[MrAlex94]

I understand why Mozilla have started implementing these features, it seems to have more mass market appeal than not - look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become.

But boy does it not add extra effort removing these features every time there’s a new roll-out and it’s not done the best way IMO. I feel as if these features would go down better if Mozilla actually notified the user that they’re available and then offered whether to enable them or not (could have them enabled by default for new users). That way you’re still giving a choice, but in a more respectful manner.

If anyone is interested I’ve gutted all the more obscene stuff out of Waterfox and have instead left the useful ones such a ML translation, which is opt-in.

Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours. Feels like you somehow have to intuitively know how something works (unlikely) or do a web search on how to use everything instead of having it shown to you nicely.

[anonymouskimmer]

> Related: I feel like onboarding is a lost art, more software should bring back software wizards and UI tours.

Yes, please! We use Google's online office programs at work and every time it has so far popped up a notification about a new feature I immediately dismissed it by the act of actually doing the work I opened the tab to do. Then I have no idea how to find out what that feature was again, as the popup notification was dismissed.

[dehrmann]

I'm torn because I probably do want to know what new, relevant features are, but I opened the app for a reason, so I want the tour to get out of my way so I can do my work.

[knollimar]

Seriously. I'm the type of person to read the what's new, but they're temporally placed for minimal engagement with them

[BrenBarn]

So true about onboarding. The trend towards trying to make all interfaces simple and immediately accessible has led to lots of functionality being deeply hidden. Of course you don't want the interface to be insanely complicated but you also don't want to make it so simple it's limiting.

Sort of related, after reading this I went and checked the Waterfox reddit and saw some people complaining about recent changes. I agree with a person there that one of the most important things is not changing. One of the reasons I use Waterfox is to not be subject to the caprices of Mozilla. I just want the same interface I've been using since back in the days of like Firefox 4.0. If there are changes, they can be introduced in an opt-in, reversible way as you suggest. But the default assumption should be "don't break users' workflows by changing behavior".

I appreciate all you do with Waterfox! I've been using it for years now.

[themafia]

> look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become.

Is there an active user market for browsers? If there isn't then this analysis is useless.

[hagbard_c]

There is an active market for users and 'AI' is the new big thing to feel them in.

[baranul]

What you are saying is right, but Mozilla looks to be abusing their users. The appropriate thing to do, if they were concerned about looking more honest and showing they care about user's privacy, would be to have the features listed in settings and allow them to be turned off. However, that's not what they are doing.

I've also noticed that new versions not only can sneak in new features, but reverse or conflict with previous changes users made in config. The sad thing is how limited the options people have to avoid the abuse.

[scuff3d]

> ...look at how popular “AI” powered browsers have become.

What? I have yet to meet a single person who has any interest in "AI powered browsers"

[hilbert42]

"…it seems to have more mass market appeal than not…"

Perhaps so, but Mozilla has a long history of shooting itself in the foot by repeatedly making ill-considered decisions that annoy users (and add-on developers) which have driven them away. Many problems were clearly avoidable, and with Google's juggernaut Chrome towering over Firefox, Mozilla's most important decision should have been to focus on keeping its user base intact at all costs. Clearly, that didn't happen.

Instead, Mozilla plowed on making changes to Firefox with seemingly little consideration of the impact they'd have on users. And Mozilla's still at it. Everyone makes mistakes and one should be forgiven for making them but it's hard to feel sorry for Mozilla given it's made so many and repeated them so often. The article says Firefox has 2.17% of the browser market, my response is if it were not for the doggedness of a small percentage of users who value not being locked into Google's and Microsoft's ecosystems Firefox would have died at least half a decade or go.

It's not possible here to provide a comprehensive survey of these mistakes and annoyances so I'll mention just a few of my pet peeves (there are many more). First, I'll preface this by saying that for most users a web browser ranks amongst their most important utilities, it should be a 'transparent' interface between them and the web, and it should function without hindering users and be malleable to suit users' needs. Unfortunately, that's so often not the case, and Firefox is not alone in not fulfilling that purpose. OK, let's start:

• Annoyingly, just about every major version of Firefox comes with changes that affect its operation. Often they introduce time-wasting and usability gotchas that are more impositions than feature improvements. For example, the Australis UI, for me it put constraints on how I could configure the UI (toolbars were more restricting and less flexible—e.g. the default spacing between icons had been increased limiting their maximum number).

• I had no objection to the Australis UI per se except that Mozilla made its use compulsory. Why didn't Mozilla provide a simple fallback option to the previous UI to protect compatibility?

(It's 40-plus years since the PC revolution, so you'd think by now developers would at least know that when they alter a UI, they force millions of users around the world to lose millions of manhours futzing around and relearning everything/developing new muscle memory and so on. In many instances these changes are unnecessary. Moreover, users find having to adapt to them damned annoying!)

• Mozilla also applied the same UI nonsense to options/preferences, the original interface (as still used by say the Palemoon fork) wasn't perfect but it's replacement was worse, its large font forced it to dribble over to the next screen and finding options wasn't as clear. It is now easy to lose focus—one can miss seeing say the About:config option even when looking for it. Improving the earlier interface would have been preferable (just think of the amount of time developers lost redeveloping that work—work that wasn't really necessary).

• Another UI annoyance is the new minimalist look, hiding toolbars and like. More development wasted on a feature that only reduced usability. Right, it's another instance of ergonomics bedamned, again, we've more user time unnecessarily wasted looking for menu items/options not to mention time taken up by add-on developers who've had the job of rectifying the Mozilla-induced problem.

• FIREFOX'S BIGGEST AND MOST LONGSTANDING PROBLEM—BROKEN ADD-ONs AND PLUGINS. Almost every new version of Firefox has broken them. It was so fucking annoying that years ago I switched to the Palemoon fork for my default browser on both Windows and Linux; it was the only way I could achieve operational stability. And I'm just a user, many add-on developers left the Firefox platform as Mozilla's changes forced them to redo work that had been completed previously.

It's been a nightmare, Mozilla kept offering excuses, new software paradigms, security reasons and so on but as a user it disrupted my workflow to the point where I gave up. The other issue was that important add-ons upon which I depended were no longer being developed for the same reasons. Why didn't Mozilla take a leaf out of MS's Windows development where backward comparability was absolutely paramount? Anyone at Mozilla reading this will be screaming security issues and such, but why didn't you offfer those in the know with at least a fallback position?

• Mozilla invented a very useful webpage format called Mozilla Archive Format, MAFF (.maff), which allowed a webpage to be saved as a single file as opposed to the traditional way of saving HTML and ancillary files separately (as per MS Windows etc.), however it is not available in Firefox, nor is the MHTML/MIME (.maf) format which is the other way of saving a webpage to a single file (as used by IE for years).

Why fucking not, as it's so damn usefull? Moreover, MAFF is so simple, it's just a zip file in disguise, unzip it and one ends up with a HTML file and a separate directory for the other files which can then be viewed by any browser. Moreover, MAFF was simpler than the MIME format and was particularly useful in the days when IE saved nonstandard HTML in its .mht files. For years, there was a MAFF plugin for Firefox but its developer gave up because Mozilla kept changing the requirements for add-ons. In the absence of an absolute necessity, such action is suicide for a program.

We are a quarter-century into the 21st Century and Firefox is 21 years old so why is Firefox still so devoid of many basic web necessities/features—ones that ought to have been fully integrated into the base product thus avoiding the need for add-ons (the same also applies to Thunderbird). It's long been such a puzzling question.

Again, I use the Palemoon (PM) fork to avoid Firefox's limitations especially its failure to integrate Mozilla's own MAFF format. Importantly for me PM still has a MAFF add-on. (On Android, I use Privacy Browser (PB) because it fully integrates the MIME/.mht webpage save facility within the body of the program, moreover, it's one of the best implementations I've used.)

• Mozilla's dictatorial authoritarian attitude and JS. I spend much of my web browsing time doing so with JavaScript disabled as webpage rendering is just so much faster, also ads and pop-ups disappear and much website spying is nuked. Firefox used to include an option to disable JavaScript but Mozilla killed it off without warning. Why? Such bloodymindedness makes me want to send Firefox's developers off to the stocks for necessary 'reeducation'. The fucking hide of them—we do need Mozilla whistleblowers to leak why the organization acts in such an autocratic manner.

Right, such dysfunctional decisions simply mean that I am unable to use Firefox even if I wanted to (and again it's PM and PB that have come to the rescue).

• Mozilla markets Firefox as a having good privacy credentials yet it's always been overly secretive about Firefox's telemetry—its defaults, how users should go about disabling its various aspects, etc. This double standard doesn't fit well with many users, myself included.

• Moreover, on that last point, Mozilla often wants users to provide feedback on various aspects of Firefox but it has a longstanding policy—which it never offers any satisfactory explanation about—of not saying why certain decisions about the program were or weren't made—why certain features were or weren't included and so on—just as we're now witnessing again with these new AI features. In short, that Mozilla is not open with its users breeds mistrust.

• There are many other problems with Firefox (such as with printing) that I cannot address here but from what I've said it's clear that in the light of the Chrome onslaught Mozilla failed to carve out a nitch for itself in places not filled by Chrome (why it's so is most curious, perhaps it's pressure from Google threatening less funding if Mozilla doesn't tow the line).

Whatever the reason, Mozilla over many years not only failed to grasp the significance of having the tech-savvy and those with special requirements amongst its loyal Firefox users but it often invoked hostile policies that alienated them. Mozilla could have easily integrated important features for technical users and still kept Firefox simple for neophytes and beginners but it failed to do so. The penalty has been harsh, Firefox nowadays is almost an irrelevancy.

Perhaps someday we'll learn reasons why Mozilla both alienated its niche market of tech-savvy users as well as throwing away an excellent opportunity to foster and encourage privacy-minded users who would have much preferred not to use Chrome or Edge.