Islands only link up every once in a while, so once you land on an island that's it at least for now. When islands link up you'll see a big '?' appear in the page header that you can click on to explore the linked island. There are two islands right now because the populations are low. There's a mechanism for discovering new islands as the island populations grow.
My hope is that by smooshing people together randomly and making it harder to move, people will have a new way (new old way?) of interacting online that has more of the good aspects of offline socialising. But you're 100% right that without a reason to engage it's going to be very quiet. I'm looking at different ways to tackle this that range from "it's a video game now" to something much more subtle.
I think you're right, but it's important to emphasize many of these attempts to tell the story of market share get major facts catastrophically wrong. The decline in Firefox market share from like 33% to below 10% is mostly because the world pivoted to mobile, and Firefox "dominance" was in a world of desktop browsers. It was defaults and distribution lock-in as the world pivoted to mobile that led to the change in market share. As well as the web as a whole effectively tripling in number of users, and Google leveraging its search monopoly and pushing out Chromebooks effectively at cost.
For some reason that part of the story always seems to get omitted, which I find bizarre. But the web pivoted to mobile and Google flexed its monopoly powers. I would argue that upwards of 95% of the change in market share is explained by those two factors.
No, the decline of Firefox market share happened in the early 2010s, on desktop, when everyone switched to Chrome because it felt way faster. I say "everyone" - this is the subset of "everyone" who were switched on enough to use a non-default browser in the first place. The rest used IE or Safari, dependent on platform.
What happened in the last 6 months or so to affect those numbers? According to them, Chrome increased in percentage quite a but recently and the others all got "compressed" towards 0.
Looking at the last 10 years gives a different perspective (not great for Firefox but maybe underscores something is different recently in general):
I can't imagine browsing the web on my phone and tablet without Firefox mobile. That would honestly be the biggest loss once this CEO takes this nonsense to the logical end.
I'm genuinely curious. What does FireFox mobile have over it's competition?
You can't install UBlock Origin on mobile.
Like I still use FireFox on mobile, just purely out of habit. I don't really see anything better about it (I am quite inexperienced when it comes to phones).
Pretty sure even back then, uBO was on the list of vetted extensions. I remember using it prior to 2023 (since like 2019), on my old OnePlus 6. There may have been a period it wasn’t available, but surely it wasn’t gone for too long.
I use several extensions on Fennec mobile: AdGuard AdBlocker, Google & YouTube cookie consent popup blocking, NoScript, Privacy Badger, Translate this page, Web Archives, uBlacklist
Please enlighten me. How does one make a browser "better" these days?
- They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
- They were ahead of the game with containers. Then everyone copied them.
- They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
- The only flaw I can think of, is they are not leaders in performance. Chrome loads faster. But that's because Chrome cheats by stealing your memory on startup.
How would you make FireFox better? When you say they should be making FireFox better, what should they be doing? Maybe they should hire you for ideas.
Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Extensions was a hit. Tabs was a hit. Containers was a hit. They had a shit tonne of misses over the decades. We just don't remember them.
The crypto and ai stuff just happens to be a miss.
First, I would stop breaking up the stuff that works. Firefox was ahead of the game with extensions, then deprecated the long tail for a rewrite that took three years [1] (during which Firefox mobile had a grand total of 9 extensions) and even then it's hard for me today to know which extensions work on mobile. They were similarly ahead of the game with containers, and yet they still don't work on private mode [2] and probably never will. That's two out of three hits where they tripped over their own two feet[3].
Second, do the one thing that users have been requesting for decades: let me donate to the browser development. Not to the Mozilla Foundation, not to internet freedom causes, to Firefox. The Mozilla foundation explicitly says that they don't want to be "the Firefox company", and yet I'd argue they should.
Third, go on the offensive. I get the impression that, with the exception of ad-blocking, Firefox is simply playing catch-up to any idea coming from Chrome regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Would Firefox had removed FTP support had Chrome not done it before?
And fourth, make all these weird experiments extensions.
> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.
Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.
What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).
> - They were ahead of the game with extensions. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with extensions, then they destroyed their own extensions. They copied everyone else, not the other way around.
> - They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then everyone copied them.
They were ahead of the game with tabs. Then while destroying their extensions they made vertical tabs harder, while still leaving it as a charitable contribution by the community instead of an internal project, and slow-walked it for a decade. I still have to do weird CSS to make them look right, because they decided to have an opinionated sidebar for no particular reason.
> - They are still the best browser to use for an ad free internet experience.
This, again, is not their fault. It's because of a man who they don't pay, who has had to battle with them on multiple occasions. Their only contribution is not accepting a Chrome standard completely. Imagine wanting to be given credit for not exactly copying your neighbor, after an enormous amount of pressure was brought to bear. It's my belief that Google decided that Firefox wouldn't kill ad blocking in the end, because it would have looked horrible in antitrust court. Now that's over (Obama judges don't believe in antitrust), and you can expect Firefox to kill it soon enough.
> Because to me, they seem to be constantly trying to make FireFox better. It's just hit or miss.
Nah. They kept telling me, while ignoring everyone's complaints about their actual experiences, that the most important thing was to reduce startup time for some unknown reason.
Make Firefox fully and exclusively a tool in service of the user.
Eliminate - both in code and by policy - anything that compromises privacy. If a new feature or support of a new technology reduces privacy, make it optional. Give me a switch to turn it off.
Stop opting the user into things. No more experiments. No more changing of preferences or behavior during upgrade.
Give the user more control; more opportunities for easy and powerful automation and integration.
Not only would this win me back as a user, I'd pay for the privilege. I'm paying for Kagi and happy to be doing so. I'd love to pay for an open source browser I could trust and respect.
In my experience Chrome does not just load faster, but it also uses less memory than Firefox because of its more aggressive tab hibernation that is enabled by default.
On my laptop I had to switch from Firefox to Chrome because it kept filling up all of my RAM resulting in other applications crashing.
Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything.
There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true.
I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly.
GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI design on forums like this and I think it is pretty unfair. It is a pretty good program comparatively. If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess.
> Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint.
This is just straight up not true. You're only saying this because you, presumably, have used Photoshop.
It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain.
Maybe you disagree. Okay. Pick a different example. 3D Max? Why aren't studios using Microsoft Paint 3D instead of 3D max?
"It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain."
See this is the thing that software devs don't "get" about UI design.
It's the exact thing the original author is trying to communicate.
You CAN have a powerful tool. And still have it be user friendly for normies!
You hide away it's complexities. So it's not INDTIMIDATING for new users.
You know what. I'm going to reinstall gimp. Just to prove my point.
Let's compare photoshop with gimp.
Before I begin, let me preface. Modern photoshop is an enshitified piece of garbage. I would never use it.
But this is nothing to do with enshitification. That's a whole different thing.
Ok let's start:
- I grab a random image from imgur. Copy paste. Ctrl-V. Both apps passed the test. I was a little worried gimp couldn't even do this.
- GIMP is ugly as fuck. It looks outdated. There's information overload on the left side. Too much shit happening. Too much text squashed together. INTIMIDATING.
- In contrast, photoshop has a more minimalist look. There is a "Layers" window on the right. New users don't need to touch it.
- There is a "Size & Position" window. This is key. Notice how there's only 3 things inside that window. Notice how it's not squashed with all the other shit on the left. Think about that. Why did the designer do this? Because those 3 things are what 90% of normies are looking to do.
- This is exactly what the original author was talking about, with the TV remote. The most common operations should be sectioned off at the top of the remote. Similarly, the most common operations in photo editing should be sectioned off, in clear view.
Ok, Step 2. Let's try and crop this image. A common operation:
- Photoshop. Click the crop button. Shows you a bit more complexity in it's settings. You don't have to touch it. It gives you a helpful grid UI: https://imgur.com/a/tLjL6en
- And then it has a blue "Done" button at the bottom. Finished easy.
- GIMP. We start with a brush by default??? Whoops I accidentally drew on the picture. I didn't want to do that. Thank god I know ctrl-Z.
- So it's that cross thing right? That's the move button. Nope that's not what I want to do :(
- It must be the one next to it. The rectangle. Ok, some random corner thingies appear in the corners. I click on one of the corners. The image gets split into two. But now what? WTF do I do now: https://imgur.com/a/f7TTHJs
I can go on and on and on and on, criticizing gimp's terrible UI design. I hope, the little I have demonstrated, is a tease into what UI design is really about.
> For people that need the complex stuff, they can access it via menus/formulas.
Yes, this is an obstacle. This makes your software worse for power users. Because now they have to jump through hoops.
If they just took all those options and dumped them somewhere, that would be better.
Okay, another example: a datagrid or table. In naive apps targeting consumers, they're filled with whitespace and they're simple to look at. Great, right?
Oh... you need to see more information than the absolute bare bones? It's okay, you can click 'show more'. The problem is that, now, it takes too much time.
What if I want to see 50 results at the same time? Gulp. If I have to click show more 10 times to do that, I'm taking my computer and throwing it out the window. I don't give a rats ass about your whitespace or visual hierarchy. I want the software to do the thing for me so I can move on with my life.
This is why people will SWEAR by old software. There are many people who refuse to use modern versions of Excel. Because it's too annoying to use, and they use it all day long, so that's not acceptable.
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