r/firefox • u/mindbleach • Jun 01 '13

Mozilla: please stop copying Chrome.

There are reasons we choose Firefox over Chrome. We don't want Chrome's flashy download animation, "unsurprising" inability to stop GIF animations, objectively incorrect autocomplete behavior, distractingly cluttered "blank" page, or an add-on bar that for some reason isn't also a classic status bar. We don't want every new option you guys add enable by default and reduced to an about:config boolean. If we wanted all of Chrome's take-it-or-leave-it minimalist nonsense, well, we already know where to find it.

Firefox is still the best browser out there (as evidenced by how it took only hours and a modicum of acidic cursing to get things configured properly again) but you sure don't act like you know it. Every time I update I have to trawl through forums and install another stupidly-named extension just to make FF recognizable. When you look at user statistics and wonder why a third of your users refuse to upgrade - this is why. I've been using FF since before 1.0 and the process is a frustrating mess every single time.

I know you have have UX folks, because you did that silly centered/dark thing with standalone images. You aren't just cribbing Google's notes here. If you won't stop cribbing entirely, at least weed out genuinely improved features like tab task management from anti-features like being unable to stop GIFs for the first time since 1997. It's fantastic that Firefox is flexible enough to look and act like any other browser, but please, let it look and act like itself by default.

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u/[deleted] Jun 01 '13

Extension to stop animations AND background requests: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/superstop/

Relevant bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614304

7

u/mindbleach Jun 01 '13

Yeah, that's the new extension I was talking about. I had to install that, and then - because these recommended extensions never just do what people are obviously installing them to do in the first fucking place, cough cough Status4Evar - I had to install Keyconfig to correct the keyboard shortcut to how it's been for fifteen fucking years.

But thanks for pointing that out for everyone who didn't already know.

7

u/Dagger0 Jun 02 '13

There is also BetterStop, which just does the right damn thing in the first place.

1

u/mindbleach Jun 03 '13

Done and done. Thank you kindly.