It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made me worry that the browser I've been using for the last 17 years doesn't have long to live. Hopefully that is not the case.
Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at Google/Apple/etc.
(ex-Mozillian here :) )
"The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company."
I'd say there's a few major reasons: protecting the name and signaling we're a real company to larger corporations.
For us, we also host websites that allows JS/CSS/HTML, so being able to put our assets on a separate domain helps with security issues.
But I still love the people there (and created https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24135032 recently)
the market share is really worrying but OTOH Mozilla just secured another multi year deal with Google so in the short-medium term they are fine financially. I hope that a reason for all those projects cuts is at least partially creation of finacial reserves, in theory they do have enough cash and momentum to stay technologically relevant for at least 10 years.
But it's hard to find a definitive record.
I don't know if it is a tech-issue or legal, but since it can be fixed with an extension, I guess it's tech?
I think the thing to be worried about is: what will happen when they run out of stuff that's already in the pipeline? Will they be able to execute the sweeping changes they'll need to do to stay within reach of blink long term? Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did.
This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note, for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of writing its own JS engine from scratch: https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs
Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on Servo.
I am sad to say this, but I think it's only a matter of time. At this point, the list of parties driving Web standards basically consists of a whole bunch of organizations that rely on Blink, plus Apple and Mozilla.
WebKit can probably hang on for a good long while because ~15% of user-agents are required by fiat to be WebKit.
Gecko? At 5% marketshare, I fear it's dropped below the point where web developers are well-incentivized worry too much about making sure their sites run well on it. Which means that it's going to get increasingly costly for individuals to continue using Firefox.
And, at the same time, actually making sure your site runs well on it is getting increasingly difficult. The rise of client-side JavaScript frameworks like React means that cross-browser issues have moved beyond easy-to-perceive things like ActiveX controls not being supported, or CSS rendering badly. Now the big problem is differences between JavaScript engines leading to annoying performance problems. And, if a developer is planning on doing the sane thing and relying mostly on libraries for their heavy lifting, there's just not that much that any individual can do about it.
My sense, at this point, is that, going forward, the Internet does still have room for free, open, community-driven standards that aren't tightly controlled by a small number of massive corporations. However, the Web (i.e., HTML, CSS and JavaScript) does not.
FFOS was a moonshot that burned a lot of resources, but I also suspect it's one of the few things that, had it been successful, could have guaranteed Firefox's long-term survival.
(And I still think FFOS was a silly move, because Mozilla will never be able to match the industrial muscle that FAANG can field. Mozilla on mobile can only succeed either by pushing harder to the court of public opinion (i.e. lobbying antitrust authorities to force Apple and Google to open up), or by partnering with another giant who wants to compete and can do the heavy lifting (Amazon, or FB, since Microsoft seems to have joined the monoculture for good).)
Google also advertised Firefox on their home page.
Flutter will be the interesting newcomer to the multi platform game, they've been working closely with the big OS teams to optimize performance on Mac, Linux and Windows and truly compete with native. So far I've only used it for mobile but the temptation is there and I'll eventually try it.
Better devtools = More developers = More testing = Smoother website = More market share.
Though as if to invalidate what I just said, today's actually the first day where I found a bug in Chrome that every other browser got right. Flex reverse row was right aligning my div and every other browser properly left aligned it... I was pretty shocked.
<quote>
However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year.
(... snip ...)
According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average.
Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in Taiwan, blaming the “economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic.”
</quote>
Their cost is probably much more than just staffing - but still - doesn't look that bleak? I get the non-ideal situation of being dependent on you competitor like that, but it _has_ proven to be a robust source of income so far..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio...
Btw.. is there any way to format a pretty quotation on HN?
> This is not a real pretty quote.
> But the good news is that even in uninterpreted form form markdown is pretty readable.
As a concrete example, :-) was invented on a bulletin board. See http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm for the details.
I'm not ancient enough to say first-hand. I know that threaded replies in BBSes in the early 80s at least coincided with usenet threaded replies.
I didn't have a proper email address until years later via my university.
I misworded my original. I wanted to say, I'm considering moving off Firefox, but not to Chrome.
Any other browser recommendations?
Preferences > Privacy > Autoplay Settings... > set "Block Audio" to "Block Audio and Video"
about:config > media.autoplay.default > 5You open a page. A big box at the top has something it it. That something is video. The video loads. By the time you scroll down, it starts to play. Oh, and it jumps into a smaller box so you're Forced to observe it and click into it to stop it.
Media autoplay is not off.
Another way to phrase that is, the media autoplay is On.
The option described above Does Not Work. Another way to describe that is, it should not have video playing by itself.
Alas, video plays by itself. Apologies in advance for being terse and not explaining myself earlier.
In short, autoplay is On and the option says it's Off.
Please let me know if I can clarify any part of this.
I'll try disabling those.
But did you try scrolling the page? Sometimes those videos start playing when you scroll down and they become smaller and jump to the bottom right hand corner of the window.
It seems a shame that such a loved & enjoyed project might fall wayside without significant financial backing. I would say I would love to help, but I have no domain expertise in browsers/rendering, or how I would develop enough to contribute.
It boggles the mind.