Firefox - No More Tab Groups [2015 - 2019]

I'm asking for a lot of suspension of disbelief when making an analogy like that.

For LibreOffice, the OpenOffice project came under control of Oracle due to them buying Sun Microsystems (so that Oracle put its hands on Java, sparc, mysql and a number of other assets). Oracle is regarded as ridiculously evil company and doesn't care much for open source (first thing they did is killing off OpenSolaris and making new development of the famed Solaris operating system closed again)

So, at least 90%, perhaps all OpenOffice.org developers fled and carried on under a new umbrella.
It's as if Mozilla were taken over by the Church of Scientology or something. Developers would run away and reform a new Mozilla, there would be a bit of chaos as you have to tell everyone to use LibreFox or whatever it's called (linux distros will switch to it immediately) but besides the financial and PR disaster, the browser might be able to survive.
 
Blazkowicz said:
For LibreOffice, the OpenOffice project came under control of Oracle due to them buying Sun Microsystems (so that Oracle put its hands on Java, sparc, mysql and a number of other assets). Oracle is regarded as ridiculously evil company and doesn't care much for open source (first thing they did is killing off OpenSolaris and making new development of the famed Solaris operating system closed again)

So, at least 90%, perhaps all OpenOffice.org developers fled and carried on under a new umbrella.
Click to expand...

LibreOffice originated from go-oo.org/go-OO which was started in 2005 and picked up more developers and users in the late 00s. Oracle bought Sun in late 2009. To my knowledge not many previous Sun/StarOffice employees are active in the LibreOffice community.
 
From vivaldi's web page

Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling
Do you tend to keep many tabs open in your browser? Organize the view using Tab Stacking. This feature lets you group multiple tabs into one. Just drag a tab over to another for an uncomplicated grouping. With Tab Stack Tiling, you can display multiple tabs side by side or in a grid layout. Through multiple tab stacks that are tiled, you have multiple desktops, which you can switch between with a single click. More power to you!

https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en
 
I'm having flashbacks to Java Applets and Flash pages whenever someone tries to bring yet another fraking standard to "the web". It all deserves to die in huge ball of fire.
 
I'm torn on this : there's obviously a huge benefit in making code execution faster (and maybe less crashy and memory hungry on large applications). The only problem I have with it is if you make use of a resource more efficient, use of that resource may increase significantly.

E.g., a friend called to help because Google Maps is slow as molasses on a netbook (or 11.6" laptop), this would help here, though switching to another mapping service will do (or even Google Earth)
 
browser makers stop giving people tools they can abuse
its a browsers job to display webpages (text,graphics, audio,video) that's it
 
...so they killed off permissive Add-ons because they are a safety risk but now they're going to allow any code from the web to run?!? o_O:mad::runaway:
 
Davros said:
browser makers stop giving people tools they can abuse
its a browsers job to display webpages (text,graphics, audio,video) that's it
Click to expand...

The video element is much newer than Javascript. But you can disable Javascript in most browsers if you do not want to use the functions it enable.
 
hoom said:
...so they killed off permissive Add-ons because they are a safety risk but now they're going to allow any code from the web to run?!? o_O:mad::runaway:
Click to expand...

Do you know anything about the state of the modern web and the browsers we use to access it?
 
tuna said:
The video element is much newer than Javascript. But you can disable Javascript in most browsers if you do not want to use the functions it enable.
Click to expand...

Originally the video HTML tag was supposed to just work, not require anything in particular and even allow to save the video at will instead of viewing it.
This was back when noone agreed on codecs and Mozilla supported ogg theora, which is 100% free but is rather bad. Suffice to say I don't think I ever used that kind of HTML5 video, perhaps it's very rarely, infrequently available. And, I think it only allows play/pause, volume and download, but nothing else. No changing of bitrate and resolution on the spot for instance.

Also, you would be stuck with the browser's controls if you went that route.
So, in the end maybe HTML5 video without javascript would be great but it lacks a few things. Especially there's no "branding" with the playback controls, or any features at all like overlaid crap, switching to a next video, interrupting your playback for your "customer experience improvement", etc. Perhaps subtitles are not supported, which could be in the standard if need be.
So, mix of technical and political reasons as they don't release want to provide you a youtube of a porn site etc. that doesn't work with ads (unless you bake them into the video) and allow trivial downloading with a right click.

Can see an example of HTML5 vid that works without any javascript there :
https://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_video.asp
There is a way it's used in the real world though, looping webm video that replaces animated gif - gif that are full blown short video do actually are much bigger and slower than an equivalent video clip.
 
So it seems Mozilla ppl have realised they were being pretty stupid about this, are working on implementing some new APIs to allow various plugins to actually be portable to WebExtensions, including TabGroups :cool:

Interesting to note that the new version of Edge in Win10 Creators Update implements a Set Aside Tabs function.
Its well short of TabGroups but its a step towards it & shows recognition that a modern Browser does need proper tools for managing lots of tabs, not stripping them out.
 
That's great news.

Edge's tabs were a nightmare when W10 was new. Crashes would throw away tabs. You couldn't scroll to see newly opened tabs once you reached about 20 tabs.

It has reached the stage where crashing Edge doesn't take the tabs out (been like that for a couple of months now). Firefox is extremely resilient by comparison, though I have had to restore my entire Firefox profile from a backup twice in the last 4 or 5 years.

The visual preview of tabs in Edge, as you "page" through them is nice, but with lots of tabs I prefer the simple long list that Firefox has. And of course, being able to perform a search.

I doubt Edge will go as far as grouping tabs. If you have multiple browser windows open, I think "close all" and then re-opening Edge will restore the multiple browser windows, including each having the set of tabs it had before. So that's sort of grouping. Hard to trust and requires correct shut down procedure, so not meaningfully viable.
 
Hmm, further reading looks like the same senior devs basically giving it the ol' .|.. ..|. :cry:
 
Actually, just tried shutting down Edge and it didn't restore tabs when I re-opened. A set-aside tab survived one restart and then total failure. So Edge is back to fucking useless with tabs
 
It's not long now until Firefox 57 comes and makes a lot of fantastic extensions unusable. I have tried looking for alternatives but it seems the extensions I use are mostly un-portable to WebExtensions.

It's depressing really and Mozilla won't be swayed. It barrels on, bobbing in the river that goes to a big waterfall. I'm not sure I want to take that ride, but I don't really see any good alternatives.

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/07/07/firefox-add-ons-webextensions-state-july-2017/
 
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