Sometimes developers include many features in an app with the best intentions. After all having many features can only be a good thing as it expands how useful the app is, and how it could potentially appeal to a wider audience. However sometimes in reality, not all features of an app is used, and sometimes it might prove more trouble than it’s worth to maintain.
According to a report from VentureBeat, it seems that this is something the developers at Mozilla have decided with regards to two features of Firefox. So much so that they will be removing them in the future. The features are tab groups and complete themes, so if you do enjoy those features now, maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to update to future Firefox builds.
In case their names weren’t obvious, tab groups basically allows users to group tabs into groups. For example if you have tabs open for flight ticket search, and other tabs for hotels, you could group them as such thus making them easier to view and remove the clutter in the process.
As for complete themes, these are basically themes that users can apply to Firefox to give it an extensive makeover. Speaking to VentureBeat, Dave Camp, Firefox’s director of engineering explained why they are removing the feature. “Complete themes are deeply tied to XUL, which we’ve announced our plans to deprecate for add-ons. They also require significant investment to support, both for theme developers and Firefox developers. We are exploring ways to enhance theme support in Firefox so that we provide the functionality of complete themes our users want in a way that is simpler to develop and maintain.”