this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2026
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Firefox’s biggest priority: rounding corners (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 days ago by rhamph@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

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[–] buffalobuffalo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

i don't see pwa or webusb/webhid/webserial talked about enough. There's so much cool stuff that can be done with it. it lets kids to be able to program an ESP32 for learning electronics. it lets me re-flash my keyboard without needing to download any additional software. comma.ai uses it for factory resetting their devices.

i used to use pwa for homeassistant and klipper/fluidd 3d printer control, and while Zen essentials kinda fills that use case, a standalone window would be nice. I remember seeing talks about making progress towards supporting pwa, but i guess nobody else cares. Just like their conversation on webserial. Darn shame that we get integrated ai instead

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

PWA's in firefox are interesting. They are actually really well supported, just not visually/in the UX.

For example, if you visit https://wavemakercards.com/ or https://www.photopea.com/ once, they will then work offline. This is a big oart of the PWA featureset.

It's because of this that there are unofficial extensions that let you "install" PWA's like you can om chromium.

My personal theory, is that firefox is in the middle of very long UI rewrite/refactor, and only when it's completed or nears completion, will we see features like vertical tabs, tab groups, or these other UI features people have been asking for for a while but have never gotten added.

[–] mofongo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

Imo, they should pull the Zen browser features. It'll really help it differentiate from Chrome while increasing usability.

[–] buffalobuffalo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I know a lotta apps do indeed make use of pwa stuff like local session storage. But for some strange reason, I got used to being able to open web apps in their own window from a desktop shortcut. I kinda miss being able to do that on Zen.

Also I thought Firefox got vertical tabs recently? I know Zen has tab groups and is centered around having vertical tabs, like Arc. Amazing project with single dev, highly recommend checking out if you've never heard of it

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

Yes. Firefox got vertical tabs and tab groups both very close to eachother, very recently.