Firefox 96
mozilla.org
mozilla.org
Highlights:
* CSS color-scheme support, which was the last of the major browsers:https://caniuse.com/?search=color-scheme
* Web Locks API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Locks_A... (Still not in Safari)
If your website supports dark mode and you want to opt-out from browser messing things up, this property is the one you need.
We've only recently seen languages capable of being smarter about preventing concurrency issues at compile time, and JavaScript is not ready.
I suppose it could be nice to have, but I'm almost certain I'd be searching for ways to solve my problem in other ways before reaching for this.
Edit: The lock is acquired via a string as well - I'm sure that'll never collide in a third party library...
You could allow them to be smuggled through postMessage, but then two pages would have to coordinate creation/reception of the lock.
I'd love to hear better solutions as I might be too tired pre-coffee to brainstorm something more elegant. I find it interesting that Windows effectively uses global string-named mutexes and overall still has a few very rare conflicts that usually make the news [1].
[1] https://geek-week.imtqy.com/articles/en488834/index.html
So does this mean it's basically "partially-applied RAFT"?
I could see that becoming a problem
Such an important detail that deserve at least few more sentence of marketing message or explanation. But the whole release note just feels like they couldn't be bothered anymore.
The release notes for alpha builds (e.g. [1]) link to this bug [2] "[meta] Update libwebrtc to new stable branch 2H2020", which as a number of comments about WebRTC using the main thread as its worker thread.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/96.0a1/releasenotes/ [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1654112
I don't know how to fix this, but I believe sometime down the road the EU is going to sue Google and also believe Firefox is going to be forked. Can't wait for both of those things to happen.
Out of curiosity: by whom? I don't think this is likely at this point, short of some truly benevolent benefactor pushing tens of millions of dollars per-year into a competing foundation.
None of the "alternative" browser companies today built upon Gecko or forked Firefox itself, because _it's really hard to maintain a browser engine_. Mozilla itself barely manages to keep up, and Apple sort-of-does (and can riff off work on Blink due to WebKit's shared history). This is also why Chrome & Chromium tend to drive de-facto standards (some good, some not so good) with an implementation-first approach.
Building browsers is hard. Really hard, especially as we consume more media and build richer applications on top of the web. Dedicated teams for video & audio, WebRTC, Wasm, CSS, JS itself (huge, let alone the security challenges), etc.
These two clues should be enough to cement your idea about how hard it is.
Even more important though is that it doesn't matter. You don't have reach. Apple locks you into Safari on mobile and Google pushes Chrome on Android and services having billions of users, like Youtube.
That's Mozilla's real problem. They lack in engineering power but engineering isn't the problem anyway. It's reach.
TBH, there's no shortage of new billionaires that could do this. If they committed to it hard, they might be able to get it to break even after a while. Google pretends that default search engine rights on firefox are worth half a billion per year. They have to be worth some fraction of that.
none of those things seem to ever happen. if you are not one of those billionaires start thinking of another approach
What we really need isn't a fork.
It's for someone to do the same deal of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder, but then commit to using all of the money for promoting and improving the browser instead of all the non-Firefox things Mozilla does with it.
Then the extent of the fork is to change the browser name and the search engine link and all the improvements go back to upstream Firefox instead of having to maintain an independent one. But when it gets out that someone is doing this, who isn't going to want the one which is actually funding the browser and is otherwise identical?
In time the "fork" could become the dominant contributor to Firefox and just take over. Or convince Mozilla to commit to doing the same thing to make them go away.
That's a really, really minor part of the costs of Mozilla. Most of the money, by far, is spent paying engineering, design and marketing.
Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation that does have published financial statements spends millions on all kinds of not-Firefox things. Including the money it gets as donations from people who think they're donating to fund Firefox and the money it gets from the for-profit Mozilla Corporation that actually does develop Firefox and should be using the money for that instead.
That's already close to half of the revenue. I won't try to guesstimate operating costs, but Mozilla needs to rent plenty of cloud computing power for both CI (heck, Mozilla pretty much invented Continuous Integration), Telemetry, Sync, Accounts, MDN, ... Offices in Silicon Valley and around the world (several of which have closed in recent years) can't be cheap, either.
I also seem to remember that Mozilla had marketing campaigns that cost dozens of millions of dollars. Pretty cheap in comparison to what e.g. Google can afford, but less so for a smaller company.
I realize that there's lots of guesses here, but I believe that my earlier claim makes definite sense.
I say so because I think there should be alternatives, but suing just for being better does not make any sense to me, if that is the case, of course.
In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels.
Was it legitimate for them to use their dominance of online search to aggressively push their web browser? I'm no expert, but some people may think that was improper.
> In part, at least, by relentlessly promoting Chrome on their (hugely popular) web properties, as well as other advertising channels.
It is their property, of course they can use it to promote their stuff.
The other topic is how much they are doing without user consent. That would definitely could incur in privacy violations. But promoting my stuff in my own places? That is not a reason to complain.
Luckily for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses Microsoft vs Eu and Microsoft vs US tells a different story about the legality of using a monopoly in one area to push for monopoly in other areas.
I'd not invest significant shares of my money into either MS or Google before we see the end of this, then maybe there is a chance to pick up some at a more realistic price.
As the saying goes: the wheels of justice grinds slowly.
If you think a company is creating monopolies just use an alternative. If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well. Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big.
By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big. The dynamics of competition tells us that when IBM existed, it appeared Microsoft, when Microsoft and IBM existed, it appeared Google, Apple came back, Facebook appeared. If big companies had absolute power then this would not happen.
More companies will be born, the same way Zara was born in Spain from a guy sewing at his own home.
Telling someone that because they are "too big" they cannot make better products makes no sense to me, since you just said you support consumers. Me too, that is why I won't force inferior products on them.
The reasons should be something else like agreeing prices among companies or similar stuff. But even that could make some small company emerge if the prices are artificially puffed up, because it makes them less competitive. It is a business chance for someone else in that case.
I do. I've used Firefox as my main browser since well over a decade ago.
> If you keep using the one from the big company, you should wonder why as well.
Again, I never use it. I tried it back when it was new but it wasn't that much faster and the extensions were subpar.
Later the reasons expanded as K didn't want to deal with Google.
> Maybe they are offering something better than the alternatives and I do not think someone should be entitled to force all the other consumers have inferior or more expensive products because a third party decides that they are too big.
If this was all then they should probably go free even if no one liked them. I think I am fair enough to judge them that way.
However they, like Microsoft before (and after) them use their monopoly in one space to chase monopolies in other space.
> By this reasoning, what you are saying is that we have to stop companies making better products for the people on the basis that they are too big.
Not at all what I am saying.
When I said "you" I meant people who complain in general terms about these companies yet they still have a choice and use stuff from companies they hate.
I am just trying to make my point that a superior product is good for the consumer and there are rules that can hurt you as a consumer that are apparwntly good.
Nothing can replace good judgement and information.
I find natural companies trying to reinvest. That creates employments anyway.
I prefer that there are more services providers as opposed to a big one but that is not a reason to stop them if they offer the best alternative. After all, smaller companies have always emerged when the big ones were there already. That shows that being big does not mean you can beat everyone at everything at all.
There is several kinds of abuse going on:
- antitrust abuse, in that Google is cross-subsidising spending billions of dollars per year on a free browser, pulled from revenues from their dominant market position on search advertising (and then setting the default search engine to re-inforce that dominant search position)
- dark patterns where Google both sneakily installs Chrome with lots of other programs even if the user doesn't want it, as well as popping up banners on Google properties that suggests that your computer doesn't run properly without Chrome (yes MS does it too, and no that doesn't make it right)
- repeated so-called "bugs" where Google 'engineers' slow down Youtube or Gmail massively on rival browsers by exploiting minor differences in Javascript interpretation for plausible deniability
before anyone says syncing, no one uses that. i guarantee that. people either now use "office work" and mobile phone. they do not mix together and no one wants to stay in touch with office notifications from browser. i do understand this is a thing for some people but why expose EVERYONE to a feature whose only purpose is to collect data on specific people and their browsing habits, bookmarks, passwords, favorites,
And besides I'm pretty sure most office workers have two devices: work and personal.
Chrome having profiles makes it super easy to just login on the work laptop on a secondary profile, which is preconfigured with login data etc so they're able to do online shopping etc in breaks
you are thinking tech engineers. i am talking about junior staff, accountants, clerks, secretaries, data entry operators, the backbone of the service industry, all the low paying jobs. the ones who do not get to do wfh because the work they do can't afford home devices.
thousands and thousands of government employees who work at their desks pushing files around and tying stuff.
thousands of call center operators,service tech. all these do not pay enough to afford personal devices.
Because your personal data and browsing habits can be monetised.
"They" sell it under the guise of conveniently taking your browsing history from one device to another (your PC to your phone and vice versa), but actually the big companies have realised that _knowing your browsing habits_ as intimately as possible means they can profit by targeted advertising and so on.
Someone has probably written a book on this. There were a lot of factors that lead to Google gaining dominance.
Some of the highlights:
1 - Microsoft let IE6 languish after capturing the market. This was strategic because they felt the Web threatened their dominance on the desktop.
2 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by promoting standards compliance and worked to clearly document web standards and compliance.
3 - Mozilla attacked IE6 by launching Firefox (formerly Phoenix) and focusing standards compliance.
4 - Apple introduced a platform (iPhone) that was rapidly adopted and incompatible with IE6, necessitating change
5 - Google saw Mozilla Firefox clawing back 25% market share from IE6
6 - Google leveraged the browser engine in Safari (the iPhone browser) to launch their own browser with a focus on performance.
7 - Google put ads for Chrome on Google Search which basically put them in Firefox and on all platforms.
I don't like what Google has become, but it was a very different company back then.
Mozilla began addressing performance issues with Firefox 57 and future releases, but for almost the entire decade prior Firefox was unstable trash.
I don't think it was any more unstable than other browsers at the time, however they were the ones who introduced session restore to combat crashing. It's funny how a mitigation to crashing evolved into a must have feature.
I've been using it since it was called Phoenix and trash is the last word I'd use to describe it.
well it was commercial software.. first trialware, then it showed ads, and so on. i guess for a long time it couldnt be given away freely as it was developed by a small company.
not being open source also hampered true cross platform, for example on openbsd it could be run only under linux emulation.
People say this all the time.
Personally I didn't like Chrome for UX and technical reasons even back when Google were nice so I have used Firefox from 2005 until now, across mostly Windows and Linux but also Mac from 2009 to 2012, often having a few hundred tabs open.
I cannot say that your statement is false for everyone but I can say that it is definitely not true for everyone.
It seems we explain all things in terms of wars among browsers when actually when Chrome came out (at first, when no market share) it was really fast and lean and they are well-known by their search engine.
The problems I have with Google are more sort of privacy stuff. But they also have their own merits. I myself am not using Chrome anymore based on privacy concerns.
tl;dr REST, competition, the shift to devices, and explosion in "web apps". The market for webapps in the 90s/00s was tiny compared to today.
A brief history of web browsing from the 90s to now:
NCSA Mosaic came along. It was alright. Then Netscape Navigator came along and it ended up a bloated mess.
In the meantime, AOL appeared, and home computer users started connecting to the internet for the first time.
Then IE6 became an awful entrenched thing, and it was "ok". It gave us XMLHttpRequest [1] which gave us REST, but apart from that, it was barely updated apart from security fixes because of 'reasons', not limited to: "part of the OS", enterprise paying customers encourage MS to make it stay the same otherwise breaking poorly written web apps. Search 'box model'.
In the meantime, Firefox appeared and was progressing, but made little headway against IE. It was faster than NN, but not exceptionally so.
Vista came along, then Windows 7, along with IE 7. And Apple with Safari. Finally, there's some competition - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE. Things like JQuery, CSS Zen Garden appeared along with w3c compliance scoring, and finally IE started dropping market share. Legacy "this site works best in IE6" apps and sites started becoming irrelevant to most people other than enterprise companies.
Newer sites and web apps started appearing and flipped it "we don't support IE any more", or in some cases showed a degraded site (IIRC there were ecommerce companies that actively charged you more if you surfed to their site using IE in the User-Agent string).
Chrome in 2010 was a far faster, better browser than IE bundled with Windows.
Chrome on Android, obviously now accounts for a huge percentage of online browsing.
If you are using Android, disable the battery optimization on Firefox in Android setting.
Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.
I agree with you, but luckily, it's not inferior!
It surely isn't generally "inferior" but let's say it has character.
I always thought it just needs a bit more attention, and I'm willing to donate, but I don't trust Mozilla for routing what we give towards Firefox development.
Let's not forget the ridiculous pay for the executives which has been shown to not correlate with revenue (or anything else):
https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
I give to the Thunderbird fund every year but have not given to Mozilla for a long time!
For countless years they've been handed some 400-500 million(!) for "free", just by keeping Google the default search engine. For a conventional company, this kind of money requires a massive operation, customer base, etc.
Mozilla just gets a check. Half a billion for free. And then pisses away this money on projects where most are questionable, have no impact, etc. All the while the user base shrinking further and further, for over a decade now.
If that is the situation, it seems pretty reasonable to me to just get rid of leadership altogether. Let the tech people figure it out, it's not like they can do worse.
If it followed the product's success, products that are going through a bad patch, or are going downwards, would not be able to attract good executives, when arguably they are the ones who need the best executives, relative to products that are doing well, which on many occasions can sustain themselves purely on momentum.
This is further complicated for non profits which cannot use ownership stakes as an incentive either.
I may be a naive person who generally detests the organization chart gymnasts, but I honestly believe Mozilla would be better off if they just got rid of all C-suites and handed that cash to their developers to do whatever they want. So many open source projects are hugely successful without a CEO. Why would Mozilla be different? Keep the cash for the devs, and it's already miles ahead of any other big open source project financially!
+1 A whole back I wanted to give to Firefox but I wanted to specify which projects it goes to. Many other orgs do this but last I checked Mozilla does not
In fact if they cannot avoid answering their answer is that donations are not even allowed to go to the browser. Something about Mozilla being a non-profit and Firefox being a fully owned commercial company.
To which I have to say that this is weird: 1. non-profits are allowed to do maintenance of their buildings and machinery, why not something that keeps generating income 2. even if the above doesn't work because of tax reasons they could just stop bleeding it dry. Firefox alone without Mozilla is very cash positive.
Summary: Donating to Firefox goes to Mozilla, the organization that keeps taking away all the money that Firefox generates.
Update: Firefox VPN and maybe Pocket too goes through Mozilla Corporation I think, but verify this before buying 1000 subscriptions :-)
I'd love to see them pour more resources into it, but it's a huge project, so I think moving the needle likely is never as simple as "a bit" more attention.
It would be neat if Mozilla added a "where do you want your money to go to" option in donations. The bulk of their funding would likely continue be from partnerships, but it would make it so much more tangible that the users really care about browser development. We're not just noisy people in the HN comments--we'll put money into it given the option.
And no problems with websites either. I don't even have Chrome or any chromium based browser installed.
(And one of the PCs it's on runs a GT 710 with now outdated drivers)
Without bugs in the driver, even bad behaviour from the browser shouldn't bring the whole machine down.
Graphics drivers are sadly famously buggy, and occasionally the hardware is buggy too, and the driver needs to work around those bugs in the hardware, and occasionally the users hardware specifically is broken in some way, and then there's no winning.
It's probably true that Firefox has less workarounds for buggy drivers hardcoded into it than Chromium, but in the end the blame is on the driver, and if they had blacklisted your driver the likely "improvement" is you'd no longer have any hardware accelleration, which is not exactly a great result - the real fix needs to be better drivers that don't crash the system for no good reason.
To use software WebRender, set about:config pref “gfx.webrender.software” = true. To use software WebGL, set "widget.dmabuf-webgl.enabled" = false. To use software video decoding, set "media.ffmpeg.vaapi-drm-display.enabled" = false.
If those settings do avoid the crashes, please file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information. Perhaps there is a GPU driver bug that Firefox needs to work around.
If file a bug report in Bugzilla with a copy of your Firefox's about:support information, Firefox developers can work around the buggy GPU driver so other users don't experience the driver crash.
I can't remember a single time when it last crashed on me in the last 2 years on both operating systems.
Google Maps performance seems to be way worse
I do wonder how's the WASM performance
I haven’t been excited for a browser upgrade in years. I see these announcements and I know I’ll lose time re-learning something or just missing old functionality that has been removed.
The Mozilla of 2022 is very much only the least evil option.
Konqueror (ancestor of WebKit) is the closest I can think of.
I still have a soft spot for Netsurf, Dillo, w3m and Lynx :)
Preemptively tackling two common criticisms:
"We already have HTML". Yes, but with Gemini, you know the entire "Geminispace" is going to be like that. It's nice for the state of mind! It also ensures sites on the network won't track you, as the wealth of HTTP headers can kindly assist with.
"We already have Gopher". Yes, but Gemini comes with some very useful, almost essential, additions for broader adoption like mandated TLS encryption and things that should have been solved decades ago like defining character encodings, use of MIME types to define binaries, and well supported links to non-Gopher protocols.
It's just not sustainable for a small open source community to build an open source browser engine.
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- Connector (required for add-on): https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connect...
- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher
And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.
Firefox has much more efficient browsing keyboard shortcuts (although old Opera was comparably good), / allows you to jump to text where you're typing and you can use ' to search only texts of links, then you can just press return/enter to click links.
Tab management is better. Custom CSS allows multiple rows of tabs at the top and allows you to hide the close tab X's entirely, so you can close tabs only with middle click or double click without having to target (or avoid) a tiny close button. Also keyboard shortcuts CTRL Shift PgUp/PgDn to rearrange tabs which doesn't seem to be present in Chrome. CTRL+Tab as an option to browse tabs in recently used order (leaving CTRL pgup/pgdn for left/right order). Also for whatever reason Chrome doesn't let you mute individual tabs, only muting entire sites, while Firefox lets you mute individual tabs.
Extensions in general on Firefox are a bit more powerful, uBlock Origin on Firefox is a bit more effective at blocking ads than it is on Chrome. On Android Firefox supports uBlock Origin while Chrome has no extensions, but honestly I think every mobile browser is pretty shit (just Firefox slightly less so).
On the developer side of things, Firefox also outperforms Chrome in its CSS developer tools; I use Chrome for debugging Javascript, I usually prefer to debug CSS and prototype layout in Firefox. There are other advantages, Firefox and Chrome kind of go in different directions in what they prioritize for developers.
But the extension support is the big one. Properly configured, Firefox will be more private than any other browser, including stuff like DeGoogled Chromium, because DeGoogled Chromium is still based on Chrome and is still missing the extension APIs that Ublock Origin uses in Firefox, it's still missing the anti-fingerprinting features from Tor.
People can debate a lot of stuff (I like Firefox's resource usage but performance is subjective and user-dependent), and people get mad about Firefox defaults and decisions the company makes (sometimes legitimately, Firefox often makes bad decisions), but just as a private browser, Firefox is objectively more capable today than any other full-featured browser I've ever seen. I don't think that's just my opinion, Firefox objectively has more privacy features and better privacy APIs for extensions.
IP address alone is already a very good identifier unless you share it with other people. If you do share it, then user-agent and browser fingerprint becomes the next thing. If other users on the same IP use Safari and you're the only one using Firefox then you are trivial to identify.
I don't have hard data to prove that, so I won't make a bold claim about it. But it seems illogical to me to say that you're using Chrome to blend in if you're also customizing Chrome (or using DeGoogled Chromium, Chromium itself, or a ton of extensions) in a way that makes it obvious you're a power user that cares about privacy.
In contrast, in Firefox having Ublock Origin installed is probably a bit more common than in Chrome, and turning on the anti-fingerprinting features standardizes a large percentage of your setup with anyone else who flips that bit in their Firefox settings. You can worry somewhat less that you're doing something that is completely unique with your anti-fingerprinting setup. But again, I would hesitate to make strong claims about that without more data.
We're (collectively within privacy spaces) working on this. It's one of the reasons why I think the "VPNs are useless" debates are so disingenuous. Tor also has this problem (if you're the only person on your network connecting to Tor, that's a decent signal about things), and nobody argues that Tor is useless.
But I'll refer back to a point I've made a couple of times in the past: if you are in a boat with 5 holes on the bottom, and you want to patch those holes before the boat sinks, there is going to be a point in time where you have 2-3 holes patched and some holes are still leaking.
Figuring out a mass-market way to deal with IP addresses (hopefully using a better method than VPNs) is a real challenge. I'm encouraged by what Apple is doing with its private relay, I'm encouraged by some (not all, but some) of the work going on with P2P connections. But it's a tough problem. We don't want these systems to be opt-in or expensive, and we want to protect people from shady actors that can abuse them (see again, VPNs).
That being said, if the response is that we shouldn't care about fingerprinting because IP addresses are an unsolved problem (even though with significant work, they're not an unsolved problem, VPNs/Wireguard/etc do legitimately help here), it just seems really fatalistic and worthless to me as a perspective. Sites do fingerprinting today, they see value in it. If fingerprinting was worthless and all you needed was an agent and an IP address, sites wouldn't fingerprint; and yet they do. To me that's evidence enough that anti-fingerprinting matters, sites don't just look at the Firefox header and then call it a day and I don't think they would waste their time if the header alone gave them all the information they wanted.
More to the point, I regularly see people argue that we shouldn't be doing anything about IP addresses because fingerprinting exists, it's an extremely common argument about why relays/VPNs/Tor/DoH/ESNI don't matter. So there's a little bit of circular reasoning here; Firefox is pretty much doing the best job at anti-fingerprinting right now, but people don't care because of IP addresses. And then when you talk about IP addresses, people don't care because of fingerprinting. The reality is that you are currently on a boat with multiple holes, it is filling with water, and you need to start patching some of them.
But at the moment which browser you use is nowhere near as powerful in identifying you as the rest of the huge fingerprinting surface available.
Fingerprinting currently gives pretty much everyone a unique fingerprint in almost every browser, so even if only 100 people managed to share a fingerprint, that would already be a big success. Firefoxes relatively low usage share doesn't currently add up to any real significance in the fingerprinting calculus.
-- sent from firefox nightly
Help with the testing so they build a better product.
That's the key problem with Chromium, it is largely under Google's thumb. If control of Chromium could be fairly split between Apple/Google/Microsoft/Mozilla/et al within a nonprofit, with no one party having ownership or override, Firefox could be Chromium based.
The thing a lot of people ignore is that having one OSS engine that everyone uses is the most efficient way for all parties. You just have to solve governance and ownership, which aren't technical problems (they're about power).
And, yes, standards would largely be dictated via this one monopoly-engine but again if governance and ownership were healthy that too wouldn't be problematic within itself (you could even include standards orgs/committees within the structure).
User choice would largely be the add-ins, unique settings, niche features, and UI (see Chrome Vs. Edge Vs. Brave, for example).
What would happen if that engine decided to ignore standards bodies? (coughMicrosoftAppleGooglecough)
What would happen if a single party managed to upsurp governance and obtain de facto single party control?
Better to have 2+ options, so there's always a "What if..." life raft.
Also, the Linux kernel itself is just one small part of a Linux distro, which means everyone from kernel maintainers, to distro creators/maintainers, to particular app makers have some direct to indirect sway on the kernel development.
The second scenario is just repeating the problems with Chromium.
In theory, if one engine was agreed upon as ideal and collaborated on fairly, the other parties could just fork it and maintain that branch separately from the usurper and make that the standard.
If everything were based on Chromium, and Google really wanted FLoC, how would that play out?
They'd add support to the codebase and... what? Everyone else would fork? Or how about for DRM support?
It's the "collaborated on fairly" that's the difficult and unsustainable piece. Especially when we're talking last mile things (i.e. that interact with the user) and the additional rewards those entice less altruistic parties with.
Java/Oracle/IBM is what you realistically get when there's serious $$$s on the table and multiple parties. And that's probably about the best possible outcome.
What happens if a single party manages to usurp governance?
I think in the 21st century we should have clearer glasses about what key enablers corporations can leverage to push their visions, even on ostensibly open source codebases.
If Chromium had better governance that is "leverage" for Mozilla to join as an equal party and for them all to work together on a single engine.
Also, rendering engines are so tightly tied to the underlining drawing apis of different platforms this would be impractical and stifle innovation.
Safari, for example, is more closely tied to the drawing apis in iOS and MacOS, which in turn are tuned to the hardware Apple sells. This allows it to be more energy efficient, particularly on mobile.
You could abstracts the drawing with an intermediate api, but that prevents different browsers from experiments or moving toward different drawing architectures.
I argue here against pure natural language specifications in favor code based specs. I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification. Natural language words are incredibly polysemic and contextual. Look for example, at how many meanings the word "break" has: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
Kolmogrov has long ago suggested that fully specified information distills down to a computer program: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
The ideal language for a pure specification might be a mix of natural language and pseudo code with a pseudo test suit. However, if you are writing that, you might as well go one step further and write working testable code.
Other technical fields usually go beyond language for specifications, using blueprints and diagrams which are their version of code.
There is also an history of trying to tackle the inadequacy of natural language for technical specifications. A pioneer of this is Donald Knuth with his Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) and the descendant concepts of having code with extractable inline comments that you can use to auto generate documentation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentation_generator
I would argue that modern platforms with pull request based workflows that tie discussions to version controlled code changes are also the progression of this line of thought.
A cleaned up version of these might make sense for a specification.
And I get some of the concerns. While natural language under specifies, reference implementations over specify. This is more of a problem with low level languages however. Modern, high level languages are getting fairly close to a form of pseudo code. I fully agree that the reference implementations shouldn't contain or should hide, low level optimizations. I also understand that reference implementations can unduly tie specs to specific hardware, OSs and platforms.
But to me, over-specification is less of a problem than under-specification and it can be mitigated by labeling particular functions or blocks of code as implementation specific and not part of the spec.
Without spec written in code, the different implementations always have subtle incompatibilities. I see egregious versions of under-specification in government where horrendously vague specs are created in order to issue RFPs for getting software built. They usually end up with non working software at mind blowing cost.
People have this weird misconception that they are contracting out to build software. They are not. Building software is really easy. You press the build button or type the compile command. Building software has been fully automated for a while now. What is difficult is designing software and specifying what it must do. This is because there is a vast jungle of protocols, business flows, hardware and software platforms that need to be interacted in different ways for different needs. This is what needs to be specified and only computer code can do it adequately.
I wish that Mozilla adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
At that point you may as well just cede the w3c to Google itself unless you've magically disentangled it from Google's business interests.
As soon as you start to create "platforms" its inevitable that a single organization will monopolize it.
I disagree there. Not in every circumstance. If the people on the business side are devs, then sure. Technical-minded non-devs can be taught to write their specs in a domain-specific pseudo-language without needing to learn about implementation details or deeper programming language knowledge/concepts, or deal with technical debt. Something on the order of writing JSON for an API.
>I just don't think human language is nearly precise enough to write an adequate specification.
Standard language, no. Several fields such as law, sciences, philosophy handle it by defining their own jargon. The first year of university often focus on onboarding students to the terminology so they can effectively communicate on the subject matter and understand papers. Natural language version of DSLs.
Consider the governance and ownership angle a little more.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are LARGE companies. These companies do things that many have ethical issues with. Putting a bunch of large companies in such a point of control is something that should give people pause.
Large multi-national companies aren't democracies and their end goals are fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. These are often super wealthy or large funds.
Web browsers need to be backwards compatible with the vast majority of web pages out there. That's half the point of the Web.
If you define standards by implementation, you can never fix bugs once web sites start using them. (If you think you can just tell web sites to suck it up, consider the vast number of configuration web pages burned into ROM. And yes, they do use new features.)
The standards themselves have this problem already, even though they're at a much higher level. (See Appendix B in the JS spec, for example.) The problem is far, far worse at the lower level of implementation.
Relying on a single implementation will quickly produce the next IE6. And if you think Google programmers (or any company X's programmers) are good enough to avoid that sort of thing, then consider how well resourced those programmers will become once there's no longer competition or even a basis for comparison.
Monoculture is bad, m'kay?
(More detailed argument: https://blog.mozilla.org/sfink/2013/02/14/browser-wars-the-g... )
"Oops, we added this experimental feature to Chrome, now it's be come a de facto standard, I guess you all had better let us upstream it!"
EDIT: Or even worse, they stop upstreaming anything at all!
Not exactly 'independent' if >85% of all revenues is directly from Google in which when that funding was threatened by them, Mozilla caved and let go most of its staff and rushed to get that contract renewed.
They can't live without the money from their worst competitor.
I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago.
So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.
That's not at all what happened. Source?
> They can't live without the money from their worst competitor.
Probably true. We could switch to a different search engine (again), but I'd imagine it wouldn't be pretty.
> I don't even think Mozilla takes itself seriously to be 'independent' or free from Google's money which that was promised by the Mozilla CEO 14 years ago.
False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt. I'll just say that in my daily experience, it's very very hard to detect any "evil Google overlord influence".
> So that was complete lies from them, wasn't it? Everyone knows they don't care about privacy at this point.
... I think you might be reading too much into specific complaints. I agree that you can construct a narrative out of a bunch of events that makes Mozilla look bad.
Or, you know, you could construct a different narrative.
I guess people are drawn to what they want to believe.
So this is not true, and it is all lies? [0] So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it?
Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding?
> False. (Source: I work for Mozilla.) I won't attempt a further argument here; it doesn't seem worth the attempt.
It is true. Don't bother denying or arguing it because everyone knows it's true. [2] Even from the title in 2007:
> "Mozilla can live without Google's Money, Baker says"
> "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago.
They know that they cannot live without Google's money and call itself 'independent' or 'privacy-first'. There is no significant revenue source other than Google is there?
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/08/13/mozilla...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-lays-off-250-employees...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...
> So this is not true, and it is all lies? [0]
Everything in that article sounds correct to me.
> So Mozilla can survive without Google's money and be free from the demand to be the default search engine by their own competitor? That isn't taking privacy seriously is it?
Ah, so that's the operative definition of privacy you're using. Yes, Mozilla sends people to Google's search engine, and that search engine is at least capable of tracking users (and many Google properties definitely are tracking users, intensively.)
But if you visit www.google.com with any browser, the same thing happens.
Yes, it would be better for privacy to default to DuckDuckGo, for example. (That's what my browser is set to.) Mozilla could switch to DDG as its default, but then it would be paid far less and would not be able to support anywhere close to the current level of development. Or they could continue to take Google's money to compete with Google. If Google is secretly in full control of Firefox's direction, then that would be better. But given my personal experience, that is nowhere even close to being the case, and so it's better that Firefox survives.
> Either way, Google seems to have Mozilla on life support and Mozilla will do anything to keep itself alive whilst falsely preaching their mission on 'privacy'. What else are they hiding?
Mozilla is working hard on privacy. If having google.com as the default search engine invalidates that in your mind, then I have no argument to give.
> > "Mozilla Corp. will walk away from Google Inc. and the millions it collects from the search company each year, if that's what it takes to stay independent, the open-source developer's CEO promised"
> I expect Mozilla employees to continuously deny it. Even when 14 years later, Mozilla still has no significant revenue sources or any plans on being independent and still wants to be heavily reliant on Google's money despite promising to 'walk away' a decade ago.
If that's what it takes to stay independent. Mozilla is independent. Therefore, no need to walk away.
It's not a comfortable independence, and Mozilla is actively working on diversifying revenue. I'm sure they could be doing better. I'm not sure random internet commenters could do better, no matter their level of confidence.
Taking Google's money is not identical to being "an arm of Google", as Baker put it in that article you quoted. I guess that's the fundamental disagreement here?
My admittedly anecdotal experience is that I find Firefox way more performant.
At this point, even though I'm not using Solaris anymore (sniff) I'm so used to it I don't feel the need to try anything else.
~90% revenue coming from its main "competitor", Google. (not sure whether to put quotes there or not, the relationship is more akin of 'sponsorship')
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...
>maintained
over 10,000 bugs, some going as far back as 2007
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIR...
>reasonably popular browser.
3.91% market share.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Firefox may be the first love for many of us, but this description is a stretch of reality. And stretching reality for the last 10 years is what may have gotten Firefox in the downward spiral it is in. Time for a wake up call maybe?
I would especially love to see deeper integration with their Multi-Account Containers add-on, e.g. allow us to tell a bookmark to open in X container, or allow us to always open X container based on URL path instead of just domain name.
How about stuff getting removed from the right-click / context menu, e.g. "page information" or "site information" (or whatever it used to be called in English)? How about no longer being able to remove specific (i.e. single) cookies? How about no longer being able to install arbitrary extensions?
I've been using Firefox for almost two decades now and have generally liked it a lot but GP has a point: The fact that the Mozilla devs have repeatedly removed (or at least hidden) more advanced features really is annoying.
Personally, Ctrl+Tab-bing cycling through tabs in most recently used order is greatly useful. Maybe its just me, but everytime I go back to Edge or Chrome, it becomes painful to the point I have to use the mouse for moving through tabs.
> everytime I go back to Edge or Chrome, it becomes painful to the point I have to use the mouse for moving through tabs
Sometimes I worry if that's exactly what they hoped would happen, similar to how Windows/Linux users often hate using a MacOS keyboard layout and vice versa.. but hopefully that isn't the case, especially because I can't think of any other software where you don't cycle through the tabs in their located order.
Well, think of it this way: In what order do windows appear when you Alt-Tab through them? Surely its not the order in which they are located on your taskbar?
@-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
body {
background-color: #000000 !important;
color: #FFFFFF !important;
}
}
Gray on gray definitely increases eye strain for me.
What does that even mean?
Take for example echo suppression. For this to work, the algorithm has to be aware of the audio that's being output in real-time. We can't have the server do that, of course, and it would be very inefficient to do this in JavaScript (which also wouldn't have access to audio output by other tabs or processes).
So this has to be something done by the browser, in a very low latency and efficient way.
As far as I understand it, Chrome and Firefox have both been doing browser side DSP in WebRTC for a while. There is a way to disable this however.
It isn't opt-in at the browser level, but there is a standard in WebRTC to disable this across all browsers.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Disable_WebR...
proved helpful. Wish I'd known sooner.
I still use Firefox as the lesser evil, and I believe there are lots of great people working on it (to whom I am thankful) but to see how the project has been run by the Mozilla Corpo-Foundation in the recent years is really disillusioning. I would love to see a change that would put a stop to the incessant stream of anti-features, while instead focusing on staying true to the original goals of the project.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/enterprise/
(In the same vein, if you use Windows, I recommend Windows LTSC)
1. https://violentmonkey.github.io/
2. https://github.com/kintesh/containerise
3. https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers
4. https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js
The LTSC suggestion is also good. I'm already using a heavily-debloated LTSC with lots of unnecessary packages removed (including the hidden ones, which are not supposed to be officially removable), and all kinds of customizations for privacy, security, performance, and convenience. While I'm satisfied with my setup (automated with custom scripts I've been maintaining since Windows 8), the number of hoops one has to go through to have their computer do what the user wants and nothing else, or a "User-Agent" that gives actual agency to the user these days is truly astonishing, and makes the goal unattainable for most people.
https://github.com/intika/Librefox
Edit: I meant Librewolf, not fox.
The default browser of Garuda Linux is a rebranded Librewolf build.
Also because they tend to be someone's hobby project and when they get bored of it (as we all do) you'll be left with an unpatched security nightmare. Which is exactly what happened with Librefox. Looks like it was last updated 3 years ago and is abandoned.
https://librewolf.net/ seems to be a fork, but I have the same reservations..
Waterfox based on Firefox but with an old school compact UI and privacy features turned on by default.
>In February 2020, Alex Kontos faced criticism over selling Waterfox to System1, an advertising company.[23][24]
>In 2018, How-To Geek advised users to not use Firefox forks such as Waterfox because security updates take longer to be incorporated into the forks compared to Firefox.[25]
https://www.userchrome.org/firefox-89-styling-proton-ui.html
- The HN crowd were likely burned the hardest by Mozilla's continued dumbing down of the browser (you'll reliably see complaints about how it seems like new releases always remove or move things needlessly)
- Firefox is de facto a Google project. If Google says jump, Mozilla says 'how high' because Google holds them at budgetpoint.
- Mozilla's stewardship of Firefox has been abysmal. A history of unforced errors, with a result of a completely irrelevant market share. (While paying a CEO millions to do... what, exactly?)
- Talking out of both sides of their mouth wrt. privacy (telemetry, cliqz and hiding it, etc)
Nope. Look at deviations in implementing Manifest v3 as an example.
For once, I like most of their decisions (except maybe for the layoffs, but they were arguably needed). Some were unfortunate, but they realized that and fixed them publicly. Everyone makes mistakes.
It does seem like it's mostly driven by people's desire to complain about Mozilla, defend Firefox, and/or opine about the direction of the web. Which is fine, though it's kind of funny that those discussions get attached to minimal release announcements.
(Don't get me wrong; it's sort of gratifying to have one's day job product showing up regularly on HN.)
Why do they need to change? The tab bar has been perfectly functional for decades, and the relatively recent change makes it worse in many aspects.
I don't mind changes that fix problems or introduce new useful features, but don't fix what ain't broke. And no, some designer/product manager somewhere having to justify their salary doesn't count as a valid problem in my book.
Also, your comment about designers and product managers is pretty dismissive and leads me to believe that you aren't very appreciative how hard it is to get UI/UX right. Just because it's area you don't understand or don't practice within doesn't mean it's not important.
I don't recall every seeing anyone complain about the existing UI though (either from FF or other browsers implementing similar tab bars), so seems like most "others" were also perfectly satisfied with the existing UI. A browser tab bar is a solved problem and attempts to mess with it usually end up worse, both for Firefox and even for Safari's as their recent-ish attempt demonstrates - which they ended up thankfully rolling back in a subsequent update (the "separate" tab display option now behaves like it used to but there was a time when even the separate option added a disgusting amount of whitespace, along with a bug that would crash the browser if you dragged a tab while it was loading).
> even though the changes are for a product and user base as a whole
You mean the single-digit marketshare which is mostly power users, a good chunk of whom is here on HN always complaining about their changes because they're so out of touch with their current users? Or the user base that doesn't exist and never will because those are perfectly happy with Chrome and don't want to switch to what looks to them like a slower, knockoff version?
> you aren't very appreciative how hard it is to get UI/UX right
I absolutely am aware how hard it is to get those things right. I also believe that once you do get it right (through a decade of effort, experience and feedback) you don't ruin it on a whim like Mozilla did. Today's low-effort trend of replacing everything with whitespace and removing most affordances is also a major step backwards and this isn't limited to Firefox.
It strikes me as dishonest to continually make it harder and harder to do something and then get rid of it on the grounds that "no one uses it".
Where can I find out more about this?
I found this link: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1654112
Which contains this comment: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1654112#c371
Which explains that the improvements came from upgrading their libwebrtc library to version 2H2020. I wasn't able to find release notes for libwebrtc itself.
Edit: It seems like a dubious security report was the origin of this, not a developer: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=544244
This morning various websites stopped working (really random js failures). After lots of digging around…chrome works fine… :/ Waiting on a restart which hopefully fixes things so I can delete this line.
1: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/96.0/releasenotes 2: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
Either way, I'm a-ok with these types of changes even at the expense of my time in remembering the cause and the solution.
How is this Firefox's problem? Isn't Gmail just a website?
From there I found this bug relating to cmd-clicking links in Gmail: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1739929
You can find detailed discussion about what's going on there. I believe this is the ultimate fix: https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0fb0990124cf
It does not appear to be specific to Gmail, no.
Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/d107bc8aeadcc816ba...
Safari: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/86143cf226f227bac5ffad...
I'm not sure what's the file for Chromium but I bet there's something similar.
I found Vivaldi and besides really minor things that I'd like to have, it looks like the perfect browser. Highly customizable, fast, and with full access to the Chrome addons. Not going back to either of the other two for the time being.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/diagnose-firefox-issues...
However, people underestimate the amount of influence Google has in the Chromium ecosystem. At this point it's their way or the highway (i.e. Firefox/Safari). None of the companies shipping Chromium based browser have either the competence, willingness, or team to ship a functional browser that is meaningfully different. It's just lipstick on a pig and magical thinking when it comes to privacy.
Firefox works well enough for me. If there are websites that work less well in it, I've long stopped caring about those. All the essentials that try to sell me stuff work just fine. Financial dependence does that. People put in an effort to make shit works when money is on the line.
I gave up on my freedom a long time ago since I use gmail and outlook for everything. I leave those things to people more enlightened than me, I just want things to work.
I wonder what happened here?
Gist: You click a link (outside FF, say from an app), and FF opens 2 windows - one with the link and other blank. I have no idea how is this acceptable for a browser as mainstream as FF.
Yup, still weird. Still can only scroll either horizontally or vertically but not both at the same time. Pinching feels weirdly linear and zooming out still doesn't use the mouse cursor position as a central point but just zooms from the center.
It's 2022, why doesn't Firefox just behave like every other application on my computer with scroll and pinch?
Why are you doing this to me, Firefox Developers?
I wonder where all the Google money goes? definitely not in firefox, otherwise it wouldn't have only just 3% market share
If they do pump money in firefox, then i guess it's time to replace the entire team, including the people at the top of the mafia, they are clearly incompetent
Use it at home and all of my personal devices though, and will not be switching any time soon.
Does anyone know the technical details here?
It's something about using a browser written for privacy from day one.
Oh well. Congrats on the release!!
LET'S GOOOOO
The day web developers forget about stupid "csrf protection tokens" is coming \o/
The difference in friction between "Getting my Yubikey out of my bag" and "Pressing the TouchID button" is enough to keep me on Chrome.
I use fingerprint authentication on a laptop with Windows 10 and Firefox on sites that allow me to use this as the second factor.
There is also a flag in about:config (signon.management.page.os-auth.enabled = true) to make sure this support is enabled.
Initially I found that it wasn’t working, and then I went through troubleshooting mode (disable all extensions) and found an extension that was blocking this from working (I didn’t spend time on investigating why or if someone else had seen the same issue).
This is the Bugzilla ticket in question: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482
It took 96 versions to reach this feature? Meanwhile, while browsing the web the whole browser becomes unresponsive anyway, even with 32gb of ram?
I once wrote a little app for myself and (what the heck) decided to release it under the GPL in case it might be of some small use to someone else. The emails I received were split between a very small fraction with useful feedback (and even a couple patches), a group of people who merely wanted to thank me, and the rest were various levels of upset and demanding. What an eye-opener that was.
What am I missing? People being defensive because they use some other browser? I'm truly mystified.
My reason is that I don't like Mozilla's false-advertising as a privacy-protecting browser which is absolutely not the case and gives a false sense of security to less savvy users that aren't aware that they need to change many settings and install specific third-party extensions to reach a semblance of privacy.
Honest question, since I am not into this research that much. I am using Firefox right now on the basis that Chrome prostitutes user data as much as possible.
Firefox by default is on par with other mainstream browsers but at least most other browsers don't shout "privacy!" at every possible opportunity.
Firefox with some configuration options changed and uBlock Origin is very good but changing configuration from the defaults exposes you to extra fingerprinting, so it's a double-edged sword.
I just want a browser that works. Why does the UI keep changing every other year? I would be very happy if it looked like Netscape. I don't care how the window looks, it's a tool, not a fashion accessory. I don't want to have to re-learn how to do things I've done for 20 years every few months. Why can't I have a menu at the top of the window like other windows do? Why can't my browser follow the same UI-conventions as other native applications?
I just don't get why they keep changing this stuff. It wasn't bad. It didn't get better. It just appears to have been changed for the sake of changing things. That's frustrating.
There's also a lot of hypocrisy that rubs me the wrong way. Mozilla talks big about privacy, but have you tried turning off Firefoxes telemetry? It's like half a dozen checkboxes you need to hunt down, and even then I'm not sure it's entirely disabled. Yeah I guess it's only bad when other people are doing it.
Unfortunately it just seems to be the way things work now. People joke all the time about UI/UX designers needing to justify their salary, I guess it's not too far from the truth.
Besides the missing top menu bar already mentioned, desktop applications don't have hamburger buttons and material design-aesthetics, looks really out of place. If you open a sub-menu in that menu, the entire menu is replaced with the submenu, that's also not how desktop menus work.
The "other people" don't do Telemetry like Mozilla does. You're making an apples to oranges comparison.
This should be opt-in, not opt-out in multiple screens and different dialogs and two about:config-settings.
But don't you? Your entire post is complaining about how it "looks" :^)
Decisions are made at Mozilla by a crew with only business school management training, and no personal awareness of engineering processes or possibilities. It is a lot like what has happened at Boeing.
That said, ten years ago it crashed all the damn time. So there's that.
Only thing I mind a bit is the hidden compact theme which makes me worried it'll disappear completely at some point. The standard mode is too big imo. But the way it is now in about:config is fine
But the browser works well, renders well and I love the E2E encrypted sync. I don't use any other browser anymore. No problems with crashes or sites not working.
Just wanted to say that because people who are satisfied tend to be less vocal :)
Specifically, people feel it was a let down to throw away the layout engine that was rewritten in Rust and drop the efforts to modernize other components too. There's a lot of people who feel let down with the deprecation and removal of support for older, more powerful plugin APIs.
And as for writing a browser on your own, lots of competent developers might implement an HTML renderer. I don't think a single person could implement a browser that's capable running youtube, banking websites, amazon, a fully features javascript VM, all the modern sandboxing and various web APIs (that now even include Bluetooth and USB).
I don't think bringing pitchforks to Mozilla will make them write better software or listen to users more, but I don't want to de-legitimize the concerns that some of their core audience might have. IMO, Firefox is still the best browser to use. Chrome and it's derivatives, please go.
As an example, they keep asking for donations which they are not spending on Firefox development. It is that kind of stuff that people such as me are tired of. This has nothing to do with your experience releasing GPL code.
Sometimes Mozillians help with the self destruction. Like last week, when Mozilla reminded people they take donations, including in crypto. Luckily, ex-Mozillians came to the rescue to carve a line in the sand on Twitter. Absolutely unacceptable. An online mob forms, likely of people whom never donated a cent, and Mozilla is pressured to stop accepting crypto.
They had been accepting it since 2014.
It doesn't matter if you hate crypto. If somebody else has crypto and donates this to Mozilla, that is a good thing for Mozilla. If one is bothered by environmental concerns, Mozilla did not mine the crypto. They are on the receiving end of a transaction, one that now will take place elsewhere.
Who needs enemies with friends like this.
Heres my main reasoning: I trust open source and the governance and operations around it. Chromium the engine is open-source licensed permissively, way more hackable than Firefox, and has a ton of organizations work on it actively (even more if you include derivative projects like CEF and Electron)
The web standards are still driven via committee, theres now just a much more reliable and stable reference implementation. The economic incentives are still largely there to be a relatively good open source custodian (forking is easy and probably a better place to start anyway). If anything it feels more Linux-like in that sense too (common compatible core with lots of room for forking/creating distros).
The anti-competitive practices are IMO things like Widevine and Google properties blocking non-whitelisted browsers, which we should be talking about. The chromium convergence doesn't quite feel the same to me.
And what if they stop? Or what if they bring the development into something you don't like anymore? Hard forking a giant codebase like Chrome's is basically impossible for anyone nowadays, so you are stuck with Google's decisions for Blink and Chromium. We still need Firefox.
Good.
Still waiting for a message about "fixed the extension API".
What does that constitute in your opinion?
Because if it's "go back to XUL", that's:
1. never going to happen,
2. would invalidate A LOT of work that's been done to make Firefox more performant and more secure and reduced technical debt (IIRC XUL leeched into FF internals all over the place, making pretty much any sort of update to the browser into a breaking change for extensions)
Just starting in an end and fix the worst omissions would be a good start.
But, it is amomg other things to make a function available that will remove the top tab bar or at least make it invisible.
Not exactly hard, I do it manually every single time I restart my Firefox Developer edition. (Yes, the chrome (i.e. frame) around the browser window is still written in markup. I go into it with inspector and enter display:none at the right place.)
No, in 2022 a browser without uBlock Origin or equivalent enabled by default should be considered defective and a security vulnerability.
(not to mention that running untrusted code could expose you to browser exploits so running untrusted code for no benefit is a liability when there are permissively-licensed tools such as uBlock and its filter lists to detect & block them)
uBlock Origin uses Adblock-style lists maintained by the community to determine what to block, and "what" can include scripts, CSS selectors or entire URLs regardless of how they're requested (even <img/> pixel tags can be blocked, and similarly you can load malicious JS but "defang" it by blocking the endpoints it uses to phone home so other JS on the page that expects the malicious JS to be there will still work).
I suggest you install uBlock Origin - whether you keep NoScript is up to you; it may provide greater protection (or simply performance by not running scripts you don't need) if you're happy with the management overhead of manually choosing which scripts to execute.
I uninstalled Firefox. I don't trust anyone who is trying hard to corner me into an echo chamber.
Was having trouble meeting some aggressive deadlines, so keeping a session going with mostly reference manuals loaded was important. But Firefox kept badgering me about 95.0.2 and providing a dialog with only Download and Dismiss options. Looked at the site and saw 95.0.2 addresses frequent crashes on c/e/z-series Bobcat processors running Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 which has no relevance to me. Then my Windows 10 box Firefox stopped bothering with the Download/Dismiss dialog and started updating directly. Only Windows security allowed me to stop it.
It is great that Firefox developers are making progress and releasing fixes, but they should really try to make the updating process more friendly and allow people who do not have outdated processors and operating systems to get work done without being interrupted by irrelevant junk. This may seem small, but having the operating system and all major applications constantly demanding updates and restarts is getting really distracting.
Because of the nature of vulnerabilities and software patches, that's not really possible. You pretty much need patches every few weeks to avoid getting exposed to vulnerabilities. That said, you can get ESR/LTS versions of software to keep the amount of non-security changes from breaking your workflow. For firefox this means switching to firefox ESR release.