Firefox’s biggest priority: rounding corners
Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.
https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/
Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:
We are bringing back compact mode as well
We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.
Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/mozillas-head-of-firefox-talks-product-priorities-ai-skepticism-and-browser-choice/Open linkView original on awful.systems
57 replies
I absolutely get the Mozilla hate. What I don't get is the dwindling numbers. I recently had to switch from Zen back to Firefox on my corporate laptop due to policy. Firefox really still is an excellent browser and would recommend it over Chrome. I occasionally have to open chrome and that's starting to feel more and more like explorer.
Mozilla do not operate a pervasive network of internet monopolies that can relentlessly push for Firefox adoption and sabotage compatibility of other browsers. If Mozilla had any sense, they might dedicate some more budget to advocating antitrust and campaigning other counter-monopolistic policies, but instead… they want to make the corners rounder. And flip back and forth on supporting a compact layout, while deliberating over whether they need more AI or even more AI.
Duh. Obviously the logo is what's wrong, better redesign that too.
No, wait, it needs AI!
No, wait, it needs to tell me about some VPN.
Support the specifications, be secure. Perhaps try that.
When funds are tight? No, they can’t. There are finite engineering resources. The more new features you add, the more bugs are introduced, and the less resources there are to fix any of them (old or new).
Which is why frontend designers should start working on backend specifications
Yes, but you need to be careful not to give the impression that all you are doing is work on round borders again, and not on supporting more web features.
@cristian64 @victorz hey! They're also working on AI AI AI AI
Well, to me this is yet another redesign; still no support for WebUSB. I worry and rant because I care, as I don't ever want to use a Chromium-based browser. So, Firefox should really put focus (as well as focus in blog announcements) on the true important aspects of the web.
I think thats an intentional choice, because the security and privacy over the current implementation (which is designed around chrome fingerprinting as always)
Mozilla Corporation, whose CEO was paid six million dollars last year, and 6.9 million in 2022, is a nonprofit volunteer project?
Of course the CEO gets paid that, if they don't do that they run the risk of running a profit, gotta get rid of the money somehow. /s
Ah, I see you've never used Firefox or paid attention to any of the decisions that Mozilla's leadership makes.
Why on EARTH did they move the FUCKING BACK BUTTON and replace it in its prior position with some FUCKING BULLSHIT USELESS sidebar button
If I give up and become a supervillain, my primary hand-to-hand combat weapon will be a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines laser-etched onto stainless steel plates and somehow bound in a physicalized representation of the tattered remains of these peoples' abandoned dignity
There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here.
Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author:
What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?
At least you can remove all the sidebar crap: right-click > remove from toolbar.
I really didn't need rounded everything, not every tool needs to be Fisher-Priced.
I really can't wait for Servo to get into a usable state and have alternative browsers being build on top of that.
How do I start using this, is it something an end user can support through adoption?
no, it's very much not up to web standards yet. it has a super fast html renderer and css engine that support something like 70% of properties, a very barebones js runtime that has basically no browser apis, and a frontend that (i think) only takes urls via command-line.
last year, admittedly. good to hear that it's coming along!
Honestly that description kinda makes me want to target servo for all of my hobby browser-backed UIs. Html5 with forms can do a surprising amount (albeit not always as effortlessly as just including a JavaScript library) - though I expect something like IndexedDB isn't at all available?
EDIT: well, the servo repo has a bunch of code in a
storage/engines/indexeddbfolder, but the repo aussi has about 30 open issues relating to "IndexedDB" in one way or another.I'm currently targetting CSS 2.0 for one of my projects. I'm trying to make it work right on a 3DS, Netscape Navigator, IE and, of course, Servo, without serving custom files to each other.
It's been incredibly annoying, but also fun to learn about standards from 1998, and how browsers handled them.
It's also disheartening to learn that the modern web is, at its core, designed not to run on basically anything older than 2016.
i don't know if they're going in version order with implementations either so that's an extra complication
The less APIs the better, some of the information my phone is giving out currently to evwry site I visit is ridiculous
some of them are, y'know, needed for the sites to do anything at all.
I know I am only joking, lynx ftw
You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess.
Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.
the worst part of using Firefox is mozilla
the second worst part is mozilla fans
This is why I use Zen. I don't even care about most of the extra features, I just like not having to disable the sponsored shortcuts and stupid pocket articles on my new tab page every time I install the browser
thanks for confirming the third worst category of firefox fans
I use Zen, too. You can get 90% of the things it offers with user.js and userChrome.css tweaks, many of which are pre-packaged by volunteers, but Zen gets rid of the annoyances out of the box and adds some quality of life features.
I couldn’t care less tbh. Still a fine browser, still a great daily driver, still blocks all the ads with ublock.
I got the update today and I'm so tired boss. We had almost settled on something visually calm and organized, and leeeettzzzgooooo back to floaty rounded shit with no choice left to the user !
Blender does interface right, please for the love of Cthulhu take some inspiration: it's got a "roundedness" property for every UI widget that goes from perfectly square to perfectly round, a "widget emboss" property that can be tuned to your liking or disabled entirely, a "widget underline" property, it lets you disable button decorations as well so your toolbars are only floating icons, etc. Every combination is possible and it's very easy to tune. Please do something like that and never touch it again.
To disable the new design, simply uncheck the "Enable the Nova redesign" option (Settings > Appearance > Browser theme).
Alternatively, set
browser.nova.enabledtofalsein about:config.firefox isnt competitive enough. @grok bring back compact mode. checkmate, chromium
@rhamph "The team that made it hopes it will help expand the browser’s audience beyond privacy-conscious techies and open-web or open source advocates[...]" For fucks sake, no. Thats firefoxes core audience and if anything they should be leaning into it more. Trying to lure normies will only drive away the core audience (we're already seeing this to an extent), And normies dont seem to care for anything that isnt ran by a company (if it is a carbon copy of what they're familiar with it's an irrelevent less popular knock off and if it's anything else that means it must be completely innaccessible unless you're some kind of tech god). Its like when applebees tried to start being a club at night, no one who wanted to go to a club wanted to go to applebees and applebees core audience didnt like that it became a club at night.
Was unaware of change and thought I had a virus. Looks very stupid.
gosh i hate this. gotta play with userchrome again...
@rhamph silver lining, of sorts: compact mode is back!
Not true:
They only renamed their "normal" density to "compact", and assumed –as usual– that their users are stupid.
It becomes obvious if you compare the spacing between "normal old design" and "compact new design".
it never went away, it just had to be 'enabled' in about:config (search: compact). note this still has to be done if you disable 'nova' redesign.
I like it.
horrible website captcha
Opera 12 started to do this. China owns it now and it is based on Chromium. A couple of Open Source browsers did it for the same reason later and lost users like their was orbital bombardment hitting their project. Grab a brain... it is not the design language that makes Chrome so successful and if you look and act like them, well users are just going to use them.
Your chain of causality is comically nonsensical. First of all, Opera isn't owned "by China," it's a publicly traded company whose largest shareholder happens to be Chinese. The company's still Norwegian. Second of all, that didn't happen until 2016. Opera Software ASA (now Otello ASA) are the ones who switched to Chromium 3 years before that because they had decided that Presto couldn't compete with WebKit anymore. I disagree with that decision but that's what happened.
OK, I was tired and over-simplified. I shop with Chinese Companies and I usually defend them when they are receiving Anti Sino hate and call them to task when they pull BS, so that was beneath me and not what I was saying. As a Opera user at the time I know it is a multinational group that is only mostly Chinese Investors. I also know some Chinese based business tactics that they tried to pull on users early on and got enough blowback that they stopped doing it.
The Company went to hell as soon as Jon Von Techner left the CEO roll and they brought in that "Adult" CEO and he started the Chromium rewrite, attacking community members like me, shutting out Jon until he had to leave, openly bragged about making the company more like Google Chrome so that Google would buy out Opera ASA for the patents and he would get his golden parachute(I know that that is when CEO's are fired or the company fails, but that is how he worded it). Then when Google turned their nose up their secondary job was to find ANYBODY to buy the browser and patents. That is when they sold to the mostly Chinese Company who I could not be arsed to look up because I was off of Opera and on to Vivaldi by then not knowing initially that that was Jon's Company, IIRC. The also killed OperaMail which I used for years after even though it was left on the vine to rot and was the inspiration for the modern Thunderbird UI design.
i, too, dislike it when things are owned by the evil scary China instead of good and righteous Norway
Because edge is actually based on chromium?
Basically all of it is chromium. There is a ton of stuff that is not just the rendering extension that is included like extensions, pwa support, or hardware interface protocols (like webusb) that are from chromium, that wouldn't work if edge was just using blink. Chromium isn't just the rendering engine, it's this whole platform.
They do mention blink in the article, so they do seem to be aware of this distrinction.
Well, egg on my face, Edge is a bigger rip-off than I thought. Thanks for the enlightenment.
I know this person has been banished from the community and all but still how the actual fuck do you possibly miss that Edge is a Chromium fork. Look at it. It's the most Chromium fork looking thing ever created.
i don't see pwa or webusb/webhid/webserial talked about enough. There's so much cool stuff that can be done with it. it lets kids to be able to program an ESP32 for learning electronics. it lets me re-flash my keyboard without needing to download any additional software. comma.ai uses it for factory resetting their devices.
i used to use pwa for homeassistant and klipper/fluidd 3d printer control, and while Zen essentials kinda fills that use case, a standalone window would be nice. I remember seeing talks about making progress towards supporting pwa, but i guess nobody else cares. Just like their conversation on webserial. Darn shame that we get integrated ai instead
PWA's in firefox are interesting. They are actually really well supported, just not visually/in the UX.
For example, if you visit https://wavemakercards.com/ or https://www.photopea.com/ once, they will then work offline. This is a big oart of the PWA featureset.
It's because of this that there are unofficial extensions that let you "install" PWA's like you can om chromium.
My personal theory, is that firefox is in the middle of very long UI rewrite/refactor, and only when it's completed or nears completion, will we see features like vertical tabs, tab groups, or these other UI features people have been asking for for a while but have never gotten added.
Imo, they should pull the Zen browser features. It'll really help it differentiate from Chrome while increasing usability.
I know a lotta apps do indeed make use of pwa stuff like local session storage. But for some strange reason, I got used to being able to open web apps in their own window from a desktop shortcut. I kinda miss being able to do that on Zen.
Also I thought Firefox got vertical tabs recently? I know Zen has tab groups and is centered around having vertical tabs, like Arc. Amazing project with single dev, highly recommend checking out if you've never heard of it
Unofficial tool for PWA management: https://github.com/filips123/PWAsForFirefox
Yes. Firefox got vertical tabs and tab groups both very close to eachother, very recently.
Blink, the engine developed by the Chromium project? What a fascinating and important distinction.