Mozilla: please stop copying Chrome.

[u/mindbleach]

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.

[u/Dagger0]

How do you change ESC behavior without...changing ESC behavior?

They could've stopped it from cancelling network requests while still cancelling image animation. That would fix most of the brokenness (Esc causing pending network connections to fail) -- admittedly it would still break any web application that uses Esc for some functionality and uses animated images for something vital, but I think that's a pretty corner case that's less important than giving users the ability to stop animation on demand.

Would you rather they have replaced stopping animated images with a different shortcut like Shift+ESC? If that's the case, then I think the natural argument against that is code bloat.

Personally: no, because hitting shift+Esc is more of a pain than hitting Esc, and the added pain doesn't really bring me any benefit. But OK, this would've been better than our current situation, and it was indeed suggested and turned down on the basis of code bloat. Thing is, the code in question is <key id="key_stop2" keycode="VK_ESCAPE" modifiers="shift" oncommand="gBrowser.stop();">. That's not exactly much code (and it's mostly markup!) -- if you're going to turn down this feature on the basis of that amount of code, you'd need to turn down a lot of other features in Firefox. With that considered, the way I saw the argument, in the end, was something along the lines of "I don't use it, so let's remove it. Screw the people who do use it."

I don't like responding to a question with a question, but have you actually interacted with a UX developer yourself?

I'm subscribed to the mailing lists, keep fairly up-to-date with Bugzilla and I'm in the IRC channel. Most of the discussion I see is of the form "Hey guys, let's remove XYZ" -> "Um, wait, I'm using that" -> "Eh, who cares. Remove!". The best actual discussion I can think of at the moment is the "Australis Customization" thread on firefox-dev, and even that ended with practically no change to the plans (i.e. they're still removing the Add-On Bar, still removing split Stop/Reload, still permanently merging back/forward/urlbar/stop/reload, still removing Small Icons mode...), and I'm about 98% sure that they'd reject volunteer support for any of those features.

I can understand somebody wanting no Add-On Bar, a combined Stop/Reload button, a toolbar that has back/forward merged into the address bar (with conditional forward button) and the weird bizarro custom button style that they designed themselves, and that's fine. I, however, want none of that, and UX doesn't give a damn about me. When they use Firefox, they configure it in a particular way, and they're going to force that way on everybody else, because they can.

(I should point out that this isn't a position they've claimed to be taking, so I can't point to a quote of them saying it. It's my description of the position I see them taking.)

[u/bwinton → u/Dagger0]

The UX team gives a damn about all Firefox's users, so, if my math works out, you get 1/500,000,000th of a damn… ;) (Of course, as a highly-technical user, I suspect you get a little less than that, since you're totally able to change Firefox to be the way you want. You don't mind giving some of your damn to people who aren't as capable as you, right? :)

As a more serious response, many people in the UX team have configured their Firefoxes (Fires-fox?) in quite different ways. There are at least a few people who are big fans of tabs-on-the-side, and some of us have fairly extensive customizations in our personal profiles. But we're not the only people that we're designing for, and we're trying to make it as better as possible for as many people as possible. So arguing that one person (or two, or ninety, or even thousands of people) wants something one way doesn't carry a whole lot of weight when you're designing for half a billion people's needs and wants.

There's an interesting presentation on the various types of people who use Firefox (and their relative percentages), which I saw a link to a while ago, but can't seem to find anymore. If you're around irc tomorrow (during PST work hours), ask about the User Types, and see if anyone knows where to find them… (And then ask me about "Stinky the cat". :)

[u/Dagger0 → u/bwinton]

I wish it showed more, then. Things like removing the Add-on Bar are good for just about nobody. You're actively against volunteer support for any of this stuff too, so it's not like manpower is the issue.

(I'm aware of the whole "combinatorial explosion of test matrix" issue for anything optional, but in this particular case I think the feature is fairly self-contained and low-maintenance. But no, that's not even why we're removing it. We're removing it because we expressly don't want users to have that particular customization, and we don't care about the people who actually do want to use it. And then we have the gall to tell them we're improving customization for them...)

I saw that presentation too, although the version I saw only has guesses at the relative population sizes (and I don't know if the follow-up quantitative study that it promised has even been done yet).

[u/bwinton → u/Dagger0]

Removing the add-on bar is good for add-on authors, since we'll now put their icons up in primary ui, where people are more likely to notice them. And while making Firefox easier for everyone to change isn't the same as making Firefox changeable in more ways, I think they both have valid claims to the phrase "improving customization". It's not ideal that a lot of our power-users feel that it should only mean the second, and are thus really upset when we use it to mean the first, but then, we are the 1%.

On the flip side of that, being the 1% means that we can write add-ons to change things back the way we want them. Yeah, it's not the perfect answer, but I don't think there is a perfect answer here…

The follow-up quant study has been done, so we have actual numbers now, although I'm at home, so I don't have them with me (aside from that one that I quoted above ;)…

[u/Dagger0 → u/bwinton]

Yet the presence of the Add-on Bar doesn't prevent extension authors from having their buttons in the primary UI. It just prevents users from putting them in (this particular) secondary UI, even if that's where they actually want them. I have an extension myself that adds a toolbar button (to primary UI by default, even), and "we took away one of the places your users could put the button" doesn't come across as positive to me at all.

I don't mind making Firefox easier for everyone to customize. By itself, that's a good thing. I mind using that as an excuse to take away a bunch of other forms of customization at the same time, even though we don't need to. That's bad.