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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

The writing's been on the wall for a while now. I call it "The Mozilla Shuffle". Power features start out built into the menu. Then they get pushed to settings. Then they go to a key in about:config. Then you have to make the key yourself. Then they start ignoring the key but there's an extension that puts support back. Then the functionality which runs the extension gets disabled but if you're really determined you can work some magic with userChrome to get it back. Then you have to make keys in about:config to make it take the changes in userChrome. Finally, it's disabled entirely with no way to get back.

But hey, at least these days I get the benefit of having to use two completely separate methods to tell Pocket to get the hell out of my browser.

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Wow, that's extremely accurate! Disabling the tab bar has also went this exact route (when you use a tiling wm with tabs, some people like to disable browser and terminal tabs as it's redundant)

I managed to do it with a combination of two extensions, some about:config flags and userChrome.css some years ago, but it may already be broken by now.

Mozilla keeps trying to get to the mainstream market while ignoring its dedicated users... The only times I got people to switch over to firefox was because things like ublock support on android. Nobody I've talked to has ever been interested in their side products (Pocket, that file transfer thing...), and something tells me this new voice engine is going to go the same route.

OTOH it's nice Mozilla is working on improving their voice dataset (which powers the DeepSpeech model, iirc). And again kind of sad they use Google Cloud while they could have their own version...

Frankly it started going downhill when they jumped headfirst into the version number dick-measuring contest with Chrome. They care about pulling in new users, not keeping old ones. Anything to make a news headline and generate clicks and downloads. Some asshat feature one percent of their users will try one time and then never touch again. Disembowling their feature set to make a benchmark run five percent faster so they can make a graph with the biggest bar. Moral grandstanding about Google so a couple tech sites give them a mention.

It makes me so angry. Firefox was the chosen one. It slew the evil giant IE. Then Mr.moneybags Chrome came around and scared Mozilla so shitless they completely forgot why people chose them over IE in the first place. Their solution to every problem is "be more like Chrome while being less like Google".

Newsflash, Mozilla: you really suck at that. Maybe try something else.

> It makes me so angry. Firefox was the chosen one. It slew the evil giant IE. Then Mr.moneybags Chrome came around and scared Mozilla so shitless they completely forgot why people chose them over IE in the first place. Their solution to every problem is "be more like Chrome while being less like Google".

I totally agree. I feel so powerless watching them fail like that... Google annihilated firefox. Moral lesson here: free software can be destroyed. Not by openly fighting it, like Microsoft, but by rotting it from the core, like Google.

Disabling the tab bar is pretty easy. I use tree style tabs and they supply a couple of lines of css to paste into userChrome. You can even live debug userChrome using Inspector. The userChrome format did change about a year ago though.

They're paid something stupid like 100s of Millions of $USD to direct users to Google, and I understand the CEO was paid by Google (>$1M) though I've not seen good corroboration of that. Bias towards Google is not surprising.

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