Mozilla Ends the Advertisements In Firefox's New Tab Tiles (mozilla.org) 197
An anonymous reader writes: For some time, Mozilla has been experimenting with advertisements in the "suggested tiles" on new Firefox tabs. They received a lot of criticism from the community for it, and now (using linguistic gymnastics), Mozilla has decided to end that experiment. They say, "We experimented with all content – including advertising. We proved that advertising can be done well while respecting users. We have learned a ton along the way. Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. We want to deliver that type of content experience to our users, and we know that it will take focus and effort to do that right. We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery. We want to thank all the partners who have worked with us on Tiles. Naturally, we will fulfill our current commitments as we wind down this experiment over the next few months."
How the mighty have fallen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging.
Do people who speak like this not realise how fucking ridiculous they sound?
Firefox: 8% of the market and dropping. (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest browser usage stats [caniuse.com] are showing Firefox at only about 8% of the market. That's just the desktop market only, too. They have almost no mobile presence at all (Firefox for Android is at 0.04%).
Is Mozilla finally realizing that people are fucking fed up with all of the utter stupidity that has infected Firefox for the last several years?
Are they finally waking up to the fact that their whole organization will soon be irrelevant once the remaining Firefox users move to Chrome or the other browsers?
Fuck, I sure hope so! I hope that their next blog post talks about how Australis is being thrown away in favor of the Firefox 3.6 UI, which was actually usable.
And I hope the blog post after that is about them finally getting around to fixing the goddamn performance issues that make Firefox so much slower than Chrome.
I really do hope that Mozilla has realized that treating their users like total shit hasn't helped them.
Maybe they are learning that when you treat your users like shit, and force one unwanted change after another on them, that they'll move to the better products that competitors are offering!
I really hope that's the case.
I hope that Mozilla is getting a grip on the reality that they're facing.
Do what Firefox's users want. Don't force idiotic changes on them. Don't force ads, of all things, on them.
Re: Firefox: 8% of the market and dropping. (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is a lack of anything better than Firefox. Chrome/Chromium will spy on and rape your children, IE is a Microsoft product, Midori is good but still needs polish which probably won't happen because muh lightweight.
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The problem is a lack of anything better than Firefox. Chrome/Chromium will spy on and rape your children, IE is a Microsoft product, Midori is good but still needs polish which probably won't happen because muh lightweight.
Safari? I guess Mac users aren't of interest to you (I agree FF is still more usable that Safari, but Safari isn't bad and doesn't spy).
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I disagree.
It is the worst browser. IE 11 is ok and is W3C compliant. MS Edge is even better and Windows 10.1 next spring will have Edge with Webkit extensions too! Opera uses Chromium minus the spyware. No one cares about Google spying. It is the best browser. IE 11 is usable. Edge is good.
Where does this leave Firefox? Firefox is stuck in a timewarp and is turning into what Netscape was. A social media engine and bug ridden product. In the end AOL got a branded IE 6 and named it AOLNetscape even though th
Re: Firefox: 8% of the market and dropping. (Score:5, Informative)
There's a rewrite in progress, it's called Servo, if you want to check it out, it's actually really cool https://github.com/servo/servo [github.com]
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Pale Moon.
It's kinda sad when "properly maintained version of Firefox that predates all the bullshit they've added recently" equates to "better than Firefox".
But at least I have a decent approximation of Firefox without all the bullshit, so there's that.
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I gave up on that altruistic bullshit when I realised I just wanted to browse the web with something that works. When Firefox started driving users who care about privacy towards Chrome, Mozilla should have realised they were majorly on the wrong path.
Also IE being a Microsoft product is not bad in on itself. IE is a really crap browser, that's the problem. If it were released by the FSF I still wouldn't use it.
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When Firefox started driving users who care about privacy towards Chrome
How so? While Firefox keeps breaking the add-ons now, with a little effort you can maintain real adblock, requestpolicy, noscript, cookieculler, httpsfinder, betterprivacy, youtube video downloader etc. Chrome doesn't have a decent replacement for most of these, last I checked.
The other features Firefox (with add-ons) still has - mouse gestures that work on preferences tab too, tree-style tabs which chrome has refused to ever support using any add-on etc. There is still no match for Firefox in features.
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ublock and tamper monkey do most of what I need. Youtube video downloader? Why does that need to be a plugin sitting hogging memory? If you want a youtube video just go to tubeoffline.com and download it.
What does Firefox offer in exchange for a tiny bit of extra functionality? A slower browser. A browser which will let a single script crash the program. A browser that despite having a decent memory footprint now still has some horrific memory leaks. Still not 64bit, though I should be glad since it means m
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OK, some valid criticism there, some not. Tree style tabs?
1. You tube downloader means any flash/mp4 video downloader. There is no dedicated website for all of them.
2. For a few years, Firefox has been asking me to kill misbehaving scripts. Do you have an example of a Firefox crashing script?
3. I've been using 64 bit Firefox for 5 years on Fedora Linux. It's been available before that, but I was on 32 bit Fedora.
4. With vimperator, I've not needed any icons in the top right for 7 years. Chrome's vim emulati
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1. Not something I need a plugin for. Even if tubeoffline didn't exist managing complex downloads is something I do rarely so it should be a sitting feature in the browser. Standalone app e.g. Jdownloader works just fine as a replacement when needed.
2. Script may have been the wrong word. But yes there are countless examples of something going wrong in one tab taking out the browser. That was the predictable result of everything as one process approach that people have been criticising Firefox for a long ti
Re: Firefox: 8% of the market and dropping. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not "best", "least-worst".
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I think if that happens they are just fucked, as nobody is gonna pay the hundreds of millions they got from Google and Yahoo for their search, not with numbers as low as they are.
It should not cost millions to make and distribute a browser. They need to downsize back into the community project they are supposed to be, they should have an annual budget of less than $1million a year, anything beyond that is fat that needs to get cut.
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I know that FF was the #1 browser for my customers for several years and since Australis every.single.one has asked me to help them move to something else or gone to Chrome.
I can imagine that conversation. "I hate this new UI, help me switch to a browser with a UI that's just like the one I hate!"
What's next? "Tracking protection is off by default? Help me switch to Chrome! Surely, they can be trusted."
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I switched to FF from Chrome when FF introduced the new UI. Why? Chrome is a resource hog and the only thing keeping me there was the UI.
Chrome benefits from the myth of performance, as they were, at one time, the better performing browser. That's obviously no longer the case, so I expect the tide to turn again over the next few years. To call the death of FF seems a bit premature, considering the state of the competition.
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it doesn't look like Google, Pale Moon project, or Comodo are be as dumb as Mozilla was.
I dunno about Google. I still don't get the decision that they and Opera made; to block users from saving to %temp% and opening one-offs from the download window. I originally thought "well that's dumb, but at least it beats Firefox."
Then I came to realize, the hard way, just how many CSVs, XLS/ODS, and DOCs I download on a daily basis at work.
Now I'm back to Pale Moon. I don't love it, but it's really got the laurels of "sucks the least" clinched.
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> Fuck, I sure hope so! I hope that their next blog post talks about how Australis is being thrown away in favor of the Firefox 3.6 UI, which was actually usable.
Classic Theme Restorer to the rescue. :-)
Re:Firefox: 8% of the market and dropping. (Score:5, Interesting)
Third (fourth?) AC chiming in.
It wasn't that there was a huge gap between 3.6 and 4.0. It was that 3.6 marked the demarcation between a browser with a status bar - which was something every browser had had since the days of Mosaic, and 4.0 was the one without the status bar, because the UX team, ignoring overwhelming negative feedback, had already made up its mind that the users didn't need one anymore, and if they didn't like it, they could always install a third-party extension.
The problem with "install a third-party extension" is that it effectively tells the community: we're not building a browser for you, we're making our own UX decisions and it's up to the community to spend its own efforts undoing our work if you want to keep the browser the way you wanted it.
To this day, two the most popular extensions have been Status4Evar, and post-Australis, ClassicThemeRestorer.
A UI team builds a user interface based on feedback from users. A UX team ignores the data and implements its preconceived notions of design aesthetic against them, creating negative value that the community must then work to undo.
The real irony about the rationale for the status bar was that it took up too much vertical space. 16 pixels. And the same group of webdevs - not the same individuals, but their contemperaneous collegues - in the same name of "advancing" the web for small screens and mobile, subsequently went on to design mastheads like time.com, nytimes.com, forbes.com, and pretty much any local TV news station with giant 60+ and 150+-pixel position:fixed things that remain visible at all times.
You can't have a 16-pixel status bar. Not even an about:config option to re-enable it. You can't have an option to put tabs on top/bottom. But giant CSS position:fixed mastheads that remain visible and limit the actual content to a tiny sliver of the screen, why, that's just fine.
Fuck this industry. I'm so glad I left.
Millennials/Hipsters are the problem. (Score:1)
Collectively they're called Millennials or Hipsters. They've been the worst thing to happen to computer software ever. Their "design" ideas have ruined a large number of well-established software products, including Firefox 4 and later, GNOME 3, and Windows 8. They've also ruined many web sites (just look at the Slashdot Beta disaster), as you've pointed out. And they're also responsible for systemd, which has rende
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Everything these people are involved with turns to total shit.
Oh, you are so gonna be a Tea Partier if you aren't already. The olde cranky bastard is very stong in you.
Re:Millennials/Hipsters are the problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except they have a valid point. If the changes that these people made had been rated as good by the general public, there would have been an increase in their marketshare. In this case the opposite has held true, and it reflects directly back on those that mozilla has hired meaning that the millinials/hipsters are the cause of mozilla's massive loss in marketshare in the last 8 years. This entire thing could be summed up as a learning experience: Don't change what isn't broken, and don't shove garbage down the users throats.
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Except they have a valid point. If the changes that these people made had been rated as good by the general public, there would have been an increase in their marketshare. In this case the opposite has held true, and it reflects directly back on those that mozilla has hired meaning that the millinials/hipsters are the cause of mozilla's massive loss in marketshare in the last 8 years.
You sound exactly like the guys down at the local bar moaning about how it all went downhill after women got the vote.
You forgot to add:
Thanks, Obama!
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Certiously, someone so insightful should have pretty good citations.
I'll even wait until you get those goddamned kids off your lawn for the cites.
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5 insightful? So you must have proof that hipsters and millenials are running the show at Mozilla?
Certiously, someone so insightful should have pretty good citations.
I'll even wait until you get those goddamned kids off your lawn for the cites.
You only need to look at the policy changes and the internal pushes that have been taking place at Mozilla itself including statements by their current CEO and others. [reddit.com] That includes stuff by people who work at Mozilla trying to force their views on people at other OSS projects. Or haven't you noticed the shrill amount of whining by hipsters and millennials over terms like "master, slave, suicide"(as an example) in various FOSS projects, and how they want to remove them. Never mind that it would break ba
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You sound exactly like the guys down at the local bar moaning about how it all went downhill after women got the vote.
You forgot to add:
Thanks, Obama!
Yeah how dare I actually be involved in FOSS projects and see the amount of BS going on these days over the perpetual hurt feelings brigade over words that are used in important functions.
Oh as for the Obama thing? Pro tip: America isn't the centre of the universe, no matter how much you think it is.
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You sound exactly like the guys down at the local bar moaning about how it all went downhill after women got the vote.
You forgot to add:
Thanks, Obama!
Yeah how dare I actually be involved in FOSS projects and see the amount of BS going on these days over the perpetual hurt feelings brigade over words that are used in important functions.
Oh as for the Obama thing? Pro tip: America isn't the centre of the universe, no matter how much you think it is.
You mad bro?
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You mad bro?
Sadly no, more disappointed in the general stupidity.
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You mad bro?
Sadly no, more disappointed in the general stupidity.
And how. It's pretty widely known that I'm so stupid I forget to breath at times.
But define hipster for me. Seems for some that it is like hardcore neoconservatives calling anyone who disagrees with them a Libtard or some other useless pejorative.
And to think, no one brought up "neckbeards" And with millennials. Ive experience with quite a few, and for the most part, they consume, they do not produce. But even that's a forced generalization.
To cap it all off we have seen the same sort of ruination of
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Competition. It keeps everyone honest.
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Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging.
Do people who speak like this not realise how fucking ridiculous they sound?
Sounds like a pornsite advertisement.
Fresh horrors (Score:5, Insightful)
"We have therefore made the decision to stop advertising in Firefox through the Tiles experiment in order to focus on content discovery."
I feel the need to pick this sentence apart and read between the lines. What fresh horrors do they have in store?
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When you start to type something into your address bar or search bar; it's going to start looking more like a Facebook news feed enticing you to click on a Sponsor's clickbait/ad, than search results.
Respecting users? (Score:2, Informative)
Part of me wonders what prompted this change [palemoon.org].
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Palemoon and Fossamail (Score:2)
Too much (Score:5, Insightful)
"Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. We want to deliver that type of content experience to our users, and we know that it will take focus and effort to do that right."
People do want this. But not from you. Provide a good web browser and then get out of the way. It's this same logic that prevents users from setting a homepage on Android. That's right, Mozilla doesn't want you to change the most basic web browser setting on Firefox for Android. No, I don't want to put a link to my home page on your home page. Stop trying to provide "an experience"!
Re:Too much (Score:5, Insightful)
People do want this. But not from you.
This. I want content I ASK FOR, not the crap you think I might want to see. It is pathetically stupid for Firefox to put ANYTHING on a new tab except perhaps the home page the user has set. I'd rather they not even put the "settings" wheel on a page that is supposed to be BLANK (about:blank).
No, I don't want to put a link to my home page on your home page.
I find it rather annoying when Firefox on CentOS decides that I need to see some CentOS page when I open it, and the repeated "check plugins" page that cannot be disabled on Windows is even more so. It takes fiddling deep in the config to set the plugin check URL to something invalid to get it to stop running off to momma.
Ads on the New Tab page? (Score:2)
What's the purpose when so many people run ad blockers?
Re:Ads on the New Tab page? (Score:4, Funny)
If you say APK in the bathroom mirror 3 times he appears and edits your hosts file. I bet you're too chicken to try it though.
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If you say APK in the bathroom mirror 3 times he appears and edits your hosts file. I bet you're too chicken to try it though.
Please, do not summon the host file monster.
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Can your incantation do 16 things?
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APK
APK
APK
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Can adblock+ do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:
1.) Protect vs. malicious sites/servers (past ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C communique
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C communique
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C communique
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (adds reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phish
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get you past a dns blocking
12.) Keep yo
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OMG it worked!
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>"What's the purpose when so many people run ad blockers?"
These were not web pages and not blocked by ad blockers, it was just placeholders when you open a new, fresh tab. But you could also easily elect to have the browser not show them, too. Mozilla did it right- you could just select a blank page for new tabs if you wanted. The control was right there, easy to find... just click on the gear and check "show blank page."
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Well, I had no problem with it. If you don't want it blank, you just use about:config.
If you want "user choice", you must REALLY hate Chrome...
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I was not aware of that until now! I still had about:config browser.newab.url set to about:blank, but it wasn't doing anything. Ug, that does piss me off, somewhat.
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These were not web pages and not blocked by ad blockers, it was just placeholders when you open a new, fresh tab.
Right. When I open a blank tab, I see ... facepalm.
(I'm using Chromium because it's multi-threaded.)
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Mozilla didn't do it right. There's no correct way to do ads. Ads are harmful.
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What's the purpose when so many people run ad blockers?
It's wasn't ads. And you could easily disable it... The new tabs page showed tiles, like it does in chrome... Honestly that's great, before it was just a blank page.
The only thing was that when you were a new firefox user and there was no content to display in the tiles, some of the empty ones would be sponsored... Or at least that's how I understood it..
Honestly, Mozilla makes money from the search deal.. Which is just ads in-directly... I'm not sure it's much worse to do it directly. Granted it's a
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All it did was give new or occasional firefox users an immediate negative impression of the browser. When the first thing I see on my first day is ads, and no other browsers have ads, I don't come back.
spread on thick (Score:5, Insightful)
'our users' relevant, exciting and engaging, experience.
Marketing has taken over the asylum, nothing but fluff words and miss understanding the relationship, users of firefox are users of firefox, not your users. Not part of the flock you sell at market.
But should pick at holes given their commitment to mimic chrome until there is not reason to pick firefox over chrome. How can an organisation with one main product not understand that the only reason the vast majority of the users of that product only stay is because of the third party plugins inspite of moves to mimic chrome. Then deprecate the third party plugins ?
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They're going for that segment of the market which really likes chrome but think it's too fast and doesn't use enough memory.
I've been using firefox since it was called (Score:3)
netscape and it kind of irritates me that their default "start page" asks for donations when they start doing bullshit like the ads tiles and pocket.
Yea, I turned it off, but I also know from experience a shit load of people don't know how and/or don't care enough to learn.
Nice mini-rant, dude (Score:1)
But they need to raise funds to exist. Projects without funds are dead projects.
Besides, you turned the feature off. So you are complaining about a default setting that you can change yourself, and you did.
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But they need to raise funds to exist. Projects without funds are dead projects.
Projects with too much money tend to get worse because they attract the type of leadership that sees money as its top priority. The type of leadership that has NO IDEA WHY the project is popular in the first place. Mozilla and Dice come to mind.
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Projects without funds are dead projects.
Sometimes, it's a mercy killing.
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Why bother existing if your purpose was to be the open source users-first browser but you've ended up as the only browser that forces ads onto users and your commercial competitors feel less commercial?
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But they need to raise funds to exist. Projects without funds are dead projects.
Projects without users are projects that have no need to exist.
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(Myself, I think changing the name to Netscape made a lot of sense, but when they decided to change the meaning of "Netscape" to make it an application
OT: When will Dicedot figure out (Score:4, Insightful)
what Ads Disabled means?
or does it mean I need an ad blocker here too?
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None of the ad block filter subscriptions block them too. I did share this on adblockplus.org, EasyList, etc. but they didn't think it neded to be blocked by them since it is /.'s own ads. I had to block themselves myself manually. :(
Gee whiz, who knew? (Score:2)
I mean really, who could have predicted that users wouldn't want to see more ads?
It's, like, so unbelievable!
"Experience" is the new "value" (Score:2)
The word that makes a customer cringe for he knows that it means the maker of the product is trying to either upsell or otherwise fuck with him.
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People forget something.
Companies do not make great products and innovations. PEOPLE make great products and innovations. A good company realizes this and hires the best with visions and capable employees to sell and make the product to drive it home.
When committees and marketers who often are not good at their job make the calls you are done. No software engineers who got promoted to leadership positions but rather droids.
In other worse as stated by another slashdotter all from Mozilla sounds the same as a
What a waste of time! (Score:2)
Proof that Mozilla watches South Park (Score:2)
Unless that blog poster is a human ad....
OMG!!!!
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But does he KNOW he's an ad?
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https://youtu.be/a1Y73sPHKxw [youtu.be]
Well good! (Score:2)
I'm glad that they learned their lesson. Maybe if Pale Moon starts to be bad ever, I'll consider switching back.
Our learnings show that users want content that is (Score:1)
I think that means that users want great fun advertisements. I think it's true. My favorites are the ones about pills for diseases I've never heard of before suggesting I ask my doctor for more information. I never have anything fun to talk to my doctor about, and these are great conversation starters.
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"Our learnings show that users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging." I think that means that users want great fun advertisements. I think it's true. My favorites are the ones about pills for diseases I've never heard of before suggesting I ask my doctor for more information. I never have anything fun to talk to my doctor about, and these are great conversation starters.
Ask your Doctor if Scratchicrotchi 80 grit catheters are for you!
I actually think Mozilla did advertising right (Score:2)
I can't think of a single UI change Firefox has made in years that I liked. Some I've hated; some I'm indiferent to.
I don't like that FF still has performance issues compared to Chrome. Doesn't crash like it used to, though.
But the occasional ad on the new tab page didn't really bother me.
IMHO it's actually an example of the right way to do advertising. It was non-intrusive, it was differentiated enough from other content that you could tell it was an ad without being distracting. It usually contained s
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content that is relevant, exciting and engaging. (Score:2)
"Users want content that is relevant, exciting and engaging."
"We need to facilitate integrated synergies"
"The new Browser will engage visionary models"
"This will allow us to enable leading-edge content"
All these three word corporate bullshitisms courtesy of the Corporate bullshit generator http://www.novasio.com/bs_gene... [novasio.com]
If there was ever a bad sign, it is when an outfit starts u
Explains a lot... (Score:2)
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Australis
What in particular is so terrible about the Australis UI? I think you're getting worked up over nothing. If you want Firefox to look different then use Classic Theme Restorer [mozilla.org] or something like it.
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1. Moving things around without asking me
2. Stupid fucking hamburger menu button which I want nothing to do with and which periodically comes back all by itself, forcing me to continually re-customize and remove it. Which is helpful, because my constantly removing it is obviously accidental. I must want the hamburger menu, I just don't know it yet. While we're explaining what's so terrible about things, I'd love to hear what's so terrible about a hierarchical menu system.
3. Curvy chrome-alike tabs which use
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you are both complaining about tabs that take too much space and the lack of a status bar that does uselessly take space ... most of it was just gray area without information anyway.
If you saw the status bar as a waste of space, then you were using it incorrectly. Not only does it show you where links will take you before you click on them, but any good extension offers the option to move its interface there and clean up the top of your browser. Damn if the first thing I did when the status bar was removed
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> Right now I have 27
I don't like the tab UI design mostly, because the tab bar is vertical-space-wasting. I probably never have more than 10-12 browser windows open at one time in that rare instance when there are a lot. What about your workflow or usage warrants 27 tabs?
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not refreshing pages is the killer feature of the tons-of-tabs workflow:
It seems every browser decided to re-load all the page resources when you hit the back button (or.. trigger javascript events that end up requiring this?). This takes a bunch of time and also loses your position on the page. If you just want to peek at a link or two (say.. when reading slashdot...), it's much easier to open those links in tabs, read them in the order they finish loading, and then go back to the original page that hopefu
Re: Finally listening to the comunity! (Score:2)
$324M budget and this AC gets the user sentiment better than all the focus groups ever have.
MoFo will be a joke if they only wind up being a Firefox company - the grand vision roundly failed if several billion dollars couldn't even get a threaded/processed UI implemented for basically two desktop apps, e.g.. Remember when Firebird was the protest app against the extant leadership?
The Board could at least throw 10% of the budget at the evil-Kirk devs who would still be willing to go off and hoist the Jolly R
Re:I have always hated the "New Tab" page (Score:5, Interesting)
The "new tab" page got hidden from the UI for no reason.
It was relegated to "browser.newtab.url" in about:config for a long fucking time, and I used it to specify the new tab page should be "about:blank" the instant they added the "new tab" page that showed your top visited sites, etc. because I knew the ads were coming.
It worked until they started putting ads on the new tab page. The browser.newtab.url setting was ignored.
People bitched and moaned. Mozilla and their dogs on the bug tracker made up some bullshit about how it was a security issue. They claimed malware was hijacking the new tab page via that setting. They did not provide any example of this actually happening.
They SHOULD have just re-exposed the option in the main settings page - use a url, use blank or use the tiles page.
But their "solution" was to ignore the setting and force everyone onto the shitty tiles page.
Choosing "show a blank page" on the tiles page options menu (yes, it has it's own options menu with a gear icon separate from the browser's main options menu) doesn't show you a blank page. It's loads the tiles new tab page with content hidden and the options gear visible. This "blank page" option was inconsistent with the "blank page" option for the home page (which gave you about:blank - a true blank page).
People bitched because they wanted to load a specific page for their new tabs, or wanted a blank page. Mozilla and their goons on the bug tracker started closing bug reports left and right without ever considering user feedback. As I predicted, it was all about the ads. Mozilla said that if users wanted this functionality they should install an addon. So I did. https://www.soeren-hentzschel.... [soeren-hentzschel.at]
Everyone laughed at how Mozilla said the change was done for user security and then pointed people to an unverified third party addon to restore functionality that used to be on the browser's main settings page.
And here I am laughing again. I'll continue to laugh as long as Mozilla continues to fail.
If you would like to laugh along, check out:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org]
And all the dozens of other reports they've marked as dupes and closed. Make sure you expand and read all of the censored comments. (There were many more they outright removed.)
Re:I have always hated the "New Tab" page (Score:5, Insightful)
It got hidden from the UI for a very good reason: if you have a feature that you want to remove, you hide it from the UI and then use the drop-off in usage stats from telemetry collected from "average" users to claim it was never wanted in the first place.
Then you present those skewed metrics to the clueless bosses in order to implement the user-hostile, advertising-friendly, and design-fashionable thing you wanted to implement in the first place.
You don't need tabs-on-top. You don't need a checkbox to enable tabs-on-top. You don't need an about:config preference to re-enable tabs-on top.
You don't need a status bar. You don't need a hidden about:config to enable the status bar.
You don't need to disable Javascript. You don't need an about:config to selectively disable javascript.
You don't need to see the http:/// [http] part of the URL bar. You don't need to see the fully-qualified domain name or the complete URL. You just need to know you're connected to AOL. (Thankfully this one got shot down before it made it to production in Chrome, let alone Firefox.)
Firefox started out as a powerful browser under control of the user. With every feature deletion, they lose market share.
This has been the pattern from UXtards in every product over the past 5 years. CEIP (telemetry) was opt-in in Win7. Was opt-out in Win8. Can be forcibly disabled in Win7. The telemetry of error reporting cannot be opted out of in Win10 beneath Enterprise.
The clued users disable the shit on sight, leaving only the clueless. And metrics-driven UXtards never realize they end up producing products that can only be used by morons, because the only metrics they get are from morons. They could get the opinions of thought leaders by simply asking them, but no, that's not "Big Data" or otherwise buzzword-compliant. So this is the shit we get.
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Anyone still using Firefox, class, anyone?
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Firefox is my primary browser both on my Win7 laptop, Mac, and B&N Nook HD+ tablet running CM12. I also use on a Linux box. Many changes have been made to Firefox in recent years that cost it points, and many of these are UI-centric. The UI is a lot like that for Chrome now, at least for the Android apps. I don't use Chrome, because its worse for what bothers me. Another reason is Google's primary business of Big Data. Although the UI for IE throughh v11 is the least offensive for me, it is my sec
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Yes. The worst parts of Firefox is when it copies Chrome; evolving to the same look, using the same ridiculously fast upgrade cycle, etc. Any browser I use must have noscript and adblock plugins, and that eliminates a lot of browsers. So I have firefox on the phone (where it's not very good, but the default google browser is braindead), Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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Yes actually. I currently use FF, IE, and Chrome. FF for my primary browser, IE for my 2nd monitor media browser (YouTube/Twitch/etc), and Chrome as my backup browser that has no extensions installed in case I need to look at something and it is not working in my NoScript/AdBlock browsers.
Now am I a fan of what FF has done for some time now, not at all. In fact my FF is modded via extensions and the config files to resemble something usable to me. If for whatever reason I lost all of that I likely would
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Been using Opera Developer on Mint/Cinnamon for a few weeks and it's definitely ok. Only one crash (surprisingly, expected more) and very fast (unsurprisingly given the engine underneath). As a matter of fact, I was somewhat stunned that after getting to the bottom of this thread there wasn't any mention of it.
Random thoughts:
- One process per tab (ps aux |grep opera...whoa!)
- Lazy tab loading (enabled in settings)
- No multirow tabs afaict, didn't see an extension like Tab Mix on FF
- uBlock works great (e
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Remember when Google was a search company? Yeah....
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I can remember when Firefox was actually innovative, stable, and a refreshing choice in a browser. Maybe that was only because IE 5 and 6 was so bad?
That's the reason. Now when Chrome and Edge have upped their game, Firefox starts to look quite crusty.