IMHO, this is far too stretched. Give me a single project or initiative she pushed successfully that became a part of "the web we have today".
Mitchell was a lawyer at Netscape, and used those two things to (with others) spin Firefox off into a non-profit (controlling a for-profit). No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
Someone who'd got it wrong would have opened the door for the kind of IP clawback we're seeing with the cloud tech startups wanting to pull people into their companion SaaS products.
And die.
And spending >$6.000.000.000 to do it.
As a 30 years user, it's just so sad to see Firefox going down down down. No innovation, no progress since the introduction of tabs. At least the sell-customer-data-for-marketing-experiments phase is done. And at least it's not unusable slow like it was for some years, so the bare minimum works. And it somehow survived the XUL/extension debacle. But it's 2024 and I'm through my 10th vertical tab extension (Tab Center Reborn for now) since using FF. How is FF supposed to work with >20 tabs open? The only reason to use it for me is it's open source and not owned by M$ or Google. Would there be another open source browser with traction, I'd be gone in a second.
Are there any major features or reason that chrome is better these days?
In which way?
Unfortunately many people (especially here) have advertised Chrome instead, naively believing Chrome to have these important properties.
Chrome has always been the controlled frontend for Google business and Google is readily willing to hurt the browser to aid its business and keep its dominance.
And in general, your requirement is not matching the demand of the majority of users. I don't give a f** if something is open or liberated, I'm a user, I care firstly whether it's doing what I need, and being open&free are just tools to balance the powerplay of the creators.
But if not enough people are using the browser, they have no power anyway. And if there is only one developer, then we as the users have not way to balance our power against them. Mozilla has shown over the last decade that the user has no power in their game, which shows that free and open software in itself has little meaning.
The multiple blink-browsers are showing better how this is supposed to work, then the one project who always claims this as one of their main goals.
But none of this matters as I was talking about browsers, not browser engines, that are not the same thing and none of the Blink browsers listed above are open source browsers.
Majority of the users are using the browser they are told to use. If everyone is telling them to use Chrome, they use it. And there practically has not been much resistance to Chrome. How many IT people have told over the years to not user Chrome, and use Firefox instead? There was huge resistance to IE, but not to Chrome, and it pays now its dividends.
Is Chrome now doing what the users want? How many people are upset about the latest moves by Google. For me it was obvious result for long time, I was actually surprised that it didn't happen earlier. Now based on the reactions, many users didn't expect it.
Bring back multi-row tabs.
Actually, while we're at it, bring back XUL. And apologize to all the addon developers and users they straight up lied to.
I can't live without multi-row tabs but it's totally doable in current Firefox. It's now possible with just CSS. It still breaks every so often when they make big UI changes but it's manageable.
It's the reason that Firefox is my main browser.
Which is a shame, because, stability aside, it really is the best option among Blink-based browsers, at least for the power user. No containers, sadly, but the problem there is Blink itself.
I miss session manager, tab mix plus, a few others.
I really miss having a gesture extension that runs at the GUI level, so it doesn't stop working while pages are loading and lag all the time and not work in certain places. And that one isn't even about XUL, they simply refuse to implement the mouse callback in the new system.
For a long time, chrome has had significantly better memory use. I really tried firefox again 2 or 3 years ago. If you have to keep jira open all day for work, it was unusable.
Regardless, your comment illustrates why Baker should have been fired for cause. Browsers are not really evaluated on technical merits past a minimal quality threshold. Rather, browser marketshare is built on distribution -- like any business.
And firefox was incompetent at that. Google has effectively used search; Microsoft effectively uses their OS; Apple effectively uses their OS, etc. And all products work this way: this is the reason Slack sold to Salesforce, ie Microsoft was using Office's distribution to effectively clobber Slack with Teams. The same reason that Google pays billions of dollars to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine.
What could have been done here? I dunno, but focusing on technical measures is not the right lens. BD is and was the necessary component, and that could have started with companies that don't want to see Chrome be the sole browser in the world. What could you have done to get eg Facebook or other companies with large web properties to ask their users to use Firefox? What partnership could have been forged with Microsoft when they were broadly uninterested in browsers? What could you have done to make Firefox a better browser for technical users specifically? etc.
Apple started their comeback with developers who liked the combination of a slick UI, commercial software and a unix shell (Got a G4 Cube around 2002 or so, then a Macbook). Dominating that niche made them hip and then everyone wanted one. The rest is history.
Everyone uses Linux, even if MS did everything to push MS on servers. And don't forget Apple spend millions (billions?) on pushing OSX to the server two (I had some XServe and XSans). But Linux dominated, and not because of Red Hat.
Many people and perhaps in the future everyone uses Postgres, even if MS and Oracle spend millions (billions?) to prevent this.
Brave currently tries to grow from the secure niche. I think Chrome started from the developer niche, with developer tools, being embeddable, open sourcing a rendering engine etc.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/:scope
I have no problem with Firefox staying as it is. But do not push new products via it. Focusing on the things other companies cannot copy (privacy, extensibility for the user) is definitely the angle for Firefox IMHO.
What does better mean? What is better in the last 10 years? And I'm not trolling, I'm interested in what 10 things FF got better for you in the last 10 years.
Say, I have been buying on Amazon 10 years ago using FF.
In which ways has FF made that better or easier for me as a user? Can't think of anything with Amazon.
The only things I can think of: More secure when misclicking somewhere and better video on Youtube.
The synchronization of browser tabs and history across devices is also very good nowadays, so if you look at some product on Amazon with your phone on the way home, you can continue the same browsing session on your regular PC right away.
There are also multiple profiles. That helps in case you have multiple Amazon accounts like one for shopping, one to mooch off your cousin's prime video subscription, and one to work with the AWS console for your workplace. I think you couldn't do that out of the box 10 years ago.
(For me - and probably many others - though I use 1password since the beginning, have 50 tabs open so sync is a challenge and never understood to use the profiles, perhaps I'm too stupid or the UI is bad)
When it came out I thought profiles was a good idea, eager to use it, but it's often difficult to say what is in what profile. AWS is clear, and banking, but reading some articles? For me to work the UI would need to be smooth so I don't need to switch profiles just because something is in the other. Perhaps I'm not focused enough ;-) It then was too complicated for me to use and switch and I dropped it.
Writing this in FF, where would I need to click to switch profiles? I have a drop down on the right (it's not in there), I have a drop down on the left (also no profiles), I have a menu at the top(can't find it there) and a drop down in my sidebar (no profiles in there).
On a phone iOS Safari has “tab groups” that effectively act as windows in a desktop browser. It also has a tab search feature.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta...
Go to about:profiles. From there, you can create and switch between profiles. This is not as convenient as it perhaps should be, but I did find one add-on that claims to simplify the process [1].
"Create, edit, delete and switch between browser profiles seamlessly in Firefox. Inspired by Chrome's profile switcher."
;-)
These are things that have improved in the last decade. I also like the fact that FF isn't owned by an Ad company that pushes binaries supposedly built from an open-source project controlled by an Ad company.
Open 20 tabs and you get delays. (probably intentional gutting by google)
I often open a string of 30+ tabs of youtube to watch in one go, and it works fine for me.
* multi account containers
* better implementation of standards than chrome (i swear to god chrome date pickers...)
* cool privacy features like blocking facebook properties, email relays, etc
* smaller memory footprint than competitors
to your point about things being worse than they were 10 years ago, in part i agree. the web as a whole has gotten much more bloated and frustrating than it was a decade ago. pages take gobs of bandwidth and memory, everything is in a walled garden or infected with facebook's tentacles. in terms of experience, imo it's really hard to separate the browser from the browsed because the end result is that the experience of using the web in 2024 is downright unpleasant, where it wasn't really before, but i just don't see that as mozilla's fault. i think without mozilla it would be even worse, and it can always get worse...
Except for Rust.
a = 3
do(a)
// can't use aHot take: it's usually not, and people are using Rust in a lot of places where it's the wrong choice. It looks a lot more appealing when you're writing an OS or a browser.
From the Wikipedia page [1]
> The first few releases of the product were made available in "commercial" and "evaluation" versions; for example, version "1.0" and version "1.0N". The "N" evaluation versions were identical to the commercial versions; the letter was intended as a reminder to people to pay for the browser once they felt they had tried it long enough and were satisfied with it. This distinction was formally dropped within a year of the initial release, and the full version of the browser continued to be made available for free online [...]
Maybe the misunderstanding is because (from the same page) the original plan was to have a free version only for academic and non-profit organizations and make everybody else pay. That wouldn't have had a chance even ~30 years ago especially because building a browser was much easier than now. The features were so much more limited in 1995. No JavaScript, no CSS, the only one that mattered was loading and displaying text and images on the page without blocking until everything was downloaded. The Mosaic browser was blocking. Minutes staring at a white page waiting for something to appear...
Businesses paid for it. It was free for non-commercial purposes.
However I dug more and I found this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape
> Netscape Navigator was not free to the general public until January 1998
so either I don't remember well (maybe my company had actually bought some licenses) or nobody was paying no matter what. I remember everybody else and I downloaded Navigator from Netscape's site without having to go through any authorization process.
There was a brief time where Netscape Communicator filled the role that Outlook fills now.
AFAIK The Mozilla project (initially started by JWZ) started when Netscape made its browser open source. The reason for this was the loss of market share due to free IE. Firefox came a few years later as a spin-off from the Mozilla Application Suite. Mozilla/Firefox's popularity correlated with Linux's because we needed a good open-source web browser on Linux (and BSD), not because she saw some opportunity to make an open web possible.
> No, she didn't write any code, but she is directly responsible for forming a company that enabled Firefox to be free and open source.
Unlike Brendan's role (excluding javascript), she had a small part, but I would not call it significant.
It may not be as obvious now, but at the time, IE often offered a better experience for both users and web developers.
IE tended to be faster and stabler than its competitors, and releases like IE3 and IE5 offered a number of innovative features and technologies.
IE coming with Windows clearly didn't prevent a large number of users from switching to Firefox once Firefox started offering a better experience, and then to Chrome once it started generally offering a better experience than both Firefox and IE did.
I would say that the turning point was when HTML 4 adopted a lot of things based on the way IE did them rather than Netscape (e.g. <div> + CSS rather than <layer> etc). By IE5, if you were on Windows, you pretty much had to be a die-hard Netscape fan to keep using it.
Baker may be a savvy lawyer, but that doesn't make her a good technologist.
Besides which – forming a spin-off company seems like super basic stuff for a lawyer? Why are you describing it as if it’s some crucial innovation?