191–200 of 310 posts
This plays in the hands of Google; each new feature is another opportunity to fingerprint the user. If things continue like that, a new platform will have to emerge to replace the web.
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Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but…
The thing that annoys me the most is to change tab: on chrome / brave we can just swipe the top bar and change tab. On firefox, we need to first click on the tab button, and then find the right tab by looking at a huge list of tabs. I find it much less practical and that's what got me back to chrome.
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I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone ask…
I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resist…
> It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum.
This is the crux of it. You see this as luck, but it wasn't luck at all! Someone had to say "we're going to fund this crazy work that might not pan out". They did so explicitly because they saw the same things you saw: Chrome was fast and it was getting harder to keep adding the features and standards required while being secure and fast.
Building Firefox OS wasn't completely at odds with wanting to build the best browser, because Firefox OS was fundamentally still a browser. There were other problems that caused the initiative to fail.
So here's the thing, Mozilla has had hits and misses. Rust and Servo were a long-term bet that is paying off. The decision to make the bet was not pure luck, but a real choice.
A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a…
...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up wit…
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I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.
mozillia research is sort of doing it with gecko. But yeah, from scratch is hard... Google didn't even do that, they started from webkit.
Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"
I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.
Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"
I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.
If I was Mozilla, I'd doing the later buying small companies doing user- and privacy-focused variants of popular services. Then, they could have a whole umbrella of stuff to offer to differentiate them based on reputation. I'd at least try a paid offering in the enterprise space as well.
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I'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say i…
The last time we had a web monoculture (IE6), it was not a pleasant experience. MS had decided it was over, they won, no more need to invest resources in that (and really, they would have preferred you write native Windows apps, but IE-only web pages which still only ran on Windows was a good second choice to them). It's also easy for a single dominant vendor implementation to impose terms on required periphery tech…
I don't think that's quite true, for several reasons:
* The biggest external contributors (Opera, Samsung, and Intel) put in more development effort than Pale Moon has, by a wide margin. (I think non-Google contributors to Chromium outnumber those working on Opera's Presto at its peak, though less than Opera's desktop product and Presto at that time.)
* Last time we saw any browser vendor leave the browser engine business (i.e., Opera killing Presto), we saw plenty of people jumping ship to keep working on browser engines (and not just those let go), so if we were hypothetically in a Chromium monoculture it's unlikely that Google pulling out would stop every Googler currently contributing from continuing to do so.
Also, when it comes to the Linux kernel, remember that both Windows and FreeBSD implement the Linux kernel syscall ABI too, which you can argue means they are alternative implementations of the kernel.
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With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture. There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab. Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves e…
I believe Chrome has for a while been using much the same model as Firefox has recently taken up, not a new process for each tab. AMO’s lack of malware problem is simply because it’s not so popular—making addons was, before WebExtensions, decidedly harder, and the browser’s not as popular as Chrome, so why bother targeting it when there are bigger fish you can catch more easily?
I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be broken up into more independent parts. We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work to be shared. We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS…
The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign that it is quite modular already?