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> We’re adjusting our cadence to increase our agility, and bring you new features more quickly. In recent quarters, we’ve had many requests to take features to
by ken 7y ago
> We’re adjusting our cadence to increase our agility, and bring you new features more quickly. In recent quarters, we’ve had many requests to take features to market sooner.
Mozilla has been tweaking their process forever, but all of it is for naught if they don't work on what users want. The latest FF brags "we are shipping a new “New Tab” page experience that connects you to the best of Pocket’s content", while standard keyboard shortcuts have been broken for well over 10 years. This is not a problem with their release cadence.
Users have a curious way of asking for what they believe is feasible. I've seen users encounter an obvious bug, and work around it by hand, and turn around and ask for something completely different, like an alternative workaround. (Just add a macro system so I can record this sequence of 7 steps to work around this weird thing...) They literally don't think to ask "Fix this bug".
I wonder if that's what's happening here. As an occasional Firefox user, I know that keyboard shortcuts have been broken since the Bush administration, and the codebase is far too complex for me to work on even the simplest features (I've tried). I can absolutely see a user thinking "If they can't do what we want, at least they could do it faster". That feels like a change that's feasible in a way that "Fix the massive complexity problem" or even "Fix keyboard shortcuts (which are apparently massively complex)" do not.
Firefox itself was created by a couple programmers chatting late at night in a Denny's. They made a far better browser than the Mozilla organization of the day could. It's an important organization and it's impressive they can regularly ship useful free software, but user interfaces have never been a strong point for open source, in the way that compilers and runtimes and databases are. Tweak away, but I don't hold much hope for the situation to improve. The next great open-source browser is going to come from 2 or 3 people chatting in a Denny's, not Mozilla with N-week releases, for any value of N.
- ChrisSD 7y agoWhat's broken with keyboard shortcuts?
- michaelmrose 7y agoNot being able to configure them would be one thing. The lack of a shortcut to open reader mode for years another.
- i_cant_speel 7y agoCmd + alt + r
- omaranto 7y agoI don't know what cmd means (I'm kidding, I have seen Apple computers even if I've never used one), but you can find out what the keyboard shortcut is on your own copy of Firefox by hovering the mouse over the Reader mode icon. On my Firefox it says "Ctrl + Alt + R".
- michaelmrose 7y agoThey added reader mode to firefox for android in 2012 it took them 3 years to add this to desktop firefox and almost a year to actually add a hotkey that you can't configure. Firefox 38 for reader 50 for a hotkey.
- maxerickson 7y agoWhat's a concrete example of a broken shortcut? The shortcuts I use work fine, so I don't understand the complaint.
- boring_twenties 7y agoSome shortcuts I use -- like Alt-$NUMBER to jump to a specific tab -- are frequently overridden by websites, which I view as a browser breakage because this should simply not be allowed.
- roca 7y agoObviously this is a tough one since most users don't know those shortcuts exist and will get upset if those shortcuts stop working in a Web site.
- cmrdporcupine 7y agoThere may have been a late night Denny's involved, but the rendering engine inside the original Phoenix/Firefox came out of the existing Netscape codebase. And that had thousands and thousands and thousands of person hours invested in it, by a largish engineering org, before Firefox saw the light of day.
- quickthrower2 7y ago> They made a far better browser than the Mozilla organization of the day could I'm guessing this is not the case, because the demands and requirements of browsers would have increased massively since then in terms of the breadth of the developer APIs and security issues that need to be dealt with, plus an every increasing demand on speed and having the largest company in the world with effectively unlimited cash, the best minds and some sharp practices as your competitor.
- zbraniecki 7y ago> Firefox itself was created by a couple programmers chatting late at night in a Denny's. You're presenting a very naive and romanticized version of the story. source: I've been involved in Phoenix since 0.2.