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The Firefox Dilemma

blog.tawhidhannan.co.uk

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Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#91

Post by chrismorgan »

taf2 wrote: post #83
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?

These days, Firefox has containers, whereby you can have isolation while inside the same profile (so same history, bookmarks, extensions, &c.). Full profile switching is as functional and clumsy as ever (because there’s really no good way of improving it).

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#92

Post by metildaa »

baybal2 wrote: post #82
metildaa wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I asked you for citations for your claims, yet instead I get diversion...

Wrt having a usable browser, I'm literally using Firefox for Android to talk to you right now. Firefox has been a usable browser for years, seems your salty tho.

Please provide citations for:

- 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

- All the money Mozilla directors scored was due to them slicing off the project piece by piece for last 10 years.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#93

Post by fireattack »

ginko wrote: post #76
fireattack wrote: post #31

I fully agree with this article. I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best. When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be. When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system…

Looking at your Win7+nVidia bug, I'm kind of confused why you would expect Firefox to fix this when this seems to be a bug in the nVidia graphics driver.

It's hard to define it as an nVidia bug or a browser bug. You may say it's an nVidia bug because it only happens on nVidia; but then you can also say it's a "Win 7 bug" because it only happens on Win7.

Anyway, as a fact: it works fine in IE and Chrome (after they fixed it). So at very least, it is fixable on browser's end.

It also works fine in any video player you can think of.

Also, from what I can see, neither Chromium dev nor Firefox dev claim it's an "nVidia bug". Chromium dev just went ahead and fixed it. Firefox dev said they're not going to fix it because (from previous ticket [1]) "We don't intend to add new features such as this code is only used on Windows 7." Which IMHO makes no sense because when this bug firstly appeared, it was 3-4 years ago; and Win 7 is still one of the most used OS and is in the supported OS list of Firefox.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1161349#c46

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#94

Post by hkt »

rlv-dan wrote: post #10

A big problem is that the web standard is too complicated. Browsers are pretty much a virtual os that can do almost everything. For anyone to make a browser from scratch today is not feasible. We will move towards a monoculture, because there is no alternative unless we make a drastic shift in rethinking how the web should work.

This!

I'd be very happy with a fixed, lower tier of web standard that is easy to implement against. It should contain enough standards to build attractive, solid (eg) online banking interfaces, blogs and news sites, commenting etc. In other words, a minimum for media consumption, rather than apps.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#95

Post by hkt »

pvinis wrote: post #87

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?

No, they'd spend their time pruning all the google telemetry crud out of chromium. The fact is that Mozilla's next gen stuff is going to be streets ahead of Chrome, and I suspect their efforts will be rewarded in the end.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#96

Post by bayesian_horse »

mcny wrote: post #68
bayesian_horse wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms.

> Maybe Chrome can compete with itself by swapping out the rendering and Javascript vms. Not that I have any insider information but from the complaints I've read about how the committees that handle promotion requests at Google, I'd be surprised if there aren't Google engineers already trying their hand at this. What I'd like to know is how much does Chrome cost Google? I've read that Mozilla spends just under half…

The Mozilla Foundation is doing a whole lot of stuff besides developing Firefox, whereas not all development for Firefox is paid for by Mozilla.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#97

Post by lewisjoe »

dTal wrote: post #24
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.

It was on its way. Most people just shrugged and used the default browser (IE) and there wasn't much mindset that browsers were meant to be power tools - IE didn't even have tabs, it was just a window that held a webpage with a couple of back buttons. And IE felt clean after AOL, which was many people's first browsing experience. Among those who did switch, most switched to Firefox (and a small few switched to Opera)…

This is true. I wasn't much tech savvy back then. I switched to Chrome because it made my internet fast.

Of course it might not really have, but the sleek look, the circular loader instead of a progress bar kind of a loader that Firefox had at that time, faster JS engine – all this combined to give me a wow factor in terms of browsing speed.

Remember, this was at the time when 250kbps of broadband speed was the "normal". And speed was easily a critical factor.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#98

Post by nikbackm »

robin_reala wrote: post #71
rl3 wrote: post #60

An incredibly interesting alternate reality would have been one where Microsoft used Quantum/Servo to power Edge instead of Chromium.

As much as I would have liked them to, it doesn’t fix the problem of people not testing in Edge, which is why they’ve gone for Chromium in the first place.

They also want to have synergy with Electron.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#99

Post by chrismorgan »

daliusd wrote: post #66

I like idea to list what Firefox does better. My addition to the list: Firefox has better kerning support while Chromium team ignores the problem (e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=888374... and https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=912052 ). For the context: I'm software developer working in printing.

My experience with reporting these sorts of things: in Edge, fixed in about a month; in Firefox, normally fairly quickly, but sometimes months and occasionally never; in Chromium, I don’t even know why I bother filing bugs sometimes.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=639223 is a good example of my experience there: a fancy typography thing that is just completely broken in an uncommon but by no means unreasonable situation, and it just sits for years untouched.

But Firefox is still definitely not perfect: as an example that has sat unfixed for ten years, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479829 is about hyphenation and ligatures not mixing well (you can get half your ff ligature on one line and half on the next). I tend to see the effects of that once or twice a year.

Re: The Firefox Dilemma

#100

Post by austincheney »

Waterluvian wrote: post #81
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?

The DOM is a structured API to markup (HTML/XML). That means DOM instructions are access to something outside the language. Leaving the language, for any reason, is slower than executing within the language. That said the execution speed of DOM instructions is orthogonal to the execution speed of JavaScript alone.

> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?

The DOM is the standard technology the browsers use to communicate from JavaScript to markup. QuerySelectors are strings, so they have to be parsed into DOM instructions by the browser using a native code engine. Since the DOM is a well defined standard and it is the standard that all browsers use DOM instruction performance can be directly compared between the different browsers.

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