They are simply no longer willing to disrupt the status quo, even to help their users. They are far more motivated to be "popular", and have a big "audience", and a respected "brand", than about sticking up for their users. The fact that they even think about software development in terms of "building an audience(?)" shows that they are way off course. The most important software we use that is actively developed is made by people who are primarily concerned with making good software, not with this pseudo public relations cargo cult corporate speak.
Hint: Go back and look at what Firefox used to be like 10 years ago, and notice the difference in culture.
The fact is, if Mozilla took a proactive stand against Google Apple and Microsoft, that would greatly increase their popularity.
The old Firefox was "irresponsible" by including a popup blocker by default, and upset a lot of people. Firefox also refused to support any of Microsoft's early web DRM. People said that not supporting DRM would lock users out of content, but it actually probably contributed to the death of those systems.
Google has been slowly clamping down on user freedoms. Just one example, Google removed the option to save html5 video[1] (I'm sure users were begging for that "feature"). I would honestly not be surprised if the UX clowns at Mozilla remove that function from Firefox as well.
How long until they remove the "view source" option because being able to view source is confusing to people who have never used a browser and it is used less than 1% of the time or some other flimsy justification?
There have been people within Mozilla who just want to abandon their own code and simply release a re-branded Chromium. Because they only care about their precious brand and keeping the donations coming, and they are truly terrible stewards of the software they have inherited. Besides, once they stop actually developing their own software, they will have lots of money leftover to give themselves bonuses and throw expensive galas.
This is just false.
I guess you're not aware of the content blocking work we've been focusing on lately?: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/30/17800714/mozilla-firefox-...
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox. I can say, without hesitation, that we definitely give a damn about protecting the user and protecting the health of the web.
Can you give an example? While I personally don't agree with everything Mozilla has done in the last couple of years (like the native pocket integration for example) I do not agree with that statement.
Pocket integration: not the right thing, at least not the way they rolled it out in Germany, but not a restriction on user freedom.
Removal of about:config entries: This changes in response to changes to the engine, and restrictions can make sense if they avoid mainstream users from being confused about their setup so they find it difficult to find help. The developers edition usually has a bit more flexibility here, for advanced users.
Move to WebExtensions: This massively increases evolvability of Firefox, which I expect will result in better security, better performance, and less interference between extensions.
Changing appearance: I guess things like this are a side-effect of moving to WebExtensions. Maybe they will be supported again as the API evolves.
Dropping bookmark descriptions: these are identified as a possible attack vector in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1276819
Transmitting user data: this really does help developers and I find the way Mozilla go about this not to be sneaky the way their rivals are.
Setting the defaults to values that don't confuse mainstream users is fine. Removing the corresponding settings from the settings dialog or other easily-accessible UI ... maybe. But removing them even from "about:config"? That used to be the place explicitly for advanced settings for advanced users, settings that were too scary for the UI. These settings need to be somewhere. (What if mainstream users discover the Developer Edition? Mozilla will have to make a Secret Developer Edition to make sure only the real advanced users can find it!)
Also, where in that Bugzilla thread are bookmark descriptions mentioned as being an attack vector? I can't find anything about it.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Dev...
I was wondering the same thing. The only relevant item I could find is in bug 1402890 [0] linked in the very last comment. It says:
> Websites dictating what goes in a user's bookmark without any way to change that would be a terrible idea. Doubly so if it's secretly stored without even being viewable.
To me that seems like a valid privacy concern, but it should be solvable without discarding the entire feature. The "it's too hard to maintain this, let's just drop it, some volunteer will implement this again if it's needed (yeah, it won't integrate with our own UI like the current solution does, so what)" mindset in both those bugs just reeks of CADT [1].
I read the issue where it was discussed and a few suggestions to handle it in a way that didn't break bookmarks for people who used the description feature were pretty much ignored by the developers. The only reason I could infer from the detractors is that it was inconvenient to implement. As a long time supporter of Firefox the way they disregard us users shown in that thread altered my opinion of Mozilla significantly.
They can't outright come out and take an adversarial position against google -- they rely on them for hundreds of millions of dollars. Mozilla would not exist if Google did not pay them to be their default search. Donations account for 5% of their revenue, maybe.
Pale Moon is proof enough of that - the platform is viable, and people care about it. If Firefox were to discard the wrongheaded choices, I'm pretty sure sure that the PM community would fold back in. Rather than saying, "oh maybe there's a reason Mozilla Corp's not using the money for real advertising", users would still be going out like we did in the early '00s and building word-of-mouth to support a product worth supporting.
Corporations do not exist to "play nice". They exist to overtake, consume, and ultimately to destroy. Google has almost fully overtaken the Web for corp backers. Mozilla needs to develop the guts to take it back for the users.
"Pale Moon? What???" -- 99% of the world. It has 0.06% marketshare.
If you have a way for Firefox to make money without corporate support I am all ears, but fundamental idealism isn't going to solve anything for Firefox, it will just cause Mozilla to go extinct. I'd rather have them around than not.
And close enough to zero top-tier developer hours as to make no odds, so the "democratic decisions" would make no actual difference to an app that would be suddenly dead in the water.
Yeah, I would love to see a fierce, wholly independent Mozilla both doing the technical ass-kicking it's been doing, and with a much freer hand in user advocacy. But if Mozilla's income were to be cut off, everyone would suffer: they would suddenly have zero momentum with which to continue either their technical excellence or their existing, worthwhile advocacy efforts.
There's no reason for this kind of dog whistling.
Further, we are not exactly talking rocket surgery here, this is an extension anyone can install with a few clicks and as many can attest this is some serious bang for the buck all across the board (performance, privacy, security). Not to mention in the meantime they had the resources to auto install addons like Looking Glass
> There have been people within Mozilla who just want to abandon their own code and simply release a re-branded Chromium.
Citation needed.
Here's my quote: we're committed to Gecko.
I _am_ curious about the motivation behind Firefox Focus though. I use vanilla Firefox on Android and really enjoy it.. what was the motivation for using a Webkit base for Focus? Seems like the stripped down, privacy focused experience would have worked fine based on Firefox proper?
However, Focus (on Android) is now moving to "GeckoView", Firefox for Android's Gecko engine repackaged into a WebView-like component. GeckoView will be available for app developers (Mozilla or others) to build new browsers. Watch Mozilla's Hacks blog for news coming soon! :)
Here are instructions for test driving Focus+GeckoView now:
https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-android/wiki/Release...
I'm pretty sure the answer is quite simple, which is that the Gecko embedding story has been diabolical for a long time (i.e., it's hard to put Gecko in a new product), whereas the majority of WebKit ports and Chromium (through its Embedding Framework, or to a somewhat lesser extent its Content API) are designed to be easily embedded in new applications.
AIUI, the fact this led to this ridiculous situation is part of the reason for the renewed interest in embedding Gecko (and the emergence of GeckoView).
The work to make GeckoView offer a full set of functionality in Focus should also help other apps.
It dates from back when Mozilla seemed to be losing quickly, and actually rebranding Chrome (with their own changes) might have made sense. I'm glad they didn't, of course.
I have no reason believe he, or anybody else at Mozilla, currently thinks that way.
See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/02/and-then-there-were-thr... on Presto's demise (except it lives on after death in Opera Mini, to this day!)
And https://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/04/blink.html on the Blink fork.
Ironically, the only successfully growing Gecko-based product is KaiOS (see http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/india) but the current MoCo+MoFo leadership killed the upstream support a while ago to focus on Desktop. Maybe they will see the light...
Despite? I'd say because of. The last of my primary reasons for using FF over chrome were killed with Quantum.
Which?
Most likely the parent used one or more of these, as they were some of the extensions you could point to that Firefox had but Chrome never really did, and without them Firefox arguably doesn't have the same appeal.
There's still plenty of reasons to use Firefox over Chrome, but there are also plenty of users bitter about the loss of their previously working extensions.
this. I was never a tree view tab convert, but definitely miss noscript and vim bindings, plus things like the selenium UI.
XUL sucked in many ways, I tried writing extensions with it and I have no illusions there. But coming up with a reasonable upgrade strategy for a huge swath of popular extensions was something that should have been done before deprecating it. Rather mozilla basically told people that if webextensions didn't do what they need now, then just hope for the best sometime in the future, and in the meantime too bad, your extensions are gone.
But honestly this wasn't the only thing, just the most recent. It's the general attitude of willingness to ignore the actual use cases of their actual users for some theoretical appeal to a mass market of "average users" that they've yet to convert. I felt much the same way after the Aurelius release broke a bunch of ui, and any number of other breaking changes over the last few years.
And by "the selenium IU" I assume you mean Selenium IDE, i.e., https://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/selenium-ide.png
Is that what you mean?
I'd suggest that you read my colleague's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15696184 to understand just how much friction the legacy addon ecosystem was creating. It just wasn't sustainable.
[1] https://github.com/truedread/netflix-1080p/issues/15#issueco...
That's why I installed Linux Mint on my parent's computer, it runs Firefox, Skype and Google Earth just fine, can download photos from camera, copy DVDs and that's basically all. No shitty antiviruses they can download and I can SSH to the machine to check what's going on. Nothing, if you're interested.
I was looking at Google, but I no longer have any idea what the heck their strategy on Hangouts, Meet, Allo, Duo and whatever else they're producing these days is.
Don't forget the bit where Chrome rams its fucking updater down your throat at every occasion and any way to disable it is only temporary.
And Chromium manages to be even worse at least on OSX: it apparently decides that being quit is unacceptable and relaunches itself hidden in the background.
If you want to manage Chrome updates on your own, use the msi installer.
https://www.alexkras.com/firefox-launches-marketing-offensiv...
Same here, and it's maddening. That kind of bullshit, along with OneDrive ads in the freaking file browser, and now the subject of this article, have pushed me completely off of Windows.
Now that Steam Play exists and works with every Windows-only game I've thrown at it, I have absolutely nothing holding me to Windows on my gaming PC and workstations at home. I still have to deal with WSE 2016 and Windows 7 Pro at work, but that decision is not up to me and even if it were, we'd still have to stay with Windows for some of our software. The owner would absolutely love to make us a Mac house all the way but she understands why we can't make that move.
It's terrible behavior.
Maybe you could make a tool that lets you make changes, schedules a modification of this file on next restart, and after the restart it propagates the changes in the registry too.
Yes, "please reboot to apply your new mouse position^W^W^Wfile association changes", yay, but that'd work.
Although I'd definitely hate it.
One example: https://kolbi.cz/blog/2017/10/25/setuserfta-userchoice-hash-...
The fact that his utility received AV false positives is also extremely disturbing --- what more effective a way of forcing your choices on others than to label all workarounds these others find as being malware? AV is like the ultimate in censorship.
Perhaps Moz Corp haven't heard of Wikipedia and so couldn't keep that page updated.
Sorry, I'm having a cynicism overload. Carry on.
Unchecky works well to prevent that crapware from ever getting installed. It unticks those default 'install my paid crap' offers.
FTFY