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This is the English translation of my another entry.
I decided to reject a pull request for TST, adding new secret preference to disable animation effects around drag and drop of tabs, because it contradicts the principle of the TST project. This entry describes why I rejected the pull request.
Because it is introduced by Firefox itself. After the animation effect is activated on Firefox, I updated TST to follow it. However, it was unwelcome update for some people and I got many requests like "it is hard to operate tabs with drag-and-drop", "I want an option to disable animation effects during tabs are dragged." Actually, I can see two issues on the issue tracker:
The patch of the pull request adds a secret preference to do it. It is enough small and clear. If I added the option, I wrote just same patch.
But I disagree to merge the pull request, because I think that the approach of the patch is similar to a story: "Firefox's Gecko engine is too buggy and less compatibility to WebKit, so why don't you delete all codes of Gecko and introduce WebKit with Firefox-like UI?" In other words, it is very easy to add new option which is requested by people, however, I'm extremely reluctant to do it beacuse it is opposed to my polify on Tree Style Tab project.
Basically, this project depends on Mozilla Firefox project --which is very large and uncontrollable by me-- and it is unavoidable to be tossed up and down by the storm of changes in Firefox. Actually, on my another project, I had to rewrite the addon for new versions of Firefox again and again. I learned through the bitter experience that I should have some strict policies on my addon projects:
Don't re-implement a feature included in Firefox itself. For example, Tab Mix Plus has its own session management mechanism, because TMP project is started before the session management feature is introduced by Firefox itself. If the TMP project was started after that, they project team didn't implement such a custom session manager. There is no merit to implement a custom feature which conflicts to Firefox's.
To reduce maintenance cost, and to keep better compatibility with other addons which are developed based on Firefox's APIs, I think I should update and re-construct my addons for new APIs introduced by Firefox. It is better than I struggle to keep old custom implementations against Firefox's changes.
However, sometimes I decide to keep my custom implementations, when it is hard to rewrite codes for Firefox's new API for me.
For example, TST uses a library "JSDeferred" to process asynchronous operations easily. On the other side, lately Firefox uses Promise and Task for the same purpose. I know I should rewrite TST based on them instead of JSDeferred, but I still don't do it because: 1) TST is strongly designed based on JSDeferred. 2) Promise/Task are not available on the current ESR (Firefox 17). (In other words, I'll merge pull requests to do such a reconstruction, if there is no disadvantage about compatibility with other addons.)
When the API of Firefox's library is too untrustworthy for me, I decide to use my custom library based on very low stable APIs.
For example, Firefox has a system named "preference" which can save/restore users' configurations. Because it is not developer-friendly (ex. there are three deferent types --boolean, integer, and string--, and hard to observe changed configurations dynamically), Firefox provides some libraries like FUEL. But, such libraries are untrustworthy and risky for me because Firefox team sometimes changes those APIs despite they promised those APIs are developer-friendly --obviously they should be stable and safe--. I don't want to spend time to update my codes for such unstable APIs, so I actually use my custom library modules/lib/prefs.js which is based only on very stable low APIs. It is one of reasons why I don't update my codes for Promise/Task yet.
Anyway, I think that FUEL APIs are untrustworthy because Firefox team created FUEL just for third party add-on developers, not themselves. Because Promise/Task are used everywhere in Firefox, Firefox team will keep them stable for themselves.
Don't include features not related to the main concept. The basic concept is: what I want to use, one feature per one addon, and, as minimum as possible.
In my old blog entry (note: written in Japanese), I told that: features which I never use or unrelated to the main concept may satisfy users in the short term, but it will shorten life of the project in the long term. Basically I develop and publish my addons on GitHub because I need it and I want to keep it available for me. So I don't want to introduce changes which can disrupt the concept.
Provide higihly compatible, natural look-and-feel for Firefox's built-in features and other addons. For example, Firefox has a feature "auto hide toolbox" for the fullscreen mode started by F11 key. And, TST also provides "auto hide tab bar" feature. Yes, it is not related to "tree" feature. But if TST doesn't have the feature, you'll see unexpected vertical tab bar in the fullscreen mode. You press F11, you expect that the web page becomes fullscreened, then the vertical tab bar should not appear on the scene.
This is the main reason why I took much time to update TST to support drag-and-drop animation effects. Before the animation effect is introduced to Firefox, I respected behaviors of drag-and-drop around layers and objects on Adobe Illustrator. This behavior is still available when you drag a link to the tab bar.
Based on the above policies, I disagree to merge this pull request to TST's master, because:
Because there is no option to enable/disable animation effects, I think that Firefox team basically designs Firefox to do drag-and-drop operations with animations. Then, I should keep TST along the design of Firefox itself.
Actually disabling animation effects by userChrome.css or other ways sometimes break Firefox itself. For example, the internal operation to finalize closed tabs uses "TransitionEnd" DOM event to trigger itself, but it didn't workcorrectly because the event was never fired if the animation efect was disabled by userChrome.css. (I don't kwnow the bug is already fixed or not.)
I don't think my addon should be specially hospitable for people who live without animation effects, because Firefox itself disfavors them.
This is just my personal, current opinion. Of course I don't think this is the final truth of the topic. If you have information which can solve my worrying, or if you explain compelling reasons that I should do it, then I possibly merge such a change.
Otherwise, I'm sorry but I never merge such pull requests to my master repository. Then please fork this project, extend, maintain, and release it for people who have same distress - it is my stance on this project. To keep my codes forkable -- this is one of reasons why I distribute all codes of TST under OSS licenses.
の末尾に2020年11月30日時点の日本の首相のファミリーネーム(ローマ字で回答)を繋げて下さい。例えば「noda」なら、「2013-11-06_animation-on-off-english.trackbacknoda」です。これは機械的なトラックバックスパムを防止するための措置です。
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