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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.
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.
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!
Yes, I use Tab Groups a lot and I was just thinking this must be my punishment for not sharing firefox telemetry data...
Indeed. That is the thing that has kept me in firefox despite the utter stupidity of trying harder and harder to make firefox unusable. Classic theme restorer fixes enough to make it mostly usable. Without it firefox is just unusable.
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.
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?
The thing with browsers is that you write to a loose standard.
No, the thing with today's browsers is that the "standards" are loose. Up until Google and Mozilla started messing everything up and the W3C became almost completely irrelevant, we enjoyed probably a decade or so where writing web-based front-ends was a big advantage over writing native UIs for each major platform precisely because the web front-end was widely portable with relatively little effort and good reliability.
We're repeating exactly the same mistakes as we did in the IE vs. Netscape embrace-and-extend days, just now with more players and -- perhaps a greater cause for concern -- with most of the leading players having a much stronger bias towards driving the Web in a specific direction that favours their own commercial goals at the expense of other valuable uses for Web technology.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.