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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

#721

Post by koffiezet »

zmix wrote: post #652
oatmealsnap wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First, many years ago, they should have made an XUL IDE. Then they should have focused on XML and giving the world an XML based web-browser, trying to drive XML further. XML would have had a much better chance on the web, if web-servers could have responded to URL encoded XPaths (or even XQueries in POST/GET), serving back XML Fragments which could have been XMLIncluded by the browser. They could have lobbied that. N…

XUL was a horrible idea, certainly at the time. Firefox's UI felt sluggish due to it, certainly since I was used to Opera's blazing fast and responsive UI, which I stuck to for exactly that reason. I only had Firefox installed for compatibility reasons. People seem to forget that while IE was a mess, Firefox was only "better", not "amazingly fantastically better".

With computers having become faster, together with development thrown at it, that's not really an issue anymore, but developers have also realized these days that XML is far from human readable, and for the majority of applications it has been used for, simply a bad idea.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#722

Post by mda »

qkls wrote: post #712
mda wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, you think firefox has any quantifiable privacy benefit over chrome?

It's a benefit that it's not owned by a company that collects your data to sells ads.

Are you sure it sells 'your' data? Or Chrome somehow acts as a tool for this purpose?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#723

Post by 51Cards »

KGIII wrote: post #242
51Cards wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am however one of those. While I understand the technical reasons for the switch I don't think it has been handled well. Extensions I rely on daily are going to cease functioning because the WebExtensions API isn't mature enough for the developers to migrate. Are they going to wait? Probably not... most affected will probably abandon their projects because FF rushed the transition and their user base is about to dr…

Rushed? It was announced more than two years ago, as I recall. Hmm... August, 2015.

When it was announced is somewhat irrelevant. Developers are saying Web Extensions still isn't able to support the needed functionality. That needed to be addressed before shutting down the older APIs. That is where I feel developers have been left hanging... given a "shutdown" date when the replacement isn't even ready yet.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#724

Post by qkls »

mda wrote: post #722
qkls wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a benefit that it's not owned by a company that collects your data to sells ads.

Are you sure it sells 'your' data? Or Chrome somehow acts as a tool for this purpose?

Google doesn't officially tell that Chrome tracks you more than other browsers do, but an ex-Google employee has said that "Google definitely uses Chrome user data and can track every click within it". https://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/ex-google-employ...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#725

Post by [deleted] »

quesera wrote: post #384
Groxx wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"great" may be stretching it more than a little. They have indeed worked for a very long time (which is definitely great), but launching multiple firefoxes at once with different profiles is (has been? haven't tried for over a year) an absolute nightmare for anyone not launching it exclusively from the CLI with aliases. I actually made app wrappers just so I could click things instead of having a weird blend of "you…

Yeah, fair point. My solution on macOS is an AppleScript with the usual Firefox name and icon, installed in the usual location, which runs a shell script with the proper args to pop the profile manager in a new session (`-ProfileManager -no-remote`). The real Firefox binary is buried in a nondiscoverable location (`$HOME/Applications/.Firefox`) so that it doesn't get launched directly. ...but after getting around to…

[deleted]

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#726

Post by ohthehugemanate »

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…

One of the key misconceptions about Mozilla is that Firefox is their "core business." It is not. Mozilla is not a company; their "core business" is not defined by their most successful software product. It's defined by their mission statement: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all."

They've used their $100-160 million (it has grown over time) budget for a lot of things in the last several years. Off the top of my head:

* Legal battles * Advocacy for open standards like HTML5 * Web literacy projects like webmaker and MDN * LetsEncrypt * Bugzilla * Thunderbird * NSS * Spidermonkey * Rust * PDF.js * Firefox OS * Development and support for open VR web standards * Supporting other, non-Mozilla open source projects like Tor and NTP

Remember that the goal isn't the success of any particular software product. It's pushing the debate and forcing other vendors to adopt and stick with OSS and open standards.

In short: yes, Firefox has lagged behind chrome in the last few years in terms of speed. But remember when IOS didn't support HTML5, or any competing apps? Remember when no one was serving the global south with mobile web capable devices? Remember when HTTPS adoption was at 3% and going nowhere? Remember when CSS meant days of per-browser testing and tweaks? You're welcome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#727

Post by ohthehugemanate »

mda wrote: post #697
JoelTheSuperior wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness I (and I suspect many others) refuse to use Chrome on privacy grounds.

Serious question, you think firefox has any quantifiable privacy benefit over chrome?

We'll, there's the obvious argument that any open source software is better for your privacy and security than any closed source software, just because you know what it's doing. Then there's chrome's history of repeatedly discovering "whoops, we weren't supposed to be collecting that"... For me, it was when a researcher noticed that chrome kept his microphone activated all the time, because it was passively recording and sending all your audio to google. That one even made it into chromium! Then there's the abuse of their products to force people into their browser and OS - like Hangouts only working on chrome, or chrome not enabling hardware acceleration for any device but Chromebooks, despite a years old (trivial) patch to do so, and years of testing reports. Arch Linux maintains its own version of chromium just to have that patch included.

But for me, it's the conflict of interest that makes the real difference. Fundamentally, Google as a company makes it's money by selling information about me and my behavior on the internet. That's it's objective. Firefox exists to promote open standards, OSS, and privacy on the Internet. If chrome at the moment doesn't seem to be contributing towards Google's objective, that's by definition only a temporary state of affairs. And I know which objective I would rather support.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#728

Post by hacking_again »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #726
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…

One of the key misconceptions about Mozilla is that Firefox is their "core business." It is not. Mozilla is not a company; their "core business" is not defined by their most successful software product. It's defined by their mission statement: "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all." They've used their $100-160 million (it has grown over time) budget for a lot of things in the…

> Mozilla is not a company

Mozilla Corp. is taxable and had revenues of $329.5 million in 2014 per Wikipedia. Most of that money came from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine in Firefox. Open internet and goodwill aside, Firefox is very much their core business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#729

Post by eric-hu »

coldtea wrote: post #699
eric-hu wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Wasn't it Webkit that hit that first? Whereas Firefox at the time was just 93%. https://twitter.com/webkit/status/728643624464883712?lang=en

You could be right. I tried to fact check myself and couldn't find a reference to which browser hit 100% first. I did see this article about safari shipping modules first, though:

https://www.contentful.com/blog/2017/04/04/es6-modules-suppo...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#730

Post by mda »

qkls wrote: post #724
mda wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it sells 'your' data? Or Chrome somehow acts as a tool for this purpose?

Google doesn't officially tell that Chrome tracks you more than other browsers do, but an ex-Google employee has said that "Google definitely uses Chrome user data and can track every click within it". https://www.siliconbeachtraining.co.uk/blog/ex-google-employ...

The article does not give any context and I am not sure what they meant by that sentence. Is it because you can log in to Chrome with your Google account?
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