lithopsian wrote:Why is simple. Read the blogs and you will see that (the UX team at least) is deliberately aiming for "the 98%" as they see it, and sod the rest.
In doing so,they're IMHO missing the whole picture:I must first of all give them (them being the developers and the ones actually in charge) credit for taking on this huge task of taking Firefox on the mobile devices and tackle such big competitors with their comparatively small resources-I have a feeling that the majority of us here don't care so much about these gizmos,we can be a bunch of luddites sometimes,I suspect some of us would still happily use Firefox 2.0 (not me,I would use 3.6.x).
But these devices account for the biggest part of the market (probably),and can actually be useful and fun to use,so if I can have an open source Mozilla branded device/OS instead of the usual big names,why not...
Having said that,they are actually won over by this idea of "consistency",meaning that all Mozilla applications should look and feel the same across devices,which sounds good in theory:unfortunately,the practical outcome is that the application we care about the most,our desktop browser,is being relentlessly crippled and shamelessly patterned after a mobile device,gradually losing versatility,ease of customization and forcing us all to resort to all kind of extensions/hacks/workarounds to get back what we are used to have,which at times looks more like a losing battle than anything else.
Aesthetical matters,curved tabs,icon design and colour,shape of widgets,who really cares in the end,but if I've chosen to buy and use a desktop computer with a fully functional browser it is because is a far more powerful and versatile tool to browse the web and locally save interesting data than any other device,and they should respect that.
Everytime I show off Firefox to someone using Chrome,illustrating the usage of the awesome bar,bookmarks and tags,keyword searches,security addons like Adblock and NoScript,useful addons like Scrapbook or Context Search,or Site Searcher,they say "what a nice browser,that's far more smart than Chrome".
Mozilla should push with all means the knowledge of all these Firefox feature to all users,that 98% you are talking about,instead of slowly depriving the browser of features that "no one uses" because no one really knows that they are actually there,sometimes I think,looking at all the stuff that is buried inside Firefox,that they're even better at hiding stuff then coding.Every now and then,I still find something that I didn't know about after using Firefox since the release 2.0 and spending quite some time on customizing it to my liking...
IMHO,they should fight that inferiority complex that they have towards Chrome and accept that it isn't better at all,Google simply has more money to throw into publicizing it and making it available (sometimes forcibly,bundled with some "freeware" applications) literally everywhere,simple as that.