Firefox Was Always Enough
ianbicking.org
ianbicking.org
FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP stuff is a giant opportunity for any web actor.
Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted.
So yes Firefox was always enough. Leadership at Mozilla doesn't get it.
That said. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for years. I only use chrome when a website needs it or works better in it.
I am curious as I don't relate to this and recommend Firefox to friends and family.
I don't know whether those are bugs in Firefox or if Chrome is doing something funky that causes it to work but not Firefox.
I haven’t tried using Citrix for years. It used to work fine in Firefox, but given the quality of it I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve broken something.
I'm not convinced changes to the browsers themselves at this point is anything other than a very marginal improvement.
From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'.
Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs
This was WebOS in 2009.
Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Reception
> The Nokia N9 was announced at Nokia's Connections event in Singapore, June 2011. The reception for the device has been very positive, citing the MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan UI, pseudo-buttonless design, polycarbonate unibody construction and its NFC capabilities. Still, many reviewers did not recommend to buy the N9 only because of Nokia's earlier decision to drop MeeGo for Windows Phone for future smartphones – often questioning this decision at the same time. Engadget's editor Vlad Savov said in June 2011 that "it's a terrific phone that's got me legitimately excited to use it, but its future is clouded by a parent that's investing its time and money into building up a whole other OS." In a later review, Engadget writes: "Love at first sight — this is possibly the most beautiful phone ever made," and "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan is such a breath of fresh air it will leave you gasping — that is, until you remember that you're dealing with a dead man walking."
> I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS.
This is naive. They did execute, and failed. That’s different than not executing at all. You can’t break into this segment without cooperation from the mobile phone operators... even in India and Southeast Asia whom were the primary target markets (less disposable income than Americans)
I had a Firefox OS phone. There was nothing great about it. It was average (by intention in order to work on restricted devices). I never used it to make calls, I used it for development. And it only had a wifi connection because I did not buy service for it.
There was nothing really “disruptive” about it as I recall. $20 Android phones destroyed any hope after the mobile operators turned a blind eye.
p.s. I still have the phone.
Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.
More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was:
- USA: Facebook Messenger
- Japan, Taiwan: LINE
- China: WeChat
- Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp
And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.
The only people I know who don't use WhatsApp are very privacy focused and therefor use Signal.
We actually:
- have been friendly to 3rd party clients developers, like Loquim (https://loqui.im/). Once WA turned on e2e encryption, the situation for 3rd party clients changed from "difficult but fun" to "mostly impossible".
- wrote a JVM in JS to run the S40 version of WA (https://github.com/mozilla/pluotsorbet).
- partnered with a company specialized in bringing android apps to other OSes (they had Windows Phone support for instance).
I.e. if you've got something to claim as the reason it can't also apply to KaiOS unless there was something KaiOS did right that Mozilla didn't.
People do this all the time. I did it with my first android phone, a Nexus S, despite having bought the phone with no intention of doing so. The Chinese crapware it came loaded with didn't really leave any alternative.
So, what would have happened to Android, if Google didn't have the Maps / Play Store big stick?
Every device manufacturer wants to differentiate. None of them are good at it.
Elop was an incompetent leader, but he had not been involved in creating the mess. He went for a worse option, but that does not say that Meego would have ever succeeded.
Yes, I am stuck in the past myself, typing this on SailfishOS. But one has to see the realities.
I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone.
What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.
As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
This doesn't pass the sniff test, unless you're doing something weird like measuring the mobile OS market in dollars spent on phones.
> Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.
To be clear, I have no experience of Windows Phone. I'm just bemused that 100% of comments about what it was like are so glowing. For some other product, you'd expect to see some comments saying "this was the greatest product ever to be commercially available" and some others saying "no, I had one of those, and it sucked". That doesn't seem to happen for Windows Phone.
No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.
With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.
It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find".
When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well established that you won't get featured, no matter how great your app is if it is available on other platforms.
> With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.
YouTube is available to anyone with a web browser, such as people using a smartphone.
Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anything else.
They needed Samsung and HTC to have adopted them at the time.
Windows Phone was an epic disaster in how badly it was rolled out. It was Ballmer at his worst. MS kept oscillating between whether they wanted Windows Phone to be an iPhone competitor or an Android competitor. They picked the worst of all worlds, by choosing to focus on distributing through 3rd party vendors, but refusing to allow them to make any changes to the interface, therefore basically eliminating any major vendors from adopting and promoting Windows Phone. It’s still amazing that MS was unable to unseat Android at a time OEMs were desperate for an Android alternative thanks to the uncertainty around the Oracle lawsuits (and were already paying more to MS than Google for Android! thanks to MS’s OS related patent portfolio).
Ubuntu Phone never made any sense, targeting the most expensive niche of the market as it did.
A lot of patent fees paid to Apple and Google for every phone sold.
Windows Phone was really good and it had millions of fans. It would probably do well in today's duopoly market if relaunched but MS has lost interest in phones presently.
People didn't buy it. Simple as that.
Doesn't matter how much better people think the consumer experience is if nobody's buying it.
I don’t need to do anything!
The only thing that matters is people didn’t buy it. It wasn’t a success.
Because this product could only be sold to a hardware maker. It doesn't matter how good it was/is, because hardware makers are smart enough now not to rely on a 3rd party supplier of an OS, in fact they've been working hard on degoogling Android as much as possible.
Another failed alternative that comes to mind is WebOS, and yes indeed, it got acquired by LG for the reasons above.
Wasn't it initially too slow and bloated for the hardware they released it on?
> “In the software world, particularly for platforms, these are winner-take-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is. That is, Android is the standard non-Apple phone platform. That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win. It really is winner take all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system."
https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/24/18715202/microsoft-bill-g...
I have personally gone through carrier negotiations and they’re the reason why Android phones come with bloat ware and people go to such lengths to build and distribute minimalistic Android systems.
When the pandemic is over and the world opens again go visit Mobile World Congress. Bring a tissue because the industry might make you cry.
Might it have something to do with the word "OS" in the title? It's never worked except for Apple, but because Apple is selling a whole product, not an OS, it doesn't seem to hit in the same way.
Marketing something as "____ OS" appears to more or less guarantee a marketing failure.
that is why founder started brave.
[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/959909542246019072
This is the meat of my problem with Firefox as it stands. I've not stopped using Firefox since the mid 2000's but come on, you need something more than just checks from Google. Charge me for a commercial version of FireFox that includes a VPN subscription and funds its development. Just do it ten years ago.
Honestly, if they're not going to embrace Rust and Servo becomes completely usable I may just jump ship eventually. My hope for Servo is that it becomes 100% Rust as much as sustainably possible (I understand for codecs and some things recreating them in Rust might be overkill when there's standardized libraries just use them), even the JS engine.
“How will we ever earn money here at Mozilla? All we have is this world class web browser that provides massive value to millions of people, but we refuse to directly monetize. Oh whatever will we do?”
If you want to pay for using their browser, you could always donate to them.
According to the author, the problem contributing to this misprioritization was that “Firefox exists just to give Mozilla a seat at the table when the web is defined,” such that they didn’t care if it was the best. I doubt that’s true. Few want second, third, or fourth place. So let’s assume they wanted it to be the best. Where did it go wrong?
As much as Rust is great and FF was a great project to try it out on, I’m not convinced that FF needed a full rewrite, and in my experience there were significant problems with performance as Rust wasn’t fully there and the developers didn’t test adequately on all platforms, which they should’ve pushed more for if the funds were there.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
The day I found out about that I stopped using Firefox and switched to qutebrowser.
they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.
Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entirely different level of support. They will need a billing and support team that is beholden to those paying customers.
It will shift the focus that Firefox has on attracting and retaining users to attracting and retaining paying users.
It will mean they need to meet various warranty and regulatory requirements around the world, and potentially introduce new business risks and liabilities related to those requirements (e.g. non-compliance with specific regional legislation).
What you are asking for is to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and to get there you need a radical shift in the organization that supports and ships Firefox.
Or, you could do what the rest of folks who want to support Firefox do, and make a donation in the way that Mozilla is signalling is the best way to support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development.
If that isn't good enough for you, track down an OSS contributor to Firefox, and give them money. Direct action for the win!
That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of their mission.
(Maybe you can? I haven't donated to them...)
9HZZRfNlpR is right. Not only do you get to say this, you have no other choice but to say this. Buying a laptop sends the strongest possible message that you're giving your money to the laptop division, and not to the tablet division. If you wanted to support the tablet division, you would have bought a tablet. And Lenovo will keep very careful track of this. They may choose to cross-subsidize, but your message will be received loud and clear.
Have you ever compiled and run servo? I have. It's really cool but nowhere remotely close to being ready for a full production browser.
Mozilla are embracing Rust, they are just no longer interested in the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo, maintaining both at once during the entire process, and then spending multiple years trying to integrate it back into the browser.
Back when the Servo team was let go, what they basically said is that moving forwards things will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than hundreds of thousands of LoC at a time.
1. Ask that the DOJ strips Chrome from Google. You can't make the browser, search, and ad platform. Monopoly power. Google needs to exit Chrome right now.
2. Ask the DOJ to force vendors like Apple to allow other browser engines. They can't lock down all "code execution" on generic computers they sell.
3. Integrate Ad Blocking in Firefox.
4. Collect money from advertisers willing to make non-invasive ads that want to be seen.
Brave's business model, but with much more badass tech.
After revenue comes back, make a mail service.
have i missed something?
They did not lay of all of their Rust developers, or even most of them. WebRender and Stylo are now integral parts of Firefox, and are actively maintained by teams of people, and a lot of new code continues being written in Rust.
The Servo DOM and HTML engine is massively complex - far moreso than Stylo or WebRender - and nowhere near ready for production use. Mozilla decided that rewriting the remaining parts (read: vast majority) of Firefox slowly, in-place, would be a better path forwards than maintaining two massively complex browser engines in parallel and trying to swap it out completely.
It's execution is not actually very good, if "doing well" means quality. I was actually avoiding getting a smartphone for a while, but the rise of kaios-powered phones, at least the ones in the US, drove me to smartphones. Contrary to the promise of firefoxOS/kaiOS, there was no kind of "app store" or other way to install custom apps, it just had the usual featurephone features. What there was, was a phone where every keypress had like 750ms-2000ms of latency until it had an effect on screen, making it almost unusable. It ruined feature phones, at least for now. I tried a couple. It's a pretty terrible product on every US phone using it I have seen; whatever led to it being on those phones, it was not quality.
It may be that KaiOS phones available in other countries (always the target market) are better, and an improvement from what came before. (But why are phones available in the US using it for such awfulness worse than what came before?) I would like to think if Mozilla had stayed involved, it would be better.
The business question of course is how the current (Chinese?) company behind KaiOS found enough runway to get it to market when Mozilla did not. Lowered standards/expectations might be part of it though. But it may not at all, I have no idea the story behind what happened. This thread has people giving their reasons for why FirefoxOS failed... but most of their reasons fail to explain why someone else could somehow take the open source IP behind Firefox OS and have a succesful company which succesfully got it onto phones. What was the difference?
I've said this many times and I'm going to repeat it again; I wish Mozilla would offer me a way to purchase a monthly subscription for Firefox.
I want to support the open Web and I want to support FireFox development (but not any n+1 random Mozilla products / experiments) and I hate that they don't offer this.
Though would Mozilla grant some type of premium version of Firefox or premium support for your subscription monies?
The problem with optional subscriptions is that most people will never opt-in. If subscriptions are made mandatory, the general public will be driven to one of the other major browsers.
It's a matter of "can't", not "won't". Subscription revenue would go to Mozilla Corp directly and therefore has no restrictions, because it's taxed as income. It at least has the possibility of being spent on Firefox development even if it actually goes to Rust maintainence or whatever else.
But the feedback from people who do use it is overwhelmingly positive. A lot of people love Pocket. It's enormously popular, despite the impression you would get if you exclusively went by HN comments.
Personally, I've just recently started to try using it. It hasn't really captured my enthusiasm yet, despite addressing one of my larger pain points with a browser. I still think I'd prefer management capabilities that felt more built into the standard (well, Tree-Style Tabs) tabs/history experience. But it's early days, I'll have to see how my Pocket experiment goes.
They're certainly good at surfacing appealing-looking content that isn't vapid when I try reading it. That's worth something.
Ugh, this is nonsense. Mozilla has not "ditched Rust as a core component of a tech focused corp". Mozilla has ditched the idea of developing entire components of Firefox in a silo for 5-8 years, and then spending 3 years trying to integrate that component back into the browser, the entire time trying to keep both components maintained and up-to-date with ridiculously fast changing web standards.
They want to continue using Rust, but it will be done more piecemeal and in-place, rather than trying to keep two entirely separate browser engines maintained and standards-compliant for the next 5+ years.
Azure, AWS, Google Cloud are all major Rust sponsors at this point. It doesn’t make sense for Mozilla to remain a major sponsor for a product that almost certainly can and will exist, and likely flourish even more, as a more independent project.
At this point Mozilla’s ownership of Rust would likely only cost resources and serve to limit the growth and development of rust.
Mozilla was tired of getting smoked by Chrome, which actually invested in browser development using what the tools they already had ("engineering"), as opposed to subsidizing PhDs on programming language theory.
Now it's too little too late. They've passed the point where they could catch up on technical grounds, so they make appeals to morality to market their software. Yes, I agree it was bad leadership.
I was little infuriated when they added pocket.
Google meet does work well on chrome only. (Not firefox's fault completely)
I didn't like how they suddenly changed layout on Android and made many extensions unusable.
I didn't like Mozilla the corp / foundation's political alignments, a personal opinion and actually I don't even care about politics. But we Indians (much like South America I guess), have an aversion to SJW virtue-signalling politics because we have seen how it brings too-much right leaning parties into power. Why would a tech company get into politics at all unless it's about some virtue signalling execs pushing their agenda?
They fired some actually talented programmers but kept the C-suite, with their non-technical CEO being paid big amounts despite company being in losing game. While I personally don't like some aspects of rust community, the language itself is solid and could be a differentiating point for firefox.
As soon as I have seen their management take such decisions and their pushing of political agenda, I can't trust these people to maintain a browser well. No offense to engineers I was telling about Mozilla itself. So I somehow migrated to chrome. I miss UBO on mobile but bromite is good enough. Google is not much better
They may not lose much from a middle-class Indian dude switching to other browser. But think about it. Bringing politics and favoring useless C suite execs is a great way to lose future donors. A company should not do politics. They say they do politics for open web, that's not what I am talking about. FSF has done much better than Mozilla foundation in this regard. Mozilla just favoured execs and their agendas before technology, and lost the market.
Maybe it's me being too naive, but if you had asked me 10 years ago to predict where they would be, I would've said that in the future Firefox would come in different versions. The main one, the flagship, would remain the general purpose browser that we know. But there would be some special editions custom tailored to specific markets. You'd have "Enterprise" editions, that facilitate internal app development for organizations. If your organization needed to quickly build internal tools, you wouldn't need to tussle with WebPack and all the other front-end nonsense. The browser would come already equipped with a development toolkit and environment, ready to connect to your db of choice, etc. I imagined that they could come up with other special versions of Firefox already customized to facilitate integration with popular platforms like Salesforce, Amazon, and others for people who work or develop for those.
A proper browser as a platform with an ecosystem. I still think it's possible.
Because your competitors are free and users expect free and we have a culture stuck in a rut of "everything is free" because ads don't have them taking money out of their wallet.
Not every software is in a niche where they can flip the switch back into a premium model and have a good outcome. If Firefox did it, most of us would stop using it.
Maybe Firefox is at a point where that's a boat worth rocking, but it certainly isn't obvious nor without fatal risk.
The best route still appears to be paying for whatever paid services Mozilla comes out with (VPN, Pocket, ...?) even if you don't use them. I don't know if a "pay what you like" option would be problematic?
(Regulators watch pretty closely when you have 100s of millions of dollars of annual income.)
Maybe. There still doesn't seem to be any guarantee that money raised this way would go toward Firefox development. With zero pricing signals it's very hard to express the "you have one job" frustration that many of us are feeling about Mozilla these days.
Examples: Pocket and their new VPN service.
Wait, pocket is a Mozilla thing? When that first popped up in Firefox, I just assumed they partnered with some business and sold out a little chunk of my data.
Now that I'm reading up on it, I see that it's more complicated. Apparently, Mozilla Corp _bought_ Pocket, which used to be Read It Later. Which I had been using at some point before. Wow. Some better communication around all that from Mozilla's side, and I might have given Pocket a chance when they rolled it out.
Sure, people with business interests will try to push the idea of what constitutes a valid option in various directions, but as someone more thoughtful than me once said, "prediction is hard, especially if it's about the future," and as another thoughtful person said, "even The Future has a future."
Plus, as the other commenter says, I am not going to recommend Firefox to my non-technical friends if it requires non-trivial amount of money.
I think subscriptions to software can do a lot to bring in line users needs with company needs. Especially around security of purchased software - if there are no profits to be made as the software is already sold why patch security issues or bug fixes, your only goal is to sell the next one.
There clearly is value in using browser technology in business. If Mozilla was a browser company they would've pushed more aggressively to understand novel ways it can be leveraged in those environments (who are also generally willing to pay for such things). I can imagine business applications being developed in a marketplace and Mozilla at the center taking a cut somewhere.
Why do we have to deal with "tree-shaking" in 2020? That's because the browser makers have completely divorced themselves from the idea that they could be part of the app ecosystem. They just build a browser that abides by the standards and push it out the door with their foot. You guys out there figure it out.
I mean, the whole thing was a disaster but at least we eventually ended up with Firefox out of the deal. Maybe the way out is the way through...
Edit: I enjoyed making this joke, but I think your ideas do have a lot of merit.
Even an Electron like package as well - but also sold with support contracts, and offered as FOSS to the community - would have lots of potential.
If I see one big problem with Mozilla, is that they chose to let go people like the author. Engineering & product culture only follows.
Point being that the author is more of a rule than an exception.
Disclaimer: Was a Mozilla fellow a few years back.
It was also a very different place when I started (before Fx4) from when I ended (just before FxOS was killed).
When I started it was a place full of passion, with a lot of technical vision going on (Fx4 was a major reboot and there were a number of side projects going on that showed promise), albeit not necessarily a lot of obvious strategic vision. I'm sure there was more behind the scenes with John Lilly, whose leadership I hired into, but I lost confidence after he left and suddenly it seemed like the message was "desktop is dying, mobile is everything."
Wasn't our mission success based on having enough market share to win a seat at the standards tables and win a place on the "supported browsers" test plan for major websites? Getting a significant part of the shrinking desktop market we'd already executed well on in the past and that competitors were idling on might be better than getting a little of the mobile market that companies with greater resources were bouncing off of left and right, no?
Intranets and SaaS apps are still a thing, and offices still use desktop, so there'd still be a core audience right? Maybe mobile browsers can be different and less standardized than desktop browsers and that's OK? Maybe it has to be? Maybe it even should be while mobile browsing incubates? Maybe browsers won't even be the primary way websites interact on mobile and they'll use client apps instead?
That was a confusing pivot for me at the time, and Mozilla's strategy was to both put all the momentum on mobile and to kneejerk to a rapid update model for the desktop browser, inspired by Chrome. Problem was that destroyed the desktop add-ons community because it turns out you can't do that when you have a monkeypatch/binary extension model with high coupling, and Jetpack/Add-Ons SDK wasn't mature enough or powerful enough yet to replicate most existing add-ons.
It also exhausted the users because the existing flow of having to explicitly approve updates on launch still remained, only now it was frequent enough to disrupt workflows--you never knew when launching a web page meant having to navigate the updates dialog first. Google had designed their browser ecosystem and usability around that update model, it wasn't something you could just graft on. By the time we figured it out Chrome had picked up a decent chunk of the community.
The company then more or less doubled in size, in no small part bringing in a bunch of people from mobile and related sectors that didn't have the FOSS culture in their backgrounds. That culminated in the development of FxOS, which I always felt like was treated as an unwelcome fork by the platform team. Maybe it was because of the need to support two fundamentally different forms of interaction, two different models of security, two different distribution and update models, two different lots of things in wrapping Gecko with an application vs. wrapping it with an OS. That also divided the company, since there were now two broadly different technical missions going on, albeit sharing code.
When considering the success of FxOS vs. KaiOS, it's worth thinking about the drag having two competing priorities in the same company causes, and how that might clarify when the 3rd party is doing the fork instead. Conflicts like "how do you release a fix for Fx the browser when it'd zero-day FxOS the phone and you can't get an update through the carrier for two months" may not be so much of a problem to figure out without that tension. I'm extremely impressed with what Fabrice and co. have able to pull off with KaiOS, and I bet lightening that load helped a lot.
When I left, after it was plain FxOS was not going to succeed at that time, in that environment, it was still a place full of passion--but it was now also a place equally full of frustration, and not with a lot of strong leadership going on and a sharply muted FOSS culture. Seemed like there were a lot of missteps and platitudes, but not a ton of optimism. I was very happy to see Servo come to fruition and Quantum be released, because I honestly expected Mozilla to go down in flames before they could get the desktop browser to a state where people who'd defected would install it again.
I'll always treasure my experience with Mozilla--and having worked at two FAANGs now since, I agree the level of talent was equal or greater at Mozilla. But I do have to admit I wish I'd shifted that five year period about 2-3 years earlier across the board. I came in right after the really good part, I think.
And I do have to wonder if that talent would remain as good without the strong FOSS culture that incentivized me to be there. I worry when I see people like Ian getting laid off too, because there's simply no way that can be about talent. If he doesn't still fit there, that implies a level of change with which I'd have been deeply uncomfortable.
I don’t know why more Windows software doesn’t use Google’s approach. A low priority scheduled updater is more user friendly than update on launch, and it doesn’t kill boot times like an update on reboot.
Firefox Dev Tools are fucking awesome. Firefox sync works great. All the extensions I want are here. It's fast enough in ways that microbenchmarks don't mean anything to me...and it's free as in Liberty (last but not least).
I've been looking for a VPN, and even though I find the features rather anemic - I've used mullvad before and I trust the infrastructure that Mozilla VPN is built on and it's a way to give money to them. I will probably also switch over from Raindrop to Pocket for the same purpose.
I use it for a few years already and never had any problem.
i like it more than pockets.
Since the desktop app has a reader view, it's great both for organizing things for classical bookmarking, and for maintaining a "live" set of things you need have at hand, such as documentation. It's very good for "read it later" use cases, too.
Pocket is a very good offline reader for having a queue of web articles (and only that; it does not do handle things like PDFs well) to read later, but not good for anything else.
I think Opera Software circa 2012 was doing all of the things we would hope for/expect from Mozilla & Firefox, and doing them much better than Mozilla could. Bar one: it was not open source.
When I made the switch to Firefox in 2012, it was my belief that I would not have been forced to switch browser had Opera originally been open source. I strongly believed in open source at the time; I used Opera in spite of that. When they shut down the Presto project, I lamented the loss due to the inability of the community to fork.
I'm wondering if Firefox went away, would a fork be likely to survive in any impactful way; browsers are massive, complex & enormously expensive to maintain, whether you have rights to the source or not. Maybe open source isn't the panacea we thought in this particular context.
I'm still on Firefox as I'm loathe to support any browsers built on Blink & contribute further to a monoculture, but the Vivaldi project have finally started to achieve similar things to what Opera was doing 8 years ago. It's notable that it's linked in blue in the section of this article headed "A better browser".
I used Firefox since then. And I never had an issue with it. But, especially at the beginning, I really felt it was an inferior browser. But still better than chrome for sure. Just because I don't want google to know all my chronology.
Often, Opera Mobile was your only chance to get something done online on such a device. For example, purchase a ticket.
The one cool feature i considered going back to opera for was built in torrent support, I really thought that would catch on.
Even now Firefox doesn't feel like an open-source project in the traditional sense; it feels like its culture is still Netscape. It's still very much owned by a corporation that does most of the development.
Konqueror shows that a proper open-source browser is or at least was possible. It always had an order of magnitude fewer developers than the competition, but was able to keep up by using better tools and frameworks and relentlessly keeping the code clean. Even today I wouldn't be surprised if it received more outside contributions than Firefox.
Not ironic, intentional. Chrome was made by former Firefox engineers, and the name was a joke about exactly this. I remember struggling to come up with a better name for the app other than this code name and then they eventually launched it with it anyway.
> The visible graphical interface features of an application are sometimes referred to as chrome or GUI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface#User_...
I just browsed the website of the Mozilla Foundation and to my surprise learned that Firefox development is not one of its responsibilities. I was assuming that that was in fact its primary mission. It's not apparently. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a vague website but it reads to me like they are spending their time doing activism and marketing and that they do not employ any developers.
The reason the foundation leading product development would make sense to me is that having no commercial conflicts of interests are kind of a per-requisite to do what most users (including me) value in Firefox, is to protect their privacy, commit to open standards (over any competitive advantages that proprietary/exclusive features could bring), be as secure as they can be, etc.
Except it seems that Firefox development is currently not structured like that and Firefox is instead an OSS product developed by a commercial for profit business competing with other companies backing a different OSS product (i.e. chromium) where users have some concerns about the conflicts of interests of the companies backing that (e.g. Google and MS) with respect to exactly the things I value in Firefox.
So, given that, what's the point of having the foundation and what's the point of Firefox as a commercial product (other than guilt tripping Google into keeping the money coming)? I don't mean pretty words and mission statements of a commercial entity. But what's the point for users picking one company over another? They are both companies that ultimately are run by their share holders; not by their users. A foundation is different: it serves its members and its mission without a goal to enrich shareholders.
It’s a weird setup sure, but it wasn’t originally like this. Originally there was just the nonprofit Mozilla, but IRS rules got in the way. If I remember correctly, the IRS requires a certain amount percentage of income for a nonprofit to come from donations, and Mozilla was below that threshold because they were making too much money from the Google search deal (which legally is selling a product). Mozilla split themselves this way to get around the tax laws.
If Mozilla was founded today, they’d probably incorporate as a B corp, but those didn’t exist back in the early aughts, so they have this strange setup instead. They could always reincorporate as a B Corp, but there’s no benefit to do so.
People thinking this is a strange setup usually just don't have much experience with non-profits with revenue.
Google is rapidly locking down enterprise by building in tight integrations with Google Workspace/G-Suite (see: context aware authentication).
In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. The first step in their recovery is to convey what their vision of the web looks like in 2035 and commit to Firefox being the first browser to make it a reality by 2025.
Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.
Nitpick: they are DoubleClick:
> DoubleClick was a company acquired by Google in 2007
But net overall? I believe it's better than 2005 and even 2010. Meaning, I would not want to revert back to 2010 and start building back up from there. There is too much good we would lose in the process.
I have no idea if my opinion is shared by the majority, but I am very optimistic about the future of the web.
The characteristics of the web from 20+ years ago are still there. Many or most people just prefer not to use that type of web from 20+ years ago.
Everyone is still free to use whichever browser they want to access whichever website they want (in the US at least) in the same manner they did in the previous decades.
I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options.
I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.
- a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005)
- waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G
- waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google
- web "apps" with worse performance characteristics than programs that ran on 66 MHz machines
I don't use Slack.
It was still pretty sweet to run a transparent Squid proxy with an ads blacklist.
Why own a dog? You spend money on it, it shits, it makes noise, you have to find a caretaker when you go on vacation, it bites, it needs walks, it needs to go to the vet, your next girlfriend might be allergic to it, and after all that, it dies.
Do people who own dogs not know these things? Or is it that they own one despite those things and there's a more interesting conversation to be had?
Comments like this make me wonder if you, yourself, are capable of seeing anything that's improved about the web which is a much more illuminating exercise to do than enumerating just bad things, something anyone can do.
In fact, I submit blind optimism is in fact more tiring, look at any comment thread about Tesla or Bitcoin. It's as if these two things are perfect and you had better buckle up if you dare criticize either one.
Take a look at The Web Design Museum, Gallery of Flash Websites: https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/flash-websites/ . Beautiful visuals, terrible SEO.
Flash is an important quirk of internet history and a stepping stone that created expectations of what the web could one day be: a rich, open, cross-device application platform accessible by URL.
And that's what the web achieved with only a few exceptions.
> In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today.
That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen:
- tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports)
- large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it
- bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole
- The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).
It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business."
The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy.
I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt.
I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now.
Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare.
There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience.
The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
Yeah I completely agree. There are extensions that make managing containers easier but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still run into regular problems.
That said, the Facebook and Google extensions don’t require micromanaging. They only cover those two respective clouds but it’s still a really strong starting point.
> I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now
It is possible with the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox. In fact this is exactly how I’ve been browsing the web for around a year now.
It’s really liberating.
I can assure you that perf has not been abandoned.
Ah how this resonates with me so much, I remember the difference of tabless IE and oh so magical Netscape / Firefox when those were new. I consider myself Mozilla fanboy to this days.
But alas, every time I try clean installation with default settings I cannot believe how … bad this became and how far it diverged from original experience: by now Firefox is browser with the WORST user experience regarding tabs usage, from my perspective.
Current defaults are: - Super slow Ctrl+Tab modal tab switcher, mimicking OS alt+tab app switching mechanic. But slow. And distracting. And not pretty. And considering tab bar, mostly redundant. - Ctrl+Tabbing order is, naturally, in most recently used order, so visual tab proximity means nothing. - Ctrl+Shift+Tab does mostly nothing [1]. No, it does not select the least recently used tab. No, it does not switch to tab to the left. When tabs don't fit the tabs bar width, Ctrl+Shift+Tab opens another (vertical) tabs list and lets you read titles and navigate with arrows. But usually you just instinctively press Ctrl+Tab to "undo" it, but now you stare on that Modal over the opened list and question your browser choice. From there Ctrl+Tab finally stops working predictably and whole experience breaks into horrible mess.
Don't get me wrong, Ctrl+PgUp/PgDown still operates well. You can still change some settings to get even Ctrl+Tab working the way original Firefox popularized. But still, this state of things makes me very sad. I'd really like to spread Firefox, but with such details that I cannot explain even to myself it is impossible.
Currently, I have the hn comments in one window, and the article in another window, and hn front page in another window on a "smaller" 2K monitor. Customized for compact density, os tab bar moved to the right, menu bar off (the default) and still the 30 links on the hn front page don't fit on the page. Why can't the tab bar be hidden when there is only one tab? I don't need to see a tab with a truncated title that already appears in the title bar. I guess I am supposed to hide the title bar, and learn to love a Lotus Notes era "Tab" interface. In my opinion, tabs are not cool.
On my Windows7 installation Ctrl+Tab switches to the next tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switches to the previous tab. New tabs are open after the current tab.
This might be related to the window manager or the Linux build defaults?
Thanks.
Whoever though it's a good idea to make behaviour non-transparent to users -.-
I don't mind customizing things the way I want them, but it would be helpful if there was an easier way to share setting between profiles.
The traction that Electron has gained as a cross-platform option for building apps is huge. It's only set to get bigger (whether for better or worse).
Imagine if Gecko was in this space competing with Electron. Imagine if thousands of developers place their trust in Mozilla because they have built their cross-platform apps using Gecko. They'd want to see Mozilla grow and succeed - they have a stake in seeing Gecko development continue. Is it too late (or too unrealistic) for this to happen?
A very long time ago, Mozilla did have the option to embed Gecko into apps. It was never well-documented and what remains of the documentation is out-of-date and untouched:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
They have. Several times, in fact. There was the old embedding, then XULRunner, then Firefox apps (I'm not sure if that's the same as webapprt). But these efforts generally only lasts a couple of years before Mozilla decides it's the wrong approach and kills off the embedding.
The ability to create extensions for my personal use that can interact in local with my computer would be great.
I understand that a browser have to be sandboxed but there are ways that could work without being unsafe. Maybe even two separate downloads, one for people that want to use the browser UI capabilities but work in local.
This would not solve Mozilla problems, so it's a little tangent to the current discussion.
I think it might lead to growth or "mind share" among app developers (and indirectly to end-users who use the apps built by devs).
The Chrome engine now powers the Edge and Brave browsers. Electron is used to built desktop apps by companies everyone recognises e.g. Microsoft, Slack, Figma. The appetite among companies and devs to build Electron apps shows no slowdown.
Mozilla is nowhere to been seen in ths important space. In my opinion, this is a missed opportunity.
Safari has continuously caused "headache" to businesses that rely on tracking user behavior for years now, as Apple is very bent on protecting your privacy from every other company outside or inside their walled garden.
I find it odd to ask whether any non-monetary goals are "truly" their goals. They are a listed company. Of course they want to make profit. But they do so in part by means of providing privacy and security.
I get that Chrome isn't Google's direct source of income, ads are. But, it seems like controlling the web in order to facilitate serving advertisements (e.g. AMP, Extension Manifest v3) is part of its strategy. If Mozilla made a more successful browser, and Mozilla hewed to its stated values, it would just become a threat to Chrome, rather than a harmless surface area for serving ads, and a small opportunity to earn a little good will.
From that perspective, it made perfect sense to me that Mozilla has tried to diversify its revenue. The fact that it hasn't been successful at doing that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea.
They would haggle a bit more but they would still pay. That's because Firefox's very existence is their insurance against accusations of monopolistic practices in a field where antitrust caselaw actually exists.
Particlulalry if having lots of users is how you influence things, since then you need to provide a good product (or lock users in via some external ecosystem).
Maybe some recent EU legislation moves can help them in the same way the browser choice thing helped.
If you care about making Firefox good for users, you will work to improve current performance, and prioritize compatibility with badly coded websites. Even if it makes it harder to adopt future standards coming down the pipeline.
If you care about pushing standards, you'll put more energy into those future standards, even at the cost of performance and compatibility with badly coded websites.
Firefox has consistently chosen to prioritize standards that are someone's idea about how to do things better over the real world that exists right now.
The situation for Firefox is that bad, that even enterprise users - ESR - are moving to MS Edge since its offering support together with MS Office.
I think Firefox needs something drastic to become relevant again, which is very unlikely taking into account the last years history.
Myself as a FF user i'm more and more tempted to switch to some other multiplatform-chrome-compatible browser.
Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser.
Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.
I virtually never open Samsung Internet only because I virtually never open any web browser. Browsers launch as a side effect of something else. For example clicking on a link inside LinkedIn, Telegram, bank app help, etc.
When that happens, if a separate app gets opened it's usually Firefox Focus that opens for me, so I guess that means the default URL handler is Firefox Focus (must have set it years ago) and it's not being changed by software updates.
that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?
It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.
Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.
Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.
And yet there are a range of choices for terminal only browsers. You've overall right, but I doubt that minority of users would let Firefox totally die any time soon.
It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.
Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever.
So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopoly charges.
If Chrome ever dominated the browser market entirely with 95%+ marketshare like Internet Explorer back in the bad old days of IE5/6, they'd be painting a large target on their backs for various governments to step in and make life difficult.
If we think about it, Chrome/Chromium's current ~70% market share is pretty ideal for Google. They get to kinda sorta mostly control the web, without a bunch of pesky governments on their backs.
Though I do think there is some truth to the monopoly hedge as well.
200 million monthly users is still a lot of people.
Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).
Firefox switching to Yahoo for default search was probably an eye opener for them; 30% of global search traffic (at whatever fraction of users didn't change their search engine) is a boatload of money and from public estimates at least an order of magnitude more than they pay Mozilla for the traffic.
From a business perspective Google might benefit if Firefox disappeared but there's no guarantee. Opera, Brave, Safari, Edge, etc. could take up Firefox's install-base without significantly increasing Chrome's. At least Firefox is a known entity for them and they would probably rather have a guaranteed platform with Google as the default search engine than having to negotiate with whatever sprang up to replace Firefox.
Firefox market share is now in the danger zone where Google can replace it with more Chrome promotion and still save on TAC vs. Chrome-eng+mktg. Also the danger zone where webdevs do not test in Gecko and break Firefox, even on such properties as AirBNB.
And the writer has a point when he says that the weight of Firefox has allowed Mozilla to be a heavyweight at the table of the standards of the web.
But there's a point he misses (and he was nearly there when he mentioned Gecko).
What do Chrome, Safari, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, Edge and basically every browser on Android and iOS have in common? That's the web engine - and that's WebKit/Blink, with Chromium usually being the foundation.
That wasn't a big problem when the guys at Google were still pushing for better web standards, but that's no longer the case. Gecko may have a big window to become a really modular engine that any browser can use on any platform, and it could advertise itself like the modular, corporate-free, privacy-aware, fully standard-compliant solution that can power the next generation of browsers out there - or at least be an alternative to the WebKit/Blink/Chromium monopoly. I know that a while ago Mozilla had considered exposing Gecko as a browser-agnostic engine, but at some point for some reason they dropped the plan - and that's quite a shame.
I also don't get the point of limiting addons to a vetted whitelist. I feared this would be the case since they introduced signing requirements, and that's precisely what happened. I waited a bit, but I completely lost interest since the new mobile redesign which also destroyed the UI usability for me.
Mozilla will need to do a complete turn-around to get me back on mobile.
My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.
Massive efforts were made to bring IE up-to-speed. Support for -webkit- prefixes and more were added, but that proved to be too little, too late. IE 11 eventually even had pretty stellar ES6 support.
Forking Trident into EdgeHTML (for project Spartan) was a good move, but still not the right move. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, it was clear that Edge would need to adapt or die. I left before the decision was made to drop EdgeHTML (I went to Brave), but I think that was the right decision for Microsoft.
I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.
Man, that would be something? Firefox forking Chromium to replace gecko would be a very sad day for the internet, but as of now it does kind of seem inevitable.
I dont think there is a point to continue Firefox without Gecko. Of course im with you, if Gecko dies it will be a very sad day for the internet.
I don't recall which site it was for me recently, perhaps Sainsbury's, but I reached a card payment screen and it just would not accept payment - it kept getting stuck with a spinner making no progress at the payment stage. Opened exactly the same page in Safari and it worked fine quickly. Next time it happened again, and I remembered that I needed to switch browser.
That payment problem is fixed now though. It was broken for a few months and is fine now.
There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time.
There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead.
If a payment process gets stuck due to an FF-specific adblocker, I'd still count that as an accident of implementation affecting FF users, because final stage payment processes don't have any reason to call up ad-blocked services, and most FF users use an adblocker, don't they?
I couldn’t determine why; I have customized perhaps a dozen variables within Firefox so it is hard to know wether iCloud depends on any of them.
To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts, in particular a fully parallel layout engine in combination with their other work would have meant drastically improved UI speeds, notably on Android, but elsewhere as well, it would have eliminated a lot of development difficulty and allowed a much more native-equivalent level of performance. That would have made a good basis for an embedded engine to compete with electron.
That path seems to have been closed off with the Servo team being fired. I’m not sure where Mozilla is going now, it’s not enough to tread water.
They could have been on the path of Google Apps and Office 365 before they even existed. Now, who knows.
The browser evolved from an information dispersal tool to become a networked operating system with a few implementations loosely compatible.
My suggestion is that now with web assembly we have a chance to almost start over with that. The problem is that people are not really approaching wasm as an operating system or shared platform. Rather they are making piecemeal efforts and adding little bits of functionality in here and there in different runtimes etc.
So so far it seems a missed opportunity to create a framework where people can collaborate on what the platform is. Something like a common ABI. Or a distributed package registry. Or a voting mechanism for new features.
We should have a new shared platform built on web assembly. And for the information distribution part, drop CSS and HTML and start over with content-centric networking and markdown. Focus on instant retrieval and pre-dissemination.
If I, a random user, come up with a really great standard that solves a bunch of real problems that users have, it has no chance of being accepted unless it solves the problems of the few rich stewards.
So, today, The Web(TM) and its Internets(TM), which now pretty much defines our global economy, is currently being developed by advertising and consumer product companies, and a handful of companies who profit off of the standards that they make. Our future rests not a little in their hands.
Feels kinda like watching a big capitalist train moving towards global society in really slow motion.
An example of glaring UI bug in Chrome: https://webm.red/view/XWtg.webm
Print to PDF is better in Chrome, comes with a preview.
Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
I like the bookmark tags feature of Firefox though, which Chrome lacks.
That's an interesting feature, I'd like it if that was implemented. I see some add-ons do something to simulate this.
> Opening a recently closed tab opens a new tab in Chrome instead of replacing the existing one.
This opens a new tab for me, no settings I've changed that I could find.
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
There will probably always be differences, that's why different browsers exist after all, and it'll be different annoyances for different people. Personally I think generally the UX of Chrome (that Firefox has tried to copy) is the worst thing about all current browsers. The new add-on API made me start using custom UX CSS to make it tolerable instead of a "fix add-on", but the only serious alternative (Chrome) always felt worse to me. Has many nifty features though.
Hm? I reopen closed tabs all the time in Firefox and have never encountered this. They open in a new tab. Maybe you changed an about:config pref?
Wait, isn't this something the OS print dialog is supposed to provide?
> Search marks matches in the scroll bar.
I'd like to see this implemented as well (just as another commenter mentioned).
> There were probably 5-10 more annoyances in Firefox for me that I don't recall right now. Maybe it was my familiarity with Chrome but overall I still think Chrome has better UX defaults.
Which is mostly because you're more familiar with Chrome overall (and it's also a matter of taste). As an example, I strongly dislike the downloads "bar" in chrome and the fact that bookmark/history/downloads pages are pages and not dialogs. Many people dislike dialogs tho, because they seem bloated and difficult to use to them.
One small UI gimmick I'd like to see implemented in major browsers (at least on macOS) is an option to use the fluent/vibrant blur tab bar background instead of the default white/gray/black. Firefox already kinda does that (at least when using the dark theme), but I still have to write my own userchrome.css to get the full effect.
Who in their right mind pushed the Fenix upgrade for release while absolutely breaking compatibility with the whole universe of Firefox add-ons?
The whole point of using firefox is the control that add-ons and the about:config actually give you. Failing to realize that is failing to understand who you're user are.
I hope that Mozilla the company fail as fast as possible, so that Mozilla the foundation is allowed to carry on Firefox's purpose and fund actual work from people like the author, instead of ivory tower board and C-levels.
I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me.
Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google with my data.
Not to mention the loss of critical add-ons.
I loved Firefox on desktop, and for mobile the tradeoffs of slower load were acceptable for a secure browser. That got taken away, forcibly, and left a bad taste in the mouth of virtually every review you read on Play app store.
It was way more than a UI reskin, it was a complete overhaul. It makes me lose trust in having them maintain things like passwords knowing they can produce instability like they did here.
I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.
That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do it.
So since their explanation doesn't add up, tell me, why do you think Mozilla, who gets most of it's funding from Google, decided to make add-ons such as Privacy Badger and umatrix and cookie autodelete unavailable to us to use?
Never just assume someone does something for a good reason. Never assume malicious intent either, but don't just take it laying down when a tool you use no longer works for you. If a tool keeps getting worse and worse from a user perspective, it is because the changes being made aren't made with the user in mind.
Not sure about the other two
I never left. There still isn't a good alternative for me.
But can someone please fix the extension API? A good start could be to add a supported way to move the tab bar around or at least remove it so it doesn't annoy me when I use vertical tabs.
Well if the number of users diminishes...
Feel free to try it out and drop feedback! (https://getamna.com)
a few tips from from no one:
1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards.
2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox needs to be the best browser. It is the thing that makes the company money and makes it recognizable to the lay person. You will never be able to outspend Google, Microsoft, and Apple, but they are always going to have more competing priorities pulling their best engineers away and causing political infighting about what should be crammed into the browser. Mozilla does not have to have any of that.
3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses.
That is it. I like some of Mozilla's side projects and I agree with the business philosophy that they should be looking to diversify their revenue stream, but I think they should all be part of two core products: Firefox and Thunderbird. Why Thunderbird? Because I think there is an undeserved niche in the business email service provider space and I think Mozilla can have a universal client on desktop, phone, tablet, and browser that is the trojan horse to up sell that product.
I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.
As someone currently beta testing Mimestream (3rd party Gmail desktop client for Mac), I couldn't disagree more. A good UI and a responsive interface makes an absolute world of difference. Gmail's web interface isn't bad, but a desktop client is just so much better to use.
However, relevant to this thread, it's not developed by Google, as Thunderbird would not be. And so Thunderbird could still provide value as such a client.
I think this was the key. No average user I know uses an email client on their PC, outside of the corporate one. It's one more thing to take care of and average users rarely want that.
It's easier on mobile where people are used with the "app" concept, not really on the PC. This is one reason why Thunderbird doesn't enjoy the kind of popularity browser based email does.
But that obviously it doesn't happen that often or else Thunderbird would boast a lot more users than it actually does. Relatively few users use it at all, and it's a reasonable assumption that the usage is higher among the more tech savvy than the average user.
I still find it to be a significant improvement, even if most of my interactions involve arrow keys and the backspace key (ironically the keys I can't use in their web interface).
I would love for Mozilla to start a competing email service that focused on performance, UI, privacy and integrated well with not only Thunderbird but other desktop mail clients.
It still might be a good idea to host an e-Mail service or create an Exchange pendant.
I often wonder why there never has been a popular open pendant to domain controllers in Windows. I think there were multiple attempts, but I don't think anything really caught on.
The jump from "providing an email client" to "providing a privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses" is already quite large. Being able to sell that by giving some guarantees (in signed SLA form) is yet another jump on an entirely different scale.
Then look no further than public institutions, where (leaving everything else aside) almost every tender is public [0]. You'll never see Thunderbird in any of the submitted bids because there's no company behind it to write the bid and put its weight behind it.
It's a good canary to see if a service or product has anyone capable of supporting it, or if it can be monetized in any way. This doesn't have to be the developer, just any company that can realistically push it into the corporate world.
For smaller companies, or companies that want to invest less in their technology stack IT department, it sounds like a better deal to have all services provided and backed by a larger computation corporation (even if that's not always actually cheaper in the long run).
You can go quite a ways with that before you would get close to breaking even on even a single dedicated IT person. Assuming their cloud services etc. fit your business needs of course - but that's an awful lot of companies.
I agree that this is a sticking issue; most procurement offices have vendor/supplier questionnaires that ask about their cash flows etc., because companies want to deal with going concerns. FOSS without an org doesn't check that box.
BUT isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation, as separate from the nonprofit???
That's just the "smaller" half the story.
> isn't this exactly the point of having a Mozilla Corporation
This is the critical part. If I am using Thunderbird (or the hypothetical mail service discussed above) in my company today and have an issue or request (bug, configuration error, need assistance with a deployment, want additional features in the product, want additional integration with other products) can I contact someone directly and know that this will be treated according to my specific expectations?
In other words can I call someone at Mozilla Corporation now and ask for dedicated tech support, for a bug fix in a specified time frame, for a consultant to listen to my needs and come up with a solution? Because if my business relies on that product or service and I get no guarantees then I won't be happy to pay you just so I can queue up on Github and raise issues, and I'll go with %prominent software vendor% who gives me that.
RedHat doesn't sell you "Linux", they sell everything that comes with it, and create an entire ecosystem to go with that (partners that offer certification, training, consultancy and support, dev support, etc.).
Rust to solve the problem with memory and runtime safety a super important issue for browsers that run code from anyone
Deepspeech - so Firefox can support web speech api, extremely useful api to enable accessibility
There are so many more as the web as a platform grows to support an increasingly complex web...
WebRTC is massive having software tools to exercise the use cases is important
Just my 2 cents
All encompassing: The web hosts most of our desktop applications. It should host even more of them, it should host mobile applications, it should be the universal platform. More APIs. More ways to package and present sites. (See Project Fugu)
I fundamentally disagree with this one. There's just too much of a bad security track record on all 6 of the first 6 levels of the OSI model for me to use web apps for office apps.
And so, as I said, I strongly agree with your #3.
On 3, I too would love to see that happen, but, from the outside at least, the project has seen so much upheaval [1]. I don't really understand the significance of the latest change, at the start of the year [2], but hopefully it's a good sign.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird#History [2] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Support for CoreAnimation compositing was added last year. Support for hardware acceleration on Linux was added this week.
I use it, but both Chromium and Safari are better on this platform.
Battery life has always been very top priority for Apple. That's the reason why Apple stopped supporting Flash and basically killed it (thank gosh).
Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/transitions (really amazing stuff back then but not really used until all major browsers caught up years later), was the first to ditch Flash support, has argueably the best privacy policy, has superb font rendering, etc.
As far as "least standards-compliant," I understand that when it comes to supporting progressive web apps, Safari has largely dropped the ball, but in day-to-day practice there just aren't many sites that I have trouble with on Safari. (The biggest one seems to be new Reddit, and I am not entirely convinced that issue is on Safari's end.)
I'm a Firefox fanboy, still use it on OSX because it's important to me, but the amount of random pauses, crashes, etc is just painful on OSX. It's like none of the Firefox developers use it on OSX or something.
And before someone says "oh it's your extensions", that IMO leads to two talking points
1. It's 2020 and major extensions still cause memory leaks in Firefox. Debugging them isn't easy at all. Almost all of the resources say something like "Run in safe mode and see if it fixes things" and then lots of posts of "post your about:memory here and I'll analyze it." I'm a software engineer by trade and it's been difficult for me to diagnose...
2. Nah because I don't run any extensions on my OSX firefox install
And wow. Has it really been that long? I thought it was like 2 years ago, so when I first saw your comment, I had to go check myself!
Most people don't care about battery life?
I also stopped recommending it to randos when they started coming back and complaining about weird behavior. Now if I don’t know someone and want them to just have the simplest working experience I recommend Safari on Mac and Brave on windows.
Disclaimer: For my use-case, which did not include having 1000 tabs open forever.
I've had so many issues with the Firefox Developer edition I stopped using it and have switched to Opera for my browsing needs.
Way more reliable, doesn't constantly hang and time out, and isn't a total resource hog like Firefox has become.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/The...
On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.
I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.
It is for me and many others. Emacs works great under XWayland but Chromium HW video acceleration doesn't.
Emacs is a community project whereas Chromium has billions poured into it. Even Wine's getting Wayland support now and that ran under XWayland fine.
I don't think it's that unfair. Firefox on Linux is just better. Leaves some to be desired, sure, but a lot less than Chromium.
How can most people not know it exists, when it had a majority user share at some point?
I used FF for years before switching to chrome when it came out. Every attempt I've made since to switch back (windows and macOS) as been a disaster. Hogging resources, pages that skip around while scrolling, and rendering issues (perhaps GPU related) are a few of the numerous issues I've run into.
I try to switch back to FF about twice a year. I'm going on about a eight years with no success.
It takes FOREVER after starting Firefox to load saved tabs -- like 30 seconds to 1 minute of delay before the first tab starts to load.
Recently, it also has been updating quietly in the background and FORCING me to restart Firefox to view any content. I'm sure there's a setting I can change somewhere that makes it require manual updates. That should be the default.
However, when it comes to a hosted email service, there are plenty of good options already out there (e.g. Fastmail and Protonmail). The same goes for VPNs.
I would much prefer Mozilla spend that money making Firefox better, or putting that money in some sort of mutual fund, the proceeds of which would fund browser development if Google ever stopped paying Mozilla.
The reason is, VPN services are not hard to build. Email services are not hard to build. Browsers are hard to build, and if Firefox development ever stalled it would probably go away forever.
Maybe not hard to build, but they are decidedly non-trivial to maintain. Their whole purpose is to get around the business/political decisions of one organization or another, and those organizations are making it increasingly difficult to be got around. A "real" VPN company has to deal with service providers on both ends of the tunnel trying to detect and block them, compliance with complicated legal situations in every country (and state) they have a presence in, law enforcement demanding access to logs and traffic, fraudsters trying to create accounts with stolen payment methods, attackers trying to make their way into the system for a variety of nefarious reasons, and semi-regular zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered and patched throughout the whole service stack. To name just a few of the most obvious hurdles.
No, I would not want to be responsible for running a VPN service in this day and age.
Email hosting is not much better, for most of the same reasons as above, except that spam filtering is also a whole full-time profession unto itself as well.
But yes, I agree with your point on Mozilla's lack of focus. And management competency, I would argue.
But I couldn't disagree more with number 3. Thunderbird is always going to be a niche product with a much smaller potential user base than Firefox.
More or less every corporation and every individual user out there is a potential consumer of Firefox--every single one who uses the web.
Thunderbird? Not so much. Many consumers prefer web-based e-mail clients or e-mail clients tied directly to the e-mail platform they are using (Gmail, Outlook.com, etc.). And Thunderbird is never going to replace Outlook for corporate mail. Thunderbird is only useful when you want a generic feature set, and it mostly competes with other niche mail clients.
Basically, every dollar invested in Thunderbird is a dollar that could be better spent on Firefox (or MDN). If anything, they should spin off development of Thunderbird into a separate company with its own independent funding structure.
They already did that.
- In 2012 Mozilla (the corporation) started this move by announcing that "Thunderbird was not a priority for Mozilla" [1]. At this point Mozilla (corp) stopped actively investing in Thunderbird.
- In 2015, Mitchel Baker made it clear that the Mozilla (corp) wanted to get rid of Thunderbird [2]. At this point the Mozilla corp started shutting down support services for the Thunderbird project.
- In 2017 Thunderbird was legally moved to the Mozilla Foundation (instead of the corporation) and started surviving mostly on its own, with some minor help from the Mozilla Foundation [3]. Here Mozilla (corp), the company responsible for Firefox, already got rid of Thunderbird entirely.
- In 2020, it became clear that Thunderbird can survive entirely on its own donations and could even try to provide commercial services. Thus, the Mozilla Foundation created a new "MZLA Technologies Corporation" that is now the legal entity responsible of Thunderbird [4]. MZLA Tech is not responsible for any other product that I know of.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/mozilla.governance/c/kAyVlhfEcXg...
[3] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...
[4] https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
That being platform control and advertising.
Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android.
Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable.
Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform.
Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same problem that Linux has. Namely that Linux may be better and fit the needs, but people aren't going to bother installing it. Just look at Windows 10 and how many people are pissed at various aspects from telemetry, updates, ads and still these same people can't be bothered to flash Linux. Linux has something like 1-2% of the desktop market.
The other issue with (2) is that R&D into Firefox will not return money. Not unless they choose to basically switch to blink and offload the R&D costs onto Google. Heck Microsoft themselves did the same because they realized the R&D costs weren't worth it.
If Mozilla wants to stay alive, it needs to diversify and find a niche not dominated/controlled by Google, Microsoft and Apple.
I keep trying FF, but I honestly haven't found it sufficiently compelling to go back. I don't mix work hardware and personal business, so I don't need multiple profiles. I prefer chrome's debug tools.
Maybe we will see how manifest v3 plays out with uBlock, that might actually be enough.
For a time, chrome was bundled along side JRE updates. I went over to my mother's multiple times and saw that Chrome had, yet again, replaced Firefox.
Not to mention the constant advertising/banners to switch to Chrome on all of Google's web properties.
Adobe had no incentive to change this relationship because they got paid by Google twice: for bundling Chrome in Flash and bundling Flash in Chrome.
>Chrome didn't dethrone IE and displace FF because google advertised it.
This I almost heavily disagree with. Surprisingly, marketing and advertising is far, far more effective than product performance. Performance helps retain users, but advertising is what moves users. That is nearly always the case.
It started that way, then it dominated because every google search not using chrome popped up “Better with Chrome” or “Try Chrome.” Same with all of Google’s properties. There’s no way to disable this. That’s billions of free adverts every day. It adds up.
I think similarly back in the 90s that IE4 took off because Netscape4 was horrible and then stagnated, but dominated because Windows bundled and required it. They had bundled and required IE2/3 but those were inferior to NN3.
So being good gets them to critical mass and then anticompetitive forces got them to owning.
I personally moved to Edge from Chrome after they forked Chromium because of better integration with Windows. I wouldn't have before, because it was lacking. Now with feature parity, the integration with Windows has a value.
Chromium can be configured for all of the privacy things Firefox has. There is no inherent other difference. Normal people will always value utility over privacy.
Mozilla can chose to fork Chromium, and come ahead. Chromium/Blink was a fork of WebKit. They made it better. Mozilla can chose a better starting point with Chromium.
I still remember moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Chrome now to Edge.
I was blown away by Chrome when it came out. It was just better. Way better.
Firefox runs on macOS
As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X.
Even from Mozilla's economics perspective, it doesn't make sense for Mozilla to be spending engineering effort maintaining both the iOS and OS X variants for something like 4% of desktop. If it was up to me, I would have just migrated/maintained the Firefox Wrapper iOS and called it a day.
I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop."
Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lock the Mac down to only App Store installs. Yes, I know Apple gets 30% of software sales that way. No, that is not enough of a reason for them to take the hit to their hardware profits that would undoubtedly entail. Even if it were just a loss of a few percent of Mac sales -- which I think is extremely optimistic -- it'd be coming out of the sales of the most expensive Macs, and making up one lost Mac sale literally requires hundreds of sales on the App Store to make up for it. Any executive at Apple who suggested that would be beat senseless by their accounting department.
Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.
Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).
Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).
Development houses would have much more control over updates.
Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.
As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)
The real successful strategy is to do it very slowly and gradually. With each release make it a tiny bit more annoying to install and run non-store apps. Make them slower - "this app is not trusted so it needs to be monitored for your safety which might negatively affect its performance". Users will prefer store apps and will put pressure on app developers to publish on app store.
If they do it well then hardly anybody will even notice they finally killed the non-store apps.
If and when both iOS and macOS are replaced by one unified operating system, this would be back on the table. But personally, I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on it happening even then.
That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.
Mozilla is already too bloated, too rotten and too stuck in it's ridiculous ways to salvage.
Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both.
I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to use Firefox for as long as it's possible, and then I'll find the least crappy Chromium fork available".
I don't know if it'll take 6 months or 6 years to get to that point but I really don't have faith in Mozilla righting the ship.
Firefox isn't struggling on technical grounds though. It's not a charity case, it's a perfectly competent browser. Whether Firefox outperforms Chromium depends on which benchmark you use. As far as the user is concerned, they're both technically solid browsers.
Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just to build a good browser?
The only way to beat Chrome, is the same way Firefox beat IE: Someone else will have to do it.
For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?
In that sense, Firefox's competition is not Chrome: it's the other "non-mainstream" browsers like Chromium Edge, Brave, or Opera. What can Mozilla do to attract those users to Firefox? Google doesn't want to crush Firefox to 0% because Google profits from Firefox searches and presumably wants a non-Chromium browser to exist to avoid antitrust scrutiny regulating Chrome.
... It'll raise trust if they follow through their promises. Open source Pocket, yet?
While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003.
People need to be able to do more than just access email on a desktop or laptop.
I'd like to see two new things under the Thunderbird/Mozilla name:
a) a fully open source GPL licensed, self-hostable, webmail server application that fulfills the same functions as rainloop or roundcube, implemented in the Thunderbird name. Maybe it could have its own new GUI to run inside the browser, or it could offer an optional "traditional" GUI that is similar to the Thunderbird desktop client. This has a possibility for a natural symbiotic relationship with Firefox, as the best and most optimal web browser client to view the webmail.
b) a Thunderbird Android email client. There should be no reason why people should be locked into the default Android google/gmail email client. I can't even view message headers on it. I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.
K-9 mail should satisfy these requirements. It's been slow moving development wise the last two years, but it is not dead:
Here it is: https://email.faircode.eu/
Unlike K-9, it is very actively developed.
If this shares neither the thunderbird feature set or UX, why does it have to be called thunderbird? I still use thunderbird because it's UX efficiency for dealing with large volumes of mail blow away the Gmail and Fastmail web interfaces.
You should definitely check out mutt for this.
Sort of. Google basically is what makes the company money, which is more or less indentured servitude. If it were to break away and find another way to monetize I think it becomes a very different browser.
There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.
1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.
2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?
3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.
I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.
4. Pocket, add daily news to it.
Pocket already knows what I like, has one of the best reader mode, TTS, has millions of mobile users already and is deeply integrated within Firefox.
Mozilla's values could even help it sign some deals with independent news media.
Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.
When it has been suggested many times that Moz just needed to put the money they got from Google into a fund to finance FF development.
As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them. All in all, Moz just acts as a fig leaf for the web end-game, pretending there's a community or some such.
With respect to "web standards", our best bet could be to demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards (possibly in an executable language to base a new formal browser/viewer app on). The way it is now helps no-one except Google.
W3C is mostly involved in CSS specs today, with significant influence on this past decade's advances, and also source of a lot of the complexity of browsers. CSS is a primary candidate for a formal spec among web standards IMO, since HTML5 the markup language is sufficiently covered by either the procedural spec or SGML.
WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).
This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.
> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.
This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).
Not OP, but I think the comment was saying that donating to Mozilla will result in them using the funds on all sorts of stupid shit not FireFox related. Not to literally donate to FireFox as a stand-alone software dev endeavor. Mozilla could easily accept funds in a legally compliant way if they had some sort of “please direct my funds primarily on FireFox” if they wanted to do so. This is similar to how many charities take donations from donors (eg “Here’s some money, only use it to build a building with my name on it.”)
Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.
Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.
1. Were a very tiny part of the overall Mozilla budget
2. Were also employees of Moco, not Mofo, and so donations could not go towards them either.
> nobody needs (sorry Rustees)
Industry adoption says otherwise, see for example, the CTO of Amazon's comments during re:Invent yesterday.
(That being said, you could absolutely suggest that it's not Mozilla's job to help the industry in this way. That's a much better argument than "nobody needs Rust.")
Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
Exactly what I mean, of course.
> Also, the main executive pay people complain about is paid by the Corporation, not the Foundation, so, suggesting your donations would go towards that is also incorrect.
Thx for clearing that up.
Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.
Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.
WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.
Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.
I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.
And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.
It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?
With Rust and WASM being funded and pushed by MS, Amazon, Google, Nature, and many others, I'm afraid you're dead wrong.
As I was typing this it made me starting looking a bug I've found using it. So then I started Googling around to see if someone else found it. Looking at it, it appears it's been open for 3 years. But in the bug ticket they had steps to fix it. I now know few more menus in Thunderbird that I never considered clicking on. The bug now seem to be resolved and happier.
But then I also wish they would trim it down or at least give me the option to turn stuff off. I don't want an events and task organiser and all this stuff. I just want a mail client. I also wish their spam filter would be more consistent and stuff keeps getting through that I've flagged and is clearly spam as it's the same message I've been receiving for the last couple of months.
Mozilla takes way too much of Google's search money for them to stand up to Google. [0]
If only another investor could save Firefox from the clutches of Google's dependency.
[0]: https://hothardware.com/news/mozilla-firefox-google-doj-anti...
If you want to refer to what you wrote before, a link is the way to do it. And of course you're welcome to add information that's specific to what's new in this article. There should be something different somewhere...
Has veto ever worked for web browsers?? I think the problem is user perception: users don't blame the page, they blame the browser. Especially when they learn browser X renders the page while browser Y doesn't. As an example, browsers were racing to fix malformed HTML so that the user has a good experience.
With the reach of Google, Firefox had to be that much better to keep up, like it was compared to any version of IE. Unfortunately, Firefox kind of remained the same while Chrome became better and better.
In hindsight, they could have done what Opera did. But then they didn't. I don't think they did anything particularly wrong. Firefox just aged beyond its usefulness and will die, just because it's not needed anymore.
I see Brave as the spiritual successor of Firefox. Just like Firefox challenged the then status quo and made way for better browsers to come, Brave is challenging the current status quo Chrome and Google's business model at the same time.
I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.
Firefox is a treasure we should keep alive, because otherwise the web would turn into the same closed source walled garden, as most other things do.
I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them.
And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codebase for their browsers, companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, Tesla. If Google does stop the development, there is a good chance that someone else will pick it up and keep it shared and open to distribute the work required to develop and maintain it.
The real problem of course is that the web specs itself have become too complex and expensive to implement. But a stripped-down version of browser could point out why we need to reboot the whole technology. It would be a long shot, I admit.
First time I've seen this phrased that way. If all you can think of with regards to tech is security and privacy, you are the EU: "technological pessimism".
I don't think thats true for the west. The only impressive progress we have made for the last 50 years was in computer hardware and software. Sure, we are somewhat comfortable, we got a bit better at producing things, but if compare that with 1850-1950? Its not even a competition.
I don't know how you can look at plummeting rates of illiteracy, child mortality, polio(!) and countless other scourges on humanity and conclude that no impressive progress has been made since 1950 outside of computers.
The first (internal) organ transplant was only in 1954. The amount of progress made in medicine and pharmaceuticals alone is staggering.
Like Theranos?
They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major update, either software wise or news wise, that amounts to good news. They try to dress it up but the substance is always bad for the user. Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.
Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.
The idea that Mozilla is somehow the only thing standing between Google and control of web standards is laughable. I used to buy it. But Firefox is funded by Google, and they'll get what they want. And you can see plain as day that they're getting what they want. At this point you're more disconnected from Google's influence using ungoogled-chromium than using Firefox. So that's what I do. I feel more free online using a fork of a Google product than I do using Firefox. Imagine that.
At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.
What works for whom? Every place I go on the internet where technical people discuss things, there's a common thread: competing interests have incentivized companies to put user needs second and it has resulted in a broken web that does not work and does not serve the users. The most cynical of us say that the web is irreparable.
It seems to me, from a user perspective, that they haven't found what works at all. It also seems to me that they don't care about finding what works anymore, they're happy to rest on their megalithic laurels the way Blockbuster and Radio Shack thought they could ad infinitum.
I think you're right about novel features and things breaking for no good reason, and I think the next phase in innovation of communication and networking technologies are already beginning to adopt some new axioms: less is more, and the idea that there will be one place to do everything online is flawed and cannot be achieved.
They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed.
They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the past few months I've seen several of my extensions which were previously disabled start re-enabling themselves as support for those APIs has been added. The eventual goal is to support all of the extensions that were supported before.
You can track that progress here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
It sucks that, for the span of a couple months, I lost a couple of my addons, but as someone whose team has struggled for years supporting two very different versions of a piece of software simultaneously, I understand why they did it. And the new browser is so much faster and more responsive that my annoyance about the addons was tempered somewhat.
>Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.
They did not fire the Rust team. They laid off a few of the people who had been working primarily on Rust, and retained several others. But significant components of Firefox are written in Rust, and the people who are working on those components are still employed. And significant amounts of new code is being written in Rust - but essentially they can't swapping out hundreds of thousands of lines of code at a time anymore.
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensi...
"Extensions can add powerful customization features to Firefox. However, we have noticed that the number of add-ons available for Firefox today can be overwhelming for some users. And even though our policy provides clear guidelines for the behavior of add-ons, they sometimes find it difficult to decide which tools and developers they consider most trustworthy. That's why we established the ‘recommended extensions’ program: a collection of curated extensions that meet our highest standards for security, functionality and usability, which we are now bringing to another platform with the new Firefox for Android."
If what you're saying is true, it is backtracking. They made a deliberate decision, as I have demonstrated with the link above, to restricted access to extensions on their mobile browser. And in the quote, they provide what I consider to be a phony bologna excuse plainly evident on its face. I don't trust Mozilla anymore and I do not want to use their products because of if this, and any time the topic comes up I will continue to talk about it.
They certainly did – https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play for example is a very simply content script which doesn't use any special extension APIs at all and so would have worked right from the start, yet it still took several months until it was eventually added to the list of officially "blessed" add-ons.