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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

robert.ocallahan.org

231–240 of 310 posts

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#231
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great

Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.

Have you tried Firefox Focus?

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#232
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pure speculation. Maybe they're doing something shady with edge that would get them in more trouble(or found out) if they put in enterprise systems, but they see the regular consumer market as easy targets who can't defend themselves. That might explain why they're pushing edge so hard.

IoT Enterprise and LTSB are for embedded systems, they lack many of desktop applications and features (like Cortana) found in "regular" Windows. Windows 10 Enterprise is the desktop version, it has everything in Pro, and then some. There's nothing "shady" about Edge. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare

> IoT Enterprise and LTSB are for embedded systems, they lack many of desktop applications and features (like Cortana) found in "regular" Windows.

I view that as an advantage. That's why I use LTSB whenever I set up a Windows desktop for anyone at work.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#233
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. The Mozilla Corporation is 100% owned by the Mozilla Foundation. The Foundation determines the loan of the chairperson. And they pay the chairperson so much, because the industry pays chairpersons so much. Mitchell could find an even better paying…

The question is not that whether Mitchell could find a better paying job, but rather if Mozilla could find a chairperson as good as her for $100k.

100k is low even for engineers in the bay

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.

Have you tried Firefox Focus?

Focus is chrome with a different skin and ads blocked. Literally, it's WebView which is Chrome.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox Focus is my go to browser on Android for 'just looking things up'. It's perfect for Wikipedia and IMDB (when someone points at the film you are watching and asks who the actor is). I only use another browser if I want up keep the page. No cookies, no bookmarks, no trackers

Sadly, Focus appears to just be another Chrome skin with some ui and privacy tweaks, and I think it's pretty telling that Mozilla did this rather than actually use FF mobile as the basis for this product. If you want to encourage browser diversity it doesn't really help. I use FF Mobile because I want competition and I do like the features Firefox offers, but the performance and UX on Android are definitely lacking r…

To me the UX is a major plus in FF on Android (albeit with plenty of rough edges in the more hidden features). But yeah, no investment in mobile performance sucks (but hey, they spent hundred of eng months on making desktop not suck, so yay I guess?).

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#236
post #47
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.

Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.

Given enough time, it does. People used to talk about a “WebKit monoculture” on mobile back when both Safari and Chrome were built on WebKit (although, they enabled different features and used different JavaScript engines). After Google forked WebKit to create Blink, WebKit and Blink started to diverge with different development priorities resulting in different improvements being made and different features being implemented. So as time goes on, and code gets added, removed, and rewritten, much of the commonality eventually disappears over time.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) So far, this is the only thing that really drives me bonkers about iOS and has for a long time. I'd love to be able to use an actual third-party browser with a third-party rendering engine, even if it meant having to install a particular signing certificate or some such. Doubly so for using browser-specific exte…

I wish someone would just port Firefox mobile to iOS. You don't have to put it on the app store (which is impossible). Just zip up the xcode project, let me swap in my developer key, and run it on my phone. The protections against JIT and so on are enforced by policy, not by technology. I understand it would be a lot of effort for little gain. But if more developers would offer their stuff as self-signable "xcode pro…

Gecko already runs on iOS, I just don't know what the exact build process is. The trouble is, a browser is much more than an engine, and why would people sink effort into an unreleasable product.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#238

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…

Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again. Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything. If the pain of everybody using the same browser…

You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat.

Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#239
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on t…

As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome. The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here. Kinda…

There was an article some time ago by someone from Chrome/google in which you could read that they optimized for benchmarks before but benchmarks are not real world usage so they stopped and started to optimize for real world usage. They did it because they optimized for some benchmarks while making real world average usage less efficient. Benchmarks do not show real browser performance.

Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

#240
post #97

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…

I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on t…

Unfortunately same experience here. Firefox is just slower than Chrome for me on all devices and I also have some high CPU hiccups with FF.
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