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I think Servo is going to be a massive Good Thing (tm) for Mozilla, but they have messed up a few times with UI anti-patterns and sneaking extensions into updat

I think Servo is going to be a massive Good Thing (tm) for Mozilla, but they have messed up a few times with UI anti-patterns and sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. They have seriously breached our trust like Google and it will take years to earn back that trust. I switched to Firefox away from Chrome recently. I am happy with this but I wish they had a friendly UI you could bring up to expose cookies to be shared between tabs on an opt-in basis. Cookies should be isolated per-tab by default. Cookies and other persistent data should be forgotten as soon as the tab is closed. I don't like container tabs, I think it gets confusing to manage tab groups by profile. I want to quickly mouse over and say "expose this tab's cookies to this other tab". I'm still sad I can't get perfect "tree tabs" going. I have a plugin I use to show parent and child tabs in a tree arrangement but nothing looks sexy about it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?src=search https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?sr... I want an actual tree of lines shown to each row/tab to quickly visualize how the tabs were created from parent-to-child. How it currently looks is too busy with borders everywhere. It's functional but not what I envisioned. I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. I'm just frustrated that I remember trying to make this work in like 2002 and it's soon to be 2019. I feel like browsers aren't made for workstations, but casual consumption. They should enable so much productivity. I also wish they focused on minimizing and isolating references to various Web APIs, so it would be easier to unreference and orphan them - unreachable from advertisers. (Unrelated rant?)

chmln 8y ago
I'm afraid our hopes of Servo resurrecting Mozilla were short lived. From what I understand, work on Servo for Desktop has been phased out considerably. See https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
- Teknoman117 8y ago
  Ah crap. I totally missed that this happens. It's a damn shame really, what exists of Servo at this point was rather amazing in terms of speed.
  - chmln 8y ago
    I will admit I was secretly hoping that Servo would become a new, minimalistic, privacy-focused browser that would also blow Chrome out the water with performance. Its a shame they just plugged some parts into Firefox and called it a day. Instead of getting us a new shiny browser that could compete with Chrome, Mozilla focuses efforts on dubious Pocket/Cliqz/VPN integrations and a bunch of progressive outreach programs. Unless something changes drastically, Firefox will descend into irrelevancy very soon (if not already). And that's bad for all of us.
    - Manishearth 8y ago
      We haven't called it a day. The servo team still exists, we still work on Servo. Working on a production ready project is hard and takes forever, the integration work was a pit stop where we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.
      - chmln 8y ago
        > we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them. Compared to the number of people who browse the web on desktop, the number of VR/AR users is statistically insignificant. Moving Servo's focus away from desktop and towards niche VR/AR experiments will only accelerate the decline of Firefox. Or rather, fail to slow it down.
- leeman2016 8y ago
  Wow... that's a shocker.
Sylos 8y ago
> sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. If you have auto-updates enabled, Mozilla, like Google, has complete control over the source code that runs on your system. Had they wanted to sneak new source code in, they would have specifically not packaged it as an extension, which made it user-visible and limited to the extension API in its capabilities, and instead just patched the Firefox code to include it. So, they were decidedly doing the opposite of sneaking it in.
dan-robertson 8y ago
It is possible to hide the top tab bar but extensions are not allowed to do it. You have to write some css file to set the tab bar to display:none. I think there’s a description of the process somewhere in the github repo for that extension (maybe in an issue)
Vinnl 8y ago
> They have seriously breached our trust like Google Mozilla has made some mistakes, absolutely, but it really is not anywhere close to being "like Google". It's still the far superior choice, personal freedoms-wise, over Chrome.
nachtigall 8y ago
> I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. It could be easier, but still doable in 5 minutes (that's how long it took me) with some CSS, see https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#hide-horizontal-tabs-at-the-top-of-the-window-1349 https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo... on how to do it. There seem to be some security concern or it's not so easy UX wise, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 for all the discussions and progress.
- blitmap 8y ago
  This is definitely within my skillset but far from user-friendly. I'm just remarking on how simple it is to put a toggle in the settings to show/hide the tab bar and they haven't done this because they're pushing a particular look that is very similar to the design choices for Chrome.

chmln 8y ago

I'm afraid our hopes of Servo resurrecting Mozilla were short lived. From what I understand, work on Servo for Desktop has been phased out considerably. See https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/ https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/

Teknoman117 8y ago
Ah crap. I totally missed that this happens. It's a damn shame really, what exists of Servo at this point was rather amazing in terms of speed.
- chmln 8y ago
  I will admit I was secretly hoping that Servo would become a new, minimalistic, privacy-focused browser that would also blow Chrome out the water with performance. Its a shame they just plugged some parts into Firefox and called it a day. Instead of getting us a new shiny browser that could compete with Chrome, Mozilla focuses efforts on dubious Pocket/Cliqz/VPN integrations and a bunch of progressive outreach programs. Unless something changes drastically, Firefox will descend into irrelevancy very soon (if not already). And that's bad for all of us.
  - Manishearth 8y ago
    We haven't called it a day. The servo team still exists, we still work on Servo. Working on a production ready project is hard and takes forever, the integration work was a pit stop where we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.
    - chmln 8y ago
      > we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them. Compared to the number of people who browse the web on desktop, the number of VR/AR users is statistically insignificant. Moving Servo's focus away from desktop and towards niche VR/AR experiments will only accelerate the decline of Firefox. Or rather, fail to slow it down.
leeman2016 8y ago
Wow... that's a shocker.

Sylos 8y ago

> sneaking extensions into updates that users didn't opt for. If you have auto-updates enabled, Mozilla, like Google, has complete control over the source code that runs on your system. Had they wanted to sneak new source code in, they would have specifically not packaged it as an extension, which made it user-visible and limited to the extension API in its capabilities, and instead just patched the Firefox code to include it. So, they were decidedly doing the opposite of sneaking it in.

dan-robertson 8y ago

It is possible to hide the top tab bar but extensions are not allowed to do it. You have to write some css file to set the tab bar to display:none. I think there’s a description of the process somewhere in the github repo for that extension (maybe in an issue)

Vinnl 8y ago

> They have seriously breached our trust like Google Mozilla has made some mistakes, absolutely, but it really is not anywhere close to being "like Google". It's still the far superior choice, personal freedoms-wise, over Chrome.

nachtigall 8y ago

> I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. It could be easier, but still doable in 5 minutes (that's how long it took me) with some CSS, see https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#hide-horizontal-tabs-at-the-top-of-the-window-1349 https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo... on how to do it. There seem to be some security concern or it's not so easy UX wise, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 for all the discussions and progress.

blitmap 8y ago
This is definitely within my skillset but far from user-friendly. I'm just remarking on how simple it is to put a toggle in the settings to show/hide the tab bar and they haven't done this because they're pushing a particular look that is very similar to the design choices for Chrome.