Firefox View is a sleeper hit. If you haven't tried it recently, try it again.
The icon now looks like this, if you removed it from your toolbar (like I did) and need to find and re-add it:
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Yeah, kind of unfortunate that it didn't do much at the start and people were asking themselves why it's there, but from a development perspective, it absolutely makes sense that they wouldn't implement everything ahead of time, before getting feedback from users...
Well, they're rolling out their Shopping sidebar and ad network really quietly. Been rolling it out since 5 versions ago. But something tells me they don't really want feedback on that, so who knows.
If you've got qualitative feedback about the implementation, like you wanted to use the Shopping sidebar, but the text was much too small on your device, or maybe you found a vulnerability in their ad network implementation, which allows tracking individual users, then the developers absolutely want that feedback.
If your feedback is "Don't roll these out!", you're still free to give that feedback, but yeah, that's not useful in the development process.
You'd need to address that to management and ideally include a really good idea for how else to secure the wages of their employees. "Don't make any money!" and "Please, fully rely on the money from Google!" are not useful as feedback.
Wow, what awoke the status quo defender in you. Apparently your expectations for Mozilla are that it chases dollar signs like any other for-profit, but okay...
Stop overpaying your CEO
Average CEO pay went down in 2022... but Mozilla CEO pay skyrocketed. For no good reason. The browser is crashing and burning.
Stop laying off employees
There was another round of layoffs because Mozilla was "diversifying" like you said they should.
Aka fad chasing.
But yes they should learn and...
Stop chasing new fads
They should have learned from their mistakes instead of buying an AI/NFT corporation for an undisclosed sum...
Keep your promises
That new Mozilla-branded company sells customer data to 3rd parties for advertisement purposes. Location data, "inferred profiles," browsing and search history, the works.
If that's what Mozilla fully turns into, you should want it destroyed too.
You seemed to be going off on a tangent about their strategic decisions, when I was talking simply about the feature development process.
I have no interest in discussing their strategic decisions, because flaming about it in some random internet forum isn't going to change anything anyways.
If there was a chance that we worked out a more viable strategy, which Mozilla could tangibly realize, that would be different. But presumably, neither of us work in a full-time managerial position at Mozilla, so to assume so, would be absolute madness.
I hope you consider what I actually wrote rather than brushing it off.
Because when you say
I have no interest in discussing their strategic decisions
you sounded interested a couple hours earlier when you told me to
include a really good idea for how else to secure the wages of their employees.
Make a decent tab grouping feature
Good news, they're actually working on this one!
I've gotten so used to Sidebery and its folding tabs that groups almost feel a little rudimentary, but the ones on Chrome are proof that a simple killer feature like that could really go a long way.
Make tabs look like tabs again, and not like huge buttons!
I don't see anything in the OP's comment that defends the status quo.
The OP was focused specifically on technical feedback. Telling the devs you don't like their management process isn't going to change anything. Telling them you think the implementation is substandard because of technical reasons A, B, and C can help change things, because the dev team can respond to that.
If you want to target their management, make an open letter or something and get people talking about it. If you want to influence development decisions, keep the discussion technical.
Ephera is the OP you responded to, not the OP of the post.
If your feedback is “Don’t roll these out!”, you’re still free to give that feedback
This is the context I'm referring to. Their response highlights that they're not interested in talking about management structure, only the specific technical issues with the feature. They've been incredibly consistent about that.
You went on a tangent about business direction. They responded they're not interested in that, and if that's the way you want to engage, keep the developers out of it because it's completely unhelpful (i.e. don't post stuff like that on their bugzilla, which is unfortunately all to common). I don't think OP is implying that criticizing management decisions isn't worth doing, there's just a more helpful way to do that than including it in a technical discussion.
So you have no issue with the validity of my complaint?
- Mozilla overpays their CEO
- Mozilla has repeatedly screwed over employees
- Chasing shiny things isn't helping them
- Mozilla is screwing over their users privacy
You just want to argue pedantics? No thank you
It's irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Whether I agree with you (I do) has nothing to do with the shopping feature implementation.
If you have technical issues with the shopping feature, bring it up with the developers. If you have policy issues for the management, name and shame with an open letter or similar.
Ethos is crucial to code recommendations.
If Mozilla included a virus in Firefox, I wouldn't be suggesting bugfixes to make the virus more user friendly. I would point to the general ethos to not build viruses into their software.
And because Mozilla promises an open Web where you make the choices, hardcoding an addon that promotes the three biggest retailers and a handful of paying advertisers is antithetical to that ethos too.
If Mozilla included a virus in Firefox, I wouldn’t be suggesting bugfixes to make the virus more user friendly. I would point to the general ethos to not build viruses into their software.
The technical problem (i.e. the one relevant to the dev team) is how the virus got into the release product. If it was intentional, it's a management problem and there's no point in talking to the dev team further. If it was due to a breach in their infrastructure, then it absolutely is relevant to discuss w/ the dev team to ensure the breach is contained and fixed.
hardcoding an addon that promotes...
This again can be split into two groups:
- technical - opt-in vs opt-out may be a technical decision the devs can make; if it's opt-out, whether it collects information by default may be a dev decision
- management - whether it should be hard-coded, opt-in vs opt-out, collect user data or not, etc; there's no point in discussing these with the dev team once it's clear it's not their choice
Target the complains at the right group.
For others who were confused, it's the icon to the far left of the tab bar.
I've used it on my Android phone (open list of tabs, it's at the top next to the private tab selector), but never realized it was also available on desktop Firefox.
Neat!
I actually hid it after thinking it wasn't very good, but that was several versions ago (with a different icon). Thanks for pointing that out, and I updated my comment!
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-set-tab-pickup-firefox-view
For people who disable history who needs to reopen an closed tab. That is what you're talking about?
just out of curiosity why did browsers move to the rapid releases of the >120 version numbers instead of the lower numbers?
In the rapid release model there are no updates bigger than the regularly scheduled releases. So each regularly scheduled release needs to bump the biggest version number. Otherwise the biggest number would never change and there would also be fewer ways to distinguish smaller releases.
That's not necessarily true, they could totally use semantic versioning (but without the requirement for a breaking change) and bump the major version when there's a big user-facing change. For example, Firefox Quantum would've been a great time for a version bump. Or they could do with Year.Release versioning like Ubuntu does.
I think either of those are more useful than the current sequential numbers because they provide some additional information. I like the Major.Minor style so I have an idea of how significant the changes are.
True, but one problem would be that every release would break something as there are just so many changes in each. On this scale SemVer doesn't work that well. It also doesn't really tell you anything about the significance of changes (trivial changes can cause major bumps, or huge new features can be fully backwards compatible).
Dates could work. Though Firefox 2024.03 just doesn't have the same ring to it :p. And they also don't say anything about significance.
Yes, you'd have to change the definition of a major release from "breaking change" to "big change." Your normal releases would increment the minor version, security fixes would increment the patch version, and big changes would increment the major. Whether something is "big" is pretty subjective, but they provide an opportunity for marketing.
Or if we want to go with something objective and simple, the major release would correspond to an ESR release, which happens about once/year.
The purpose here is to make the numbers mean something rather than "number goes up." If you ask me what was in Firefox 120, I would have no idea because large numbers are harder to remember than smaller numbers.
Yeah it could work too. Like you said though it's subjective and internal arguments about what deserves to be big or not sounds tiring :p. For marketing large changes, inventing a buzzword seems to be working well enough.
I guess to each their own, but I kind of like not knowing the version. I just use Firefox and if I really care what's new I can look at the changelog, or see it in the what's new pop-up.
I would sincerely advocate for year.month or year.release model so that typical users can figure out how outdated their software is. An average person is usually terrible at keeping software up to date.
At least for Firefox the average person is getting updated automatically. They'd need to go into about:config to turn it off.
Bigger number better
...probably