I don’t normally find myself hanging out on Mozilla’s forums, but got an itch just now and wanted to get a few really basic gripes off my chest. There’s more…believe me, there’s more…but I’m curious if anybody agrees or disagrees with these:
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The developers seem intent on condensing settings, apparently in the interest of simplicity. Firefox has grouped “Remember browsing and download history” together for years and it’s maddening. I can understand saving browsing history. I might want to search for pages that I visited previously. But I have never found a reason to save my download history. Say I downloaded LibreOffice last week. What am I going to do…DOWNLOAD IT AGAIN??? These options have nothing to do with each other and should never have been grouped.
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Recently I found myself actually using the Settings search feature to find the Cache settings. I couldn’t find it because it’s now hidden inside a Clear Data button. Please consider moving it back into the open. There’s no rule limiting you to how many buttons can appear in a Settings category. I see you also dropped (or likely hid inside about:config) an option to force a specific cache size. Boo.
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Likewise you’re actually hiding cookies now inside the Developer Tools -> Storage area? Really?? I don’t normally bother with cookies because I delete them at the end of every session, but went looking for them just now and was shocked that I had to do a web search for instructions. Personally, if you want to simplify Firefox, I’d suggest dropping the Browser Tools options entirely. I’ll bet hitting F12 accidentally really freaks some people out…but of course you’ll never simplify that.
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Moving briefly to Firefox for Android, a Home button appeared, err, roughly 18 months ago. I would normally rejoice because it puts Firefox on par with many other mobile browsers except the logic is like none other and I never use it. It’s as if somebody made a programming mistake, a few somebodies liked it, and thus a bug became a feature. Tap the icon to view tabs, then the “+” to make a new tab, and a new tab appears. Except the tab count below hasn’t increased by one. It’s some kind of ghost tab. Say I type a domain incorrectly or click an obnoxious or potentially malicious link. I want out of there fast. In every other browser I could click/tap home. Except in Firefox mobile, all this does is generate another ghost tab, the potentially malicious tab still running in the background. Why??? Please, please fix this logic.
I realize these issues are small compared to Firefox running very slowly on site X, or not logging into site Y, or butchering site Z, but a bunch of paper cuts will still add up. Maybe I’ll add to this list in the future?
On the bright side, thank you for re-adding desktop Settings options for Load images automatically and Enable JavaScript…assuming that wasn’t actually the work of the Waterfox (my actual browser) team…but these should never have disappeared either.
Also kudos for the Look & Feel category, to appease people like me who lament the loss of the wonderful Classic Theme Restorer. But I still miss seeing Settings in a compact, free-floating window aka. Pale Moon. And the loss of a big transfer animation in the upper right corner. And not being able to hide search service icons from the address bar drop-down after purposely disabling “Search from address bar”.