Comment 10 for bug 877993

I'm sorry if that's too harsh. It wasn't my intention to insult anyone. My patience with Ubuntu finally snapped with 11.10 (after using it as the main OS for three years), and Ubufox has since its appearance seemed like one of those bad ideas which are allowed to remain because someone has too much invested in it to remove it (like Unity).

The project page <https://launchpad.net/ubufox> simply describes it as "ubuntu tweaks and extensions" with no more explanation, and the three first pages of a Google search didn't seem to show any pages explaining what this means. After uninstalling it I never noticed any difference in Firefox, so it seemed like unnecessary stability / security / [quality measurement du jour] risk for no discernible gain.

If it's just a meta-extension, then why not install the extensions themselves? If I read the open source community right, it's considered very bad form as a software distributor to install by default a package which installs and removes stuff behind the scenes with each release.

If the tweaks are visual (which is totally understandable to keep a unified graphical experience) why not put them into a theme instead of an inscrutable (except for very paranoid programmers who actually read the code) extension? If the tweaks are more fundamental, why not spend the effort on including them in the Firefox base? I assume the Mozilla developers would be eager to incorporate useful changes by Ubuntu developers.

Maybe this is caring too much about a minor piece of software, but after the Golden Years 2008-2010 Ubufox and Unity seem like symptoms of a reckless approach to improve "shine" while ignoring actual usability. I was expecting to be able to recommend Ubuntu whole-heartedly to all family members in 2011, but with the recent developments that's more unlikely than in 2008.

With regard to keeping bugs open, what difference should it make how the request was worded? As a developer I'm used to dealing with swearing and what looks like snarky and sarcastic text in bug reports - It's a natural deficiency of the medium that we can't feel the frustration of the user who loses the panel shortcuts (11.10 upgrade), has crash bugs without any simple way of reporting what precisely went wrong (Banshee, Pidgin, Evolution et al), or who has to jump through hoops to get to commonly used software (Unity). I don't know whether there exists any communications channel to report such major issues *and* come up with solutions to the improvement of what I still deem (because of 10.04) to be the best distro ever, but I'd be happy to work with the developers rather than just submitting bug reports.