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We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone
- LightHugger 4y agoI laughed... mozilla isn't the first company to hide user unfriendly nonsense under a guise of accessibility, but they're certainly in the running for causing the most annoyance with it!
- wlesieutre 4y agoWhat's user unfriendly about copying text out of images and making screenreaders faster?
- anm89 4y agoYeah, is that why they forcefully shut down my browser mid session any time they feel like updating? Seriously thinking of moving away from firefox these days
- NoahKAndrews 4y agoI believe that only happens when a Linux package manager updates Firefox while it's running.
- TillE 4y agoProbably. Never seen anything like that on Windows or macOS.
- OscarCunningham 4y agoI get 'Firefox needs to restart' all the time on MacOS.
- eropple 4y agoRight, but it doesn't auto-update and kill your session.
- cassianoleal 4y agoYeah it does. It might be possible to disable it though but as far as I'm aware it's enabled by default.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y agoNo, it prompts first.
- pasc1878 4y agoIt is a preference you can set.
- cassianoleal 4y agoIt is a preference. I’m not sure what the default is, but the recommended is to have it done without prompting.
- smeagull 4y agoHappens on Mac all the time.
- deathanatos 4y ago… Firefox on my work macOS is presently has an emblem on the hamburger menu, and if you open the menu: "Update available — restart now". I've been delaying for days? weeks? at this point. Clicking it causes the browser to disappear for ~20 seconds, +10s for the UI to become available.
- micahdeath 4y agoHappens on Windows
- kibwen 4y agoNever once in my experience, and I haven't configured it otherwise.
- godshatter 4y agoWhenever firefox on Windows at work starts to act flaky (won't let me open a new tab, stutters, locks up for a while) it's probably going to update when I close it down in frustration and open it again.
- solarkraft 4y agoI have (macOS).
- eikenberry 4y agoHow can this happen when Linux package managers don't auto-update (without help)? I mean if you don't want Firefox updated while you are using it you just just don't update it. If your distro has some sort of auto-update by default (do any do this?, I thought available update notifications was the standard) then disable it and get control of that back. Auto-updating packages is an anti-pattern (ie. bad).
- mjw1007 4y agoIt can also happen if you have two copies of 'stock' Firefox running (with different profiles) and one of them runs the update.
- deathanatos 4y ago… it doesn't, and I've just run `pacman -S` to check. (& it didn't.) (It does cause some tabs to message that a browser restart is required. Even so … this is really the first I hit this, as I'm usually doing updates when it is opportunistic to do so, such as right before a reboot (so any kernel updates happen).)
- jacquesm 4y agoThis could well be an issue with 'snap', see earlier thread on the subject.
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoNope, on ubuntu you get a popup while you are browsing the net saying that SNAP UPDATES ARE POSTPONED because you started something that is entombed in a snap... Then it does this every time you boot your os and start the browser first. Maybe, next time, before you start your browser it should update the snaps, then let you use the browser. NOOOOOOOO WAAAY! Display the popup for 2 weeks... or before you commit self harm you do the update yourself. And we are going to Mars!
- babypuncher 4y agoI've never had this happen on Windows or macOS. In Linux, I have had Firefox complain when my package manager updates Firefox while it is running, which I think is perfectly normal. What an odd thing to randomly complain about, and completely off-topic in regards to the article.
- b1476 4y agoAgreed. I often update (in Fedora) which causes Firefox to be restarted - never had any issues clicking the 'restart Firefox' button though which relaunches it and opens the last session, often opening dozens of older tabs without issue. Bizarre thing to complain about.
- lucb1e 4y agoI'm not the parent poster, but this happens to me as well. It's new and didn't happen about a year ago or before that. To everyone saying this is Snap: I'm using Debian. It does not have snap. To everyone saying this is apt: no, I also do not apt upgrade and then wonder why tab processes suddenly can't talk to the master process anymore. Unattended upgrades is not installed on this system (it's not a server and I do manual upgrades regularly, it's not as though that unexpectedly reports that there aren't any to be applied). It happens both on systems where firefox-esr is installed via apt and where Firefox is installed directly from Mozilla without going through apt (stability vs. timely features). I do remember that this indeed happens when I once did upgrade via apt and then continued using Firefox. Similar effect with e.g. Signal.
- hulitu 4y ago> We’re making Firefox accessible and delightful for everyone Then don't draw anything in the titlebar and let the user decide how big shall be the scrollbar . For a start ...
- leodriesch 4y agoYou can enable a classic titlebar (at least on Windows, can't test on other systems right now) by right clicking next to the URL bar and choosing Customize Toolbar. Then theres an option to enable the title bar in the lower left corner.
- maccard 4y agoI just checked and this is an option on my Mac too.
- mplanchard 4y agoThanks for this! Mine was on, and I never thought to turn it off (Linux, KDE). Unlike what seems like 99% of the people on HN, I don't pay that much attention to browser chrome, b/c my browser is just a window for stuff, but I do like the extra screen real estate.
- zerocrates 4y agoYeah, drawing the tabs in the space that would otherwise be the titlebar, that's a win in my books, reclaiming some space. If I want to see the page title I can hover over the tab.
- SilasX 4y agoOr let me customize the controls. Yes, yes, even before a tab has loaded a document from the internet!
- that 4y ago1. go to about:config 2. search for: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override 3. set the value from 0 to however many css pixels wide you want the scrollbar
- worble 4y agoThis is offtopic (and probably against the rules) but why is it that every thread about Firefox seems to be filled with toxic vitriol? It seems that everything Firefox does causes anguish for everyone in the comments, but I rarely see such hate leveraged at Chrome posts/updates. What causes this effect?
- mgkimsal 4y agoPossibly a sense of betrayal? There was a time when FF seemed like it had a future of being a large player in the browser market. Hanging in single-digit usage seems like that time has come/gone, yet we continue to see loads of things that are... ancillary to that earlier dream of 'being #1' (or just a larger player). Some announcements are 'nice', but almost all seem to point to 'too little too late' for the original dream. I say this as someone who uses chrome/ff/safari daily, and threw a 'Mozilla release party' (with a Mozilla cake!) back when Mozilla hit 1.0, and donated early on to FF/mozilla. They seemingly squandered years becoming less and less relevant to day to day usage, and it bugs some folks. On top of that, we get treated to press releases and social media tidbits now and then of "we're laying off dozens/hundreds of people, and our CEO makes millions of dollars". Depressing to see what it's become vs what people expected years ago...
- nyolfen 4y agospeaking from a distance, mozilla has long struck me as one of these parasitized open source orgs like wikimedia, famous for one piece of software or project but stuffed to the brim with bureaucratic careerists who contribute nothing
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y agoI dunno, when I started as a junior dev I really appreciated mozillas js guides and other webdev related documentation. They just seemed to have top notch stuff that made me respect the foundation, since they didn’t need to go out of their way to produce such a communally helpful thing. I’m sure to a webdev that already had a ton of experience they might’ve thought it was a waste of their donation money or whatever but I personally got a lot of benefit
- smeagull 4y agoCould they stop disabling the browser when it updates (running against the about:config settings) so that I don't lose work when I have a partially functional browser that won't load new pages which breaks every single page application?
- lucb1e 4y ago> a partially functional browser that won't load new pages I thought it was just me because it was going on for so long! Since maybe half a year, every time you use Firefox for a while (I suspend to RAM when not using my system), it starts to cheerfully go "whoops, this tab has crashed!" or "We need just one tiny thing to keep going [nuke¹ and restart whole browser as the only button]". Makes me want to firewall mozilla IP ranges and subscribe to an rss feed to see when a security release came out so that I can go to the update menu manually and do it not when I am in the middle of looking something up during a phone call with someone. It's also not as though this uses the regular updates mechanism. There is still Menu -> About -> "you're up to date" / "click here to download update" / "click here to restart to apply update" and it will also notify you of those releases. This is some other mechanism going on under the hood. Perhaps the Experiments thing that gets randomly deployed to random people's browsers, not sure, I thought I disabled all of that years ago. ¹Yes I know firefox and other browsers nowadays have this textarea/input content restoring and such. Ask me how well that works now that every developer decided they're too cool for basic HTML elements whose functionality have been honed for close to three decades now, and would rather re-invent everything from page loading to input fields by using dynamic javascript instead.
- Barrin92 4y agoThat image to text feature is great. I have someone who is almost blind in my immediate family and the increase of text screenshots is a really big problem for people who rely on screen readers. As a side-note this seems to be fueled by short-form platforms like Twitter that impose character limits, really not a good thing.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skilled 4y agodefine "delightful" for me please.
- adamrezich 4y agoit's hard to put this properly into words but recently I've noticed a trend of software self-describing as having subjective qualities that one would typically leave to the consumer to determine on their own. specifically, indie games self-describing as things like "cute" or "cozy", in addition to "delightful" (as seen here) and other similar words. it might be good marketing or whatever but to me it comes across as… presumptuous? like, I should be the judge of whether or not your product is cute/cozy/delightful/etc., you should show me that instead of telling me. it also evokes the Fire Phone's "Delighter" https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/20/excitement-engines https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/06/20/excitement-eng...
- yamtaddle 4y agoThe automatic image OCR thing is so nice that it's one of those features where once you use it, you immediately regard anything without it as obsolete. Instantly must-have. ... but that's a mac/iOS feature, not FF. Firefox is just enabling it, which is why that's mac-only (I'd guess it already worked on iOS "Firefox", but I'm not sure)
- laktak 4y agoFirefox invented vertical tabs but then forgot about them. Always having to search for the next short lived plugin made me switch to Edge. I'd be delighted if this would change
- paulryanrogers 4y agoWow really? I thought vertical tabs was invented by extensions. FWIW "Tree Style Tabs" has been around a long time, even making the jump to web extensions early.
- pasc1878 4y agoI used vertical tabs when Firefox was Netscape. I used OmniWeb. Currently Firefox is the only browser that I can get an addon to provide vertical tabs. IUt is called Tree Style Tab
- lzaaz 4y agoOff the top of my head, Edge and Vivaldi have vertical tabs built-in.
- solarkraft 4y agoI know that's not the benchmark in this comment chain, but Tree Style Tabs can actually do ... trees (who would've guessed?). Plain vertical tabs are fairly crippled in comparison.
- None4U 4y agoEdge can do groups, but there are only two levels.
- pasc1878 4y agoAh yes I forgot Vivaldi - which I did use but it just leaked memory even worse than Firefox - running on macOS
- lewisl9029 4y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago"Delightful", when applied to software, is a scary fucking word these days. It conjures images of horrific UI changes made by the whim of some designer who may or may not have ever actually used the software in question. That said, I recently switched to Firefox and am generally pleased with it.
- sfmike 4y agois it possible to abstract chrome extensions to firefox natively, this would 10x its value and adoption as chromium extenions are what keeps many people using chrome based browsers.
- solarkraft 4y agoBoth supoort Web Extensions, though the exposed APIs differ sightly and Chromium's version will be less powerful soon. What extension keeps you with Chrome? All that I need are available for Firefox.
- llanowarelves 4y agoHow similar are the two? How hard would it be to "shim" them in, like Deno is doing with Nodejs modules out of necessity.
- foxes 4y agoSurprise and delight users by displaying their birthday on the settings page.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
- xvilka 4y agoShould have invested into rewriting Firefox into Rust instead of doubling down on unrelated to browser activities (who needs them anyway?). Accessibility is important though, I have nothing against it.
- Gigachad 4y ago
- TwoNineFive 4y agoFirefox writers have some serious case of toxic positivity. It's very off-putting.
- t235a 4y agoAfter using many other browsers,Firefox,Brave,Vivaldi,Edge,chromium..I back to Chrome, it just work,even if MV3,leave only Firefox as backup.