Mozilla's Assisted Suicide, Assisted by GNOME
The sister site has taken note of a disturbing new development that may soon impact Mozilla Firefox, the Web browser that gets worse all the time but is likely the only way (Firefox or similar, e.g. LibreWolf) to avoid Chrome-isms on GNU/Linux, aside from more minimalist browsers such as Lynx and NetSurf (not many sites support these).
"The discussions," Linuxiac wrote (as did others), "visible in Mozilla's Phabricator revision D277804 and a linked GNOME gsettings-desktop-schemas merge request, focus on disabling the traditional primary selection paste by default."
So they plan to make it hard to "carry" multiple selections. Great! Even a 1990s GNU/Linux feature getting culled? Removing functionality is NOT improving things. It is NOT improving anything. You simply make it harder for people to do the SAME thing they did before (quickly and easily). We wrote about this many times before.
Mozilla's vision or trajectory for Firefox has long been disturbing. Previously, Firefox removed a traditional (proper, quick to use) menu to make way for a bloody hamburger menu that nobody asked for, presumably because they want to pretend that desktops and laptops should work like a phone with a very tiny screen. The same was done with about:config and Settings (everything became a tab), omission of protocol (e.g. "http://"), and all sorts of other useful things. Then, some years ago, Firefox acted like computers with a mouse were actually touchscreens; it demanded you hold down the button to keep the menu active. Unbelievable and a very serious regression. Yes, it is REGRESSIVE and NOT consistent with other user interfaces (UIs), which means users will struggle and get confused (lack of consistency means people need to brain-switch and learn more things). They try to call this "modern", as if some tiny screen and just one button ("back" or "home") is all we need. Like "modern" "smart" TVs that have popups, lag (blurry, smudged pictures due to streams under some conditions), out-of-sync streams, and interfaces that have just one button (that stuff takes longer to learn and use than 1980s remote controls). Those TVs are spying on you (impossible to completely opt out), they can go horribly wrong or fall offline (even for network configuration reasons), and they generally won't last for very long (expensive to repair).
This is the sort of thing they turn Firefox into. It used to be software, now they make it an "app". It's attributable to brain damage from stupid, misguided, selfish hipsters or Mozilla's GAFAM infiltrators that don't understand Free software. What an excellent way to repel people; even old Falkon will still support the selection stack properly, so why can't Mozilla? Understaffed? Falkon can handle all this, even with one active developer.
An associate thought it is an important topic and said that "Mozilla + GNOME are just throwing sand in the gears perhaps simply because they can..."
Firefox is meant to get better all the time, but instead it gets worse. █