Hiding scrollbars on Firefox Quantum

UPDATE: updated at June/2018, now works with recent Firefox versions.

The new Firefox (also know as Firefox Quantum) is so good and so fast that I’ve happily living with it even with the loss of my essential tab-management add-ons. It’s that awesome.

What’s less awesome is that there’s no way to hide the scrollbars, and no extension that can actually do it. And it won’t ever be – those kind of changes to the user interface are just no longer possible.

Fortunately, you can still nuke’em out of existence by editing your userChrome.css . Here’s how.

Should you react to React’s License?

A few weeks ago, the Apache Software Foundation dramatically declared that the BSD+Patents license currently in use by Facebook is not a proper open source license. React uses such license, and the news sent some ripples down the React community.

Last week, WordPress decided to move away from React, a costly decision given how React was a centerpiece technology for existing and planned new features. That’s a good opportunity for us to take a look at the whole issue.

Open vs Closed Questions

If you’re doing any significant work at all, you should also be doing a lot of consumer research. Software development? You should be prototyping fast and early and running experience sessions. Branding? You should spend most of your time collecting information, then working some stuff out, then collecting again. Marketing? Try everything and AB test like crazy. You get the picture – nothing good will emerge in isolation, so you must have a solid information pipeline between you and your target.

It baffles me how often careful, critical, analytical professionals miss the opportunity to design their own procedures better. It’s like we have an unspoken rule that our skills are only to be used directly with whatever we’re building, not on trying to question the efficacy and improve our tools.

Now, often people focus too much on what they want to know and forget to think about how important it is to think about how they’re going to know that. Consumers are humans (I hope), and a consumer interview is a social encounter, often among complete strangers and with a lot of underlying expectations. Would you go unprepared for a blind date? Then you cannot just hope for the best here – you need to carefully plan your research sessions, for how they will be run will have a crucial effect on the quality of information you’ll get.

Most research is about asking things, so for now I’ll tackle that. When it comes to questioning users, we seem to use closed questions more often than necessary, and this kills off a lot of potential feedback, besides providing us with data which is at best meaningless and at worst misleading. Continue reading…

Bacteria and antibiotic research

A lot (but not nearly enough) has been talked about the growing problem of antibiotic resistance; and the issue is compounded by the fact that we’re not doing a very good job at developing new antibacterial medication. And indeed there’s a lot of room for improvement in research methodology, corporate priorities, research incentives, etc.

But I often get the feeling that people talk about those issues like they’re the only thing preventing us from “winning” the war against bacteria; that the threat of a bacterial apocalypse hangs over us because we’re too dumb to fight them back properly. This seems to ignore a simple, basic fact: