Mozilla to Cut Some Firefox Features
Tab grouping and heave themes are the first to go.
As a part of Mozilla’s “Great or Dead” strategy, the open source organization has announced that they will be removing some of the rarely used Firefox features.
What are these features? First is tab grouping (aka Panorama), which was introduced with Firefox 4 and allowed users to organize related tabs into groups, and switch between them when needed. As explained by Firefox’ director of programming engineering, “Very few people chose to use it, so we are retiring it because the work required to maintain it is disproportionate to its popularity.”
Next is heavyweight (or complete) themes, allowing you to replace Firefox packages and style them in any shape or form. Since these themes are tied to XUL, which Mozilla is retiring, it was only an obvious thing to do.
[Via: VB]
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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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What a surprise…
Staying in my old stable version, ain’t nobody got time for your crap Mozilla.
Can’t blame neither developers or users, the times are changing and having an old-looking, bloated with useless features browser can be off-putting for many people. Customization is a good thing, but nowadays, I can really go for a stripped down browser that has only bookmark sync, adblock and popup block.
Streamlining the product can be both a good and a bad thing at the same time. Customization may suffer, but the overall product becomes more lightweight and less complex.
I’ve seen people complain when their browser of choice ditches customization in favor of commercialism. What happened to Opera, made their most loyal of supporters to stay with Opera 12 or start looking for a new browser, like Vivaldi.
I like having customization to some extent, but not that all-in-one browser. The only reason I’m using Vivaldi and I’m curious as to what will happen with it in the near future is because every other browser that I’ve used over the years (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Maxthon) has proven to be causing me enough issues here and there to drive me nuts. My last hopes are in Vivaldi, Edge with extensions support and maybe Firefox in the future 1-2 years when it’s been stripped of all the legacy code it’s currently carrying.
It would be nice to have two versions of a browser – Full Version and Lite Version. With the Full version containing all of the features and the Lite version containing only the ones the majority of people use.
While I agree that removing full themes can be bad, only because some themes can make the browser more functional, they are also pretty useless at the same time, considering that the current Firefox skin is just perfect – tabs can be clicked when you drag the pointed to the edge of the screen, they are on top, just like the standard for a modern browser.
At the end of the day, people, who don’t like those changes, can either stay with the old versions, find a Firefox fork and stick to it, make their own, or look for alternative browser.
Firefox is dying and it’s really the developers’ fault. The times are changing in that there are more and more power users today, and those power users used to love Firefox. For years now they’ve been cutting feature after feature, and it’s no wonder they’re losing market share: they’ve lost the power users, and it was the power users that gave them the market share in the first place, either directly or through evangelism.
I still use v27 at work because of this. And at home I’m with v35 because every time I update I need to fix something Mozilla has broken and it takes me 2 hours or more to code some patch of my own and use it as a home-made extension.
Firefox, as it is, is gonna die. It’s been dying for years, as I said, and it’s gonna become Chrome.
Pathetic.
I agree with you about the fact that Firefox is steadily going downhill, but then again, ironically almost everyone is now using Chrome. Every friend’s laptop screen I look at, every screenshot or video/livestream I see – Chrome, Chrome, Chrome…
Chrome was good and fast, but only when it was initially released in 2008 and until 2010. After that it got more and more bloated, with more useless features and now it’s slow and horrible, I don’t even understand why people even put up with it.
The way I see it, Firefox and Chrome are going in reverse directions – Firefox is becoming more stripped down, while Chrome becomes more bloated. And again, ironically, Chrome continues to steal users away from Firefox.
The problem, the way I see it, is that when Chrome was released, Google started some vicious, filled with bloodlust advertising, which got them to where they stand right now witch Chrome. On the other had Mozilla never bothered to advertise Firefox and since it never got better or faster, people simply started leaving it.
I’ve used Firefox for about 2 or 3 years and I’ve always remembered it being slow. Before I (accidentally) discovered Firefox at around 2007, I was some teen, who didn’t knew any better but to use IE6 and Firefox was like a gift from the gods, but even so, it was always slow and when Chrome came out, it was blazing fast.