joshmatthews

Why do all modern browsers want to have the tabs across the top of the screen? I have a nice big widescreen monitor, and I'd rather have the tabs on a column on the left so I have more vertical space for reading. I currently use Tree Style Tab and almost everyone that sees it wants it.

Consistency and familiarity is a strong argument here. Everyone does it, so users are used to it. Any browser that deviated would need to have an incredibly intuitive replacement interface, and I'm not convinced that vertical tabs fulfill that description.

Why did you implement the change to stop downloads when closing the browser by default rather than leave the download manager open until it completes? This is confusing to a lot of non-technical people. I usually go into about:config and change it to notify them if they still have a download going.

You might be surprised by how many people were confused by closing the main Firefox window and seeing the download manager window remain open. I'm pretty sure that we prompt the user when closing the last Firefox window while a download is running, now.

There's a confluence of factors that led to this situation. Our Windows marketshare overwhelmingly dominates our OS X and Linux population, so we allocate resources accordingly. The team of paid employees working on OS X integration could be counted on one hand for the past few years, and we've never had a strong community of volunteer developers with OS X experience either. That's changed in the past year, so we're now starting to see some catching up occurring (swipe animations, download animations in the dock, etc.), but the team is still quite small and overburdened unfortunately. As you're clearly aware, the fact that we need to reinvent all of this stuff for XUL makes it a challenging process.

I think Mitchell's blog post on the subject (she's the Chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation) clearly explains the reasoning behind the decision.

4.5 years ago, I saw a blog post asking for help getting the Electrolysis project started. I spent a couple months working on the first bug I was assigned, and I've been hooked ever since.