Link: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/mozillas-head-of-firefox-talks-product-priorities-ai-skepticism-and-browser-choice/

Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

Duh. Obviously the logo is what's wrong, better redesign that too.

No, wait, it needs AI!

No, wait, it needs to tell me about some VPN.

Support the specifications, be secure. Perhaps try that.

Yes, but you need to be careful not to give the impression that all you are doing is work on round borders again, and not on supporting more web features.

Blink, the engine developed by the Chromium project? What a fascinating and important distinction.

Because edge is actually based on chromium?

Basically all of it is chromium. There is a ton of stuff that is not just the rendering extension that is included like extensions, pwa support, or hardware interface protocols (like webusb) that are from chromium, that wouldn't work if edge was just using blink. Chromium isn't just the rendering engine, it's this whole platform.

They do mention blink in the article, so they do seem to be aware of this distrinction.

Well, egg on my face, Edge is a bigger rip-off than I thought. Thanks for the enlightenment.

Well, to me this is yet another redesign; still no support for WebUSB. I worry and rant because I care, as I don't ever want to use a Chromium-based browser. So, Firefox should really put focus (as well as focus in blog announcements) on the true important aspects of the web.

I really can't wait for Servo to get into a usable state and have alternative browsers being build on top of that.

How do I start using this, is it something an end user can support through adoption?

You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess.

Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.

horrible website captcha

I got the update today and I'm so tired boss. We had almost settled on something visually calm and organized, and leeeettzzzgooooo back to floaty rounded shit with no choice left to the user !

Blender does interface right, please for the love of Cthulhu take some inspiration: it's got a "roundedness" property for every UI widget that goes from perfectly square to perfectly round, a "widget emboss" property that can be tuned to your liking or disabled entirely, a "widget underline" property, it lets you disable button decorations as well so your toolbars are only floating icons, etc. Every combination is possible and it's very easy to tune. Please do something like that and never touch it again.

no, it's very much not up to web standards yet. it has a super fast html renderer and css engine that support something like 70% of properties, a very barebones js runtime that has basically no browser apis, and a frontend that (i think) only takes urls via command-line.

Opera 12 started to do this. China owns it now and it is based on Chromium.
A couple of Open Source browsers did it for the same reason later and lost users like their was orbital bombardment hitting their project.
Grab a brain... it is not the design language that makes Chrome so successful and if you look and act like them, well users are just going to use them.

Moaning about missing features from a nonprofit, and volunteer project doesn’t look good.

Mozilla Corporation, whose CEO was paid six million dollars last year, and 6.9 million in 2022, is a nonprofit volunteer project?

gosh i hate this. gotta play with userchrome again...

I mean, can't several things be worked on at the same time?

When funds are tight? No, they can’t. There are finite engineering resources. The more new features you add, the more bugs are introduced, and the less resources there are to fix any of them (old or new).

i don't see pwa or webusb/webhid/webserial talked about enough. There's so much cool stuff that can be done with it. it lets kids to be able to program an ESP32 for learning electronics. it lets me re-flash my keyboard without needing to download any additional software. comma.ai uses it for factory resetting their devices.

i used to use pwa for homeassistant and klipper/fluidd 3d printer control, and while Zen essentials kinda fills that use case, a standalone window would be nice. I remember seeing talks about making progress towards supporting pwa, but i guess nobody else cares. Just like their conversation on webserial. Darn shame that we get integrated ai instead

The less APIs the better, some of the information my phone is giving out currently to evwry site I visit is ridiculous

some of them are, y'know, needed for the sites to do anything at all.

I know I am only joking, lynx ftw

Of course the CEO gets paid that, if they don't do that they run the risk of running a profit, gotta get rid of the money somehow. /s

PWA's in firefox are interesting. They are actually really well supported, just not visually/in the UX.

For example, if you visit https://wavemakercards.com/ or https://www.photopea.com/ once, they will then work offline. This is a big oart of the PWA featureset.

It's because of this that there are unofficial extensions that let you "install" PWA's like you can om chromium.

My personal theory, is that firefox is in the middle of very long UI rewrite/refactor, and only when it's completed or nears completion, will we see features like vertical tabs, tab groups, or these other UI features people have been asking for for a while but have never gotten added.

I think thats an intentional choice, because the security and privacy over the current implementation (which is designed around chrome fingerprinting as always)

I’m sure they don’t make silly decisions for no reason.

Ah, I see you've never used Firefox or paid attention to any of the decisions that Mozilla's leadership makes.

it’s rich to fill this thread with exhausting fandom for mozilla of all corporations when you’ve only been a daily Firefox user since 2018 (cute)

the worst part of using Firefox is mozilla

the second worst part is mozilla fans

i, too, dislike it when things are owned by the evil scary China instead of good and righteous Norway

Imo, they should pull the Zen browser features. It'll really help it differentiate from Chrome while increasing usability.

gosh please no, my current one hasn't broken for over a year.

I know a lotta apps do indeed make use of pwa stuff like local session storage. But for some strange reason, I got used to being able to open web apps in their own window from a desktop shortcut. I kinda miss being able to do that on Zen.

Also I thought Firefox got vertical tabs recently? I know Zen has tab groups and is centered around having vertical tabs, like Arc. Amazing project with single dev, highly recommend checking out if you've never heard of it

What Firefox needs is to fire everyone responsible for the UX, if they have such people on their payroll & put all their ehm "limited" resources on improving performance & some effort is also needed to become more Chromium compatible, perhaps even on a site by site basis. Alas as long as Google is the main revenue source for the project, all this is a pipe dream.

Firefox never had other issues. Poor performance -especially JS- compared to Chromium & some websites just don't work anymore.

I like it.

This is why I use Zen. I don't even care about most of the extra features, I just like not having to disable the sponsored shortcuts and stupid pocket articles on my new tab page every time I install the browser

Yes. Firefox got vertical tabs and tab groups both very close to eachother, very recently.

@rhamph silver lining, of sorts: compact mode is back!

To disable the new design, simply uncheck the "Enable the Nova redesign" option (Settings > Appearance > Browser theme).

Alternatively, set browser.nova.enabled to false in about:config.

Honestly that description kinda makes me want to target servo for all of my hobby browser-backed UIs. Html5 with forms can do a surprising amount (albeit not always as effortlessly as just including a JavaScript library) - though I expect something like IndexedDB isn't at all available?

EDIT: well, the servo repo has a bunch of code in a storage/engines/indexeddb folder, but the repo aussi has about 30 open issues relating to "IndexedDB" in one way or another.

And part of this is made possible by AI tools, to be honest with you. We are able to do a lot more.

People want to feel like they’re in a modern browser—things that match the design language of the operating system. So that’s part of it. We are bringing back compact mode as well…

firefox isnt competitive enough. @grok bring back compact mode. checkmate, chromium

i don't know if they're going in version order with implementations either so that's an extra complication

Which is why frontend designers should start working on backend specifications

it never went away, it just had to be 'enabled' in about:config (search: compact). note this still has to be done if you disable 'nova' redesign.

I'm currently targetting CSS 2.0 for one of my projects. I'm trying to make it work right on a 3DS, Netscape Navigator, IE and, of course, Servo, without serving custom files to each other.

It's been incredibly annoying, but also fun to learn about standards from 1998, and how browsers handled them.

It's also disheartening to learn that the modern web is, at its core, designed not to run on basically anything older than 2016.

Why on EARTH did they move the FUCKING BACK BUTTON and replace it in its prior position with some FUCKING BULLSHIT USELESS sidebar button

If I give up and become a supervillain, my primary hand-to-hand combat weapon will be a copy of the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines laser-etched onto stainless steel plates and somehow bound in a physicalized representation of the tattered remains of these peoples' abandoned dignity

There are few parts I thought about sneering about in individual comments, but I think there are… enough here.

Still, one particularly galling part was this remark by the author:

Firefox’s new redesign is—at least to me—a welcome one. It no longer looks like a browser from 2015.

What on earth does a ‘browser from 2015’ look like? That was barely a decade ago! You mean an interface that still managed to function rather than whatever inscrutable nonsense the phone OSes are doing this week? Who wants software that has to be completely redesigned every five years?

Was unaware of change and thought I had a virus. Looks very stupid.