> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ...
I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.
I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.
I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
> For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?
I agree with you, but I'm completely aware that the point you're making is the same point that's causing the problem.
"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.
It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.
Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate.
It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.
Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore.
There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.
I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).
I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise…
MDI was rightfully seen as a complete failure, but there was also SDI, where each open thing is a separate window. I don't know how we got from MDI in office apps being completely terrible, to MDI in browsers being the accepted norm.
Well websites and documents are not the same thing so it makes sense that a paradigm that works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. I do find web-based document editors very annoying to use when they are in the same window as other tabs - at least web browser MDIs allow you do effortlessly separate tabs into a new window these days.
Tabbed MDI is effectively just a better interface to SDI (for most situations)
Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.
As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.
Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.
It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.
I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that.
New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.
Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.
But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
> Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges.
That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…
A few weeks ago I noticed some mysterious app was killing my (poor) internet downloading a large file.
It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.
Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?
It'll be good to just use the browser again, so I will def be trying this out. But I can't help but feel that for simple dumb questions it's a lot easier to just ask AI bots instead of searching on a web browser. Does this just depend on the context? Example most recently I wanted to know how many miles would a pair of running shoes last. AI can answer this instantly (hooray instant gratification) and googling something like this would take longer. And of course this is why they shove this stuff on the browser.
I guess then, the browser and AI just serve different purposes now?
Every single thing for the past 10 years has had (opt-out, which most people didn't) telemetry and that correlates with a decline in quality, not improvement.
Suggesting bash/curl'ing to get a 12 lines JSON file is just... Not great. We've seen a shitload of developers account getting compromised (with all the supply chain attacks) and developers account turning evil.
Also there's absolutely zero need to be sudo to put a JSON config file for Firefox on Linux.
You're basically bash/curl'ing the kitchen sink, with all the security risks that entails, executing a shell script as root (which may or may not be malicious now or at some point in the future), just to...
Put a 12 lines JSON file in a user's Firefox config folder.
Way to go my "fremen" brothers [1].
[1] the "fremen" in Dune as those who adore the Shai-Hulud
I noticed that Safari is not mentioned - is it because is not relevant on Desktop or because it didn't go through the same enshittification process as the other two major browsers?
It's silly to treat this like a totalizing partisan issue where everything must be clearly "pro-ai" or "anti-ai".
Browsers are currently incentivised to add a bunch of new features outside their traditional role. Some people prefer to keep the browser's role simple. It's not ideological and it's not "hating".
This niche will get smaller over time. The key hurdle right now is that most "AI" is just LLMs. People currently prefer to go to a website or open a dedicated application for AI inference. As better integrations with other workflows are made and people see them, the resistance will weaken.
Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.
> aims to remove: Most AI features, Copilot, Shopping features, ...
I grew up on DOS, and my first browser was IE3. My first tech book as a kid was for HTML[1], and I was in absolute awe at what you could make with all the tags, especially interactive form controls.
I remember Firefox being revolutionary for simply having tabs. Every time a new Visual Basic (starting with DOS) release came out, I was excited at the new standardized UI controls we had available.
I remember when Tweetie for iPhone OS came out and invented pull-down refresh that literally every app and mobile OS uses now.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
[1] Can someone help me find this book? I've been looking for years. It used the Mosaic browser.
I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.
Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).
Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.
You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut
> For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.
So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?
Not sure if that's a great example
I agree with you, but I'm completely aware that the point you're making is the same point that's causing the problem.
"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.
It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.
Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".
These days QWERTY keyboards are optimal because programs, programming languages and text formats are optimized for QWERTY keyboards.
> the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming
even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed
It's been debunked by both research (no such mention at the time) and practice on extant machines.
> Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I think "yes" and "a bit", in that order. The early days of the web and mobile, where everything was new, are gone. In those days, there was no established pattern for standard UX. Designers had to innovate.
It makes sense that we have a lot less innovation now. There's probably room for a lot more than we see, but not for the level that was there in the early days of the web.
Only speaking for myself, but I have "front end exhaustion". Text based sites like this are the only ones I spend any time on anymore.
There's no reason to "learn" a UI or use shortcuts on most sites, because they change everything around every few months.
I see people reminiscing about tabs in firefox, well today a majority of the top websites don't even allow you to open links in new tabs! The links aren't even real links anymore, and everything's a webapp. ( and by top websites, I mean social media, not the top sites used by the HN crowd. Sites like YT, FB, IG, and TT ).
I try to interact with the "UI" of websites as little as possible these days. I use RSS readers for as much as possible. Any time I get a popup on any site, I get mad. I don't care about news updates, software updates, or offers. Anything that pops up at me, or moves around before I can click it, looks like a scam to me. Even if it's "legitimate". The modern web feels like an arcade game that's trying to waste my time.
I remember what it was like before tabs, when there was that Multi Document Interface (something like that) instead, so you had the main parent window but then each page was its own window within it that you could resize, minimise, maximise…
Like the AOL browser, come to think of it.
Tabs in Firefox were such an unfamiliar thing.
MDI was rightfully seen as a complete failure, but there was also SDI, where each open thing is a separate window. I don't know how we got from MDI in office apps being completely terrible, to MDI in browsers being the accepted norm.
Well websites and documents are not the same thing so it makes sense that a paradigm that works for one doesn't necessarily work for the other. I do find web-based document editors very annoying to use when they are in the same window as other tabs - at least web browser MDIs allow you do effortlessly separate tabs into a new window these days.
Tabbed MDI is effectively just a better interface to SDI (for most situations)
Actual MDI applications feel so dated. It made more sense when there wasn't a unified task bar kinda thing (which when you think of it, is kinda like tabs as well)
[1] Sounds difficult without any other detail.
But it would be funny if it's this: https://archive.org/details/teachyourselfweb00lema/page/n9/m...
This is a strong contender. Other candidates (hard to find links to the first editions):
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11177063-creating-cool-w... - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1097095.HTML_for_Dummies...
That actually might be it! It's hard to tell, I was only 10. Still skimming it.
Why would it be funny though? Am I missing something?
> Are those days permanently gone?
Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.
As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.
Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.
It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
Are those days permanently gone? The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
I agree mostly with your sentiment. But I still think there is still some work being done. For example the Arc and Zen Browsers. I never used Arc because it is closed source. But it sure looked beautiful. And Zen I tested, but it seemed laggy. I think I might give it another go to see if some of the performance issues have been fixed.
I went through the same (or at least very similar) experience. I loved that.
New apps were announced in blogs, and people downloaded them to try them out. I remember downloading Opera, using it for a few days or weeks, and then going back to Firefox.
Fun fact: Opera had a tab functionality before Firefox. In fact a little-known browser called InternetWorks from the 90s is thought to be the first that had them.
> The days when actual UI/UX innovation was a thing?
It's still a thing but it went off the rails, see Apple and their latest no-contrast UI.
Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Apple has the unfortunate burden of needing to shepherd millions of developers over to this new paradigm (AR) before it really exists, and so is shoving Liquid Glass onto devices that don't really benefit from it.
But in practice people are generally not happy about lots of new experimentation going on. By definition, most of the results suck. In retrospect we get to stand in awe of those that survived the evolutionary battle and say "wow browser tabs" and "wow pull to refresh" and forget the millions of other bad ideas that we tried.
> Good example because Liquid Glass is obviously preparing for the next paradigm shift in computing which will actually require/open up a lot of innovation on the UI front again.
Bruh, I just want to be able to read the text on my phone.
Yeah: most experiments fail and even the ones that ultimately succeed have rough edges.
That's my point about people swooning about the days of UI experimentation. There's a reason we don't do it once we figure out good solutions to problems (experimentation is hard and mostly bad).
And I don't want the fucking notifications displayed on my glasses!
Oh wait, I have them all off. So what will AR do for me?
If pull-down refresh were invented today it would definitely be called an anti-pattern and the evidence of the regression of Apple.
???
I had a look at what it actually does in the Firefox settings and all it seems to do is to disable one AI feature flag, change the default search engine, and then set a few other flags that are changes that you may or may not want to make, unrelated to AI. Not sure you want to run a 3rd party shell script just to do that…
A few weeks ago I noticed some mysterious app was killing my (poor) internet downloading a large file.
It was chrome, downloading a multi GB file without any sort of UI hints that it was doing so. A generative AI file.
Is this why chrome uses so much ram? They’ve just been pushing up the memory usage in preparation for this day, hoping I wouldn’t notice the extra software now running on my (old, outdated) system?
This is why I use Firefox. In case where I have to use something chromium based (because Cloudflare hates Firefox, apparently), I use Brave.
Interesting. Do you have more specifics? I don't use Chrome or it's derivatives, but this is the first I've heard of it doing that.
Chrome can run small[0] models and can auto-download them: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in
[0] "small" in comparison to ChatGPT, but still a bulky download
It'll be good to just use the browser again, so I will def be trying this out. But I can't help but feel that for simple dumb questions it's a lot easier to just ask AI bots instead of searching on a web browser. Does this just depend on the context? Example most recently I wanted to know how many miles would a pair of running shoes last. AI can answer this instantly (hooray instant gratification) and googling something like this would take longer. And of course this is why they shove this stuff on the browser.
I guess then, the browser and AI just serve different purposes now?
there are already a bunch of electron and chromium projects that give you just a simple and highly performant browser sandbox.
If you go through the manual steps on mac os, the file gets deleted when Firefox is updated.
Is there a way to persist the file even after updates?
For Firefox, I think that disabling the telemetry and the studies is not going to help Mozilla improve the browser.
Every single thing for the past 10 years has had (opt-out, which most people didn't) telemetry and that correlates with a decline in quality, not improvement.
Suggesting bash/curl'ing to get a 12 lines JSON file is just... Not great. We've seen a shitload of developers account getting compromised (with all the supply chain attacks) and developers account turning evil.
Also there's absolutely zero need to be sudo to put a JSON config file for Firefox on Linux.
You're basically bash/curl'ing the kitchen sink, with all the security risks that entails, executing a shell script as root (which may or may not be malicious now or at some point in the future), just to...
Put a 12 lines JSON file in a user's Firefox config folder.
Way to go my "fremen" brothers [1].
[1] the "fremen" in Dune as those who adore the Shai-Hulud
I noticed that Safari is not mentioned - is it because is not relevant on Desktop or because it didn't go through the same enshittification process as the other two major browsers?
Nice touch - seeing the Windows 95 IE favicon took me back for a while.
can you remove webrtc, localstorage, web workers, and customize fonts?
Half of the websites will stop working if you did that.
And you might as well just fork chromium for that purpose.
I mean this is an Anti-AI move. I am not saying you should join the pro ai but hating on AI just because its AI is not a good look
It's silly to treat this like a totalizing partisan issue where everything must be clearly "pro-ai" or "anti-ai".
Browsers are currently incentivised to add a bunch of new features outside their traditional role. Some people prefer to keep the browser's role simple. It's not ideological and it's not "hating".
I gaurantee you there will be a very popular niche that focuses entirely on being anti-AI, and it will always be around.
This niche will get smaller over time. The key hurdle right now is that most "AI" is just LLMs. People currently prefer to go to a website or open a dedicated application for AI inference. As better integrations with other workflows are made and people see them, the resistance will weaken.
Microsoft shoving LLMs into literally everything, including Notepad, is what people are currently hating, because it isn't quite ready.
> but hating on AI just because its AI is not a good look
why not? All things being equal non-AI solution is better. "it is current hyped thing" should bring some downward correction
and of all things to hate, AI hate is harmless and at least partially justified