Browser Hell - I'm starting to hate Mozilla AND Google

Sorry for the little rant, I'm curious if I'm the only one bothered by such...

When did it become en vogue to change the GUI of a software product three times a year?

I ditched Chrome because it would auto-update silently, suddenly changing the way the "new tab" thumbnails were presented, or the top bar would work.

Chrome on my Android, after the last update, moved the search bar, moved the reload button, increased the thickness of the menu and looked like sh!te (in addition to not playing embedded videos anymore).

Now today I update Firefox - because at least that one asks nicely - and suddenly the "new tab" thumbnails have changed size from easy to click 3x3 grid to a smallish overloaded 5x5 grid. There's a way to reduce it back to a 3x3, but the thumbnails stay small.

The thing that bothers me here is that we all teach ourself automatically how to best, quickest use a software GUI. Every computer user who is efficient with mouse & keyboard (i.e. fast at opening, closing, doing things) has this adaption going on where you know your paths around the screen. So since when did vendors decide that changing the click spots every so often is a brilliant idea?

Facebook has been doing it too, come to think of it.

Changing the look of your most used piece of software is damn annoying and I hate it too.

I use Firefox almost exclusively,only using Chrome when I wanted to see what the fuss was about with the new YouTube 60fps videos.

Also,the last couple of days,most YT videos won't even play,is that just me? I guess not because it happens on both browsers.

I dislike the Google thumbnail deal and have it unoptioned and run standard. YT has been up and down for a bit now with it's loading and playing and uploading vids across multiple browsers for many users. Refreshing mutiple times , clearing cache or changing to private browsing clears the issue. Have seen the same YT issue reported heaps across a lot of forums and websites in the last year or so with no clear fix.

Youtube is a topic in itself...

We have about a 100MB internet link here at the office. That's still not enough for them to manage buffering and interuption-free playback.

There's also the "we need to verify your age so please sign into your made up account name" BS going on. Sure, you want me to sign up to my fake personal credentials so you can verify my age... not because you want to track me across multiple platforms with a name attached...

The problem in total here is that these companies have a monopoly or almost-monopoly.


In previous days, unauthorized updates/changing of client software, or swapping website features around, changing ToS every other week, stuff that flat out doesn't work... wouldn't have happened or at least be a reason for concern and improvement on part of the vendor. These days it's pretty much "up yours!" to the customer.

I'm no longer dedicated to a single type of browser and regularly use different modified browsers based on two popular engines: blink(chrome) and gecko(firefox). Well, admittedly, Opera is my favorite.

I do know the feeling and was similarly annoyed when a new version of itunes years ago hid the sidebar. Took some effort to get it back.

The solution for me was to go with the flow and increase my capability to adapt to new changes. For every GUI I use, I remind myself, "Don't get used to this." lol

I mainly use Opera now too. It's pretty solid, occasionally irritating, but I much prefer it to either Firefox or Explorer. Wouldnt ever use Chrome.

Once upon a time there was a fantastic browser called Opera. I allowed you to do whatever YOU wanted to do, customization was paramount to these guys. The thing was very serious when it came to standards, too, and had tons of features integrated out of the box with no performance hit at all... But it never gained a substantial market share and they ended up selling their souls to Google and created a Chrome clone still called Opera.

I still use it, the good old version 12 branch, with each day it becomes more and more incompatible with the pages (or rather, the pages become incompatible with the browser). But still...

Today you have to choose between dancing with the ugly girl or not dancing at all. But everybody *needs* to dance, so.

And the "sign in" mania... man, have you noticed the amount of plain statements from Google+ popping into YT? Title of the video is, say, "woman falling off a ladder", and half the comments to the video will be "Mike shared - woman falling off LOL - Shared via Google+". They are injecting something from G+, I guess posts? into comments in YT... Not that YT comments were poetry before this, but at least they made you laugh from time to time.

I use the SeaMonkey browser. Based on Firefox code base, and follows a pretty decent "aint' broke, don't fix it" approach to UI and such.

http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

opera

+1

Been using SeaMonkey since I got peeled away from Netscape,
somewhat under protest, as it couldn't manage any more.
SeaMonkey is the height of dependable consistency, plus it
has always had a built in html composer, so I can write
text in a non-proprietary format when I have compose
documents.