-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On 2021-03-01 at 14:10, Paul Kosinski via Enterprise wrote:
> Thane's posting gives voice to my recent dissatisfaction with > Firefox. > > I have used Firefox since when it was still Netscape. And when it > became Open Source I decided it was by far the most trustworthy > browser around (especially given the existence of NoScript and the > like). > > Starting even before the rise of "Quantum", unfortunately, it has > taken a path of rapid change, too often for the worse. Many > features have been "simplified", and even removed. Configurability > and thus usability has suffered as a result. It's great that > Firefox emulates the speed of Chrome (and Chromium), but I, at > least, don't like the Chrome/Chromium UI, and I like the Firefox UI > less and less the more it emulates the Chrome/Chromium UI. This very much reflects my own perspective and experience, as well. I likewise got started with Firefox and its ancestors that far back, and likewise have been dismayed at many of the changes that have been made over the years; it sometimes seems as if the development process is breaking the things I like about Firefox so consistently over time that it almost must be intentional, that the intended eventual endpoint of the design process is something that includes almost nothing of what led me to like and recommend the browser to begin with. > For example, Why has the traditional Windows/Mac menu been > deprecated in favor of unintuitive icons? Why are tabs *only* on > top like Chrome? (Google probably wants tabs on top so the user > forgets it's a general purpose computer, and thinks it's just a > gateway to Google, like Chromebook is.) And why can't the overall > appearance be configured for readability? (Remember Classic Theme > Restorer, Classic Toolbar Buttons and CCK2?) Remember them? I still use CTR, at least on my personal devices (see below). I'd rather not need to - there are things about the interface I want which I can't reproduce exactly even with CTR - but it's much better than without. That said, I suspect that this entire mailing list may owe its existence to CCK2, given that Mike Kaply *wrote* CCK2 and appears to now be the primary Mozilla-side driver of the enterprise support and interaction which is the purpose of this mailing list. My guess with regard to "tabs on top" is a combination of A: the argument that since the address bar changes depending on which tab you're on, it belongs "inside" the tab, with B: a more general reluctance to support options, since the more options you have the more code paths you have to test and maintain, and the more likely it is that regressions will slip through the testing cracks. I've seen actual Mozilla developers express the perspective from option B, albeit some time ago by now - IIRC, it was specifically in the context of removing the option to have tabs on top, around the time of the lead-up to the Australis release. How that meshes with the claims (which I think I've seen) of a commitment to support customizability I've never seen explained. > The worst change in recent memory, of course, (which many have > commented on) was the change where upgrading Firefox installed a > brand new profile that lost the user's bookmarks. Was the thought > that everybody was saving bookmarks online at Mozilla? (Besides > the lack of personal privacy implied, there are enterprises that > would never allow this.) Did this happen on simple upgrades? I remember reading things that may have indicated that it did, but so far I'm only encountering it when the Firefox install path changes, which unfortunately is a necessity when switching from 32-bit to 64-bit Firefox on Windows (which itself is a necessity in the long run, because everything is going 64-bit eventually). IMO there would have been a better way to design the profile-migration process, so that it would have retained things automatically (whether or not with prompting) on a more common basis, and I think I even have some idea of what that design would be - but the chance of that ever getting implemented at this point is virtually nil, not least because the transition ship has probably largely sailed in most cases. (IIRC Mike may have suggested once that I file a bug report suggesting the alternate design. I never have, because I don't have the emotional stamina to stick through a potentially contentious fight with the developers over this; if I'm ever going to pick such a fight, it's going to be over something that's a long-term usability issue, not a one-time transition.) > For now, I'm sticking with Firefox, because I still think it's the > most trustworthy. But every new release fills me with dread, since > I wonder what feature or behavior I depend on is going to be > removed or degraded. I feel very much the same way. It's long since (as in, at least as far back as Firefox 17) reached the point where I not only recommend that everyone run the ESR, simply because there's too much change too fast to evaluate otherwise, but also where I postpone upgrading for as long as possible - because I want to evaluate the changes in the new version before upgrading, and I know I'm going to need plan and design and implement some unknown set of tweaks to make things keep working the way I want them to, and that's an extensive, intensive, work-heavy process which would be ridiculously impractical to do with every non-ESR release. On my personal devices, I in fact still run Firefox ESR 58, because some of the things I need are broken beyond repair with the abandonment of non-WebExtension add-ons; one of these years I'll find the willpower, motivation, and social-interaction fuel to interact with the developers enough to figure out what's going to be necessary and get the right changes made that I can implement whatever code is missing and have things work on a newer version, but especially given that the addon-support-and-discussion forum has moved from mailing list to Web interface, there aren't even great odds that that will happen by the end of the decade. Australis was a bad move. Abandonment of pre-WebExtension add-ons, without a commitment to make sure that everything a non-malicious extension might legitimately want to do which was possible with a pre-WebExtension add-on would become possible to do with WebExtensions, was a worse one. I could probably go on, but I'll end for now by saying that I think the first change that was a sign of things to come - and which probably helped lead to the rest - was the change from meaningful major / minor / micro version numbers to an automatic increment of the major version every ~six weeks. That made it way too easy to introduce changes that broke other things (because, hey, of course a new major version can include breaking changes!), and way too hard for users to tell which upgrades were going to include such changes before upgrading. - -- Andrew J. 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