Alex Limi, a Mozilla designer, writes about Firefox user experience, browser downloads, and performance.
HN repeatedly cites "Checkboxes that kill your product" to explain why Firefox removed the option to disable JavaScript.
> Firefox's declining market share over this period is very good evidence
The only evidence we have is that Google's marketing team has been very effective at advertising Chrome. :-P
> Many of us long-time Firefox users have actually found the past three years to be the worst so far, in terms of design.
I'm not sure why you think you can speak for many Firefox users.
> rush to copy Chrome in appearance and behavior
I'll quote myself from a different discussion [1]:
Outside of manilla folder-like tabs and a panel menu, Chrome is given far too much credit in innovating the direction of browser UI. Tabs on top is an objectively better UI choice [2]. The download manager is an original Firefox design [3] and almost anything else that other browsers have adopted (tabs on top, start page tiles, etc) is all from Opera.
> now it's declining because it's providing a worse experience, and the recent changes clearly haven't been helping the situation.
FWIW, Firefox has held steady over the past year hovering around 20% according to Net Applications [4], and they even had a small uptick in the past month. In any case, I am confident Firefox lost users because of Chrome's superior performance and snappy behavior, not because of UI changes. I think projects like MemShrink [5], Project Snappy [6], and the revived Electrolysis [7] will go a long way towards improving Firefox's performance. Will those changes be too little too late? Who knows. Will the upcoming Australis design be…
I began using Firefox a long time ago (when it was called Phoenix) but switched to Chrome.
A couple months ago I switched back to Firefox because Chrome lost my open tab session in some cases (hard crashes when loading the old session), due to privacy issues and because it often triggered long swaps (locking the process) when dealing with lots of tabs (I usually have like 50-60 tabs open in several windows). Also because I support Mozilla's values.
Unfortunately I'm not very happy either. Alongside the issues commented here, I noticed these problems:
- Sometimes it just goes to 25% CPU usage and the browser becomes really slow. The only choice is to close all windows and open Firefox again.
- Multimonitor and Flash sucks. I'm not sure if this is Firefox or Flash's fault, but it often chooses one window as its parent, regardless of where the tab with the Flash content is located. Clicking/hovering the embedded object fails when the object thinks I'm in the wrong monitor. Also, going fullscreen usually pops the window in the wrong monitor.
- The JS PDF viewer is slow as hell (I once spent 5 minutes waiting for it to zoom, and I couldn't close it because I feared losing some changes in other tab). Firefox's JS engine is quite slow in and of itself, who thought it would be a good idea to embed a JS PDF viewer?
- Extensions take ages to be updated in the Addons repository (especially compared to Chrome) which frustrates extension developers and users. I personally know a…
> None of these uses requires the ability to play quake3 inside firefox, or are really applications inside a webpage.
Maybe, for now. But WebRTC/WebSockets have a value proposal for real-time interaction in collaborative office suites. Canvas/WebGL have one for performance in authoring tools and for articles illustrations. Documents are readable in your default serif/sans-serif set, but WebFonts are a good designer/author tool just like fonts are in print. Etc... Renouncing this added value because each new feature increases the attack surface sounds like throwing the baby with the bathwater.
> I'm just disappointed in the defeatist attitude of browser vendors and expert users: the idea of having a browser safe mode that you can lock down doesn't strike me as such an impossiblity and it would give some incentive to developers to put their act together.
Two thoughts:
1. Such a "Safe mode" disabling features presents high risks of breaking tons of sites, leaving non-expert users in the dark, and these users are the most likely to be clueless about what's wrong and may just switch to another browser.
In the case of JavaScript, Firefox is actually going the opposite way of what you want, by making it harder to disable it [1]. The closest to your wish with Firefox is probably to use their LTS version, ESR, where the dust settled for a little while more (but which ironically, was affected by today's exploit ^^).
2. Can what you are proposing be a "mode"? Take the "Reader…
With a changing of the guard, the honor system can handily disappear. We saw this transpire with the burying of the JavaScript toggle. A new guy showed up, and decided that disabling JavaScript was “an advanced feature” and just too dangerous for ordinary folk. [1, 2]
Of course it begins with good intentions, and promises to leave explicit privacy options alone, but new devs show up with different opinion and the old devs are gone, and suddenly privacy options are getting toggled any old time.
Beyond even that, we all know that the realities of privacy are never ever cut and dry. Leaky details can expose people in peculiar ways. Fingerprinting preferences and hardware facts for forensic purposes has taught us that much. Viewport size, OS, connection speed, graphics capabilities, hardware acceleration profiles. Even stylometry, choice of words, manner of speech can give people away. In that sense, exposing any user choices might prove to compromise identity to some degree.
1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709
2. https://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ (seriously breathless persuasive writing about how urgent it is to hide the toggle for javascript, among other things, but make no mistake, the high value target was the javascript checkbox)
Firefox's arguments for not really bothering with the remaining parts of Acid3 was that it seemed like it they weren't testing particularly relevant standards and that the implementations of the other browsers for those standards were mostly to pass Acid3 and not particularly useful either. See http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ for more info.
That seems like valid reasoning to me. I've also seen Hixie make comments that seem to indicate him wanting to avoid these issues for any potential Acid4:
When we do Acid4 (probably around the time we have at least three major browsers shipping Acid3-passing browsers), I think we'll have to focus on testing fewer, more critical things. Acid3 tests a lot of critical stuff, but also checks a lot of less important stuff at the same time, and it's in those areas that we've had the most problems with specs changing under us.
From http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1215829569
> As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely.
It's a bad idea to add an option entirely for the purpose of making the product not work anymore.
https://limi.net/checkboxes
> Window management sucks
I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares.
> there's no device manager! Not even cli tools!
`ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter?
> There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Accessibility/Conceptual/AccessibilityMacOSX/index.html
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/XCUIAutomation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript
https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios