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> Just another casualty of telemetry. Sure, but you're missing the bigger picture, which is that each feature has all sorts of other costs (maintenance, securi
by ehsankia 5y ago
> Just another casualty of telemetry.
Sure, but you're missing the bigger picture, which is that each feature has all sorts of other costs (maintenance, security risk, codebase complexity, etc). As mentioned in the bug, this feature got in the way of implementing another feature.
Telemetry helps guide the balance between those costs and the value the feature brings, and you can disagree with how that balance in each decision, but it still is a fact that codebase health is important and if you don't prune, you'll very quickly end up with a huge messy project, no matter how careful you are along the way.
Of course, the other option would've been to rewrite/refactor the feature, but again, is an engineers time better spent working on something that helps 50 people or 50K people?
- Dylan16807 5y agoThey still have the feature, but not the menu. I bet the maintenance burden of the menu is extremely low.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoExactly. With infinite engineering resources, you can afford to keep every feature around and maintained forever. But nobody has infinite engineering resources. Maintaining everything comes at a cost, and eventually you have to make some hard decisions about which features to abandon so you can reallocate engineers to features people actually use. Frustrating for the small number of people who use that specific feature, but you can't please everyone.
- zozbot234 5y ago> But nobody has infinite engineering resources. Maintaining everything comes at a cost Irrelevant in this case. There are far more effective ways of paying down technical debt and enhancing future maintainability than removing a small, self-contained feature that occasionally addresses a critical user need. This is Firefox we're talking about, they've got a humongous legacy codebase to play with.