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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

No one likes to see features removed from something. But this seems really reasonable given alternatives and current usage. Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products.

Another favorite quote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision." I'm betting this hurt (though a brief search through the FF mailing lists didn't turn up anything), but it seems like a good strategic decision.

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"Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product. It's what you say no to, rather than what you say yes to, that lead to great products."

That doesn't apply in this case. Saying no would have meant they never added it to Firefox. They said yes and now they're removing it. I'm not sure who said it, but there's a saying along the lines of "If you force users to change, they go shopping."

Keep in mind that the definition of "great product" depends on the person. For the average user, a product that does what you want and keeps doing it is a great product, and anything else sucks.

They also said that the features are used by less than 0.01% of users. I assume this is based on their own telemetry. So they're really not forcing very many users to change at all.

They said 0.01% of sessions. Feed preview isn't something you expect to use every session.

No, they're just following the lure of analytics, to optimize things that should just be left alone.

> "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't a strategic decision."

I can't help but feel that's a silly quote. There are plenty of strategic decisions that don't hurt (especially choosing between two future directions, neither of which you have sunk costs in) and plenty of decisions which hurt and so you want to justify them as being strategic... when they might just be bad strategic decisions, or bad tactical decisions.

Honestly the quote sounds like what a bad manager says when they make a decision employees are against, when the employees are actually better-informed.

I agree the quote is too glib. But the charitable read I have is that a "strategic decision" by definition is a choice between options that each have some pros and cons. If you end up feeling purely happy about a decision, the alternatives you discarded must have had no upsides for you to feel a shred of regret about. The quote doesn't specify the magnitude of "hurt," after all.

>Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product.

Decisions like this are making Firefox an inferior product. Proxy API are terrible post-Quantum, so there's no decent Proxy switching addon. Tab Groups are gone, existing plugins are way inferior. Every feature they remove is replaced by way inferior workarounds which make browsing a pain.

>Tough decisions like this are the way you end up with a great product

Mozilla have been making "tough decisions" for the past 3 years but they haven't been able to even create a semblance of a "great product".

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