TechTakes

2716 readers

29 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

154

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

submitted 4 days ago by rhamph@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

59 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] themannofcool@alovely.space 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

@rhamph "The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser’s audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates[...]" For fucks sake, no. Thats firefoxes core audience and if anything they should be leaning into it more. Trying to lure normies will only drive away the core audience (we're already seeing this to an extent), And normies dont seem to care for anything that isnt ran by a company (if it is a carbon copy of what they're familiar with it's an irrelevent less popular knock off and if it's anything else that means it must be completely innaccessible unless you're some kind of tech god). Its like when applebees tried to start being a club at night, no one who wanted to go to a club wanted to go to applebees and applebees core audience didnt like that it became a club at night.