Comment Re:Good, two birds with one stone... (Score 1) 411
That's the good. The bad is extensions silently failing; interface being suddenly reorganised without any explanation.
The Mozilla view seems to be that Web Apps can already act in this capricious fashion, so desktop applications should too. This just seems to be taking what is bad and unempowering about web applications and bringing it to the desktop.
The latest interface idea is to reorganise the address bar to remove the site icon, get rid of the blue https signifier and replace it with a greyed out padlock (once more it's a coincidence how similar this ends up being to Chrome). I understand the reasoning for removing the site icon, but developers seem to think it's OK to jump from telling users that they should ignore any lock in that position, and look for the blue text, to a new UI which is the exact opposite. And they wish to push these changes silently to users; I can only assume they don't work with actual end users in the real world.
Every UI change has a cost to users in adapting to it, and a cost to those who support end users (businesses using the browser or supporting end users of browser based software), this needs to be balanced against the value of the new UI. At the very least the experience for users moving from the old to the new system needs to be considered. Users are much less excited by new stuff than developers, and they're much more put out be needless change. One of the effects of Mozilla's open development process is being able to see this disregard across their bugzilla/maillists/wikis.