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Firefox 45 Will Remove Tab Groups Today, Get This Add-on To Replace It (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox 45, set to be released today, will remove the Tab Groups feature, a feature that many people used, but Mozilla decided to ask due to buggy code. The good news is that a developer created a perfect replacement for this feature as an add-on. Users that use Tab Groups on a daily basis are urged to install the add-on before upgrading to Firefox 45. The add-on will take over from the browser's Tab Groups feature without any complex configuration. Users that update to Firefox 45 will have their tab groups moved to their Bookmarks as folders, which may be difficult to move back into the Tab Groups add-on later on, especially if some people have hundreds of URLs.
I Firefox from its early Phoenix days until I switched to other browsers after the "AwesomeBar" debacle in 2008, and my opinion today is that while the binary size has increased, the value provided by Firefox has gone down. Its no surprise they have lost market share from a decent high in the mid 2000's to their pathetic lows of today.
I've been amazed, and not in a good way, since Mozilla has started their code cleanup project. People had been complaining for years that Mozilla was throwing every bell and whistle into Firefox adding bloat and bugs. Now that they have found out the users are right and start removing the bloat and bugs, all the users can [still] do is bitch. Extensions are being added that allow the smaller pools of users to continue using those features and the bloat is gone for everyone else. It's a win all the way around. Do this for enough features and everyone gets a slimmer, faster browser that has the features you use but, without all the bloat for the ones you don't. The one person that exists that uses every feature removed might lose out but, all of the rest of us gain.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Pale Moon is the Firefox that you wish Firefox still were.
I thought it was a cool feature. I never had a use for it. I guess it was a solution in search of a problem.
Unlike IE, Chrome, and Safari, Firefox is not the default browser on any widely used platform (except desktop Linux, although even that is still mostly a system for nerds and not widely used by ordinary plebs). That means that the market for Firefox is the users that are knowledgeable enough to download a binary to replace the default web browser on their platform--likely, this means power users. Power users like things like advanced tab and cookie management. Power users do not like social media integration. Power users do not appreciate when the features they like (especially the ones they like enough to work around some long-lived bugs) are axed and replaced by an extension they have to go out and download.
actually the summary seems to be this: Remove everything I don't use, keep everything I do. And since I'm impacted I must be reflective of the actual user base. What the actual users use and what slashdotters whinge about are actually worlds apart.