'Not invented here' syndrome with this generation of programmers

[moonbat]

Off-topic:

What kind of spoofing - is it because they use HTML for the browser UI instead of XUL?

It's because they are conflating the UI with content, yes. So there's a lot of spoofing that switches to fullscreen and then hides the FS toast and overlays UI elements or mimics them, and even in Windowed mode content can inject elements that overlap UI elements regularly, basically clickjacking the browser UI or pretending to be on Site A while actually being on Site B. It's a mess, to be fair.

Replying as a separate thread since this is off topic for the original. Desktop UIs were pretty stable and mature by the end of the 00s, as was Mozilla's application platform that originally underpinned both Firefox and Thunderbird (and now lives on as UXP). There was zero need to rewrite the browser from scratch using Rust, or get rid of XUL in favor of HTML to create the browser itself (when HTML is a document markup language and XUL was explicitly created for UIs with a separate namespace so that XUL and HTML can't mix (correct me if I'm wrong)). One reason of course was the decision to ape Chrome and go multi-process, though I don't see why that would require creating Rust. The other reason, or malady, is the modern obsession of change for the sake of change. Upsetting long established UI conventions and messing around with a stable application platform just because as the new generation of programmers, they want to stroke their urge to create something new at the cost of what was already there.

Hence the constant dicking around with Firefox UI - removing this and that, integrating third party cruft into the browser core, and what not. One can see this with Windows starting with version 8, GNOME 3 and several other examples. Apparently even Mac OS is now starting to ape iOS. Developers need to stop marking territory with established codebases at the cost of their users.

[athenian200]

I would say they did actually have a reason for their changes to the UI, but those reasons kind of suck.

The main reason is because they wanted a consistent interface between the mobile version of their UI and the desktop version, because more and more people were switching to phones as their primary device. So while here on the desktop we see a perfectly good application becoming worse and worse, on the phone the newer type of UI matches the sort of conventions they are used to among mobile apps, which are totally alien and unpleasant to those of us using a desktop.

And they were too lazy to maintain a desktop version of the interface separately, so they just forced the mobile UI on desktop users. It also helped that there were existing frameworks that could be used to make a website look good on both desktop and mobile, and switching to HTML for the UI made it possible to basically use those same frameworks to write the browser interface itself. So I think you may be attributing too much desire to be creative and leave a mark to the Mozilla developers, when most of their changes can be explained by laziness and mobile-first philosophy.

On the other hand, I think Rust might be a better example of the phenomenon you're talking about... there really was no good reason to create Rust rather than help the ISO improve future versions of C and C++. Most of the stuff they wanted to accomplish in Rust was also stuff people wanted to work better in older languages, especially newer revisions of them.

[moonbat]

One other thing that bugs me is, when they are anyway using web frameworks why can't these frameworks detect if a person is using a desktop and use a more dense layout accordingly? It isn't as though you have to maintain a separate version of the same website as used to be the case initially. For instance, the side menu can be always open instead of having to click a hamburger button to open it since there are no horizontal constraints on a large monitor.

[vannilla]

One other thing that bugs me is, when they are anyway using web frameworks why can't these frameworks detect if a person is using a desktop and use a more dense layout accordingly? It isn't as though you have to maintain a separate version of the same website as used to be the case initially. For instance, the side menu can be always open instead of having to click a hamburger button to open it since there are no horizontal constraints on a large monitor.

Servers can't really detect if the user agent is a desktop or another device unless they trust the user agent identification string, which cannot be trusted as we all know.
They can, however, know about the screen size and act accordingly, so yes you can have "dense" interfaces on "desktops" and "sparse" layouts otherwise.

Why don't they do it? There are many reasons: incomptetent developers, an explicit request from the customer paying for the website development or simply the usual artistic "fads" (for a lack of a better word) that have always happened in human history: first it's baroque, then it's rococo, then it's art nuveau, then it's baroque once again, then it's brutalism, then it's rococo again...

Additionally, there is a small number of sites (small in that you can count them on your fingers) which are designed to be accessible even for people with certain disabilities that are not simply visual impairments, so for example you have large clickable areas and large whitespace so that people with Parkinson disease can click or tap and scroll without activating buttons despite the tremors.