this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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TL;DR: They added a stupid chatbot feature. Fuck Mozilla as of late.
For clarity: they added an opt-in experimental sidebar that you can put a chatbot of your choice into.
Fair enough. They added an opt-in experimental sidebar that you can put a chatbot of your choice into instead of working on anything more pressing.
Yeah, except everyone in the community disagrees on what that "more pressing" thing is. I am waiting impatiently for tab groups, but I know some people are holding their breaths for vertical tabs (which I couldn't care less about). I think they should implement ActivityPub and RSS readers natively, but some people are bored by that entire idea.
Meanwhile, Google is putting AI features into Chrome, expanding the expectation that those features will be in any browser; which can impact adoption if they're not in Firefox, too.
Mozilla has to balance their development between the priorities of multiple types of existing users but also their potential future users. I don't envy the decision-making process.
These are things that add-ons can do. I like sidebery very much for the purpose of tabs grouping.
Vertical tabs, ActivityPub, and RSS yes; but while Sidebery makes tabs vertical, it can't actually do grouping on the existing tab bar. Actually, no add-on can touch the tab bar (other than getting rid of it, I think; though that just might be via userchrome css). If they opened up the tab bar for add-ons to fiddle with, I am sure that a decent tab grouping add-on would come out in minutes.
I'm apparently an old curmudgeon about tabs being on the top of the screen, so anything that moves the tabs to the sidebar is kind of a nonstarter for me. I think it's because I like to use my computer with multiple applications open side-by-side (or with a browser open on a vertical monitor), for which vertical tabs would take over too much real estate.
Anyway, they said they're working on tab grouping, so hopefully in that process they also give some more capabilities in that realm to add-ons.
Ah, of course. Personaly I like the vertical tabs because of the tree structure and different panels to hide even more.
By the way, have you tried floorp?
Not yet. Floorp and Midori are on my list to try out, but I just haven't had a chance to go through the setup and conversion process yet. Maybe someday.
To me this doesn't sound like a massive amount of work went into this, it's just a sidebar that displays a web page.
Pretty much the same thing happened with Pocket. "Why is Pocket integrated to Firefox?" "Well it's a project wholly owned by Mozilla. If you don't like it, you can just remove the button." "Well I still don't like it at all - can I remove it entirely to reclaim some of the bloat?" "What bloat? It's just a button and a few web API calls, disk/memory saving would be negligible."