Mozilla needs proper tech support

[Future_Amish]

After more than a decade of UI changes updates, googling solutions to basic problems has become nearly impossible.  The "help" forum needs a magical and unknowable keyword to get in the ballpark of what you are looking for and can take hours. Posting a new help topic generally results in a comment like "already been answered" creating a needless amount conflict people frustrated with randomly broken tech and people answering the same five questions without any form of compensation.

I preempt the rebuttable: "It's a free web-service" argument as follows:

Mozilla has more than enough disposable money and labor hours into arbitrary UI redesigns.  They can slow the pace of re-designs to create a proper help department that can mitigate the chaos that these arbitrary changes create.

Alternatively Mozilla could just stop randomly changing things that don't need changing and everyone would be way happier I imagine.

Either way, the world is chaotic and confusing enough.  Please stop adding to the problem

[jscher2000]

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@Future_Amish wrote:

After more than a decade of UI changes updates, googling solutions to basic problems has become nearly impossible.  The "help" forum needs a magical and unknowable keyword to get in the ballpark of what you are looking for and can take hours. Posting a new help topic generally results in a comment like "already been answered" creating a needless amount conflict people frustrated with randomly broken tech and people answering the same five questions without any form of compensation.

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Mozilla invests more support resources in help articles (there is a "kb" in the URL) than in support forum search tools. As you point out, frequent changes in Firefox make it risky to rely on old forum posts, and that assumes you know what wording to search for.

The best approach is to start a new question, which is behind the "Get Help" link at the top of page on https://support.mozilla.org/, or "below the fold" if you got to help through the Help menu > Get Help. I don't think it's common that forum volunteers would give you a useless comment like "already been answered" without also providing a link to the actual answer.

If you have a question that you already submitted, do you want to share a link to it here for discussion?

[KDAM71]

Hello @jscher2000 ,

I've been looking for help with a firefox problem. On the Dutch version of the Mozilla support site you mentioned, I keep going in circles. I can't find anywhere to ask a new question.

Greetings, Klaas

[jscher2000]

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@KDAM71 wrote:

I've been looking for help with a firefox problem. On the Dutch version of the Mozilla support site you mentioned, I keep going in circles. I can't find anywhere to ask a new question.

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I don't know the language, but I changed the URL from en-US to nl and checked the usual place that I look:

Een vraag stellen = https://support.mozilla.org/nl/questions/new/desktop 

[KDAM71]

That's indeed where I looked. First I used the search bar but my question wasn't answered there. Then I used the get help menu and started going in circles. In the mean time I've found a probable answer elsewhere.

[Future_Amish]

Ok.  Perhaps I wasn't being clear because your response was to say what I already said back to me as if this would somehow add anything to the conversation.

Having a piece of software work fine for months or years that suddenly stops functioning because of updates and changes in the UI solves no problems for users and creates many problems for users.

Dealing with these arbitrary changes takes hours or seaching through help, newletters, forums, posts...insert semantic noun here.

If these hours turn up nothing and new post must be created that may or may not solve the issue and can take many more hours if not days....just re-learn how to organize my bookmarks, which is a thing I already knew how to do, but now can't, because it's different, for no good reason.

Summary: 

Option 1:  Stop the above behavior

Option 2: Re-divert resources from the above behavior to mitigate the chaos from the above behavior

Was that more clear?

[KDAM71]

It's just as clear as the first time when it was clear too. My question was do you have to use the newest version or could you keep using the version you were happy with.

[Future_Amish]

Tried that when it became a problem years ago.  Eventually the browser is so out of date that most pages won't work anymore.  Which brings us right back here.

[KDAM71]

Oh well, it was just an idea. Good luck finding the help you need.

[jscher2000]

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@Future_Amish wrote:

...just re-learn how to organize my bookmarks, which is a thing I already knew how to do, but now can't, because it's different, for no good reason.

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I can't think of any intentional changes to how we can organize bookmarks. Can you describe this problem in more detail? Is that what you posted about on Mozilla Support?

Regarding the more general point that not all changes are welcome, yes, of course, that is one reason for this site, so Mozilla can hear what changes are needed and which need to be reverted.

[mozsortitout]

Cannot agree more.
Plenty of dev time spent on breaking stuff. And yet little on making the UI consistent and  predictable for users.
If you are a dev/ UI/UX practioner working on a product people use for day-to-day work, and you find it exciting to introduce new changes that might be exciting but cause thousands of people to spend hours solving problems that didn't need to be there ... you should be ashamed of yourself - you are putting your own egotistical need for novelty above the need of your users for a product that works. This is not experimental cutting edge tech. It is a browser. It needs to be stable.
Devs contributing to mozilla UI who think you're cool because you're introducing new stuff: Please stop. Go elsewhere. We prefer security updates only than your constant rug sweeping and are happy to live with an old looking browser and clunky but predictable UI if that's what it takes for you to stop messing with **bleep** that works (and is searchable).

[KDAM71]

Can't your problems be solved by downgrading? Mainly I read your not happy with the new version and you were happy with the old one. Is there a necessity for you to upgrade?