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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

#501

Post by seba_dos1 »

icebraining wrote: post #491
nikcub wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 2015, they only spent ~$215M on software development in total, so they couldn't have spent hundreds of millions on FxOS alone. Plus, I think that view - that FF marketshare was reduced, therefore they weren't investing in it enough - is shortsighted. The improvements that have been landing on FF lately are the result of work being done for a long time. And you can't just dump more money into a project and expect i…

Well, most of stuff that make recent Firefoxes better, like Electrolysis or WebExtensions, was either initially made for or a fundamental part of Firefox OS.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#502

Post by kevingadd »

dralley wrote: post #292
Brakenshire wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically Firefox OS would become a lot more viable with these sorts of performance improvements. Using Firefox Nightly I have actually felt an occasional sensation of blurring between native and web, because of how quickly some sites render and respond. I wonder how applicable these innovations will be on the mobile web. You'd have thought parallel processing would be particularly important in mobile processors whe…

Firefox OS was ahead of it's time in the most literal sense. What they really should have done was FIRST work on all these new web APIs that allow you to make web apps that can accomplish things that only native apps could do before. They didn't exist 5 years ago, and that was a problem. Perhaps if they focused on making web apps as capable as native apps first, it would have been a viable platform.

Building new Web APIs was a core pillar of Firefox OS development, and it applied to desktop Firefox as well. Unfortunately these efforts were bogged down by poor executive leadership and the difficulty of getting any other browser vendor to take new APIs seriously, so the work went pretty slowly.

Gamepad API spec efforts began as part of this, for example. Then another vendor kicked their own inferior spec out the door without talking to anyone and that ended up being the de-facto standard (not the first time). Other APIs like exposing battery status, network connectivity status, and the ability to notify with vibration were in the works, just to name a few I remember.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#503

Post by Manishearth »

pferde wrote: post #482
Manishearth wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since it's Facebook we can't accuse them of browser favouritism as they're browser neutral Favoritism isn't the only reason for these things. What often happens is that the website devs all use one browser and nobody tests it. It's not like Google wants their sites to be broken on other browsers either (I presume), it's just that many teams at Google aren't bothered. IIRC Firefox has the same WebRTC APIs as Chrome,…

> Favoritism isn't the only reason for these things. What often happens is that the website devs all use one browser and nobody tests it. That is exactly the point the GP post makes. These things are supposed to be standardized and the standards well described, so basic things should work everywhere without any testing. But somehow for web, it is acceptable and accepted as status quo, even after years and years of sm…

Yeah. Well, it's not just "features", it's also stuff like minor differences that the spec allows for (the spec doesn't spec everything). For example, assuming the order of elements in the indexed getter of getComputedValues().

There are also cases like where Google's U2F library doesn't work with Firefox's U2F implementation because Firefox's window.u2f is immutable, as a newer (IIRC draft) spec dictates, whereas it isn't in Chrome, and the library does `var u2f=u2f||{}` which errors in Firefox.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#504

Post by matthewmacleod »

dom0 wrote: post #479
kuschku wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apple's JavaScript implementation is based on KJS as well. Arguably, Microsoft was hostile towards open source in general at the time, while Apple simply stole open source software.

It is not theft to use open source software in accordance with its license.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#505

Post by lugg »

dralley wrote: post #282
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…

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.…

The above poster is also neglecting to realise Mozilla is not a normal business in it for profit (as far as I understand it - correct me if I'm wrong.)

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Foundation_Projects

The foundation has a crazy long history of funding open source and various pursuits. Comparing their style of execution to google is just rediculously unfair on so many levels.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#506

Post by eric-hu »

dralley wrote: post #282
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…

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.…

> Firefox is a massive legacy codebase that couldn't be cleaned up without breaking A LOT OF THINGS, and at every step in the process they faced people begging them not to break their things, despite the alternative being the continued rot of Firefox's internals.

I've made a couple small contributions to Firefox. Though I'd been a Firefox user for years, this never occurred to me until I looked at the source in 2015 and saw TODO comments to upgrade a C++ operation to something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011) when Firefox dropped Windows XP support.

I was surprised at the time that so much of the code was ES6. My mentor pointed out that web app companies might need to wait a few years for users to mass-adopt ES6 browsers. On the other hand, Firefox can use ES6 everywhere in its own code where JS makes sense, since it's only going to be running on latest Firefox JS engine.

I think Firefox hit full ES6 compatibility first among the browsers because there was this extra incentive to modernize the codebase.

Chrome didn't have to build off of the Netscape source, so it didn't have the same legacy problems in 2008 that Firefox did. I think Mozilla has done a remarkable job keeping pace with Google, taking this into account.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#507

Post by zyngaro »

The problem of firefox is not the desktop, it's on android where it really need to catch-up with chrome. I am not sure everything that was said here also applied to firefox for android. Also I would have done the speed comparison on mobile. The new UI of firefox and android is really ugly. It actually looks like you are in a webview.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#508

Post by IanCal »

wruza wrote: post #496
IanCal wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could have invested in half the tech things I've seen which I thought were bloody stupid ideas, I'd be a rich man.

Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?

1. I'm not a venture capitalist and startups don't/can't generally accept small investments.

2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas.

I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#509

Post by rqs »

rightos wrote: post #2

I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed". But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and inte…

A Chrome clone? How that opinion came out of you?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#510

Post by StavrosK »

jaipilot747 wrote: post #313
StavrosK wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the beta two days ago and oh my God this thing is super fast. I used to dread opening web pages, now it's my favorite thing! I am extremely impressed with the work they did.

I don't know what changed, but at last the terrible lag when moving the cursor on text fields is gone. Loving it. I do have to find the webextension equivalent of half my add-ons though.

Yeah, and unfortunately some of the addons aren't even available :(
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