This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers who are doing very important work. Please don't.

Not very well.

I'm one of those web developers who still uses Firefox as my daily driver which means the products I work on work on Firefox. Maybe twice a year a tester uses Chrome and turns up something that's not quite right.

Developers like me are a major reason why Firefox is still a viable web browser and there is someone like me in most organizations. If it wasn't for people like us more and more web pages would work in Chrome only and you just couldn't do things with Firefox. Collectively we probably contribute as much to the success of Firefox than all the people who actually check in changes to the source code but we are not treated accordingly. If they piss all of us off Firefox will become a non-viable web browser.

So far as accessibility I am doing a round of accessibility on my site and found things have gotten way worse for multiple reasons. I used to use NVDA + Firefox but since upgrading to Win 11 NVDA is completely broken for me and I have to pull the power plug on my computer to shut down NVDA.

Narrator + Edge basically works, but Narrator + Firefox is completely spastic. I might have a navigation bar with elements like

-- Choice 1

-- Choice 2

-- Choice 3

in a <nav> and it might read something like "Choice Landmark 1 Navigation Navigation Landmark Choice 2 Landmark Choice Navigation 3 Landmark" where using any ARIA role comes across as website vandalism because it makes Narrator + Firefox blurt out "Landmark" and "Group" and similar words randomly when it is reading stuff.

When something is that broken it doesn't seem worth even putting a ticket it for it.

> This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers

If only Mozilla felt the same about wasting people's time. We wouldn't be having this discussion.

It's the same as you screaming at a McDonalds worker for not serving all day breakfast.

That's at least a worthy cause.

Falling down...

There are only a few options here.

You can file the ticket claiming that the shiny new promoted thing is actually an antifeature and that you hate the popup. You can then hope that the PM or exec who is currently receiving adulations or making speeches in the hope of a bonus or promotion after the rollout gets assigned the ticket, rather than some lowly volunteer. Then, the next time they get asked to make something, they'll think "wait, maybe I shouldn't advertise this new thing by forcing a popup on every Firefox user?" If that happens often enough to become part of the shared zeitgeist at the organization, they may be able to enact a Mozilla-wide policy against such popups and stop building antifeatures. Good luck, I hope it works for you.

Or you can throw sand in the works. When the accessibility department complains that people keep filing tickets and wasting their time whenever a new feature includes a popup, that component of the organization can push back

Every time I inadvertently find myself at a gas station with those horrific advertisement kiosks installed at the pumps, I either look around for a nearby station that doesn't have ads playing, or I stab the "Help" button to page the cashier. I am well aware that the minimum wage employee stocking the shelves and helping people prepay does not have the phone number of the GSTV producers or the executive decision makers at ExxonMobil or whoever, and I have no animus against that person - I'm infallibly polite with the individual. But I ask them to keep the line open to mute the ads, and they usually do. My only hope for eliminating those ads is either shopping at different gas stations - but how are they ever going to distinguish that microscopic boycott from the noise - or hoping that this communication filters up through the organization.

Don't be so cynical. There are people who actually have impaired accessibility and struggle with technologies we take for granted. Those people are the target of accessibility engineering, not your popup needs.

Well, what are examples of these popups?

Just because a modal window exists doesn't mean it's bad for accessibility.

Hum... Pretty much so.

Unless it's a real emergency or the contents don't make sense until you do something, every modal window is an accessibility problem.

Even if it is a "real emergency," modal dialogs still don't make sense because people are so annoyed by them, they don't read them. If you really, really want the user to read something, don't put it in a modal that pops up over the thing they actually want to do. They're pretty much horrible UX for any conceivable use case.

My favorite mis-feature of these modals are the ones that announce something on page load, but they've also implemented "click outside modal to close it" so when you have any sort of muscle memory kicking in when you go to the website, you see a modal for 0.1s before it disappears as you click where you wanted to go.

On the opposite side, I'm also unreasonable frustrated when those modals appear and I cannot close it by clicking outside of it.

End results? Modals are horrible in most situations, especially when you want people to actually ingest some information.

There's another category of things that aren't really modals but they still prevent you from accessing some important user interface element because they draw on top of it even if they don't block out all UI elements.

Toasts in Windows are a good example -- often I am trying to use the tray but a toast pops up and I have to wait for the toast to clear or a toast pops up that makes me use the tray icons that it covers up if I want to deal with the situation. Of course on Windows there is the problem that clicking on a toast doesn't seem to ever do anything (like take you to the app that made the toast) and there is not a good mechanism to see the toast once it's past, etc.

In the case of Firefox I was particularly annoyed by little panels that floated above bookmark items on the chrome at the top of the page because, I dunno, there is something new I can do with my bookmarks, I guess. What I do know is that I wanted to click on something that was at the top of the web page and that stupid panel was in the way -- it wouldn't have stopped me from clicking on something else, but it's predictable that you're going to load a web page and frequently click on a link on a navbar at the very top.

There are certain applications that I'm frequently using to resolve a problem (say I just found out a bill is overdue) where I really feel under the gun and I find it astonishingly annoying to have to close a large number of dialogs telling me about new features.

A human being with some empathy might realize that you're initially in a state where you're not receptive to a message and later realize you are.

If I got a popup advertising a new feature after I completed a task I'd be a lot more receptive to it, particularly in that I'd be feeling the glow of having completed a task, being satisfied with the product, and not feeling so pressured, having some headspace to learn about a new feature.

My bank telling me that I've qualified for even more debt when I'm trying to manage what I've already got is a great example of this

So is the appearance of any modal window something that justifies filing tickets with Firefox?

It doesn't sound like that's PaulHoule's motivation anyway — he knows that these tickets are not going to be fixed, just closed — the point is to "pour just a little bit of sand in the gears".

If usability tickets are closed because the company doesn't want to bother, then maybe these gears deserve to have sand put in them.

I generally approve of subversive actions which are naturally damaging if and exactly if the accusation they are based on is true.

That is, the logic is something like "well, either it gets fixed, in which case it's a victory for good, or they're hypocrites who don't really care, in which case 1. it wastes their time and 2. they deserve to have their time wasted."

Is PaulHoule filing tickets with other browser vendors?

Is the point to target Mozilla, or to actually make a difference in accessibility?

Why would he file tickets with browsers he does not use?

And my whole point is that a strategy can have multiple effects. As I understand it:

- Firefox care about usability => the issues get fixed or at least considered.

- Firefox don't care about usability => sand in the gears.

So it's a hybrid strategy whose purpose depends on the situation.

I dunno. I don't personally report many bugs in public software...

But reporting real problems because you are annoyed that problems keep appearing and don't get fixed doesn't look like a societal hurting behavior to me. It does look like personally hurting, but antagonizing the author because of this is a real societal hurting behavior.

> Well, what are examples of these popups?

CTA to translate between languages which the translation models don't support "yet". It's disrupting for absolutely no reason.

I wish someone would answer your question.

As it stands, without any example, I for one have no idea what is being talked about, where these popups in FF are, how they affect accessibility.

Do I dislike modals that cover the entire window, yes, absolutely, but I have never encountered such in FF as a browser.

Why would you brag about that? Honestly, to what end? If your goal is to put sand in the gears what difference is there between this and trolling, spamming or just good ol' fashioned DOS?

I can't speak for OP but I would do it to the end it demonstrates how frustrating these 'small inconveniences' actually are. Don't interrupt my workflow unnecessarily. The same reason I don't want adverts everywhere, or I use sponsor block for youtube. I didn't seek out advertisements so I can filter it out.

I am not seeking out AI features so I don't add them to my browser. Mozilla and google and everyone it seems now is forcing it everywhere down our throats. If a small grain of sand reflects any of the same frustration, I say good. Wish I could do more.

Exactly, in my case I have the hidden disability of schizotypy which makes it harder for me to ignore things. If you are blind or dyslexic or have ADHD or any kind of cognitive problem you just don't need to have your spoons wasted by having dialogs cover content and user interface elements that you need to complete your tasks.

I'd just like to say, I'm somewhat diagnosed for anxiety and some adhd in Europe so it's a bit more loose, I never consider it or even medicate much. But this has made me think about the tiny things that throw me. And just now I found the perfect example. My TV. I removed all netflix, prime Disney etc. But as I'm watching YouTube which I'm prone to do to chill out. I sit on the remote. The remote had a netflix button, TV decides I need to install in, automatically, referral cookies loaded and my TV from my video I'm watching, to sitting on the remote, has netflix in my face asking me for money. Just happened AGAIN.

I didn't read malice into the post, just using a tongue-in-cheek tone.

My reading was "letting them know doing bad choices will not quitely be accepted".

But I may ofcourse read something into it that wasn't meant.

It goes beyond tongue-in-cheek if he's actually filing tickets and forcing engineers to spend their time responding.

Nobody at Mozilla is forced to do anything, including adding obnoxious popups and unwanted features to the browser. If you're inclined to do that, why not go work for Microsoft or Google, where you'll likely be paid more to do it?

Choices have consequences, and user-hostile choices should have developer-hostile consequences.

I don't get it. Why should not tickets be submitted for when a new feature worsen the usability of the product?

Some people really really hate Mozilla. But this is the first time I can recall seeing someone deliberately consuming Mozilla's resources and undermining the project, rather than arguing against it.

Though in principle he's not wrong in opening an issue.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine, and not even specifically in Firefox or even browsers. It's in applications and OS's as well. I don't know if it's actually increased recently, or I've become more sensitized, but it harkens back to the web 1.0 pop-up misery of yore..

this would be admirable if it's done in earnest to try and increase accessibility, but you say explicitly it's done specifically to "pour sand in the gears". please don't

Maybe ff will actually fix the problem then. They certainly have the money to, they just chose not to

Fix accessibility or raise the CEO's salary again.

Could you link some? Would love to see what dialogs are meant, whether they can actually cause accessibility issues or are just "unwanted" and how the maintainers comment/decide on that front.

Been a hot minute since I last installed FF from scratch so maybe missing something, but the only popup I could remember in more recent releases was one showcasing Firefox View, which only appeared after setup. And of course the "Change to Default" message every browser shows after first opening, including the ability to never show that again. Since then, nothing.

Using a healthy mix of Chrome, Firefox and Safari depending on device and task and while I have niggles with all three, not aware of this on any, but maybe I am blind on this front.

Dialogues are supposed to pop over content. There is not enough chrome for anything else.

But it used to be that browser dialogues would start from the chrome, thus being impossible for webpages to mimic.

That's childish and sad. Don't do that please