along with the new twitter style changes, please welcome firefox 91 where you can no longer disable proton and are forced to have the tabs feature waste much more screen space, can't wait to see how it looks like on my 1024x768 laptop
this is what i mean about software development playing such a large part on hardware obsolescence. the hardware is fine, the screen is fine, i can use it fine today. but a new update forces a layout change that makes it more uncomfortable to use on the hardware that didn't change
i hate how hard it is to use modern software on tabby, my X61t thinkpad, just because modern ui is so damn big and bulky taking up unreasonable amount of space it doesn't need to on a 1024x768 screen. i have to jump through so many hoops...
... to get fonts on all window renderer software in a single machine (gtk, qt, custom ones like firefox, etc) to agree to use much smaller fonts than they want to, so i can reclaim some usable screen real estate we perfectly had back in the early 2000s
i hate how it falls on the user to find and develop workarounds to keep older machines usable today simply because of unnecessary changes, such as proton on firefox taking more tab space on the screen than it needs. this is understandable in commercial software, but...
... open source environments like linux have no excuse for it. and i'm not talking about changes that DO need to happen, such as no longer supporting 386 processors. i'm talking about the stuff that could be avoided or made opt-in.
the biggest problem in FOSS today is the lack of separation of user and developer. FOSS developers by large expect everybody using their software to be able to make the changes they personally need on a developer level, and that is the reason why linux is not user-friendly
and it won't be, until we solve that. bug trackers don't solve anything when you consider that there are bugs older than a lot of the teens on twitter today still open in mozilla's tracker because they simply aren't taken care of.
one of my favourites is how mozilla showcased a new color picker for firefox mobile back in 2013, finally letting us pick any value instead of being limited to a random preset selection that serves nobody. that functionality has yet to come, 8 years later. https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2013/12/a-new-colour-picker-on-firefox-for-android/
*looks at how big this twitter thread is getting* maybe i should write a blog post about this
resulting in the drive for newer hardware, bigger hardware, faster hardware. none of it necessarily means better, it's just moving forward aimlessly regardless of need