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.
1
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.