HN user
Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?
How much public opinion is worth burning for how much increased usage of a new theme feature? In my opinion, very little.
I think we're squarely in the "very little" range here in terms of how much public backlash we saw. You might be overestimating how widely folks got angry the same way you got angry, or perhaps we weren't monitoring the right forums and channels when releasing the feature, who knows.
There's for sure a lesson to be learned in here. The product owner who had decided and pushed for making it seem like colorways were ephemeral has long left Mozilla, so you're preaching to the choir at this point.
I still don't consider colorways a failure, all things considered. To me, the fact that colorways are still some of the most used themes outweighs you remembering that you were angry three or so years ago, but thanks for the feedback.
People using colorways after the feature was removed? Well, that sounds like a failure of the feature then.
The whole crux upon which the colorways marketing rested, was they were temporary! You get to change your theme for a few months, and then later on at some random point, it changes again as it's taken away from you.
It was sort of a marketing gimmick, one I wasn't particularly fond of. (I was the lead engineer for colorways.) What it really meant is that we'd offer the onboarding screen and colorways built into about:addons for a limited time. The intent was never to remove them once users installed them. We have since migrated them to AMO where they can still be installed: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collections/4757633...
No, that had happened about two years earlier I think (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1678742 goes back to 2020). Alas, the bottleneck there was UX staffing rather than engineering.
Not surprising, since I believe Firefox gave everyone the Colorways screen when that feature showed up,
Right, I assume that's what the parent comment meant by "force-fed to us." That screen was indeed the whole point: It made the theming feature visible and accessible to the average users.
Don't forget colorways, the non-feature that still needed to be force-fed to us. I assumed people who wanted to change the color theme already could
Most average users don't ever change settings or otherwise customize stuff, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't enjoy a different theme. Colorways saw good adoption according to our internal Telemetry. In fact, three years later colorway themes combined remain more popular than either Dark, Light, or Alpenglow, despite not being offered or advertised directly in Firefox anymore.
School chemistry means it was a ~20 year old prediction 30 years ago, based on known oil deposits 50 years ago.
It would have been a hopeful prediction from today's perspective, as we would necessarily have stopped pumping and burning oil by now, but unfortunately we haven't.
This is just not true. We're watching ocean currents collapse in real time. You're the frog getting boiled being angry at the thermometer. Wake the f- up.
In climate science parlance it means it's a conservative guess and will likely happen faster than anticipated.
Was the biggest "tough on crime" person I've ever met. I think people with means don't understand if you don't have money you can't afford bail.
Or maybe they do understand. This kind of politics ensures the privileged stay privileged.
Hmm, if I had to choose between not having Facebook and having React, I'd pick the former in a heartbeat. Not that this was a real choice, but it was nonetheless bitter to see colleagues join the behemoth that was Facebook.
You could just set `browser.tabs.dragDrop.createGroup.delayMS` to a high value like 3000; that would mean having to rest the mouse for three seconds to group tabs during drag and drop.
In about:config, try looking for browser.tabs.dragDrop. The createGroup... and moveOverThresholdPercent flags control the group creation behavior during drag and drop. If anyone finds values that make it less likely to accidentally create groups while still allowing intentional grouping via drag and drop, I can channel these back to the team.
Do you know how do you move a tab group once created?
It should work once you've updated to Firefox 138.
We've implemented drag and drop of groups for both horizontal and vertical in 138 which presumably you were updated to today :)
They have slimmer tires as well, right? I wonder though, do they deteriorate faster as their surface would carry more weight?
edit: https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/ answers this, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
player is aiming at the sky continuously
Same here :(
I'm guessing this wasn't tested (at all?) in Firefox? That's unfortunate.
His main objection seems to stem from the fact that Jack Dorsey's net worth is $5.6 billion.
Fair. You do not become a billionaire without being a massive POS.
Yes, they would still be opposed to them.
A measure could well be somewhat effective on its own, but then it would require the industry to get creative and work extra hard to still get people hooked, which they will do, but they'd rather not have to do it in the first place.
What's more, opposition to any type of well intended regulation is typical for harmful industries, even if the regulation might be ineffective. They do that on principle, as they don't want the precedent of getting regulated. The mere idea of having regulations for the benefit of society threatens their business models.
We're working on that.
We'll at some point support the tabGroups webextension API, so it would be fairly straightforward for add-ons to do that. We're also looking at automatic grouping options though.
I remember, I was around back then. :) Panorama was in some ways ahead of its time. The UI was nice visually but also somewhat heavy handed / not very beginner friendly to say the least, which contributed to it being used only by a relatively small share of our user base.
We're cautious about not repeating history. We're implementing tab groups from scratch and directly in the tab bar. Our Firefox View feature (Tools > Firefox View) may later get a more visual surface for managing groups.
Agreed. I work at Mozilla as an engineer for Firefox, and I'm generally happy to see this.
I currently work on tab groups, and I'm curious to see what their implementation will look like or whether they'll try to fast-track our work-in-progress once that's somewhat viable.
For the sidebar and vertical tabs, they seem to have implemented their own thing rather than using what our team has been working on. At a first glance, the results look similar. I wonder if they'll want to ditch their implementation once we've released, as forking this stuff long-term may not be super cost efficient.
Their claims about performance do seem dubious. Mostly they seem to tweak a bunch of Firefox prefs, but more often than not there are good reasons for Firefox's defaults, and changing them may come with a tradeoff.
Here are Firefox about:config preferences they tweak for performance:
https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/1eaf6e49ef8edd44...
I also found this somewhat funny:
# Edit: ok, ill remove it, goodbye top #1 on fastest browsers benchmark :[
# ac_add_options --without-wasm-sandboxed-libraries
I don't think you see "Cupertino said" when referring to Apple these days.
Except that's exactly what you want e.g. when you want something to stand out relative to its context. For instance, you want your headings to be 150% the size of surrounding text, so when you have an info box with smaller text and a heading, that heading should not end up as tall as your main text headings.
Of course you could also have distinct heading classes or equivalent selectors for different contexts, and specify every case in rem, if that's how you like your stylesheets.
case in point: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment-and-conserv...
More than enough by what measure? That constant hammering hasn't yet translated to political will to actually turn the ship around.
I don’t know why all the attention is on climate change
Because it's the largest existential threat human civilization has ever faced.
But perhaps two things can be bad at the same time, and we should stop flooding earth with microplastics without taking away any attention from climate change. There's plenty of attention to go around. It's not like humanity is wholly committed to fighting climate change. Quite the contrary.