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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#461

Post by kuschku »

tzs wrote: post #431
eslaught wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it was, but how much additional effort did Apple put into the code base by way of WebKit? Apple didn't need to open source that work, even if the original was open source, and I'm sure the leg up made a big time-to-market difference for Chrome. Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it final…

> Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market. When LGPL code is linked with non-free code and the resulting work is distributed LGPL only requires that the changes to the LGPL code be open and that the object files for the non-free code are provided so that users can exercis…

The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements.

First, they didn't publish anything for years. Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years.

It took ages until they published some source code, even longer until they opened their repository.

By that time KHTML was long dead, and development had centered on WebKit.

No, Apple is no saint in this story.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#462

Post by Manishearth »

lightedman wrote: post #409
mconley wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Make FireFox work with FaceBook's Live Video feature - as in both viewing and broadcasting. You'll have me switch back from Chrome in a heartbeat.

Can you try this in an install of Nightly? It's working for me.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#463

Post by thecrazyone »

trapperkeeper74 wrote: post #423
sametmax wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

wow, this! This is in fact m status message on Whatsapp since I learnt when recounted by Brene Brown

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#464

Post by Manishearth »

ATsch wrote: post #103
hdhzy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention Firefox for Android that supports extensions (uBlock etc.).

Unfortunately, for me at least, it's not a viable option. Firefox on android still feels significantly more sluggish than chrome. Plus, googles questionable business practice of embedding chrome into many apps, while making opening links very fast, adds another three clicks to someone not using chrome.

Set it as the default browser; it will work normally.

Firefox also supports https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/android/customtabs .

It also has a very nifty feature (IIRC off by default) where if you click on a link instead of switching to Firefox it shows a "Tab opened in Firefox" toast which you can tap on to switch to. This means I can for example click on the links in an email whilst still reading it, and then switch to the browser later to read them all. This does make opening links two taps by default (tap on the link, and then tap on the toast), but there's no tap-hold so it's fast and nice. Plus my workflow prefers opening tabs that i look at later, not immediately.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#465

Post by kuschku »

earenndil wrote: post #408
Sideloader wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And FF Developer Edition still lets you install unsigned extensions.

Actually, in stock chrome, it's much easier to install 3rd-party extensions than in stock ff.

Unless you are on Windows, there Chrome makes them impossible.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#466

Post by Khaine »

Sylos wrote: post #358
Retric wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around 2012 when they started Android still sucked, so IMO it was a reasonable choice. They also killed it off fairly quickly so no big deal.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and…

I thought the reasons that they lost market share was that they started cloning the chrome interface stripping out usable features (i.e. status bar) at the expense of fixing memory and performance issues. I stopped using Firefox when they removed the status bar and made it an extension and then went and bundled in a read later service extension.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#467

Post by kuschku »

clouddrover wrote: post #357
Manishearth wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the Nightly builds are (typically) _more_ stable than production-issue from other vendors. Yeah, I switched to Nightly a couple releases ago (I'd use Dev edition before that because in the past Nightly used to be really unstable) and it's been great. The only time I've been getting crashes are when I flipped stylo on early (which was to be expected), and a couple of random crashes here and there. In fact, I've…

> Netflix is force of habit, it works great in Firefox now Netflix doesn't work great in either Firefox or Chrome, but that's not the browser's fault. Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742 You can see the playback details (formats, resolution, bit rate, etc.) of the video you're currently…

> Netflix only streams 720p video to Firefox, Opera, and Chrome whereas it will stream 1080p or better to Safari, IE 11, and Edge

Yeah, that's due to DRM.

The simple solution is to disable the EME plugin, and just pirate everything (while still paying for Netflix). You pay for it, and have a moral right to it, and you can watch it in 1080p or 4K easily.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#468

Post by Manishearth »

chimeracoder wrote: post #219
nopreserveroot wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your bootlicking on topic at least. If the company is for-profit and the software is free, you are definitely sacrificing your privacy.

Mozilla (the foundation) is a non-profit corporation, but Mozilla (the corporation that creates the free browser) is a for-profit corporation. They're separate entities. Of course, non-profit corporations are still able to turn profits as well. They just can't distribute dividends to shareholders.

To be clear: The for-profit is wholly owned by the non-profit; so there are no shareholders (except for the non-profit).

There are restrictions around what 501(c)(3)s can do. The existence of Firefox helps push the goals of Mozilla Foundation, and also bring extra money to the table of the non-profit (but not unbounded! There are similar restrictions on how much money can travel back that way)

This is not an uncommon pattern, see https://www.americanbar.org/publications/blt/2014/06/03_levi...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#469

Post by kuschku »

hueving wrote: post #414
matt4077 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an insane discussion, but I can't resist: By definition, "profit" is the share of revenue that is not needed for the existence and work of the company. There's even a category of enterprises successfully working in such a framework. They're called–oh happy day–"non-profits".

Non profits don't give extra leftover revenue to employees, so it's still a bullshit statement.

Some do, like most German grocery store chains, real estate corporations, etc.

They are cooperatives, all employees and customers can vote on all decisions, and surplus profit is either reinvested or paid out to employees and customers.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#470

Post by int_19h »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #442
int_19h wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?

I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla…

> There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI

There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.

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