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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."

6 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's next? by Dagger2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    That article is talking about plugins. The GP is actually talking about extensions. They're two very different types of add-ons.

    Of course, they're also dropping support for extensions (and replacing it with support for slightly-improved Greasemonkey scripts). You can't make this stuff up, folks.

  2. Electrolysis project by Malc · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:What's next? by hyades1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You should check out Pale Moon. It's basically Firefox before it all went to shytte, and they seem intent on maintaining the kind of browser that made Firefox a success in the first place.

    --
    I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
  4. Re:What's next? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Palemoon is a fork and it's its point provide a stable API that stops changing with the mood of Firefox devs. It means your favourite extensions that work with Palemoon will keep working indefinitely, which is a major progress. It also means you can't keep in sync with the newer versions developed for Firefox.

    If you want the latest extensions go with Firefox, and keep in mind it might stop working at anytime because Mozilla changed an API, and it will eventually definitively stop working when Mozilla finally goes with their plan of removing the XUL extension API to replace it with the Chrome extension API.

  5. Re:Fuck Mozilla by Alumoi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  6. Put 'em in extensions by tepples · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.