I am sad that Mozilla is a Greek tragedy. I have always envied people who worked there. But, the bad parts of history rhyme with history all over again. How everybody has to spoil things that were at one time working fairly well. How they have to ruin it for various what I would call objectively bad, but understandably human nature driven, reasons. I still use Firefox preferentially over anything else as much as I can because it /seems/ like the least evil thing around, but it is really kind of a poopshow itself in all sorts of ways. The UI UX has of course over time just been a comedy of oh look i slipped on a banana peel made of dog excrement kind of horribleness. (I will say that I think that is a true statement about literally every web browser (let alone yes almost all software in general) I have ever used, but that doesn't really count in their defense in my opine.) And all along they've been pretty much only alive because of the revenue stream from Google, I guess. So nowadays we get all the sturm und drang about how they are laying folks off and cancelling projects. C'est la vie. There's a technological Nero somewhere trying to sell lyres online to anybody who will buy one.

To quote a more eloquent and pithy friend of mine, "MOZILLA REVEALS SECRET PLUTONIUM FLUORIDE SUPERCONDUCTOR PROPULSION EXPERIMENTS. Guys? The Browser? I used Firefox in the 2000s the way I voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000s, as a pitiful symbol of defiance. I used Firefox in the 2010s the way I voted for Democrats in the 2010s: as an absolute last resort with a gun to my head and no other choice."

now for something completely different: something i recommend. 

kvm switches are mostly a lie. sort of like how wifi extenders are mostly a lie. but i have to say that the TESmart HDMI 4k KVM switches i have bought and used at home have been actually rather very good. More often than not they actually work. This is with a crazy range of old and newer hardware, and almost every main OS under the sun (linux, windows, macos, sometimes even *bsd's).

last night i "discovered" that apple tv + roku + cbs + star trek discovery == epic train wreck utter fail end to end that is just yet another in a long string of proofs that all entertainment is very deeply ethically intellectually hyper dead to me.

(on the other hand, i do have to say that the roku channel's carousel horizontal scrolling is like a billion times smoother than anything i have ever seen from netflix or amazon or any other app.)

(By saying this here below, I don't mean to make light of micro-aggressions, I am sure somebody will decide that I am belittling the idea of micro-aggressions. But I'll continue with my train of thought anyway.)

There is a big problem with usability and user experience that is a thread, a theme, a running train wreck, that goes through just about every computer/technical interaction I have with just about anything. That is: the nicks and cuts and bumps and scrapes and occasional razor-sharp rooster spurs of less that good user interfaces. This happens in everything pretty much in my experience. It happens in the context of mobile, desktop, web, embedded, consumer, industrial, commercial, medical, yadda etc., and it happens in their OSs, GUIs, and apps. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed in any and all programming languages & environments. Also in my experience 100% guaranteed with any kind of technology enabled/supported workflow like, say, telephone customer support, or, probably, say, voting machines (ha ha).

Anyway, I think when I try to describe the gestalt of these bad UX things as nicks and cuts, or slings and arrows, then it doesn't feel quite as accurately, forcefully descriptive as calling them micro-aggressions in the UI UX world. The point being that a single micro aggression maybe could be ignored or allowed to roll off your back (though that's not great, of course), but every additional one isn't just an additive insult+injury, it is more a multiplicative thing, even becoming exponential as you hit some threshold of pain and frustration.

Your individual "little" bug in your app is actually embedded in, swimming with, multiplying the impact of, all the other "little" bugs in the universe of technology. My nerves have already been rubbed raw by my stupid mobile or desktop environment, and then I also have to smack my face against the what now feels like brickwallminefield that is your bug.

So, yeah.

I find it... interesting, in the worst sense of the word, that all the communication software products cannot get "muting" ui ux right/wrong. Would it really be so hard to have a ui that just shows, "You are muted" or "You are audible"? Instead we have weird annoying evil toggle button switches. Or roundabout things like "Tap to unmute".

On occasion i piece together, or upgrade, desktop pc hardware. It is truly amazing how all the parts are pretty much just horrible through-and-through. Things like: Screws of different specifications; Power cables that go the wrong way (I guess some expect you to run them through the back of the motherboard tray and then come down from the top of the case, to be all cool and tidy, dunno); Power connectors that aren't symmetric (ie all of them) and the keyways are hard to see and don't really work just by feel; Power cables that have wiggly pins (ie molex); AM4 socket back brackets that fall completely off and down into the back side of the case when you are removing the cooler to redo the thermal paste; Mounting for various data drives (hdd, dvd, ssd, laptop hdd, etc.) being a nightmare of incompatibly placed screw holes, and easily lost or broken drive rails/caddies; all the stupid age-old fiddly bits of a zillion different connector types like the bloody front panel pinouts; pc cases that aren't perfectly flat on top because it just looks cooler i guess; etc. ad nauseam. Sure that's why people "just buy a dell" but a lot of these things are just painfully obviously bad physical design stuff that i feel like you'd have to explicitly go out of your way and spend R&D $$$ on to make it as bad as they make it. And this is from name brands in all the parts, not just some random producer nobody has ever heard of before.

For an epic good time in seeing how usability and security can both combine to make a living computer hell on earth for end users, go read up on the Microsoft Windows 10 "windows hello" PIN stuff. Especially things like trying to just not have a pin at all, but hitting the brick wall of the remove button being greyed out. The "solutions" include all sorts of horrible brain surgery on the permissions of hidden system folders and/or actual windows registry editing. Just, hilarious. It is almost as if microsoft has not been making operating systems or user interfaces for multiple decades now. Well, of course, this is microsoft (hey, i worked there, i can complain) so yeah they don't actually ever learn or improve. (If you want more evidence of how they shovel things out the door that are suboptimal, you should have had the pleasure of trying to use the pc xbox app.)