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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

#581

Post by Osmose »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #501
icebraining wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FirefoxOS produced several useful artifacts, sure, but they were things like device APIs. e10s pre-dates FirefoxOS by many years, and unless there was some very long-term secret plan that they didn't tell the rest of the company about, WebExtensions came after FirefoxOS was shuttered.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#582

Post by JosephLark »

JosephLark wrote: post #37
wkirby wrote: post #17

I wanted to try Firefox, but 2 hours into using it I had a meeting in Google Hangouts. Firefox no longer supports Google Hangouts. Back to Chrome it is.

Yeah, that situation is a mess and should be embarrassing for those involved. I can use Hangouts for simple messaging from Firefox, but as soon as we need to hop on a call I need to boot up Chrome. Often I forget and try to answer in Firefox just to get the error message. Then I have to start Chrome, login to gmail if it's logged out, wait for everything to load, and then answer the call. Ends up taking a fairly long…

I'm really not worried about some downvotes, but am surprised to see them. How is it not embarrassing that as much progress we have made with web standards, a major feature in one of the most popular email services is browser specific?

There is no need to point any fingers, but I find it interesting that for years now we've had key players in major browsers sit around at conferences and talk up how much they're working together on standards yet this is where we end up.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#583

Post by abiox »

tmzt wrote: post #141
kenhwang wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust was pretty much designed to solve problems for Firefox. It's IMO the best bet Mozilla has made these last few years and we're just starting to see them reaping the rewards.

I don't know how this relates to the creator of Rust or its actual origin story, but Mozilla has been trying to get many of the same results out of C++ for a long time. You can look at the evolution of smart pointers in the codebase, along with more formal ways of representing error return codes (borrowed from MS COM), and general good practices. It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for par…

> (borrowed from MS COM)

are you referring to microsoft's com (component object model)?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#584

Post by digi_owl »

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.

It was not about the hardware. It was their goals, and their partners.

First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit.

This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones.

It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#585

Post by JosephLark »

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…

> something available in C++11 (that's C++ released in 2011)

Nit: The standard was finalized in 2011 - August 2011 to be more specific, so quite late in the year. Full compliance in various compilers was not achieved for quite some time after that - MSVC being quite problematic in that regard.

Major projects - esp. those compiled on multiple systems across several compilers, like Firefox - absolutely could not just go ahead and start using C++11 in 2011.

I was really into native development around that time, and C++11 was the first time I was exposed to the complexities and gotchas around standardization vs. implementation. I've stopped paying as much attention since, but I believe C++14 fared much better.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#586

Post by SeanDav »

I have said this multiple times, but I am going to say it again. I have always used Firefox and Chrome, side by side since Chrome first came out and I have never, ever, in all that time, even once thought that Chrome was faster than Firefox (or vice-versa) for my day to day use. Speed has just never been an issue, yet I see it quoted in almost every comparison between Firefox and Chrome...

Firefox has always been my main browser, with Chrome only used if required, although I generally have them both open. I am a heavy user of tabs and multiple windows, and Firefox eats Chrome's lunch in this area, while using far less memory.

Still, very good to see Mozilla back on track again and producing great browser software. Keep it up Mozilla!

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#587

Post by JosephLark »

jamiesonbecker wrote: post #554

As well as the vastly better Firefox, I've been very impressed by the new Brave browser[1]. Actually, extremely impressed. I normally do dev with Chrome for heavy JS (even compared to new devel edition ff) and even though Brave's devtools seem to match up to an older version compared to Chrome, page updates etc are just so much faster in Brave than in Chrome. Fast renders matters a LOT when you're developing. (Btw, t…

Maybe I'm missing something, but my impression of Brave was that behind the scenes it was just another Chromium browser. All the same little issues I have with Chromium were present in Brave when I tried it - exact same configuration tweaks (other than privacy stuff in Chrome) I needed to make to get me to a happy state. So aren't any of the visible speedups just a matter of the native adblocking? Are you comparing the speeds to Chrome/Chromium with adblocking?

Maybe Brave is more heavily customized than I thought?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#588

Post by digi_owl »

badsectoracula wrote: post #545
mk89 wrote: post #81

Never abandoned Firefox. Now what? :) And please, donate to Mozilla, if you can. They really do deserve some help. Fighting against giants like Google, MS and Apple... They have products running on all kinds of possible platforms, also on old Android phones! And they have some of the best extensions.

> 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…

Looked into Palemoon?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#589

Post by tmzt »

abiox wrote: post #583
tmzt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how this relates to the creator of Rust or its actual origin story, but Mozilla has been trying to get many of the same results out of C++ for a long time. You can look at the evolution of smart pointers in the codebase, along with more formal ways of representing error return codes (borrowed from MS COM), and general good practices. It seems at some point they became aware of how unsuited C++ is for par…

> (borrowed from MS COM) are you referring to microsoft's com (component object model)?

Yes, though more to HRESULTS from the Windows API. This meant return values could indicate success or a specific error which could be determined with macros.

Rust actually has a similar mechanism in its standard lib, the Result enum whuch resembles Maybe from Haskell, but has either a returned value if successful (which can be the empty object ()) or an Error.

XPCOM was modeled on the Microsoft version using the same vtable tricks that it used to enable dynamic dispatch through interfaces.

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