5 ms·

> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to

by worble 2y ago

> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more. I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".

persnickety 2y ago
On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better. But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
- akkartik 2y ago
  > on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving? My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible. We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
  - persnickety 2y ago
    I'm using Firefox. I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history. I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff. I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are. On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge. I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
    - akkartik 2y ago
      I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world. I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
      - persnickety 2y ago
        Multiple tools from multiple people make it less likely that the entire ecosystem is going to collapse, but makes it likelier that any one tool will stop working. But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software). The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it. I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
> I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. True. I avoid the 2 largest chromium browsers because their innovations have a goal of exploiting end users.
eviks 2y ago
Maintaining your UI and being able to tweak it to your liking is exactly the part of "UI innovation" where Firefox is severely lacking And there is nothing dependable about you failure to do something for many years because the UI is stable in not supporting it
babypuncher 2y ago
It's a catch-22 because if you stop innovating your UI for 20 years and alternatives come up with something people actually like then you will lose users to them and slowly fade into irrelevancy. Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  As I remember it, Firefox succeeded because it fundamentally worked well and was very configurable, not because of the UX. The others at the time were bad at both of those things. The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    In my opinion, Firefox has never been particularly good. I tried it when it first came out - it was slow and a memory hog. Using IE6 was a much better experience, so I stayed there. It was only once Chrome came out that we had an actual good alternative to IE, and I switched immediately once I tried it. I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    That's not how I remember it. Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability. FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    Everyone I knew who wasn't working in tech that switched to Firefox did so because tabs were this revolutionary new thing that transformed their browsing experience. Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.
godelski 2y ago
I mostly agree, and don't get all the fuss about Chrome (or any other browser's) UI. To me they look all very similar and function very similarly. The differences just don't seem that big of a deal. I think it is mostly people being resistant to change. I had one friend that I convinced to switch to FireFox after a year[0]. A month after he switched over I got him to admit that it was easy to switch and there's no real change. > it took a week of tinkering I wish this was more obvious, but there is a user.js file that Firefox looks at[1,2,3]. You can edit this and carry it around in a dotfiles or something. > They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more. I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable". [0] Argument is about having legitimate browser competition and the privacy boost of containerizing what data Google could (keyword) collect. I'd really only bring it up when he'd be complaining about Chrome or Google, so quite often. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197798 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197798 [2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file [3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-...
- cassepipe 2y ago
  I also thought that Firefox latest redesign was quite bad. This project fixes it and it's easy to install : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
  - godelski 2y ago
    I don't have a problem with the current design, but you're right that this is better. I'll give it a try, thanks!
clumsysmurf 2y ago
I'm in the group that uses multiple browsers. Its hard going between Safari and Firefox: * Safari has tab groups. I guess Firefox is working on it again * FF 129 just got Tab previews, but you have to hover over each to see it. Safari can show you previews for everything in a tab group It sounds like FF is catching up slowly, but compared to Safari's UI, still feel like IE6. I use it for uBlock mostly.

by worble 2y ago

persnickety 2y ago

On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better. But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.

akkartik 2y ago
> on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving? My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible. We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
- persnickety 2y ago
  I'm using Firefox. I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history. I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff. I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are. On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge. I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
  - akkartik 2y ago
    I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world. I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
    - persnickety 2y ago
      Multiple tools from multiple people make it less likely that the entire ecosystem is going to collapse, but makes it likelier that any one tool will stop working. But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software). The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it. I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

> I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. True. I avoid the 2 largest chromium browsers because their innovations have a goal of exploiting end users.

eviks 2y ago

Maintaining your UI and being able to tweak it to your liking is exactly the part of "UI innovation" where Firefox is severely lacking And there is nothing dependable about you failure to do something for many years because the UI is stable in not supporting it

babypuncher 2y ago

It's a catch-22 because if you stop innovating your UI for 20 years and alternatives come up with something people actually like then you will lose users to them and slowly fade into irrelevancy. Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.

JohnFen 2y ago
As I remember it, Firefox succeeded because it fundamentally worked well and was very configurable, not because of the UX. The others at the time were bad at both of those things. The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  In my opinion, Firefox has never been particularly good. I tried it when it first came out - it was slow and a memory hog. Using IE6 was a much better experience, so I stayed there. It was only once Chrome came out that we had an actual good alternative to IE, and I switched immediately once I tried it. I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  That's not how I remember it. Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability. FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  Everyone I knew who wasn't working in tech that switched to Firefox did so because tabs were this revolutionary new thing that transformed their browsing experience. Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.

godelski 2y ago

I mostly agree, and don't get all the fuss about Chrome (or any other browser's) UI. To me they look all very similar and function very similarly. The differences just don't seem that big of a deal. I think it is mostly people being resistant to change. I had one friend that I convinced to switch to FireFox after a year[0]. A month after he switched over I got him to admit that it was easy to switch and there's no real change. > it took a week of tinkering I wish this was more obvious, but there is a user.js file that Firefox looks at[1,2,3]. You can edit this and carry it around in a dotfiles or something. > They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more. I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable". [0] Argument is about having legitimate browser competition and the privacy boost of containerizing what data Google could (keyword) collect. I'd really only bring it up when he'd be complaining about Chrome or Google, so quite often. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197798 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197798 [2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file [3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-...

cassepipe 2y ago
I also thought that Firefox latest redesign was quite bad. This project fixes it and it's easy to install : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
- godelski 2y ago
  I don't have a problem with the current design, but you're right that this is better. I'll give it a try, thanks!

clumsysmurf 2y ago

I'm in the group that uses multiple browsers. Its hard going between Safari and Firefox: * Safari has tab groups. I guess Firefox is working on it again * FF 129 just got Tab previews, but you have to hover over each to see it. Safari can show you previews for everything in a tab group It sounds like FF is catching up slowly, but compared to Safari's UI, still feel like IE6. I use it for uBlock mostly.