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Comment by jjordan | Hacker News Reader

Is this the version that kills Live Bookmarks? Some of us FF old-timers are hopelessly reliant on these things, and it's, as far as I have found, the fastest way to quickly scan lists of headlines from all your favorite sites at once. Seriously, one click and you can quickly mouse over the sites on your bookmarks toolbar to consume hundreds of headlines.

I really, REALLY hate that they're killing this feature, but this addon promises to restore it: https://www.ghacks.net/2018/07/30/livemarks-restores-live-bo...

Edit: here's the official GitHub: https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/

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> but this addon promises to restore it

Mozilla did the same with tab groups, then the addon was abandoned. The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.

[abraham simpson voice] It'll happen to you too! [/abraham simpson voice] /jk

> Mozilla did the same with tab groups, then the addon was abandoned.

Wouldn't that indicate that the extension was not that widely used, and as such Mozilla were correct in removing it from the central codebase?

“Not that widely used" is an incredibly elastic term. When you axe twenty "5% features" your worst case is offending 100% of your users.

Which can be worth it depending on what you trade it for. I really liked the tab group feature but the new extension API is vastly more secure and can (probably) be extended to allow for most addons.

At Mozzila they need to prioritize many different things and I can understand how a constant push to make the browser leaner is foundamental. (especially in cases like RSS feeds)

It's true that it wasn't widely used, but it seems as if Mozilla did their best to make it that way. It wasn't exposed to the user by default, but instead was hidden as something you could get to by the toolbar customization screen, so you had to modify the toolbar to even get access to the feature.

I don't think most people even knew it was there.

Just like RSS in modern versions, and just like tab groups they will be removing it too.

The addon was abandoned by its author because Mozilla was making major changes to the addon API at the time. Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk, not to mention it made threading/parallelizing the browser hard. The new extension API removed a lot of that freedom. After the API change, it wasn't possible (and might still not be) to develop a useful tab groups addon with the new API, so the author ceased development.

I can't imagine Mozilla crippling the addon API to the point where it can't grab data off an RSS feed and display it.

> Extensions used to have carte blanche to change the browser, which was a security risk …

I don't buy that. It's my browser running on my computer, it's my choice whose code I choose to run on it.

If, say, emacs or vi had this kind of handholding, neither one would be much more than a text editor.

Emacs and vi are used by programmers. Browsers are used by nearly every single person on the Internet. The threat model is completely different.

Time for a developers only Browser! Anyone wants to grab that? :)

Qutebrowser and next browser are both quite programmer-focused. They are WebKit based, however.

qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine, which is based on Chromium/Blink - I wouldn't call that WebKit anymore ;-)

I was probably wrong about next too, then. Still, they both hail from the Steve Jobs school of blurry fonts, which is all any sane person tries to avoid in a web browser ; )

Emacs or vi don't handle potentially malicious third-party code...

Sure they do. That's what extensions are.

That’s like saying everyone is at risk of bear attacks because a few people in rural areas do get attacked. Yes, extensions exist but when was the last time someone clicked on a link in an email and installed an emacs extension? That happens daily to thousands of web users because the population is so many orders of magnitude greater.

> The replacement that is compatible with the new form of extension isn't able to unload the tabs, just hide them, which undoes most of the performance benefits.

I believe this information is out of date. Firefox 58 brought extension developers the ability to unload tabs: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1322485

And Totally Not Panorama takes advantage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/basic-panoram...

FWIW, Tree Style Tab solved tab groups (and more) for me.

I wish tab handling had a first-class API in Firefox, so that different tab managers could interact with the default tab menu, etc.

Also:

Firefox 64 introduces an entirely new API, browser.menus.overrideContext, which allows complete customization of the context menu shown within add-on content like sidebars, popups, etc.

This is illustrated right in the post by my favorite pain point, the Tree Stye Tab custom tab menu mixing with the regular tab menu.

Finally!

> FWIW, Tree Style Tab solved tab groups (and more) for me.

Yes, but I don't really want tree-styled tabs, I want tab groups :P The interface is vastly different.

I added Livemarks. It helps, but it's still missing a critical feature of the old extension- the icon showing which RSS links you've already visited. That'll be added at some point at least:

https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/issues/17

Still, this update felt particularly user hostile. My user experience was:

- I'm in the middle of browsing and open a tab to do a search, but the new tab shows the "Firefox needs to restart because updates are more important than you!“ page.

- I'm forced to restart. Manually, since the automatic restart is probably broken on my system. Tab state in some SPA tabs are lost.

- Now I have to migrate my live bookmarks. They converted themselves to regular bookmarks- I have to right click and delete those one by one. Then I install Livemarks, import the exported bookmarks data, and then drag those one by one to my bookmarks toolbar.

I'm half considering Chrome. If Firefox is going to be like this, why bother? Might as well start the Chrome dominance and stagnation part of the browser cycle.

After installing the update it opens this page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/live-bookmarks-migratio...

arrrr... what they don't realize when they review their telemetry data is that most people that use this feature have turned off sharing telemetry data. Combine that with the fact that they haven't advertised the feature in the past decade and it leads to devs thinking nobody uses it.

This is why I tend to leave telemetry data on. :)

.. now if only Google had used that to notice the things I like about Inbox and keep them :-(

Then perhaps you can see why telemetry is useful to responsible companies like Firefox, and maybe people who disable it have no right to complain about decisions based off telemetry data?

This is a fascinatingly coercive take on the privacy / observability tradeoff.

No, this is supporting direct feedback. How can mozzila know which features are useful in your opinion? how should they know that you wanted [feature X]?

Maybe they are also in the wrong if the telemetry is excessive, but the alternative is to never deprecate any feature ever.

They could ask.

And receive answers like, "A faster horse."

Telemetry can tell you which features someone uses. It doesn't tell you why.

They could ask slightly more focused questions than "what would you like?".

Better than keep removing features and reasons to use Firefox from some of their loyalest users, even if they are a minority. User retention seems Mozilla's largest issue at the moment now they're down under 10%.

Ask who? Power users? Then the only signal they would get is "every feature is used by everyone". That's worthless 'data'. Telemetry is the only way mozilla could possibly collect real data.

Then perhaps you can see why using telemetry is irresponsible.

when google recently made chrome automatically sign-in once you login to a google site, i read one of their technical managers basically say, "all our data shows users care more about the convenience than the privacy" -- i thought exactly that.

The usage stats from telemetry showed a 0.01% usage rate. Even if 99% of people that used the Live Bookmarks feature disabled telemetry that implies that 99% of Firefox users did not use the feature.

Well, Firefox killed the RSS button on the URL bar a while ago now (bring it back with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/), so AFAIK there has been absolutely nothing to indicate the feature even existed for years now.

Also, 0.01% of a big number is still a big number, and given the state of the feature, that number is likely to include a lot of long-time users.

According to Mozilla's statistics, 0.01% amounts to only 80'000 browser installs that use live bookmarks. That's not a big number and it's easy to find features that more people care about (ie multi-tab selection).

When resources are constrained you have to make decisions about what features you'll continue to develop and which to cut out. Live bookmarks was cut out. Mozilla devs have also mentioned that this feature is ancient code and would have required a lot of coding effort to bring up to date.

I'm sure if you were to invest the time to reimplement live bookmarks with modern code and with the internal restructuring in the browser in mind and you'd volunteer to maintain it and fix all filed bugs, they'd accept it.

It's really weird to apparently be personally part of a 0.01% group. I feel that usage rate must be suspect- in some Firefox version they gave out live bookmarks by default, and surely more than 1 in 10,000 people still have those. Do we know what the telemetry actually measured?

Given how long ago it is since live bookmarks were a feature they made obvious, or called attention to in any way, in the default install, that's not so surprising.

They removed the visibility years ago, then progressive updates made them ever less visible, including hiding then removing RSS notification. Once the first step was taken, the route to removal was set, including the telemetry figures.

If they were as visible as pocket, perhaps as visible as pocket stories on new tabs, usage would be hugely higher.

I upgraded and instantly regretted it, as usual.

You can use firefox ESR until it too gets phased out: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

I am a _huge_ RSS user (TinyTiny-RSS) but I don't think enough people used these features to continue supporting them. Plus, I really do not want my web browser to be an RSS reader. Have you considered moving to a dedicated RSS reader ?

Whats wrong with just using a proper RSS client?

Nothing's "wrong" with it, but I have yet to find one that allows me to read more headlines in a shorter time than Live Bookmarks.

The best thing about RSS reader in Firefox for me was the fact it blended perfectly with bookmarks feature - it was easy to reach especially when you had bookmarks bar enabled. The way it displayed content also suited me - I didn't have to break my browsing flow to open another tab like in Presto-based Opera or special feed with summaries like in Safari; links in form of bookmarks changing titles were absolutely best.

A web browser today is essentially an Internet-facing client-side operating system. You are suggesting to use something that runs outside this OS. (Just pointing out.)

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