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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."

7 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Mozilla wins #1 prize! - for "hiding" features by burni2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!

  2. Re:How do they know? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, I use Tab Groups a lot and I was just thinking this must be my punishment for not sharing firefox telemetry data...

  3. Re:Killing off "Classic theme restorer" by luvirini · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Fuck Mozilla by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's funny how back when Chrome and then Firefox introduced rapid, automatic updates to the web-browsing public, I would get modded to oblivion if I expressed my opinion that this is a bad thing and not in users' interests. It means features keep breaking and UIs keep moving around and sometimes useful functionality even gets removed entirely. Moreover, real web sites and apps don't tend to use bleeding edge features anyway, because those features aren't stable and reliable across browsers, so the main benefit claimed for very rapid updates is mostly an illusion. I suspect a lot more people would agree with me today, though.

    --
    If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
  5. Creates Problems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Tab to make available offline by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  7. Re:What's next? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... If Mozilla removes something it's all wailing and gnashing of teeth, if they add something it's called bloat,...

    Because Mozilla is removing useful features and not fixing bug, and adding useless features.

    .
    If Mozilla really wants to remove bloat, start by removing Pocket.