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.
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
I couldn’t care less tbh. Still a fine browser, still a great daily driver, still blocks all the ads with ublock.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
To disable the new design, simply uncheck the “Enable the Nova redesign” option (Settings > Appearance > Browser theme).
Alternatively, set
browser.nova.enabledtofalsein about:config.@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.
I like it.
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 on it.
gosh i hate this. gotta play with userchrome again…
gosh please no, my current one hasn’t broken for over a year.
Opera 12 started to do this. China owns it now and it is based on Chromium. A couple of Open Source browsers did it for the same reason later and lost users like their was orbital bombardment hitting their project. Grab a brain… it is not the design language that makes Chrome so successful and if you look and act like them, well users are just going to use them.
i, too, dislike it when things are owned by the evil scary China instead of good and righteous Norway
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.
horrible website captcha
