Please excuse if this is not the right category to post this.
I tried to find a better way to share my thoughts (and frustration) about the state of Firefox, but Mozilla obviously wants me to register my email address with a third party to share feedback at this confusing Ideas.Mozilla.Org website. Because that’s apparently the logical thing to do when “everything we make and do honors our Personal Data Promise”?
Well, I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser since forever (early 2000s) and I’m overall very thankful to the project for offering one of the best web browsers for free for years now. However, many of the recent developments are no longer to my liking.
The big one is obviously Proton
I dislike it for all the reasons people have already discussed. Who thought this was a superior UI? It is wasting sooo much space and offers a worse UX. Proton is the main reason I’m thinking about switching my main browser for the first time in almost two decades.
Removal of tab groups
This was a handy privacy feature. Any specific reason why this was removed?
In addition there are some seemingly innocuous changes that are nonetheless super annoying to my day-to-day browsing experience:
"View Image" option gone from context menu.
Open image in new tab is not the same! It always takes an additional click to actually view the image. View Image did also work with middle-click so you had the option to either open the image in the same tab or a new one. The current option is a step back.
Changing long standing shortcut for opening bookmark manager
This now toggles the bookmarks toolbar instead. Make them customizable if you need to, but don’t change established keyboard shortcuts users have learned over years.
Arbitrarily changing the UI is the kind of stuff I’ve come to loathe Windows 10-era Microsoft products for. Now Mozilla is doing the same with Firefox which is just sad.
It’s hard to have confidence in the Firefox project these days. I’m suspicious of every new update and will probably revert back to 78.15.0 esr or switch to a different browser altogether.
To me, Firefox was hands-down the best browser for many years. The recent changes feel like a degradation and are just frustrating - which seems to be a trend in modern software and UI development. sigh
(Sorry, this became more of a rant)
Edit: Are you kidding me? In the discourse profile settings in the Email Addresses section it says Never shown to the public. But you automatically pre-populate the optional Name field with the email which is then shown right next to the username in every post? Really, Mozilla?
Edit 2: Speaking of bad UI. The settings dialog of this discourse thing is a “great” example. Save button for the Account dialog is in between the options. Neither at the end of the page where you would expect it, nor at the top(?) where it is on all the other settings pages. When I have the cursor in the Name field and hit enter (because I can’t find the save button below), the change email dialog opens instead. I’m loosing hope, fast.