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> Are you using "refresh" very often? Ummm yes? Funny, I just wrote another comment complaining how hitting refresh on a major airline's flight status page is

> Are you using "refresh" very often? Ummm yes? Funny, I just wrote another comment complaining how hitting refresh on a major airline's flight status page is liable to give one of those terrible "something went wrong" messages (apparently the search results are liable to expire, but until they do, refreshing will actually update the info, so it is useful to periodically press to see if the flight got delayed). Combining stop and refresh is also dangerous since that's a race condition. Suppose the page is taking forever, I decide I've had enough of that and want to press stop. But in the second it takes me to actually click on it, the page decided to finally load! Now my click, instead of stopping the annoying spinner animation, clears out the information that FINALLY arrived and brought the annoying spinner back. (I actually think there is a pretty good case to just remove the stop button though, it isn't vital and just hitting back or close does the same thing anyway. But combining it with the refresh button is about the worst possible thing you could do to either button. It takes one useful button and one meh button and combines them into one awful button.) Speaking of clicks, that's actually the last straw that made me abandon firefox entirely: in version 75, they broke clicking on the url bar. Instead of doing the sane thing - putting the cursor where I clicked - it instead selects all. Before, double click would select all, meaning if you wanted that, it was still easily available. Now double click instead selects... a word. So they completely removed the very useful single click functionality and turned double click into a completely useless behavior. Absolutely unbearable. I could tolerate or undo most the other UI changes they did, but this click thing couldn't be user style'd away, couldn't be configured away. They just shoved this massive breakage down. So I uninstalled it . > takes space even when you're not loading I'd rather have a predictable UI of marginal utility that doesn't change out from under me than a UI that randomly changes from bad to worse in its own time. At least you can get used to consistency, even if it is consistently mediocre. > What makes v1 "the best ever"? Don't put things in quotes that weren't actually said. I actually said "v1 was not great but ok, and it got overall worse". There's actually specific changes I think were good, coupled with other changes that were bad.

yoavm 5y ago
I'm sorry I rephrased your text, but you did write "v1 remains the best UI firefox has ever". How is that so different from "the best ever" is beyond me. What browser did you move to after you uninstalled Firefox because of the click in the URL thing? Seems like Chrome does the same. To me it actually makes sense - I think most of the times when a user reaches the URL they want to put a new one, not to edit the existing one. This behavior makes that easier.
- destructionator 5y ago
  > How is that so different from "the best ever" is beyond me. "the best ever" implies it is the best.... ever. Inclusive of all competition. "the best firefox has ever had" limits the comparison to just firefox. > What browser did you move to after you uninstalled Firefox because of the click in the URL thing? I made my own ui skin for chromium. I'm not terribly happy about using chromium but I couldn't figure out how to use the firefox engine for it - another strategic mistake by the incompetent buffoons at Mozilla not making this easy, and of course doing the whole browser myself is a big job (heck, even the UI skin is a big job, there's a LOT of things still on my todo list, but it minimally works without driving me absolutely nuts which is more than I can say about Firefox's recent versions). > To me it actually makes sense - I think most of the times when a user reaches the URL they want to put a new one, not to edit the existing one. This behavior makes that easier. Most the time I want a new one, I'll open a new tab and thus have a blank url. If I'm clicking on an existing url, it is because I want to edit it. But if I do want to replace it, the old double click behavior to select all made this utterly trivial too: single click to edit, double click to replace. Hell, they even used to have an about:config thing to make single click select all, but in their infinite wisdom, they removed even that hidden config option to turn it back off. With the new behavior, editing a url becomes quite frustrating. The work around is to click, wait until the double click time period elapses, then click again. Don't do it too soon though, or it will do the completely useless "select word" thing instead. If you click a third time, it will now select all again! Fourth click? Back to select word. You must wait for a while before you can just click to edit. Oh, and do you use middle click on X? That single click select all... does NOT assert the PRIMARY selection. But double and triple click do! So if you single click it, it looks selected... but it isn't. Double click out of old habit? Now it is wiped out. Ridiculous. So this change marginally benefits some users (who probably don't really care) while being devastatingly crippling to the people who do. Maybe some utilitarian function can say +1 usability point times 10 million users outweighs -1000 usability points to 1000 users. But I'm gonna go ahead and disagree. Mozilla is a niche product at this point, maybe they should start caring about the 1000 users they have left.
  - yoasif_ 5y ago
    > I made my own ui skin for chromium. That was easier than this patch? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570#c92 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570#c92
Teever 5y ago
If you're using your mouse to refresh why not right click and refresh instead of moving the cursor all the way up to the top left of the screen?
- jhasse 5y ago
  Doesnt always work because some pages overwrite the context menu.
imiric 5y ago
Well said. I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. Many of these changes were done to unify the UI across platforms. Yet using Firefox on iPadOS is an even worse experience than on desktop. Tapping on the URL bar has the same select-all behavior, and it always takes me several taps in order to place the cursor where I want it, in order to change part of the URL. It's absolutely infuriating. Not to mention that it ignores arrow keys on the Smart Keyboard Folio to clear the selection, so it forces you to use awkward and imprecise taps. /facepalm And I constantly run into major UI bugs, like tabs getting confused and showing blank or wrong titles; sometimes tapping marks the tab as selected instead of switching to it; sometimes tapping on links inexplicably opens them in a new tab, etc. How these issues continue to plague a browser as popular as FF is beyond me. It almost feels like it's never tested by developers and designers and updates are just pushed indiscriminately. I'm considering just giving up and using Safari, since that's what I'm using anyway behind the awful FF UI.

yoavm 5y ago

I'm sorry I rephrased your text, but you did write "v1 remains the best UI firefox has ever". How is that so different from "the best ever" is beyond me. What browser did you move to after you uninstalled Firefox because of the click in the URL thing? Seems like Chrome does the same. To me it actually makes sense - I think most of the times when a user reaches the URL they want to put a new one, not to edit the existing one. This behavior makes that easier.

destructionator 5y ago
> How is that so different from "the best ever" is beyond me. "the best ever" implies it is the best.... ever. Inclusive of all competition. "the best firefox has ever had" limits the comparison to just firefox. > What browser did you move to after you uninstalled Firefox because of the click in the URL thing? I made my own ui skin for chromium. I'm not terribly happy about using chromium but I couldn't figure out how to use the firefox engine for it - another strategic mistake by the incompetent buffoons at Mozilla not making this easy, and of course doing the whole browser myself is a big job (heck, even the UI skin is a big job, there's a LOT of things still on my todo list, but it minimally works without driving me absolutely nuts which is more than I can say about Firefox's recent versions). > To me it actually makes sense - I think most of the times when a user reaches the URL they want to put a new one, not to edit the existing one. This behavior makes that easier. Most the time I want a new one, I'll open a new tab and thus have a blank url. If I'm clicking on an existing url, it is because I want to edit it. But if I do want to replace it, the old double click behavior to select all made this utterly trivial too: single click to edit, double click to replace. Hell, they even used to have an about:config thing to make single click select all, but in their infinite wisdom, they removed even that hidden config option to turn it back off. With the new behavior, editing a url becomes quite frustrating. The work around is to click, wait until the double click time period elapses, then click again. Don't do it too soon though, or it will do the completely useless "select word" thing instead. If you click a third time, it will now select all again! Fourth click? Back to select word. You must wait for a while before you can just click to edit. Oh, and do you use middle click on X? That single click select all... does NOT assert the PRIMARY selection. But double and triple click do! So if you single click it, it looks selected... but it isn't. Double click out of old habit? Now it is wiped out. Ridiculous. So this change marginally benefits some users (who probably don't really care) while being devastatingly crippling to the people who do. Maybe some utilitarian function can say +1 usability point times 10 million users outweighs -1000 usability points to 1000 users. But I'm gonna go ahead and disagree. Mozilla is a niche product at this point, maybe they should start caring about the 1000 users they have left.
- yoasif_ 5y ago
  > I made my own ui skin for chromium. That was easier than this patch? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570#c92 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570#c92

Teever 5y ago

If you're using your mouse to refresh why not right click and refresh instead of moving the cursor all the way up to the top left of the screen?

jhasse 5y ago
Doesnt always work because some pages overwrite the context menu.

imiric 5y ago

Well said. I wish I could upvote this comment more than once. Many of these changes were done to unify the UI across platforms. Yet using Firefox on iPadOS is an even worse experience than on desktop. Tapping on the URL bar has the same select-all behavior, and it always takes me several taps in order to place the cursor where I want it, in order to change part of the URL. It's absolutely infuriating. Not to mention that it ignores arrow keys on the Smart Keyboard Folio to clear the selection, so it forces you to use awkward and imprecise taps. /facepalm And I constantly run into major UI bugs, like tabs getting confused and showing blank or wrong titles; sometimes tapping marks the tab as selected instead of switching to it; sometimes tapping on links inexplicably opens them in a new tab, etc. How these issues continue to plague a browser as popular as FF is beyond me. It almost feels like it's never tested by developers and designers and updates are just pushed indiscriminately. I'm considering just giving up and using Safari, since that's what I'm using anyway behind the awful FF UI.