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And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.

by sbjs 3y ago

WastingMyTime89 3y ago
The danger of this is obvious. Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one. That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.
zo1 3y ago
"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail. Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)
ehnto 3y ago
You risk driving away your evangelists for one. If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.

And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.

by sbjs 3y ago

And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.

The danger of this is obvious. Everyone is there for a different minority used feature. By caring only about the feature used by the majority, you are actually satisfying no one. That’s why product managers use persona on top of metrics. Nice products have niche features and some kind of personality. You don’t want to overfocus on them but stripping them all is a losing move.

IIsi50MHz 3y ago
WordPerfect and Quattro Pro (now WordPerfect Suite, I think) seem to persist due catering to special needs of law firms. Catering to some niche users can keep you afloat despite an otherwise market-dominant competitor.

zo1 3y ago

"WTF" is there to maintain in the feature anyways? If it's such a bloated mess that this kind of small feature causes maintenance issues and a lot of effort to include in subsequent releases, then maybe it is time for Firefox to fail. Sigh, I've been using Firefox for almost 2 decades, and this is the first I've heard of this feature.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Firefox would have no users at all if Mozilla abandon us nerds and power users who all rely a slightly different set of Firefox's obscure features. If Mozilla were smart, they would embrace us instead of wishing we were more like normal users (if we were, we'd be using chrome already!)

ehnto 3y ago

You risk driving away your evangelists for one. If you only focus on the most popular features you eventually narrow your product to one feature, so obviously there is a balance in there somewhere between focus and utility as well. Identifying why people use your product is as important as knowing what they use. Chrome does all the things I actually use from Firefox, but I use Firefox because when I ever need slightly more hackability it is there for me. That is at best, a once a year occurance.