Configurability

My ability to use the internet it appears will be over sooner than I expected, as Firefox 25 will remove most configurability options as well as having a terrible, eye-shatteringly bad interface.

The Chrome browser is equally bad if not worse, and of course IE is completely unusable.

Assuming that most pages will work on a version of Firefox that I can actually use for 2-3 years after Firefox 25 comes out is a fairly good assumption, I think. After that, it’s likely that I will curtail or nearly completely eliminate most internet usage as the experience will become intolerable since then I will be forced to use the new interface or have many pages render broken.

I find terrible interfaces to be complete unusable, so it’s no exaggeration to expect that in five years my recreational internet usage will drop from 3-4 hours a day now to nearly 0 as user-hostile interfaces are all that is available.

It’s very sad because one of the primary reasons Firefox came to the fore was its configurability; it’s why it stole so much market share from IE. Why make it more like the terrible, slow (if you are doing anything serious) Chrome browser I have no idea.

The developer arrogance treadmill continues, I guess. Too bad there is not likely to be a fork, or a usable browser in the future.

Unlike with OSes, the internet is evolving quickly so it’s not likely I can get 10 years of usage out of Firefox 24 (the last sane version) as I will be able to out of Windows 7. As I’ve noted, the cool thing about me continuing to use Windows 7 while people switch to Windows 8, Unity and Gnome 3 is that it gives me a huge competitive advantage in the workplace as using those interfaces is productivity-killing among my main competition.

I will still use the internet/a browser for work of course, but about 2018 or so I suspect I will only turn on my computer to edit photos and such.

So much opportunity lost, but humans do that – cater to the stupid as there are more of them, and I guess always will be.