Firefox 45 Will Remove Tab Groups Today, Get This Add-on To Replace It (softpedia.com) 267
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.
We have come full circle (Score:5, Funny)
In my day, we would axe a good question in school. Today, we ask a feature that sucks. What a future
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I had the reread the sentence to understand.
I had to reread the sentence about rereading the sentence to understand to understand.
And you get all the buggy code... (Score:2)
as a bonus.
What did they ask? (Score:2)
Wrong lingo (Score:5, Funny)
"Mozilla decided to ask due to buggy code."? /.'s editors got their lingo wrong.
I think
You better axe somebody!
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So why not just fix the code?. (Score:2)
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Too busy chasing IoT which they will dump when no one wants Mozilla's solution. Then they'll move to the next buzzword technology.
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Whatever else you want to say about Edge, the design spec given to the team was a print out of the w3c spec.
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along with windows 10 on every Windows 7+ OS and involuntary at that...shut down Windows Update in your services to prevent OS hijacking by MS
No, don't. Windows Update is how you get security updates. And more importantly, if you don't trust your OS vendor to act in your best interests, and you distrust them so much you want to disable security updates, then why are you continuing to use their OS???
If your OS vendor is actually untrustworthy, (and the OS is closed-source so you don't really know what's go
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I'm getting a little worried about the slips the Mozilla foundation is making..
Said the uncontested Master of Understatement!
BTW, thanks for the heads up on Vivaldi - it's installing as I write this. It's been a while since I took a new browser for a spin...
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In case you really don't understand, it's pretty simple (esp. for the "Recommended Sites" feature): advertising.
Firefox is a free download, and it's open-source, so obviously they're not extracting money from their users. But they need money to run the Mozilla Foundation and pay the developers and executives and everyone else that works there and pay the rent. They were(/are?) getting a pile of money from Google, in exchange for making Google the preferred/default search engine. (I think they've shifted
Impromptu Poll Question: (Score:2)
Me? '1'; I knew what it was, but didn't see the point to it and therefore never used it.
Re:Impromptu Poll Question: (Score:4, Insightful)
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5. I use it all the time to manage separate tasks simultaneously. Between that and All-In-One Gestures, I'm staying with Firefox for the foreseeable future.
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Imagine, if instead of Tab-groups, it was integrated as a Window Manager. Which would enable a whole slew of productivity uses.
So instead of making it actually useful, it got delegated to "not even the icon is shown on the toolbar anymore". Lets put Pocket where Tab Groups were.
Mozilla has been planning to remove this feature for 3 or 4 years now. Innovation at work.
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2. I used it once. When it came out.
Dozens of tabs turned into a Tab Group. Tried to undo it or whatever. The Group closed. No way to reopen a closed Tab Group. Dozens of tabs that I was using gone in an instant. Never touched that buggy shit again.
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On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 represents 'I never used it at all', and 5 represents 'I used it all the time': How often did you use the 'Tab Groups' feature in Firefox?
For me, it's a "5". I use it all the time and find it indispensable.
Instead of opening 5 tabs one by one, I group 'em and click "Open all n tabs". For me it's an extremely useful feature. I have about a dozen tab groups that I use all the time, every single day. The feature works perfectly for me, I had no idea it was considered "buggy".
Thanks, Mozilla, you really know how to fuck shit up.
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I used it in Opera
I would have used it in FF, but I find I have to kill tabs so often because some strange bug makes them slow down my whole computer, that I cannot abide the extra level of GUI./p
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0, didn't know it existed.
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I thinks it's a neat idea altough it was probably invented by Opera 15 years ago. If few people use it I think making it an extension is the right call
Or just get Pale Moon. (Score:2, Insightful)
Pale Moon is the Firefox that you wish Firefox still were.
Be that as it may... (Score:2)
Is there any other reason to upgrade to version 45?
In other browser news I see Comodo Dragon is up to version48.12.18.243
But Avast thinks its a virus and won't let me download it.
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Unless ye prefer Tabs Mix Plus - I always found TMP to be too much Kitchen Sink, less stable, with a slower turnaround in bug fixes, AND functionally worse compared to TreeStyleTabs, if yer flavour is Side Left|Right Tabs at least.
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"Unless ye prefer Tabs Mix Plus - I always found TMP to be too much Kitchen Sink, less stable, with a slower turnaround in bug fixes, AND functionally worse compared to TreeStyleTabs, if yer flavour is Side Left|Right Tabs at least."
FWIW Tabs Mix Plus also just got updated -when I reset FF after the update installed.
Does Mozilla know who their market is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile, At Mozilla (Score:5, Funny)
Mozilla Boss: How can we fuck up Firefox for the next release?
Mozilla Dev: We've had great success fucking up or removing features people use.
Mozilla Intern: And make sure we make it more like Chrome, people hate that.
MB: Sounds good, what should we target next?
MI: I can run some numbers and see what features a moderate percentage of our users use. That way we continue the nice slow spiral down the drain.
MD: As long as I don't have to add anything new, I'm all for it.
MB: All right, so we pick some remaining features that distinguish us from Chrome, and we take one away that users depend on. Not too few users, not too many.
MI: I'll run a report against a target 20-40%.
MD: Once we pick a feature, I'll get on bugzilla and start adding bullshit about how it's a security risk for unspecified reasons, how it's unmaintained despite it not needing any maintenance, etc.
MI: I'll use my sock puppet accounts to create a few dupe accounts to reply in agreement with our actions.
MB: I'm fine with this as long as we make it absolutely clear we don't give a fucking shit what users want. Make sure to mark all their issues as "will not fix" and lock the comments whenever they post evidence of use or arguments against our "unmaintained" line.
MD: Don't worry, I'll post that we're redirecting all "conversation" to the mailing list.
MI: And as the moderator of the mailing list, I'll simply reject any postings that argue against us.
MB: Excellent. At this rate, we'll have a complete Chrome clone by the end of the year!
Browser suggestion for the Mac (Score:2)
Does anyone know of a good alternative for the Mac? The one thing that is really keeping me on Firefox is it's ability to restore my session after a crash (either browser or system). A few years ago I tried a couple other browsers and they would lose tabs that I had open if they quit unexpectedly but Firefox doesn't do that.
It's important because right now my system freezes sometimes when it goes to sleep. The screen will turn back on and I can move the pointer around with the mouse but that's as responsive
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Take a gander at Opera. Give it a full week, try out any extensions you might want (Chrome extensions work too), and see if it fits your needs. I'm not sure how many years have gone by since I started using Opera but I've been using it since the days where I had to pay for it. I'm pretty happy with it as my main browser though there was a period where they kind of lost direction.
I have firewall logs and Wireshark runs that show no unknown traffic getting out. I'm pretty happy with it. It's based on Chromium
Slashdot readers outraged by this horrible habit! (Score:2)
Seeing as how Tab Groups used to be an add-on (Score:2)
Does flashblock work? (Score:2)
Flashblock on Firefox seems to have gone to shit recently. Is there a version that works?
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
The complete works of Shakespeare were already published so the chimps were "on the bench" so to speak.
Meanwhile in a parallel universe (Score:4, Funny)
OMG (Score:5+ Insightful)
What? Why did they spend all of their time fixing this stupid feature no one uses! Firefox is supposed to be lean instead of all this useless bloat! Just make it an extension, that's the whole point of Firefox
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If you want a bare bones browser, go get Lynx.
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Re:Meanwhile in a parallel universe (Score:5, Informative)
No, he's not stuck in 2005, he's stuck on Slashdot. He's absolutely right: if Mozilla had actually fixed this feature, tons of Slashdotters would be bitching about it just like he pointed out.
Now, if you want to make the case that most Slashdotters are stuck in 2005 (or 1995), then you'd have a valid point.
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Can somebody please mod down the parent comment? It's absolute, unsubstantiated garbage.
Tabs are an essential part of any web browser. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Firefox, IE, Edge, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or whatever other modern browser you want to bring up. This is functionality that nearly all, if not all, users want and will actively use.
Likewise, tab grouping is an essential part of the default tab functionality. Like tabs themselves, tab grouping is functionality that the majority of user
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1. I have a widescreen monitor so Tree Style Tab does a much better job of hierarchically grouping tabs than the half-arsed Firefox Tab Grouping effort. Most other people also have a widescreen monitor.
2. Some people do use Firefox Hello. Now that Microsoft Corporation have predictably deprecated the Linux Skype client, it's not as viable as it once was. Besides, much better commercial alternatives exist such as Zoom.
3. I fully agree with you about Pocket.
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This is functionality that nearly all, if not all, users want and will actively use.
There's at least one person that is in the no-tabs camp: Me! I do understand that many people like and use the tabs feature of browsers. I just am not among them and don't like tabs for two reasons, mostly. The tab bar makes for too much wasted vertical space on low vertical resolution displays like those in many laptops. Also, I like seeing a button on the taskbar for the apps and windows I have open, and using tabs within a single browser window doesn't make for all the buttons I want. So, this mean
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The leaky inflatable canoe that Firefox is goes tits up on 20 tabs, on a machine with 8 gigs, and most people don't have 16 or 32 gigs
Horseshit. I've had hundreds of tabs open on a seven-year-old machine with only two gigs of RAM, running Windows 7, just last summer (so like around version 38).
Of course, that was a bit rough until they added the "don't load tabs until you click on them" feature like a few years back.
Now I'm running Pale Moon with Tree-Style Tabs, and the most trouble I have with my browser is when PM and Chromium decide to get into a slapfight for no reason and drag down the entire machine. I literally can't even remember
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I've found the killer isn't so much RAM as CPU. I use an ultrabook (I travel a lot, so the lighter the better), and find the top CPU hog about 95% of the time is Firefox, when that's running the fan almost never stops because Firefox has the CPU at 10%+ load (everything else is 0.4%, 0.2%, that sort of thing). Needless to say, this doesn't help battery life.
Then there are the spikes, like when you're opening a web page and Firefox sits there at 25% load (quad-core machine, so it's pegging one of the cores
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You had me excited about Opera until you mentioned the tabs across the top. Its probably the same ugly hack that the Chrome tree style tabs add on uses, which just isn't workable. How the hell are there no browsers with tree style side tabs available?
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Have you looked at this:
https://addons.opera.com/en/ex... [opera.com]
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Chrome won't allow for it, neither will Pale Moon.
Yes it will. Tree-Style Tabs. I've been using it for the last year at least.
https://addons.palemoon.org/re... [palemoon.org]
(It says "incompatible" but most of them either have an interim patched version, or you can run a slightly older FF version)
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maybe 60 tabs open in two windows
What is your need for so many pages/sites loaded at one time? Surely most of those are never viewed most days. Aren't these enough of a resource waste to be worth not having opened?
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Cool.
Quick: What's in those 150 tabs? What, you can't remember them all?
Tabs are mostly just places to put web pages that you forgot to close. A hundred and fifty of them? Across twenty windows? What are they all for?
Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who's used Firefox since way back when it was named "Phoenix," I say that removing anything and everything that isn't strictly necessary (except tabs themselves and support for extensions) is a good thing!
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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.
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What's wrong with the awesomebar ? It's the only thing holding me from moving to Chrome.
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What's wrong with the awesomebar ? It's the only thing holding me from moving to Chrome.
To start, it's not awesome.
Second, it takes up way too much space, showing me information I don't need or care about. Third, I can't configure it to be simpler unless I use something like the Old Location Bar add-on - which I use.
I don't know how popular add-ons like Old Location Bar, Classic Theme Restorer and Expire History by Days are, but that they exist and are, at least moderately, popular should tell the Mozilla team something. Too bad they're not listening. But, to each their own, I guess ...
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I disagree. Not entirely, but enough to comment.
Check out this hypothetical- the browser was just an URL bar, and then you could add plugins / extensions / whatnot. Into this reasonably open environment, inject different ways of doing pretty much everything- favorites, start pages, content blocking and modification, tabs, etc.
You or I would tinker with this and it would be pretty much perfect, until we have to go to another machine. Then we are reliant on either moving these preferences about via some on
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Perhaps, if you had read my entire post, you'd get that you basically just argued for exactly what I was saying: make any extra functionality an add-on (so users like you and I can remove the
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The main issue for me (being that I have moved to other browsers and made my peace with similar functionality) is the way it was handled by the FF developers - it really was a huge "fuck you, this is happening, tough shit if you don't like it" at the time, with massive changes to the way the address bar worked. If you wanted to revert to the old functionality, you were told to do x, y and z, while the developers and fanboys ignored the valid response that doing x, y and z didn't actually restore the addres
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You didn't mention what browser. As someone mulling ditching Firefox, I'm intrigued by alternatives beyond Chrome, IE/Edge, etc. I know Palemoon is out there but what else?
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Chrome is decent, but not exactly light on resources, either. IE is dead, Edge is not ready yet. Opera is quite nice, but as a niche browser it tends to have a few compatibility issues.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps because what people wanted them to remove were completely non-browser related crap like "Pocket", or "social integration" features, or "recommended sites", rather than actual browser related functionality like fine-grain cookie management and tab groups.
They're keeping the shit and throwing out the useful bits. Which I might see if it was working, but it's not: they're haemorrhaging more and more market share as they add shit and remove good things, because - gasp - people wanted the good stuff and didn't want the shit.
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Just more evidence that Mozilla knows nothing about its users and instead is creating a browser by Mozilla devs intended for Mozilla devs.
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Extensions are being added that allow the smaller pools of users to continue using those features and the bloat is gone for everyone else.
Like those extensions for things non-browsery things like Hello, Pocket and Social - oh, right, they're bloat for everyone.
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... 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. ...
Firefox has been removing useful features, such as the ability to customize the UI, and adding useless highly bloated features, such as Pocket.
.
It is not necessarily the removal or addition of features, but what features are being added or removed.
And the problem is that Mozilla is clueless in this area.
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The problem is that the new extensions system is much more restrictive and doesn't allow all the features to be added back in. That's done for security, because it turns out allowing extensions to modify security critical parts of the browser is a really bad idea, especially when your extensions are written in Javascript.
Firefox can never be what people want it to be - fast, massively modifiable through extensions and secure. It's a case of picking any two.
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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.
Its a different set of users bitching. The first set of bitchers no longer use Firefox.
Firefox became the bloated browser for users that want a bloated browser. Possibly the worst thing to do at this point is to alienate the remaining user base.
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The trouble is, we already had that in the form of Communicator/SeaMonkey. Firefox was created as a reaction against bloat!
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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.
Because they're different groups of users. It's not one unified group.
That, or the FF users who wanted the browser stripped down have already jumped ship and we're just hearing the ones who are still around who like the bloat anymore.
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I switched to Chromium several years ago because FF was having problems, but I ended up switching back to FF because Chromium is such a memory hog (a side effect of having a separate process per tab, I think). I always avoided Chrome because of Google's added closed-source "features".
But lately with FF I've been seeing what you're complaining about: after a while, the FF process will peg the CPU, and I'll end up having to Ctrl-Alt-Esc and kill it. After I restart the session, it won't use much CPU at all;
Re:So... (Score:4, Interesting)
They promised to remove Extension support several years ago, with some foolish idea that they could drive people to use their "jet" thing. Not only was Jet utter crap, but the outcry at the threat of removing extensions echoed for a long time in their ears. I don't think they have enough remaining customers to make good on that stupid promise again.
The only reason I've remained loyal to Firefox is the extension model works so well. I can live with most of their ugly and awkward UI changes, even though they're all user-unfriendly and I hate everything about them. Extensions have replaced some of the missing needed features they've removed. But the main thing is there is no reason to use any browser that doesn't run NoScript. There's no reason to contact any server of a resource if I have no intention of loading or viewing said resource. And all the major alternatives are worse. Chrome is actively sending browsing habits directly into the world's largest advertising company, and I have no desire to feed that rapacious tiger. Microsoft's old offerings are laughably as insecure as swiss cheese, and their new browser phones home with practically every keypress.
Yes, I could run privoxy, but that's a really awkward approach when compared to NoScript's brilliant rules engine. But if the only choice becomes running through a filtering proxy, then I'm no longer bound to Firefox. May as well use the built in browsers at that point - they're less hassle.
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That's why I use Pale Moon [palemoon.org]. It's FireFox without the bloat. And it's also available in a 64-bit version.
Just commenting on this so the parent AC post becomes visible - more people need to know about Pale Moon. I use it too - installed it after FF came out with that Australis shit and I decided I'd had enough of Mozilla's attitude problem.
If enough users adopt Pale Moon, the developer may have enough sufficient resources to keep it alive, security updates and all, when FF inevitably goes down the drain around which it is circling more closely with each passing release.
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And as I regularly do, just going to remind everyone that there IS a Linux build [palemoon.org] available. It might not have the sexy installer but it's easy to install and update anyway.
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Well, you could stop disabling telemetry? If they know what it is you, and those likes you, have for usage patterns they might (hey, it's possible) actually be more inclined to keep and improve the native features you enjoy.
I think a part of the problem is that non-tech users get heard more because they don't disable telemetry. They probably don't know how to. The few that are technical users and leave telemetry enabled are drowned out by the Average Joe User-types.
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Except that that doesn't seem to be what's happening, because a lot of random unnecessary junk is added.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to find the hamburger button to take me to the gear button so i can disable the helpful^Whorrible new about:newtab page.
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but Mozilla decided to ask due to buggy code
Ask - a question, to question, a query or inquiry.
Axe - to cut, chop, or remove.
Unless you're using some sort of ghetto slang, in which case "Axe" can be used for both.
Example: "Fry, let me axe you a question."
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[citation needed]
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Consult any historical old/middle English textbook. The pronunciation went aks => ask
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's not as convincing as you might think... it not only proposes spelling implies pronunciation, but simply as an excuse for why a dimwit might pronounce nuclear as nucular. Hi George!
I'll buy the spelling went ax -> ask, but that doesn't definitively mean it was pronounced axe.
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Well I wasn't around 1000 years ago but based on the 'vowel shifts' throughout the 2nd millennium, I would guess it was pronounced with an 'a' as in 'father' rather than as in 'cat'.
so something like 'arks' but without the 'r' sound rather than 'axe' rhymes with Â'tacks'.
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According to the summary, it appears they asked the code to be less buggy. Apparently, the code didn't respond as Mozilla wanted?
Chimps? (Score:2)
...Mozilla's solution to a bit of code that's been present in their software for years and is buggy is to remove it years later rather than fix it?
Good to know they're still the consummate professionals we always assumed they were.
Really, where does Mozilla find so many chimps to hire?
Judging on recent examples, I'd say from the Nautilus, Gnome 3 and systemd crowd.
Removing important and popular features is the new IT paradigm!
Really it's Descinobe (Score:2, Funny)
reverse Ebonicsed
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Firefox deserves to go the way of IE6.
Well, Mozilla's symbol is a dinosaur after all.
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You complaints about Firefox sound good, except that all the other mainstream browsers are at least as bad.
Chrome is a memory hog and reloads everything when a session is restarted (unlike FF which waits until you look at a tab to reload it).
IE is, well, IE (or "Edge" as they call it now), and has no plug-ins AFAIK. On today's web, uBlock Origin and a script blocker are mandatory. And it only runs on Windows.
Safari only runs on Macs.
So it's not like there's a lot of great choices out there.
Re:Is Firefox still going ? (Score:4, Informative)
Right!
# apt-get install palemoon Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package palemoon
Pale Moon on Debian Jessie:
echo "deb http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepi... [mepis-deb.org] mepis12cr test" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mepis.list
apt-get update
apt-get install palemoon
If you're running a 'buntu variant, add the ppa: https://launchpad.net/~marian.... [launchpad.net]
If you're on some other Linux variant, (or on Debian or 'buntu for that matter), just run the install script available here: https://linux.palemoon.org/dow... [palemoon.org]
Really, it's not that hard. Hell, there's even a special version for the Raspberry Pi.
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https://linux.palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]
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For some reason, it's still the #1 browser in Germany [clicky.com]. It would seem as if most people consider it the lesser evil compared to Chrome.
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Do you all actually read the comments before commenting 100th time about a typo? Obviously not, what the hell am i asking.
You misspelled "axetually".
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LOL. You must be new here.
An editor that actually edits. On /. ? Bwahaha ! :-(
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Do you not use setting roaming or are you using Windows Phone 10? The reason I ask is that I can't imagine making Edge my default browser as I wouldn't be able to keep my phone and desktop and laptop and tablet, etc in sync.
As far as better memory management, that's not been my experience. Open up about 20-30 tabs in Firefox with an Ad blocker installed, note the memory usage. Now bookmark the open tabs and export the bookmarks. Open the same 20-30 tabs in Chrome (again with an ad blocker), add up the memor
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Sounds exactly like Gnome3.
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Buddy, you don't know half of it. They've fucked up 45ESR big time: pocket, reader, idiot new search, no more options in a separate windows.
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First you say it runs flawlessly and then you say it has bugs and missing functionality. The missing functionality can be overlooked but having bugs kind of takes away that whole "flawlessly" thing, doesn't it?