FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay

sbvrt — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 23:16:07 GMT

I have an increasingly annoying issue with Firefox's UX, utility and general practices:

Why the bother?

I know, there's more than enough exaggerated ranting and picky complaining all around, but I this discussion isn't meant to feed baseless outrage, merely want to share my experiences and concerns - and see if others might share them and have ideas for solutions?

I am very much an advocate of FF and want this browser to stay relevant and thrive. In my opinion, it is one of the last full-featured and trustworthy browsers left that is an alternative to a WebKit-only-Internet. A browser engine I have no particular issue with either, it's honestly a great piece of software! But it's manifold implementations are almost exclusively provided by huge monolithic company whose core business interest have nothing to do with "browsers", mandating a certain grade of suspicion when adopting a program of theirs that will be the interface for almost anything I search, read, buy, do on a daily basis.

This is the main reason I keep sticking with Firefox, despite experiencing reocurring alienation (through issues that are admittedly not that serious, but they compound)

About UX and utility:

Storytime:
Today I finally performed some overdue updates, and rebooted my machine to find Firefox prompting me to "Update Firefox to make it better!" -- or something abstract like this, I don't recall exactly.

Knowing how FF has a habit of dropping even my pinned tabs on mere reboots, I crossed my fingers and clicked, wanting to follow through with any delayed updates.

An interstitial pops up, shows a ton of green marks to assure me all prefs, sessions, histories etc where successfully migrated - ouah, first oof! I didn't know I'd be performing THAT kind of "major version update" kind of thing?

Anyway, cool, it reloads:

My state is gone, all windows, all tabs.
My pinned tabs are gone. Mailboxes, PM tooling, Messaging Apps, Calendars, Smarthome Ctrl, everything I pinned.
Oh, my "previous session" is gone too. Well ok, that happens every odd reboot or so, I'm used to it by now.
But ... all cookies, sessions, logged in apps ... Now being a web developer, THAT's annoying.
Launch my PW manager, spend the next half hour logging back in into all the dashboards & staging & prod envs I was actively working on, and half of the tabs i re-pinned.

Having a bit of an idea about software, I do know this might be a weird singular issue. But its not the first time. Larger FF updates, sometimes even simple reboots reliably f up all session I had running. Thing is:
I'm logged in though, the browser tells me the "synchronisation" is up to date ...

Continuing down the hour-ish-long pain-train of having updated Firefox: The extension icons in my toolbar are all gone, they now reside in a little menu. Except Firefox' own "Pocket" that is, a service I already confirmed I was not interested in, have no account, cannot uninstall. This one was on me okay. I did stupidly rummage in the setting menus for quite a while until realizing that I need to click the little cog on every ext in the small menu and "pin them" back to where I had them. Straightforward, but cumbersome, and another bit of UX that you have to know about.

About web feature support:

To conclude: I build webapps for a living, I'm mostly centered around UI/UX and end-level frontend, meaning: I'm that "early web-era guy" who's actually deep into CSS and leaves the actual webapp-stuff largely to smarter people. But I into CSS and paint, I do go deep.

And while I love meme-ing about Safari being the "new IE6" because of Apples OS-tied update policies, I hate to have to reconsider: Nowadays it's Firefox. When it comes to support of modern CSS features, time and time again I need to refrain from using them, because even Safari has managed integrating latest features months-to-half-years before FF. I've been waiting almost all of last year to finally being able to leverage `:has`, I work around using `rch` units because of FF, always. It's not BAD, but enough to have me chuckle by now, anytime a not-even-that-new module still only has partial support.

Closing:

But don't take me wrong here, this is still not a CSS-nerd nitpicking about having to renounce cutting-edge features. This is someone who adamantly swears by having a last bit of diversity and competition in the browser market, not having to pick between Google/Microsoft/Apple or be SooL, and stumbling upon constant little annoyances that tell me:

Your "everyday user" will not care and just switch to a browser that has a transparent UX, "just works" when it comes to technicalities, and doesn't end up oddly breaking modern website every now and then.

And I think this is an issue that holds Firefox back, while i consider it of utmost importance to strenghen the distribution of "alternative, non big-corp software" in todays internet.

Am I exaggerating? Do you share my experiences? Do you have ideas (or plans) for how to make this situation better? Are there more pressant issues I'm not seeing?

I would love to know your thoughts on this!

Re: FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay

SandGrains — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 01:00:04 GMT

The Mozilla foundation's primary responsibility to society is making sure google doesn't solidify their grasp on a browser monopoly. All other political, moral, and ethical motivations are hypocritical in light of failure to do that. And I completely agree with your sentiment. The quality of the experience in using Firefox has been barely holding on.

Re: FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay

jscher2000 — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 13:18:26 GMT

I generally update within 2-7 days of a release and so far haven't lost data. Is it possible your Firefox performed a Refresh (sometimes described in the UI as a Tune-up)? The telltale sign is an Old Firefox Data folder on your desktop.

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FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay

Re: FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay

Re: FF is one of the only "independent" browsers left, but makes it somewhat hard to stay