6 ms·

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of

I use Firefox sort of begrudgingly. It's marginally less bad than the other options, but it's still an awful browser. I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. It has hamburger menus on desktop and a lot of weird space-saving design that makes no sense on a modern high resolution display. Buttons are small, have cryptic flat Linear B icons with no labels, and the menus are hard to navigate. It's also nearly impossible to disable all the tracking they do. Even if you do, they'll sometimes remotely change your settings, so there's no guarantee settings will stay the way you configured them. They love to talk about how privacy is important and keep building tools to disable other people's tracking, but their own data gathering is sacrosanct and must be retained at all costs. Overall Mozilla seems to wage an all-out war on user agency, constantly trying to take away configuration options, while pushing shit nobody wants like Pocket or their themes.

micahdeath 4y ago
This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Yeah. I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.
3np 4y ago
Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration). Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.
starik36 4y ago
> Buttons are small... I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  If the buttons are small, they are harder to click. It's also harder to understand what they do, which is important when they have icons that are just cryptic monochrome squiggles. What's the merit in making the buttons unobtrusive? What are you going to do with all those saved pixels? There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration. When the browser is covering a sixth of my screen it's already uncomfortably large. There is no reason to save hundreds of pixels when there are literally millions to spare.
  - starik36 4y ago
    Given this line of thought, why doesn't Firefox put every single icon from the menu on the toolbar. Since there is so much space. My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive. Looking at my toolbar now, I really don't think they are that small. Just the right size. https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Well if you make something hard to access, of course it won't be used very often. The buttons are pretty tiny within the context of the entire screen: https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD
    - thesimp 4y ago
      Your toolbar is a nightmare for people that may have some eyesight problems or are not expert FPS shooters in the latest triple A game and miss some mouse dexterity. What I'm trying to say is that a large surface is good for muscle memory. And I have a lot of pixels to play with, 4k screens are cheap. Of-course programs have to scale between small and (very) big screens, but making everything very small by default is not the way to go.
    - rrishi 4y ago
      Curious to know the set of extensions you've got there
slondr 4y ago
It’s trivial to increase the UI button size in Firefox, though.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Really? How do you do that?
  - swozey 4y ago
    I can't open it right now but I'm pretty sure you right click anywhere around the bookmarks bar (NOT a bookmark) you get an option to customize the UI/bars and there's a checkbox for icon size Unless I'm completely mixing this up with Chrome but I don't see that here.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Nope, not getting any of that. If it ever existed, it's another casualty in the war on configurability. There's an option to add more space between the icons, but they're still as tiny as they ever were.
      - moskimus 4y ago
        It still exists. Customize Toolbar -> Density (bottom left). There are only 2 or 3 presets, but it is possible to slightly adjust the icon size. Just confirmed on 109.0.1.
        marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Huh, I get two presets. And the density only changes the spacing between the buttons. They're still the same size.
        moskimus 4y ago
        You may be right. I checked before replying, but I may have just been tricked by an optical illusion with the extra padding shifting everything. By default there are only 2 densities, but there used to also be a "Compact" option which was removed. I believe it is possible to still enable this, though it is officially unsupported at this point.
deafpolygon 4y ago
You can change every aspect of the chrome yourself if you want.
Georgelemental 4y ago
I appreciate the space saving. Not everyone has a 4K 30 inch display
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Why can't a browser exist that makes use of such a display though? Seems like every browser is targeting 12½" monitors to the detriment of proper desktops.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    I would not be shocked if 13” was, in fact, the modal display size. A lot of people work off of laptops or even tablets.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Why is not possible to cater to the needs of more than one group of users? Windows 95 had the ability to change the size of its icons. Clearly it can be done.
      - lostmsu 4y ago
        You can scale the whole UI https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_anyway_to_increase_size_of_entire_ui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_an...
zorrolovsky 4y ago
I agree with your sentiment. To address privacy concerns I decided to use a privacy-oriented fork: LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/. I use it as a daily driver for all my use cases and it works like a charm (inc extensions). It is frustrating that Mozilla/firefox position themselves as user friendly and privacy-focused but they don't walk the talk. It's all marketing lies so my sympathy for the org is on an all-time low.
altairprime 4y ago
Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry. There is a lot of telemetry, but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I don't want my applications to dial home and tell Mozilla what I'm doing with them. Doesn't matter what you call it.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    It does. “I don’t want telemetry” and “I don’t want tracking” are two overlapping sets of people. Whether or not you care about the distinction, others do.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      It doesn't. You're replying to marginalia_nu, who has just clarified their position after you made a point. You're not replying to all those hypothetical people who haven't made a peep.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level. In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.
  - altairprime 4y ago
    Telemetry analysis doesn’t care who you are, and makes no effort to find out, even if it’s plausible that one could find out of effort was taken to do so. Tracking analysis does care who you are, and makes every effort to find out, whether to sell marketing to you or to sell your data to others. It isn’t necessary to deanonymize telemetry to make use of it, and it’s quite costly to do so (both in PII storage duties to GDPR et al. and in enrichment terms), so tracking isn’t knowingly done by default by lots of telemetry implementers (for example, Homebrew). Note that telemetry implemented using Facebook clearly does end up with Facebook trying to track you in order to sell you ads and sell your data; implementation decisions are critically relevant when it comes to collecting telemetry, in order to not accidentally cause tracking.
rft 4y ago
As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will also be deleted on browser restart. Sure, I can use the developer edition, but why? I am not a web developer. I get Mozilla's arguments about user security, but isn't an about:config tweak obscure enough? It already shows you plenty warning when you open it. Looking at the mentioned LibreWolf, the changes reminded me of my time using ungoogled Chromium. I left that path, because it seemed like an uphill battle to keep up with upstream changes in the long term. Also you potentially risk using a somewhat outdated browser until all changes are ported to the new version. I was also not a fan of giving Chromium browsers additional market share. For me switching to FF was primarily about using a browser supporting user choice and privacy, not for its UX or anything else. However Mozilla is losing my trust in this regard. Opt-out telemetry/tracking/whatever you want to call it and user experiments as well as reducing user choice with forced signatures by a central party, this sounds counter to why I switched in the first place. I hate that I have to go into settings after installing it to disable "features", it is not Windows... [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef... (I am also a bit surprised I had to strip an utm key from this URL...)
- pja 4y ago
  Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system. There are (sadly) plenty of people out there who will install a browser extension & tweak an about:config setting if you set up the right incentives to get them to look past the warnings. The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.
  - oauea 4y ago
    When you dig deeper, you will indeed find that the public reason for these kind of restrictions is "to keep the user safe". They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions. It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.
93po 4y ago
I've used FF for a decade and have literally never noticed a UI change that I gave any thought to whatsoever.
andrewaylett 4y ago
If you want a menu, and you're not on Mac where Firefox supplies a full set of menus by default like any other well-behaved Mac application, hit the "Alt" key on your keyboard. Or right click on the toolbar and show it. Honestly, I wish I could turn it off because I only ever activate it by accident when switching from Mac to Linux and forgetting to switch from Cmd to Ctrl. > I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. You're entitled to your opinion, certainly, but please do be aware that not everyone agrees with you? I quite like Alpenglow, I'm happy with the combined onmibar, I trust them to not to abuse their telemetry. My understanding is that the data suggests that more people use themes than use "regular" add-ons. It's by no means perfect, but it's a whole lot better than one might expect from reading all the negative comments on pretty much any Firefox thread.

micahdeath 4y ago

This also sounds like Chrome and Edge.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Yeah. I think part of the problem is that if all they're doing with their browser is to emulate Chrome, they'll never be more than a Chrome clone.

3np 4y ago

Some of those things are sorted out easily with Librewolf (patched Firefox) and Arkenfox (drop-in user.js configuration). Both are easy and encouraged to customize but also work fine out of the box.

starik36 4y ago

> Buttons are small... I don't understand this criticism. How often do you actually have to use those buttons? At best, once in a long while. So given that, why not make the buttons unobtrusive.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
If the buttons are small, they are harder to click. It's also harder to understand what they do, which is important when they have icons that are just cryptic monochrome squiggles. What's the merit in making the buttons unobtrusive? What are you going to do with all those saved pixels? There is no pixel shortage on desktop! That's a mobile design consideration. When the browser is covering a sixth of my screen it's already uncomfortably large. There is no reason to save hundreds of pixels when there are literally millions to spare.
- starik36 4y ago
  Given this line of thought, why doesn't Firefox put every single icon from the menu on the toolbar. Since there is so much space. My argument is that since those buttons are rarely used, they should be unobtrusive. Looking at my toolbar now, I really don't think they are that small. Just the right size. https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png https://i.imgur.com/wyM9c2k.png
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Well if you make something hard to access, of course it won't be used very often. The buttons are pretty tiny within the context of the entire screen: https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD https://imgur.com/BGKsaeD
  - thesimp 4y ago
    Your toolbar is a nightmare for people that may have some eyesight problems or are not expert FPS shooters in the latest triple A game and miss some mouse dexterity. What I'm trying to say is that a large surface is good for muscle memory. And I have a lot of pixels to play with, 4k screens are cheap. Of-course programs have to scale between small and (very) big screens, but making everything very small by default is not the way to go.
  - rrishi 4y ago
    Curious to know the set of extensions you've got there

slondr 4y ago

It’s trivial to increase the UI button size in Firefox, though.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Really? How do you do that?
- swozey 4y ago
  I can't open it right now but I'm pretty sure you right click anywhere around the bookmarks bar (NOT a bookmark) you get an option to customize the UI/bars and there's a checkbox for icon size Unless I'm completely mixing this up with Chrome but I don't see that here.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Nope, not getting any of that. If it ever existed, it's another casualty in the war on configurability. There's an option to add more space between the icons, but they're still as tiny as they ever were.
    - moskimus 4y ago
      It still exists. Customize Toolbar -> Density (bottom left). There are only 2 or 3 presets, but it is possible to slightly adjust the icon size. Just confirmed on 109.0.1.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Huh, I get two presets. And the density only changes the spacing between the buttons. They're still the same size.
        moskimus 4y ago
        You may be right. I checked before replying, but I may have just been tricked by an optical illusion with the extra padding shifting everything. By default there are only 2 densities, but there used to also be a "Compact" option which was removed. I believe it is possible to still enable this, though it is officially unsupported at this point.

deafpolygon 4y ago

You can change every aspect of the chrome yourself if you want.

Georgelemental 4y ago

I appreciate the space saving. Not everyone has a 4K 30 inch display

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Why can't a browser exist that makes use of such a display though? Seems like every browser is targeting 12½" monitors to the detriment of proper desktops.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  I would not be shocked if 13” was, in fact, the modal display size. A lot of people work off of laptops or even tablets.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Why is not possible to cater to the needs of more than one group of users? Windows 95 had the ability to change the size of its icons. Clearly it can be done.
    - lostmsu 4y ago
      You can scale the whole UI https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_anyway_to_increase_size_of_entire_ui/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnf7y/is_there_an...

zorrolovsky 4y ago

I agree with your sentiment. To address privacy concerns I decided to use a privacy-oriented fork: LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/. I use it as a daily driver for all my use cases and it works like a charm (inc extensions). It is frustrating that Mozilla/firefox position themselves as user friendly and privacy-focused but they don't walk the talk. It's all marketing lies so my sympathy for the org is on an all-time low.

altairprime 4y ago

Telemetry is not synonymous with tracking. You can implement telemetry while not tracking users. You can track users without telemetry. There is a lot of telemetry, but there doesn’t seem to be any tracking.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I don't want my applications to dial home and tell Mozilla what I'm doing with them. Doesn't matter what you call it.
- altairprime 4y ago
  It does. “I don’t want telemetry” and “I don’t want tracking” are two overlapping sets of people. Whether or not you care about the distinction, others do.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It doesn't. You're replying to marginalia_nu, who has just clarified their position after you made a point. You're not replying to all those hypothetical people who haven't made a peep.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
jeroenhd 4y ago
What's the difference here? There's a unique client ID included in the report, so that means statistics can be tracked at the individual level. In theory you can have telemetry without tracking but I'm pretty sure nobody does it anymore.
- altairprime 4y ago
  Telemetry analysis doesn’t care who you are, and makes no effort to find out, even if it’s plausible that one could find out of effort was taken to do so. Tracking analysis does care who you are, and makes every effort to find out, whether to sell marketing to you or to sell your data to others. It isn’t necessary to deanonymize telemetry to make use of it, and it’s quite costly to do so (both in PII storage duties to GDPR et al. and in enrichment terms), so tracking isn’t knowingly done by default by lots of telemetry implementers (for example, Homebrew). Note that telemetry implemented using Facebook clearly does end up with Facebook trying to track you in order to sell you ads and sell your data; implementation decisions are critically relevant when it comes to collecting telemetry, in order to not accidentally cause tracking.

rft 4y ago

As a long time FF user my opinion of it took quite a hit recently. I wanted to hack together a small personal extension, likely outside the scope of what Tampermonkey can do easily. I was really shocked by the mandatory signature enforcement. You need to get your extension signed by Mozilla with no way to disable it in the standard FF, the about:config setting does nothing (see [1]). Your temporary extension will also be deleted on browser restart. Sure, I can use the developer edition, but why? I am not a web developer. I get Mozilla's arguments about user security, but isn't an about:config tweak obscure enough? It already shows you plenty warning when you open it. Looking at the mentioned LibreWolf, the changes reminded me of my time using ungoogled Chromium. I left that path, because it seemed like an uphill battle to keep up with upstream changes in the long term. Also you potentially risk using a somewhat outdated browser until all changes are ported to the new version. I was also not a fan of giving Chromium browsers additional market share. For me switching to FF was primarily about using a browser supporting user choice and privacy, not for its UX or anything else. However Mozilla is losing my trust in this regard. Opt-out telemetry/tracking/whatever you want to call it and user experiments as well as reducing user choice with forced signatures by a central party, this sounds counter to why I switched in the first place. I hate that I have to go into settings after installing it to disable "features", it is not Windows... [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-on-signing-in-firef... (I am also a bit surprised I had to strip an utm key from this URL...)

pja 4y ago
Usually you find that the reason these barriers exist is because people were abusing the previous system. There are (sadly) plenty of people out there who will install a browser extension & tweak an about:config setting if you set up the right incentives to get them to look past the warnings. The price of protecting these people from those that would take advantage of them is developers having to download a different version of the browser in order to develop their extensions.
- oauea 4y ago
  When you dig deeper, you will indeed find that the public reason for these kind of restrictions is "to keep the user safe". They claim to be worried about malware installing their own extensions, so they lock everything down. As if that same malware wouldn't just patch the firefox binary to allow loading unsigned extensions. It's ridiculous and obviously meant as a first step towards a walled garden. It's very unfortunate that firefox followed google in this.

93po 4y ago

I've used FF for a decade and have literally never noticed a UI change that I gave any thought to whatsoever.

andrewaylett 4y ago

If you want a menu, and you're not on Mac where Firefox supplies a full set of menus by default like any other well-behaved Mac application, hit the "Alt" key on your keyboard. Or right click on the toolbar and show it. Honestly, I wish I could turn it off because I only ever activate it by accident when switching from Mac to Linux and forgetting to switch from Cmd to Ctrl. > I vehemently disagree with almost all of its design decisions, and with every new release they seem to stray even farther from sane UX. You're entitled to your opinion, certainly, but please do be aware that not everyone agrees with you? I quite like Alpenglow, I'm happy with the combined onmibar, I trust them to not to abuse their telemetry. My understanding is that the data suggests that more people use themes than use "regular" add-ons. It's by no means perfect, but it's a whole lot better than one might expect from reading all the negative comments on pretty much any Firefox thread.