Opportunity Sizing: Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
blog.harterrt.com
blog.harterrt.com
Certainly marketing people care about the net promoter score, and it would be good to have an idea how its changes affect growth.
Mainstream users don't care about any of it. The only reason Firefox or even Netscape were ever mainstream was because they were undeniably better than alternatives. User advocates got the word out, but it was the clear advantages carried the day.
Now that browsers are all mostly the same for the laymen there's no reason to change the default. Or if they change it's only to whatever's most familiar.
I also don't quite get people's attachment to FTP. FTP has always been a horrible protocol and only relatively tolerable back before the Internet got so widespread. The moment one went from a modem to say, DSL, one would quickly bump into the horrors of FTP under NAT. And even before then, FTP sometimes screw up hours of downloading with ASCII mode.
FTP is clearly a protocol made for command-line comfort, and was never a good fit for something like a web browser anyway. The directory listing is an atrocity because it's made for human eyes and requires a dozen different parsers for automation depending on variety. The mess with the passive/ASCII stuff requires the user to understand those are things that exist and what they may want. And the hacky anonymous download access was achieved by giving the user instructions in the login banner.
All those things are really not suitable for anything that aims to make it simple to download on click.
GUIs did not exist when FTP was made. Frankly, the concept of user accounts didn't either, so the anonymous access hack was a product of its time and not an intentional design decision.
I am confused though, because FTP being a protocol means it is fairly standardized in terms of commands and expected output right? Are there FTP servers that spat out wildly different responses to typical commands? Because if so, SMTP/POP3 should suffer from the same thing, but I don't recall many email client developers complaining about it.
That's because it was made to be shown to a human using a commandline client, and wasn't intended to be parsed. As a result, a FTP client like Firefox needs to parse about a dozen possible versions, plus there's a standard for actual machine-readable listings that may still not be universally supported.
Anonymous access was typically announced in the welcome message, with something along the lines of "Login as user ftp, pass ftp for anonymous access". Again, made for humans reading that.
And besides that, it has annoying design quirks like that "download done" is just closing the socket.
My point is that FTP is a remarkably annoying protocol for something like Firefox to implement. It involves figuring out how to parse stuff that wasn't made to be parsed, guessing common anonymous account names and passwords, and dealing with ASCII/binary active/passive modes. The nature of a program like Firefox clashes with the protocol badly.
Proper GUI clients show all the messages the FTP server is producing because sometimes it's just a necessity. It's always possible that there will be something the client won't be able to deal with automatically.
You appear to have a choice between a browsers with feature parity, except one of them supports your privacy more.
Like "this type of reasoning" is what happens whenever you reach a point where you get resource constrained (even Chrome/Chromium has to pick how to allocate their resources). Eventually you need to pick what to work on, and what to keep maintaining.
To be honest the main reason I have to keep Firefox as my default browser is that I'm used to the developer tools and I like them better than Chrome's. But it's gotten to the point where I have to tell myself that it wouldn't make any sense to drop those, but I thought the same when they dropped all the other features, so I find it harder and harder to stay optimistic.
I haven't used Brave at all. I can appreciate wanting the ad-blocker being built in. I guess I've been using ad-block add-ons since... they first existed (I remember being excited about FF 2.0), so I'm actually kinda leary of built in ad-blockers (alignment of interests and all), but I can also appreciate with Brave is trying to do with BAT and all.
I guess I naturally stick with FF (despite being annoyed by many of their changes) since I can (or at least I think I do) appreciate the magnitude of what they're trying to do, as well as the realize that while it's okay to hold them to a higher standard, what it feels like is that a lot of people hold FF/Mozilla to a really high standard, and then Chrome/Chromium to different (typically lower) standard, and when FF comes short of their high standards, they just switch to Chrome/Chromium without actually directly comparing the two browsers to each other. Like if FF can't be the fantasy magical piece of software they want, they may as well just use Chrome/Chromium.
Rant over.
I hope FF keeps the dev-tools. I'd be in a pickle too if they went away.
Same thing with premature, or otherwise unnecessary, optimization. Sometimes it's just fun!
In OP's situation, it sounds like their counterpart is trying to argue that this project is a "good thing to do" for the user/system. In reality, it's a bit of code hygiene that makes it more fun to do work (still important [1]).
That dissonance hides the true value of the work and makes it difficult to reason about.
a bad manager would.
But also, an engineer capable of this is basically CxO material - which threatens said manager's career progress!
This is a really good (initial) framework for thinking about what new features should or should not be built.
But I would advise against using it (alone) as a tool for deciding which existing features should be removed (as other readers suggest may be happening).
With new features, it's a binary choice - build or not.
With existing features, there is a third choice - continue development, stop development (but maintain), or remove feature. Removing features has costs that might not be worth the savings.
Google lost a lot of goodwill over the last few years by unceremoniously dropping products. Mozilla, over the last year or so, seems to be making some of the same mistakes.
Chromium is terrible enough that users don't really have an alternative - at the moment. But goodwill is really hard to get back after it's been squandered.