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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#81

Post by Waterluvian »

austincheney wrote: post #53

Hands down there is one objective thing that Firefox does well and nobody else comes remotely close. DOM access. For some reason Firefox is thousands of times faster than other browsers when it comes to executing the standard DOM API methods. I know that is a bold statement but it is easily verified with numbers using a perf tool. Chrome is faster at executing JavaScript than Firefox, but even still Firefox leaves ev…

My understanding is that DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript. Does "thousands of times faster" challenge that?

Ie. React's virtual DOM is a phenomenal idea because it greatly reduces actual DOM interaction. Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#82

Post by baybal2 »

metildaa wrote: post #63
baybal2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but you can't move Mozilla forward without firing incompetent directors flying chartered jets and getting $1M USD remuneration for nothing. All success Mozilla ever had was due to hard work of volunteer developers who pulled out Firefox, and all the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years. P.S. There is a whisper going around that Google's only reaso…

Could I get some citations? What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO. Mozilla's intentions and fears seem to be very reasonable, driving what they do from AV1 to fighting DRM, though they have hit de…

> What I've seen coming out of Mozilla over tthe past few years, from DeepSpeech to Rust and Servo appears to be foundational technology written by Mozilla engineers. This tech has the potential to do a lot of good, having it be a public resource is important IMO.

Many things been coming out of their house, but not a usable browser — a raison d'etre stated in their charter.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#83

Post by taf2 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #65

I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.) I look at the sessions of p…

I run something similar in chrome but make use of profile switching heavily to segment what I’m doing with session isolation. I can have my work logins separately from my personal or test logins- has Firefox improved profile switching, it used to require custom start up arguments?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#84

Post by waterhouse »

chrismorgan wrote: post #67
ekianjo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bookmark tags are probably going to be the next to go when Firefox decides "too few people are using it".

No, that’s bookmark keywords, which are not widely used and difficult to discover, and for which there’s a rough alternative in search engines. I believe it’s on the chopping block, or at least it looked to be a few months ago, as I discovered when looking through Bugzilla to see about exposing bookmark keywords to WebExtensions so that I could make an extension that would implement DuckDuckGo’s !bangs in the browser…

If they get rid of bookmark keywords, without some other equivalent mechanism (i.e. one that lets me set up URL bar commands so that "wp X" -> roughly "en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X", "g" -> "mail.google.com/u/0/h", and so on), then I will be really annoyed.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#85

Post by toyg »

Delmania wrote: post #38
cyberjunkie wrote: post #3

I wonder if there is a term to describe the sheer ignorance of the (tech-aware) masses. Sadly, Firefox is fighting a hard battle that it's possibly, and slowly losing.

Perhaps Firefox should research why Chrome is so successful and adopt that? I use Edge, Safari, FF Dev Edition, and Chrome, and I consistently return to Chrome because of the smooth user experience. In my uninformed opinion, FF is losing for the same reason the FSF's products never went mainstream, which is they're focusing too much on their message than delivering a solid product. Which is sad, because I do remember…

They could have the best browser on the planet and they would still be a bit player. Google owns mobile and webmail like MS owned the desktop, and most people will use what the platform owner tells them to use. As long as the ruler doesn't fall asleep at the wheel, like MS did with IE, everyone else will be a bit player.

I think market share is the wrong metric to fixate on. FF market share has never been particularly big, that shouldn't be the target and it never really was. The target used to be improving the web and being the most innovative and reliable engine for web standards. This is what Mozilla was good at, before they started thinking like your run-of-the-mill big company ("we need to find the Next Big Thing! Market share! Leverage! Competitive advantage!"...) and wasted years in pointless side-bets.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#87

Post by pvinis »

Imagine if Firefox used webkit/chromium underneath.

Would that allow Mozilla to make Firefox more awesome by freeing up dev time that was taken by servo and gecko, and now can be used to make great UI and extensions and features?

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#88

Post by hkt »

Jonnax wrote: post #49
Konryan wrote: post #41

I think there's another factor at play that isn't often mentioned: Google uses the dominant position of its services, as well as the strength of their brands, to promote Chrome as the better browser, in not-so-subtle ways. One is often repeatedly prompted to install Chrome when visiting Google on other browsers[1][2]. Most normal users would just give up and install just to get rid of the pop up. Microsoft has been d…

Also Firefox for Android gets a shit version of Google search. But if you spoof your user agent it works perfectly. That definitely is using their dominance in search to make people.use their web browser.

Doesn't surprise me. The EU should fine Google for a lot of things, including that.

There's always duckduckgo, though.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#89

Post by chrismorgan »

tarruda wrote: post #69
chrismorgan wrote: post #65

I’ve been using Firefox since about 0.93, with about a year in the middle when I used Chrome as my primary browser, because it ran from a USB disk much better than Firefox did at the time, and that was what I needed at the time. (I am glad that Chrome came along, because by showing how bad Firefox was in some areas it spurred Mozilla on to improve it, so that it’s no longer bad like that.) I look at the sessions of p…

> I currently have 165 tabs spread across three windows How do you manage this setup? I'm specifically interested in how you can assign tabs to different windows and have this information persist across restarts.

It’s all purely done manually. There’s almost no overlap between things that could go in my general personal and general work windows (exceptions: HN threads where FastMail comes up and I respond, or the very occasional article from HN or RSS feeds that is directly tied to something I’m doing for work). I store them on different virtual desktops, too, so when Firefox starts I just move the windows to the appropriate desktops, and then keeping it all separate is straightforward.

I do also use container tabs a little with some automatic assignment (automatic assignment to container, that is, not to window, useful as that would be), but I don’t think I actually need them any more; I think that FastMail is now the only thing where I need actively different sessions for personal and work, and it supports multiple logins just fine.

Then sometimes there’s a particular project that I want to focus on, and so I create a new window just for it, and shift it and any other related stuff into another new virtual desktop.

P.S. I just closed 50 tabs because I had finished something and deferred another thing.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#90

Post by toyg »

lmm wrote: post #13
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #2

Out of curiosity, before Chrome came along, why didn't Firefox eat IE's lunch? The Microsoft anti-trust case was 1999-2001 but Chrome came out in 2008.

Firefox was always slow - the GUI felt slower than IE to me - and while it theoretically had better standards support, there were no websites that didn't work in IE. (Personally I was using Konqueror in that era - even then it felt like a much better browser - and wish the open-source community had rallied behind it. But the US open-source folks never seemed to pay much attention to anything that had been implemented…

Konqueror was "suicided" by KDE themselves, right about the time Apple picked it up to make WebKit.

The truth is that working on browser engines is hard and unfashionable work, nobody in opensource really wants to do it. Every desktop environment made its crappy half-baked reimplementation when it looked like deep desktop integration was inevitable and Netscape was a black-box (the IE 4/5 era), then dropped it when Firefox came about - it was good enough, and the integration fashion had passed.

I do agree that KDE was (still is) ridiculously ignored in the US. The licence schism generated a certain tribalism that is now difficult to overcome. Which is funny, considering GPL is now The Devil in the US.

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