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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

#631

Post by gravity_123 »

Semaphor wrote: post #35

Switched from Chrome to Nightly as my main browser 2 days ago when KeepassHttpConnector [0] got it's 1.0 release. Speed is absolutely on par with Chrome (which is something I never had in my earlier tries, usually gave FF a chance 2 times per year). Had 1 full browser crash which never happened with Chrome (in recent years), but then I was also running stable vs nightly now. I'm still missing one extension (Join for…

> I'm still missing one extension (Join for Android)

AFAIK Firefox extension is pending addition of push API support in extensions. Joao has filed a bug report[0] for that, but there hasn't been much activity on it for some time.

[0]:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1378096

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#632

Post by int_19h »

Kimm0n0 wrote: post #540
glogla wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe some of the hardware makers should have thrown some resources at the project.

What's in it for them that justifies the expense?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#633

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

If those phones were actually available to buy. I wanted to buy one but they were not available to western europe, then were distributed over weird channels and turned out to have performance issues. So I gave up and got an older android phone for free.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#634

Post by bigbugbag »

rowyourboat wrote: post #432
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…

> They squandered a lot of money, while neglecting their core business (their web browser). They are not a business, they are a non-profit organization. And their aim is not to simply build a better browser, but to preserve the open web, and put control in the hands of the users. Granted, phoneOS was a failure, but given their mission, they had to try.

They are a non-profit organization owning a for profit corporation making tens to hundred millions dollars a year selling users data to search engine.

Notably this non-profit organization had provisioned $15 millions anticipating that the IRS might get into how a non-profit was actually for profit, it eventually happened and the foundation ended up getting a $1.5 million fine for their google income before setting up the for profit corporation scheme[1].

[1]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/18/google_still_mozill...

The non-profit organization foundation

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#635

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

Not sure how this 2015 figure is relevant as according to Andreas Gal who started the boot to gecko project, the shift back to firefox browser and away from firefox OS happened in 2014.

2011 to 2014, that's 4 years. Enough for firefox OS to gobble hundred millions of dollars.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#636

Post by bigbugbag »

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…

The main reason for chrome eating up market is google pocket depth and heavy marekting push through all mean avialable.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#637

Post by bigbugbag »

Khaine wrote: post #466
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…

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.

The main reason is google used its piles of cash to push their browser.

The side reason is firefox made counterproductive and unnecessary changes: removing the status bar, australis UI, removing the ability to disable script, dropping alsa support and many other useful features removed proving that user have no freedom of choice and no say. While adding unwanted things (DRM, pocket, hello, etc.) and not fixing broken things.

Some power users and long supporter would have sticked with firefox despite google's marketing, had it not piled bad move after bad move and not listening to its users.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#638

Post by AsyncAwait »

abritinthebay wrote: post #570
glogla wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was worth a shot certainly, no company ever didn't undertake projects that didn't pan out in the end, at least somebody tried to break the smartphone duopoly. I can imagine the money being spent on much worse things.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#639

Post by bigbugbag »

nextos wrote: post #256
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.

Firefox beta is very nice. My only (big) regret is that APIs that make Vimperator work are getting phased out. I can't live without Vimperator.

Why don't you switch to waterfox ? it has support for legacy extension and plans to keep them alive, it's even currently working on hosting its own copy of the addon store.

https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#640

Post by bigbugbag »

gotofritz wrote: post #108
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…

Even if "they were just building a Chrome clone", it would still be valuable because of the privacy concerns

what do you mean privacy concerns ? firefox is far from being a privacy browser outside of marketing.

Also chrome has had privacy oriented counterpart since the early days such as srware iron[1].

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron

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