Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time to give Firefox another chance

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 733 posts

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#421

Post by trapperkeeper74 »

hueving wrote: post #410
dralley wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Mozilla has had quite a few projects that didn't really pan out, I'm not sure you're giving them enough credit. They developed (well... became the first and most significant major backer of) an entirely new programming language, purely for the purposes of building a better browser. And then devoted tons of resources for years into developing Servo, a massive and complex project that is only being realized now.…

Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?

It seemed risky but innovation demands taking risks. Mozilla could use another “product” category than mainly just a browser.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#422

Post by bad_user »

koolba wrote: post #274
ricw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their search associations [1]. It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squand…

You can't say Mozilla and squander in the same sentence without referencing their phone OS.

Much of that effort has also gone into Firefox for Android.

Which I might say, it has been the only Android browser supporting extensions and quite a nice browser overall ;-)

Does Microsoft make a browser for Android? Does Apple?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#423

Post by trapperkeeper74 »

sametmax wrote: post #416
hueving wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?

Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#424

Post by gravelc »

Wow! Just installed the beta, and it's great. Waiting for the LastPass extension now before it can become a daily driver.

Most of my monitors are high Hz (144 or higher), and the scrolling is definitely smoother than Chrome when there's plenty of images to be loaded. Like butter.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#425

Post by nikcub »

nine_k wrote: post #339
ricw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not representative of either the time frame or the resources available to Mozilla. Mozilla has had Hundreds of millions of annual income through their search associations [1]. It’s surprising how they’ve wasted that amount of money to finally in 2017 build a browser that can compete again. This is 9 years after google chrome was released! They have absolutely no excuse for falling this far behind. They squand…

You probably forgot to consider how much money / effort have Google wasted on projects that did not pan out. Their flagship products, like Hangouts, still have long-standing issues. Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.

Since Ruth Porat came in as CFO Google has reduced other projects spending to $3.5B p.a on $80B of revenue - less than 5%

Mozilla has revenue of $420M p.a - I don't know what they spent on Firefox OS but it would have been a big bet (hundreds of millions?). At the same time their Firefox marketshare was reduced.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#426

Post by noncoml »

kenhwang wrote: post #365
Turing_Machine wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much Rust is actually in the new Firefox? I'm not seeing any based on a casual click-around in the repo, though I'll freely admit I haven't scanned the entire source tree. Edit: if there is any, can someone give me a link to the part of the source tree that has it?

Read about the first bit of Rust shipping here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/ And many of the Rust things that make FF56+ fast can be found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

Great pointers, thanks.

Do they also have any write-up on how did they find Rust during these changes? Was the back count lower than usual? Did the see an increase on productivity?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#427

Post by ASipos »

I use Firefox primarily because of the Awesome Bar.

I just have to remember like two or three substrings from an URL or page title and bam! the page is there.

For comparison, Chrome's omnibox generally only searches for whole words, while the Google search suggestions take up much precious space, while it is known that most web browsing is directed to pages already visited. Firefox's decision to keep the URL bar and the search bar separate seems sensible.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#428

Post by SubiculumCode »

mconley wrote: post #361
pivotal wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been running Nightly and experienced the same thing with inbox. If I attempt to interact with it before fully loaded, inbox will freeze up for minutes at a time. Love everything else about nightly, this is my biggest issue.

Hi! Firefox engineer here, and I want to understand why your Firefox is misbehaving. Would you be willing to provide us a performance profile? Instructions are here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance... Feel free to email it to me if you don't want to post the link publicly. I'm mconley at mozilla dot com.

I've been noticing that gmail will seem to lose connection with Nightly Firefox on occassion after sitting a while (Win 7 PC).

Other than that Nightly is amaze balls.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#430

Post by vanviegen »

zdkl wrote: post #399
jrnichols wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share," I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.

Yeah further proof for google that being sneaky Gets Shit Done. We collectively need to factor this into our product choices and stop encouraging the sneakiest of them all.

I understand that it's quite trendy to shit on Google's parade these days.

But how exactly is bundling Flash player sneaky?

Or are you alluding to some sort of bait and switch that was executed to suck people into the Google sphere? If so, please explain! Chrome was never marketed as a privacy-minded browser, was it?

Post reply on HN