Mozilla is working on a Firefox design refresh
Mozilla is working on a design refresh for the organization's Firefox web browser that it refers to as Photon internally. The last major design refresh of Firefox was unveiled in Firefox 57 in November 2017; it was known as Proton back then.
Mozilla did change several interface elements after the release of Firefox 57, recently the controversial address bar overhaul that it launched in Firefox 75 Stable.
Information about the design refresh is limited at this point in time. Mozilla created a meta bug on Bugzilla as a reference to keep track of the changes. While there are not any mockups or screenshots posted on the site, the names of the bugs provide information on the elements that will get a refresh. These are:
- The Firefox address bar and tabs bar.
- The main Firefox menu.
- Infobars.
- Doorhangers.
- Context Menus.
- Modals.
Most user interface elements are listed in the meta bug. Mozilla plans to release the new design in Firefox 89; the browser is scheduled for a mid-2021 release. Its release date is set to May 18, 2021.
Since development work is ongoing, it is possible that the release will be delayed.
Sören Hentzschel revealed that he saw some of the Firefox Proton mockups. According to a post on his German blog, development is still in an early stage. Mozilla created multiple mockups with different designs and it is not clear yet which of these will be picked and be included in Firefox.
He notes that Firefox will look more modern when the designs land and that Mozilla plans to introduce useful improvements, especially in regards to the user experience.
Hentzschel mentions two examples of potential improvements to the user experience: a mockup that displays vertical tabs in a compact mode, and another that shows the grouping of tabs on the tab bar.
How to test Firefox's Proton visual refresh
Development versions of Firefox will receive the refresh earlier. Firefox users who run Nightly, Beta or Development editions of the browser may do the following to enable Proton in the browser (note that the switch does nothing at this point as Mozilla will have to push it to the development versions first):
- Load about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Confirm that you will be careful.
- Search for browser.proton.enabled.
- Set the preference to TRUE to enable the design.
- Restart the Firefox web browser.
Again, it will take weeks or even months before the design refresh will become available in Firefox Nightly. Rest assured that we will publish screenshots of the design refresh as soon as it becomes available.
Now You: anything in particular that you would like to see improved / changed?
Kill YouTube
Which other browser can display bookmarks in a vertical panel?
Microsoft Edge
@clriis
Vivaldi.
I like new UIs and I like Firefox. Good news for me.
And BTW, I don’t know what are you guys are talking about. 3.9 score in Google Play? Who told you it is bad? I really appreciate their refresh, now Firefox on Android is really stands out among other browsers, in a good way. Really don’t know why there are so many haters.
It’s because the old versions were better and many people voted 5 stars. After the Firefux Daylight garbage redesign many people started voting 1 star.
new UI… again?
Plenty of comments on Slashdot about this (move the slider + load all comments to see the best ones):
https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/01/03/0516247/mozilla-is-working-on-a-firefox-design-refresh?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed
Speaking of design refresh… Slashdot still uses that confusing threaded view? How could anyone follow whats going on in there?
When will FF get a Right Click Past Unformatted Text option as cutting and pasting article titles that are also hyperlinks are getting eaten when pasting into any Disqus forum. That and the Spell Checker Mozilla Foundation and folks with dyslexia and aphasia and the need for a context sensitive spell checker. And these “Non Profit” Foundations that get tax abatement and really the entire Open Source spelling system needs to be able to accommodate more with spelling and comprehension issues!
And FF my Spelling Dictionary how to force that to use the US English version and stop defaulting to other than my Linux Mint selected English Language selection!
i always hated the ugly Hamburger crapola, i hope they get rid of that. i think AOM could be designed better. but firefox needs to keep up with the likes of Vivaldi or firefox will lose more users to it, firefox has a better Addon system still than Chromium has or Chrome. the context Menu could be done simpler
https://www.debugpoint.com/2021/01/firefox-proton/
Some first public leaked mockups??
Kind regards Martin!
I looked at it. Looks like they are copying Apple’s flat gray get-the-OS-out-of-your-face ugly. Whoops! I still see a gradient of color in one of the sliders. Maybe they could get rid of that “3D flat” look, too. I want my new tabs empty. The new “Open Menu†is adaptive based on your usage and only shows the most used menu items at the top. Meaning nothing stays put. I was unaware that a turquoise tone minimizes distraction when viewing a webpage, and Firefox Launches More Experimental Features Including PageShot, Min Vid and Tracking Protection, woohoo! I can’t wait.
So a rip off of Opera? https://www.opera.com/features
>>>Mozilla plans to introduce useful improvements, especially in regards to the user experience.
Oh, well, in that event, YES!!!
The ESR branch of Firefox is always a must have if you need sustained stability and productivity with no headhache at all for one entire year. It always work, always, it is a rock. I use it only for trusted sites with no kind of extension at all and with the default configuration. Just out of the box you get a full functional browser that works like a charm in every site. Also you can easily disable privacy protection to see all entire websites as they are designed to be seen. Sometimes is useful to see the entire site. Chrome is terrible for privacy, out of the box it stores passwords, site payments, data filling and more unfriendly and insecure each time, in fact I uninstalled it and will never come back again. And if you want to browse around non trusted sites with Firefox, just install ublock origin with all filters on or whatever those you need. Done. :]
YAY! Another revamp that moves stuff I use from familiar positions and sequence causing me to have to figure out how to reorganize it in a way that I, the actual user would like to have it, which, nine times out of ten is not the way it was from the last revamp nor the way it is in the new.
Stop bothering it and make it more secure and functional. Did I ask you for some silly pop out search bar? or the inability to open a new tab on an internal page I prefer without having to modify it through about:config? or many other small and not so small annoyances that you somehow see as improvements.
Fortunately, there’ll always be a fix or workaround for all these so called improvements that never actually seem to be so. Guess I’ll be saying farewell to the blended dark blue to light blue swoop of color that one day graced this browser. What’ll it be this time? Maybe red blending to yellow in a circus/hotdog motif! Be sure to move all the standard icons to the right, since most are on the left now. Increase the search bar to triple the size and be sure to make it un-resizable so that less and less useful addons will be out of the way for more important things like announcements reminding me to register for a firefox account that will take care of my every need and desire.
Looking forward to the latest nightmare. Hope you are getting plenty of overtime checking and triple checking every aspect of this well oiled browser!
Manifest v3u is reason enough for me to use Firefox over chrome.
@Jon
When Manifest V3 hits, browsers with native adblockers (which are not extensions, i.e. unaffected) like Brave, Opera, Vivaldi will profit. Mainly Brave, I guess. I doubt that Firefox will be profiting from this. Assuming that many users will even be switching away from Chrome, after all it will still be allowing for sizable adblocking lists.
Look at Android, Chrome has no adblocking there at all, and Brave is still the go to.
Manifest v3 has not yet affected Chrome, but isn’t helping firesux’ case.
OMG…..seems like everytime I launched FF I get the the please wait while FF installs updates. Now they’re going to update it again ??? The university department I used to work for dumped FF because a VP was having a meeting. The conference room computer was checked early to make sure the VP’s website would open. Guess what happened….yep…he started up FF and had to wait for about 2 minutes while FF updated. FF was pulled from all conference rooms and replaced with Chrome. If only they had a prompt asking “Update now yes/no” . I am done with FF even on my android tablet. I have no plugins and it freezes and is sluggish.
I dont personally like their so called “new” design woth the tabs in the title bar and addressbar/bookbar loaded in each tab. i used the usersettings file to put them back where o want them to be. as long as i keep getting to ise this file to change the ui myself, then they can do what they want. it uses a ton of threads when loading webpages as well.
Another one? First one killed half of their user base. Firefox users are fatigue with all these changes. It will most likely be intrusive changes and user will have no choice. RIP Firefox.
The salary-raise for the MozCorp-CEO from 2.5 to 3 mil* is obviously well-deserved, LOL.
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/endangered-firefox-the-state-of-mozilla/
@max
https://itdm.com/wp-content/uploads/Mozilla.png
Says it all.
And – From the gHacks archive —
How to turn the new Firefox 29 into the old Firefox
by Martin Brinkmann on April 26, 2014 in Firefox – 126 comments
Firefox 29 will introduce changes to the web browser that will rock the world of some users of the browser. The version of Firefox ships with Australis, a design, layout and feature change that introduces major changes to Firefox and is in my opinion comparable to the major switch from Firefox 3 to 4.
[…]
Once you have upgraded your browser and restarted it, you will notice quite a few changes right in the main interface.
https://www.ghacks.net/2014/04/26/turn-new-firefox-29-old-firefox/
And — make sure to read the comments from six years ago —
The more things change – the more they stay the same.
Happy New Year Everyone!
To those saying that Mozilla should just use the blink engine, I say that’s a bad idea on multiple fronts. Bad for the web, bad for privacy. Especially in light of the fact that even Microsoft is using it.
Those saying that all open source projects are created equal, so we should all just use Blink, are putting too much faith in our ability to audit the huge code base making up Blink. Google makes the majority of its revenue by selling information that it collects about it’s users. For many, that would in itself be reason enough to not use it.
What really bothers me right now, and I can’t stress just how much it bothers me, is that Mozilla is focused on things like a UI refresh, after they let a huge number of developers go, stopped sponsoring the Rust programming language, and stopped developing the new Servo browser engine in house. Rust and Servo were to be the future of the Firefox browser, and it made all the sense in the world that a browser engine, which have notoriously been known to be huge memory hogs in the past, be developed in a language that makes misuse of memory difficult.
But no, rather than leading the way to the future by replacing their ancient code base with something truly modern and original, they chose to drop it and just put a new skin on an old browser.
Here be mockups (via Reddit thread): https://www.figma.com/file/B2HHiX8QEmqRl4sgcXr75l/Proton-Project?node-id=340%3A2294
I’m occasionally forced to use an alternative browser to my regular one (Waterfox Classic) since a growing number of sites don’t support it anymore. The latest of those is Github (probably due to M$ being the current owner now).
Firefox in that respect is an acceptable alternative since at least “about:config” functions as a means to block stuff like telemetry while still retaining the option to control other aspects with addons. I just hope Moz won’t do away with the “Menu bar” option because I hate those Javascript menus.
Oh-o… I’m posting too fast again! Two posts in one hour is too fast according to your site Martin.
Mozilla has this [used to be large] organization with nothing much to do but “refresh” things now and then. (Gotta do something after all.) Still, this announcement takes me back to better times when it actually mattered… nostalgia is nice. (See what not listening to your users has brought you, Mozi?)
I hope there are still developers making add-ons that will fix what the new ‘design refresh’ spoil.
@Anonymous
WebExtensions are limited in what they are allowed to do to the UI.
Maybe some userChrome.css hacks will fix it, but certainly not any extensions.
They’ve already disabled userChrome by default, it needs an about:config option to enable it. I won’t be surprised if they remove it entirely sometime in the future. So only the designers will have the ability to change the interface, and the end user will be prohibited entirely.
They may as well throw in the towel and use Chromium as a Browser because they’re going down the drain fast…Google money is keeping them alive anyway.
I think there needs to be new direction in Mozilla. The current ceo needs to go. She is focusing on things that are not core. Eg spending money on social issues like gender neutrality while firing developers. It’s laudable to engage on these matters but they do not bring market share nor revenue. At its core, Mozilla is a browser and a standard setter. They should focus on this. Make the browser better and you will have users coming. They could use the chromium engine and save themselves from developing a rival engine to one that powers 95% of the Web.
They could also start looking at corporates and build a browser for these markets. Corporates will pay for reliability and usability. That will not come without new leadership.
A reasonable refresh would be firing the current CEO and not replacing her with someone who thinks a good business strategy is to flip the middle finger to half the user base.
Who can blame Firefox for wanting to go out looking snazzy, being buried in a nice new suit? Too bad it’s long overdue, the UI has been stinky for ages.. Who knows, maybe now they will start respecting themes on linux? You know, that OS which still gives a damn about Firefox.. That’s where they should improve, on windows the battle is over.
https://preview.redd.it/zvujthy3pbqz.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=caf32ca30014211fc7aefab43b0acf11abb17115
this is good news, we will wait ..
Native vertical tabs? Yes, finally!!!
I really do love the current design though.
thanks for the info on FF refresh and changes to get it in my Nightly when it is released.
you have me confused though.
first you mention that the new version is called internally Photon.
then you tell that before FF57 there was the Proton internally dev version and further on you only refer to Proton for the new version under development?
A Firefox design refresh? That sounds like bad news. Perhaps they will want to make it look like a google product which shall remain unmentioned.
Maybe they hope that people will mistake it for Chrome and use it, because they would otherwise not.
I think rather than outright copying Chrome and Edge, Mozilla will now focus on making the usability similar to chromium, while copying more and more features from google’s engine into their own engine. In that way, they can still say that they have their own engine, but in practice, within a couple years, their engine’s codebase will be very similar to Blink.#
Mozilla’s main problem is a marketing one: They could innovate and save hundreds of millions of expenses simply with switching to Blink and Chromium. Within a year, they would have created a front-end UI that resembles current Firefox but with the better engine. But they think that they can’t do this because this would eliminate the unique selling point of Firefox. While this may not be true, they don’t have the courage to try this out, since they could indeed lose a large part of their loyal user base.
So I think the management has decided to go a different route, and with the recent yahoo money they have the opportunity to do this since they currently have net assets of around 2 years of their current expenses. Over the next years, they will qietly eliminate redundant parts of the browser, and lay off more of their engineers.
In the meantime, their focus will be on creating new revenue models. Their strategy seems to be to try out lots of different experiments and see whether something sticks. This is usually a recipe for disaster, but since the entire web will be moving towards different revenue models over the next years, and away from ads, this may work out long-term.
of course they are: diversity hire / art school reject bingo: when you fail at everything you’re supposed to be doing, just refresh the UI again for the nth time…
Unfortunately this is the kind of thing that happens when you let mentally ill people with pronouns in their name/bios have access to your codebase, They change things for the sake of changing things and if you ask for justification they can’t provide any, and of course they don’t want to support the existing product because they lack the technical knowledge to do so, instead they need to endlessly reinvent the wheel to appear competent.
I’m sure this will break my userChrome.css and waste my time because somebody changes a class selector to be more inclusive or some other garbage, just like every other UI revamp in the past.
Your ad hominem argument discounts the criticism that follows it. Move onto another browser already, yeah?
Is not “Ad hominem” if it is true.
These mentally ill people enjoy reinveting the wheel and for them “that’s ok”.
Once in a blue moon you may get a reasonable answer from one of them, otherwise is a mix of no answers, answers that tried to dismiss you based on your “ignorance” or incapacity to understand and they don’t waste their time trying to explain any further.
Sooner or later they’ll make it about racismus or any other label they like to use to dismiss althogether all non “positive and exactly what they want to hear” if you keep asking questions or pressing for an answer or more details about their responses.
Just in the last few years Chrome people bothered adding some tab management options to the browser, after more than a decade of existing. Trying to ask why that was not the case before and why they haven’t added some of the options firefox or even Opera has to it and you would have gotten mostly non answers.
Try to do the same with Mozilla and you get at beast PR drivel as to why.
Best you can hope is some dev to write a blog post with some “explanations” about the decisions they took, but that’s final, trying to question it and be ready to be called “toxic” or some “ism” be thrown at you as soon as you disagree to any degree.
@Is True
Can confirm, what is even going on at the place (Mozilla):
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3067471
Technically it’s not ‘ad hominem’ as Ayy’s criticism doesn’t target a specific person… :)
ad polynem?
One of the reasons why Chrome is so successful is UI consistency. Take the first Chrome version from 2008 and the current one and you can see that it’s the same software still. Do the same with Phoenix (first version of Firefox) and current Firefox and tyou’ll spot major differences.
Mozilla’s constant messing with the UI = UI designers trying to justify their jobs, WILL drive more users away again. They’ve also recently “designed” Firefox on Android to death (see Play Store reviews).
But all of this is good in my book, the shady Google proxy called Mozilla needs to go away.
Chromium is open source but that does not mean it can be modified at will. Only some portions of it can. Without making it as basic as say FF Focus or Ungoogled Chromium, the only way to get anything resembling privacy out of Chromia is to do it outside the browser.
Yeah, FF is no different than Chrome OOB but it can be made quite private with lots of work. Similar to Windows.
BTW, Google gave Apple billions to be one of their search engines and also a Chrome in emulation mode browser sitting on top of Safari.
Becoming completely impossible to follow your sophistic Strawmen. Start with conclusions then back into reams of minor points as primary drivers, unwittingly supporting the exact opposites of stated conclusions.
Whatever.
@ULBoom
> Chromium is open source but that does not mean it can be modified at will.
But that’s exactly what it means.
> Only some portions of it can. Without making it as basic as say FF Focus or Ungoogled Chromium, the only way to get anything resembling privacy out of Chromia is to do it outside the browser.
Ah, so you are talking about the practicality of introducing major changes to Chromium… Well, of course, if you are just a one man shop like the dev behind Ungoogled Chromium (nothing against him), then the changes you can reasonably introduce and maintain will be minor, I agree. However, that is not how most Chromium-based browsers are being developed. Most have companies behind them that will scale accordingly in size if more and more people use their browsers. If e.g. Vivaldi or Brave had 20% market share each (utopian figures, I know), there is no reason to believe that they couldn’t modify Chromium even more than they do now.
That you can’t create a privacy-centric fork of Chromium today is false and I can actually prove it: Look at Brave, Bromite, Vanadium.
> Yeah, FF is no different than Chrome OOB but it can be made quite private with lots of work.
I do not deny that but technically you can do the same with Chromium (at the code level). Many of the toggles you have to flip to their sane values in FF are already at their sane values by default in some Chromium-based browsers. Just saying.
> BTW, Google gave Apple billions to be one of their search engines and also a Chrome in emulation mode browser sitting on top of Safari.
The difference between Apple and Mozilla is that Apple can survive without Google paying them. This is being reflected in their sometimes strong opposition to Google’s plans at W3C discussions, while Mozilla’s opposition amounts to silence in the woods.
> Becoming completely impossible to follow your sophistic Strawmen.
I don’t need sophism to state that:
“Google having 100% control of web standards” and “Google having 95% control of web standards with 5% controlled opposition doing their bidding” is in the end the same thing. Mozilla will not (and never did) oppose Google in any meaningful way. They are Google’s fig leaf in case antitrust investigators ask inconvenient questions. If anything, Mozilla keeps the monopoly going rather than weaken it.
Google is playing it rather smartly: Keeping an irrelevant opposition which they absolutely control around, have them set bad privacy defaults for the vast majority of users, but leave some hidden settings for the privacy-concerned who will then advertise the controlled opposition based on something 1% of users – at most – do (changing hidden settings), saying that it’s the “privacy browser” when it’s actually not. Ingenious, I would do the same thing if I was them.
The current situation means that Google can do as they please and that’s just sad. As long as people think that Mozilla is part of the solution instead of part of the problem, nothing will change. They’ll go along with whatever Google does and people still flock to them – good for Google, I guess.
As one calls into the woods, it echoes out
>>>”while Mozilla’s opposition amounts to silence in the woods.”
This may grant you some undeserved applause by some halfwit fans of yours, but anyone with more than half a brain should realize by now that if those are literally the only things you could find in your vain quest to discredit Firefox, it’s actually a pretty solid browser.
@Polichinelo’s secret: oh dear, what sour grapes that Iron Hearts has fans and you seemingly don’t. Time for a change in your PR strategy?
Well to be fair first version of Firefox (Phoenix) came out in 2004, which back then UI was much different. Over the years it has changed to keep up with newer trends.
@mo
Fair enough, compare 2008 – 2010 Firefox to the current one, then. Design overhauls during from that point until today:
Firefox 3.6 -> Firefox 4.0 -> Firefox 29.0 -> Firefox 57.0 -> Firefox 89.0
All of these were major and the Firefox 89.0 overhaul presumably will be major. Nobody wants to deal with Mozilla being virtually unable to leave the UI alone. It’s a waste of time.
Agreed, that is probably the only browser that remained almost the same since its launch. And why should they change it when it works perfectly fine.
“But all of this is good in my book, the shady Google proxy called Mozilla needs to go away.”
And supporting Chromium (mostly dominated by Google) is good how?
* [Editor: removed, please keep it civil]
@Unknown person
You are a +++ [Editor: removed, please remain civil] if you think that Firefox with 3% market share has any kind of influence on web standards at this stage. Mozilla is also 90%+ funded by Google via search engine royalties, meaning they won’t do anything that could potentially anger their paymasters. This is why Firefox’s default privacy is piss poor, they leave it to the user to change it because they are banned from doing it by default (and yes, there are many non-breaking changes they could introduce to benefit users).
The only entity who opposes Google at W3C discussions is literally Apple. Mozilla usually sides with their Google masters, go look it up if you don’t believe me. Using Firefox solves nothing and does not put a dent in Google’s designs in any way.
Chromium itself is open source, so anyone can take the code and modify it as they see fit. Being opposed to one open source project dominating (’cause quality engineers) is pretty dumb. That’s like saying Linux (hypothetically) dominating a market would be bad and that we would need FreeBSD to “resolve” that situation.
The monopoly scare tactics are the only “argument” Mozilla cheerleaders have left because the actual browser itself is typically not worth using.
We get it, we’ve been told for OVER TWO YEARS now, with the almost never-ending frequency of a screaming baby, that you hate Firefox with the passion of a thousand burning suns. Please prove you unsubstantiated claims. And yes, the burden of proof is on you
> Mozilla is also 90%+ funded by Google via search engine royalties, meaning they won’t do anything that could potentially anger their paymasters. This is why Firefox’s default privacy is piss poor, they leave it to the user to change it because they are banned from doing it by default
Please provide proof that Mozilla’s search engine deal with google (and other search engines if applicable) contain terms that limit what Mozilla is allowed to do with it’s own product outside of setting the engine as default in those regions where it applies.
You can’t, because you’re making shit up. Do you seriously believe google even needs to do anything like that, let alone run the risk of legal issues.
> The only entity who opposes Google at W3C discussions is literally Apple. Mozilla usually sides with their Google masters, go look it up if you don’t believe me
Please provide some empirical/statistical proof. My logical guess is that 95% of changes are agreed upon by all parties. Do you even know how many changes are constantly made to web APIs – the vast bulk of which are not contentious in any way?
> if you think that Firefox with 3% market share has any kind of influence on web standards at this stage
Have you empirically measured this influence?
Have you even read in-depth discussions on these standards as they get finalized and changed over time? Have you even seen all the Mozilla employees who take part (and have taken part) in web API standards. There are many helping shape a consensus – along with google, apple, microsoft, and a huge amount of non-browser-specific contributors. Even a few Brave devs are in there – can you please also hate on them to be consistent, thanks. I can name at least a dozen Mozilla employees right now, off hand, from memory, who have helped shape “fuckloads” for over a decade, and continue to do so today. I can point to, without even looking hard, at dozens of changes accepted in the last few months after concerns or questions or suggestions from just a single Mozilla dev.
You seem to think it’s the size of the user base that dictates how much input or change is effected. The truth is, it is not 30 google engineers per 1 mozilla engineer: that’s not how it works. And any outcome is the result of discussion, logic, facts – not “I’m bigger than you, so no”
In reality, anyone can help and effect web standards. But yes, it is true that google throws it’s weight. Apple can’t do shit about it either. Can you please hate on Apple as well, to be consistent
Iron Heart, then I must be a “+++”. Because Firefox engineers do have influence on web standards. And I know this fact because I’m a member of the CSSWG in the World Wide Web Consortium. I don’t have to “go look it up”, we have weekly meetings.
We already lost Trident/EdgeHTML, it would be catastrophic for the web if we also lost Gecko. A WebKit/Blink monoculture would be bad. Not as bad as a Trident/EdgeHTML monoculture, since WebKit and Blink are open source as you say. But browser diversity is good for innovation.
@Oriol
I didn’t mean to say or imply that Firefox engineers do not partake in discussions, make proposals etc. That’s not my point at all.
You can ask virtually any web dev, admin… Gecko is an afterthought in their testing. Can’t blame them when it only has 3% – 4% market share (mobile + desktop combined). What Chromium and Safari have implemented is the gold standard, so to speak. You reach 96% of all users already if what you have implemented works in these two. The devs didn’t “choose” that situation, either, rather the market did.
I mean, what are you going to do about the fact that *de facto* almost nobody uses Firefox? Even you have to bow to certain realities. Gecko wouldn’t be the first irrelevant engine to die, either. Presto is no more, and Trident is on life support (more or less abandoned aside from anything security-related). It can happen again.
The way things are headed, I think a Blink – WebKit duopoly will be the only logical outcome.
You call it “design refresh”, I call it the final nail in the coffin. This browser just went below 8% market share in December 2020. If history is to go by, this kind of changes only lures users away rather than bringing new ones, or, at the very least, maintaining the current user base. Fact. You can check the statistics for any browser, Chrome including, you’ll notice during every user-facing change the browser suffered a loss in market share.
ADD: look how well the Firefox for Android is doing. Currently at 3.9/5 stars with more 1 star reviews coming every day. And that’s a fairly average userbase, not the “hardcore” userbase you still have on PC, therefore the argument “oh the majority of users like these changes” doesn’t hold a candle.
And then you’ve got actual mozilla developers posting images of themselves on twitter, drinking Pepsi (claiming it’s beer; the can was sealed too, but that’s besides the point), in their pool, showing the middle finger to their users – I don’t think it was a smart move afterall. It actually was so stupid it made it seem funny.
Yuliya, can you provide more details about these mozilla developers showing the middle finger to their users? I know some mozilla developers personally, and it seems so out of place for them to do that.
The posts have been since removed from Twitter
But see here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_developer_literally_gives_users_the/
Here you go
https://i.redd.it/jn1rja1g4ng51.png
@Anonymous
Not @Yuliya, but still glad to help out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/i8nuyb/firefox_developer_literally_gives_users_the/
Then you haven’t been around since the Phoenix/Firefox 1 days. Take all the changes Mozilla has done to make Firefox a Chrome-clone. They gutted customization of the browser to limit add-ons to a specific set of web extensions instead of keeping XUL, they went to fast release so that add-on developers had trouble keeping up and gave up, and they have gone onto political lobbying instead of fixing their browser.
Mozilla used to be a leader, but now they’re just a follower, so we have nothing that can contest Google Chrome.
Oh, my goodness!
>>> “And then you’ve got actual mozilla developers posting images of themselves on twitter, drinking Pepsi”
Pepsi? This chinese coke! … clearly they are commies!111!!
Even most terrible, they have also planned to sneakily and surreptitiously murder Santa Claus. YES, and we have proof this was directly ordered by Chaves … or Fidel … or … anyway we have PROOF!!!
Listen folks, this terrorist – with a market share of just over 4% across all platforms – blackmail Google year after year for hundred and hundred of millions and poor Google is forced to pull this cash out of your pocket!!! … out of YOUR pocket! Yes POCKET! Got it …? POCKEEEEET!!!!!
Let’s donate your data to Google and make a “Brave New Internet” again!
@Yuliya
Firefox actually sits between 3% – 4% market share if you look at mobile and desktop combined (no reason not to).