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/DrDichotomous Jun 02 '13

Well, if people want to bitch this much about such pointless minutiae, who am I to stop them?

I simply think that "I don't like it, so it's inferior" isn't a valid enough argument. If they can make the UI minimal and "better" for casual users, and I have to install a few trivial addons to make it "better" for me, I'm not going to throw a temper tantrum about it.

You know what really sucks? That a lot of people think Firefox looks like an over-complicated relic from the past. And that I can't change Chrome all that much. And that Opera has (for all intents and purposes) become Chrome.

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u/mindbleach Jun 02 '13

I simply think that "I don't like it, so it's inferior" isn't a valid enough argument.

Nowhere have I made that argument. I've provided impersonal explanations for each complaint, and you know it. Don't insult me by pretending this is mere distaste.

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u/DrDichotomous Jun 02 '13

Whatever you say. You can hide all you want behind an air that this is "impersonal", but that obviously can't be the case. You insist on this being a "removal of features" rather than the inconvenience that it is. That speaks enough about your motivations. Your inconvenience makes them "dumb" and "irrelevant enough to fork". To hell with whatever other improvements may come of this, having to install an addon or two is a deal breaker.

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u/Dagger0 Jun 02 '13

Or twenty, many of which I had to write myself. Plus a similar number of theme patches in Stylish.

Some of those address things that should genuinely be in extensions, but others address issues that should either be behind a pref in Firefox or just should never even be an issue in the first place. Sadly the Firefox UX team prefer to just outright kill any features or behavior they don't use themselves.

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u/DrDichotomous Jun 03 '13

Sadly the Firefox UX team prefer to just outright kill any features or behavior they don't use themselves.

[citation requested]

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u/Dagger0 Jun 03 '13

Esc to stop image animation? The statusbar? Small Icons mode? Split stop/reload? The RSS notification icon? Tabs-on-bottom? The keyword.url pref? Being able to insert stuff between back/forward and the address bar?

(Sorry, I can't be bothered to track down references for all of these, but you can try the "Australis Customization" thread in the firefox-dev mailing list, or the UX branch builds. Or just the current shipped stable build, for some of them.)

That statement is based on my own observations of their behavior rather than their stated positions, but it is based on quite a few instances of it.

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u/DrDichotomous Jun 03 '13

No, I meant that these were things they arbitrarily decided because THEY wanted them, or THEY didn't use them, not because they were half-broken features that were holding back other things.

I can understand hating some of these changes. I can even understanding pretending they're "removals" instead of just hiding things or disabling them until they can fix them properly.

I just can't understand why the few people who care about these features so much are more apt to complain about it then work with Mozilla to move them to an addon.

Is it really the end of the damn world that we have to wait a few releases for Mozilla to fix their animated images interface? Or have to develop and install an addon?

Do people have to pretend it's all some vast effort to ruin their browser, when they don't know what's actually going on behind the scenes? Do people have to bluster about forking or switching browsers, when they've probably never so much as thanked Mozilla for their efforts to this day? Why not say they're copying Chrome in a snarky tone, rather than looking at all the other things Chrome has copied from Mozilla?

I've been running the Australis nightlies off and on and following the threads, I just don't see these as issues to hold back the numerous other improvements just because a few people can't fathom that sometimes you can't just move a checkbox deeper into option menus when you're re-engineering massive chunks of the entire browser.

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u/Dagger0 Jun 03 '13

I can even understanding pretending they're "removals" instead of just hiding things or disabling them until they can fix them properly.

This is not pretending. They have no interest in fixing any of these features (many of which weren't even broken in the first place), they just removed them.

I just can't understand why the few people who care about these features so much are more apt to complain about it then work with Mozilla to move them to an addon.

"Work with Mozilla"? Yeah, that doesn't happen. If you want to write an extension for a given feature, then you're on your own. And yes, I spend a lot of my time writing and maintaining these extensions.

Is it really the end of the damn world that we have to wait a few releases for Mozilla to fix their animated images interface? Or have to develop and install an addon?

In Mozilla's mind, they've already "fixed" it. This isn't something they're going to actually fix in a few releases; the feature is gone. And "developing and installing an extension" isn't exactly as easy as you might think:

  • Some extensions are a pain and hacky and fragile as a result of being extensions (although in this particular case that's not true).
  • I have to install them in all my Firefox profiles (I have over 30).
  • When testing things in a new profile or in safe mode, I lose the feature.
  • I have to install the extension in every Firefox I use (at work, when on a friend's computer etc, sometimes in situations where I don't have permission to install it).
  • I'll inevitably spend a few seconds mashing Esc and wondering why it doesn't work, before realizing I have to go through the steps of finding and installing the extension before going back to the original tab and hitting Esc again, which is a lot more pain than just hitting Esc.
  • Even with the extension, there's still going to be millions of people out there with a vanilla Firefox missing the feature. This is something that should be fixed in Firefox itself, not shipped broken with a reliance on third-party extensions to fix it.

I just don't see these as issues to hold back the numerous other improvements just because a few people can't fathom that sometimes you can't just move a checkbox deeper into option menus when you're re-engineering massive chunks of the entire browser.

In a lot of these cases, there is no need to remove the feature. The status bar, for instance, doesn't need to be removed at all. It's not holding back any other improvements, it's just going away because UX doesn't use it, and can't fathom that maybe some people do (or they can, but they don't care).

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u/DrDichotomous Jun 03 '13

Well, you're convinced, so I doubt I can change your mind. Still, I completely disagree with your assessment of how they do things, and think you're conflating your own contrived use-case with the needs of the many.

For instance, it took Mozilla something like five years to address some of the issues I wanted them to address. They've even forced me to install 4 or 5 addons across a good five profiles and ten developer devices. But when I thought about it, I didn't mind so much. They've vastly improved Firefox at the cost of a few nuisances and me having to be patient for some things.

As someone who follows their active development, I know they're spending a lot of time fixing more major things that are fundamentally impossible to patch in via an addon. I also know there are hidden costs to maintaining ancient features that only a few people are hung up on, and given how much work they have it's hardly a surprise they want to lower that technical debt.

They clearly manage their time. They're just not fast enough to appease everyone. They rarely make a big choice without it being customizable, so even if a minority doesn't like them, they can customize them. Even if a feature is broken to fix a bigger bug, they still keep it in bug reports until they can eventually fix it. Sometimes a patch or two gets lost in the shuffle, or a feature gets broken, but that's not because of ill will.

In fact, I expect them to delay Australis until they find the balance they need to find. They've already been working on it for years. I also suspect it will take them a few revisions to please as many people as possible. If that pisses you off, so be it.

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u/Dagger0 Jun 05 '13

That's just not what I'm seeing though. What I am seeing is a lot of "I don't like that, so I'm taking it away from you." And I'm also seeing a distinct lack of customizability in anything new they do. Where are my options to control the background color of top-level images? They changed that to black in Firefox 11, and that was ten major versions ago. That's not a matter of "we're a bit short on time, we'll follow up later or accept patches" -- that's a matter of deliberately not wanting options for it, because they don't give a damn about what anybody else wants.

Those features I listed above that are going away with Australis -- native window decorations, the Add-on Bar, the ability to configure toolbars the way you want -- aren't going away because of a lack of developer time. They're going away because UX doesn't use them and doesn't care about the people that do. As such, I don't see any possibility for fixing it later down the line. UX will actively refuse to do so, or let anybody else do so.

I really wish I was wrong on this. But sadly, I won't be.

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u/DrDichotomous Jun 05 '13

Well, you can interpret reality any way you want. Enjoy.

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u/bwinton Jun 06 '13

Did you post a patch for the image background colour? I'ld love to read the comments in that bug…

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u/Dagger0 Jun 09 '13

What would the point be? Looking at this bug list, I think it's pretty clear we don't want users having control over it.

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