Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.
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!
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.
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?
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.
~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?
-- sent from firefox nightly
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.
Help with the testing so they build a better product.
- 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.