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> negative opinions being amplified and folks who are happy/satisfied just keep it to themselves. Exactly this. All posts on the internet act as a selection fi

by cdrini 5y ago

> negative opinions being amplified and folks who are happy/satisfied just keep it to themselves. Exactly this. All posts on the internet act as a selection filter; the people most likely to comment are those with strong feelings on the subject. When we read comments, we tend to think "wow, I just read 10 comments and all but one hated the UI! People must really dislike this UI". But our sample isn't random, it's heavily biased! And we develop a biased understanding of the general population -- the vast majority of whom won't have left a comment at all. Instead of thinking "9/10 people dislike this UI", it's probably closer to "9 people out of all Firefox users dislike this UI". And more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on HackerNews dislike this UI." Actually, I wonder if you can use Bayes' theorem to get the actual population's distribution somehow...

jdlshore 5y ago
Agreed, the constant negativity (especially here on HN) gets very tiresome. For what it's worth, Firefox has been my daily driver for years and I'm very happy with it. The new tab design doesn't bother me at all.
- hulitu 5y ago
  I'll be positive. I like Firefox so much that i actively avoid it. I still need to keep it because some sites do not support other browsers.
- 0des 5y ago
  I don't take it as negativity, per se, but in my opinion more often there are people expressing concern. For many of us, Firefox began as a relationship with Netscape; over the years this has been a living and evolving relationship, with a lot of positive things, but also a few more significant negative steps back in a direction that the community/userbase find to be antithetical to the spirit of what the project is/was/claims to be. Thank you for this reply, and trip down memory lane; I hope it is well received. I'm not trying to be a contrarian, I just wanted to interrupt this glass of Metamucil to share an alternative viewpoint.
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  And Firefox has been my daily driver for years and the new tab design was enough to finally push me over to Tree Style Tabs full-time. I like everything about Firefox, except for the management practices of Mozilla and the constant unnecessary UI meddling that trashes my userChrome.css practically every update. It's very hard to guess overall user sentiment from anecdata.
  - johnsoft 5y ago
    Speaking of Tree Style Tabs – Does anyone have an up-to-date user CSS that hides the top tabs and moves the toolbar up into the dead space? I used to have a snippet that worked, but it broke a few dozen versions ago.
    - Freaky 5y ago
      Here's what I'm using: https://gist.github.com/Freaky/b5cd807d518a176298c1d0e612dcc1aa https://gist.github.com/Freaky/b5cd807d518a176298c1d0e612dcc...
      - johnsoft 5y ago
        This is gold, thanks!
        e_proxus 5y ago
        Here's my version for Windows. It keeps the window buttons and removes the empty space on top. https://gist.github.com/eproxus/f95c2d2bd0f9b8f5d2b6f464e27cc29a https://gist.github.com/eproxus/f95c2d2bd0f9b8f5d2b6f464e27c...
  - pkage 5y ago
    On the subject of Tree Style Tabs, I've found Sidebery[0] to be a great replacement. Significantly less buggy, and more feature rich (panels, etc). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  The internet is basically a bunch of people living a super comfortable life, whining about trivial shit.
michaelmior 5y ago
> And more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on HackerNews dislike this UI." And even more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on Hacker News and cared enough to leave a comment dislike this UI"
- cptskippy 5y ago
  Tbf, 9 users is a not insignificant number of their userbase. I say that as someone who has only ever used Firefox as my default browser. But yeah it seems like every release of ff there's a vocal group saying how it's going to pot and it's all doom and gloom. I have been using ff since it was called Phoenix and it's fine. I fire up Chrome and Edge out of necessity for work and have never been compelled to switch. Maybe I just don't need whatever it is that Chrome has that makes it so special but all the browsers are pretty decent these days. At some point around IE11 I realized I wasn't writing W3C standards HTML/JS and then having to hack it for noncompliant browsers. I wrote code once and it just worked.
rhizome 5y ago
>Instead of thinking "9/10 people dislike this UI", it's probably closer to "9 people out of all Firefox users dislike this UI". Yeah, even with your Bayes mention I'm gonna go ahead and get a second opinion on your statistical analysis there. I know, there's always someone in every crowd who quibbles with a poster's perspective, but you're hanging your entire sentiment on this one.
- cdrini 5y ago
  I'm not following your comment; can you expand? To rephrase what I was saying, I think that when we read 10 comments, of which nine are negative, we think "90% of people must dislike this". I don't think most people would actually think 90%, but I do think we "get a feeling" it's a very high percentage. We get this impression that the 10 comments are by 10 random people, so it's close to a random sample. But it's not, it's a very biased selection. The very post itself acts as a selection filter, only selecting people with certain properties. In this case, people with strong opinions about Firefox's UI. In short, the denominator isn't 10, but something much much greater. And this isn't a stastical analysis (not yet anyways!), just a statistics/psychology hunch :)
  - rhizome 5y ago
    >I think that when we read 10 comments, of which nine are negative, we think "90% of people must dislike this" I don't. When I see something like that with such a small sample size, I think that the downvoters just got there first. That could be because the YouTube algorithm put the video in front of people who happen to have higher standards, or who are bitchier, or who are familiar with the poster and their disruptive complaints over on the Slack for $X. Could be anything...anything other than generalizable overall quality.
    - cdrini 5y ago
      I'm hypothesising that this is a bias people have when reading posts in the internet. People are susceptible to it to different degrees. And your statement does show this bias in a different way. You comment on the 10 being too small a sample size. That implies that if there were more posts, say 90 vs 10, you would draw some conclusions about the question "Do people like the new UI?". In the same way you're saying that the sample would be biased because someone posted on YouTube, I'm saying it will _always_ be biased, regardless of size, because the post itself (and all posts) attracts a biased sample. A larger sample is good for a random sample, but I think posts attract a sufficiently biased sample by their very nature, so increasing the sample size won't help.
jjcon 5y ago
>Exactly this. All posts on the internet act as a selection filter; On the other hand, Firefox has been steadily losing tons of users and market share for the past decade so maybe people really do hate it?
- acdha 5y ago
  The problem is distinguishing that from Google using Gmail, Youtube, Docs, etc. to promote Chrome. You don't know whether someone stopped using Firefox because they like Chrome better or because they hit enough of those “we pinkie-swear it's not intentional” friction points and got tired of swimming upstream.
birksherty 5y ago
That may be true. But the fact here is that UI always become more illegible and that's why people are hating this update. It needs much more load on brain nowadays to click a button as everything looks so flat. Just for the sake of new update and job security by designers. We just get used to it later with the flatness and then they make it more flat. The cycle continues.

by cdrini 5y ago

jdlshore 5y ago

Agreed, the constant negativity (especially here on HN) gets very tiresome. For what it's worth, Firefox has been my daily driver for years and I'm very happy with it. The new tab design doesn't bother me at all.

hulitu 5y ago
I'll be positive. I like Firefox so much that i actively avoid it. I still need to keep it because some sites do not support other browsers.
0des 5y ago
I don't take it as negativity, per se, but in my opinion more often there are people expressing concern. For many of us, Firefox began as a relationship with Netscape; over the years this has been a living and evolving relationship, with a lot of positive things, but also a few more significant negative steps back in a direction that the community/userbase find to be antithetical to the spirit of what the project is/was/claims to be. Thank you for this reply, and trip down memory lane; I hope it is well received. I'm not trying to be a contrarian, I just wanted to interrupt this glass of Metamucil to share an alternative viewpoint.
vanilla_nut 5y ago
And Firefox has been my daily driver for years and the new tab design was enough to finally push me over to Tree Style Tabs full-time. I like everything about Firefox, except for the management practices of Mozilla and the constant unnecessary UI meddling that trashes my userChrome.css practically every update. It's very hard to guess overall user sentiment from anecdata.
- johnsoft 5y ago
  Speaking of Tree Style Tabs – Does anyone have an up-to-date user CSS that hides the top tabs and moves the toolbar up into the dead space? I used to have a snippet that worked, but it broke a few dozen versions ago.
  - Freaky 5y ago
    Here's what I'm using: https://gist.github.com/Freaky/b5cd807d518a176298c1d0e612dcc1aa https://gist.github.com/Freaky/b5cd807d518a176298c1d0e612dcc...
    - johnsoft 5y ago
      This is gold, thanks!
      - e_proxus 5y ago
        Here's my version for Windows. It keeps the window buttons and removes the empty space on top. https://gist.github.com/eproxus/f95c2d2bd0f9b8f5d2b6f464e27cc29a https://gist.github.com/eproxus/f95c2d2bd0f9b8f5d2b6f464e27c...
- pkage 5y ago
  On the subject of Tree Style Tabs, I've found Sidebery[0] to be a great replacement. Significantly less buggy, and more feature rich (panels, etc). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
drexlspivey 5y ago
The internet is basically a bunch of people living a super comfortable life, whining about trivial shit.

michaelmior 5y ago

> And more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on HackerNews dislike this UI." And even more exactly, it's "9 people out of all Firefox users who saw this on Hacker News and cared enough to leave a comment dislike this UI"

cptskippy 5y ago
Tbf, 9 users is a not insignificant number of their userbase. I say that as someone who has only ever used Firefox as my default browser. But yeah it seems like every release of ff there's a vocal group saying how it's going to pot and it's all doom and gloom. I have been using ff since it was called Phoenix and it's fine. I fire up Chrome and Edge out of necessity for work and have never been compelled to switch. Maybe I just don't need whatever it is that Chrome has that makes it so special but all the browsers are pretty decent these days. At some point around IE11 I realized I wasn't writing W3C standards HTML/JS and then having to hack it for noncompliant browsers. I wrote code once and it just worked.

rhizome 5y ago

>Instead of thinking "9/10 people dislike this UI", it's probably closer to "9 people out of all Firefox users dislike this UI". Yeah, even with your Bayes mention I'm gonna go ahead and get a second opinion on your statistical analysis there. I know, there's always someone in every crowd who quibbles with a poster's perspective, but you're hanging your entire sentiment on this one.

cdrini 5y ago
I'm not following your comment; can you expand? To rephrase what I was saying, I think that when we read 10 comments, of which nine are negative, we think "90% of people must dislike this". I don't think most people would actually think 90%, but I do think we "get a feeling" it's a very high percentage. We get this impression that the 10 comments are by 10 random people, so it's close to a random sample. But it's not, it's a very biased selection. The very post itself acts as a selection filter, only selecting people with certain properties. In this case, people with strong opinions about Firefox's UI. In short, the denominator isn't 10, but something much much greater. And this isn't a stastical analysis (not yet anyways!), just a statistics/psychology hunch :)
- rhizome 5y ago
  >I think that when we read 10 comments, of which nine are negative, we think "90% of people must dislike this" I don't. When I see something like that with such a small sample size, I think that the downvoters just got there first. That could be because the YouTube algorithm put the video in front of people who happen to have higher standards, or who are bitchier, or who are familiar with the poster and their disruptive complaints over on the Slack for $X. Could be anything...anything other than generalizable overall quality.
  - cdrini 5y ago
    I'm hypothesising that this is a bias people have when reading posts in the internet. People are susceptible to it to different degrees. And your statement does show this bias in a different way. You comment on the 10 being too small a sample size. That implies that if there were more posts, say 90 vs 10, you would draw some conclusions about the question "Do people like the new UI?". In the same way you're saying that the sample would be biased because someone posted on YouTube, I'm saying it will _always_ be biased, regardless of size, because the post itself (and all posts) attracts a biased sample. A larger sample is good for a random sample, but I think posts attract a sufficiently biased sample by their very nature, so increasing the sample size won't help.

jjcon 5y ago

>Exactly this. All posts on the internet act as a selection filter; On the other hand, Firefox has been steadily losing tons of users and market share for the past decade so maybe people really do hate it?

acdha 5y ago
The problem is distinguishing that from Google using Gmail, Youtube, Docs, etc. to promote Chrome. You don't know whether someone stopped using Firefox because they like Chrome better or because they hit enough of those “we pinkie-swear it's not intentional” friction points and got tired of swimming upstream.

birksherty 5y ago

That may be true. But the fact here is that UI always become more illegible and that's why people are hating this update. It needs much more load on brain nowadays to click a button as everything looks so flat. Just for the sake of new update and job security by designers. We just get used to it later with the flatness and then they make it more flat. The cycle continues.