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Comment by MauranKilom | Hacker News Reader

"Only 5% of users use this feature, so we will remove it to save development efforts."

As seen in Firefox..

You're not wrong. While they do not have yet a list of metrics they'd like to collect (from their initial mailinglist post [1]), it's stated as an idea in there

> We also want to know how frequently panels in gnome-control-center are visited to determine which panels could be consolidated or removed, because there are other settings we want to add, but our usability research indicates that the current high quantity of settings panels already makes it difficult for users to find commonly-used settings.

Personally I'd like to see more transparency in their usability research, because GNOME is best know for removing features, which is what they'd like to do this time around as well.

[1]: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/CAJqbrbeOZrHvYjvMCc=qGZD_VXB...

I agree that the usability research should be transparent and data-driven. As a statistician, I'd rather have something I can actually critique instead of "we just didn't think it was user-friendly."

Counterpoint: Steve Jobs

Even post-Jobs Apple is opt-in for telemetry or crash reports.

Apple also does a lot of (non-anonymous) user testing, which can give very detailed feedback.

It's getting off topic, but the irony of a browser with a 2-4% user base pulling this shit can't be overstated.

Why? They have a fixed budget after all.

Because they're very much the victims of web designers with the same mindset, and if anyone should be the ones to recognize how unfair throwing minority user groups under the bus can be.

It also doesn't really make strategic sense to focus on the lowest common denominator. Chrome already has that group. The one place they could eke out a loyal userbase is specifically the users that Chrome fails to capture because they have unusual needs or requirements.

Actually when I think about it, it's even worse than this. Firefox has been on the receiving end of this type of discrimination more or less for as long as it's existed. It was the state of affairs when IE was the challenger too.

You have to be just mindbogglingly oblivious to not see how this has been one of their biggest problems the last 20 years.

They spent some of that budget on getting a freaking sneaker designer to make time-limited theme colo-- sorry, time-limited colorways and did a bunch of popups and cringe copy on it.

Meanwhile, Brave's vertical tabs were done by a single developer.

In addition, this kind of thinking will attrit some of those 5% of users, so repeated application will shrink their market share even further. it's the excel problem: a huge number of features will only be used by a minority of users, but a majority of users use at least one of those features.

With that logic you could say that 95% of users could keep leaving because you keep focusing on the minority use cases.

Would you rather attrite a fraction of 95% of your users or a fraction of 5% of your users.

see the second half of my comment. You may lose 5% of your users with one particular removal, but if you keep doing it you'll lose most of them.

Did you read my comment? If we had to remove one of two features and one of them was used by 5% of users and one of them was used by 95% of users wouldn't you like to know which one is which?

Without data you can invest your time into the wrong features.

or, you could not remove features

You were the one that brought up removing features.

And those GPT-3.5 calls ain't cheap.

Good, unfortunately. Developer time is a zero-sum game. They're not saying "ah we can just kick back and do less work then", they're saying "how do we allocate our limited resources to maximise benefit to users?". And when it's voluntary FOSS work, honestly it isn't unreasonable if it is the former situation

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