Alex Limi

http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ does a great job explaining why Mozilla killed the checkbox for disabling JavaScript.

Here's a very relevant blog post by Alex Limi of Mozilla: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ Most sites these days that aren’t just displaying content will fail in interesting & mysterious ways if you don’t have JavaScript enabled. For the general population, Firefox will appear broken. And yes, I know that some people have reasons (privacy, web development) to turn off JavaScript. There are many add-ons that can help with this — but it’s not something that we should ship to hundreds of millions of users. (EDIT: this is the relevant quote, but worth reading the whole article)

You generally don't have to. Back in the day of 3.6, sure — but not these days. We automatically vacuum your DB and maintain it for you. However, there are still extensions that cause issues, and the odd bug that is an actual issue with how we do things. The reason he recommends creating a new profile and syncing stuff over is because it's sometimes easier than to figure out what's broken on a particular system that has a pre-Firefox 4 profile. Here's a step-by-step instruction on how to do it — if your Firefox is slow, this will most likely fix it: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/

At which point, it essentially becomes a "break some of my apps in confusing and inexplicable ways" button. Related reading: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill

They don't let users easily disable JS because that breaks so many webpages, and they didn't want to deal with supporting users who complained that Firefox wasn't working. http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/

I've seen a "New Tab" button on Firefox since at least version 3.6, IIRC. It's visible in the UI comparison at http://limi.net/articles/firefox-4.

> Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3 test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later anyhow. About ACID3, the main issue was SVG fonts. They are an unneeded standard, because Web Fonts exist, and Firefox has therefore not implemented them (so saying they eventually did is incorrect). The right thing to do was to fix the ACID3 test, which has been done, see more details here: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 About 3D CSS, sure, there were disagreements and eventually Apple got it's way, that's a normal part of the standards process, you can't predict how things will work out. You can't expect every browser maker to be right from the beginning on every topic.

I seem to remember an article awhile back where someone from Mozilla wrote that they didn't care to make up the last X% of the test because (if I recall correctly) they didn't agree with the interpretation of the standards that made up the tiny bit they were failing on. They felt they were keeping true to the actual spec and that the Acid was incorrect and thus it was silly to conform just to get that 100/100. I may be mistaken but perhaps the Acid test has now come into line with whatever spec items they were disputing. IF this is the case then my kudos to the Mozilla team for not "conforming" just to conform. Edit: found the link: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ So it was not wanting to put in partial implementations when a final spec wasn't complete yet just to pass a test. Edit again: Even Firefox 3.6 now scores a 99/100

If anything it's the other way around. Mozilla works out in the open and the designs of the new UI had been released long before Opera released its software, as Alex Limi points out: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-4/. That said, what's wrong with taking the good ideas from other products? It's a net win for the users and the web.

You might want to try running in a fresh profile, to see if anything in your old profile is causing the problem: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-preferences/ Sorry about your unanswered bug - it's pretty hard for us to address general performance bugs that don't have specific steps to reproduce. We have to focus on fixing what we can see or measure, and hope that it fixes what users are seeing too.

You're probably thinking of a combination of this: http://kaioa.com/node/99 Which explains how to use JAR archives in Firefox instead of CSS sprites to optimize page loads, and this: http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages Which is a proposal for a universal standard of packaging resources like this.

With a changing of the guard, the honor system can handily disappear. We saw this transpire with the burying of the JavaScript toggle. A new guy showed up, and decided that disabling JavaScript was “an advanced feature” and just too dangerous for ordinary folk. [1, 2] Of course it begins with good intentions, and promises to leave explicit privacy options alone, but new devs show up with different opinion and the old devs are gone, and suddenly privacy options are getting toggled any old time. Beyond even that, we all know that the realities of privacy are never ever cut and dry. Leaky details can expose people in peculiar ways. Fingerprinting preferences and hardware facts for forensic purposes has taught us that much. Viewport size, OS, connection speed, graphics capabilities, hardware acceleration profiles. Even stylometry, choice of words, manner of speech can give people away. In that sense, exposing any user choices might prove to compromise identity to some degree. 1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709 2. https://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ (seriously breathless persuasive writing about how urgent it is to hide the toggle for javascript, among other things, but make no mistake, the high value target was the javascript checkbox)

> None of these uses requires the ability to play quake3 inside firefox, or are really applications inside a webpage. Maybe, for now. But WebRTC/WebSockets have a value proposal for real-time interaction in collaborative office suites. Canvas/WebGL have one for performance in authoring tools and for articles illustrations. Documents are readable in your default serif/sans-serif set, but WebFonts are a good designer/author tool just like fonts are in print. Etc... Renouncing this added value because each new feature increases the attack surface sounds like throwing the baby with the bathwater. > I'm just disappointed in the defeatist attitude of browser vendors and expert users: the idea of having a browser safe mode that you can lock down doesn't strike me as such an impossiblity and it would give some incentive to developers to put their act together. Two thoughts: 1. Such a "Safe mode" disabling features presents high risks of breaking tons of sites, leaving non-expert users in the dark, and these users are the most likely to be clueless about what's wrong and may just switch to another browser. In the case of JavaScript, Firefox is actually going the opposite way of what you want, by making it harder to disable it [1]. The closest to your wish with Firefox is probably to use their LTS version, ESR, where the dust settled for a little while more (but which ironically, was affected by today's exploit ^^). 2. Can what you are proposing be a "mode"? Take the "Reader…

> Firefox's declining market share over this period is very good evidence The only evidence we have is that Google's marketing team has been very effective at advertising Chrome. :-P > Many of us long-time Firefox users have actually found the past three years to be the worst so far, in terms of design. I'm not sure why you think you can speak for many Firefox users. > rush to copy Chrome in appearance and behavior I'll quote myself from a different discussion [1]: Outside of manilla folder-like tabs and a panel menu, Chrome is given far too much credit in innovating the direction of browser UI. Tabs on top is an objectively better UI choice [2]. The download manager is an original Firefox design [3] and almost anything else that other browsers have adopted (tabs on top, start page tiles, etc) is all from Opera. > now it's declining because it's providing a worse experience, and the recent changes clearly haven't been helping the situation. FWIW, Firefox has held steady over the past year hovering around 20% according to Net Applications [4], and they even had a small uptick in the past month. In any case, I am confident Firefox lost users because of Chrome's superior performance and snappy behavior, not because of UI changes. I think projects like MemShrink [5], Project Snappy [6], and the revived Electrolysis [7] will go a long way towards improving Firefox's performance. Will those changes be too little too late? Who knows. Will the upcoming Australis design be…

I began using Firefox a long time ago (when it was called Phoenix) but switched to Chrome. A couple months ago I switched back to Firefox because Chrome lost my open tab session in some cases (hard crashes when loading the old session), due to privacy issues and because it often triggered long swaps (locking the process) when dealing with lots of tabs (I usually have like 50-60 tabs open in several windows). Also because I support Mozilla's values. Unfortunately I'm not very happy either. Alongside the issues commented here, I noticed these problems: - Sometimes it just goes to 25% CPU usage and the browser becomes really slow. The only choice is to close all windows and open Firefox again. - Multimonitor and Flash sucks. I'm not sure if this is Firefox or Flash's fault, but it often chooses one window as its parent, regardless of where the tab with the Flash content is located. Clicking/hovering the embedded object fails when the object thinks I'm in the wrong monitor. Also, going fullscreen usually pops the window in the wrong monitor. - The JS PDF viewer is slow as hell (I once spent 5 minutes waiting for it to zoom, and I couldn't close it because I feared losing some changes in other tab). Firefox's JS engine is quite slow in and of itself, who thought it would be a good idea to embed a JS PDF viewer? - Extensions take ages to be updated in the Addons repository (especially compared to Chrome) which frustrates extension developers and users. I personally know a…

Firefox's arguments for not really bothering with the remaining parts of Acid3 was that it seemed like it they weren't testing particularly relevant standards and that the implementations of the other browsers for those standards were mostly to pass Acid3 and not particularly useful either. See http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3/ for more info. That seems like valid reasoning to me. I've also seen Hixie make comments that seem to indicate him wanting to avoid these issues for any potential Acid4: When we do Acid4 (probably around the time we have at least three major browsers shipping Acid3-passing browsers), I think we'll have to focus on testing fewer, more critical things. Acid3 tests a lot of critical stuff, but also checks a lot of less important stuff at the same time, and it's in those areas that we've had the most problems with specs changing under us. From http://ln.hixie.ch/?count=1&start=1215829569

Here's the bug where the option was removed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=851702 Limi's blog post "Checkboxes that kill your product" is cited in the bug as a good explanation of the motivation behind this: http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ The option has been added to the DevTools for developers who find it useful: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=864249 And of course addons like NoScript or js-switch are available if you still want this in your UI: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/noscript/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/js-switch/

> As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely. It's a bad idea to add an option entirely for the purpose of making the product not work anymore. https://limi.net/checkboxes > Window management sucks I'm always mystified reading these kinds of posts on HN because it literally always starts out as "macOS is an OS for babies" and turns out to mean "macOS doesn't have a tiling window manager". Like, cmon man, who cares. > there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! `ioreg -l` or `system_profiler`. Why does this matter? > There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Accessibilit… https://developer.apple.com/documentation/XCUIAutomation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/welcome/ios