Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
That article is talking about plugins. The GP is actually talking about extensions. They're two very different types of add-ons.
Of course, they're also dropping support for extensions (and replacing it with support for slightly-improved Greasemonkey scripts). You can't make this stuff up, folks.
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 think Firefox would get a lot more loyal users if they replaced "Dotzler" with "Akira."
You should check out Pale Moon. It's basically Firefox before it all went to shytte, and they seem intent on maintaining the kind of browser that made Firefox a success in the first place.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
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.
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?
... If Mozilla removes something it's all wailing and gnashing of teeth, if they add something it's called bloat,...
Because Mozilla is removing useful features and not fixing bug, and adding useless features.
.
If Mozilla really wants to remove bloat, start by removing Pocket.
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.
Palemoon is a fork and it's its point provide a stable API that stops changing with the mood of Firefox devs. It means your favourite extensions that work with Palemoon will keep working indefinitely, which is a major progress. It also means you can't keep in sync with the newer versions developed for Firefox.
If you want the latest extensions go with Firefox, and keep in mind it might stop working at anytime because Mozilla changed an API, and it will eventually definitively stop working when Mozilla finally goes with their plan of removing the XUL extension API to replace it with the Chrome extension API.
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?
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.