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Comment by ersii | Hacker News Reader

Will "Page Shot" be a removable addon or would it be forced upon us like the Pocket integration was at first?

Page Shot, like all features in Test Pilot is opt in. We have no plans to force anything on anyone. A big part of why we built test pilot in the first place was to give us a platform to test UX without going all 'Leeroy Jenkins' on Firefox users every time we come up with a new idea.

That's great, thanks for elaborating - I had missed checking out what "Test Pilot" actually was.

That said, what will happen to Page Shot if it's deemed a good/decent UX and it's graduation time? Will it be an installable addon? Pre-shipped? Baked in?

I guess it's something to be decided in the future, yet it makes me curious today.

why would you want to remove that feature? i mean, you can probably remove the button to be out of sight easily. if it does nothing when you're not using it, what's the deal?

Don't need it, don't want it. I want a lean, fast, secure & efficient web browser. Not a screenshot tool. I already have one of those.

well, but people usually don't ask for making e.g. the print feature optional because they don't use it and want a lean browser... i mean, you need to draw a line somewhere, sure, but different people will draw it differently.

The 'print' feature is a platform-provided thing. Firefox isn't shipping printer drivers or a printer UI. It simply gives the OS printing subsystem content the user wants to print.

Funnily enough the platform also provides a screenshot system. From another comment it seems like this was driven mostly by user feedback from Windows users, because the ~3 different ways of doing a print screen on Windows are not sufficient and they demand more.

And giving the OS printing subsystem the content the user wants to print requires thousands lines of code in Firefox. Thousands of lines of code many people don't need, while many others do. Just like with any other feature. My parents don't need bookmarks or even tabs, so should we get rid of them in Firefox?

Btw. the screenshot tool of Windows can't capture a webpage properly, only the visible area.

Agreed a line has to be drawn. For me: remove print, remove bookmarks, keep tabs.

That's actually not a bad idea.

The browser already renders the page, it's a pretty small step to saving it as an image. After all, there's already a screenshot tool in the developer tools.

Does your screenshot tool let you capture whole webpages, or just what's in the viewport at the current moment?

All these tools are lazy loaded and don't affect browser speed when disabled. The most you're complaining about is the existance of a small bit of extra code in the Firefox download.

What bothers me is that they have engineers working on this extra fluff. Meanwhile UI bugs I reported years ago go unaddressed. It is not a good sign.

This isn't fluff, these are features that a lot of people want.

Link to the UI bug? Sometimes things fall between the cracks.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705744

You don't have to use it.

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