That's how I expect Google to make decisions, not Mozilla. I would like to say that I trust Mozilla to appropriately weigh pros and cons and make unpopular decisions when necessary, but it seems like the entire deliberation process was a few individuals in one of the bugzilla threads that jaas linked above: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1402890 (and I don't see any mention of how widely used it is, from telemetry or otherwise).
> That's how I expect Google to make decisions, not Mozilla
Exactly. There is no point to compete with Google for "browser for Uncle Joe", Google won that battle. The power user browser niche is what Firefox could take instead. But no, let's chase after the leader by his rules, look at how good is Blackberry doing.
> Exactly. There is no point to compete with Google for "browser for Uncle Joe"
Yes there is.
For Firefox to be useful, websites need to work in it. That means web developers need to test in it. And that means that the demographics that they target need to have enough Firefox users to justify testing it. That means there needs to be a sizable portion of Firefox users in every major demographic.
Otherwise it'll be right back to where we were with IE6, except unlike back then, Google Chrome isn't abandonware that just happens to ship with Windows.
I don't know what is 'a significant share' when we are talking about power users. Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.
> I don't know what is 'a significant share' when we are talking about power users.
It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources. Of course there's no fixed share that "worth tailoring to" can be translated to universally. It's a judgement call.
Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%?
I doubt this one even met the 1% bar. Would you agree that it's reasonable if not necessary to draw a line somewhere?
> Not to say a significant share of power users disabled telemetry completely so we can't say anything about their share using this feature.
What we can at the very least do is reason about features and why and how people would use them, and we can collect anecdotal evidence.
I consider myself a power user. I have never used this feature in more than a decade, and have a hard time imagining what important thing people would do with it.
> It basically means: worth tailoring to, given precious UI space and limited developer resources.
How much precious developer time is required maintain a user-facing text field on an entity with only a handful of other fields? Certainly not enough to properly justify a feature regression with user-data loss.
> Do you think 50% of power users used this feature? How about 10%? 5%? 1%?
IMHO, you're thinking about power users incorrectly. Power users aren't as cookie-cutter as regular users, so you shouldn't expect them all to use an identical set of features. For instance, say you have 100 power user features. It wouldn't surprise me if none of those features passed 1% usage, but 90% of power users use at least one of them. Get rid of them all due to "low usage according to telemetry" and you've just created regressions for 90% of your power users.
Are you saying it's unsustainable to maintain an application suitable for power users?
It'll definitely take more effort than maintaining a restrictive, dumbed-down app; but it's certainly not impossible and I think the benefit is worth it.
> I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use.
There isn't one kind of "power user," especially for something like a web browser. If you want to support power users, you probably will need to support hundreds of specialized features, many of which won't be used my everyone. If you don't do that, then I think it's very unlikely that you support power users [1]. Apps with feature-sets like this exist, so I think it's wrong to make a blanket statement that it's unsustainable.
I'm not saying it's always sustainable either: if you're a two man team at a small company, you probably can't manage to support much more than the core user group. However, Mozilla's big and I think they need to offer something unique compared to Chrome and Safari.
[1] As opposed to developers or extension-writers. My definition of power user excludes people who extensively modify the software themselves.
I do kind of wonder how many power users are opting out of telemetry for privacy reasons...
Unrelated, but dear god that bug tracker was infuriating to read. As in I had a strong desire to reach through the screen and shake a few by the shoulders asking "What the FUCK is wrong with you people?!"
Concern over data loss nearly dismissed out of hand, a smug "you should have backups" response to intentionally caused data loss, and all this over what amounts to a property field on a bookmark... It's like I was reading the GNOME tracker!
All this over "maintenance burden". Is the "maintenace burden" of a non-searchable field that's only visible in a single context really that high? Really? It seems like this is quickly becoming the go-to excuse to eliminate power user features in a way that those users will not see until its too late. "Developer" is already a subset of "power user", and "developer who reads the bug tracker for unwanted future surprises" is an even smaller subset.
If you think about, how this simplifies anything, you will start to understand the mess that is the FF codebase (not that chrome is noticeably better, particularly if you try and build it anywhere outside of ubuntu/x86_64).
It's not a mess, it's just a case of "not used by me, so remove it". Instead of improving the feature they let it rot away, like so many others, and then ignore that people still used it. Really sad.
No, it's not understandable at all. It might be understandable to have an option to display descriptions or not, but not remove altogether. Frankly, Firefox was, for a long time, the only major privacy-respecting browser. Heck, Tor Browser is still built on FF. By only caring about "telemetry" (i.e. random information sharing without the user having the ability to audit data prior to any transmission), and not caring about providing the best and most robust privacy-focused feature set, Firefox is actively cutting off a major part of its old user base, telling them that Firefox is not the browser which they originally installed anymore. Now, if the description data was being stored in plaintext and that data was being leaked, by all means, say that outright so we know that the devs screwed up again, remove the dangerous function, leave the data to the user (that part really kills me, btw - Mozilla is trying to delete information from my PC without my explicit consent), and put it in roadmap to reimplement in a more privacy-driven way.
That means, do not reveal information to any server - and I mean any - if I have a server on my network, don't let my user settings leak there. Do not rely on an external, insecure, website to do what your browser should. And all websites are insecure - I am not the only person to deal with the server from bare metal up, that means there are twice as many security risks as there are abstractions from me plugging my computer directly into that computer.
If you want "telemetry", give me a button in my options menu to compile the report, in human-readable plaintext, and then, only after I approve it, ask me to send that text file through sFTP to a server I can log into with a one-time username and password, with 1024bit encryption minimum. I would be okay with sending a monthly report, after having confirmed that it does in fact contain no information whatsoever that could be used to deanonymize me. Anything more than once a month per user is extreme, and means that the devs are being overloaded with data so they don't have time to manually code.
In that case, understandable they chose to remove them.