Bookmarks and tabs are a good example of how easily you could accidentally step on the core userbases' toes. There are absolutely stellar tab and bookmark addons that essentially completely change how those systems work. They are also vastly more complex (but in a way that serves powerusers).
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.
The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Personally I think the solution is to treat mainline browsers like Firefox as reference implementations that several highly specialized forks are developed on top of. Only users with the most general/basic of needs would use the “vanilla” version of the browser, while everybody else would have a favorite fork that fits their needs very closely.
Arc and Zen are a decent example of this model in play. They’re very opinionated and not everybody’s cup of tea, but that’s fine, because there’s literally every other browser if something more conducive to general audiences is what you’re looking for. Browsers don’t need to be one size fits all and in fact I think are being held back by trying to be that way.
> The thing with extensions like Tree Style Tabs and Sidebery is that nice as they may be, they’re awkwardly bolted onto the browser’s UI and the best you as a user can do to try to fix that is to hack on your userchrome and then pray that your hacks won’t be broken in some upcoming browser update.
Now that firefox has native vertical tabs it's possible that the the integration can get better in the nearer future since I doubt the vertical tabs feature (which i haven't used yet) has tabs on the top AND side.
If firefox changes either feature in an attempt to get closer to those tools they risk breaking those very addons (leading to pissed off users and devs). Likewise if they change in another direction.
The only real solution that avoids that would be to promote some addons to first class implementations and allow you to mix and match them. But that of course increases maintenance burden permanently and even then it's likely to piss off some chunk of users.
Both tabs and bookmarks currently work well in the simple usecase and can be extended to the power users' use cases. There are unfortunately though a ton of other things that take priority over that. Namely rustifying code (to reduce maintenance burden and reduce bugs) and maintaining feature parity with chrome.