Developers that make Firefox less power user friendly.
As You may already know some devs at mozilla are doing whatever they can to strip Firefox from options and other nice features. Basically by referring to some guy's page that complains to himself [a monoloque]: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill , they took away very nice options people used to browse the internet having turned ON or OFF. Of course it's easier to take something away than to implement some informative stuff telling user what he just did or how to make his browser "usable" again. By "usable" I mean the way Alex sees it. He claims that: "Firefox is very customizable! In fact, it’s so customizable that we allow you to make the browser unusable with a single click." and that IS almost true, except if You go so detailed about stuff You should really care about saying truth to people, oh right I forgot, that was directed to himself I guess. You can't turn off that bar with a single click You need to go to menu first to do it so it requires a bit more clicks. You at least need to access correct menu by clicking on it, then submenu, then pick a bar to be disabled, and most likely You would need to repeat such procedure.
Basically he says that by Your son's clicking You can be left with browser having only title bar, well, true is that it can really take You some time to figure it out how to get Your menu bar back to enable all the things there (I myself got caught on that in Media Player Classic, but after pressing ESC it all went to normall), but what do we have help for? You just simply check help and You will find Your answer that You need to just press ALT button once to access titile bar and enable all features back or more times if You pick wrong bar at first ;). A lot of people that use computer for long time already know what single clicking left ALT button does and that a lot of programs always allowed disabling or enabling bars. But fortunatelly this feature was not taken away in Nightly (Firefox Alpha build) that is still normal looking (or Holly builds)... yet.
Basically what was taken away (or moved somewhere else if You will) is the ability to control how the browser should render webpages. Even though it was not much to be turned off but it really could make sites hard to browse. At the same time I noticed sites informing user how to bring all the features back if he did disable them by mistake, even with full walkthrough. Same thing could be done at Mozilla devs side, to inform user that browser can render webpage unusable due to certain functions being disabled with a small bar at the top of page, not the huge dialog box look alike that shows for example when "plugin wants to get installed so I should care and press allow, because it's so huge it must mean I should really see it repeating over and over on webpage wanting to install it on its every subpage, I'm so liking it etc". I'm sorry it's too hard to implement, I'm sorry to be voicing myself here, I should really just shut up and let You make browser that doesn't support plugins and everything being hardcoded, even sites You SHOULD browse to not let user DO TOO MUCH /sarcasm.
So why mozilla devs made such changes? What could be the reason? Well first let's read a bit about Alex on the bottom of his elaboration:
"Alex Limi is VP of Product Design at
Highfive , a company that is transforming the way you work.
Previously head of Firefox
UX & Product Design Strategy
at Mozilla , designer at Google
& co-founder of Plone ."
So he was previously A HEAD OF Firefox UX & Product Design Strategy at Mozilla! We can now easly suspect that he either:
- had a BIG VOICE (seems a lot bigger than people on earth since his "word" made mozilla devs not listen to anyone else and just went for it, taking away customizations. Slowly, one by one.),
- he promised Mozilla devs something in exchange for making "his" Highfive not be easly "breakable" by users.
This is only assumption, since nobody really knows what is the real reason, but thing should be noted that after this they started to appear VERY NOT FRIENDLY with all the saying: "such discussion should be moved to forums" or "this decision is final". WOW! How far it can go? Maybe they will implement something in Firefox to automatically uninstall it and prevent installing the browser again on computers of complainers with a single hit of a button at their Headquarters? Maybe...
I didn't want to sound so agitated but I really am. What agitates me is not the fact that Alex made his elaboration. He has very huge right to do so, as every journalist does. But the thing that Mozilla devs "listened" to him SO EASLY and IGNORED everyone else. It just looks like they are doing browser for themselfes only.
That's all I have to say (write).
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Mr_KrzYch00
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