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Firefox wants its default awesome Google back?

Apart from a greater focus on UI deterioration than on performance improvement, Firefox also has a tendency to make some settings particularly a pain to customize. Here are the 2 most annoying IMO until now:

  • the “add-on bar” and its absolutely unmissable “remove me” button (I can’t say how many dozen times I accidentally clicked that s**t)
  • the “add-on compatibility checking is disable” notice and its quite unmissable too “re-enable this setting you had to manually add into about:config” button (just in case you changed that setting inadvertently?).

Both those buttons make it super-easy to revert to default settings for the corresponding options, while at the same time changing the default behavior is quite a pain (respectively, right-clicking on some very narrow space in the navigation bar and manually creating a new setting with EVERY FREAKING new Firefox version in about:config). Clearly, the objective behind this is to claim customizability while strongly pushing users towards the default settings. And then I suppose the next step will be to say “look at those usage analysis, everybody prefers the default settings!”. That would be so… “Mozillish”.

And here comes a more unexpected annoyance into this list: after I laboriously changed my default “awesome bar” search engine to Duckduckgo, I got a button to… set it back to Google. FFFS…
Firefox wants Google as the default search engine

Posted in Firefox, Google.


2 Responses

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  1. Albirew says

    you can get back the status bar (addon bar like it was before) with Status-4-Evar:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/
    Because status bar really IS a serious business.

  2. patheticcockroach says

    Great add-on, thanks! A pity though that once again Mozilla makes us replace a core feature with yet another add-on…



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