Chrome and Google not caring or supporting these kind of things I get but Firefox's recent efforts seem to be either gross negligence or targeted moved to destroy their addon ecosystem.
I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.
> I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.
Well, it got me to switch from Chrome to Firefox on Windows, so there's that at least. Firefox feels much faster to me now, and strongly reminds me of Chrome in the very early days.
I think there’s a certain degree to which needing to implement spectre mitigations (e.g. site isolation) threw a wrench into some of the plans for improving the baseline of the extension apis.
I feel you. I absolutely think that Firefox needs to not follow Chrome's footsteps but instead continue to be the Emacs of the web versus being a gedit.
Been trending that way for years now. Making a browser that does what you want it to do is way easier than making a browser that does what your users want it to do. Sometimes I wonder if the "iterate version integers every six weeks so our e-peen looks bigger" approach is to blame.
That's an interesting thought. It's almost like Chrome and Firefox have been in a "browser cold war" for years now, trying to outdo each other's version numbers, trying to entice users with greener grass rather than the stronger "attacks" of the IE-Firefox "browser wars" of the past, and one side trying to imitate the other.
Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated. Users may have gained some rapid iteration, but in the long term, I think we lost the ability to understand how the browsers are changing (of course, some of that is a matter of the inherent complexity explosion in the Web).
And once you change to the constantly-incremented version numbering scheme, how can you ever go back to something more meaningful? Who's would blink first?
Happily, Pale Moon, for example, retains more modest version numbers. I hope their developers continue doing well. Imagine if it (or a similar project) were the next Phoenix, the way Firefox rose from Netscape's ashes.
Chrome realized that if it jumped ahead in version number, it could gain a huge PR advantage, and then Firefox was forced to follow that pattern or appear outdated.
Personal anecdote, but of all the non-technical people I know (which I define as those who may barely know what a browser is, and only use the computer for browsing a tiny fraction of the Internet), none of them like the constant change, especially when it breaks their workflow, and those who do pay attention to version numbers think the rapid "version explosion" (to quote one) is completely silly. Like a lot of other things in life, they just put up with it because they're powerless.
I really wonder who the browser makers are targeting with the "move fast and break things constantly" attitude, because it's definitely neither the technical nor non-technical users I know.
Certainly isn't me. I'm still salty about Firefox 2 removing the "close current tab" button and putting an X on every tab instead. It was nice having that muscle memory instead of having to hunt down whichever tab you're currently focused on.
I've never used Firefox 1.x so haven't used that UI, but it sounds like something they could've made configurable but didn't want to, for whatever reason.
However, in all the tabbed browsers I've used, Ctrl+F4 closes the current tab.
I thought Firefox was going to get better with their redesign but it seems like it just resulted in lost functionality. Their misguided quest to get more market share has been a completely failure and pushed anyone who valued their customizable experience away.