Firefox: We Don't Need Google's Money Any More
cnet.com
cnet.com
that's surprising b/c i've had a good experience with firefox on android: i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature, and although i'm still using adb for debug, newer versions apparently do debugging direct with desktop browser instances, no adb needed. for all i know, chrome has similar features as well, so i'll just say that i haven't found firefox mobile lacking.
i was totally unaware that mozilla was making that much money (or any significant amount of money) from corporate deals, but that's probably b/c i'm naieve. proprotionally larger donations will go to wikipedia instead of mozilla in the future.
1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar).
2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones.
3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app.
My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.
Unfortunately, I've found that Firefox is a bit slower to render pages than Android Chrome, and scrolling experience sometimes feels janky. That said, it's unlikely that Android Chrome will ever support ad blocking, so Firefox will stay on my device.
BTW I have the BBC news site whitelisted on desktop because the ads are not nearly as intrusive and UX-breaking.
Sadly it breaks intents and doesn't call on local apps despite system settings. Instead it loads the site and only displays an android icon allowing to switch to an app. It's very annoying on slower connections (on the subway for example).
If you're outside the browser, intent resolution proceeds normally. What changes is that if you're in Firefox you need to take an affirmative step to raise the intent instead of going to the web page. To me, that's the sensible default.
Otherwise you end up with nonsense like the following:
1. Clicking on an intent-matching link (e.g. Play Store, Google+, Twitter)
2. Being kicked to the intent-handling app
3. The app deciding not to handle the link (it's some sort of corner case)
4. Being kicked to whatever browser the app picks (often not the one you started with)
Back when devices were sold on the Play Store (not the Google Store), I lost track of the number of times I did this dance when I just wanted to look up something about a Nexus device. The problem was the Play Store app, unsurprisingly, didn't know anything about devices even though it matched Play Store device URLs.
Pocket were added as it were easier than implementing their own Reading List, although Pocket will be shipped as a default extension in the future rather than being integrated. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694
You sure you're not confusing Reading List and Reader View? Work on Reader View is still happening in bugs such as this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1175536
Firefox mobile has extensions! It is the best mobile browser.
> i particularly like the "send tab to desktop browser" feature
I love ff and mozilla, but I don't think they are trying enough on android to win larger market share.
> that's surprising
Not really.
Think the desktop. Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser, but held its market-share simply by being the default. Because people don't know they can change browser. Internet is the blue E. Etc.
Now think Android. All phones comes preloaded with Google Chrome, and most people still don't recognize the idea that a browser is something you choose. Since Chrome is a reasonably good browser (apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothership), people have even less incentive to look up alternate browsers.
And with Chrome being spammed everywhere Google has a piece of internet real estate (No I will not "upgrade" my Firefox to Chrome. Please stop asking), it keeps on winning usage on the desktop and thus helps cement its market-share on Android too. People genuinely ask why Firefox can't sync with their Google-account, implying that if it can't sync with Google, they don't think it can sync at all.
Evidently that's how people work these days. I don't get it either.
> Think MSIE. For a long time it was a horrible browser,
> but held its market-share simply by being the default.
There was no Netscape 5, and Netscape 6 was an abomination. It wasn't until Phoenix (the Firefox predecessor) that IE had anything to worry about. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
> apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothers
Chrome is not just reasonably good, but actually the forefront runner in some areas. It has some nice touches to it, like how it pops that magnifier on taps, preventing fat fingering. It's also the best browser in terms of web standards implemented.
For example it's the only mobile browser I know that implements the Push and the Notifications API, so you no longer need the native Facebook app, as Facebook's web interface now delivers push notifications on Android: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/03/push-notif...
Another example, Chrome also does web app manifests properly and Add to Homescreen actually works, compared with Firefox: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2014/11/Support-fo...
Along with other features, like giving access to the phone's camera, or giving each website its own "window", Chrome is the mobile browser that is built for web applications and sadly Firefox Mobile is not. And actually this has always been a difference in philosophy. It's why Chrome started with the one process per tab and with strong sandboxing on the desktop as well, Chrome being built for applications.
So you know, I love my Firefox, but sometimes I feel that they are spending resources on a small niche mobile OS that would have been better spent on improving Firefox Mobile. It's the end of 2015 and Add to Homescreen is still broken, which pains me greatly because I prefer web stuff instead of native apps.
> Chrome is the mobile browser that is built for web
> applications and sadly Firefox Mobile is not. And
> actually this has always been a difference in
> philosophy. It's why Chrome started with the one
> process per tab and with strong sandboxing on the
> desktop as well, Chrome being built for applications.
I'm curious how that would work. I know the desktop Firefox will only - very gradually - move to a complete sandboxing architecture, because of the way it will break many add-ons.
But Firefox for Android already supports extensions - is it only the Chrome-like/WebExtensions-like extensions it supports now? Is that why it will be easier to move to a complete sandboxing system on mobile first?
This functionality is actually old, see here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/AppleA...
And of course, these are proprietary extensions to Safari, so since then a proposal for a standard happened and got implemented in Chrome. The way forward is to specify a JSON file containing a specification, called the app's manifest. I already mentioned it above, but see here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2014/11/Support-fo...
Firefox Mobile on Android does not implement it. BUT, they have a very similar manifest for Firefox OS, but that is not compatible with the new W3C standard. I can't really blame them for Firefox OS, as they probably developed this format before the W3c specification, of which they were also a part of. See here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Build/Manifest
But yes, take a recent Android and try Add to Homescreen for say Facebook or Twitter. And compare the result. Yes, a shortcut gets added to your homescreen, with a low resolution icon and no integration whatsoever. Heck, sometimes it doesn't even use the normal favicon. My old iPhone 3GS was handling this better 5 years ago.
Their strategy right now is to implement new APIs meant for web apps, including the above mentioned manifest, but only for privileged applications, packaged as a zip file and only installable via the Firefox Marketplace, an effort part of Firefox OS. And even though that's cool and you can install and run some of those apps on Android and probably on the desktop as well, that's not the Web.
And I'm not even asking for much. For my needs all I want is high-res icons, as I've got a resolution of 2560×1440 on my Nexus and those icons that Firefox adds are freaking horrible.
I mean - I dont mind the low res icon, though I dont receive notifications.
[1] http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/service-worker/introd...
Firefox is my default on Android, but I do hope to see some progress on these, as I personally prefer web apps to native ones - more portable, not subject to a walled garden, plus the browser is the ultimate sandbox.
Zoomed View? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=663803
> It's also the best browser in terms of web standards implemented.
http://caniuse.com/#compare=firefox+45,chrome+49,and_chr+46,...
Looks pretty "even" to me? Mostly the things Google seem to be focusing on is things they can use in their services or that can use their already existing services as a back-end, for example speech synthesis.
> implements the Push and the Notifications API
Push API is available in Firefox Dev Edition¹·².
> Along with other features, like giving access to the phone's camera
What do you mean? This is available via the same API in Firefox.
> giving each website its own "window"
Think you could clarify what you mean with "window"?
1: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/keep-pushing-it-with-the-w...
To be fair, they do a lot of that already, but they often approach it in adversarial terms, which is doomed to fail. Persona, for example, is interesting but will never align with anyone else's interest; whereas easy sync would (making it easier to switch OS would appeal to at least one between MS and Apple, and to Google too).
One does not exclude the other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
> .. an irrelevant "me too" mobile os
[citation needed]
> [citation needed]
It's been developed for more than 4 years and still nobody wants it: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ultrac...
Now they're going to compete at the high-end, which means they have to find OEMs that will bet their flagship models on it. Good luck with that.
There are three elements to OS choice: standardization, marketing and openness. Looking at the desktop market, you can see how Microsoft dominated standardization, Apple managed to dominate marketing, and Linux used its unrivaled openness to sneak in between the two.
In the mobile world, Android already occupies two of those slots, basically pre-empting any linux-like effort from ever gaining significant traction. That means the only ways you can break in the mobile OS market (assuming you're not producing breakthrough tech creating its own market) are 1) flooding the market with such a massive amount of units that standardization stops being a factor, or 2) flooding the airwaves with such a massive amount of excellent advertising that your devices become more desirable than Apple ones. Good luck with that.
(Note how price is not a factor. Mobile devices are inherently aspirational, as Nokia found out.)
The hard truth is that the land grab is over: if your mobile OS has not made it yet, chances are that it never will -- at least as long as devices stay in this particular form factor and nobody comes up with groundbreaking tech.
Mozilla should concentrate on standards, including a kick-ass Android browser; everything else is a waste of time.
You're right that this doesn't follow devoid of context, but luckily we're talking about a specific entity and a specific situation. The assumption that motivates this assumption is the idea that Mozilla has finite resources, not just in the literal sense, but in the sense of having to make significant trade-offs in what to focus on. This seems like a fairly reasonable assumption to make given that they're often so far behind on things that are fairly widely considered positive, like one-process-per-tab.
You may disagree with that assumption, but at least address it instead of being wearisome and linking to a Wikipedia logical fallacy page.
To be honest, I think they've finally realized that the OS was a pipe dream -- the iOS release could have happened years ago, but now it's finally been sanctioned. Coincidence?
Installing and switching your workflow to using a new app, OS, browser etc. takes effort. If the effort required is too high compared to the benefit gained, most people aren't going to do it (I imagine hackernews readers have a much higher tolerance for this!).
That's why monopolies in technology are so dangerous in my opinion as when you can force a "good enough" product on customers competitors aren't going to get any traction unless their product is significantly better. This means companies don't try to compete so the customer misses out on the incremental improvements from sustained competition.
This is an exaggeration. Your search inputs will be sent to Google for autocompletion, etc, but you can disable this.
Google is definitely sending more than just search inputs.
> All phones comes preloaded with Google Chrome
That's not true. There's still a fair bit of Android Browser out there - it's up to the OEM whether they ship Chrome or their own customised version of Android Browser.
> (apart from sending your every keystroke to the mothership)
I don't believe you. Here's the source, show me where it does this: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git
Here's the privacy policy, which explains what it actually sends: https://www.google.co.uk/chrome/browser/privacy/
(Perhaps you're thinking of the instant search feature? That's quite a long way from "every keystroke", and the page above explains how to turn it off if you don't like it.)
You're wasting your breath. This thread is littered with people uncritically repeating that assertion. It's officially graduated from "fact" to "article of faith among the cynical and ignorant".
It's Firefox. It's your privacy. It's off until explicitly enabled.
What could get Firefox Android marketshare are webapps that depend on it being listed in Google Play. But thats also the problem - I'm not sure what webapp tech Mozilla is pushing today that Google is not pushing an equivalent of.
As it is, average fat finger users are not shopping for new web browsers on Android. They probably would on iOS since Safari is turning into another IE disaster, but Apple won't let them.
Firefox crashes my phone all the time. Also I keep hitting the "Share Link" option when I want to open in a new tab, why is that the first option? Who shares links that often?
I've not noticed crashes either.
As for crashes, they can be phone dependent. For another statistically insignificant data point, I don't get any crashes either.
So am I—that's exactly what I used and tested, on my current phone.
The scroll acceleration or easing is "off", compared to Chrome on Android and native widget list views. I wouldn't normally complain that Firefox doesn't match Chrome's behaviour in some specific area, but it's incredibly frustrating to be used to scroll behaviour on a platform and have a single app reimplement that in a non-conformant manner. It just feels... icky, and broken.
There have been bugs filed about it but nothing seems to have been done.
This is the one main thing stopping me from using Firefox on Android and recommending it to others. It might seem minor but it affects the very way I interact with the app, and I use the browser on my phone at least 50% of the time I'm looking at the device.
The earliest Android browser was lacking things that people had gotten used to on desktop (like tabs), but since the introduction of Chrome I would be surprised to see high usage of any third-party browser on Android (and iOS, of course, makes it difficult to consistently use a third-party browser). It's worth noting that even in the days when third-party browsers would have been most compelling, usage was still tiny.
I don't think the fact that firefox mobile is good quality really makes it that surprising that usage is low: people simply aren't in the habit of customizing their devices in any real way, especially on mobile.
Mozilla can be more ambitious. Or atleast as bold as they once were, when they took on Microsoft.
If they can convince Baidu, Yahoo et al to keep them open, independent and competitive against the likes of Apple, Google or Microsoft, then there is no reason they can't pull the same thing off to fund an open social network or a open search engine that can shake things up a little at Google and Facebook.
I am really quite sick of the Google and Facebook ivory towers deciding where and how things should work. Most of these decisions are based on empire defense rather than the common good.
They speak the language of the common good, but constantly do things that benefit them disproportionately.
So what is their purpose at the end of the day, other than "... we are the rich; we own america. God knows how. but we intend to keep it".
They need saving from themselves. And I am glad Mozilla exists like a Ralph Nader does to keep things honest.
Please don't! This has been both tried before and it ended in a waste of resources, money (Diaspora, anyone?) and goodwill.
You can't beat the network effect of a social network with "we are open source", people don't care that much. You either have a usecase no one else has thought about, a technical killer feature or you don't try.
With a search engine, the network effect is not as big, but you better deliver something consistently better than Google right from the start.
Both are not fields ripe for disruption as the web browser game was in the mid-2000's.
But in the end, that's kind of my point - FB is humongous and I hope Mozilla does not pick a fight there. As much as I despise FB, I'd rather Mozilla enters the competitions they can win.
Mozilla's contribution to the web, is not that they have the most popular browser, but they have a browser with enough users that they get a seat at the table to influence open standards.
And there is no reason they shouldn't replicate the model and expand that sphere of influence into other domains. Diaspora failing is not a good enough reason to bend over to Zuckerberg.
Well yes, but they arrived at this by having a vision what a good browser is at a time when browsers were abysmal. They didn't arrive there by just wanting an open-source browser. Yes, there was a network effect at play too (everyone "optimized" for MSIE), but they were able to bootstrap their user base with the tech-savvy who were fed up with the horrible HTML/CSS/JS support browsers of the time offered.
They did not have that vision with FirefoxOS - they wanted to secure a foothold in the mobile market, but had no compelling idea on how to gain that in the face of Apple/Google. Similarly, disliking Zuck is a a really bad reason to pour energy into yet another open social network.
Also if we're your default you can always use !g to forward a search to encrypted.google.com if the results don't meet your needs. In fact you can forward your search to over 6000 sites (https://duckduckgo.com/bang) and even suggest your own bangs :)
The Open Data movement is more applicable here. With that in mind there is Common Crawl and Open Street Maps.
The thing about collecting data out of good will or for some nonprofit mission is that you have different standards, motivations and methods for connecting data than for public for-profit corporations. Some data should not be collected, at least without permission. Privacy and copyrights are issues Google and Facebook deal with after the fact not before they collect the data.
Meaning that they are diverting resources that could have gone towards hammering out the best code there is towards eternal UI tweaking and "getting XYZ into coding".
Frankly i see this as a ripple from the .com era. As the web went commercial, people that formerly learned about print (and other) media production moved online. Thus we got the "geek" persona, someone who worked with servers but was still "stylish". This to distance that activity from the "nerd" persona, that was seen as "non-stylish".
Sadly, the geek get all the attention by being "social savy". Thus a small, but apparently loud, group of people end up with undo influence.
This is a matter of using some imagination and presenting the case to the right people.
Why are they building their own infra?
Why are Amazon and Netflix making their own content?
The most simplified reason - after whats happened with the music and news industry, the content producers don't trust Silicon Valley. And most importantly marketing of content cannot happen without Facebook today. And that's just media.
There is the telecom sector (Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T) which believes all kinds of interesting things about the traffic silicon valley generates.
There is the advertising industry which has seen more and more of the data and tools they used, being built into FB and offered directly to their customers.
There is Apple which has suddenly realized their user base might pay for security, privacy and non ad supported networks.
There are all kinds of other players in tech from Twitter to Linkdin to Quora to Snapchat to Uber who are constantly worrying about how their data might overnight start flowing into FB\Whatsapp\Instagram etc.
And this is just the US. There are all kinds of extremely resourceful entities outside who would love leverage against FB and Google.
Mozilla is the ideal non threatening entity they might get behind. Nobody is expecting FB to be dethroned anytime soon, but that doesn't mean any of them are enjoying the control they hand over to them. Tapping into that frustration, can result in a more even playing field in both search and social.
The only major Rust projects at this point are Rust and Servo, and both of them are quite closely tied to each other. There are a handful of libraries, and lots of small-scale demos or sample code, but that's about it.
We aren't seeing companies across the board rushing to use it. We aren't seeing more than a handful of significant open source projects using it. We aren't seeing freelancers use it for their projects. We aren't seeing researchers use it. We aren't seeing academics adopt it for teaching purposes.
Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did. While Rust will likely have some future, its impact may be much smaller than many of us anticipated even just a year ago.
It's been less than a year since Rust 1.0.
It's been less than a year since 1.0. Most development is closed source behind closed doors, so you won't get to hear about new things being built in Rust. A bunch of startups, as well as Dropbox are using Rust, for example.
I would call Redox and Piston large rust projects as well.
There has been at least one OS course being taught with Rust as well.
> Rust is not taking off like Java, or C#, or Ruby, or even Go did.
For reference, Rust has been out for six months now. :P And fortunately, I can tell you that Rust is getting action at a lot of companies, and we're excited to see them start writing reports about their experience.
Also generally my first move when I install FF on a new machine is to switch out the default search provider so... This doesn't affect me too much
What I'm referring to is the fact that turning the web into a platform on which a wide variety of applications can run makes it more complicated and consequently more failure-prone and more tedious to use the web to publish and to read text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
I don't in isolation mind the creation of a new application-delivery platform (and I appreciate the fact that the new application-delivery platform is not the intellectual property of a single corporation). I just wish there were some way to tell publishers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images to switch from the new application-delivery platform to something else, something whose design is not a compromise between the needs of the application-delivery platform and the needs of publishers and readers of text, images and links to other pages of text and images.
Documents work better when they are mere data as opposed to programs requiring or assuming a complicated execution environment. HTML documents were better than PostScript and MS-Word documents for this reason -- until JavaScript was added to HTML, and web pages became programs assuming an execution environment, and then that execution environment got more and more complicated.
Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me).
Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.
Not according to Mozilla: http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/12/mozilla-has-no-plans-to-of...
pocket is moving out of the main tree back to being an add-on > probably with partnerships like Pocket
> I never mentioned that someone is lying!?
Even if there isn't some sort of payola deal going on to feed that money back to Mozilla, this is clearly being done for profit. Maybe it's some sort of indirect benefit, maybe it's someone doing a favor for a friend.
The alternative isn't any better: if there isn't any benefit for Mozilla, they are letting for-profit businesses insert themselves as a feature dependency.
No it isn't.
The reason behind Pocket integration was thus:
Firefox wanted a similar "temporary bookmark" feature to augment Reader mode and other things. Instead of coding it themselves, they decided on using an existing addon that gave the same functionality.
There's no indirect benefit (aside from having a new feature). There's a very clear and logical reason behind the integration. In retrospect, they should have consulted with the community first perhaps, but it's false that Mozilla did this for some direct or indirect benefit.
There's a lot of hate around pocket, and it provides a cool, but simple feature. Yet I haven't heard anyone who loves it and actively wants it. The best I've heard is "yeah, it's OK", even online. I don't know why they would push so hard for a product that there's so much hatred for, and nobody rooting for, whey they could just say "Wow, OK. Guess you guys don't want it. We're scrapping it". It's far from a killer feature, so who's it for?
Also the Developer Edition, which is the alpha channel, is multi-process as you'd expect it to be. But speaking of hundreds of tabs, try doing that in Chrome, do that in Firefox, and compare.
Ah yes. The infamous "16GB ram in a laptop is not enough because I use a web-browser called Chrome"-syndrome.
And then someone turns around and says Firefox has memory leaks. You'd think they were joking, but they're not.
At least in my experience, bad example. Chrome works with ~300 Tabs, Firefox freezes or crashes regularly with way less then that. And this machine only has 8 GB RAM. Let's hope the current changes in Firefox stabilize it.
Sorry but no, unless it has catched up with Chrome Developer Tools (back into native since the last 3 years so I don't know the actual differences).
EDIT: Made the content between parenthesis clearer.
As I mentioned, this goes back to approximately three years ago.
The developer tools console could do:
- completion while typing
- display JavaScript data structures in more visual way
- breakpoints on DOM changes, events and Ajax requests
- profile network, memory and cpu usage
- navigate cookies, indexdb and websql databases
- reformat JavaScript code
- CSS editor
- work as IDE
- debugger API to work together with IDEs like Netbeans
- profile 2D and 3D performance
Basically, even though I prefer native to web, while using Chrome Developer Tools I had the feeling I was kind of back to Smalltalk.
Additionally their website was better than MDN in terms of information, specially thanks to the many sessions on Google conferences.
https://developer.chrome.com/devtools
That said, maybe Firefox is now on par.
It's there.
> - display JavaScript data structures in more visual way
Sort of? Is the existence of the 'inspect' function enough?
> - breakpoints on DOM changes, events and Ajax requests
I'm not sure about this. I mean, you can set the breakpoints in code per usual but I expect you mean setting them on the nodes themselves and perhaps global breakpoints in the net panel?
> - profile network, memory and cpu usage
This sort of profiling?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Performance
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Network_Monit...
> - navigate cookies, indexdb and websql databases
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Storage_Inspe...
By the by, WebSQL isn't part of any standardization track and will not be implemented in Firefox as it stands, and neither will IE it looks like.
> - reformat JavaScript code
You mean "prettify source"? If so, yes.
> - CSS editor
There's the Style Editor, and the side pane of the Inspector.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Style_Editor
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Page_Inspecto...
> - work as IDE
I guess the Scratchpad is the closest thing to that. So technically, no. As a side note, there is the WebIDE for Firefox OS development.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Tools/Scratchpad
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Tools/WebIDE
> - debugger API to work together with IDEs like Netbeans
It's possible with the remote debugging protocol but the only implementation I know of is the proof of concept that Paul Rouget put together two years ago, although I don't think he released any code.
http://paulrouget.com/e/devtoolsnext/
> - profile 2D and 3D performance
You mean FPS and such? If so see the profiling tools linked previously.
The right way to look at this is to go back to what we used to suffer through and recognize that it's awesome that we have two sharp dev teams putting at lot of effort into making life easier for web developers. Using the “worst” one is still far ahead of the best two years ago.
Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards, an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would switch to Chrome and so on).
No, people moved to Chrome because it was a much better product.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+JustinSchuh/posts/CNEgtJWYTb5
http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2010/05/vulnerability-databases-...
Why? Surely as with any software one should only install extensions that one trusts?
https://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/chromium/chromium-securit...
When it's ready, hopefully Servo will be used as the basis for a browser that can provide security comparable to Chrome. But there's much more to that comprehensive goal than just writing a renderer in Rust.
Which is why the latest Servo builds have very strict sandboxing. People assume that Servo's security story is "just write it in Rust and it'll magically be secure". In reality, nobody on the team is that naive. The goal is to create a browser engine that achieves and significantly exceeds the state of the art. The architecture for that exists right now.
Neat that they have a sandbox up and running, though. I wasn't aware of that. Is there a paper somewhere I can read about their sandbox architecture?
Either way, there's no denying that Google literally spammed Chrome everywhere, and often with misleading or dishonest text.
"Your browser is outdated. Upgrade it now (to Chrome) for a better experience", "Make youtube faster with Chrome" etc etc.
It was literally impossible to go anywhere on the web, without the top of every second screen you visited saying "Upgrade to Chrome". It was massive and it was dishonest.
Ofcourse moms and dads everywhere jumped on this, like they jump on the "free scans" and "you have a virus" messages without ever considering if Chrome was a different browser or there being any technical merit to the claims about being better. Google used the exact same strategy as malware authors.
They even bundled it as a drive-by install with other popular software (like Flash). Update flash and suddenly your default browser is Chrome, which conveniently imported all your Firefox data and now reports all of that to Google, one keystroke at a time.
It's hard not to call this spyware.
Plain and simple: Chrome's marketshare is based on being evil and nothing else.
These days Chrome may feel like a better product, because Google keeps making their pages for Chrome and nothing else, using proprietary Google only extensions.
And that reminds me of a story I've heard before... Something about there E's..?
Back then, Google's Chrome was still an exciting new thing being discovered by many non-techies, fast and simple. Google seemed like a company dead set on being the good guys.
Things have muddled since, IMHO.
Yea this was pretty odd. Usually all the people around me are the last to switch, because they make their decisions based on "whichever thing they saw first or more prominently". In Chrome's case, I switched quite a while after most of my friends: they all saw Chrome marketed all over the place while I consciously enjoyed a Firefox feature or two that Chrome was lacking. I finally ended up switching when Firefox's incredible slowness made it too painful to keep using (this was around v3.5, I believe).
Please. Aren't we all tired of this?
How is that not stealing? How is that different from what we usually call spyware?
There is nothing legitimate about how Chrome has hijacked a multitude of users' PCs and their data. There's no way to defend this behaviour.
Proof?
That's ofcourse if they even noticed that their browser now looks slightly different at all.
Voila. Data stolen. Or are you going to argue that this represents completely concentfull and legitimately syncing?
This is a dark UX anti-pattern, using the same technique as a regular scammer or phishing site.
Google is absolutely, horrifyingly into evil territory here.
I don't particularly care about this spyware debate but I can't see how something bad being better than something else bad bears any relevance unless we are talking about choosing between two bad options.
People clicking the "I agree" button on a EULA is not consent.
Are you perhaps thinking of the currently unused "class-A data"?
https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/04/30/firefox-syncs-n...
https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2014/02/07/a-better-firefo...
https://github.com/mozilla/fxa-auth-server/wiki/onepw-protoc...
Edit:
From what I can see, client side encryption in Google Chrome appears to be opt-in?
If you say synchronized data in Chrome is being sold to 3rd parties by Google, I would really love to see a proof for this claim.
I'm saying Google shouldn't have the Firefox/MSIE data in the first place, because lots of users never intended to install chrome, but got it as a drive-by installation.
They are the illegitimate third party "stealing" the data.
And you still didn't provide any proof of that
Any source showing that it is put as default browser and imports everything without asking?
Randomly generated token included in installer. Used to measure success rate of Google Chrome once at installation.[99]
Encoded string, according to Google, contains non-identifying information about where Chrome was downloaded from and its installation week, and is used to measure promotional campaigns.[99] Google provides the source code to decode this string.[95] On Google search query On first launch and first use of address bar[99] Optional.
Unique identifier along with user preferences, logs of usage metrics and crashes. default disabled
Text typed into the address bar. Optional
Information about how often Chrome is used, details about the OS and Chrome version. used on update
See comment thread here for classification: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10631843
By the time V8 shipped, SpiderMonkey's TraceMonkey (and not long thereafter JaegerMonkey) was pretty competitive. There were differences between the engines—TraceMonkey fell off fast paths more often while V8 sans Crankshaft had fewer optimizations for tight loops—but they weren't night and day differences.
This is all history, of course. Nowadays, V8 and SpiderMonkey have essentially the same architecture (although as I understand things SpiderMonkey is more unified with the IonMonkey JIT core powering both Baseline and Ion, whereas Crankshaft and non-Crankshaft V8 are more divergent).
Google spent a fair amount of money for a few years on marketing and paying all sorts of other software to bundle Chrome as an opt-out.
They just want something that works and for most people they were told that that was Chrome, because it was pushed right in their faces from Google Search and whatever other Google services they used. Not to mention all the installers they had it bundled with.
I'm convinced it was 80% advertising that got the average person to install desktop Chrome originally. On mobile I think it was 99% due it being the default on Android. Most people don't change default apps or settings.
Then there was their active push to eliminate other browser by providing chrome-only experiences. Mostly tech demos and games, but also actively blocking random features in other browsers.
And let's not forget android.
So in short, no, people didn't move there because it was better. You are really overestimating people.
A good browser is hard, like really hard. It's in the same order of magnitude as writing an OS. To improve the user experience they need to hire guys like https://randomascii.wordpress.com (Bruce Dawson).
Firefox has indeed been losing share gradually, but not due to their browser implementation. That's been improving such that I think the slide would be worse otherwise.
Today on Linux I have to restart Firefox every ~20min because it slows to crawl. I don't know why and don't really care, because it'll take an unknown amount of time to root cause and 6 months from now an OS or browser update is likely to cause something similar.
I'm not dissing the Firefox devs. Google seems to have more people to throw at this problem.
Fortunately for me, Safari also doesn't implement some HTML5 APIs I use (e.g. PointerLock), so I feel justified in pretending it doesn't exist.
Firefox, on the other hand, is the only browser that can sync between desktop-mobile and has adblock on both sides. Chrome unfortunately doesn't on the mobile side.
That's not a good example -- Mozilla supposedly didn't get any money to add Pocket.
Why they added that Pocket integration (with no easy way to uninstall it like an extension, and yes I know you can goto the ever so user-friendly about:config and make changes), I'll never know. After tons of complaints about that bundleware, Mozilla continues to leave it in.
Also, we listened to complaints, and pocket is moving out of the main tree back to being an add-on. You can follow the progress at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694
But btw, this goes both ways. On Windows 10 my Firefox looks better and behaves properly with a bigger DPI value, whereas Chrome does not. Now that's an important feature ;-)
Unless Firefox can get distributor deals with Dell / HP / etc the way Google has to get Chrome preloaded (between that and its default-on-Android status is what is rapidly pushing its market share) nobody has the pressing need to go out of their way going borderline door to door replacing IE6 with Firefox on everyones computer like they did in 2005-2008.
[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222550
[1] https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
If you are not paying for it, you are the prod... oops, wrong browser vendor! /s
Seriously though, I know there are trade-offs to consider, but some of the technical decisions being made for Firefox make me wonder what they were thinking (case in point: Pocket). Too bad most Firefox forks tend to wither over time.
> The organization once banked on the millions that Google paid for search traffic from the Firefox browser.
Then, there is this:
> Now it relies on Yahoo, Baidu and others, and it expects revenue to grow.
and this:
> is confident new search-engine deals will bring in even more money
when they dont, they're dead.
Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock.
Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.
20 tabs is shockingly low for causing performance problems, especially that severe and _especially_ on a computer with freaking 16 GB of RAM. I abuse tabs pretty badly on Chrome: on my 16 GB workstation I'd have a few hundred open, many of them for weeks at a time, and on my 8 GB laptop, I usually have up to 100, and I rarely get performance problems, certainly never to that degree.
I was one of the late-switchers to Chrome because there were some Firefox features I enjoyed, but the garbage performance finally forced my hand back in 2009/10 or whatever. I periodically check back with Firefox out of a healthy sense of wanting to be aware of alternatives, but it consistently fails at what's perhaps the most important to me: performance.
My most CPU intensive extensions are Stylish @ 3%, µUblock @ 2%, and All Tabs Helper @ 1%. For tabs it's about:performance @ 22%, a YouTube video @ 6%, and a paused YouTube video @ 2%.
This is with Nightly (binary downloaded from Mozilla) on a 4core 3.7GHz AMD CPU, with an integrated 8core GPU: the A10-7850K running Gentoo Linux.
Wow, that's a lot of cash. What are the top expenditures of Mozilla?
$40 million "branding and marketing" $38 million "general and administrative" $10 million depreciation $13 million "program services" (whatever that is) $213 million "software development"
Note that this is not counting income taxes (another $2.5 million) as an expense, because this is basically the "how much taxable profit is there?" calculation.
Nate that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation claims Mozilla has "1000+" employees; if that claim is true I would expect $200+ million just for salaries, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, etc (obviously depending on where the employees are located).
Your comment and concerns don't make any sense.
Yes, in some languages Google search is sometimes superior, but the difference isn't huge and I always can type "!g something" into DuckDuckGo if I need to (and I don't have to confirm any user agreements in that case).
In fact, what still makes me use Google search sometimes isn't localization or some clever heuristic features like flight search, but "search by image" feature. I don't know any other engine that would do that nearly as good as Google. TinEye is left far behind, unfortunately.
By the way, DuckDuckGo now has country/language localization as well, though it does not seem to be the default.
I like how the article references twitter quotes:
<span data-popup="twitter">"We're going where the users are going,"<span class="icon-small-twitterBlue"></span></span></OT>
So you're just reliant on Yahoo/Bing money now.
How would one go about getting started in this now? I hear there's "old style addons", jetpack-based ones, and something about making it Electrolysis-compatible... and then there's WebExtensions looming in the horizon. Could you give me one definite starting point that's reasonably modern and future-proof?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/hacker%20news
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/tag/hackernews
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hn-utility-su...
Or do you mean "none" is some other way?