Mozilla Firefox 45 Now Available

[schmidtbag]

they are not, but they are working on it.
Tab grouping was a brilliant feature.

Tab grouping was nice but in my opinion, it wasn't very intuitive. There are extensions that are better. For example:

http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en#features

[Ericg]

For what it's worth, a developer stepped up and released an addon that brings back the TabGroups. Useful for those who actually use the feature. It's also nice for those (like me) who don't, and therefore don't need this in core.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/

[Apopas]

I still don't see why it was removed. It's pretty useful on desktop.

The external plugin is based in the same code and has the same functionality.

[Guest]

I still don't see why it was removed. It's pretty useful on desktop.

Official rationale was that their telemetry said that only minor part of userbase was using it (< 1%) and that there were several open bugs on issue tracker that nobody was willing to fix. I agree with you on usefulness, quite frankly I can't imagine myself not useing it anymore, grouping stuff together is just how my brain works.
Plus I use it together with pentadactyl for GUI-less firefox (I have bound panorama to F1 and apart from it, I rarely use any gui elements so they are basically just wasted pixels where content should be).

[bug77]

Because it wasn't used and needed resources to be maintained

I think it's used more than Hello.

The external plugin is based in the same code and has the same functionality.

It's still essentially the same as deprecating, since they only moved it to a plugin because it was already unmaintained. Sadly, as much as I like Firefox, it becomes increasingly more apparent they don't have the resources to stay on top any more.

[jacob]

currently firefox is the worst browser.

I agree that it's the worst of the major browsers except MSIE, Chrome, Safari and Opera

[klapaucius]

currently firefox is the worst browser.

can you elaborate on that?

[dimko]

Tab grouping was nice but in my opinion, it wasn't very intuitive. There are extensions that are better. For example:
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treest...ml.en#features

I'd like as few extentions as possible. It may have not been intuitive, but it was good, so why remove it?
It's like saying, this new radio in car, while was nice, not everyone knew how to use it, so we removed it all together.(with no replacement)

[schmidtbag]

I'd like as few extentions as possible. It may have not been intuitive, but it was good, so why remove it?
It's like saying, this new radio in car, while was nice, not everyone knew how to use it, so we removed it all together.(with no replacement)

Understood. I'm not saying it should have been removed because there was a better option, what I'm saying is it doesn't matter if it's removed because there is a better option (and a free one, at that). I'm not sure if they had a good reason to remove it.

For the record - Firefox gained popularity because of extensions. Sure, you're not obligated to add them but on modern PCs, most extensions don't hurt performance in any measurable way. Using your car radio analogy, that's like getting a car where it's sound system has nothing but an aux jack or a USB port, and you decide to use neither. Normally, I would say to use Opera, since almost every nice feature we use today (including tab grouping) was a built-in feature that they started, but nowadays Opera lacks many of their own ideas and isn't innovative like they used to be.

[Zan Lynx]

It's still essentially the same as deprecating, since they only moved it to a plugin because it was already unmaintained. Sadly, as much as I like Firefox, it becomes increasingly more apparent they don't have the resources to stay on top any more.

Some Firefox devs are working on Rust and Servo. Once Servo is done, Firefox will be light years ahead of all the others.