Re: [gentoo-dev] Firefox bloat Was: chromium ...

[Kent Fredric]

On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 02:36:27 +0000 (UTC)
Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:

> FWIW, the australis thing never really affected me much.  I had some
> extensions (and configuration mania guified native options) changing
> the look somewhat before, and have some extensions (and config mania
> options) changing the look somewhat now.  It did take me several
> hours (between configuring and extension browsing) to get the new UI
> setup to something I was comfortable with, but then I'm used to that
> any time I change desktop (kde) major versions as well, and this was
> a comparable change. I've never seen a desktop GUI I was entirely
> comfortable with as shipped and I don't expect I ever will, and with
> the browser being used /as/ a desktop more and more these days, and
> most people including me spending more and more time in it even when
> they don't use it /as/ the desktop, it's reasonably comparable, and
> the australis GUI intro /was/ in practice /quite/ comparable to a
> major desktop upgrade, so I /expected/ to need to spend that time
> reconfiguring the GUI and extensions after the australis upgrade, and
> it wasn't a big deal for me.
>
> Tho I can definitely see the problem for people who actually /do/
> find a GUI they like (or have trained themselves to like) without
> having to reconfigure/customize it, only to have the thing moved out
> from under them once they are used to it.  It's just that I'm not
> such a person, and both the before and after were and remain
> impressively configurable with extensions, so I never had that
> problem.
>
> I am rather disturbed by bloat such as pocket, reader, and hello, but
> config mania has options to disable hello, and I got rid of the
> pocket icons as well, so the reader icon appearing in the address bar
> (which BTW also has much of the not-so-awesome disabled, config mania
> again), so at least I can keep them out of my face, even if they
> remain part of the too- large audit footprint, etc.

Again, my frustration was not *just* with "new look and feel", but that
the implementation details are both lethargic in comparison to the
previous model, and introduce a *constant* conflict with every tab
extension.

Every time you open the configuration, your vertical tab bar gets
relocated to the top of the screen, and you have a giant configuration
interface that is simply less useful than the previous one.

And sometimes this "move all the things" breaks the interface requiring
a restart to return back to working.

The browser gets into a schizophrenic confusion where configuration
wants tabs to be a certain way *just* to configure things, but the user
doesn't want those tabs to be configured that way, and has to design
their new look-and-feel in the knowledge that it will all shift
somewhere else when you close the configuration UI.

I don't care for a "fancy" look and feel, and I don't want to have to
have *technical* and usability issues introduced to provide such
look-and-feel I never asked for.

This is thus not a problem merely introduced with "Getting it how you
like it", but is a problem that becomes a new problem that flares up
every time you want to change a thing, because one of the things that
is not to your liking is the configuration UI itself, and there's no
meta-configuration-UI to eradicate *that*

Its like every other special snowflake application that decides it
needs some "special" user interface that deviates substantially from
the generic ones provided by their windowing toolkit.

It all ends in hate.

However, seems like Palemoon is an acceptable compromise to me.
Some things are a bit out of touch, but it is responsive and does what
I tell it to, and I don't feel so enslaved to the whims of some
designer at mozilla who is tasked with making Firefox more like Chrome.