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I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more co

I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. There used to be an XUL extension to do this, before XUL was killed off. Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain. Not surprised their market share keeps shrinking. At this point, what's the sell? Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26464973

testesttest 6y ago
I only use them on mobile at this point (for adblock). For desktop, they are just worse than Chrome.
- fastball 6y ago
  Brave has better adblock on mobile in my experience anyway.
masklinn 6y ago
> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is just way too unnecessarily large. A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my personal hardware covers).
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.
josephcsible 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.
- SirLotsaLocks 6y ago
  at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.
  - marcodiego 6y ago
    If it weren't for those 'using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause', IE would still be king.
    - toyg 6y ago
      Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.
    - spijdar 6y ago
      Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally. I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI. Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets. Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 6y ago
I also use this feature. I suspected I did but I had to go and look at the settings. I took two screenshots in normal and compact density. The difference on my 15.6" laptop is very small. A few vertical pixels of spacing in the tab bar and address bars. I'd rather keep compact mode but I'll hardly notice the difference. Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that direction.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  If anything I'd like it even more compact in >= 2k screens.
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  I have noticed this trend across many different applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender. Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display). A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice. I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path
    - 6y ago
aembleton 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Tree Style Tabs on the desktop and and uBO on Android.
- trulyme 6y ago
  ...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.
dynamic_sausage 6y ago
> I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js: user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);
- m463 6y ago
  or just get a 4k monitor and realize things are too small and you need the extra space for readability.
karaterobot 6y ago
> Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature. They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving product feedback which are likely read by product people and not engineers fixing bugs.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  They said that engineers are well aware of the feedback, that implies they don't care about the other channels either to me
eulers_secret 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases, preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there), their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff. > Most sites don't work as well Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken? What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me. I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".
- charlesdaniels 6y ago
  > Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken? Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that I don't have hard data to back this claim up. > What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me. Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla marginally more with my user data than Google. But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right now. > I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell". I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend. I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web and all that).
lukewrites 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? I use it almost entirely for containers. Do any other browsers have the same functionality either built-in or via plugin?
- freebuju 6y ago
  Chrome has an addon that's closed sourced but claims to emulate containers feature from FF. I've forgotten the name since I never bothered checking it out.
Paul-ish 6y ago
> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by, but no one is going to write an article about each new feature and change.
limeblack 6y ago
> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. I agree. They need an emulate chrome option: Match keyboard shortcuts, menu, and compact layout.
skinkestek 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to make me dislike them? That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay $15 a month for it, maybe $25. A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in my current position. FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by someone.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  My guess is everyone has a different definition of unbroken. And with the Chromium-monoculture one can't reliably use some parts of the web with any other browser. Or even a too-old Chromium-based browser for that matter.
  - skinkestek 6y ago
    Firefox works for everything I need and want to to except my time sheets - and I do a lot. A fork would of course need to be kept up to date with the base (until everyone switches :-).
seba_dos1 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much much much more in order to make me switch to a different browser because there's simply no competition there - everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single instantaneous crippling.
dandellion 6y ago
I find myself in a similar situation, they keep removing more and more features that made me choose Firefox over the alternatives for the last 15 years. Recently I've been using Brave a bit and it seems a good Chrome-based alternative, I still prefer Firefox as my main driver, but in the direction they're headed at some point there'll be just no reason to keep using it.
Spooky23 6y ago
I’ll never understand why designers hate dense interfaces so much.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Here is my theory: The designers before them went for different metrics. Designers need to design. And this is how the circle of UX paradigms is powered. Like fashion, it will cycle. The current trends are current, until they aren't.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    By the way, that is not a negative statement towards design or designers. I think it's just our nature playing out.
    - CRConrad 6y ago
      It kind of is a negative statement: It illustrates that sometimes (often), our nature sucks.
bachmeier 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.
- pitaj 6y ago
  This has never happened to me.
  - serf 6y ago
    it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle with browsers for long periods. example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day. It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset. The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes. Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.
    - derefr 6y ago
      I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site, with no distractions, that does the right thing when self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window, restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive administration and maximize useful uptime. I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself. https://fluidapp.com/ https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.
nevster 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Panorama Tab Groups
simias 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on Chromium. It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.
zenincognito 6y ago
100% agree with the default layout wasting too much space. I like this user also wish there was even a more compact layout. This is most certainly a abandon software breaking change for me.
shock 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain. I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now wants to remove support⁰ for user.js, supposedly to save a stat() call :-/ ⓪ - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752
dosenbrot 6y ago
> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto, I hate programs wasting space with these things. The compact design matches really good with other toolbars and stuff in KDE. (however, there could be an option to make it bigger, for touch displays, but it should'nt the only choise)
m463 6y ago
> Why bother using FF at this point? All these people complaining about a free browser, and one that isn't selling your soul to pay for it. Please check your behavior, and set a better example in the future.
jbluepolarbear 6y ago
I haven’t used Firefox since they introduced The Australis interface. I hated it. It broke all the extensions I used, the ones I developed, and took away my ability to put the buttons where I wanted. I figured if I had to learn a new browser I’d go with Chrome. Now I mainly use Edge and I really like it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Seb-C 6y ago
I gave up to Firefox about a month ago and switched to Vivaldi. So far I'm not looking back. I would certainly have preferred to stick with a non-blink browser, but Mozilla won't stop remove features I like and making harmful changes. How many pointless UX revamps have they done in the last decade? Meanwhile everyone is still waiting for the many unkept promises, including mobile extensions.
nanis 6y ago
> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. Ditto ... I am not clear why we need eight pixels' padding around the location bar and what looks like 15 pixels' padding around the icons alongside. It looks like the location bar is around 32 px on this admittedly ancient 1280x800 laptop screen and I'd be happy with 20 px.
BuckRogers 6y ago
I'm an 18+ year non-stop Firefox user and have always routinely checked out the competition (once every few years). Just did my latest comparison last night in fact. What I appreciate about a browser has changed over the years, I'm less of a privacy expert or some sort of Gecko diehard, and more about features and performance. Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync. Opera- dedicated search bar, with no way to set a hotkey to focus it. Disqualified as that makes it a non-power user's browser for me right off the bat. This browser's closed source and Chinese ownership does give me pause. Vivaldi- dedicated search bar and hotkey (yay!), but no way to sync tabs with iOS. I've already determined for a while now that Firefox (best on features) and native browsers, Edge and Safari (best on performance) were my 3 browsers of choice, and that remains unchanged. Edge on Windows 10 is truly great, and has a decent start at sync, even if it doesn't come close to how well Firefox does there. It just needs fleshed out more. To answer your question on what the sell is, it's really dependent on the user, and native browsers have huge advantages (most people should probably just use Edge/Safari IMO), but I see Firefox as the only non-native browser worth using due to the best-in-class feature set. I'm not going to draw this post out further detailing all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for me to demonstrate how much Firefox outclasses the competition there. It's a very mature browser.

testesttest 6y ago

I only use them on mobile at this point (for adblock). For desktop, they are just worse than Chrome.

fastball 6y ago
Brave has better adblock on mobile in my experience anyway.

masklinn 6y ago

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto. First thing I do when setting up firefox, the default is just way too unnecessarily large. A large monitor isn't even necessary, it's too large at every monitor size between 13" and 34" (which is the range my personal hardware covers).

charlesdaniels 6y ago
I feel like it would be even worse on a smaller display where screen real-estate is at a premium. I am fortunate to be able to afford (relatively, compared to most of the world) high end computer equipment where wasting pixels is not as problematic as it might be for someone with less resources.

josephcsible 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Because the alternative is that Blink becomes the new IE6.

SirLotsaLocks 6y ago
at the moment I plan on continuing using firefox so I'm not leaving but you can't keep using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause. Firefox has to earn their place and be a browser people to use. I think firefox going after the general public makes sense but when it comes at an expense to generally more advanced users they've probably gone a step too far though to be fair they don't have nearly as many devs as other browsers like chrome and edge.
- marcodiego 6y ago
  If it weren't for those 'using a browser with a worse experience because of some futile moral cause', IE would still be king.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Man, I remember the Mozilla days, and then Phoenix and Firebird... so many issues, so many problems. But there was a sense of belonging to "the good web" which would have inevitably triumphed. And then Google showed us that anything can be corrupted.
  - spijdar 6y ago
    Characterizing early Firefox as only gaining traction because people had more warm fuzzy feelings for it seems off to me, although I wasn't around at the time personally. I started using Firefox in the late 2000s mostly because I switched to Linux, and Chrome wasn't a thing yet. The web dev tools were better (firebug, anyone?), there were extensions like pentydactyl and whichever predecessor it had back in the day, and overall I just preferred the UI. Pretty much every reason I originally used Firefox is gone now. I used it out of habit now and because it's less memory intensive still, but that's it. There's just not much going for Firefox except being backed by "the good guys" in a fight against the Empire. Even the cross platform support has withered with all the Chrome components like Skia and dependencies on tools like node.js (ironic that Firefox needs chrome's javascript engine to compile) limiting it to mainstream target triplets. Firefox is trying to stay usable and I applaud that, but now they're just perpetually stuck trying to play catch up with Chrome's features and performance, always lagging behind, either a little or a lot. Chrome sets the web standards -- I think Firefox has simply lost.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pmontra 6y ago

I also use this feature. I suspected I did but I had to go and look at the settings. I took two screenshots in normal and compact density. The difference on my 15.6" laptop is very small. A few vertical pixels of spacing in the tab bar and address bars. I'd rather keep compact mode but I'll hardly notice the difference. Anyway, this designers' fad of making desktop applications look like mobile apps (I'm intentionally using those two different names) must come to an end. My favorite example is "think if Excel on a computer would have half an inch padding around each cell with possibly no borders". This normal layout thing is only a very small step in that direction but it's still in that direction.

SubiculumCode 6y ago
If anything I'd like it even more compact in >= 2k screens.
charlesdaniels 6y ago
I have noticed this trend across many different applications/toolkits. In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender. Desktops tend to have high-precision pointing devices. It is wasteful of space to make big, touch-friendly buttons. Many web apps and GTK programs that follow this trend are barely usable on my laptop (1366x768 display). A good UI toolkit should support adjusting the size of the UI elements according to what platform is being used. In an ideal world, I could just set some kind of scale factor and have all my applications respect it. Then the people with touchscreens can be happy, as can the people with mice. I guess from the perspective of commercial software, it's cheaper to write one UI and have it cater to the lowest-common-denominator. What I don't understand is why these design trends have become popular in the open source space.
- klyrs 6y ago
  Ubuntu directing me to "swipe up to login" on my desktop with a 4K monitor is a crime against humanity. IIRC a tap at the keyboard has the same effect but that's not the discoverable path
  - 6y ago

aembleton 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Tree Style Tabs on the desktop and and uBO on Android.

trulyme 6y ago
...and not many other extensions on Android. They killed most of them, leaving just 17 or so. Oh yes, and you can actually install the rest of them on nightly if you follow some weird procedure, just so that we all know there is actually no technical reason for it. Thank you Mozilla, appreciate it.

dynamic_sausage 6y ago

> I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js: user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);

m463 6y ago
or just get a 4k monitor and realize things are too small and you need the extra space for readability.

karaterobot 6y ago

> Edit 1: worth noting, there is a lower-down comment thread[0] with relevant links - Mozilla does not care if you like this feature. They're just saying to please stop spamming the bug tracker with "me too" messages. There are Mozilla forums for giving product feedback which are likely read by product people and not engineers fixing bugs.

thatguy0900 6y ago
They said that engineers are well aware of the feedback, that implies they don't care about the other channels either to me

eulers_secret 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Lots of reasons: familiarity, it works for your use cases, preventing a Chrome hegemony (though we're already there), their focus on privacy, important add-ons still work great. The fact FF isn't owned by an ad-run business who's main concern is figuring out a more effective way to make you buy stuff. > Most sites don't work as well Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken? What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me. I'm not changing because they removed one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell".

charlesdaniels 6y ago
> Citation definitely needed. This is worded without precision, you could claim "work as well" to mean nearly anything. Do you have specifics, with data? Performance? Functionality? Features? DRM? What is it? I haven't encountered any broken web sites with desktop Firefox. But, I also don't look at all the internet, so I'm curious - what's broken? Mostly JS-heavy sites by big companies. But yes, I admit that I don't have hard data to back this claim up. > What alternatives are there? Chrome is a no-go, Brave is off doing it's URL redirect and bitcoin weirdness (that I don't need in a browser) Edge is just Chrome. There's some de-googled Chrome options and I guess some weird special-build Firefox options, but really, out of all the options I see, FF is best for me. Un-googled chromium is one. I suppose that I trust Mozilla marginally more with my user data than Google. But yes, I agree, the browser landscape is pretty lousy right now. > I'm not changing because they moved one tiny feature used by a very vocal minority, and it's a mistake to assume that FF has no value or no "sell". I perceive this to be the continuation of a trend. I think FF still has value for now, but it seems like that value is pretty quickly dropping - as a piece of software, if not from a philosophical perspective (supporting the open web and all that).

lukewrites 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? I use it almost entirely for containers. Do any other browsers have the same functionality either built-in or via plugin?

freebuju 6y ago
Chrome has an addon that's closed sourced but claims to emulate containers feature from FF. I've forgotten the name since I never bothered checking it out.

Paul-ish 6y ago

> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. Maybe this reflects the coverage more than the reality. Read the changelog and you will see things worth getting excited by, but no one is going to write an article about each new feature and change.

limeblack 6y ago

> Seems like every time I see coverage about Firefox, it's Mozilla removing or crippling some feature I care about. I agree. They need an emulate chrome option: Match keyboard shortcuts, menu, and compact layout.

skinkestek 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Because it is still better and Google has worked even harder to make me dislike them? That said, if someone made a viable fork of the latest Firefox and fixed all the problems and missing APIs I could easily pay $15 a month for it, maybe $25. A good browser would be worth almost as much as a good IDE in my current position. FTR: employeer pays my full subscription to all Jetbrains tools. I'd happily try to get them to pay for unbroken Firefox but more realistically pay it myself. $100 - 200 for the software and $50 to spite Mozilla at this point ;-) Just today someone tried politely to ask about what one could do to get them to reconsider the api to hide tabs and were brushed of by someone.

paulryanrogers 6y ago
My guess is everyone has a different definition of unbroken. And with the Chromium-monoculture one can't reliably use some parts of the web with any other browser. Or even a too-old Chromium-based browser for that matter.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  Firefox works for everything I need and want to to except my time sheets - and I do a lot. A fork would of course need to be kept up to date with the base (until everyone switches :-).

seba_dos1 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Well, the thing is that Firefox would have to be crippled much much much more in order to make me switch to a different browser because there's simply no competition there - everything else is much worse already, so I'd simply trade my browser getting slowly crippled over time with a single instantaneous crippling.

dandellion 6y ago

I find myself in a similar situation, they keep removing more and more features that made me choose Firefox over the alternatives for the last 15 years. Recently I've been using Brave a bit and it seems a good Chrome-based alternative, I still prefer Firefox as my main driver, but in the direction they're headed at some point there'll be just no reason to keep using it.

Spooky23 6y ago

I’ll never understand why designers hate dense interfaces so much.

ddingus 6y ago
Here is my theory: The designers before them went for different metrics. Designers need to design. And this is how the circle of UX paradigms is powered. Like fashion, it will cycle. The current trends are current, until they aren't.
- ddingus 6y ago
  By the way, that is not a negative statement towards design or designers. I think it's just our nature playing out.
  - CRConrad 6y ago
    It kind of is a negative statement: It illustrates that sometimes (often), our nature sucks.

bachmeier 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. I absolutely LOVE the way Firefox dies to force you to restart your browser. Silently updates in the background, then all of a sudden it stops working and you don't know why. Who among us hasn't wanted to be teaching a class with dozens of students and have their browser die? Guess they're going after those that yearn for the days of Windows 98 stability.

pitaj 6y ago
This has never happened to me.
- serf 6y ago
  it happens pretty routinely to me on computers that idle with browsers for long periods. example : a cctv kiosk I have just sits on a URL all day. It updates silently and breaks the browser sometimes a few times a month, facilitating remote administration to reset. The other lovely behavior is when after an update the tab to show update notes is prioritized upon browser auto-restart -- thus covering up the cctv kiosk tab with something advertising firefox changes. Firefox is getting harder to love, (thankfully?) so is the competition in most cases.
  - derefr 6y ago
    I'm surprised there isn't a browser-ish application purpose-built to be used as a webview of a single site, with no distractions, that does the right thing when self-updating (= wait for a scheduled maintenance window, restart, then reload everything exactly as it was.) This app would be to browsers, as Windows IoT Core (nee Windows Embedded) is to regular Windows: the thing you run on a kiosk to minimize the need for interactive administration and maximize useful uptime. I mean, you can kind of use Electron for this, but it's not designed to be used this way (i.e. to be used un-customized as a long-running service with hot updates.) It's designed as an SDK for developers to produce apps with, not as an app in-and-of itself. https://fluidapp.com/ https://fluidapp.com/ exists, but it's not multiplatform, and it still doesn't address the needs of the embedded market either.

nevster 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Panorama Tab Groups

simias 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. I share some of your gripes and I do think that Mozilla routinely drops the ball with Firefox, but that's a gross overstatement. I exclusively use Firefox as my main browser (both on desktop and mobile) and I only very occasionally stumble upon websites that will only work correctly on Chromium. It's annoying when it happens but it's most definitely not "most sites" in my experience, it's a small minority.

zenincognito 6y ago

100% agree with the default layout wasting too much space. I like this user also wish there was even a more compact layout. This is most certainly a abandon software breaking change for me.

shock 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? Most sites don't work as well, and Mozilla seems actively hostile to my use case. If I'm going to use a browser that is hostile to me, I may as well get better website compatibility out of the bargain. I feel the same. I am saddened that some guy from Mozilla now wants to remove support⁰ for user.js, supposedly to save a stat() call :-/ ⓪ - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1543752

dosenbrot 6y ago

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. Ditto, I hate programs wasting space with these things. The compact design matches really good with other toolbars and stuff in KDE. (however, there could be an option to make it bigger, for touch displays, but it should'nt the only choise)

m463 6y ago

> Why bother using FF at this point? All these people complaining about a free browser, and one that isn't selling your soul to pay for it. Please check your behavior, and set a better example in the future.

jbluepolarbear 6y ago

I haven’t used Firefox since they introduced The Australis interface. I hated it. It broke all the extensions I used, the ones I developed, and took away my ability to put the buttons where I wanted. I figured if I had to learn a new browser I’d go with Chrome. Now I mainly use Edge and I really like it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Seb-C 6y ago

I gave up to Firefox about a month ago and switched to Vivaldi. So far I'm not looking back. I would certainly have preferred to stick with a non-blink browser, but Mozilla won't stop remove features I like and making harmful changes. How many pointless UX revamps have they done in the last decade? Meanwhile everyone is still waiting for the many unkept promises, including mobile extensions.

nanis 6y ago

> I use this feature. On a large monitor, Firefox wastes quite a lot of space with the default layout. To be honest, I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout. Ditto ... I am not clear why we need eight pixels' padding around the location bar and what looks like 15 pixels' padding around the icons alongside. It looks like the location bar is around 32 px on this admittedly ancient 1280x800 laptop screen and I'd be happy with 20 px.

BuckRogers 6y ago

I'm an 18+ year non-stop Firefox user and have always routinely checked out the competition (once every few years). Just did my latest comparison last night in fact. What I appreciate about a browser has changed over the years, I'm less of a privacy expert or some sort of Gecko diehard, and more about features and performance. Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync. Opera- dedicated search bar, with no way to set a hotkey to focus it. Disqualified as that makes it a non-power user's browser for me right off the bat. This browser's closed source and Chinese ownership does give me pause. Vivaldi- dedicated search bar and hotkey (yay!), but no way to sync tabs with iOS. I've already determined for a while now that Firefox (best on features) and native browsers, Edge and Safari (best on performance) were my 3 browsers of choice, and that remains unchanged. Edge on Windows 10 is truly great, and has a decent start at sync, even if it doesn't come close to how well Firefox does there. It just needs fleshed out more. To answer your question on what the sell is, it's really dependent on the user, and native browsers have huge advantages (most people should probably just use Edge/Safari IMO), but I see Firefox as the only non-native browser worth using due to the best-in-class feature set. I'm not going to draw this post out further detailing all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for me to demonstrate how much Firefox outclasses the competition there. It's a very mature browser.