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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."
Dear Mozilla,
I understand you've been having problems with continuously-dropping market share, going from a high of 50-odd-percent to under ten percent, and heading steadily for zero. I understand that you plan to remove some things to try and reverse this ongoing decline. Could I suggest removing all of:
Thanks,
The rapidly-diminishing community of Firefox users.
Sadly, most of the people who use "power features" of an application are not the ones who click "next-next-next-finish" when installing, i.e. they are also the ones who opt out of phone-home data collection.
After last Pocket discussion i've run a survey in my company.
Of 73 persons still using Firefox as their main browser:
I still do not understand why it is so hard to have a flexible UI.
One factor is that the underlying codebase evidently has some significant architectural problems, which unfortunately Mozilla haven't been able to resolve in a long time. This line gets wheeled out time and again to explain why Firefox still doesn't support important features like proper isolation between tabs, and sometimes also for more minor issues like why security warnings sometimes don't match up with what's actually happening on the page.
I can't help thinking that if they had focussed on getting their software architecture house in order first, before all the whizzy new features and never-ending UI rearrangements that no-one actually seems to want, Firefox would look and feel a lot different today. I see happy users citing Pale Moon every time these discussions come up now, and perhaps that's why.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
The alternative to regular forced upgrades is a complex series of radically different standards.
How do you figure that? The Web evolved from infancy to arguably the most effective communications system and knowledge repository in the history of humanity without needing six-weekly updates. And frankly, developing for the Web was much easier when web standards actually meant something too, while trying to keep up with this week's bug in Chrome or Firefox is a horrendous drain on productivity and morale. For all its flaws, as least you knew where you stood with something like IE6, and once you'd figured out the handful of workarounds you needed if you wanted to use a newer feature, most of the time stuff just worked.
Ultimately product owners focused on a specific product are going to do a better job than the vast majority of users in deciding how to move their products forward.
The trouble is, it's not clear that the Web and browsers generally and Firefox in particular are moving forward. They're moving for sure, but all too many changes in the relatively recent past have been steps backward for significant numbers of users. We could debate specifics, or we could just look at Firefox's market share dropping like a rock as it has steadily eroded the priorities and flexibility that made it an attractive choice for so long.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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;