im in ur bookmarks, deleting ur data September 24, 2018 5:32 PM Subscribe Firefox 62.0 removes bookmark descriptions from the UI. Go to Bookmarks, Show All Bookmarks. Notice anything missing? Firefox 62.
0 has removed the “Description” free-text field. This has been in the works for some time, as the long-standing existence of this data was flagged as a bug about a year ago. Currently, descriptions are only hidden in the UI; current plan is to delete them from the user’s bookmark database altogether in Firefox 64.0 on December 11, 2018.
Hat tip to this AskMe answer. If you use bookmark descriptions, you can use the “Export as HTML” function to save your data and make descriptions visible, though not directly editable. If there’s data in there that you need, export it now before Firefox 64 deletes it completely without warning or recourse. This change is necessary because having an extra text field in a database in the year 2018 is an unacceptable burden. posted by Huffy Puffy (101 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite I was ready to be angry and I started to be and then I got to the bottom of the linked bug report. “I think you misunderstand the nature of the problem, I can assure you we do understand it, after 10 years of maintenance of this specific code. This is not about removing the description field, it’s about removing the whole architecture behind it, that was misdesigned and exists just to cover this feature that can be easily (and better) be reimplemented in an add-on, or in Firefox itself, but with a better architecture.” And having supported some warty software in my time I can really appreciate that perspective.
In the end it seems like they are trying to support the core use in a more performant way: “And yes, this architectural choice can cause multi-second (or even multi minutes) hangs in the UI, plus slowing down EVERY bookmark operation, and when you have users with 80 THOUSANDS bookmarks, you can probably understand what it means.” posted by scamander at 5:51 PM on September 24 [ 13 favorites ] Descriptions are a minor feature of bookmarks, they are fetched from the page at the bookmarking time and can be manually edited by the user Was this a common thing? I gave up on browser bookmarking after Safari updates borked them like they were iTunes libraries. posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 5:59 PM on September 24 [ 1 favorite ] I’m so hardcore I delete the bookmark name too. All I have is a line of favicons in the bookmarks toolbar, and that’s how I like it.
posted by scruss at 6:13 PM on September 24 [ 28 favorites ] 80,000 bookmarks ain’t nothin’. I got 80,000 tabs. Take that Firefox! posted by M-x shell at 6:15 PM on September 24 [ 7 favorites ] In my FF it has Name/Location/Tags/Keyword. So what of those is being removed? posted by cashman at 6:16 PM on September 24 I got 80,000 tabs. Take that Firefox! This kills the Firefox posted by edeezy at 6:16 PM on September 24 [ 15 favorites ] I get the argument behind it, but it would be nice if they could warn people and/or automatically export the info before deleting the data entirely.
(And I don’t even use this feature.) posted by Rhaomi at 6:17 PM on September 24 [ 6 favorites ] Or just sign up for Pinboard. posted by PhineasGage at 6:30 PM on September 24 [ 9 favorites ] I use the descriptions for practically everything I take the time to bookmark unless the link name itself is sufficiently descriptive to cause me to remember why I bookmarked something in the first place.
posted by bz at 6:32 PM on September 24 [ 4 favorites ] I read that same comment about “misunderstanding the nature of the problem” and it just left me more annoyed. It seems deeply disingenuous to argue that the only two choices are to delete user data or maintain the old architecture forever. That same comment even says they could easily reimplement the feature in Firefox itself. They have have the option of migrating user data to a new system! I’ve worked on some steaming piles of tech debt, too, and migrating data from the old system to a new one can be a pain.
It might not be a good trade-off in terms of time spent, but we don’t know because they ignore that option. It sucks when you have a bug that loses someone’s data. But deciding to delete their data without even a proactive warning is something else.
That’s just so user-hostile, and the way it’s approached here feels like trying to sneak that decision in by the back door.
posted by duien at 6:34 PM on September 24 [ 23 favorites ] Sorry, I just read back through my comment and realized it might sound like I’m mad at your comment, scamander. I’m only mad at Mozilla. posted by duien at 6:38 PM on September 24 [ 2 favorites ] I’m so hardcore I delete the bookmark name too. All I have is a line of favicons in the bookmarks toolbar, and that’s how I like it.
I thought I was the only one. posted by pemberkins at 7:15 PM on September 24 [ 5 favorites ] That’s just so user-hostile, and the way it’s approached here feels like trying to sneak that decision in by the back door.
Mozilla keeps pulling this shit. If people didn’t learn the last time they broke user profiles and lost data, or the last time they sunsetted features used by a whole swath of add-ons, people probably won’t learn now. To me, Chrome is like democracy: the worst system in the world except for all the others. posted by tclark at 7:25 PM on September 24 [ 5 favorites ] And Mozilla could be (and has been) brilliant. But they need new leadership post haste. And I volunteer, no shit.
There are not a whole lot of major companies or groups where I personally and honestly believe I could do a better job than the incompetents that run the joint. That list includes Twitter and Mozilla.
posted by tclark at 7:27 PM on September 24 To me, Chrome is like democracy: the worst system in the world except for all the others. posted by MikeKD at 7:32 PM on September 24 [ 23 favorites ] Was this a common thing? There are still a handful of features like that still rattling around in Firefox from the old days – things almost nobody uses, but the people who use them at all care about it a lot. We do our best to make sure that functionality like this – badly architected, legacy holdovers from the bad old days, but living in the core of the product and something we need to clear out so we can make progress – can be replaced with things like feature-comparable webextensions whenever possible, with hopefully minimal impact. In this case, this difficult-to-instrument feature was a major stumbling block in our progress towards fully removing blocking main-thread IO, a significant cause of UI hangs in Firefox, and fixing that will be a big improvement for everyone who uses Firefox .
I think we definitely could have communicated this better, but I also think this was definitely the right call. To me, Chrome is like democracy: Kinda lolled a bit tbh.
posted by mhoye at 7:38 PM on September 24 [ 29 favorites ] I got fairly pissed off at a recent “we’re killing old code no one wants to maintain” Mozilla move. This one feels less significant to me personally, but I’m sure there’s a set of users just as irritated. After the last thing and a slew of other missteps (some minor, some less so), I think I’ve finally more or less given up on Firefox. I don’t, by that, mean that I’ve migrated to another browser – the options are for the most part all obviously fucked – or that I wish for the project’s failure.
I just, you know, pretty much despair. This has been my attitude towards the web generally for a while, so I guess it makes sense that my attitude towards all of the available client software matches. posted by brennen at 7:44 PM on September 24 [ 6 favorites ] I guess this is timely: “From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you.” Yeah Chrome is basically a surveillance tool these days.
Which is not to say that other browsers aren’t either, but Google can pay their people more, so I assume that the surveillance innfrastructure they get for that is better quality. posted by carter at 7:50 PM on September 24 [ 7 favorites ] idk for all the recent things they’ve fumbled on, I’m pretty stoked about that “Remove the overlay from this page.
” button up on the address bar that kills like 97% of modal interruptions. It’s the fat X inside the circle.
That thing is awesome (I’m on 63.0b8 if it matters). posted by glonous keming at 7:50 PM on September 24 [ 3 favorites ] Q: bookmark folders are still OK, yeah? posted by eustatic at 7:55 PM on September 24 [ 1 favorite ] I got fairly pissed off at a recent “we’re killing old code no one wants to maintain” Mozilla move. Huh, I thought we advertised that change reasonably well, but it was pretty much the same story.
Not “nobody wants to maintain this”, but “this code can’t remain in-place without being a significant drag on progress, and would be better moved to a nice, safe (contained, well-scoped) home in a webextension”. The livemarks webextension is the one we ginned up, but I think there’s a couple of others. posted by mhoye at 8:04 PM on September 24 [ 3 favorites ] Where does all this anger come from? Big props to mhoye for so gracefully handling dissatisfied comments… posted by PhineasGage at 8:12 PM on September 24 [ 9 favorites ] I’m so hardcore I delete the bookmark name too. All I have is a line of favicons in the bookmarks toolbar, and that’s how I like it.
That’s… kind of great? I would file a feature request for a option that does that, to make the process less manual and let you keep the favicon but still have mouseovers still show the title. You know about pinned tabs? posted by mhoye at 8:12 PM on September 24 [ 1 favorite ] mhoye, I’d specifically contend (and have elsewhere) that exiling stuff like feed discovery to extensions is itself harmful, but there’s no real point re-litigating this kind of thing.
I wish y’all well, but I personally give up. The web’s a dead loss for structural reasons considerably bigger than my fiddly preferences about long-obscured browser features. posted by brennen at 8:13 PM on September 24 [ 8 favorites ] I think the browser most like democracy is Lynx: ostensibly open to anyone, but difficult to understand and use effectively; subject of bitter debates, but really only very few people keep up with new developments and argue with each other; it was designed back when the world was a dramatically different place, but works with underlying principles you still see everywhere today; and yet in practice it’s less effective with every passing year. posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:33 PM on September 24 [ 12 favorites ] Where does all this anger come from? Big props to mhoye for so gracefully handling dissatisfied comments..
. I installed LastPass a month or two ago and use it now. Before that, I’d put username and password reminder hints in the bookmarks description field. Now that information is gone with no warning and for no perceptible reason. Now, I happened to find out on Ask MetaFilter that I can export the bookmarks list to html and see it that way, and I think I have most of my important passwords in LastPass now anyway (and lots of them were saved in Firefox, too) but if I didn’t I could have gotten locked out of stuff.
As Jason from The Good Place says, “Any time I had a problem, I threw a Molotov cocktail and, boom, I had a different problem.” posted by Huffy Puffy at 8:34 PM on September 24 [ 2 favorites ] To me, Chrome is like democracy: Kinda lolled a bit tbh.
Yeah, I lolled when Mozilla took over everyone’s browser as a stunt to promote the new season of Mr.
Robot, too. posted by tclark at 8:38 PM on September 24 [ 3 favorites ] mhoye – I know you mean well, I know this is a project near and dear to your heart, and I’m sure you have an insider’s perspective that the rest of us (I assume) don’t. But I also sincerely hope you have seen and comprehended the level of anguish that Firefox’s users have been experiencing for the past few months. I hope Mozilla is aware that some of the abrupt changes associated with Quantum have been utterly catastrophic to what I suspect is a significant segment of their loyal (up to now, at least) user base, and that they understand how very real and very deep our frustration is.
Certainly there’s got to be progress, and improvement isn’t always a perfectly smooth process.
But lately I’ve been seeing (and experiencing personally) a steady erosion of trust and goodwill and willingness to fight for the underdog on the part of your users, due among other things to how so many of these unwelcome surprises were just kind of sprung on us, and how unwilling Mozilla appears to be to reintroducing (or developing the API features that will allow extension developers to reintroduce) some of the begged-for features that got gutted in the upgrade. You say above that you thought you adequately advertised some of those changes but please be aware that many of us don’t feel like we were adequately warned. That deserves measured consideration on Mozilla’s part. I’ve been holding out on upgrading to Quantum, hoping that the bulwark of defenses I’ve built up through a combination of hardcore privacy settings, security extensions, and 3rd-party anti-virus/anti-malware utilities will be adequate to compensate for a lack of security/bug updates while I cling to version 56 come Hell or high water – or until Firefox stops actively working against my effort to construct a browser that’s safe but that also meets my needs. I’ve tried upgrading a couple of times on my lower-impact “test” system but the necessary adjustments and the loss of functionality are simply too disastrous, it’s absolutely a no-go in my work systems. I can’t do it and still continue to do my job. And I hate that an application I’ve come to rely on to be accommodating to individual users’ needs now appears to be diligently throwing that legacy away baby-with-bath-water style. posted by Greg_Ace at 9:09 PM on September 24 [ 11 favorites ] Where does all this anger come from? We have this conversation a lot, internally; it’s part of the price of being an open, transparent organization.
I spend a lot of time repeating that most of it doesn’t come from people who hate us; it comes from people who love us and are scared that we might be losing our way. posted by mhoye at 9:10 PM on September 24 [ 15 favorites ] As a software engineer, I know all too well how much effort it costs to keep features running. It sucks to have to do it, but any time you have limited resources, you have to make choices about where those resources are spent. I feel for anyone who used this feature, but sometimes that’s how it has go.
I’ve had to re-write a Firefox extension when it moved to Quantum and the new Web Extension API that went with it, so I know how painful it is to lose features you’re used to, but the night-and-day difference in speed I got from Quantum was well worth it, and even though it hurt, I know they made the right choice pushing that forward. I suspect that my earlier-drafted comments about people kvetching about a browser that they downloaded for free would probably not go over well, so I won’t go into that more than to encourage people to donate to the Mozilla Foundation if they’re so inclined. (Note: I’m not affiliated in any way with Mozilla, I just like Firefox.) posted by Aleyn at 9:13 PM on September 24 Where does all this anger come from? You think people are mad now, wait till they come in to work one fine December morning and discover Mozilla has deleted a bunch of their data.
Not made inaccessible within the UI but removed from the product entirely. Whoever made that decision needs to have their head examined.
posted by madajb at 9:24 PM on September 24 [ 7 favorites ] Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve been using Firefox since it was the Phoenix beta and honestly I can’t see a single thing about Quantum that I can complain about.
It’s fast, it does what I need, and I’m happy.
I’m not sure what others are missing with recent updates. I certainly don’t miss how slow it used to be. Removing features that are underutilized and cause major problems – especially when there are workarounds – that doesn’t seem user hostile. It does seem weird to expect the demands of a few vocal people to overrule the experience of the majority of users.
As much as it sucks to be on the negative end of a UI decision, I can’t get worked up about this one. posted by caution live frogs at 9:24 PM on September 24 [ 4 favorites ] I think people would be a lot more receptive to the “just do it in an extension” argument if browsers didn’t have a history of progressively limiting the capabilities of extensions. posted by Pyry at 9:28 PM on September 24 [ 15 favorites ] I think the browser most like democracy is Lynx: … and yet in practice it’s less effective with every passing year. Note that we’re not talking about Lynx’ bookmarks. posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:34 PM on September 24 My desktops always have Firefox with noscript. I use safari and chrome (only for my old-guy yahoo mail account) and..
. My bookmarks are mistakes most of the time. Recent history or I’ve likely moved on. I’m not going to “check that later”. POTUS thread and all… posted by Windopaene at 9:35 PM on September 24 >” But I also sincerely hope you have seen and comprehended the level of anguish that Firefox’s users have been experiencing for the past few months. ” Not months.
It’s years now; not too far off a decade since v4& Aurora were the first signs of Mozilla mistaking ‘contributors’ and ‘bugzilla commenters’ for ‘users’. I’ve been using Firefox since it was Phoenix v0.2.
I’ve grudgingly moved as far as 52.something.something ESR, despite multiple near-dealbreaking functionality changes, but have avoided going further because of actual genuine dealbreaking functionality changes. Despite its own many many problems, I’ve about 50% moved to Safari.
It doesn’t have a lot of the features I use daily. Yeah, it doesn’t have any sort of user-annotation for bookmarks. Yeah, in the future it probably will remove a few features it has that I do use. But I don’t expect better of it.
With Mozilla, I did… posted by Pinback at 9:46 PM on September 24 [ 1 favorite ] Reading the bug, it sounds like the big sticking point here is that the description field was auto-populated with whatever a page’s HTML description contained, so now there’s no way to automatically distinguish between the 99% of users who have never edited a bookmark description in their lives, and the people like Huffy Puffy who, unbeknownst to everyone, happen to have organized their lives around the feature. If there were some way to identify people who have actually used the description field, it would be possible to let those users know it’s disappearing and export their data for them (or prompt them to use a suitable extension). But since the feature was badly designed from the start, there’s no good way to save just the useful data for the people that used the feature without giving everybody else a big pile of junk. But the outright hostility to even acknowledging that deleting even a small number of users’ data without much in the way of notice is not good. Other solutions aren’t great, such as tossing it into a text file in the user’s profile, which has privacy implications, but this isn’t the right way to handle deleting people’s stuff. Fortunately, no data has actually been deleted yet and won’t be until a subsequent version.
posted by zachlipton at 9:56 PM on September 24 [ 2 favorites ] I think people are used to being pushed around by Google and Microsoft and Apple and they look to Mozilla as a respite from that, whether based in fact or not. So when Mozilla acts in a way that’s perceived as authoritarian people get a little more mad or sad than they would otherwise because they hope for better. They need to give people the option to save if they don’t happen to be Hacker News readers. posted by M-x shell at 10:02 PM on September 24 [ 6 favorites ] It seems like the obvious solution would be to automatically export the descriptions to an html or JSON file as part of the Firefox 64 installation process. That way the data is not lost for anyone who doesn’t read the patch notes (because most users don’t, until they have a problem!).
posted by JDHarper at 10:57 PM on September 24 [ 4 favorites ] If I trust the Mozilla sync servers I expect them to respect my data.
Randomly deleting data breaks that trust. I would expect Mozilla to give large and explicit warnings, and a link to a suggested replacement extension. posted by jaduncan at 10:59 PM on September 24 [ 1 favorite ] At least it’s not Safari, the most garbage browser to ever garbage. Says the guy who used to create small AVI clips because Microsoft insisted animated gifs were not going to be used with their new browser, IE 1.0, no sir. posted by maxwelton at 11:30 PM on September 24 [ 2 favorites ] Ok, I’ve been drinking a little bit so I’m overcoming my normal recalcitrance to comment on computer things on mefi.
Please update your browsers. I would go so far as to say that if you could only do one thing the ensure that your computer doesn’t get screwed, it would be update your browser. Updating your browser is more valuable than all your anti-virus or any of your browser extensions to keep you safe. I’m not sure if people realize how frequently all browsers get popped. Someone up thread say they were sticking to Firefox 56. Not to pick on them, but Firefox 56 was released roughly a year ago.
Let’s use that as a case study Since then: Firefox 57: 2 critical bugs Firefox 57.0.1: 1 critical bug Firefox 57.0.
2: 2 critical bugs Firefox 57.0.4: spectre mitigations Firefox 58: 2 critical bugs Firefox 58.0.
1: 1 critical bug Firefox 59: 4 high sev bugs Firefox 59.0.1: 3 critical bugs Firefox 59.0.2: 2 high sev bugs Firefox 60: 6 high sev bugs Firefox 60.0.1: 1 critical, 1 high sev Firefox 61: 3 critical, 5 high sev Firefox 62.0.
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