Comment by idoubtit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by idoubtit | Hacker News Reader

Not much content in this article. A single benchmark which shows nothing of real-life cases. Two minor technical features, one of them already in Chrome beta. Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.

I do give Firefox a chance, but it gets tiring.

Many years ago, I dropped Firefox's ancestor for Opera 6. The UI and the features were miles ahead (e.g. Mozilla had no tabs). Yet I wanted to support free software so, once in a while, I tried to use Mozilla/Firefox again, but so many features where lacking, and the reactivity was really bad. When Opera dropped their engine and UI to become a new Chromium derivative, I switched to Firefox. I tried to get used to it, but for the past year my main desktop browser has been Vivaldi, a Chromium derivative.

I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?

I can't stand horizontal tabs in my brower. The Tree Style Tab extension was a strong point of pre-quantum FF, though its CPU usage was noticeable. Unfortunately, it's been a pain since I upgraded to Quantum, with many bugs and slowness.

Another example: my last FF ESR upgrade introduced a calamitous rewrite of the download interface. It's inconsistent, error-prone and ridden with several bugs. For weeks, I duplicated many downloads because the notification is absurdly small and quick. Now I've learned to click on the FF icon to check if the download started.

A last example: this morning, I selected 5 finished downloads and removed them. No reaction for 2 seconds, so I pressed the key again, just as the suppression begin, in slow motion. It took FF 3 seconds to remove 6 entries from the log.

With uBlock against tracking, DDG+Qwant for search, and a custom cookie handler (no third-party, white-list for those that persist after a tab closes), I don't think FF has anything to offer me on privacy. So the only reasons that keep me interested in Firefox are Free Software and Web diversity. I'm afraid these moral incentives don't weight much against many practical reasons.

> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?

Whenever I hear people complain about the settings being impossible to figure out, I always open them up and try.

So I opened settings, which has a search input at the top, and search "new tab".

It has an option to choose "Firefox Home (Default)" or "Blank page" for new tabs, in the section titled "New Windows and Tabs". (With windows, you can choose "Custom URLs" as well).

But you don't want blank. Hmmm. So I open a new tab. Every section has a dropdown menu with a "Remove Section" option (it also has "Manage Settings" links that takes me to the preference page I was on initially.)

Drag-and-drop from bookmarks, though, is stumping me. For what it's worth, it's also stumping me in Chrome. I don't think I've ever tried Vivaldi.

For the most part, basic customization seems intuitive and straightforward. If there is a way to customize by dragging your bookmarks onto the page, though, it isn't intuitive and straightforward. Not sure if that should fall under edge-case customizations (which I expect to be hidden).

It is annoying when things I consider obviously the correct design are treated as obscure things few would want, but I recognize that some of them truly are.

EDIT: I will say, though, that it seems really strange that "New window" has a custom URL option, but new tab doesn't. I guess they're concerned about people setting slow new tab URLs and then being frustrated.

I tried Firefox here just now to see if it's gotten any better since I last tried.

I open the preferences window. Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences window like every other application I've ever used, it's some sort of webpage which opens in a new tab in the same window as the webpage I'm browsing. The controls are all completely custom, and the layout looks nothing like any preferences window I've seen since Netscape.

Also, the Firefox UI doesn't use the same language as the rest of the OS (which is English), or even the webpage content displayed by Firefox (also English). It's all displayed in the language I tried to learn last year, for some reason.

In the search box at top, typing "language" finds nothing, and typing the word for language in the language I'm seeing shows a fancy control with "English (United States)" at the top. There's nothing I see which would indicate why the UI is not English. I google for "how to change firefox ui language", and all the pages I find say to set it here, and restart.

Thus ends another adventure in attempting to use Firefox, and it ends the same way all my adventures do: nothing is standard, everything is custom, and so it doesn't work right. This time, I didn't even get far enough along to complain that all the keyboard shortcuts are broken.

Dear Mozilla: for Firefox to win me back, it has to be a good web browser. Stop trying to be an operating system. I already have one of those. "Look/act like every other application" is the correct answer in every case.

> Well, not quite. Instead of a preferences window like every other application I've ever used, it's some sort of webpage which opens in a new tab in the same window as the webpage I'm browsing.

Well, I can think of one other program that puts its settings in a web page and a tab: Chrome. Hope you're not using that...

> In the search box at top, typing "language" finds nothing, and typing the word for language in the language I'm seeing shows a fancy control with "English (United States)" at the top. There's nothing I see which would indicate why the UI is not English. I google for "how to change firefox ui language", and all the pages I find say to set it here, and restart.

At least for now, you should download the correct language from https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/

Firefox must have realized that their UI for handling "top sites" was bad. In ESR v60.7, the Tiles/topSites block has a menu where the first entry is "+ Add Top Site". This was missing before.

In fact, this problem was not directly mine, it was a request from my parents.

I made my parents (nearly 70 years old) use Firefox. After an upgrade of their FF, they lost their usual homepage. In empty tabs their custom links were replaced by the dynamical list of their most visited sites. At the time of change, most tiles were not even relevant because their recent activity was not representative. They were annoyed, tried to fix it, and failed.

There was no contextual help, and searching technical info is hard for non technical persons, especially if they don't understand English. So my parents called me for help. On my next visit to them, I tried to do it myself, but did not manage to guess how it worked. DDG helped. After this episode, I wondered if FF was the right browser for them. It seems that Chromium's UI is more stable, and that is important for ageing people.

All your points against Firefox are mine against every other browser: I have tried to but never managed to switch to Chrome or Opera because there are just so many weird limitations and so much weird behavior - for me.

> I still use Firefox, but I'm getting more and more irritated against it. I had to search the web in order to change the tile of empty tabs (no buttons, no context menu, only drag-n-drop from bookmarks). Who designed such an unguessable interface?

The people who design unguessable interfaces are usually called ux designers. Removing every trace of help , including but not limited to hiding the menu, removing tooltips on hover, keyboard shortcuts, getting started wizards etc etc is what they do it seems - all in the name of usability I guess.

I recently got myself an iPads and while I love it, googling even the simplest things is getting a habit.

Feel your frustration on this one, but I guess it is just "modern" and you happened to move from one modern thing that worked your way to another modern thing that worked in someone elses way.

That said: I think Mozilla really messed up when they cut the old APIs before the new ones where ready.

Edit: in defense of modern ux designers and other designers - some things work so much better now that we don’t need manuals for everything longer and many things do look better ;-)

If UX designers are designing unguessable interfaces, then they’re not doing a good job. A good UX designer would make it better than guessable, they’d make it mostly intuitable so you don’t have to guess for most things. As much as I’m against Google and that I use FF, Chrome/Chromium (and derivatives that don’t change too much of the UI) does have the best UX (IMO) with Safari as a second, amongst the browsers I’ve tried. I use FF in spite of the UX because I align with their goals and values.

With that said, good UX is REALLY difficult and, as a non-profit, I give FF a pass. I give them more of a pass because UX gets more difficult when you also emphasize customization and options. However, it’s one area they should definitely work on if they want to capture more of the market. Most people I know use Chrome because it’s “easier to use”.

> Chrome/Chromium (and derivatives that don’t change too much of the UI) does have the best UX (IMO) with Safari as a second, amongst the browsers I’ve tried.

It's almost as if different people are different and have different ux preferences and expectations :-)

Sure, which is why I put in (IMO)

> Not much content in this article.

I could say that of every dev.to article I’ve ever encountered. I have no idea why that’s the case — I could understand it if they were all by the same author, but they’re not. Maybe I’ve been unlucky and unlikely amount of times.

> Lastly, an appeal to fight Chrome's monopole. Surprisingly, not a word about privacy.

I have the feeling the author is rehashing arguments they’ve read without fully understanding them. They’re curious about Brave[1], which goes against the stated goal of decreasing Google’s dominance (being based on Chromium).

[1]: https://dev.to/dtroode/comment/c89l

I am not a native English speaker and sometimes I can wrong understand comments. But I am trying to improve my skills

Yes, this article is short, but it's just a few reasons that moved me from Chrome. And people need to try themselves

try FF nightly. I'm on debian as my daily driver, but nightly works well for me.

I've been trying nightly as well. But it seems to sporadically reset all my settings whenever it upgrades. For example the DoH was turned off again. And there are some weird settings like this: $$$apz.fling_curve_function_x1$$$ and it isn't editable nor deletable.

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