Firefox Tilt

~ the goodbye ~

It had two names, which is part of why people lose track of it. Victor Porof filed bug 659807 in 2011 under the title "Implement Tilt: a WebGL-based 3D visualization of a Webpage", shipped it as an add-on, and then a second bug went in to fold it into the developer tools. By the time it reached everybody's browser in Firefox 11 on 13 March 2012 it was just called 3D View, a button in the Inspector. Everyone who remembers it calls it Tilt.

What it did was take the page you were on and extrude the DOM. Every nested element floated above its parent on the z axis, so a document became a stack of glass plates hanging in space, and you dragged with the mouse to rotate the whole thing. Clicking a plate selected that node in the inspector. It was rendered with WebGL and GLSL shaders, in a browser, against a live page, in 2012.

Firefox 47 came out on 7 June 2016. The developer release notes for that version list the change in five words: 3D view has been removed. No blog post, no deprecation cycle that anyone noticed. The reason was Electrolysis, Mozilla's long rewrite that moved page content into separate processes, and Tilt's whole method depended on reaching into the content the way a single-process browser let you. The e10s rollout began the version after and finished in Firefox 49 that September.

~ the chronicle ~

~ it was for showing people ~

If you had ever tried to explain nesting to somebody who did not already understand nesting, Tilt did it in one gesture: here is your markup, here is how deep you have buried this button, look at the tower you built. Presentations used it. Conference talks used it. It appears in the Firefox dev tools slide decks of the era because it demonstrated in three seconds what a tree diagram takes a paragraph to fail at.

For day-to-day debugging it was less useful than the flat inspector next to it, and everybody knew that, including the people who loved it. That is a hard position for a feature to hold once a platform migration starts asking what each thing costs.

~ why nothing came back ~

People asked. There is a Mozilla Discourse thread titled "Any chance of bringing back the Tilt 3d View?" and a support question asking why it was removed at all, both from users who only found out when the button stopped being there. The answer each time was the same architectural one, and by then the WebGL extension that started it was years stale against a browser that had moved underneath it.

Chrome never built an equivalent. Various 3D DOM visualizers exist as extensions and as demo pages, and none of them ever came shipped in the browser with nothing to install, which was the specific thing that made this one land.

~ a note on where this sat ~

I am an engineer and I was not a front-end person in 2012, which means I saw Tilt the way most of the industry saw it, as a screenshot somebody posted. That is close to its natural audience. A feature whose main use is demonstration reaches far more people than use it, and then leaves almost nobody who misses it enough to complain when it goes.

killedbymozilla dates this one at around 2014 and that is wrong by two years. The date is in the Firefox 47 release notes, where it always was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »