17 year old Firefox feature request fixed • Hacker News Board

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#201

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 8:58 AM UTC

fuzzy2 wrote: post #190

clankyclanker wrote: post #10

Good on them for actually tracking this feature request for over a decade and not just closing it after three weeks for “lack of interest.” Looking at you, every random GitHub project ever.

The downside is that Mozilla tracks thousands of open tickets, most of which are probably obsolete. But who is going to start now with reviewing stuff from 20 years ago? As much as it pains me (I’m still tracking multiple bugs I reported) to say this, but all tickets with no activity for some reasonable time period must simply be closed. Things are _already_ out of control.

That's too simplistic. What if it IS an issue, or what if it WILL be fixed, but because of priorities it's always bumped down the list? What do you then, bump it every few weeks?

No, any open source project needs someone (or multiple people) triaging tickets; either keep them open and make sure they are implemented in a reasonable time, or close them as a 'wontfix'.

Of course, then you'll have the issue of people opening up new tickets for the same thing, and the triagers will have to either point them to the old ticket, or the discussion about whether or not to do it has to be restarted.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#202

Post by ohgodplsno » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:00 AM UTC

Centigonal wrote: post #40

_jal wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I half-seriously suggested that a project I used to care about set up a cron job to delete requests older than a year automatically. The rationale was that they only did that sporadically every few years, when some other change mooted the issue. If they ignored feature requests on a schedule, it would better manage external expectations. See also, The CADT Model (but copy-paste the link in to your browser bar to avoi…

oh, I love jwz's HN DoS mitigation image.

Oh it's not DoS mitigation, he really just hates HNers. Completely understand him.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#203

Post by coldtea » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

That's what I love about FOSS!

If a program doesn't have the feature you like, it can always be added -- 17 years later.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#204

Post by dfgdghdf » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #171

dfgdghdf wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I click the address bar it's because I want to use the current tab to visit a new page, so select-all is perfect. I think they should make this configurable though, I can see both sides of it.

Ctrl-T and start typing is much faster than mousing the cursor up to the URL bar

But then I am left with a stale tab.

CTRL+L would be the shortcut, but often I browse without my hand on the keyboard, just the trackpad or mouse.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#205

Post by jobigoud » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:29 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #203

That's what I love about FOSS! If a program doesn't have the feature you like, it can always be added -- 17 years later.

I love this about the internet in general. It could have been possible for the person that implemented the change to be born after the request was even made. All the while the discussion thread was maintained alive, while that person would be going to school and learn to code.

Similarly you can post a very specific question on a forum and it's possible the person that will answer it casually many years later as if they were just continuing the discussion wasn't even born when you posted the question.

These extremely asynchronous interactions between strangers are something unique. I wonder what's the current record for longest lived discussion thread like this, or the question-answer pair with the longest interval. A bit like the open-ended questions in academia that are answered decades later.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#206

Post by jobigoud » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #103

gdrift wrote: post #45

One of the most voted for issues is closed WONTFIX: single click selects all in address bar and search box. I use Firefox exclusively and this is the single most annoying change they made for no apparent reason. So annoying. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621570 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?votes=133

> single click selects all in address bar and search box. FWIW, this is fixed in Firefox 3.6; you should probably upgrade.

This behavior is the bug. We would prefer the pre-3.6 behavior where the address bar and search box works like a normal textbox.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#207

Post by iFreilicht » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:40 AM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #96

wongarsu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand the tutorials I remember following back in the days were quite long and all in one page, while today those tend to be split into annoyingly many pages.

For more ad serves. F the modern web.

Nah, docs in general are just very big these days, it makes quite a bit of sense to not load all of them into one single page. I do like that I can search all of pandoc's documentation with just Ctrl+F, but that's not reasonable for all software. Heck, even man pages are split up into many pages for more complex tools.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#208

Post by iFreilicht » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:42 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #194

Good. Can we have webmidi next?

Don't we already? I thought I used that before.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#209

Post by bartvk » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #33

cle wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it's in progress. Also native "rubberband" scrolling in macOS is in progress as well. Excellent!

Making it also respect dark mode in alerts would be nice.

Yup, I'm waiting for that one as well. Open/save/print dialogs seem to be using native components, but I'm guessing they link to old versions of AppKit because they don't respect the system setting for dark mode either.

But all in all, I'm pretty happy with Firefox. This is a very minor thing for me.

Re: 17 year old Firefox feature request fixed

#210

Post by iFreilicht » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #115

evilpie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good timing! I actually fixed this 21 year old feature request: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 You can set browser.quitShortcut.disabled=true in about config starting with Firefox 87.

Whoa, that is incredible, thank you SO MUCH! I don't think I can explain the extent to which this simple papercut has been vicious and painful to me. So many times, I've started writing some long post in a text field and accidentally lost it due to pressing some wrong keyboard shortcut (oops, you pressed backspace outside a text field! oops, we bound this key to 'reload the page', oops you closed the form by pressing…

Oh god yes, backspace outside the text box is the worst. Some websites mitigate this themselves, but it would really be nice if the browser could take care of this.