It’s time to give Firefox another chance • Hacker News Board

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#561

Post by tux1968 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:30 PM UTC

fernandotakai wrote: post #553

badsectoracula wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they have some of the best extensions. Sadly 11 of the 14 extensions i use do not work on Firefox 57 (i just tried it). The browser is indeed faster - it feels faster than Chrome and Edge - but i never really had an issue with its performance. On the other hand i have a very big issue with the functionality that is lost. Stylish, FireFTP, Greasemonkey (with its own extensions), Better Reader, DownThemAll and a…

same with me. vimperator doesn't work on fx57, which means i won't be updating soon. it's a big dealbreaker for me.

They're transitioning way too quickly. There is going to be scorched earth if they stick to the plan to stop supporting legacy extensions in version 57. Over 10 basic extensions I use no longer work and have no replacement that works with the new webextensions... there's not even the ability to export all cookies for wget -- they need to reevaluate their timeline.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#562

Post by makomk » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:31 PM UTC

jrnichols wrote: post #382

Sylos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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.

For a while, wasn't it quite difficult to install Flash without it also installing Chrome and setting it as your default browser? I seem to recall you had to find a fairly well-hidden link to a different Flash installer from the one the site tried to direct you to.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#563

Post by m3kw9 » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:32 PM UTC

Safari wait time to me is pretty much non existent already. Even if it is a bit faster, do I want to change browsers for an example 100% speed increase from 100 to 50ms?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#564

Post by Someone » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:34 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #498

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…

(Responding out of order) > No, Apple is no saint in this story. Nowhere did I say or imply that Apple was a saint. All I said was that LGPL allows linking with closed code and distributing the resulting work without having to make the closed code open, and that Apple could have structured WebKit in such a way as to keep most of their code from having to be made open. This is the main difference between GPL and LGPL,…

Also (3) Apple had poured way more resources into this than the khtml developers had available. Since Apple kept its work secret for business reasons, that meant that, once Apple published their fork, the sheer amount of changes overwhelmed the KHTML developers (WebKit wasn’t just a port of KHTML; it broadened support for html features)

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#565

Post by JamesFM » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

asadotzler wrote: post #279

JamesFM wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to go off on you because this is a larger issue then your comment but seriously, can we hold this discussion to a higher standard? Prove to me that Google is tracking me through Chrome. Link me to an article with proof of collection. Most of us our developers here, surely we can apply some more rigor to this conversation then “we know Google is doing this because it’s Google”.

If you sign in to Chrome, your history is game for ad matching according to Google https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139

Sure, but if you sign into your Google account on any browser it does the same thing.

It's not unique to Chrome. There are additional sync options that are available to Chrome, but those are all opt in.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#566

Post by masklinn » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:50 PM UTC

eric-hu wrote: post #506

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.…

> 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…

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

A number of ES6 additions were initially Firefox extensions (though some standard-track features like comprehensions also got removed).

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#567

Post by lightedman » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

Manishearth wrote: post #462

lightedman wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Works in Nightly but the video quality is beyond garbage. 1080p webcam should not look like 320p. Chrome properly sees my camera resolution and uses it.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#568

Post by _Codemonkeyism » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 3:07 PM UTC

ricw wrote: post #259

agumonkey wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of work, the extent for how long they've been doing so, all relative to the funding they got.. it's even painful to think about. Chrome shadowed them overnight, had Google infinite wallet and started from scratch. Mozilla became the old slug.. Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet. Once again kudos.

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…

Exactly (saying this as a FF user since Mosaic times and writing in FF). There was money, millions of it, and it attracted many people who captured the browser, sidelined it, spent the money on their ideological pet projects (OS, ...) and then moved on, leaving the browser behind.

After decades of FF I will soon abandon it when it no longer runs vertical tree tabs.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#569

Post by woranl » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

j-pb wrote: post #486

The firefox team killed the ready to go WebSQL which could have also nicely standardised SQLite and pushed IndexedDB a standart thats broken and only half implemented across browsers even today. And ironically they still use SQLite for their IndexedDB implementation. Never forgive never forget.

The Firefox team killed the ready to go Filesystem api, which could have also nicely standardized.

Never forgive, never forget.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#570

Post by abritinthebay » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 3:11 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #453

hueving wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?

I don't get people complaining about FirefoxOS. It didn't work out because at that time, the phone hardware wasn't ready, and because they didn't have the political power and economies of scale. But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.

The reasons it did not work were obvious when they announced it however.

It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.