My first thought reading this was "it's amazing what some people can get angry about".

This isn't as simple as making everyone happy.

It's about the disrespect of not asking. Could Firefox have asked if users wanted to enable AI features? Of course they could have, did they? Of course not, just think about how would asking would effect the shareholders!!

I don't disagree with the premise that it's hard to make everyone happy, but the problem isn't about pleasing everyone, it's about treating users with respect, and not jumping on the AI everywhere bandwagon, without asking first. Especially because Firefox has billed itself as privacy protecting, and AI is definitely not privacy focused. One might even say, privacy violating... From the privacy focused browser...

I don't know what I've done to have a small right click menu but mine is only a handful of options and I even tried selecting an image and a link and some text to get all the options.

I really wish they'd just make it easily customizable. I don't care if lay-users might mess it up and get confused, such users abandoned Firefox years ago anyway.

  > It's sure hard to make everyone happy.

But to talk more generally, I think finding the balance of what options to expose to normal users and then how to expose things to power users is quite challenging. I think a big mistake people make is to just ignore power users and act like that just because they're a small percentage of users that they aren't important[0].

I think what makes computers so successful is the fact that computers aren't really a product designed "for everyone," instead, they're built as environments that can be turned into a thing that anyone needs. Which is why your power users become important and in a way, why this balance is hard to strike because in some sense every user is a power user. Nobody has the same programs installed on their computers, nobody has the same apps installed on their phones, each and every device is unique. You give them the power to make it their own, and that's the only way you can truly build something that works for everyone.

This is why I think computers are magic! But I think we've lost this idea. We've been regressing to the mean. The problem is when you create something for everybody you end up making something for nobody.

[0] I think Jack Conte (Patreon/Pomplamoose) explains it well here. It's the subset that is passionate that are often your greatest ally. No matter what you sell, most of the money comes from a small subset of buyers. The same is true with whatever metric we look at. As a musician a small subset of listeners are the ones that introduce you to the most people, buy the most merch, and all that that makes you successful. It's not the average "user" but the "power user". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zUndMfMInc

At 13:00 he quotes Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired) and I think it captures the thesis of this talk

  In the age of the internet, you don't need millions of fans to be successful. If you can just find 1000 people who are willing to buy $100 of stuff from you per year, that's $100k/yr.

Or you could do like Vivaldi, and have every menu configurable :)

yea... I would consider it a ux regression to do the OPs tweaks.

To each their own; glad it's an option :)

You can please some of the people, some of the time.

Maybe what the author is saying is that Firefox should make it much easier to configure these "options".

I had a dumb phone once that got it right.

It had one fixed menu entry called "advanced menu" this replaces the menu with one that has everything (except from "advanced menu" which is replaced with "simple menu").

One of the menu entries is "configure simple menu". This opens the same looking menu as "advanced menu" only clicking any functionality toggles a check mark in front of it.

If a sub menu had less than 3 options it is merged into the parent menu.

One plays with it for a bit and before long it becomes a Japanese celebration of emptiness.

It even had a bunch of sort of redundant options. The sms submenu had something like 8 options of which I only really used "new message" and "all messages" but you could go for "unread messages". It's not like the rest of the menu is gone, its all under "advanced menu".

If the right click menu worked like that some would bother to further configure the simple menu and one could share their config.

To make it clear it is not a "more" button "advanced" could fold out the hidden entries like a harmonica.

Yes, I for one love all the options... dont hide menus from me, I have a big screen.

How about Firefox just not fill their context menu with bullshit bloat and ads for shit nobody asked for like google lens and make it fully/easily customizable so that most users are happy and power users can add whatever they want.

It's pretty damn easy to make everyone happy.