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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

> Why does the UI change with every single Firefox release?

It doesn't. Maybe small parts of it get tweaks here and there. But your argument about having to re-adjust every update is just dishonest.

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If you use niche or power user features frequently, then it can feel like almost every single update is reworking or removing a feature you depend on.

Firefox updates are a constant stream of "1% of users use this feature so it's fine to do X to it" but it turns out that a lot of people fall into a lot of those small buckets at once.

The 1%, that was the excuse to delete my live bookmarks feature. Which was fine in a way because addons took its place, but that further pushed the 1-3% of users that knew about it to almost certainly doom it to 0.1% over time. No discoverability at all.

They also removed bookmark description. Little by little they're removing every feature I've come to like in the last fifteen years.

And then after 99 times they act all surprised there’s no users left. They are killing themselves by a thousand cuts.

What features are you talking about?

E.g. the last update removed right click -> open image, which I used all the time to view images in full screen. Now there's only an option to open the image in a new tab, which requires additional clicks to achieve the same thing.

Indeed a bad change considering you could open an image to new tab with middle-click but now there's no way to open in current tab.

Plus clicking the original "Open image" with middle mouse button (or invoking with alt+enter, IIRC) always did exactly what new command does, opened image in new tab.

New command apparently lacks alternative usage forcing current tab, but still opens image in new window instead of tab with Ctrl modifier. (Maybe it would be possible to plead for re-introduction of similar modifier?)

At least we can still drag/n/drop plain images to the Tab bar.

I disagree. These small unnecessary tweaks can really disrupt regular users' workflows.

For example, they just changed "Undo close tab" to "Reopen closed tab". Not only is it difficult to justify how this is clearer (any casual computer user should be familiar with the concept of 'undo'), but for a regular user:

- There's a period where you have to adjust, scanning for the correct menu entry each time;

- This change also modified the hotkey from 'u' for 'undo' to 'o' for... re-open, apparently.

Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?

I love Firefox, am a daily user, but I get very annoyed at the lack of proper change control that's applied.

This kind of arbitrary change at the very least annoys users, but can also degrade usability and workflow.

Finally, by showing they don't review their minor changes very well, it makes it harder to trust that they won't accidentally introduce some major bug or security flaw.

> Imagine if your editor changed its key bindings, or renamed features with each minor update?

I honestly wish my editor did. Emacs very deliberately does not do such things, and the result is a complete mess of weird keybindings, and many duplicated commands and modes which are just slightly different to each other. It's so scared of disrupting an existing user's workflow that the product as a whole definitely suffers.

The solution is to change the default keybindings for new users (bonus if there is an option to get the old presets for new installs) while not messing with the setup for existing users and let them change their settings when *they* want to.

Small tweaks are like living with opinionated people who have to touch and move everything that is not where they think it should be.

You have no clue how annoying and nerve wrecking that is.

Changing my daily workspace where I am supposed to be productive is something that should be considered a breaking change. I'd like software to leave my workspace alone if at all possible.

Make another product for those who want it different.

It does. As you said they are small and maybe you don't notice, but for some of us, it may mess up our muscle memory. I believe parent poster's honesty because in every update, trying to change back new UI elements is really annoying. Worse, some of them cannot be reverted. You have to adjust yourself to a libre software's changes.

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