Mozilla Is Removing Tab Groups and Complete Themes From Firefox (venturebeat.com) 316
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."
What's next? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
That's not their problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's not their problem (Score:4, Informative)
their problem is Google pulled their funding
No, Mozilla decided to go with Yahoo: Yahoo usurps Google in Firefox search deal [reuters.com]
Re:That's not their problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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... [computing.dcu.ie]
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).
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no their problem is firefox continues to be a slow, memory hogging, pain in the ass that does absolutely nothing special because they are too busy trying to make a poor mans chrome clone
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Compared to the competition Firefox isn't bad at all these days.
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I blame the web sites. It's like the age old competition between the shield and the sword. It's unwinnable : every time a new browser version runs 5% faster, the web developers will make their crap 10% heavier or slower. And even if they run laptops, a few-year-old Intel CPU in a laptop is incredibly fast so if your PC's single-threaded performance doesn't keep up with that you will suffer.
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I restarted it a while ago, using the "Restartless restart" extension.
All it takes is a few pages opened from news web sites to peg firefox around 100% to 110% CPU use (per top where one core used is 100%)
I don't use Chrome-ium because it will use up all my memory + swap and when all swap is used, the mouse cursor doesn't respond. It takes minutes to ctrl-alt-f1 into a shell and kill it. If I get a laptop running as a serial console for the desktop I might have a try at running Chromium so I can kill it fas
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He's an obnoxious, hipster douche
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Considering how they're working lately, my guess is the next thing to be removed is the plugin support since they know best what functions their browser needs.
Pocket is proof thereof. If anything, this could have been solved by a plugin rather than shoving it down everyone's throat.
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Considering how they're working lately, my guess is the next thing to be removed is the plugin support since they know best what functions their browser needs.
Pocket is proof thereof. If anything, this could have been solved by a plugin rather than shoving it down everyone's throat.
Well, umm.... *cough* *cough* [ibtimes.co.uk]
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Ok, so we're improving Firefox 'til it is about as useful as IE5 was?
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I cringe at the thought of what they are going to remove next.
Why? If Mozilla removes something it's all wailing and gnashing of teeth, if they add something it's called bloat, if they don't add something it's "where's my feature??" Nothing Mozilla does will appease the Slashdot groupthink.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
... 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.
Put 'em in extensions (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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This is why I use Seamonkey, the interface doesn't change. I don't have to stand on my head and hop up and down just to use it.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Thanks for that. I was going to say basically the same thing, but not nearly so well.
Cheers!
Hmmmmm.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hmmmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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"proper isolation between tabs"
That's easy, because for a long long time they tried to transition to it without breaking to many addons and converting some addons.
There is probably no browser where addons is used as much as with Firefox.
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Isolation between tabs is not much of a problem in practice, at least with Firefox
I'm glad it's not a problem for you. Personally, I seem to run into so many crashes, sometimes with plug-ins but sometimes with bugs in FF itself, that it's a serious problem in practice.
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Because it creates lots of possibilities for strange interactions. Assume there are 5 optional browser elements that interact in weird ways with 1% of web elements. That creates: 32 combinations that have to be tested against web elements (or at the very least 10 pairs) and special handling for about 1/3rd (10%) of all web elements. Now assume the same odds but 25 optional elements still with a 1% chance. Then you are looking at 33.5m c
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Isn't it amazing that Mozilla managed adequately to test all these "strange interactions" back in the days of Firefox 3 when they had fewer resources? I guess they were just less lazy then.
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I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "browser element" and "web element" or whether your assumptions are therefore realistic. But in any case, how is this any different to any other combinatorial problem for interactions in software architecture? And how come it can't be mitigated by constraining components' behaviour and limiting their ability to interact, also like any other similar problem in software architecture?
Mozilla? You want to "go faster"? (Score:2)
That's easy. Just remove all the crap you stuffed into your browser and have people who really want it use plugins.
So Long, and thanks for all the fish.... (Score:2)
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.
Mozilla wins #1 prize! - for "hiding" features (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Okay, I just tried the tab group feature (that I forgot even existed) and accidentally closed all my tabs... Point taken.
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And this is exactly why I never used Tab Groups.
When they came out I tried the feature. Put my tabs into a group (might have been by accident).
There was no way to Ungroup my tabs.
There was no way to reopen a closed Group or to identify what tabs were in the group after it was closed.
I lost all my tabs and immediately disabled the feature because undo is always a requirement.
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There's actually an icon at the top right corner...
Of course, I knew that Tab Groups existed for quite a long time, but didn't use them as the implementation is awful - on par with something that an average programmer could do themselves. The most obvious bit is that creating a second tab group instantly makes it harder to manage tabs outside the current tab group.
It's also pure overlap with an existing tag group system, known as a window.
What the fuck? (Score:3)
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 :(
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I don't know if I could function without Tab Groups any more. I have to project-hop, between a wide array of research or development areas, all the time.
* Big literature surveys,
* Sets of companies in a sector,
* Patents in a family,
* Aspects of a collaborative project where time elapses between hearing-back from others.
I don't want to print all of that out, or to save a bunch of PDFs! I just Group the Tabs, and use Tab Groups
I *do* use tab groups (Score:2)
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.
Bad move! (Score:2)
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.
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Same here - they were a great idea and despite them not getting the user base they deserve (which is perhaps understandable considering they're not an in-your-face UI thing) they do serve the needs of some people very well indeed.
And maybe this is the point - if you remove all the functionality that is not used by the ordinary user, then you'll end up with a browser that is suited solely for the ordinary user.
I use tab groups a work, my lunchtime browsing is kept tucked away for lunchtime, and then I return
Electrolysis project (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I am one of those Firefox users.. (Score:2)
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.
Mozilla is following in Microsoft's footsteps (Score:2)
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
Re:Mozilla is following in Microsoft's footsteps (Score:4, Informative)
Survey data (Score:2, Interesting)
After last Pocket discussion i've run a survey in my company.
Of 73 persons still using Firefox as their main browser:
stick a fork in it (Score:2)
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.
Rapidly diminishing Firefox (Score:2)
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, bu
If the effort required is too much (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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They tried that with other projects nobody came.
My guess is they are trying to change a bunch of stuff and it is a lot work to transition this over as well.
"difficult transition period is coming up..." (Score:2)
.
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 da [networkworld.com]
Mozilla is a has-been (Score:2)
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.
Tree Style Tabs (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Chrome & Opera can use Sidewise --- which also has quirks since it is forced to run in it's own window, because Google.
Sidewise does at least allow for TreeStyle pseudo-tabs, and suspended windows/tabs/sessions.
So even with "Tab Sidebar" you still wind up needing at least one or more other extensions, and it still doesn't match FF's TreeStyl
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I use Tab Groups a lot and I was just thinking this must be my punishment for not sharing firefox telemetry data...
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [palemoon.org]. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme [palemoon.org]. So, yeah, I'm moving there sooner rather than later now...
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Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Informative)
I think it was Windows-only in the past, but I just checked and nowadays there are also official Linux [palemoon.org] and Android [palemoon.org] versions too.
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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 [palemoon.org]. And it also allows installing the Australis theme if one likes it (I do): Australium theme [palemoon.org]. 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.
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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.
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Or he developers at Mozilla could simply learn a thing or two about statistics and biased sampling?
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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?
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No, the people to blame are those who put too much emphasis on surveys that have extreme selection bias.
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.
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
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Goto the FF settings page selected extended
and look FF has you opted in to gather metrics, that's
how.
Re:Killing off "Classic theme restorer" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Right-click on somewhere in the UI where it works and selecting "menu bar" is good enough for me, although perhaps I suffer Stockholm's syndrome..
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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/... [mozillazine.org]
"Removing support for complete themes should not have any effect on CTR."
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A poll is a good idea, but this one's unlikely to give useful results because of two problems:
- As it stands now, in order to declare that you don't use tab groups you'd have to vote that you DO use Pocket even though you don't, and vice versa, so you risk a lot of false data.
- Plenty of people will notice that you're using a URL shortener when there's no practical reason for doing so, and would be reasonable (if wrong) in assuming that you chose to do so because you firmly believe that few would willingly
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Fuck Tabs (Score:2)
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.
Re:Fuck Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fuck Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You're only thinking of the UI (Score:2, Informative)
No, I'm really not (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Then maybe you shouldn't be relying on clients that are not under your control. You may want to push out thick clients or apps that you control the versioning of so that you can dictate the version numbers of everything.
The thing with browsers is that you write to a loose standard. Everybody interperates that standard a bit differently, but mostly the same. Your goal is to make your site as compatible with the standards as possible so that it can be viewed by as many people as possible, and by a wide arr
Re:No, I'm really not (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing with browsers is that you write to a loose standard.
No, the thing with today's browsers is that the "standards" are loose. Up until Google and Mozilla started messing everything up and the W3C became almost completely irrelevant, we enjoyed probably a decade or so where writing web-based front-ends was a big advantage over writing native UIs for each major platform precisely because the web front-end was widely portable with relatively little effort and good reliability.
We're repeating exactly the same mistakes as we did in the IE vs. Netscape embrace-and-extend days, just now with more players and -- perhaps a greater cause for concern -- with most of the leading players having a much stronger bias towards driving the Web in a specific direction that favours their own commercial goals at the expense of other valuable uses for Web technology.
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The thing is, I don't want to count on everyone having the latest version.
Yes you do. That way developers using those bleeding-edge features can find the rough edges and get them fixed, and you can use their tested descendants a year later. If those features aren't delivered to end users, no one can test and learn from them and they don't become mainstream.
Creates Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:Fuck Mozilla (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Tab to make available offline (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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.
Re:Fuck Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Muck Fozilla (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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No. But I believe some addons can still cause problems, even most of those have been fixed.
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Bull's balls is an actual food.