Firefox 90
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread.
Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You.
But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore.
Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful.
I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft.
But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter.
Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition.
(Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)
See https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 and the billions spent in Chrome marketing, bundling with other software, and the free ads on Google properties.
ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.
Google doesn’t give money to control Firefox, they just need it to exist.
Mozilla is not an advertising company. They have no incentive to track users or invade privacy. Their whole ethos as a company is pro-privacy obviously.
Yes, they take take money from Google to make them the default search engine on a fresh Firefox install. They are a big company with lots of employees (less as of recently) that need to be paid, and they don’t really have any products that generate large amount of income.
Seems like a small price to pay if you ask me. I’ve never heard anyone who throws out the ‘Mozilla takes Google money’ criticism back it up with why that somehow compromises Firefox as a browser.
Heh, no.
They take money from Google to get paid and also help Google avoid antitrust suits.
The browser isn't compromised, but their principles are. When you compromise your principles or apply them very selectively, you lose credibility and authenticity.
A fitting example of this is their Facebook container. They have poured a lot of resources into minimizing the potential harm Facebook can do to its users. They totally can, as they have no dependency on Facebook at all. Yet no similar effort is made to isolate Google services.
Again, we know why. Most users are unlikely to care, but it demonstrates that principles are for sale. If we were to focus on privacy only, both Brave and Apple take a far more principled approach in protecting privacy consistently. So where does this leave Mozilla on this matter?
Brave is basically the result of the firing of Brendan Eich, for his private donation to a cause rejecting gay marriage. You can think of that what you want, but there is zero evidence of him ever projecting this private belief in the workplace in any way harmful to anybody at all.
But I get it, it looks bad for a progressive organization like Mozilla. A PR disaster.
Their progressive image indeed largely seems PR. For example, they've had a series of large layoff rounds, whilst at the same time drastically increasing executive compensation. You have to wonder where this compensation is based on, as leadership is running Mozilla into the ground. Market share keeps bleeding and there's zero alternative successful revenue streams.
That's classic neoliberalism. Firing workers whilst enriching yourself. At the same time, they are involved in "equity" projects to address the issue of some people unable to afford internet access.
This is all very confusing. Principles are sold out, contradicted, and only seem to apply to others. That's why to me, Mozilla's "values" have little value.
A Firefox user does not need to care about any of this, but here comes the problem: Mozilla is downscaling on Firefox engineering whilst increasing their more activist/political projects.
How is that strategy not a disaster? They're great at engineering yet terrible at activism.
When it comes down to it and I’m presented with the choice of opening Chrome or Firefox, I’m taking Firefox every time and it’s not close.
It does affect my choice of offering any help, such as a donation. They won't get a cent out of me, given the above.
It's indeed a Mozilla problem, not a user problem. Yet the user base is shrinking, so I'd be curious to know how this will end. I suppose Google will keep Mozilla in a zombie state for a while just to avoid regulation pressure.
Materially supporting a public, political campaign intended to remove my civil rights is NOT private behavior and IS harmful to me. I agree with the rest of your post.
I too am puzzled by how denying somebody this right that in no way negatively affects him, is something to put your weight behind.
That said, it is private behavior. He didn't use company funds, express the belief publicly or acted in any negative way towards the LGBT community in the workplace, this is confirmed by Mozilla leadership, so not my take on it.
People are free to have any private belief or donate to any campaign privately, as in, this is well within the law.
If they were just taking Exxon's money to do good things and Exxon thought it was a great PR move but still completely failed at building a good image that would be a massive win for Greenpeace in my view.
Maybe we should create and broadcast documentaries about it, think BBC Earth style, and watch ourselves and the governments ignore the lessons of it.
Come back when your "team" is not taking hundreds of millions to put out a consistently less-secure browser based on an engine nobody backs.
If anyone wants the free internet, fork Chromium and at least don't start a mile behind when security is what's at stake — like Microsoft did.
I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed.
If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over.
Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.
Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in).
Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.
I saw a physical poster or sign the other day which didn't even go that far. It had ("f" logo)/name. I had the same reaction.
What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.
It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy.
They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault).
Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.
2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?
Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.
Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects.
Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape.
If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base.
Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.
Why should I care about the politics of the
software company I use
You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money.
Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.
Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around.
[1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively culturally conservative; super-liberal SF gay people wouldn't want nuclear families after all, they'd want to live in communes or something.
And of course, CA did introduce something like "marriage with a different name" afterwards, but it didn't seem like the Prop 8 defenders liked that either, and the courts still found it unconstitutional.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo...
Low-quality.
Sadly, people like Eich have been forced to become so defensive on this topic that there's no real hope of reaching them intellectually. This is how humans work: when we feel forced to defend something, most of us will defend it far beyond the point that it's rational.
The broader gay marriage movement is, in my view, a canonical demonstration about how effective positivity can be. Truly inspiring. Some more contemporaneous social movements could learn a thing or two from the cultural normalisation of homosexuality. Rather than learning from success, what I see it a whole lot of hateful negativity on Twitter... and little else.
It is often a negative stereotype that gay people want to live in communes.
> Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled
No, he was cancelled by Mozilla for something that has nothing to do with his work. The company lost a lot of goodwill because of that. Liberals too btw. If you preach tolerance and pull stuff like this, your statements won't have much weight further on.
However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of pretending there's some objective universal standard of "neutrality."
Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or "right."
What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough to it.
Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.
Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism.
I also don't know why the account age has anything to do with this -- they're not pointing out a typo, they're pointing out a logical contradiction.
Firefox's owners can be corrupted and focused on the wrong things (i'm not saying they are, btw - actually i do not exactly agree with the idea of Firefox having "owners" in the first place, at least not the same way as Microsoft owns Windows) and have the wrong priorities. If you consider that Firefox needs to do things right, you may want to prioritize making Firefox "good" (whatever that means, e.g. making it the fastest and/or most secure browser and/or giving the most control to the user, etc) and then (in terms of priority) try to promote and create a marketing campaign that focuses on those aspects of Firefox. It isn't like marketing is all about style. And even if it focused on the style, one might disagree that the proper way to go about it is to copy Chrome.
There are many ways to interpret these two paragraphs as not being contradicting.
If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.
You're missing one component, which is that the Nazis took all of these (more or less) legitimate grievances and redirected them into the figure of the Jew. You're right in that this wasn't a result of some supernatural ability of Hitler and Goebbels, and that's the whole point. There doesn't need to be. I'm sure individual Nazis had similar thoughts as you do (this is just another motivational speech, these are decent campaign promises, etc). The precondition to repeating Nazi ideology is already present in normal psychology.
Some of the Firefox-only things I like are it suggesting Reader more more often, and the Page Info view. They're the kind of small conveniences Chrome is missing.
[EDIT] Oh, and being able to use bookmarks to sync custom searches across devices was AMAZING. Of course, that had to die. [/EDIT]
And of course zero knowledge sync and uBlock on mobile are huge, which Chrome itself has a less excellent record on. But some of the Chromium forks like Brave and Vivaldi not only offer those, but also good tab groups.
The big thing with Firefox is that its enthusiast userbase is moronically hostile to Firefox gaining financial independence of some kind. They bought Pocket and integrated it and people were just about ready to lynch the Firefox/Mozilla team. A lot of them are more motivated by the kind of purity that makes people install gNewSense and complain about companies doing business than any desire to have an actually useful tool with independent revenue streams.
Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays.
So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals.
I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.
Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.
Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.
Privacy score really depends on your views on MS/Google/Mozilla. Firefox is taaaaalkative.
xournalpp, okular.
People might hate Safari but with Firefox slowly retreating into obscurity, Safari looks to be the final vanguard against a total Chromium monoculture. Yet many on HN absolutely abhor Safari because it doesn't currently support some bleeding edge feature which end users probably don't care about.
You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it.
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...
I’m guessing 99% of the users of this site use Chrome…Dev Tools. The real question is what people use for personal browsing after hours. I wish Mozilla would just import Chrome’s Dev Tools because they’re just undeniably better than anything else on the market.
The fact that you say IE at it's peak was worse than Chrome shows incredible ignorance on the matter.
Your anecdote about your friends reminds me of this odd joke from school
There's a senior citizen driving on the highway. His wife calls him on his cell phone and in a worried voice says, Herman, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there is a madman driving the wrong way on Route 280! Herman says, I know, but there isn't just one, there are hundreds!
CERN did not invent hypertext, just made a popular version on top of TCP.
Hypertext already existed at Xerox PARC and had multiple implementations since then across UNIX and 16 bit home computers.
For the longest time this was actually the other way around. Firefox decoupled rendering from scrolling, which made it a far better option in many cases (there are some disadvantages, but FF just was further from the technical side).
Chrome cannot render nice pictures. It neglects quality for speed. I think it still does. Isn't visible in every image and you can disable this with tuned CSS tricks, but the issue remains.
But of course you are correct that all this is completely secondary...
Any serious developer that doesn't at least appreciate freedom and open source is an idiot in my opinion. Please excuse my strong language.
I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it.
That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach.
Based on statcounter, Firefox's market share went from a 2009 peak (32%) to a mere 3.29% as we speak. Just in the last year alone, it bleeds market share from 4.25% to 3.29%.
So it keeps bleeding market share, 12 years in a row. The reason it's still losing market share likely is due to the mobile market still growing in size, whilst Firefox has no presence there: 0.48%.
I have access to a handful of web properties, one of which very large and global (billions of page views). In our dashboards, Firefox does not even exist. It's not in the top 10. Above it are Chromium clones most have never heard of.
So to the "ordinary" world, those without a particular stake in open source, it's a dead browser. It's even smaller than weird regional browsers that most businesses wouldn't explicitly support.
(note that "support" is overstated as most web tech works just fine out of the box in Firefox)
Besides the ordinary world, the grip on the developer community is also lost. Increasingly, I'm seeing developers coding up demos and experiments that break in Firefox, it's not even considered at all, where just a few years ago it was a developer-default browser.
It's an extremely harsh reality check. Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope". How bad can it get?
Anyway, I'm sorry to bring this up, in particular in a release announcement. I bring it up because I believe impact is central to the discussion and trumps any feature and any engineering. If the crash is not reversed somehow, it is inevitable that very hard questions have to be answered.
It's not what I would want. I hope an independent implementation will keep existing forever.
Most people don't install browsers. They barely know what a browser is. So they use the one pushed to them, or the one familiar with. In the case of Android, I believe Google Chrome is typically shipped as the default browser.
And as it works fine, there's no incentive to install anything else. I doubt young/new internet users would even know about Firefox.
If not set as default browser already, Google pushes it from widely popular services like Youtube.
Bottom line, Google can reach billions of people, Mozilla none.
Please remember this: people do NOT chose browsers, compare them, pick their favorite. They do none of these things. It's a collective illusion by us tech folks.
I hope Firefox has changed, or that there's a setting hidden away somewhere for these.
What you see as browsers on iOS are actually browser skins running around a Safari based webview.
I've lost days of my life waiting for these reloads. It's ashame because it used to reliably out-perform chrome on my phone.
I don't understand why they would make it so, but that's the sole reason I stopped using it, despite being otherwise willing to go out of my way to support them
That was fixed a while ago, I recommend you give it another shot.
The combination of the big Android update and now the proton UI on desktop has finally pushed me over the edge. I've been a loyal Firefox defender since the mid-2000s but I don't understand what Mozilla are doing any more.
I'm trying to think of a good exit plan, but I don't see any.
Switching to Chromium, which would be a humiliating defeat, solves nothing. Chromium + privacy is Brave.
Donating the entire project to the larger open source community won't do miracles either. It's highly questionable how many contributions will be made, but that's not the real problem.
The real problem is that there's no reach. It's not an engineering problem. If you can't push a browser as a default or plug it from a billion user platform, you're out of the game.
They need to go all-in on developer tooling.
The manifest v3 issue may help by poaching technical users from chrome.
They also need to stop being so "principled" about features such as WebMidi. If I have to keep another browser around certain websites that Firefox is too principled to support then why bother using Firefox at all.
Chrome dev tools is vast and very rapidly evolving. Google has large evangelists teams dedicated to explaining dev tools or web tech in general. They are everywhere, on Twitter, Youtube, blogs, conferences, in web standards proposals.
It's Google all the way down. If I'm not mistaken, Mozilla doesn't even have any evangelists anymore.
Obviously, they'll always be gimped on iOS unless something changes there. But the latest Android version still doesn't have feature parity to Firefox 68. And Firefox 68 wasn't perfect either. Some simple UX issues with current versions come to mind: All basic browser functionality is hidden behind a kebab menu, pull-to-refresh isn't live yet, if the toolbar is at the top then the new tab button is still at the bottom, the length of a drag to dismiss a tab is too long, tab management in general, etc.
General users just won't bother with a browser that has an inferior UX to Chrome. Mozilla really needs to analyze browser affordances, specifically Chrome's, and look at how they can make it better, because Chrome isn't perfect either. It needs to be a top priority, so they can use mobile as a gateway for desktop installs. Ad-blocking is all it's got going for it on mobile, and that's not good enough for general users to convert.
All that being said, I love the desktop experience. But they're hurting their brand on mobile, and they don't even know it.
I think FF is relegated in people's minds to being broken on mobile. Which it was a while ago but now it's solid.
This isn't something you can grass-roots with a 3% share, you need influencers to broadcast, and that pretty much means you have to lay out some money. Unless maybe you can get Elon to shill Firefox in a tweet or something...
The IE comparison in dominance would be accurate, but it's worthwhile to point out that Google aggressively pushes web tech forward, whilst IE largely stagnated it. I think that's a meaningful difference, at least to developers.
And it's not just a passing note either. Firefox' once strong position was made possible by the gap left behind by IE. There is no gap now. The dominant party is speeding ahead.
Edge is an interesting case, as it shows the vast power of Google. Edge's market share is an embarrassing 3.4% in total, and on mobile about zero.
This shows that even with a desktop monopoly, they can't push it effectively. Supposedly, desktop users still keep using Chrome. Why wouldn't they? Edge is Chromium. Further, Microsoft does not have a single mass consumer service (like gmail, youtube, etc) to push it either. On mobile, Edge has no meaningful presence, and if mobile is some 70% of traffic these days, one can only conclude that all powerful Microsoft is completely unable to push a browser.
If they can't, how can Mozilla?
Google wants the web to succeed, whereas Microsoft saw it as a threat. In addition, in the case of stagnation it would be relatively easy for a Chromium clone to fill the gap.
Android and Fuchsia are also ways to achieve it.
Chromium lacks lots of relevant features that most users actually want from Chrome.
Where are your dashboards getting the data from?
I use Firefox, but like many Firefox users I use uBlockOrigin so I block requests to trackers like Google Analytics and StatCounter.
You're right that ad blockers are on the rise, but that's also true for Chrome.
Note that the points I made regarding market share seem to be consistent across the board. Whether you check Statcounter, an alternative to that, or the analytics of large websites. The story is the same: Firefox is tiny, lost in a see of dozens of equally tiny browsers.
If businesses want to operate on bad data (analytics that depend on JS), that's their fault.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Firefox seems to be at 7% desktop market share. Chrome on desktop has almost 10 times more market share. So I guess that's the browser of choice.
OSX, an operating system with a market share of only 15%, delivers desktop Safari, which still has a larger market share than Firefox across ALL desktops.
So also on desktops Firefox is losing, and keeps losing: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
The trend is down, and down only.
Personally, I think FF is great. I use it on desktop and I used to use it on Android. Now that I’m using an iPhone, I stick with Safari because there doesn’t seem to be any point in using Firefox for iOS (no addons!).
Caution: the following is a controversial opinion.
You could see it another way—which is that Google, through Chrome, is trying to define what "progress" is by unilaterally pushing new web features into Chromium as quickly as they can. If "progress" is whatever Google wants it to be, then I commend Apple from doing all of the blocking and sabotage they can. In my opinion, the web doesn't need such a rapid pace of change. It's great already. There's no need to agonise over the rate of progress—especially when progress is being dictated by so few.
I believe that to be far from the truth, minus a handful of exceptions. I believe a better and more capable web is the only still "open" platform developers have if they don't want to submit to app stores.
You could of course support the idea of a more conservative pace, as dictated by Apple. I don't buy that. For that they need to be a stand-up citizen on the web. They are not. Apple doesn't document things, has no working feedback loop, actively hampers or obscures things important to the web.
The web used to be more like the Linux kernel; today it is a fully captured corporate-led platform where only billion dollar companies can play. The problem isn’t that Apple isn’t keeping up with Google; the problem is there aren’t more entities like Apple pushing back.
Actually now that I type that I wonder what has changed. I guess the upgrade appears to happen faster because it was done before the restart? I assume Firefox itself still has to be restarted for the update to be effective.
(No problem on a Windows system; the OS reboots itself so often Firefox is guaranteed to before too long :-P)
Personally, I wish they hadn't done that. First, because my browser is always open. But also because I don't need another service.
The background update stuff uses the Windows task scheduler to schedule update checks, not the maintenance service.
(I used to work on the team that at the time owned this stuff)
The service asks before stopping Firefox? Also, what if I have private tabs open, does it retain those in the session when it restarts?
I wonder how it does that, and if it's open to exploitation by a malicious website like Facebook.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Event/isTru...
SmartBlock just stands in for that blocked script, acting just enough like the real API to prevent some common site breakage.
This lets it detect when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow, unload the stand-in script, load the real one, and continue the login flow.
It only unblocks some Facebook resources, as listed here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi...
It only unblocks it for that specific website (the domain in the tab URL), and only until Firefox is closed. Other trackers continue to be blocked, and other tracking protections stay in place (as opposed to turning off ETP for the site entirely).
I guess how it detects the "when sites try to open the popup-based authenticaion flow" is the attack vector. If it's Javascript, it's likely to be easily exploitable. If it's in the browser's chrome I suppose it would take a malicious add-on or similar device.
Right now a site could disingenuously call the relevant Facebook SDK API to unblock the Facebook resources listed here, and only on that site: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/browser/extensi...
I'm not too sure why that would be worthwhile as an attack, though. If you have anything in mind that would make it so, please let me know.
In the meantime, I'm working on a way to further tighten this a bit so the unblocking will only happen if a popup is successfully opened (so that at least if the popup blocker kicks in, nothing will happen unless the user intentionally allows that popup). I'm not 100% sure if that will work well, but I hope so.
I think the main attack vector I'd be worried about is if the SDK itself implemented a way around this protection, rendering it relatively useless. If that's not a feasible exploit, then I wouldn't be overly worried about as it would take effort on each website maintainer to implement and maintain the exploit.
The "real popup" detection sounds like a great addition if it works well!
SmartBlock also contains special logic for Google Analytics, Google Publisher Tags, and other trackers that cause sites to break when blocked. It's not meant for their benefit, but the user's.
In fact all browsers have special web-compatibility interventions for sites which don't work correctly in them. Even Chrome. And sometimes even for major sites and services, especially when it comes to anti-tracking features.
0: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...
Site compatibility is a surprisingly broad topic that doesn't tend to fit neatly into our ideal vision of the web.
Ahaaaa ! Yes !
I could have sworn it had been the default behavior and it got changed at some point but I never bothered to track that down. Can anyone confirm ?
It’s not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use width and height attributes or max-height/max-width styles to get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being able to right-click on a image and click the “View image” option from the context menu to open the image in the same tab – at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion, where there were multiple images on the same page, it was useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new background tab.
I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88 but now I’m doubly disappointed to discover that the reason was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to break decades old functionality just so that there’s even less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I understand that it’s good to maintain consistent UI but just because other mainstream browsers change decades-old behaviour in a particular way doesn’t mean that all browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a reasoned rationale¹ for many of the recent Firefox UI changes that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users.
At least now, with Firefox 90, they’ve changed the new image tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this should be less annoying.
On a related note, I’ve now had enough time to get used to automatically selecting ‘L’ (instead of ‘A’) when I want to copy a URL into the clipboard (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can live with – and adapt to – such changes if the original functionality isn’t completely removed.
Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers are aware that that users make use of such functionality. Though, in this case, they can’t tell the difference between users right-clicking and choosing “View image” because they explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to have simply divined that the users who were selecting the “View image” option didn’t really want the pre-existing, long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab.
Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision.
Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.
Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook.
This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chrome" when something is misaligned or broken in Firefox or Safari.
I wish I could say it's the project managers, sys admins or the executives who are to blame like in the IE6 days. But painfully it's just lazy or incompetent engineers who don't understand or care about the importance of open and standard tech.
When asked to build something they all treat cross browser as an extra and not-essential step and then inflate their estimates or claim it will be quicker if we don't bother.
Wish this was isolated to a few people but I feel I'm like 80 young engineers deep who are like this and I think maybe 2 I've worked with in the past 7 years cared about cross browser.
If your experience in the industry is different from this, I'm extremely envious.
There are good arguments in favor of testing and developing for Firefox, but that is not one of them.
Representing the interests of the end-user, in a typical SCRUM-ish development house, is supposed to be the product owner’s job, not the job of individual devs. If management isn’t rewarding cross-browser development, then that’s on management, or maybe even on the end-users. Not the devs. Expecting devs to put work into stuff that won’t be rewarded by their bosses if they succeed, and will likely be punished if something goes wrong, is kinda silly.
It probably doesn’t matter that much, anyway. Firefox is being killed because some of the most popular websites on the internet are made by a competitor, the vertical monopoly between YouTube and Chrome. Everything else is just a distraction.
And many in the older generation saw no point in testing anything but IE6 on Windows
Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards.
It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues.
We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody.
(browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this)
Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of.
(the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often)
Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure.
And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever.
Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure.
Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.
Regardless of the technology, UNIX, C, TCP/IP, Web,.... either you get standards and differences across vendors, or monoculture.
And we all know what monoculture brings into the party.
I could use a similar argumentation to defend we should all be writing Windows applications, or Red-Hat Enterprise Linux and be done with it.
Back when I started it was all about supporting IE7/IE8+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari (with an old iPad as a test device). A lot of polyfills were used to ease development and keeping older browsers alive. Testing on IE was quite painful (missing proper devtools, weird "Unknown Error!" alerts, slow scripts crashing the whole browser, browser implementation bugs, headaches with library conflicts, etc). I remember testing against hobby browsers like Pale Moon because things already worked fine.
Nowadays it's just all about testing in Chrome and with less priority, Safari (mostly on iPad, iPhone). The requirement of testing against other browsers were dropped by most of clients. If a project has spare time fixes for those browsers are an extra. Most analytics tools don't even show anything else of Chrome/Chromiums and Safaris (desktop and mobile).
So, even older engineers are slowly moving along with the newest generation and just test on Chrome and sometimes Safari. This days I just use a Chromium derivative, Vivaldi. It does the job and the UI speed has been improving quite a lot (but still lags a bit behind). If the project has some spare time I like to do some cross browser checks (most times, things just work fine). Sometimes I find an engineer using Firefox but most of the time they have a Chrome browser opened to test their work.
It's now closer to 3%.
The big 3 are now Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox is no longer a major browser, and hasn't been for some time.
When you look at Mozilla's leadership, it is not hard to be turned off by their actions. It certainly bothers me. But, returning to Chrome seems even worse. It's like a choice between 60% evil and (20% evil + 40% nuts).
So I'm doing a trifecta. Chrome at work. A mix of Firefox and Brave at home... increasingly Brave, especially on mobile.
It's in Firefox nightly: https://caniuse.com/jpegxl but the sooner it's in the regular release, the sooner we can all start experimenting with it and using it.
Jixel is a great name though. My advice would be for them to quietly rename it Jixel, Jixl or Jxl.
> * Improved software WebRender performance
This sounds interesting. Does anyone know where I could read more about this?
firejail, firetools
apt-cache search firejail
sigh
[EDIT] I'd actually be a lot happier with this if FF were more aggressively adding new Internet or alternative-Web protocols, or trying to use their platform to give things like federated social networks more visibility and better prominence (via, say, optional but tastefully promoted integration with the browser). That might also, you know, differentiate them and give me a reason to recommend it to non-nerds again, despite "it's way, way faster than anything else, and lighter on resources, and blocks pop-ups and has tabs and doesn't have an ad banner!" no longer being enough (or even true, for some of those qualities) like it was in the early days.
I’m sure someone will correct me, but without looking at the source code, I suspect the following will have played a role in increasing code size since the earliest days of Phoenix:
* support for newer media formats, from MP4 through AVIF
* DRM maybe?
* WebGL
* SVG?
* The complexity of modern CSS
[EDIT] in fact, some things browsers do now were seen as terrible ideas when Phoenix was released, because they would kill performance, since they're so much more expensive than alternatives. Vector graphics were regarded as to-be-avoided for a long time, because they're so much more taxing on the client than raster. CSS doing animations would have been considered insane, fit only for "look how I can bring your machine to a crawl with a web page" demos. Maintaining an entire "shadow DOM" of Javascript objects would have been regarded as parody-levels of resource wasting for all but very niche use-cases. No wonder the modern web is so slow and resource-hungry....
Mine would be somewhere between 0.5FTE assuming the bare minimum of keep-the-lights-on QA testing for each release and ongoing bug triage up to maybe 3FTE if it requires periodic security and design updates to keep up with changing standards/platforms/protocols.
A past time: typing '+"index of" main.dfm' to see what people were developing using delphi.
'+"index of" dire straits sultans of swing mp3' still kind of works.
It somehow feels wrong to use a web browser for this.
Firefox didnt remove the protocol from existence. They just removed a feature nobody uses, which is better handled outside the browser.
Now that File Explorer has a 9p file server (from Plan 9) built in for WSL1/2 support, I wonder if you could hack together good Plan 9 style FTP support for File Explorer. I don't think the 9p server is that easy to talk to directly, though. (You could of course just do a Linux mount to FTP in WSL and maybe accomplish that through two step indirection, but I'd imagine doing something more directly in 9p would be preferable.)
Edit: Just tested on Win 10 1809, ftp support is still built-in to file explorer.
Removing FTP thus fits into the strategy of browser to prefer HTTPS.
That way Firefox could drop (or never add) support for FTP, bittorrent, etc., but those could still be access within the browser by installing the extensions through your package manager. I'd love it if I could send files to friends using bittorrent through the browser without having to rely on sites like instant.io or file.pizza. I do love those sites, but they're no replacement for a proper torrent client.
In a perfect world we wouldn't have to move everything into the browser for users to consider using it. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. On that note, this probably couldn't be done because of security concerns. Making it easy for people to hand over low-level control of their browser would be problematic.
0: https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
class foo {
#privateClassMethod() {}
#privateClassField;
}
What is the issue with the new tabs?
I was fine the second day. I think it was just a case of someone moving my cheese unexpectedly.
Option to hide it completely (replacing with a mobile-style full-screen modal view with properly sized previews and keyboard navigation / fuzzy finding if you allow me to dream) would be nice.
Honestly web browsers have been in a steady decline for me ever since FF34~ish with the exception of better modern CSS/JS support. They kill features and functionality I use extensively and rarely provide any alternatives. Few of my browser extensions even work since FF killed off all old addons. It forced me to use Chrome and now Chrome is looking like they'll be killing off a good number of extensions I use in the near future. Can't have a browser for power-users because power-users don't make up enough market share. sigh
Since you didn't quite say it explicitly: The real insult was that they factored it out into an extension, and then promptly broke the extension by ripping out the API surface it needed.
It's gotten to a point where I'd gladly use an old, insecure browser with features I like that enables a workflow I'm comfortable with than being force to use a more secure browser with all the features gutted or gimped. But I can't even do that because then every other site refuses to serve me content unless I update my browser to a supported version.
Edge probably has it best with vertical tabs and that Chromium-native tab group setup.
(I also though have moved a lot of my day-to-day tab switching to Tree Style Tabs, though. I'd probably be angrier if I was already using an add-on like that.)
I'm aware of ctrl-[shift]-tab. It is too slow if you have more than a few.
Thanks.
It's annoying have to manually enable compact in about:config to get back to the compact layout in new profiles.
Apart from restoring a browser session on Mac from minimised windows, or a video playback improvement on Windows (fair enough) there hasn't been anything done here, and there are people in this thread that still confirm that battery usage isn't great. That's the main reason holding me back (in fact I'm even considering switching from Brave to Safari with all the privacy improvements they've done over time). Shame really.
With Chrome, I can control whether extensions update automatically and also have extensions disabled until I activate them for a certain page, and then they remain activated for that session.
Do I have such control for Firefox? With it being so difficult to trust extension developers, yet with some extensions being quite necessary for me, I find especially the ability to have extensions deactivated until I explicitly want them for each session very important.
user_pref("extensions.update.enabled", "false");
i have nearly 20-25 extensions myself and im pretty sure they are all open source. when i was using chrome (a long time ago) i only had one or two open source and the rest were closed. its helps when you find some extension that does something really basic but you dont know if its trustworthy or not. usually theres not a whole lot of code to look through
I'm using Firefox 90.0.1 now... I get no sound or video in Google Meet. I had the same problem with recent versions of firefox.
I have to use Chrome now for google meet.
1. Native Tab search https://youtu.be/HmWqo4X2IB8 2. Ability to remember my CC details
The feature that Firefox has that my workflow can't live without is simply `Ctrl-Tab` to move quickly between two tabs.
Firefox can do the latter by using the % search shortcut in the address bar.
1. Using "% xyz" searches for open tabs matching xyz
2. Not sure since which version, but CC card details can be stored and used with autofill, as are addresses.
Maybe there is some pref I accidentally toggled.
I don't care about the theoretical tracking issues of favicon.ico. There should be an option to turn on syncing of the bookmark icons.
ctrl-l %new.y (use arrows then enter)
Firefox can do this. It's under Settings > Privacy & Security > Forms and Autofill.
Tabby also has some useful features - you can set a shortcut for last used tab - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-...
Vivaldi has 2 rows of tabs... the 1st row is "tab group" tabs, the 2nd row are the tabs in that group. Easy to manipulate/group them.
You could also try tabs on the left edge (vs top).
I gives a virtual page that you can add group containers and put tabs in them. When you switch groups, the tabs in the window switch to those tabs. I setup groups for each of my projects and this lets me switch project contexts quickly.
(Yeah I know multiple implementations and all that, but we don't have many people running FreeBSD just to give Linux some competition.)
These already exist, and Chromium is far from perfect. I'm glad there's a viable competitor.
Firefox mobile still has some catching up to do on the overall UI/UX, but it's not too far off, and the fact that it allows extensions is nice.
[citation needed]
Firefox page rendering is GPU accelerated. It's called WebRender. Your information seems to be out of date.
Article from 2017 when WebRender was still being prepared for release: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...
Current platform support list, which seems to be "almost everyone": https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/WebRender_Where
Single platforms stagnate, we’ve seen it before with IE6 and we’re starting to see it again.
They do, but at least chromium is open source. If it stagnated like IE6 then someone would fork it.
This myth needs to die. Yes, somebody would fork it but it would very, very quickly become stale as well. It costs tens of millions to develop a browser engine nowadays, it's not something a few hobbyists can develop in the evening after their day job.
Microsoft didn't choose Chromium for their new Edge engine because they love Google, they chose it purely from an economic point of view. Even Microsoft doesn't want to develop a browser engine. Microsoft.
I've fought the good fight for FreeBSD for more than a decade, and my last system running it is getting Debian installed on it in the near-term future.
The independent Chromium distributions do very little to that effect, as they're not incentivized to specifically disable features Google puts in.
If Firefox goes away, kiss the open web goodbye. We'll have it on paper, but just that. It'll be Google's web.
It's not good at implementing standards in timely manner which Chrome implements before they're even standards (and then become standards when Google pushes them to become so). Interesting isn't it. That literally goes back to what I said.
Without Firefox and Safari, Google can declare anything it wants a standard and implement it LITERALLY yesterday.
Among standards Safari is slow to implement in "timely manner" is web pages connecting to USB devices, Bluetooth and a plethora of other nonsense which Google keeps pushing through because they want the web to be the application OS for everyone, and then slap ads on it.
Just because they standardize it doesn't mean anyone should be forced to keep up with them.
I'll take FOSS chromium variants before I give my data to Apple(and by proxy, the US and Chinese government).
There are no angels with the known contenders of "keeping the web open" unless you want to use SerenityOS's web browser that they made themselves.
Unless you are using a very exotic OS that has a browser, I'm not sure how you can begin to defend a chromium variant still derived by an unethical company (Because you have to update that fork) and then attack another unethical company for giving your data to them.
Unless there's a mathematical definition of "ethical" that we can rely on for objective assessment, that's basically everyone and no one based on how you feel any particular day.
Firefox is in a downward trajectory for marketshare and mindshare. I would love to hear a realistic solution to this problem. Maybe switching to WebKit?
I hate to be the one to bring in 'the facts' but Firefox itself is becoming more irrelevant and there is no question on that. Microsoft Edge (using Chromium) is used more than Firefox [0] and global Firefox usage has been declining ever since. [1]
As I said before [2] the Chrome ecosystem has given Google the dominance of more than just the web standards and the web developers were happy to live with this.
I'd say the so called 'open web' just exchanged from one behemoth to another.
To Downvoters: So 'Firefox is the most used and dominant browser and Chrome is in second place'? So 'Google is not paying Firefox in the millions'? I strongly disagree and can confidently say that Firefox usage is dying. Change my mind.
I have just given credible sources to substantiate my claims yet no counter arguments or disproving the facts are presented towards my comment.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-edge-just-left-a-se...
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop-mobi...
Also I'm not sure if Chromium-based browsers support the full extent of uBlock Origin.
uBO works best on Firefox. There is no CNAME uncloaking on chromium browsers, except for Brave which does this as part of their shields.
https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/
Vivaldi also have a built ad / tracker blocker where lists can be chosen.