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Mozilla Is Removing Tab Groups and Complete Themes From Firefox (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As part of Mozilla's "Go Faster" initiative for Firefox, the company is removing features that aren't used by many and require a lot of technical effort to continually improve. VentureBeat learned that the first two features to get the axe are tab groups and complete themes. Dave Camp, Firefox’s director of engineering, said, "Tab Groups was an experiment to help users deal with large numbers of tabs. Very few people chose to use it, so we are retiring it because the work required to maintain it is disproportionate to its popularity."
Tab groups are too much work, but I bet Pocket stays. These people are terminally stupid. Why does the world have to be taken over by retards? These morons did Brendan Eich a huge favor.
How do they know it was used by few people?
I cringe at the thought of what they are going to remove next. Based on the complete disconnection from their users lately, I predict they'll remove something that will cause the rest of the users to abandon ship. What could it be? Bookmarks? The URL bar? Scrollbars? The minimize button? The close button? The back button?
Trust me, it will be something just as ridiculous.
Hmm.. Ok, I don't use tab groups and themes so I'm not affected. But what happens when they take away a feature that I use.? Who will speak out for me?
I still do not understand why it is so hard to have a flexible UI. Some people want a sidebar, a a statusbar, themes, etc... Why is there this unstoppable move to remove features and make everything look like an empty sheet of paper..
Hopefully mozilla seamonkey will continue the traditional interface. It is the only browser with has large buttons so I don't have to have sniper skills to click on a forward/back stop button on my 4k screen.
...how many people use Pocket?
That's easy. Just remove all the crap you stuffed into your browser and have people who really want it use plugins.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
means killing off my interest in Firefox.
I've been using Mozilla and Firefox for the past 15+ years (Mozilla application suite, switched to Firefox when it was released).
In the past couple of years the main reason I kept on using Firefox was Tab-grouping.
With that gone I'll most likely switch to Chrome and never look back.
Either way, Firefox served me well. It'll be a shame to see it go.
I'm a bull and my penis is bigger than yours. I fuck the cows.
Let me explain:
1.) Grouping Tabs in Opera12
(Grab Tab, move it over the other Tab you like to put together to a group, Drop Tab)
= works great easy to use, even my mother could use it (and mourned the downfall of Opera12, so let's just say when my mother could use it, the usability design was great)
2.) Grouping Tabs in Firefox
(Press CTRL + Shift +E) Everybody would knew that
And now you get an overloaded preview of all open Tabs
I can only say I didn't knew that FF had tab support either.
And my critisism is:
Mozilla should really axe this feature because of usability issues and POCKET too(->plugins) many people don't use it either but are pestered with it's existence which is because it's prominently placed!
And we could also think about Opera12's visual start page with icons and the way Mozilla implemented it.
(with the idea of making money)
Data is the gold of the 21st century let's do some alchemy and turn gold into dirt!
Apparently they want to axe complete themes as we know them, and then offer some other way to modify the appearance which works better with their new UI implementation plans. The discussion is here.
Goto the FF settings page selected extended
and look FF has you opted in to gather metrics, that's
how.
If the top bar wasn't top big I would use it.
And we would never know how the magic bullet wasn't really magic after all!
You only don't get eaten because your meat tastes horrible. And you don't fuck cows, you only fuck cow fuck dolls. Then the sperm is distributed to the actual cows by pesky humans.
Nope fuck you Mozilla. I'm seriously done here.
Oy! Mozilla! Hands off tab groups, bitch!
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
I heavily use tab groups and I know quite few people who also use it (as opposed to not knowing a single person that even knows what Pocket is, let alone use it).
Tab groups is pretty much the last reason I have for using Firefox over Chrome.
They really want to die :(
And I'm gonna be sad to see them go.
I use them to group tabs by topic: I one group for example I have Android API tabs, in other Redmine tabs, etc. It works very well for me.
It also doesn't surprise me that they are a seldom used feature because, since it's not an expected feature of a browser you first have to learn of its existence and then use it. It's very much a "power user" feature. I hope there's a way to implement a similar functionality with extensions.
Vivaldi tab grouping > whatever firefox is doing
too bad vivaldi beta doesn't work right on windows (worked great on ubuntu 15.10). pinned tab icons were switched with other icons, which drove me nuts real fast. oh well... i still need firefox for download helper... offliberty doesn't cut it sometimes
If Firefox is becoming a clone of Chrome, then why use the clone and not the real thing? (BTW, I don't like Chrome.)
I still thank Taurus every day I'm not a Steer.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOO! MOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU MOSAIC COWS!!
Tab groups are generally essential to any research efforts I do. I will not like to see them go. Fortunately, someone will build an extension or plugin that will restore the functionality to Firefox. If there was a NoScript plugin for Chrome, I'd probably use Chrome instead of a Firefox without tab groups.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Meanwhile another year has passed and they still haven't completed the Electrolysis project (multi-process browser).
The monolithic process with all its memory leaks and unrestrained memory growth, and no way to figure out which tab was eating all the CPU and draining my laptop battery meant I switched to Chrome and Safari years ago. FF is not fit for purpose.
who never used any of those two features, so I guess it won't affect me. But I do feel happy that Mozilla is working on making Firefox run faster. I use it on four different OSes, and it would be appreciated if they made it tidier and faster.
I see that Mozilla is now using the same brain-dead customer feedback method that Microsoft used to remove major features because they were supposedly not used. Microsoft said that no one really used the Windows Start Menu so they just took it out completely in Windows 8. Well we see how well that worked for them. Millions of people were loading Classic Shell and other add-ons to get their Start Menu back. It was a total disaster! They probably lost billions in sales before they realized their stupidity and restored it in Windows 10.
This automated feedback method to determine which features are used has been shown to be worthless. And to hand it down in this dictatorial manner without getting any feedback beforehand just shows how out-of-touch Mozilla has become (they have probably been more concerned about the voting record of their upper management to see if they pass ideological purity). I only use Firefox for the YouTube downloader and I use SeaMonkey for my everyday browsing. So it won't affect me unless this stupidity extends to the SeaMonkey team as well. But the power-users who are usually completely ignored because they've opted out of customer feedback will be screwed. The SeaMonkey team has been good at not dropping UI features (in fact that is the primary purpose in life of the product - to maintain a consistent interface since Netscape Navigator), unlike the Firefox team who have been just trying to emulate the most popular browser of the day which is now the horrible Chrome interface.
As if that is all. If you believe that I've got some BRAND NEW Microsoft phones to sell you. Cheap. $600 American. Best in-bred that you can get anywhere from anyone in these backwoods.
After last Pocket discussion i've run a survey in my company.
Of 73 persons still using Firefox as their main browser:
Let Mozilla know what you are using!
Go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Data Choices -> Share Additional Data and check the box!
Does it still leak like sieve and ends up using tons of memory even when idling and not in use?
The main issue with Firefox is while it catered to a lot of users who wanted a browser with tons of features. Those users must of eventually decided that Chrome a minimalist browser was better and faster. In other words, yea we wanted all that stuff, but we didn't want it to slow the browser down. Even Chrome is getting bloated a tad and seeing its speed drag a bit. The Microsoft Edge browser actually kills Chrome in some tests. That's because it has very few supported plugins and no extensions. I think Mozilla has decided to forgo making those few users happy and focus on the bigger picture. A Firefox that is lean and better suited to compete with not only Chrome but possibly a new Microsoft Edge browser.
Mostly because there's nothing informing me of their existence. The awkward keyboard shortcut isn't doing it any favors. But I've been using Tree Style Tabs for years and it handles a lot of that use case automatically.
I used to love Firefox, because it was demonstrably better than IE. It was easier to use, less spammy, and frankly, fun to stick it to Microsoft. It was even worth the occasional memory apocalypse.
Haven't used it for several years now, except for testing. I can get dumbed down interfaces and adware anywhere, thanks very much.
Currently, I am a Firefox user - but maybe not for much longer if they carry on like this.
First, they introduce Australis, and refuse to listen to any of their users complaining that it suffers from bad usability.
For a long time, I was using the full theme support, in order to not have to use crappy Australis. I stopped doing so, not because I don't want to use theme support, but because the themes themselves don't work with newer versions - continual bloody cat and mouse game.
I've never used tab groups, but maybe there is a reason for that - if you want users to use a feature, DON'T HIDE IT. Seriously, the average user would have no idea that tab groups even exist, because there is no button for it by default, no menu for it. You either have to customise the UI, or know an obscure hotkey.
I had switched back to Firefox because Chrome isn't as efficient as it appears to be. But at this rate, I'm either going to be back on Chrome, or going to Vivaldi. The only thing preventing me from giving Edge a serious go is a lack of plugins.
Then just let the bugs sit since they aren't too major and say they won't get fixed until someone volunteers to fix them. There will still be a bit of effort required for testing and integration but it's open source. That means someone who really wants to fix the feature can come alone and fix it. Just announce that you aren't going to spend your efforts on it and that you need volunteers. Then if nobody steps up in a year or two think about removing it.
Once everyone agrees that Firefox has well and truly jumped the shark (which would presumably at the very latest be whenever they remove support for extensions), will there emerge a browser written and maintained by the community which respects user privacy (see Pocket, new tab suggested tiles screen), is not on the "innovation" treadmill (see Australis), and offers meaningful extensibility? (Errr... does Seamonkey match this description?)
Or is maintaining a reasonably secure and standards-compliant web browser such a herculean task that only large organizations with positive cash flow can do it?
Firefox stability and performance lack is the reason I moved to Chrome/Chromium. Becasue of that I did not know this feature. I might have moved back for a while. Firefox lost many power users over the stability and performance issues.
I thought the sperm was sometimes obtained by inducing ejaculation with some electro-jobby?
In that case, the bull don't even get to fuck the cow fuck dolls...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroejaculation
No idea of the pain level of this, or if a researcher without an agenda has actually studied the pain vs. pleasure level of this for the animal...
But Servo! But Rust! LOL!
and the most obvious part of the end user experience. Rapid automatic updates mean everyone has the latest version, which means developers can count on everyone having the latest version. Just about every aspect of modern UI counts on this. Try taking IE 8 for a spin sometime, it's awful. But there are still users clinging to it so there are still web sites stuck putting money into supporting it instead of making new, useful features. And of course don't get me started on the Security nightmare that happens when you've got dozens of unsupported browser versions in use because people refuse to upgrade.
Basically you're point is only valid if you ignore the mountains of under the hood enhancements that have been piling into browsers for the last 10 years.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
at least the social justice warriors in firefox havent yet changed the menus so they call you a rapist or something like that everytime you click on them
thats for a later version
their problem is Google pulled their funding, which rapidly shrunk their development budget. They're having to cut features that folks don't use much. And Firefox hasn't had memory leaks in years. Check your plugins. I'll give you Pocket though. It's a stupid feature that I'm assuming they got paid to include....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This stupid, rapid development cycle serves to do nothing but introduce instability. It's like a cold war between Firefox and Chrome. Release cycles should be about twice a year, at most once a quarter. Let the features mature slowly, so people can get used to them, but let security updates flow quickly and be installed automatically.
One of the reasons I'm a FreeBSD and Debian Linux user is because I value stability over feature cruft. I used to love using Konqueror, but since Konqueror is the original KHTML browser and Safari was introduced, Konqueror has added Webkit to render things more like Chrome and Safari, and this has taken valuable resources away from Konqueror, as people are not as interested in it. Konqueror used to be stable and fun to use. No longer. This browser cold war is ridiculous.
Could you also please remove:
Pocket ...
Ad tiles
Hello
Share this page
I'd really love a lean web browser that didn't spy or report on my activities and didn't try to be all things. I want a window pane into the web, not a slow and bloated infection vector whose developers think they know better than what I want and have historically chosen from before they were even born.
If you use more then 5 tabs open something is wrong and you should learn about bookmarks
I might open ten tabs, close my laptop's lid, board the bus, and read them while riding the bus. I use this as a way to avoid having to pay for mobile broadband on the way to and from work. If I were to use bookmarks instead, all I would get would be "Problem loading page: Server not found". Or is that what Pocket is intended for?
.
Firefox users have been going through a difficult period for the past few years, as the Mozilla bureaucracy has boated Firefox with things like Pocket, and removed features such as efficiency and sleekness.
Now the Mozilla bureaucracy will be removing things like the Compact Classic theme, forcing the remaining Firefox users to use the rigid Australis user interface.
As Firefox again flirts with dangerous 10% user share level some are left to wonder whether Mozilla really wants Firefox to succeed, or whether Mozilla wants Firefox to die off. It appears that Mozilla has become a bloated corporate bureaucracy, more interested in prolonging and growing itself than writing world class software.
The Mozilla community now appears to serve a bloated Mozilla, Inc. bureaucracy, instead of the users of Mozilla software.
This is about far more than just UIs, though the constantly mutating UIs are infuriating to be sure.
Rapid automatic updates mean everyone has the latest version, which means developers can count on everyone having the latest version.
The thing is, I don't want to count on everyone having the latest version. I want to be able to test my site or app, and to know that if it works in testing and I push out to production, my users will enjoy the same fully working system I signed off. And they will still be able to enjoy the same fully working system tomorrow, and next week, and next month.
Bleeding edge features are of little interest to me, because approximately 0% of them will work reliably across all major browsers when they are first introduced, or even across all of the evergreen ones. I'm not using the latest cutting edge ES6 support, I'm transpiling to reliable, portable, stable ES5 with Babel, like almost every other JS developer I know in 2015. I'm not using flexbox and cute animation tricks, because there are too many bugs to make them reliable.
In any case, while some of these tools would have been neat five years ago, today we've already solved many of the real world problems they address. While our solutions might not be as elegant, they are tried and tested, and they already exist. I'm not about to rewrite my more-than-five-minutes old web app, which works just fine for my users already, to incorporate the newly blessed shiny that might work in most browsers if I'm lucky.
Just about every aspect of modern UI counts on this.
No. I'm sorry, but that's just not true. I don't know your background, but as someone who has multiple web-related businesses and does a fair bit of freelance and consultancy work, I would wager that I work on a wider variety of real world web projects than most people reading this. Some of those projects have relatively advanced UIs, and some of them are relatively large and long-lived as web projects go. And I cannot think of a single time that any of those projects has been able to take advantage of some new browser feature that came out within the past six weeks. Not once. Ever.
Many of those projects have suffered significantly due to the ever-changing bug landscape and feature support in evergreen browsers, though. It's a huge drain on developer productivity and customer support.
Try taking IE 8 for a spin sometime, it's awful.
This argument makes no sense. IE8 is also nearly 7 years old. Even if browsers only issued a new stable release every six years, IE8 still wouldn't be the current version. And in my experience, basically no-one in 2015 is still clinging to IE8 outside of perhaps a few very large and very slow-moving businesses in specific industries.
And of course don't get me started on the Security nightmare that happens when you've got dozens of unsupported browser versions in use because people refuse to upgrade.
This is also a fundamentally flawed argument. You're conflating security updates with functionality updates, which is almost never actually necessary. It is perfectly possible to have a stable functional base and UI but apply rapid patches that are essential for security. Ask anyone who runs a Debian server, for example.
Basically you're point is only valid if you ignore the mountains of under the hood enhancements that have been piling into browsers for the last 10 years.
Ten years ago, Firefox was in its infancy, IE6 was state of the art, and Chrome wouldn't exist at all for several more years. You're just making this up now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
installed pale moon this morning: I *really* like it
Fucking Mozilla. That looks like a useful feature but this is the first time I've heard of it. Why is it buried on a 3 key shortcut? FFS.
Also popup blocker STILL does not work. Pockets is still a dumb idea.
Jesus are people ever stupid. Mozilla is NOT removing either of these features from Firefox. Tab groups will exist as an addon, and they've openly stated that they want to keep complete themes, just not the way they're currently implemented.
All I ever hear from the Firefox fans these days is "fix your shitty browser or we're leaving" and then when Mozilla starts to fix them, they say "don't fix your shitty browser; we're leaving." You'd think that these self-professed power users would understand that you can't fix things without replacing the broken components or excising them completely, but nope.
There's either a huge negativity campaign out there to ruin Firefox's reputation, or it never had an actual fandom to begin with, just spoiled self-entitled children who are only capable of taking everything in the worst way possible and don't care what good Mozilla actually does. They just want their free browser, and who cares about whether it or the people who make it can keep it going.
I don't even use tabs, much less tab groups. It was never an appealing feature for me.
Other than that I prefer Mozilla over the other browsers out there. There's some appeal with Opera though, but not enough for me to make it the main browser.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Oh yeah, I'm sure that's why Firefox is constantly working on unnecessary features like that Hello client, like integrating an external service (that was already available as an extension!) like Pocket, or like developing a half-assed mobile OS for smartphones.
I'm sure those ESSENTIAL efforts take no time and money at all.
Their terminally stupid UI "improvements" ruined Firefox. I stopped caring a while ago. Obviously they never heard about "if it is not broken, do not fix it". These people must be some of the worst, most self-absorbed and most deaf engineers on the planet.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I hope this doesn't affect my Tree Style Tabs Plugin. It's the only reason I stay on FireFox and it's awesome. You can have the tabs on the side and have subtabs which keep everything organized and nice to use.
Chrome doesn't have anything comparable. Chrome's extension is ugly and the tabs are in a separate, weird window. I can't go back to tabs at the top.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Mozilla is doing what Google did to Reader, just getting something power users use a LOT and canning it without considering the impacts. They already have a diminishing user base, pissing off power users is not the way to solve it.
People don't use group tabs much, first because most don't open many tabs, second because they simply never advertised the feature that much, just a few weeks ago I showed this to a coworker who had no idea it existed, and he is a young EE quite savvy when it comes to internet stuff, so if someone like that don't know about, there is no way a common user would.
I only hope that, if they go on with this, a good extension will be provided, otherwise I'll have to go to pale moon or other, as currently I use both chromium and firefox opened at the same time in two different screens, and it is enough to not have this feature in chromium (never found a good extension), and I usually have well over 100 tabs scattered over half a dozen tab groups.
this is a big mistake, they want to make it easier to maintain, get rid of stuff like pocket or hello which nobody actually wants, and stop this race to the bottom with chrome, where you remove features and advanced access to the browser reasources and features.
I'm just glad Mozilla is fully focused on Firefox. I'd hate to see what would happen to Thunderbird if they turned their full attention to it. I don't know of any cross-platform replacements for it that could import all my mail from Thunderbird.
What we expect Mozilla to do is remove features from Firefox core and distribute them as extensions on addons.mozilla.org. For example, Pocket used to be exactly such an extension, as are various tab management extensions. "Where's my feature?" is a matter of missing machinery in the core on which to build extensions.
> Firefox was suppose to be the fast and light browser. Then they kept on adding crap
I can't argue with that; both of these are true. But Firefox(/Iceweasel) is the lightest, memory-usage-wise, of the full-featured browsers in my (anecdotal) testing (on my personal machines, Debian testing/9 and Mint 17.2). Chrom(ium) and Opera, the other feature-complete (full-ish ECMA/DOM support, broad plugin support, developer-friendly) browsers I tried, seem to take more memory to do the same thing, especially over time. Even Pale Moon took more memory than recent Firefox versions. Midori is super-lightweight but isn't complete (can't whitelist a site in adblock, for example). I wish there was a lightweight browser with all the features I "want", but of course more features==more memory.
> If you use more then 5 tabs open something is wrong and you should learn about bookmarks
For me, it's the "out of sight, out of mind" problem -- anything I can't see, I tend to forget about in an ADD sort of way. So I keep tabs open to remind me of what I was doing (or wanted to do later). Maybe not a great system, but losing them among my thousands of bookmarks is, imo, a worse one.
Yes, yes. Blame the people who want to keep what they can of their privacy, and not the retards who can't interpret statistics and haven't got a single fucking clue about what kind of dataset they have. Way to go. You must be working for Mozilla.
Right now, I have 40 open tabs in this Firefox session, opened from different points in time and which I've never closed b'cos they contain interesting tidbits which would be tricky to search for again.
If I knew that there was something that would help me w/ this, I'd use it.
Ever heard of bookmarks?
Yeah, that place where web pages go to die, never to be seen again until their URLs become invalid? I've long stopped maintaining those graveyards, since my searchable browser history tends to do a great job remembering which sites I I actively leave open for long periods of time.
Bull's balls is an actual food.
I've started, hopefully, making use of bookmarking groups of tabs that become folders in the new page tab. I also have been trying to keep searching my bookmarks. Much like you stated, that's where pages go to die. It's not like I remember what I have bookmarked and what I don't. So, I try to find stuff in there prior to going out to a search engine - if I think it was something off the beaten track. However, no, not so much. Instead, I've just started trying to bookmark the groups and will open them again.
What I have also been doing is using Opera Beta, Developer, and Stable. This enables me to have a profile *and* be able to have things a little bit more organized. I can dig down in the profile's synced open tabs pretty well. It's hard to change old habits. I was pretty messy for a while and had lots of tabs open. Then, I grew weary of that and had just a few tabs open - that was probably the most productive period. Then they grew to around 10. Now, I'm at around 10 per browser and I keep each browser in a different desktop - if I'm home they're on different screens. :/ It's still a bit of a hodgepodge. I seem to recall getting my first "modern" web browser in the early 1990s. I am not exactly sure when. It has actually gone downhill in how I use it, in an organizational way, and I'm doubtful that I'll ever get completely back to where I once was. I still don't understand the people who have 100+ tabs open and are somehow proud of this. I'd hate to see how they keep their house clean.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
and Firefox (and you) following them. I can count the the number of time Firefox has broken a Major web site on my on the hand of the worlds worst Shop teacher. With IE 8 the number of times is legion. Same with IE 9. Even IE 10 gives me trouble. IE 11? Not so much, when it works that is. But the tangled mess of code needed to serve up the correct version of a web page and it's libraries for IE means 11 breaks too, because a library misidentifies it as 8/9/10 (either because of a bug in the library or the User Agent lying). I can't wait for Jan 26th when Microsoft finally kills 8/9 at least. You'll see a much, much better web. Now if we can just kill flash...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Use the bookmark toolbar where it is always seen and not forgotten. Create folders and BAM you have drop down menus which you can categorise your most used pages.
That wasn’t so hard was it?
History only works when you have not wiped it. If you have a page that no longer exists then add the following as a bookmark and use it on the page you are on:
javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href;
Mozilla is FOOLISH to decide things based on passive polling of their users WHO DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DECLINE THE USAGE MONITORING FEATURES. I know they have no idea how I use firefox because I turned it off.... Simply because nobody prints anymore does not mean removing the print feature completely is a wise move. I will not be surprised if they repeat this .
The main problem with tab groups was that they failed to make them GLOBAL and tied them down to the window only. No sync support or ability to put groups into windows etc. these are basic things that would make them more usable and easier to integrate the feature so users discover it. The feature was not complete - they refused to finish it and put in some more work before giving up on it. One should have been able to put all windows into tabs groups and get an overview of all the windows using the tab group view they had. Users could close windows and retain all the tabs in a group for that window-- restoring it later on. one could ask when closing and/or simply maintain a history section of the tab group view where old windows could be promoted from history to tab groups.
ADVANCED USERS decide and promote software - they keep screwing us over.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
So far you've been doing quite well. I think the novella could be quite good.
One of the only features I enjoyed using FF for. Goodbye and good riddance. I use Opera primarily (still, unfortunately) and FF as a backup, among others. That job will now go to Chrome, I suppose. I'm tired of the direction FF is headed. If only Vivaldi could mature, it's easily the better browser out of the others I mentioned (Opera Presto fan).
Presumably, they were properly interpreting the statistics which is, of course, the problem. Regardless, if you don't speak out then you will not be heard. For better or worse, that means enabling telemetry. If you don't enable this then, it would seem, you don't get a vote. While there are certainly valid complaints to be made, I'm not sure of the validity of opting to stay silent while expecting to be heard.
Personally? I typically disable telemetry and accept that there may be features lost or gained that I did not voice an opinion on. For better or worse, if you want a say you have to voice your opinion and the only viable way, at this time, is to do so via enabling telemetry data. If they do not know your use patterns or what you use for features then you'll find that your concerns are not a priority.
Security has always been about a process. It's about making choices - what will you risk to accomplish the goals you have? Privacy is a part of security. What are you willing to give up in order to have the desired results?
I don't have a solution that's going to work for everyone. I will say that it is there software and they can do with it as they please. I simply do not donate to Mozilla any longer. I'm not sure that donating would actually mean that I'd be eligible to a greater voice than someone who hasn't donated. I do know that offering my telemetry data, in aggregate, is being allowed to share my opinion. Typically, and specifically with Firefox, I do not voice my opinion and I end up simply accepting that my voice is not heard which means lost features, features I do not want, and a potentially inferior user-experience.
That said, I simply use an alternative browser. As I use three different builds of that browser, I enable telemetry data collection in two of them.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Not pretty....make the stock FF experience fast. If people want to muck it up with themes and other garbage, so be it.
The real world has occupied more of my attention. I've a new(ish) female in my life who takes an inordinate amount of time! It's nice and something that I was kind of hoping to achieve (albeit not expecting it to occur quite like it has) but it does eat into my Slashdot-time. There is a huge, I mean huge, gingerbread house and candy display in the hotel lobby. (I'm still in Buffalo and will be until tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday morning, probably Tuesday morning.)
http://www.usatoday.com/videos...
There are other links, that was the first one I came across. It's kind of neat but press and people are crawling about. It'll be nice to get the hell back on the road but it will be odd as I've a second person with me. Yay? I'm probably just going to go to DC next. I've been in this damned city, and hotel, since early/mid September. It's a nice suite and all but, honestly? I'm kind of sick of it.
Either way, to the point of the connectivity... *grins* I have three current DSL lines that are all separate. I don't know why I can't just buy the bandwidth and have access to it entirely but I need three. I have one connection in the garage/workshop. There's one in the house that was here when I bought the place, I also keep some hardware there. I have the last connection in the the new house. I'd love to be able to have the total bandwidth and just provision it myself but it seems that Fairpoint doesn't allow it.
I did have satellite for the longest time. It's not really a good solution. I don't game but latency was still problematic. My usage pattern is not conducive to satellite bandwidth. I go through a lot of bandwidth, even though I am not home - the home connection (the others are fairly idle) is still eating up a TB or more per month. I am usually connected to a machine at home, via VNC or SSH, and that's where I do a lot of "work." (It's not really work - it's just easier to spin up a bunch of VMs on more robust hardware, compile there, or even use it as another layer in security.)
The telephone lines only come from one direction. I live off of a routed highway but about five miles beyond my house the lines stop and don't start again for about sixty more miles. There are no electrical lines in there, no anything. There are some hunting camps and one or two homes that are entirely off the grid but that's it. Otherwise, I'd try to get a DSL provisioning from the other direction. As it stands, I can use cellular data if there's something that takes me offline for an extended period of time. Thus, it's my only redundancy and it's not configured to kick in if I'm not home so the network isn't so very robust. It's fine, I guess, for a residency.
When I last counted, I had some 143 ISO/compressed distros shared via torrent, some going back quite a ways, so it's probably for the best that it's not set to auto-restore service via cellular data. I've got a few dollars but that's because I don't tend to waste money on frivolous things. If it's a friend who needs to backup their data then, worst case, they know where the key to the house is and know the alarm code. If they're too remote then they can *probably* call another friend, one that is more local, and they may have the technical chops to get connectivity restored. If not, well, they can go without or call me and I can talk someone through it.
What that had to do with bookmarks is, well, only tangentially related - a lack of organization, the use pattern, etc... Hell, it's not even tangentially related. ;-) I mean, this is me! I'll just meander around from topic to topic but that was so far removed that I had typed it out a goodly portion of it before I realized how far removed it is and decided to delete it.
Seeing as I'm on the subject, it would be nice to be able to build a more robust network. I'm usually home but I like being able to access my own networks from afar. I'd also like to be able to maintain connectivity in an emergenc
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
PaleMoon for Android:
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You fix six computers for your friends and family and think you're a power user. Really, you're just a non-contributing, vulgar, immature person who's failed to impress anyone. Maybe if you'd not disabled things like telemetry your opinion would matter. Instead, you gave the project a bunch of other resource-negative people to support and somehow feel entitled to determine the project's direction. Don't tell me, you "helped" your half dozen friends and family members by disabling telemetry for them too? You've had your chance to speak and decided not to. You have contributed less than nothing by contributing negatives to the project. Did the users you introduced support Mozilla in any fashion? Don't tell me, you "helped" them by changing the default search engine as well. Firefox is not for you and has never been for you. It has been for members of the community. You are not now and have never been a member of that community. You've done nothing but whine from the sidelines and now you decide to be vulgar and insulting. Maybe if you learned to interact with people and participated in the project then your opinion would count. Maybe if you had taken a minute of your time to think before spouting off then you would have a valid opinion. Fixing a few computers, contributing nothing but a negative, and then whining like a spoilt child who thinks they're entitled to be heard is a good indicator that you have not only contributed nothing but that you will continue the trend. Go back to Internet Explorer where you belong. I hear Edge is nice. Get used to Pocket or move to a different browser. You couldn't even contribute your voice and think that whining afterwards is going to change the direction the project is going to take. No, no one is going to ignore the troves of data that show you're in the minority. Nobody is going to reverse the decisions. Nobody is going to alter the direction because it offends some "power user" who has contributed less than nothing and feels entitled to say what every other user must go through. Before you say that Mozilla is telling you what you must do keep in mind that it is Mozilla's project and you gave up your ability to have a say. You can pick a different browser for you and your half dozen friends and good riddance to you. Have fun with Edge.
That's good for things you often return to. Now there should be some cache of easy-come easy-go for stuff you intend to read/watch once, soon in the future, and never return to.
Bookmarks are quite cumbersome for that.
I use tab groups all the time. They are an amazingly useful feature. However it doesn't surprise me 'normal' users don't, because it's not on the default set of icons. One has to enable it from the customization menu. So most people simply don't know it's there. I'm pretty sure once they did they'd use it all the time too. Every single time I've shown it to a friend they've gone "wow you can do that?". Similarly, the other day I spotted Firefox can display a page in a "Reflow" format ... I forgot where they put the button for that though, so that was it. I'd use this feature if I knew how to activate it. Chances are this is the next feature that will go as Mozilla will be like "well, nobody seems to be using it so they probably just don't like it."
The nice thing about bookmarks is that you can use them as to-do lists, for example when you're researching a topic you can throw everything you find a bookmarks folder and tick them off, as it were, as you process them. Need to check back on something tomorrow? Just drop it on your bookmarks bar. It works wonders.
Another nice thing is that you can use them as a collection of references. If you know may have to refer to something later, just bookmark it in a big folder called ‘misc’. Later when you are looking for a reference, if you type a few relevant words in the address bar, the bookmark will pop-up. Your history will too, but doesn't generally differentiate very well between useful and accurate references and pages which you have visited but that turned out to be inaccurate. I recommend combining this feature with archive.is and archive.org if there's even the remotest chance of the site dying.
Perhaps few people used tab groups because of the poor UI?
I did not know about the feature and it looks appealing, but how was I supposed to guess the shortcut to access it? There is no menu item with it.
"Maybe if you'd not disabled things like telemetry your opinion would matter."
If you actually cared about your users, then my opinion would matter. But you don't, so it doesn't. All you care about is yourself. That's why you're doomed to failure. Clearly you are too stupid to see that.
Maybe if you dumb fucks actually had a clue what you were doing--if you cared to talk to your users to learn what they actually want, and knew how to design a browser that served people's needs, you would not have to rely on such idiotic ideas as "telemetry collection" as desperate and incredibly misguided attempt to clue yourself in.
The inherent flaws with your "telemetry" bullshit have been spelled out numerous times by other posters. I won't waste my time trying to explain it to you. Again: you're obviously too stupid and self-absorbed to understand.
Enjoy your slide into irrelevance and obscurity, fuckwit. And good riddance to you and your kind.
P.S. Learn to use paragraphs, dumb ass.
How did they figure this out? Spying on us, or by surveys that almost nobody takes.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
You're a net negative. You not only don't matter, you matter less due to your taking without contributing. You take bandwidth, introduce people to the program, disable their telemetry and probably change their default search engines. You've not now, nor ever, done anything to help anyone. You've failed to cite anything that is a problem except you not getting your way while not actually contributing anything. If Mozilla has fewer users that is okay. McDonalds has lots of users but aren't the best. What Mozilla will have is a number of users with fewer lecherous people who do little more than complain no matter what direction the project goes in. I dare say that you and your circle of friends will be better left by the wayside. You were doing nothing more than holding the project back with constant bickering regardless, good riddance I say, good riddance. Mozilla will have plenty of users for the foreseeable future and, importantly, they're more likely to be contributing users. We don't need more evangelists. We need people who can and will contribute. This applies to all the projects out there that rely on a community. We don't need a great number of leeches. We have plenty enough. Fork it and make your own browser if you think you're a special snowflake.
I've had the firefox history file get corrupted more than once. Firefox doesn't try to recover any of it, just rejects it and starts a new one. There's no reasonably easy way to merge the good parts of the corrupted file with the new one.
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Tab Groups are a useful feature with a less than optimal UI. I found that adding something like Tab Group Helper helped me enjoy using it. So instead of fixing the UI, Mozilla is dropping the feature. That's a really lazy way to handle this.
I don't care, it's all the same to me. Do you think we cattle cuddle up afterwards for pillow talk and a cigarette? And I'm glad my meat tastes bad - best moove we ever made. Moo.
I see a lot of hate on FF here. Bookmarking destroys tab histories, so that is why we love tabs. Usually, you want the history in the tab. But having those tabs open takes up too much ram and space. So groups were a great idea. But now FF has killed them. Is there a browser that: 1. Retains tab histories in tabs. 2. Allows tabs to be grouped? 3. Does not auto-load tabs upon restart? 4. Does not love downloading random videos, javascript, and other junk that causes memory leaks? --Jason Arthur Taylor
jason.arthur.taylor at gmail dot com;240-471-5613. I respond to all emails, if only with "ok." If I did't respond, I did
Seriously WTF !? I work in tech support for a huge vendor. For each case Ill keep tabs open per case the end amount is insane everything from bugzilla, to engineering specs to whatever is needed in reference.
Looks like myself and most other colleagues will be looking for a new choice in browser soon, hell maybe we'll even code our own for internal purposes, considering the way things are going.
Just because the normal user (base) may not use a feature doesnt mean there are many of us who actually work in tech dont.
Right now, I have 40 open tabs in this Firefox session, opened from different points in time and which I've never closed b'cos they contain interesting tidbits which would be tricky to search for again.
If I knew that there was something that would help me w/ this, I'd use it.
Ever heard of bookmarks?
Yeah, that place where web pages go to die, never to be seen again until their URLs become invalid? I've long stopped maintaining those graveyards, since my searchable browser history tends to do a great job remembering which sites I I actively leave open for long periods of time.
I fully agree w/ this. I previously would have several pages bookmarked, and elaborate multiple folders in which they were maintained, and hardly looked at them. Right now, w/ this approach, I sometimes go to the other tabs, remember why I left it open, and therefore, leave it open ;-)
Thanks. You write well by my measures. It is possible for there to be router firmware that makes the routers work together to pass data around all the DSL lines. I'm not sure it actually exists yet, but I've been trained on non-wireless Cisco routers, so Cisco's another place to look into. I'm not sure there are competitors at the level of Cisco that can provide the solution you are looking for. You can even bond the cellular connection, but depending on your plan you may not want to do that if you might run out of data during an emergency.
What works for me with bookmarks is that I have letters across the bookmarks toolbar and topics are filed under the letters. Games is under g, but game programming is under P|Programming|Game. Places that sell steam games is actually under B|bundles, though I think a link to store.steampowered.com is under S On Chrome and Firefox Slashdot is under "/." but it isn't in the Microsoft browsers because they won't import directories that contain characters forbidden by filenames.
I get phone service from MetroPCS and the terms and service has said in the past that torrents were not to be used. MetroPCS now offers free tethering for the $40 plan. I had to manually switch to the upgraded $40 plan from 2GB to 3GB at 4G speeds before it switches to 2G speeds. The $60 plan has unlimited data at "up to" 4G speeds, which means that data at any speed counts against that total. I had a 3G phone previously but could only get a 2G signal with that in a location I frequent. When I bought a 4G phone, in that area I discovered I would sometimes get a 4G signal and sometimes a 2G signal but never a 3G signal.
hard to use something if it isn't obvious and known. Tab Groups... looks cook but I hardly knew you. Its OK - I can still open up several windows with lots of tabs and use wmaker to swap around ... See, if they weren't targeting crippled windwos and apple boxes, it wouldn't have been needed.
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