Comment by mikkupikku
9 hours ago
I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.
9 hours ago
I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.
Yes. But also, lay users are not nearly as dumb/incompetent as UX designers allege when they rationalize removing features to "simplify things."
Not a UX designer, but having supported systems for decades I don't agree with your statement. If you got the system down to a single button that said 'Do' the user would still somehow screw it up.
It's simple, when you really think about it. Just remove the user. All such pebkac and id-10t errors immediately resolved.
Honestly, "go into about:config and flip some switches to remove stuff" is about as easy as I could imagine for allowing people to customize it. What would you suggest?
Yeah, if you turn it all into buttons and settings in the actual settings menus, someone else is going to post a long rant about how the settings menus have a million confusing options that nobody uses...
Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default, so this smells like a power-user-has-power-user-problems-and-solutions rant...
> Mine also isn't anywhere nearly as confusing as his by default
You can run the following and try it for yourself. Don't forget to highlight some text before right-clicking an image (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook)
They intentionally made the menu longer to look worse by selecting some text first. So it is showing four sets of contextual actions: For the Link, the Image, the Selection, and the Page.
Also a few of the menu items are new since the latest ESR (the AI stuff in particular), so you won't see them if you are running v140.
I'd suggest that they make it clearer what the user actually changed, in about:config, and show the defaults. If I click that button "Show only modified settings" I see a lot of things, mostly options that I set from the normal settings. I mean "browser.download.lastDir" should be in practically everyone's.
So there's a lot of noise and resetting things can be unclear. Especially given that when you reinstall things not all uninstalls clear out settings. It could definitely help if the about:config page tells you about the user.js file and directs you to more information. Why doesn't editing things in about:config generate the user.js file? Maybe tell people about prefer.js and where it exists?
The other thing I'd suggest, documentation. Like what is "browser.translations.chaos.errors"? There's a million things like that that are hard to learn about and explore. In an ideal system there would be a wiki with every option documented and when hovering over the option you'd get a short explanation and a click is a link to the documentation. But that's also a big undertaking (if you're building a new browser, would be nice to do this from the get go!)
I don't think there's a perfect solution and certainly these things are not easy to implement, but if you're asking how it could be easier for the user, then yeah, I think these things would be major improvements and help prevent the blindly following of random blog posts and copy pasting of things like betterfox (I'm sure it is, but how do I know?)
The toolbar has a "Customize toolbar" GUI screen that lets you add, remove and reorder elements. Maybe something similar could be done for context menus, including new entries added by extensions.
Have you ever right-clicked on the toolbar and chosen "Customize Toolbar..." ?
Something like that.
there is a middle ground where you could do something like about:mouse (about:keyboard for keyboard shortcuts already exists) for the power users. doesn't need to be fancy but it would be easy enough to do.
Measure usage, and dim the unused menu items over time... or bold the ones the user selects the most.
Mozilla should really try taking their extension ecosystem seriously, and deliver features like the AI chatbot integration as first-party extensions that come pre-installed but can be easily managed by users with a much better UI than about:config.
And then people would complain about Firefox being bloated with all these built-in extensions. And then if you don't pre-install them people will complain about needing to add all of these extra extensions.
Kinda, but if something can be built as an extension, it probably should be. It proves what you can do with the APIs, proves it can be replaced / forked by other people, and ensures a consistent level of isolation by default.
And if it can't... often it's worth asking if it should be possible.
There would still be decidedly fewer complaints, because extensions are vastly easier to manage and disable or remove than this long list of about:config settings. The fact that you cannot satisfy everybody simultaneously cannot be an excuse for failing to ship with sensible defaults and easy, discoverable customization.
Indeed, and this argument ("it will be too bloated") is often used by developers themselves to avoid (or hide) advanced features. I never quite understood it. Just put all the mysterious flags behind an "Advanced" menu, which normie users will know not to touch.
They right clicked on an image which is also a clickable link which adds the additional options for both links and images, a total of 11, to the defaults.
Apparently they've recently added a first party side bar for LLM integration, but I haven't tried it out yet.
Yes, that's one of the things that really should have been an extension. Tree Style Tab works alright as an extension-provided sidebar.
Putting the chat or sidebar in the core of the browser sounds very much like something done by a developer who wasn't around for Mozilla prior to Firefox, and isn't aware of the original goal of being the antithesis of the browser that included everything and the kitchen sink.