8 ms·
What We're Working on in Firefox
- hoseja 2y agoFunneling money and resources away from Firefox and towards C-suite's pet projects? >"More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker." Oh, so towards making Firefox actively worse, got it.
- soundnote 2y ago[flagged]
- speckx 2y agoWho was this political activist?
- oh_nice_marmot 2y agoIs this political activist in the room with us?
- grayhatter 2y agoThis is toxic as hell. I have no idea how true it is, but even if I was willing to assume it is, you're complaining about a fixed problem instead of praising the new person for doing a good job and focusing on the things important to you. This context frame is how someone focused on the wrong things was in a leadership position. Where a significant portion of people bike shedding something unrelated to the specific topic. Complain about something that actually matters, or even better praise something that's actually valuable (to help people figure out what's actually worth their time). But don't be a dick about a resolved issue just because you still want to be angry.
- lurking15 2y ago> This is toxic as hell. I think it's not toxic, and long overdue that open source isn't hijacked by overt political activism of a certain persuasion that's led to a decade+ of stagnation and so much wasted money (on CEO pay, etc.).
- soundnote 2y agoNo, I am praising the new person. They get work done, and I love to see it. When Baker was boss, the browser stagnated, removed good features, and focused more on being a front for her activism, like the moronic "Independent Voices" thing where they hired a sneaker designer to make time-limited color themes to celebrate how "color can change the culture" and gave them cringe names like "Activist" and "Expressionist" instead of blue and yellow. It's under Baker that Mozilla went yeah, we actually like censorship and would like feeds to amplify the sources we like, because users seeing what they want to see on the 'net is bad, Mozilla's Friends doing it is Good. Baker's out, and within about twenty seconds there was an announcement that they've prioritized working on tab groups and vertical tabs, something that actually makes the browser better for the user. Of course I'm going to shit on Baker. She deserves all of it, and I'm beyond glad Firefox has someone who understands they should make a tool for users at the helm.
- kevincox 2y agoThe thing I would love to see the most is full shortcut management. 1. Configure which shortcuts override web page shortcuts. (Ex: Can't open history on Google Docs) 2. Customize shortcuts arbitrarily (add/remove/remap defaults). Bonus points for vim-style shortcuts being possible. 3. Shortcuts for JS/bookmarkets.
- pennomi 2y agoWhat would dramatically increase my user experience is removing the absolutely pointless keyboard shortcuts from the browser. For example, nobody needs ctrl-s to download the html source of a page. (It’s especially annoying for users like me because it’s reflexive to type ctrl-s when editing large blocks of text.)
- wasteduniverse 2y ago[dead]
- elashri 2y agoBut many people need ctrl-s to download pdf files rendered in the browser. Yes there is a button but that is a shortcut after all.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoIs that even the default setting? I believe my ff auto downloads linked pdfs
- pennomi 2y agoData files like PDF, JPEG, MP3, etc. are different than HTML pages. It’s sensible to keep the shortcut for those because they are useful files outside of the browser environment. It’s virtually never useful to have a shortcut to save HTML pages.
- nsvd 2y agoYou should be able to change this in about:config no? I use Ctrl-s often to save images.
- pennomi 2y agoTo my knowledge it is impossible to change this behavior in Firefox. You can hackily override it by adding an extension which injects some js that captures the ctrl-s keys, but that can also break sites that legitimately use that functionality. Data files like images are a reasonable use of the shortcut. Downloading HTML is nearly always unintended behavior.
- rekabis 2y agoHow about making Firefox compatible with Tab Mix Plus again? As in, open up the API again? I consider TBP to be the second most important extension that I could possibly install, right after uBlock, but getting it to work correctly is a bit of a slog due to how tabs have been isolated and restricted from the API. It’s not hyperbole that my entire usage of FF rests upon the functionality of TBP.
- brokenmachine 2y agoWhat's TBP? TMP? I also very much miss Tab Mix Plus...
- wintermutestwin 2y agoNative vertical tabs. About time! I hope they can match Sidebery’s functionality.
- g8oz 2y agoFirefox has a way of organizing bookmarks on its Android version known as Collections. It works really well and I wish they would bring it to their iOS and desktop versions. Bookmark management needs to evolve.
- bwat48 2y agoReally happy that they are finally improving multi-profile support
- redundantly 2y agocrosses fingers Please no AI, please no AI, just security and performance improvements. Please no AI. > We are approaching the use of AI in Firefox... Dammit
- lxgr 2y agoI’d love to have a local LLM in Firefox to summarize pages, generate boilerplate in email responses etc. They recently added a fully local translation feature and I love it.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoJust write your own damn email my word. Imagine you text your friend and an ai model replies. Thats what you are doing to your coworkers.
- lxgr 2y agoIf you can convince the entire business world to get rid of formalities, please do go ahead! Otherwise, don't patronize people for using tools that make their jobs/lives easier. English is also not everyone's first language, and sometimes details like a non-awkward salutation or signing off of an email do matter.
- asadotzler 2y agoAndre Natal and I did the Firefox translation feature. It started as a research project with Mozilla and some EU schools and was called Bergamot. We adapted that for Firefox starting a couple years ago and shipped last year. The technology was a perfect fit for the user feature. I think the same holds for summarization (a Reader View feature maybe?) and as someone what was on Firefox's A11Y team for almost 5 years, I think there's some work Mozilla could do with image alt text and perhaps fixing up some common quirks that trip up screen readers so they don't have to do that fixing themselves. There are several places I believe this relatively new tech fits perfectly with web browser use cases. Those mostly aren't monetize-able though, so they're "for users" not "for money" and users don't really seem to be up for grabs these days, too locked into their routines, and so those features may not even be competitive advantages. Still, doing good for your existing user base by incorporating new tech that fits their use cases well, even if it doesn't make you more money or win you more uses is a good thing and the fact that Mozilla's not chasing growth like FANG and others means they can do more of that unprofitable "good stuff." I worked on Mozilla for 25 years. It was an amazing ride and knowing what I know about Mozilla I feel confident they'll behave not just responsibly with AI, but as paragons of virtue and a north star for the industry (and perhaps even for governments as the Mozilla Foundation has been working on responsible AI for half a decade and is in regular contact with the US and EU governments on just these kinds of issues.)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eviks 2y ago> More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker. Why not just copy and improve Vivaldi and allow users to easily rename/move/delete the menus? You wouldn't know what a specific user's top actions are
- fattegourmet 2y agoespecially when you consider that one of FF's target user bases are people who turn off all telemetry
- eviks 2y agoYeah, though telemetry wouldn't help since this level of attention to UI design doesn't (practically ) exist, and it's unrealistic to expect it from FF, so the next best thing is allow user configuration. Also you can even have a dynamic sorting section part within some menu based on how often you use a given menu item or depending on which profile you're using etc.
- asadotzler 2y agoA couple percent of Firefox's user base turn off telemetry. That is a target group, but they're hardly representative. (I'm not bullshitting. I worked for Mozilla for 25 years, including in the Netscape era. Brendan Eich and I built the Mozilla 1.0 roadmap. I was a co-creator of Firefox along with Blake and Ben. I was Firefox's PM at Mozilla when we deployed telemetry and I was a Firefox and A11Y PM when me and Andre Natal introduced local LLM-based language translation to Firefox a couple years ago (Nightly only, release came last year after I left.) If those credentials aren't enough to make my claim believable, then I don't know what else to say.)
- eviks 2y agoIt's definitely believable, defaults are very powerful (I'd expect a higher number, but not a very big one) Though out of curiosity - if someone turns all telemetry off, how would you know of this use to count?
- aaptel 2y agoVertical tabs are coming back, finally... I still miss this tree tab extension I was using maybe 7 years ago.
- unaindz 2y agosidebery ftw
- gertop 2y agoTree Style Tabs extension never left.
- forgotpwd16 2y agoOne of the reason I'm still on Firefox.
- Shorel 2y agoI use vertical tabs with Edge =)
- luuurker 2y agoI'd rather have no tabs at all than to use Edge.
- KaiMagnus 2y agoGreat news. FFs UI has been falling behind the other browsers lately and vertical tabs is something I really like. Good that they also want to include tab groups so there’s hope this will work like Tree Style Tabs. That extension is probably the gold standard when it comes to tab organization.
- guilhas 2y agoOr they could invest resources in useful things and we continue to use Tree Style Tabs In what way is the UI falling behind? How advanced can it be? The most advanced thing was probably XUL that they disabled
- jszymborski 2y agoVertical/Grouped tabs would be major. All I want after that is a way to switch profiles from the browser like literally any other browser does.
- alargemoose 2y agoI’ve always thought the long running “Multi-Account Containers” in Firefox was a better implementation of this idea than having to switch profiles and open a whole new window, when often what I need is a tab or two for a profile other than the one I’m in. You can even configure proxies to run on a per-container basis if that’s useful. But I can certainly understand wanting to better separate what your working on then just tabs with colored indicators to remind you which is which at a glance. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers
- apocalyptic0n3 2y agoThose are useful but they lack the ability to have profile-specific history and bookmarks. I have a completely different set of bookmarks for Home and Work use and would never dream of mixing the two. Profiles are the only way to deal with that, but profiles are themselves difficult to work with.
- luuurker 2y agoRecommending containers as a replacement for profiles is a bit like recommending a wheel as a replacement for a car. Containers do one thing very well and are very useful, but they don't let you have different bookmarks, add-ons, themes, settings, sync, etc.