opinions of the hard core of 20 or so whiners whenever a firefox story comes up.

          so there was no need for forced telemetry.

          Telemetry is not forced.

          Telemetry is used to optimize the business model, not the user experience.

          And what's the "business model" being optimized? How does it work if they don't make a browser that people want?

          Bullshit. PaleMoon works just fine for me. [...] not

          • I'm sure Mozilla has an employee dedicated to reading the opinions of the hard core of 20 or so whiners whenever a firefox story comes up.

            I should hope so. That's called "public relations".

            Hey, why have real people in the support and marketing departments? Everything can be done with that power of AI and analytics, right?

            Telemetry is not forced.

            You think so? Look at the source code yourself. Telemetry is always collected, but you can disable whether it is transmitted. Well, unless the preferences are reset for some reason (which does happen after certain major updates). There's also a great number of preferences that cannot be disabled. I tried disabling offl

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Sorry but you can't expect Mozilla to monitor random Reddit posts and try to draw conclusions from the number of up-votes. Aside from anything else Reddit voting is hardly reliable.

          Palemoon is crap. Sorry, but it is. It's incredibly slow next to any modern browser. Single threaded, and full of ancient and outdated extensions that have long been abandoned by the authors.

          Complaining that it's the fault of websites for not working in some obscure old browser is why so few people bother with Palemoon. You are e

          • This is not a PaleMoon problem. It's not even a technical problem. This is a Chromium problem, where developers have decided to support only one browser, use features that only work in the newest release, and tell all other browsers to fuck off.

            The reason why we have standards is to ensure that dozens of companies can release products and maintain a certain level of compatibility. That's always been problematic in the past, but it's been a manageable problem. The reason why we have graceful degradation

    • I still haven't forgiven them for the Lightspeed proposal. The only reason Mozilla killed that was because it had almost 100% negative feedback.

      Seriously, a web browser that literally does not allow ANY customization?

  • There's the Rub (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:24PM (#61463612)

    The introduction on the main page reveals Mozilla's intentions with the platform:

    This is where we grow our next generation of ideas, designs, experiments and products. You can take a look at the big problems we're working on, challenges we're exploring and bring your ideas to the conversation as we shape up and ship our next generation of software and services.

    Ah, but what the if the previous generation's ideas and designs (or even those from two generations back) are the superior ones? Can we effectively advocate for those or is it "Next Gen or Bust"?

  • by idontusenumbers ( 1367883 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:38PM (#61463662)

    Seems mozilla may have fallen into a trap where they think adding new features is what users want. I think most users would be more satisfied by the removal of all the user-facing features added over the past few years. If I had to guess, their primary user base is developers and power users yet they appear to cater toward mom-and-dad. Mom-and-dad users are content with whatever browser comes on their computer and moving to something different is a huge undertaking in terms of training and usability. Safari, Chrome, and Edge all seem dumbed-down. The way to differentiate is to no dumb-down, instead of the current course of action appears to be join-the-race-to-the-bottom.

    • Seems mozilla may have fallen into a trap where they think adding new features is what users want. I think most users would be more satisfied by the removal of all the user-facing features added over the past few years.

      Your comment combined with the one further down is exemplar of the issue. You say Mozilla should focus on removing features. The comment further down criticises Mozilla for constantly removing features.

      This is why successful companies don't listen to users. We're a shitshow of differing and contradictory opinions.
      Successful companies use marketing to get users to think the feature they see in front of them was their desire all along. And Mozilla completely lacks any kind of marketing or market power through

      • Mozilla is doing two things at once: They are removing old features people want and they are adding new features people want not. I am proposing removing the features they added that people want not. Sorry for the confusion.

        • I think my point was also confusing: No they aren't removing features people want kept. They are removing old features individual persons want, and adding new features individual persons don't want.

          The word "people" here is senseless as it implies some kind of major deviation from a democratically agreed upon common goal.

          Case in point: Pocket. I don't actually use it. Never have. And it has absolutely not bothered me in the slightest. I know someone who does use and said they like it. (they also tried to ex

  • by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @03:58PM (#61463734)

    My two cents of a rant, by all means take with grain of salt.

    I'm sure opening this up will have troves yelling about the former add-ons model, and them not understand that the former add-ons model was a complete shit storm. The reason a ton of things could do the things that they could was because the security model was such that basically everything had permissions to everything, in short there wasn't security. But not only that, the former model was never written to be multi-threaded. So if you had a misbehaving add-on, it brought everything down with it and there were hacks to try and not have that happen. But no matter how many band-aids you toss at it, it never fixed the fundamental flaws of the old model and in some cases there just were no fixes, only band-aids. Finally, the old model was heavily reliant on a very weird implementation of CORBA that Netscape invented back in the middle 90s when OOP was "the new coolness", not just that, literally EVERYTHING was an component that had weird IDL that interfaced with other interfaces on interfaces. It was like goto-hell but even worse because of all of the serialization into and out of that happened at rapid pace. Which that later issue is one of the things making the multi-threaded thing a bit harder to do.

    And there was a point that Mozilla was looking for buy-in on updating the old model. Literally nobody bought in on it. New developers didn't want to maintain it, old maintainer wanted it to die. The only people really rallying to keep the old model were the users who were contributing literal zero to the project and forks who couldn't afford to update their branches. And so with a lack of interest in updating the model, the old model died (but not completely sadly) and we got the new model that apparently everyone hates.

    For those wanting the old model. Go to Pale Moon, Ice animal, or whatever fork of the old model that's maintained. Mozilla has zero interest in the old model, it's a bitch to maintain much less make updates to, and hell some parts of it just simply cannot ever be updated (hence the reason even Pale Moon's Unified XUL Platform (UXP) is still not multithreaded, XPCOM is built with the explicit requirement of being single threaded, you cannot have the XUL+XPCOM access model and be multithreaded, making a multithreaded XPCOM is no longer XPCOM, it's like saying you'll make an HTTP client that speaks FTP, you're by definition not making an HTTP client.). Simply put, if you do not like where Firefox is in the add-on domain, go somewhere else, full stop. You are never getting the old Netscape model back. Same for NPAPI. So if you've got an embedded something that still relies on NPAPI, I mean dang, it might be time to speak with the higher ups about funding, maybe bring up a recently in the news pipeline or credit reporting agency that just failed to keep with the time. I get rock and hard place situations, but dang NPAPI is old as fuck in tech terms and it's not like POSIX, it's not like it was a good standard when it first came out. NPAPI was crap when it came out in 1995 and it didn't age well either.

    Now if you don't like the stupid Pocket shit, UI crap, or whatever else. Yeah, this is the location for voicing that shit. Personally, the Pocket shit is shit, you can at the very least disable it, but it would be great if you could unload it from memory. Why it's not an add-on is justified by some of the dumbest reasoning and they should be called out for that. The new UI update is not really that big a deal to me, I think UI is all an eye of the beholder thing but whatever. I get that some folks are put off by the "search in the address bar" thing, but I don't mind it. The DoH crap, y'all have to find better hills to die on. DNS over HTTP is a really dumb argument for people to be getting into. It's easy to disable, it's easy to ensure people don't enable it, and yes, you too can build your own and send all the requests and everything to it and it's not some 50,000 step process to make that h

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's ironic that the same people who constantly complain about Windows XP having users run as administrator and mobile apps getting too many permissions and think Javascript is a joke... ...really want their browser to run a bunch of unverified Javascript with full access to everything.

  • Just announced at WWDC. This will just embolden Mozilla to make controversial user interface changes and ignore any real feedback.
  • Just open an enhancement request on bugzilla, it would've been a lot easier to add voting to that than to develop and maintain a second issue tracker.

  • Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @04:01PM (#61463754) Journal

    Mozilla hasn't listened to anything the people have said for years. They keep plowing ahead with whatever they want, especially when it comes to removing things which users find useful.

    There must be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of comments on what people want already out there. All they have to do is read and act on them.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I must be the only one who things Firefox has got a lot better in the last few years. It's a lot faster, the UI is not perfect but not worse than any other modern browser. Add-on support is excellent, it's secure, has the best privacy features of any browser...

      The new tabs are a bit crap, need proper outlines. Not deal breakingly bad though.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          There is a long standing bug on mobile that affects all Pixel phones and breaks rendering. If they could fix it I would switch to Firefox as my primary browser. If I ever find the time I'll have a look at fixing it myself.

          Yes, I was talking about the background tabs. I just like to have the areas I can click clearly marked out.

          • No thanks. I stopped updating the app past 68 since anything past that remove two features I want (setting newtab page, ttab actually close when you close the browser) and started advertising the shit out of sync
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Organizations like to appear that they are community-engaged without the messiness of actual engagement.
    • Mozilla hasn't listened to anything the people have said for years.

      The problem with listening to the people, is that there's no such thing as "the people". There are just many different persons each with individual needs and wants.

      Apple knows this well, to be successful you don't listen to your customers. Instead you create a product you want to sell them and use marketing to create the need. It's how we ended up with an MP3 player that had a built in laptop HDD, a mobile phone that shuttered when dropped with no physical buttons, gave up using our computers for creating a

  • by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Monday June 07, 2021 @04:37PM (#61463868)
    I'm not a power user, I don't grok websites (and their failures aren't worth my time to investigate), I'm just an average Joe that wants to surf the web with noscript and ublock origin installed.

    Firefox slowed down. A bit. Why? I don't know. Not enough to blame the browser. Could be my ISP, could be my VPN (TunnelBear). But whatevs.

    I got the new version this morning. Did I notice the cornered windows? No. Did I notice what everyone else is complaining about? No. Did I notice any speed improvements? No.

    What did I notice? When I right click on a bookmark tab, what opens up is a lot longer. Not more content, just more whitespace between entries. Reminded me of 10-15 years ago when I loved MSNBC as a news source. They went from list to thumbnail, reducing screen content by a good 75%, and I promptly went elsewhere.

    When I cancelled my newspaper sub a few years back I made a bookmark of all comics I wanted to read daily. I used to right click on that and got "open all in tabs". Obvious. This morning I got "Open all bookmarks". Huh? No, I don't want to open all bookmarks. I want to open those bookmarks in this tab. Turns out it's the same thing with much murkier text as to what will happen.

    Tangent. A few releases ago it was "open all in new window", which was great. Then they opened all 50+ bookmarks in my current window, which wasn't great.

    And there was another moved menu option I tripped on this morning that I don't remember. But if I tripped on it this morning you can be sure I'll trip on it again tomorrow.

    Verdict? Not seeing anything better, not seeing much worse. Don't have insight into security/privacy stuff. My verdict on a 1-10 scale? 4. Found the workarounds fairly quickly, but don't see the need for those workarounds.

    What I do see? Changing UI stuff just to say you changed stuff. They made the UIX ($diety I hate that term) worse in the name of "but but but".
    • What I do see? Changing UI stuff just to say you changed stuff.

      Thank you! I'm using Palemoon because there's one addon that I'd have a REALLY hard time living without. But I AM very picky about the UI - so much so that Firefox's move to the Australis interface was what propmted my move to Palemoon.

      So why am I thanking you? Because you're one of those lucky people who can generally use and get used to whatever, and don't care much about UI design - yet even you are complaining at least a bit about Mozilla continuing to dick around with the UI in stupid and incomprehensi

  • Something else for them to not listen to. Hooray!
  • I wonder if Mozilla realizes people are still using the "old" version of android Frefox to avoid their "supposed" upgrades that aren't?
  • Translation: A file 13 for comments.

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