A built in screenshot tool? It's like Mozilla saw chrome's built in screen sharing and said "we're Mozilla, anything you can do, we can do better, including browser bloat".
And somehow people still wonder why Safari is so popular for Mac users.
And somehow people still wonder why Safari is so popular for Mac users.
After actually trying it out, however, it quickly became my favorite screenshot tool for web content due to its awesome UX made possible by having full access to the actual DOM of the page it takes screenshots of, namely things like being able to index all text in screenshots to allow you to search through them, and being able to intelligently limit the screenshot area to specific elements when you click on them. OS level screenshot tools simply can't offer an experience like this.
Test Pilot is, at least in part, a program intended to let us develop ideas in the open without the cost and complexity of shipping to millions of Firefox users. Whether or not you choose to install these experiments is entirely discretionary.
How are the two at all related?
I only mentioned screen sharing because of the comment about Chrome's sharing feature (of which I was unaware, but will check out).
At the very least you have to agree that any amount of time spent on "bloat" features take away time that could be spent on improving energy efficiency.
Most users didn't care that Google Chrome had become a CPU and RAM dog the last few years. They cared that their favorite websites worked. Period.
Please recognize that while you want things like energy and RAM efficiencies to the hilt, this isn't what most users care about or even know how to detect/measure. Realistically speaking, how often are you in a spot where a power outlet isn't available? Most trains and planes these days have power outlets, and any of the popular browsers give you about 4-hours on a full charge. What's the beef?
Could it be that you want Mozilla to focus on your agenda as opposed to listening to their core user group? If yes, then by all means complain away. Otherwise, laud them for trying something new to entice users to use their browser vs. the competition.
A web browser is inherently designed to browse the web, and display pages. Practically every OS in recent history has the screenshot capability, and almost all of them can run client-server type applications that allow functionality like screen-sharing, SSH, etc.
But somehow Chrome and then Mozilla have decided that their browsers should become these giant monoliths of largely existing user functionality. Remember when Microsoft tied Windows Update to MSIE. Nobody was claiming that was a good fucking idea, were they?
> News flash: users want features
News flash: users want things to be fast, secure and not kill their battery.
> Most users didn't care that Google Chrome had become a CPU and RAM dog the last few years.
[Citation needed].
> Please recognise that while you want things like energy and RAM efficiencies to the hilt, this isn't what most users care about or even know how to detect/measure.
"My computer is slow/hot/loud/lasts just 2 hours instead of 7 on battery when using Chrome" is very much something a non-technical user can determine quite easily.
> Realistically speaking, how often are you in a spot where a power outlet isn't available?
Battery life is just one advantage of energy efficiency. Have you felt how hot a laptop can get when it's chewing a lot of CPU cycles for an extended amount of time? More energy in = more heat out.
> Otherwise, laud them for trying something new to entice users to use their browser vs. the competition.
Um, no. Firefox started out as lean, high performance competition to MSIE, just after Safari was launched by Apple. The original trigger was SOFTWARE BLOAT in the Mozilla suite, the features of which were still more related than what Google and Mozilla have added lately. At some point that goal of being a high performance standards-compliant web browser has apparently fallen away in favour of a keeping-up-with-the-joneses approach against Chrome.
Chrome's reason for existence is to allow Google more control over their revenue source. If they don't have a browser they control, they can't push whatever new technology they decide will make their business do better.
Part of Google's business is continually pushing the concept that user's don't need an OS that runs apps locally - everything can be in a browser (i.e. ChromeOS/Chrome browser with its kitchen sink approach to functionality)
So while Google's reasoning is not commendable (fuck the user experience, we need people to buy into our business model) their logic in pushing every possible feature into Chrome at least is understandable, if not agreeable.
Mozilla has no business case to artificially "encourage" reliance on a web browser for all user functionality, so why give up the hedgehog approach (do one thing, and do it fucking excellently) for whatever the fuck they're doing now?
But as a developer I don't like the new tool.
Users always manage to crop out the pertinent information. As a dev I want to see body, not a cut of a visible part of it.
That's why the gcli tool was great, capturing the whole render even stuff below the fold is useful.
However it wasnt easy for users so people never used it. They had a chance to change that but haven't really.
In an earlier version of Page Shot we took a capture of the DOM at the same time as the screenshot, and so the screenshot meant "look at this" while we had an archival version of the page as the full context. Unfortunately the DOM capture didn't make it into the first release, and so we no longer have that context; we'll probably bring it back in the future, but maybe not as a combined product.