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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...
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.
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!
Yes, I use Tab Groups a lot and I was just thinking this must be my punishment for not sharing firefox telemetry data...
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
their problem is Google pulled their funding
No, Mozilla decided to go with Yahoo: Yahoo usurps Google in Firefox search deal
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.
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.
I chose neither because I use neither. JavaScript said unto me, "You need to select an option!"
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?
No, the people to blame are those who put too much emphasis on surveys that have extreme selection bias.
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.
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.
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."
I also assumed Classic Theme Restorer would probably be affected (even though CTR itself is an extension rather than a theme). But according to the developer:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/...
"Removing support for complete themes should not have any effect on CTR."
That's a heck of a spin on the situation. Google paid to be Firefox's default search engine for 10 years. It released the Chrome browser in 2008 and many wondered why it still paid Firefox to be their default search engine when Chrome had the same or higher market share. (answer was it was still worth it!)
When Google was just a search engine, they were fine paying Mozilla for Google to be Firefox's default search engine.
After Google Chrome's market share far exceeded Firefox's, they had their own solid browser platform to push Google as a default search engine. Their strategy changed. They no longer had to pay to get a wide audience, and the best way to get more browsers with Google as default was to push Google Chrome and crush Firefox. I'm sure they would have given something to be Firefox's default, but not as much as Yahoo was offering -- and likely nowhere near the amount they'd been paying prior to the Yahoo offer either.
Yahoo needed a win to boost their search income, and they got it. It was a large increase for Yahoo, but a small loss for Google... and Google is winning firefox users over to Chrome, and helping remaining firefox users to switch their search back to Google.
http://computing.dcu.ie/~humph...
It made perfect sense for Google to shrug off the tiny, declining value of Firefox search engine users as they expected to pick up market share from those leaving Firefox as well as continuing to pick up market share from those scampering off the sinking IE ship.
Meanwhile, Mozilla is running out of cash and slashing features on Firefox to save on expenses while picking up crap like Pocket to survive. It's truly sad that they're likely getting 90% of their revenue from another dying company (Yahoo) and wasting money on developing phones no one asked for. I fear they may not recover from this death spiral. (over 90% of their revenues from previous years came from Google... and you know that was more money than Yahoo gave them b/c they admit they're slashing expenses and begging for cash).