10mo ago

Firefox UX: On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement

blog.mozilla.org On Purpose: Collectively Defining Our Team’s Mission Statement – Firefox UX

How the Firefox User Research team crafted our mission statement Firefox illustration by UX designer Gabrielle Lussier Like many people who work at Mozilla, I’m inspired by the organization’s ...

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that's cool, try making a better browser tho
- In which ways do you feel Firefox should be improved and what would you prioritise?
  
  There are lots of ways I could see it happening. Firefox is still heavy on resources on low end systems. GPU is heavy, it has poor hwdec support on things like v4l2 last time I tried it (though they do at least support it now). They don't push the envelope in any way. Firefox STILL doesn't have JXL support despite safari supporting it (various forks of firefox support it thanks to patches firefox refuses to look at). HEVC support when platform support is available would be nice too. And these are just the issues off the top of my head.
  What to prioritize? all of it. They have enough resources to do so.
  
  Which browsers are better on low end systems and is there a trade-off for optimising for lower end systems?
  They have enough resources to do so.
  They actually don't
  
  Which browsers are better on low end systems and is there a trade-off for optimising for lower end systems?
  Chromium has preformed better on every single one of my systems, from core2duo and pentium linux machines, Intel Atom machines, Old arm devices. Chromium performs better in the forms of
  higher fps in youtube at higher resolutions
  greater FPS in emulator.js games
  Greater battery life on mobile devices during jetstream2 test looping https://browserbench.org/
  They actually don’t
  They do, in their 2022 report, mozilla foundation and corporations had a large amount of both total assets and liquid cash. I'll let the financial statement do the talking here
  They have the resources, they just actively refuse to use them for firefox.
  https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-2022-fs-final-0908.pdf
  
  Honestly I think that desktop FF is pretty good, with only minor annoyances like:
  default tabs need to he hidden through CSS
  setting a page to always open in a container means that, if you want to open it in a different container, you need to change that default container
  Mobile FF though? Soo bad, the only redeeming quality is that you can install ublock origin.
  
  Please share your thoughts on mobile Firefox as that's my primary browser. My issues are
  lack of tab grouping
  tabs are too easy to swipe away
  you can swipe tabs away when in OS overview mode
  no mechanism to close duplicate tabs
  lack of Material Design 3 (Material You)
  inability to disable password management
  everything about Places, it feels like history is always the lowest priority and the reality is that I want history as the top priority, synchronized tabs second and search engine suggestions last
  lack of pinned tabs in the tabs tray
  getting to picture in picture is stupid
  now, the iOS-ification of the design
  edit: forgot but terrible share sheet.
  
  open tabs can take 20+s to load a cached version, when a full refresh takes 1-2s
  when you open FF, you spin a wheel for what screen will be shown
  limited extension selection
  pages are randomly zoomed in
  closed tabs reopen after you relaunch FF (I've had situations where I'd close the same exact tab 20+ times)
  tab sync is janky as hell (doesn't show all open tabs, sometimes you need to send the same tab 5 times before you get notifications for all of them at the same time)
  it sometimes saves your position on the pages, but sometimes not
  That's what I can think off the top of my head.
  
  when you open FF, you spin a wheel for what screen will be shown
  Not sure if it's helpful, but you know there's an option for that right? Settings -> Homepage
  Other than that, a few of your issues sound like memory issues, so hopefully they can slim the browser down a bit to improve things for you. But your last item reminded me of this bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1872511
  
  Not sure if it’s helpful, but you know there’s an option for that right? Settings -> Homepage
  Thanks, but I'm pretty sure it's bugged. I've had FF open, receive a call, go back to FF, see the homepage instead of the last tab.
  Other than that, a few of your issues sound like memory issues, so hopefully they can slim the browser down a bit to improve things for you.
  I really need to get a new phone, 2gb of RAM is not enough, but I'm having a really hard time finding a pixel in my country.
  But your last item reminded me of this bug
  I think that's for tab selection. I forgot to list that as well, I've got 100+ tabs open and it occasionally jumps to showing the first instead of the last one.
  What I meant is: you read an article, and when you're halfway through you close FF. When you open it, it might continue from where you left off, or it might show you the top of the page.
  
  To be fair, being able to install uBlock Origin immediately makes it one of the best mobile browsers for that feature alone.

41 comments