Let's Organize Q&A Session with UX Team

[tilwiti]

This could be a wonderful opportunity for anyone interested to gain an insight into the design process and ask the team directly about their work and challenges. If this sounds like something that could be done, it would benefit many people who are curious about the intricacies of UX.

[Jon]

This is great @tilwiti and definitely aligns with some of the stuff we want to start doing here on Connect.

Would anyone else be interested in this? Or other types of activities? 

[jscher2000]

Yes, I would be interested.

[tilwiti]

Thank you for your reply.

The r/FirefoxCSS seems to have disappeared from Reddit, maybe it makes sense to make it part of Mozilla Connect.

It might make sense to loosen up userChrome.css's legacy status a bit (this suggests anxious thoughts of future modifications' limitations) and make modifying the interface more accessible.

But my pain is Android themes. The pre-installed themes are nice, too, but it would be better if they had customization support.

I think Firefox is a really customizable browser but lacks small things like this. Maybe that's how it can attract a bigger audience after the Manifest v3 release.

[jscher2000]

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@tilwiti wrote:

The r/FirefoxCSS seems to have disappeared from Reddit, maybe it makes sense to make it part of Mozilla Connect.

It might make sense to loosen up userChrome.css's legacy status a bit (this suggests anxious thoughts of future modifications' limitations) and make modifying the interface more accessible.

I think it would be really useful to understand what modifications people are making that they feel would be most valuable to have built-in to Firefox, or made available to add-on developers. But when it comes to using this site, I think it would be too complicated to use the Ideas section and too diffused/scattered to use the Discussion section, to iterate on those thoughts. There probably needs to be something more custom/collaborative built around the different parts of the interface. I can't help but think software vendors have a platform for this already, somewhere.

Meanwhile, a resource for custom CSS that I just learned about (in threads about r/FirefoxCSS going private) is:

https://fedia.io/m/FirefoxCSS

[tilwiti]

I'd love to meet members of the Firefox UX team here. UX is tricky, as I have tried to do something minimal in CSS, and making something display well on all platforms is a real challenge. It's essential to strike a balance between functionality and maintainability. I think that an exchange of opinions would be helpful and would realize the request of conservative users for feedback.

@Jon What do you think?

[ikpjr]

Is fedia similar to discord servers ( with topic channels ) ?

[tilwiti]

@jscher2000thank you for the fedia.io link 😉

[ikpjr]

Also @tilwiti . What would you think of a "mod organizer/manager" for a browser's UI primarily and modders ( but not excluding webpage mods or regular users ), a concept seemingly originating from the gaming ( modders specifically ) communities, that would work with Firefox and Vivaldi JS and CSS mods ?

To see what I'm talking about, one can search for mod organizer on GitHub or mod manager ( comments to posts ) on Reddit ( there shouldn't be much results about it there and you can find my detailed post(s) about this idea, specially if searching from within /r/vivaldibrowser ) . Also there's a comment on fxdx.dev about webdriver bidi that touches the topic of mod organizing ( I think it's one of the posts related to FF 121 version release, but you may try to search for it if otherwise not found ) .

What's your opinion on this ?

[tilwiti]

It's an excellent idea to organize the whole customization process into a systematized process. It would require some changes to the team and create at least a few working groups for this (probably for different platforms), but it would be wow in a world where Chrome's minimalist window has taken over. I want someone from the team to share an opinion here. For now, I can only agree and reach out to @Jon again.

@Jon, are you a fan of the default settings, or do you like to touch CSS?

[ikpjr]

I was thinking more of a community developed tool, ( unofficial, so Mozilla development isn't a requirement at all, it would be an optional plus ) living outside the browser's folders for managing and organizing community, user mods ( from mostly anywhere, really ). Implemented in python or the like. Most people probably don't realize how useful such a tool can be for users, modders, or even internal UX teams, because it would allow for easier replication of mods, more visibility to the modding scenes, foster collaboration/competitions and sharing between them and be another significant reason for people to become users of those browsers, among many other benefits, at least according to the vision I have ( if you want more detail or discuss this now or later, let me know of such discussions, I'd be interested to participate ).

[tilwiti]

Do you have a Reddit account? We can bring it up there somehow.

[ikpjr]

Yes, I'm /u/wpeter on Reddit. Maybe one of us reading this can make a post/discussion to one of the modding subreddits.

[tilwiti]

You may post your idea and make it more visible in this thread, I think.

[ikpjr]

Thanks for the heads up. I'll see that Reddit thread for interesting comments/stuff later.

[tilwiti]

There are a few things that are perhaps classic to forums, one of which is clipboard access. It's often recommended to just leave Firefox, but that seems like a sad reason to basically leave a browser because of a simple right-click paste. Yes, I know there's something in Nightly, but will there be a release? I'd really appreciate a comment from someone on the team.

[jscher2000]

---

@tilwiti wrote:

There are a few things that are perhaps classic to forums, one of which is clipboard access. It's often recommended to just leave Firefox, but that seems like a sad reason to basically leave a browser because of a simple right-click paste. Yes, I know there's something in Nightly, but will there be a release? I'd really appreciate a comment from someone on the team.

---

Is it this? https://caniuse.com/?search=clipboard.read

I understand the general concern about websites reading the contents of the clipboard which could have, for example, a password or other sensitive text that I just pasted into a different program and didn't flush yet. I don't have Nightly on this computer, so I don't know how it looks there and whether that design is fairly mature or needs a lot of work.

[tilwiti]

Yes.

[ikpjr]

To me it's a bit vague what the goals and format of the interaction of such Q&A would be.

Is it for learning UX principles and decisions only or for also discussing UX issues of every FF component or even websites UX ?

There's already /r/FirefoxCSS, /r/VivaldiCSS and at least Vivaldi community on Discord .

Where do these options fall short and aren't enough ?

Couldn't one at a minimum formulate such questions to any AI chat app or web version out there and get a capable response ( including for learning how to do CSS and JS stuff - there's also MDN which is a great resource for finding how to do stuff ) .

Is creating a Firefox UX discord server with the relevant topic channels sufficient ( if it doesn't exist ) ?

[tilwiti]

The community has numerous questions that require answers. A slight trend on Reddit is that the team doesn't listen to users. That shouldn't be true, as we have Mozilla Connect and several other communication channels. Still, I would like to see a stream similar to the localization chats or a regular (or not so regular but alive) thread where users can talk directly to designers and share their experiences. Of course, such streams are reasonably optional activities, and it's impossible to please everyone, but it would be cool and increase community engagement. 

And if on Discord, let's make the bridge to a messenger like Element for platform independence.

Since the FirefoxCSS subreddit recently fell off the radar, the idea of such a server is fine.

[ikpjr]

The thing with Element and others like it, is that either they're buggy, unofficial, don't have a app for mobile or other troublesome issues causing friction or impeding usage . At least that was my experience with Element clients I tried quite awhile ago.

Also FirefoxCSS is online again and I took the opportunity to join it and did the same with a bunch of other subreddits, if for some reason their mods decide to go private with them.