> it was a special behavior only implemented for Linux, it was not consistent with Firefox on other OSes, and with other browsers on Linux itself.
So GTK text fields behave a certain way on the entire platform (Linux). Other browsers choose to implement a behavior that is totally inconsistent with the rest of the platform. As far as I am concerned, Firefox was the only browser that implemented this correctly. Do you truly personally believe the right move here was to match the beahvior of other browsers, who themselves are incorrect by not respecting platform conventions?
> The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle
Don't fix something that isn't broken.
> Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them
I can hardly see how "having more code means it makes it harder for me to maintain" is a legitimate argument. This argument makes no sense. Delete the entire URL bar then. The URL bar requires lots of code and is hard to write unit tests for. (/s) 1. Mozilla engineers are literally paid to maintain the browser, 2. not wanting to update unit tests to deal with a pref is pure laziness, no excuse.
I agree. It seems there are two conflicting views here.
"Firefox is a kind of browser, which happens to be running on a desktop."
"Firefox is a kind of desktop app, which happens to be rendering websites."
In the first, Firefox should act like other browsers because "browsers" are the relevant reference group. In the second, Firefox should act like other apps on the platform because the platform is the relevant reference group. Personally, I think the second view is simply correct. How often do you switch between browsers? For all but a few power users, switching browsers is vanishingly rare compared to switching desktop apps. This suggests that at least for browser chrome, desktop consistency is much more important than browser consistency.
So GTK text fields behave a certain way on the entire platform (Linux). Other browsers choose to implement a behavior that is totally inconsistent with the rest of the platform. As far as I am concerned, Firefox was the only browser that implemented this correctly. Do you truly personally believe the right move here was to match the beahvior of other browsers, who themselves are incorrect by not respecting platform conventions?
> The prefs were causing broken edge cases complicate to handle
Don't fix something that isn't broken.
> Not removing the prefs would have not saved many resources, since we still need to maintain them
I can hardly see how "having more code means it makes it harder for me to maintain" is a legitimate argument. This argument makes no sense. Delete the entire URL bar then. The URL bar requires lots of code and is hard to write unit tests for. (/s) 1. Mozilla engineers are literally paid to maintain the browser, 2. not wanting to update unit tests to deal with a pref is pure laziness, no excuse.