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FF’s UX around things not related to browsing is slightly worse on all platforms. It’s most obvious on iOS where some of the styles for your “library” just don’

FF’s UX around things not related to browsing is slightly worse on all platforms. It’s most obvious on iOS where some of the styles for your “library” just don’t work correctly on iPhone 10’s. I also think their model for managing non-browsing stuff is too complex comparatively. To access many things like history and bookmarks, you need to use the dropdown menu on the right, which has like 30 different options in it, some of which seem similar but are actually different. Those options are sometimes also available from different locations, so it can be confusing how to access what you’re looking for. Other browsers are a lot more polished in this area, like Brave, Chrome, and even the new MS Edge. None are perfect, but I find their UX and UK slightly easier to use and generally less clunky. If FF fixed that, I’d be completely sold on it. But as is, I keep going back to the drawing board.

sedatk 6y ago
Firefox is especially bad in download UX. The “something is downloading” animation isn’t noticeable enough, causing me to click on download links multiple times and wondering why it didn’t work.
- fireattack 6y ago
  At least they recently added the animation back. It was nearly invisible for quite a long period.
- prox 6y ago
  Haha, and I find the mega bar on the bottom in Chrome super annoying. Get out of my face! ;)
atombender 6y ago
I long assumed the slightly-wonky UX in Firefox was due to a mountain of legacy tech debt around XUL and so on that they were still struggling to remove. Firefox doesn't really feel all that native on macOS, for example, though it's not terrible. Chrome/Brave doesn't always feel native, for that matter, but it's not nearly as clunky. But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.
cuddlybacon 6y ago
I also avoid FF because of the UI. It's what I use on my PC, which doesn't get used much. If I have to VNC into a linux machine at work, I'll use it there as well. But that is even rarer. The last time I noticed a UI change, it was for the worse. The made the url/navigation/search bar get bigger when it had focus. To me that is pretty dumb, and I wish you could turn it off. Knowing Firefox you probably can, but a few Google searches couldn't tell me how. If this was done on a product that already had a good UI, it wouldn't seem like a big deal. But given how much low hanging fruit there is in Firefox's UI, it makes you question their priorities. This is all really weird, since what made Firefox take off in the first place was its better UI. A lot of websites had compatibility issues, and people wanted to use Firefox in spite of them. A lot of webdevs got to work fixing these issues because they wanted to be able to switch to Firefox themselves. It seems that Mozilla never really understood how much its UI advantage helped Firefox get popular. Instead they seem to attribute that period of success to things that I think most people consider nice to haves: extensions, privacy, about:config, etc.
- spanhandler 6y ago
  Yeah, I also remember what sold it in the Phoenix/Firebird days, and what got me to insist on installing it for everyone I knew, being 1) popup/under blocking, 2) it was really light and nimble compared to the competition (IE, Netscape/Mozilla), both in terms of the program itself and the browsing experience, and 3) the interface was very clean, clear, and pleasant to use. Tabbed browsing was just a nice bonus and I don't remember extensions really mattering much until well after it'd started to get traction from early adopters like me installing it on everything we came in contact with. Really, it was basically Opera with a less-slightly-weird-feeling UI and no adbar in the free version. Given those early reasons for favoring it, from my perspective it's mostly gotten worse since 2.0 came out.

sedatk 6y ago

Firefox is especially bad in download UX. The “something is downloading” animation isn’t noticeable enough, causing me to click on download links multiple times and wondering why it didn’t work.

fireattack 6y ago
At least they recently added the animation back. It was nearly invisible for quite a long period.
prox 6y ago
Haha, and I find the mega bar on the bottom in Chrome super annoying. Get out of my face! ;)

atombender 6y ago

I long assumed the slightly-wonky UX in Firefox was due to a mountain of legacy tech debt around XUL and so on that they were still struggling to remove. Firefox doesn't really feel all that native on macOS, for example, though it's not terrible. Chrome/Brave doesn't always feel native, for that matter, but it's not nearly as clunky. But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.

cuddlybacon 6y ago

I also avoid FF because of the UI. It's what I use on my PC, which doesn't get used much. If I have to VNC into a linux machine at work, I'll use it there as well. But that is even rarer. The last time I noticed a UI change, it was for the worse. The made the url/navigation/search bar get bigger when it had focus. To me that is pretty dumb, and I wish you could turn it off. Knowing Firefox you probably can, but a few Google searches couldn't tell me how. If this was done on a product that already had a good UI, it wouldn't seem like a big deal. But given how much low hanging fruit there is in Firefox's UI, it makes you question their priorities. This is all really weird, since what made Firefox take off in the first place was its better UI. A lot of websites had compatibility issues, and people wanted to use Firefox in spite of them. A lot of webdevs got to work fixing these issues because they wanted to be able to switch to Firefox themselves. It seems that Mozilla never really understood how much its UI advantage helped Firefox get popular. Instead they seem to attribute that period of success to things that I think most people consider nice to haves: extensions, privacy, about:config, etc.

spanhandler 6y ago
Yeah, I also remember what sold it in the Phoenix/Firebird days, and what got me to insist on installing it for everyone I knew, being 1) popup/under blocking, 2) it was really light and nimble compared to the competition (IE, Netscape/Mozilla), both in terms of the program itself and the browsing experience, and 3) the interface was very clean, clear, and pleasant to use. Tabbed browsing was just a nice bonus and I don't remember extensions really mattering much until well after it'd started to get traction from early adopters like me installing it on everything we came in contact with. Really, it was basically Opera with a less-slightly-weird-feeling UI and no adbar in the free version. Given those early reasons for favoring it, from my perspective it's mostly gotten worse since 2.0 came out.