3 ms·

The new and updated Firefox Quantum has UI redundancy issues. I can't believe they don't let users customize the main menu!

by atalad 7y ago

kreetx 7y ago
Which menu? (The row where the address bar is is customizable, no?)
- anoncake 7y ago
  The one at the right edge of the toolbar, the only one.
Causality1 7y ago
Their strategy is to grind you down over time on whatever their users are doing that doesn't suit their grand vision. A feature will start out on the main menu then it will emigrate to a sub menu then it has to be done with an extension then it has to be done with a custom file then that custom file gets disabled by default but can be turned on and finally the feature gets disabled entirely. It happened first with xul extensions and now it's happening with userChrome.css and unsigned extensions.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  userChrome.css still works, and if you already had one they automatically flip the pref on for you. It's default-off because it increases startup time.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    I wonder, what's the 95% worst case latency for a stat on a 5400 RPM laptop drive from 10 years ago? Assuming of course that the drive is already spinning since it's reading a million other things from your profile. I bet it's negligible in almost every case.
    - jean23 7y ago
      With a 5,400 rpm, just the slow rotation can introduce a wait time of 11 ms. Seek time from moving the arm can incur up to 20 ms (although some of that might overlap with the rotation time). And if it's a ten year old HDD, there might be a re-read necessary. Even if the average read time would be just 20ms per file, cutting out ten of these reads saves 0.2 seconds, which is already noticeable to humans. And that's under the unrealistic assumption that Firefox is the only program trying to read from that poor slow HDD. On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold.
      - alpaca128 7y ago
        > On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold. And in the case of Apple also 4k iMacs. They even knowingly hide it now via a (non-existing?) footnote, seemingly hoping nobody clicks the "technical specs" button.
    - roca 7y ago
      A single file open and close isn't that much, but dozens or hundreds of these tiny performance papercuts add up and make application startup slow.

The new and updated Firefox Quantum has UI redundancy issues. I can't believe they don't let users customize the main menu!

by atalad 7y ago

The new and updated Firefox Quantum has UI redundancy issues. I can't believe they don't let users customize the main menu!

kreetx 7y ago

Which menu? (The row where the address bar is is customizable, no?)

anoncake 7y ago
The one at the right edge of the toolbar, the only one.

Causality1 7y ago

Their strategy is to grind you down over time on whatever their users are doing that doesn't suit their grand vision. A feature will start out on the main menu then it will emigrate to a sub menu then it has to be done with an extension then it has to be done with a custom file then that custom file gets disabled by default but can be turned on and finally the feature gets disabled entirely. It happened first with xul extensions and now it's happening with userChrome.css and unsigned extensions.

kevingadd 7y ago
userChrome.css still works, and if you already had one they automatically flip the pref on for you. It's default-off because it increases startup time.
- bscphil 7y ago
  I wonder, what's the 95% worst case latency for a stat on a 5400 RPM laptop drive from 10 years ago? Assuming of course that the drive is already spinning since it's reading a million other things from your profile. I bet it's negligible in almost every case.
  - jean23 7y ago
    With a 5,400 rpm, just the slow rotation can introduce a wait time of 11 ms. Seek time from moving the arm can incur up to 20 ms (although some of that might overlap with the rotation time). And if it's a ten year old HDD, there might be a re-read necessary. Even if the average read time would be just 20ms per file, cutting out ten of these reads saves 0.2 seconds, which is already noticeable to humans. And that's under the unrealistic assumption that Firefox is the only program trying to read from that poor slow HDD. On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold.
    - alpaca128 7y ago
      > On a sidenote, laptops with 5,400 RPM drives are still sold. And in the case of Apple also 4k iMacs. They even knowingly hide it now via a (non-existing?) footnote, seemingly hoping nobody clicks the "technical specs" button.
  - roca 7y ago
    A single file open and close isn't that much, but dozens or hundreds of these tiny performance papercuts add up and make application startup slow.