While I would be surprised that his reason for not doing an interview on BV would be realized, I can understand his reluctance.
Didn’t get that impression at all.
Eh, maybe.
Maybe they, after the blow out over Brendan Eich, are afraid of it all being rehashed. Or, maybe they are a bunch of snobs!
Personally, I think that following Chrome is not the right route for Firefox. There are (beyond myself, that is) a certain percentage of users out there, probably many of the ones still on firefox, who think that Google is out to steal your soul and remember all of the comments of the Google CEOs have uttered (“if you aren’t doing anything wrong, it doesn’t matter if we collect it all” and “we want to know more about you than you know about yourself”). Personally, I am down to one google app (gmail) and will get off of that when a suitable replacement comes along for it.
Thus, it was quite a sad day when Firefox changed it’s interface to match that of Chrome. Personally, I liked the old interface, and Moz abandoning it in favor of a more Chrome-like feel made me sad.
It feels like the whole “convergence” movement that is coming down the pike. I personally am old enough to think that convergence is a silly idea. I don’t want my the browser on my 6" phone to behave like the one that lives on my 17" desktop or my dual 24" monitor, any more than I want my pocket knife to behave in the same way as my table saw, or my steak knife to react in the same way as my chainsaw. Yes, they are all cutting devices, but they are designed to cut different things, and making them fit into the same mold just seems silly. By the same token, I want browsers to behave differently. I don’t want Moz to make Firefox behave the same way as Google makes Chrome behave.
Er why.
Google are evil and don’t care about your privacy so we should ignore their innovations in interface design? How is that related to anything. Microsoft are/were evil and no one complained about the slavish copying of MS office by OpenOffice. Apple arguably take the crown on pure evil but it doesn’t stop all the freedesktop theme sites being filled with ways to make various desktops look like the Mac OS.
The main selling point for chrome for me is just the slick interface that feels responsive, while Firefox’s has always felt sluggish and blocky in comparison, though it’s getting better for sure - chrome still wins on that front.
One of the great things about firefox I’ve found since I committed to using it is the amount of UI options through addons. Here below is an example of firefox with just two extensions, which has made me prefer Firefox immensely over the vanilla UI.
I also really like the customise feature in newer versions of firefox, I just hope they make it more comprehensive and powerful. I just don’t think firefox is heading in the wrong direction here at all, I just hope for more work on extending the customise feature. It would be great if it reached the point where you could just drag and drop various modular addon components onto panels, create your own menus etc, like you can with say, Plasma or XFCE.
Convergence I agree I’ve never had any interest in having my mobile work like my desktop or vice versa. I use a mouse for one, something with great accuracy, so I don’t need giant buttons everywhere. Likewise on my phone I don’t have the luxury of precision input so I need a UI designed for that, nor do I have the screen space for verbose information and excessive options.
Having an approximately similar layout has some benefits but I just treat them as completely different tools, as long as I can move data between them and both devices have good UI designs for their own needs I don’t really see the problem. I’m not really sold on the usability benefits at all really, I think convergence is more useful for marketing/branding than anything.
Wall of text crits for 25000. You died.
EB
More Mozilla…
I’m holding out hope for Mozilla, this all seems like steps in the right direction for me: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/15/the_problem_with_firefox/
NB The author mentions one of the major privacy issues with Chrom(e/ium), but unfortunately Firefox also has a great deal. First of all, pocket http://dustri.org/b/firefox-youre-supposed-to-be-in-my-pocket-not-the-other-way-around.html. And then all of this: https://github.com/amq/firefox-debloat
PS and everything Gervase Markham mentioned about Rust is also true for Go 
