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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."
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.
Perhaps this? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telem...
...how many people use Pocket?
I would've used them. I tried, but they never worked very well. The search does not work, crashes screw the groups, it's slow as hell. I don't know what the current situation is, but the feature was an excellent idea. It wasn't very well executed though.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Goto the FF settings page selected extended
and look FF has you opted in to gather metrics, that's
how.
Yes, I use Tab Groups a lot and I was just thinking this must be my punishment for not sharing firefox telemetry data...
Nope fuck you Mozilla. I'm seriously done here.
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.
If Firefox is becoming a clone of Chrome, then why use the clone and not the real thing? (BTW, I don't like Chrome.)
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.
After last Pocket discussion i've run a survey in my company.
Of 73 persons still using Firefox as their main browser:
This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.
Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.
I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
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.
NO: Making UI decisions based on Telemetry data results in the *wrong* decision almost every time.
Telemetry data sound wonderful (which is why their collection is hidden inside so many programs and OSes) but in practice they are useless.
Consider actions like "Undo" and "Undelete" or "Restore to Default". On some occasions these actions will be mission-critical to the user's needs, but they are used rarely. Telemetry will show they are not used often, so a UX retard may decide to hide the option away.
Now consider the situation from the user's perspective: I just fucked up my work, deleted the wrong items, and/or can't find the damn button/window that I need. I'm stressed and frustrated. And now, right at that moment, when I need the program to help me the most, I am forced to hunt through menus and hidden hamburgers to find the command that I know should be there somewhere... how does that make for a better "user experience".
Damn, hate on me for my profanity, but the UX dickheads need to be lined up and shot.
---
Not APK
I was ready to download and try Pale Moon, but it's Windows only :(
I have been using palemoon for 2 weeks now. I am happy. Its fast. Does not have the crap firefox has these days and everything works. Firefox is losing users to "firefox". They are doing something wrong.
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.
I think it was Windows-only in the past, but I just checked and nowadays there are also official Linux and Android versions too.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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/
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/
My use case for tabs is simple. I hit media like a magazine or blog or ... I click on all the links that interest me to open up tabs and create a reading list. Then I read / skim and close tabs.
I essentially though actually do not use tab groups though, one window per topic.
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.
The alternative to regular forced upgrades is a complex series of radically different standards. 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.
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 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.
.
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.
.
Obviously, Mozilla is doing something very wrong with Firefox: (Firefox vs. Chrome marketshare graphic)
http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2015/11/firefox-vs-chrome-100625873-large.idge.jpg
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.
No. But I believe some addons can still cause problems, even most of those have been fixed.
New things are always on the horizon
If you decide not to vote (by enabling telemetry data collection), then don't complain when they take the features away because they can't tell people are using it. The reason why they collect the data is so they can make informed decisions like this -- rather than just guessing.
Or he developers at Mozilla could simply learn a thing or two about statistics and biased sampling?
I didn't know that they exist. 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. As for themes, I had tried using them once, but the breakage of themes b/w Firefox versions soured that experience.
Any for FreeBSD?
This is precisely why I enable telemetry data in any software I use that uses it. If that specific bit data collection is in place, it will be used to determine future development of the software, so I well might try and help the software developers know that yes, I do use these menu options.
Alas, my telemetered usage of tab groups in Firefox didn't help this feature stay, and I wonder how many power users never let Mozilla know they use it in the first place. Sigh.
I've been considering moving to Pale Moon due to Mozilla's dumbing down of Firefox. The fun thing with that is that, while Pale Moon did this before, tab groups can be added back if one so wishes: Pale Moon Tab Groups add-on. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...
Enabling telemetry is what I do as well. When Microsoft or Google or Apple ask me whether I'd like to share the data so as to help them improve the OS, I check yes. How do I avoid their spying, you may ask? All my online personal habits - my banking, my shopping - I do on this PC-BSD laptop. That way, those guys get my data - but not any data about me.
I may look at Pale Moon to give it a shot, although my laptop has Chromium as well.
No, that's one not the alternative. Given the UI in Mozilla has always been separate from the rendering/JS engines, it would/should be trivially easy to update the non-UI part of Firefox from the UI, which would solve both problems, keeping security updates and standards compliance separate from usability.
That Mozilla doesn't separate this says much about why they update - it's never been about security.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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 think so, because the major faults and critical reception of Firefox updates has nothing to do with the speed of the updates. It would all have broken anyway.
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.
So only themselves to blame?
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?
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.
No, the people to blame are those who put too much emphasis on surveys that have extreme selection bias.
We can't know for sure, of course, but the only directly comparable hard data I have shows a huge increase in the number of Firefox compatibility issues we've run into since they went to rapid releases, across a range of different projects using quite different features. Correlation and causation and all that, but this is not a good sign.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Absolutely.
At home, I really don't care, but at work I really depend on tab groups. One group per task, and tasks get de- and reactivated, whenever a customer responds, when a project is reopened because of a bug. It's the virtual desktop for the browser. Hell, and even WINDOWS has virtual desktops by now!
This is the main reason I could never switch to another browser. What now - am I supposed to use some shitty non-open source privacy-invading half-assed extension someone wrote for FF or f'ing crap-UI Chrome? Fuck that.
I probably have thousands of bookmarks and when a site disappears "forever" I go to archive.org and link to the last viable version.
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.
A more serious problem with forced automatic updates is that it causes everyone to update even if the newer version has a bug that causes Firefox to crash. Might not be as common now, but I still remember at least one instance from the Firefox 2.x era where it was better to simply hold onto the existing version rather than have the browser crash on all your favorite sites.
I use Pocket, but it basically replaced a bookmark folder that I was using for storing stuff I wanted to look at later, so if it went away it would be just as easy to recreate that folder.
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.
They probably get a kick-back from Pocket. They probably get nothing from maintaining tab groups.
You can probably guess where I'm going with this and can probably guess why I am going to skip that energy expenditure. Suffice to say, I don't use Mozilla's Firefox but I am a bit fond of Thunderbird.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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/
I seem to recall, but I am not a Firefox user, that if you don't select the upgrade it won't be upgraded? Using, say, Ubuntu as the platform - when it pops up asking you to do your daily updates you can just untick the box and it won't be downloaded and installed. At least, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. I've never actually tried not ticking the box - I let it stay up to date even though it is seldom opened. (I typically use Opera, almost exclusively.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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;
I actually, intentionally, deleted my bookmarks a year or so ago. I'd not been using them but had simply been adding things to them. They were an unorganized mess that had things in there from *years and years and years* prior. I'd exported and imported them and kept them going since the 1990s. I had tens of thousands of them, many of them duplicates from one error or another during importing or whatnot. I had folders and subfolders and just a mess of them. It was almost painful but it felt so much nicer afterwards.
Now? It's much more curated and much better laid out. There's a definite folder-tree taking place that is logical (to me) and the functionality is vastly improved. Add to that the nature of the beast and searching becomes viable again. I know there's a size consideration but it would be nice if adding to bookmarks actually also added the text of the page, or perhaps some highlighted text. Then, when searching, it'd also search the text. I still struggle to remember what is and isn't bookmarked.
Anyhow, that was part of my night of the long knives - I purged a great deal of things over a period of time. The last one was getting rid of scads of backups, archived data, and things like movies and music. In the end, I deleted something like approaching 15 TB of data though much of it could be retrieved from storage. I doubt that I ever will but it is there if I ever really wanted to. My home servers and networks now have so much storage that I'm not sure of what to do with it all. I've got friends who actually have "unlimited" backup abilities as they can login and store data on certain networks in my home. But that's not got a whole lot to do with bookmarks.
(You should see what I'd deleted. I'd somehow meandered so far off-topic that I was talking about redundancy with connectivity. I figured that I'd spare you the novella.)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I suspect that you'll find that it is not their sole consideration. On the other hand, you've got people in here saying that they're smart so that they disable the telemetry data collection. One might conclude, or at least argue, that they're not that smart after all. We often think we're more or less clever than we really are, so there's no surprise there. I believe my phone collects telemetry data but I do disable it, as a general rule. I accept that this means I have less say in the future of an application. I am okay with that. Features come and go, I'll make due and I'm not so obsessed that I'm inclined to be upset about a missing or added feature unless such is basic functionality - in which case, I'll simply use alternative software.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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.
The web surpassed gopher and usenet when there were a very small number of browsers. Netscape Navigator being essentially the only important one with: Mosaic, WebExplorer, Spyglass / Internet Explorer being distant 2nd tier. HTML was what rendered on Netscape.
The push for standards came well after as Microsoft overtook Netscape and the Mozilla organization began to push for an open (not tied to Windows / ActiveX) web.
____
As for Firefox dropping share I think that has to do with the them being outclassed. When Firefox was thriving Microsoft had killed off the browser market and then let their browser stagnate for years to hold back the shift towards web applications. In a static environment it was easy for Firefox to thrive. That's entirely different than the world that came to exist as Apple, Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in web rendering technology. I think the more reasonable explanation is that Mozilla foundation just can't play the game at that level. When the field was empty they were king, when it isn't they become a niche product and they keep struggling to find their niche.
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).
No, it has systemd as a prerequisite.
The push for standards came well after as Microsoft overtook Netscape and the Mozilla organization began to push for an open (not tied to Windows / ActiveX) web.
That seems a little one-sided. As I remember it, the biggest battle in the browser war of that generation was probably IE4 against Netscape 4, which was around the time that those really became the dominant browsers and the earlier ones of the Mosaic era finally died out. I'd say it was around the same period that what we might call modern web development was born, with web sites starting to be taken as a more serious form of communication and the arrival of significant numbers of web surfers outside the government and academic communities. It was also around the same period that having actual standards for HTML and CSS started to matter, and during the following few years that Microsoft came in for increasing criticism over their embrace-and-extend strategy in the face of those standards.
That's entirely different than the world that came to exist as Apple, Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in web rendering technology.
There is also the small issue that those three sources represent close to 100% of preinstalled, default browsers today. It's somewhat ironic that just as Microsoft have been paying a bit more respect to web standards with IE10-11, both Google and Apple have overly shunned them. Mozilla have tried to follow suit and certainly haven't done it as well, but they had more to lose in the process. I think that was a huge strategic mistake that will probably lead to the collapse of their business within the next 3-5 years unless something dramatic happens to their product line.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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."
I'd put it a little earlier IE 3 vs. Netscape 3. IE 4 vs. Netscape 4, Netscape had already lost. The Mosaic era stuff had died out by IE 2. As far as Websites being more serious for communication that had already happened by the IE3 era. ActiveX was when web applications became more serious. As for standards... there was no serious push towards standards until years later. W3C as a formal organization doesn't even exist until the tail end of the browser wars, though there are a lot of European companies getting involved in the idea of web standards as early as 1994. Developing for IE and Netscape wasn't that hard. Java, Flash, ActiveX are all standards for web applications.
They happen all within 5 years of one another but they aren't sequenced the way you have them.
Yes and no. Embrace-extend-extinguish is more a charge by the workstation guys. The internet is a "unix thing" and Microsoft is focusing on not internet networking technologies. So in some sense it is earlier. Its just as a much a play in things like the spreadsheets and Lotus was getting replaced by Excel, or more importantly hardware standards for other desktop platforms. When it hits the web, it is from Microsoft creating a defacto browser standard which is not OS/platform independent. So again overlapping and certainly the web is an important example but I'd disagree with the causation you have here. The attacks start before anyone really cares much about http/web and continue being about many issues.
Absolutely. Firefox was able to thrive over IE only when it was much better than IE. People deliberately switched from IE to Firefox. The same way that people who had IE 2 installed bought Netscape 3. I'm writing to you on my Mac / Safari. My question is not "which is the best browser in Nov 2015" but rather "are any of the browsers better enough than Safari to be worth switching?". That's a harder battle for Firefox to win. They can't do deep OS integration.
If Mozilla team can get Servo out the door quickly they may have something far better.
I find it hard to imagine that Google, Microsoft or Apple with the dominance that Firefox once had would not have made XUL based applications standard. In Gecko/XUL they had the same kind of stack as KHTML/Cocoa Webcore and chance to have invented WebKit. They didn't and as a result Apple and Google picked up Webkit.... They deserve blame for not having utilized the opportunity when they had it. OTOH I think they were overwhelmed by the complexity of keeping up as the web exploded in the age of Firefox dominance. As I said, not able to play at that level.
They are in the same boat now as IE was. What does it mean to be a "standard" that Webkit doesn't follow?
Their business collapsed a long time ago as Firefox was being born. Mozilla was the open source core of Netscape. They failed to advance fast enough and the open source product was the living fragment of Netscape. Then AOL funded them for 5 years to maintain an alternative to IE. Once there were other alternatives... They don't really have a business now.
So Firefox doesn't need systemd but Pale Moon does?
PaleMoon for Android:
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
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 Mosaic era stuff had died out by IE 2.
FWIW, you're definitely wrong on that one. I was doing work in the field at the time, and Mosaic was still very much alive on Mac platforms around 1995 when IE2 came out.
I'm writing to you on my Mac / Safari. My question is not "which is the best browser in Nov 2015" but rather "are any of the browsers better enough than Safari to be worth switching?". That's a harder battle for Firefox to win.
Agreed. I just think most of the things that really did make Firefox attractive a few years ago were to do with its flexibility. For example, you could install a choice of ad-blocker long ago in Firefox, while such things have finally arrived only much more recently in certain other mainstream browsers.
What does it mean to be a "standard" that Webkit doesn't follow?
Given issues like Apple's refusal to allow any browser on iOS to use its own engine and Google's fork of WebKit to create Blink, I think that is a more complicated question than you might have intended. Indeed, with the fork, there is probably more need for standards now than ever to prevent the two drifting apart needlessly.
Once there were other alternatives... They don't really have a business now.
Well, they still make a lot of money and employ a lot of people for an organisation that doesn't have a business.
However, I can't see them continuing to do that if Firefox continues to lose market share as rapidly as it has been in recent times. Their revenue has overwhelmingly come from their search engine integration deals according to their published financials.
They also spend an awful lot of money on software development for an organisation that has a main product (Firefox) in a flat spin, secondary products (SeaMonkey and Thunderbird) that they barely seem to do anything with any more, and a range of other projects with varying usefulness and potential but little revenue generation potential.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
How did they figure this out? Spying on us, or by surveys that almost nobody takes.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Can't you do the same thing with multiple windows (each browser window having its own tabs), and bookmarks (bookmark all the tabs on a window, so you can reopen them later)?
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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Have you never been on /. before? No one liked the switch to rapid updates. During that time there were multiple news story mocking the idea, and pretty much every article that had anything to do with web browsers was filled with comments bashing Modzilla for their stupidity.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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 never even knew Tab Groups existed until now, so this is annoying, as I would have found them useful. So I guess you'll have to do what I do - one FF window per task, with all the tabs for a task in one window.
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.
Yeah, this. Oh well, guess I'll carry on just grouping them by having multiple windows instead.
Before we all beat ourselves up too much, I just went to check if I had it turned on or off (off, as it happens), and discovered this:
This feature is turned on by default in Nightly, Developer Edition (Aurora), and Beta builds of Firefox to help those users provide feedback to Mozilla. In the general release version of Firefox, this feature is turned off by default.
So in fact it's mainly power-users that they'd be getting telemetry from in the first place...
I doubt it matters.
Years of telemetry collection is apparently what resulted in useful things like Pocket integration, Google+, ads that obscure content, and Windows 8.
A programming methodology couldn't alone fuckup Firefox as much as it has. That requires careful thinking. In terms of compatibility issues I don't think the ultimate number would change at all, only the distribution. Though I guess a slower release cycle would result in having to check compatibility less often.
You can still do rapid releases with a schedule and a plan on how to address compatibility issues. I.e. some of the more aggressive changes Chrome have made which included a legacy compatibility option along with a schedule of when a future issue will cause problems.
To be perfectly honest I'm just beginning to think of Mozilla as all around incompetent. Poor project management, poor scheduling, poor interaction with their community, and poor understanding of their target demographic.
That's a fundamental problem when you're trying to evolve a UI. The demographic who happily shares and the demographic who wants nothing to do with a company use the UI in different ways.
But then there's another question: How big is the latter demographic? Sure Slashdot says the world is imploding around bad UIs, but isn't general technology use on the rise?
Unfortunately, it looks like you'll have to go back to that work-around soon. You might want to complain to Mozilla; probably they're not getting accurate user data about how many people actually use that feature.
Ever heard of different needs of different people? When you temporarily need a tab for later you keep it open that is why tabs exist, having multiple web pages organised and instantly available instead of hidden behind layers of clicks. If you've ever done extensive online research on a subject out of personal curiosity tab multiplication is a normal process and tab groups are a great way of going about it. Mozilla barely advertised the feature and hid it in a corner of the customisation UI with no way for the casual user to discover it, of course it did not gain traction. I use it regularly and am frankly sad to see it go as it was just a case of badly advertised features.
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
But it doesn't really mean that, because each evergreen browser implements each feature at a different pace, and sometimes in a different way. There might be something approximating some mostly-agreed new feature in a new update from some browser within a few weeks of deciding to add it, but it might be a year or more later before the support is stable and you can actually use that feature in production and expect it to work the same way across all of the major browsers, even just the evergreen ones. How long did it take Firefox just to be able to render rounded corners the way we do today? Or Chrome to have acceptable web font rendering quality?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
As I recall, the last big battle in IE vs NN war was over "layers", and that was IE4 vs NN4. NN added a proprietary <layer> element and a bunch of related markup, while IE repurposed <div> by extending CSS (or was it still a draft then? I think CSS 1.0 was already done?). Consequently, you had many websites working only in IE or NN, because they used one approach or the other (some people redid their websites in both, but that was expensive). And from what I recall, I saw way more NN4-only sites back then than I did IE4-only sites. It wasn't until IE5 that "this site is best viewed in Internet Explorer" became essentially the default.
If you use more then 5 tabs open something is wrong and you should learn about bookmarks
"You're holding it wrong."
No, we're not. We're holding it the way it's most convenient. Also, fuck you and your head-above-the-clouds UX horse.
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 ;-)
Bookmarks are not viable for how I use browsers.
W agree. My opinion is that IE4 is where IE crushed Netscape the transition happened then. Certainly sites had problems working with both browsers then. But the shift started happening quickly and the push for web standards would only start after Microsoft was dominant. Both of them were proprietary at at that point. Microsoft outspent Netscape, was more creative than Netscape and moved much faster than Netscape anticipated they could. The browser wars were over quickly. It was after Netscape lost that Mozilla, along with other players like Sun, the Linux community... became advocates of standards.
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.
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Just because you don't see the point of a certain feature doesn't mean there isn't one. It only means you're shortsighted. I work for several different customers, each with their own set of URLs I need to be able to quickly jump between. Every customer gets their own tab group. Then there's the tab group for the various sites with documentation for the application they use. Then there's the tab group for my company's URLs such as my time sheets, internal issues etc. And finally, each of my personal projects gets a tab group as well, as does the personal non-work set of tabs. Yes, I could just bookmark everything, and then watch my productivity go down as I keep constantly closing the tabs for customer A so I can replace them with those for customer B. I switch customers on a daily basis; tab groups help me keep things logically organised and quickly accessible. Some people actually use their browser for more than just Facebook, Twitter, youtube and slashdot, you dimwit.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?