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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

#621

Post by dom0 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #504
dom0 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Legally they might have done the minimal amount necessary to not violate the license, but morally they've been a huge dick. "We have to open source our modifications to the code base, so here you get exactly one tarball of uncommented stuff."

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#622

Post by superkuh »

floatboth wrote: post #598
superkuh wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not letting "normal" users accidentally install I strongly disagree. Browser functionality for everyone shouldn't be gimped to protect a small subset of users from themselves. >"is unstable" isn't a good reason to avoid it. I'm not holding a controversial opinion in thinking that alphas are generally buggy for significant subset of the userbase. I get that it might work fine for you but there's a reason aurora isn'…

"small subset"?! Most Firefox users don't install addons at all . The number of people who want to install addons from random untrusted places is really tiny. Developer Edition is not alpha.

Well, you're wrong. Developer is taking the place of aurora/alpha as the below quote from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Developer_Editio... shows,

>Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process. Like Aurora, features will land in the Developer Edition every six weeks, after they have stabilized in Nightly builds.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#623

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

It flies towards the trash can. It could be fast as lightning it would a fast as lightning piece of crap without the couple dozen extensions I had to add to restore the features they removed, remove the unwanted change they made and just to add the basic but missing features.

I've moved to waterfox which offers support for the legacy addons and this move actually fixed a few of the annoying bugs I had with firefox. Among which speed was not one.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#624

Post by bigbugbag »

oatmealsnap wrote: post #574
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.

Sorry, that’s just not what happened. I think there’s an important lesson in what happened to Mozilla, so I think it is worth clarifying. Chrome didn’t start from scratch (they used WebKit to start) and they didn’t overtake them overnight. Mozilla couldn’t decide what their focus should be for many years, and in that time Chrome grew thanks to Google’s infinite wallet. They made worthwhile risks that didn’t work out…

And webkit did not start from scratch either, it started from KHTML. They had considered using firefox rendering engine gecko but it was too cumbersome and got dropped.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#626

Post by bigbugbag »

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.…

I don't know what you're trying to defend here, high ranked people from mozilla admitted themselves they made bad decision and wasted money and time and developers on the wrong things instead of focusing on their core product[1].

They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years.

[1]: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#627

Post by Aissen »

Manishearth wrote: post #464
ATsch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Disagreed. I might have 3GB of RAM on this phone, but the browser(s) often get moved out of RAM. It's slower to start than Chrome/Brave. Cold-boot performance matters. I keep Firefox Beta around, and just checked, it's still almost twice as slow as Brave in a adhoc cold start test.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#628

Post by bigbugbag »

lugg wrote: post #505
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.…

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.

Are you confusing the not for profit mozilla foundation and the for profit mozilla corporation here ?

The foundation had engaged in tax evasion over the money raised through the corporation and ended up settling with the IRS by paying a $1.5 millions fine[1], they had provisioned $15 millions for this fine, suddenly they got a few unexpected millions to spend on whatever.

I agree that comparing mozilla to google makes little sense as mozilla was working for google in exchange for 85-95% of their revenue. Without google paying mozilla for their users privacy, mozilla would have had to find an actual business model and would not have had the option to wander away from their core product.

On the other hand, without mozilla google would have been mostly the same though would have probably missed some data about millions of users .

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-gets-lucky-settles-irs-aud...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#629

Post by seba_dos1 »

Osmose wrote: post #581
seba_dos1 wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

B2G extensions were already WebExtension-based when its preview release landed in Firefox 42. e10s was indeed introduced way earlier, but Firefox OS and Fennec were its main users for a while, which for sure has sped up the development significantly. Same with things like APZ.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#630

Post by bigbugbag »

glogla wrote: post #456
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?

FirefoxOS was a way out of Apple's proprietary walled garden and of being Google's product and information slave. Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.

Firefox OS was the out of reality belief from mozilla that computer were dead in a handful of years to be replaced by mobile, combined with the absolute nonsense that they could compete without hardware manufacturer support.

Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.

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