I was part of the August layoffs as well and this rings very true to my experience. Getting laid off was bittersweet - Mozilla has played a huge role in my life for the past 5 years and I care deeply about the people and the mission, but I felt the same relief when I saw the email and my calendar invite.
I'm about a month into my next (interim) role at this point. Mozilla gave people who were laid off a generous severance and recruiters were messaging everyone with a job at Mozilla on LinkedIn from the moment the news broke.
You should check out Container tabs in Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Contextual_Identity_Projec.... It's like per-tab profiles, no need for multiple copies of the browser, etc. Totally changed the way I deal with sites I need multiple accounts for (like AWS).
I love it although now that I have a Mozilla employee here I should mention that:
- it seems to be missing features when running with Tab Tree
- the ux of Mozilla vertical tabs experiment is weird and IMO bad. And I rarely complain about UX. The problem is: the tab bar goes up on the side of the awesomebar and slides it back and forth as the tab panel expands and goes back.
I have reported this but so far nobody seems to care.
Another small thing: I more or less love Firefox in general <3
> the ux of Mozilla vertical tabs experiment is weird and IMO bad ... the tab bar goes up on the side of the awesomebar and slides it back and forth as the tab panel expands and goes back.
Yeah this seems really whack. I like what Safari did: they have a left sidebar with several tabs (favorites, reading lists, shared links). Having these independent sliding spaces overloaded in the same area is clumsy.
The problem though is there is UI hierarchy between tabs and something in the sidebar like bookmarks. I can't think of a good way to place these relative to each other to impart that relationship, which is probably why they are independent for now. Hopefully they do something about that though.
Please share your UX problems on the Containers experiment's GitHub issues! Getting early user feedback is why we're testing more Firefox features as experiments. :)
> and slides it back and forth as the tab panel expands and goes back.
There's a "pin" button there that keeps it open. I know, this doesn't fix your problem, but I and everyone I've seen using it uses the pin button, and IMO it's a much better experience :) I've noticed that on most high-end laptops websites have way too much blank space on the side margins so pinning a useful tab bar in that space works fine.
Containers are awesome and very easy to use compared to profiles.
I'm guessing that Chrome might not want to make such a powerful pro-privacy feature available to the masses, so this could be a good way for Firefox to distinguish itself.
As you're already here, when can we expect Firefox to...
(a) read QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS to do per-screen dpi scaling on Linux? Currently there's an old-style extension to read this, and scale the browser accordingly, but with WebExtension only, I'd be stuck with a browser that's always the wrong scale.
(b) support hardware video decoding on Linux? Currently I use a plugin to force Firefox to use VLC to handle HTML5 video, wherever possible, so I can get fluent video - with WebExtension, this won't be possible, and CPU-decoding of HTML5 video eats over 5-10% of CPU even on an i7-6700 with a 4K video. On laptops, it's almost unusable.
(c) How long do you expect it to take until we can customize the entire browser chrome with HTML, CSS and JS again? XUL will be gone, but with Browser.html, and competing browsers such as Vivaldi, these things are possible easily. As we're already on that topic...
(d) as you don't seem to be willing to implement Tab Previews in the browser itself, when can we expect a WebExtension API to do so ourselves? In old-style extensions it is possible, but this breaks with WebExtension.
i have so been needing this! no more opening new windows, private windows, and new browsers with private windows to test multiple user scenarios. [thumbsup emoji]
