A proposal for dropping Microsummaries
Microsummaries were suggested as a new Web feature many years ago, and have been supported since Firefox 2.0. In case you were wondering, they are an auto-updating short summary of a page stored as a bookmark (the page itself provides some basic additional information to power this).
Unfortunately, after the initial launch, the excitement around the proposal and the implementation started to fade. Others suggested alternative proposals with different behaviors, like Web Slices. Microsummaries still have their place, being conceptually different, but as a Firefox-only feature and due to the low advertising received after launch, they are rarely supported on modern pages and apps.
I can sum up reasons we should drop them from the main product:
- Poor support on the Web
- High code maintenance cost (70KB component is pretty large, especially compared to its usage)
- Mostly unmaintained (no resources to look at the almost 60 bugs already filed and at improvements)
- Has surprising user privacy implications (just looking at a bookmark causes a background visit)
- Largely undiscoverable
- No active owner and proposal to revamp the feature
I think the main reasoning is that this feature cannot grow without someone actively pursuing it, unfortunately I feel that right now we miss this person. We'd want to see Microsummaries growing, and going back to be a first-class citizen of the Web, but till then, having unmaintained code is a cost larger than the benefits.
Thus, here is the plan to bring on this stuff:
- Drop Microsummaries on mozilla-central now, so it ends up in the next Aurora merge (targeting Firefox 6)
- Build a basic Microsummaries extension using the current service code
- Put the extension code on a public repository to grow a community around it
I can't give a good timeline for the extension, ideally we hope someone will make a step toward us and offer to inherit this code in his extension or to make himself the extension, that would largely speed up this step and be greatly appreciated. Otherwise we'll try to put up something usable, but can't ensure it will be ready before the feature removal, nor we'll have enough resource to maintain it competitive.
I'm trying to collect feedback AGAINST doing this in order to figure out how disruptive this change could be, so feel free to object and bring your points. Some feedback has already been collected in the bug tracking this removal and I'll shortly create a thread in mozilla.dev.apps.firefox to bring on the discussion.
(Thanks to Dietrich and Sdwilsh for invaluable feedback on this article.)
nove commenti
Sadly, yeah, microsummaries were a nice idea but the implementation didn’t get enough love – it’s fiendishly difficult to actually create a microsummary and there’s no debugging. At this point it’s probably better to just drop it.
It might be useful to cross-post to m.d.platform and m.d.extensions, but I suspect there will be no arguments there either (it would just be a good heads up, since it’s after all a feature removal).
I think they can be safely removed from Firefox.
Microsummaries were an innovative idea that unfortunately didn’t take place. Sometime happens…
Please, I’m begging you! Save the support of
microsummaries as a separate extension!
Using extension Microsummary Generator (yep, with Fx4) and
find it very useful
@StyleThing As I said, we plan to do that, but we have limited resources, if there is lot of interest around the feature I’m pretty sure someone from the community will offer to bring it on or even make the add-on. I think a dedicated add-on would work even better than our current implementation.
I have so many ideas for microsummaries that I would love – my sbux card balance, is it garbage or recycling day? I get the tough calls part, but at the same time there was never a coordinated push, and this feature needs adoption on both sides.
I actually just used the microsummary to watch the fx4 blocker count. But I have to say there is work that would need to be done. The bookmark’s toolbar doesn’t seem like the right place anymore, it was a bit silly to turn the whole thing on.
What about some sort of bounty or challenge before moving on? If everyone agrees that it has so much potential, why not try? Get creative. How to leverage the community to get this on the right path. If it works better in an addon that’s great, and that might make it easier for a community to give it the attention it deserves, but I’d just really want to see a real effort to get that community going. While resources are limited, there are more now than there were w Fx2, and the web is different. Twitter comes to mind, eg [ tweets (42) @ (3) DM (0) ].
Hi, I recently upgraded my Firefox 3.6 to 6 beta 2, and microsummaries doesn’t work any more, is there are any extension to fix that?
Sounds good to me but I’m not sure if there’s actually a need to create the extension. I’d ask for an extension maintainer to step up first. If its an unmaintained extension, it’s no more valuable than an unmaintained feature. Both will eventually die. I see no reason to invest in the extension if it’s just going to go unmaintained.