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At the end of the day, it's about the cost of supporting such feature which is why it gets removed unless it's a feature that basically doesn't need to be changed in the future at all, like 10+ years in the future the feature will still be doing its job.
Also, if not enough people are actively using the feature it basically becomes technical debt that only snowballs out of control as the project changes.
So at the end of the day you can either A) spend money on maintaining features not being and increase technical debt or B) reducing the amount of money needed to maintain useless features and reduce technical debt by removing it.
Personally I'd go with option B, specifically to keep technical debt down as unchecked tech debt is just asking for hell when layoffs, retirements or days when your short staffed begin to happen. -
The funniest thing was a few weeks ago when github said they are going to remove the explore tab. The telemetry told them that it isn't used that much. Many users were really angry and a few days later github removed the notice that they are going to remove the tab, because they realized it was used very often.
Our team just got the best email from our client hahaha
Every software should have this
I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".
Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?
Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.
But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.
The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).
Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).
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