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Firefox’s biggest priority: rounding corners (arstechnica.com)

submitted 4 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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[–] istewart@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why on EARTH did they move the FUCKING BACK BUTTON and replace it in its prior position with some FUCKING BULLSHIT USELESS sidebar button

If I give up and become a supervillain, my primary hand-to-hand combat weapon will be a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines laser-etched onto stainless steel plates and somehow bound in a physicalized representation of the tattered remains of these peoples' abandoned dignity

[–] rhamph@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here.

Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author:

Firefox’s new redesign is—at least to me—a welcome one. It no longer looks like a browser from 2015.

What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?

[–] lawks@aussie.zone 5 points 3 days ago

At least you can remove all the sidebar crap: right-click > remove from toolbar.

I really didn't need rounded everything, not every tool needs to be Fisher-Priced.