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In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a

by encom 3y ago

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fail, it would get arrogantly WONTFIXed and eventually locked. This cycle has repeated for most of Firefox's existence, but it has accelerated. Vivaldi can customise damn near every aspect of its user interface. I can set up every menu how I want it. Remove things I done use, and move the most used item to the top. I can dock my tab-bar wherever I want. I can have a proper status bar. The list goes on. It's what Firefox should have been.

orbital223 3y ago
This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.
signaru 3y ago
I still use FF, but I do miss how customizable its UI used to be. I even made it look like Chrome back then!
eviks 3y ago
Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant
int_19h 3y ago
Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl. And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them. I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.
ako 3y ago
Users are just different, I’ve been a happy Firefox (and pocket) user for many years, and wouldn’t be happy with these so called improvements. I don’t need customizability, just need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don’t feel that Firefox is at war with me.
- int_19h 3y ago
  Why would you be unhappy about customizability if the default UI works good enough out of the box for you? It's not like you're forced to customize.
sleepybrett 3y ago
> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. citation fucking needed.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851, where the primary source for encom's opinions (encom himself) says that it's his opinion. Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be proven or disproven.
- inversetelecine 3y ago
  The citation is right there: "In my opinion"
  - sleepybrett 3y ago
    I would like actual facts to back up this opinion.
    - encom 3y ago
      Fine, here's the one of the last changes that put me over the edge: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128 Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that trash heap. As mentioned, this has been a repeating occurrence. "View Image" was a tiny thing, but I happened to use it many times per day. And many MANY such tiny things just wears you down eventually.
      - sleepybrett 3y ago
        Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later.... Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.
jjav 3y ago
> Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time Every upgrade? I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.

by encom 3y ago

orbital223 3y ago

This has been my exact journey, been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox, finally got fed up a couple of years ago and switched to Vivaldi. It's such a breath of fresh air not having to dread update notifications anymore.

signaru 3y ago

I still use FF, but I do miss how customizable its UI used to be. I even made it look like Chrome back then!

eviks 3y ago

Indeed, the level of customization in Vivaldi is awesome and what Firefox should've done instead of going the other way (that would counter the lame excuse you link to elsewhere that "view image" makes the menu too long - just make the menu editable, duh!), even though their UI is unfortunately not very petformant

int_19h 3y ago

Feature-wise, Vivaldi is great indeed. But every time I actually try to switch to it as a primary for any prolonged amount of time, I inevitably run into major perf issues and/or deal-breaking bugs. In fact, my most recent attempt was just about a week ago, and vertical tabs w/grouping had numerous visual glitches for me, with tab buttons occasionally becoming taller than the screen, white rectangles that are supposed to go around tab groups having half the width that the tabs inside do etc. I "solved" this by using the Windows pane instead, and all was fine, until the browser just started randomly lagging to the point where everything slowed to the crawl. And yes, I did report it to their bug tracker - which is private, by the way, so there's no way to know who else is having those problems, or how work on them is proceeding. I will say that the bugs I reported on the last attempt are fixed, but it's little consolation when new equally bad bugs show up in their place. And as for perf issues, there are numerous active threads on Vivaldi forums about them. I'd love to use Vivaldi as my primary, esp. now that they also have an iOS offering, so tab & history sync across all of my devices is possible. But it really needs to be more stable.

ako 3y ago

Users are just different, I’ve been a happy Firefox (and pocket) user for many years, and wouldn’t be happy with these so called improvements. I don’t need customizability, just need it to work good enough out of the box. Definitely don’t feel that Firefox is at war with me.

int_19h 3y ago
Why would you be unhappy about customizability if the default UI works good enough out of the box for you? It's not like you're forced to customize.

sleepybrett 3y ago

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. citation fucking needed.

bigstrat2003 3y ago
Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851, where the primary source for encom's opinions (encom himself) says that it's his opinion. Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be proven or disproven.
inversetelecine 3y ago
The citation is right there: "In my opinion"
- sleepybrett 3y ago
  I would like actual facts to back up this opinion.
  - encom 3y ago
    Fine, here's the one of the last changes that put me over the edge: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128 Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that trash heap. As mentioned, this has been a repeating occurrence. "View Image" was a tiny thing, but I happened to use it many times per day. And many MANY such tiny things just wears you down eventually.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
      Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later.... Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.

jjav 3y ago

> Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time Every upgrade? I've been using firefox since forever (as long as it has existed) and while I was very annoyed when they removed the customizable UI support a few years ago, that's really the one and only time when they broke functionality as far as I've ever been able to notice.