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Firefox 70

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Re: Firefox 70

#271

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

deogeo wrote: post #234
burtonator wrote: post #116

Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party! I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy. However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome). They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Goog…

> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. W…

I thought that the cable TV subscription pays for the distribution and ads pay for the channels?

Re: Firefox 70

#272

Post by rwxsh »

pier25 wrote: post #90
bhj wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from the Q&A at the end: > Safari’s compositor is entirely Core Animation based; Safari basically skips step 2. (Step 2 is "the Firefox “compositor” assembles Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window")

You think this affects video decoding? Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.

> You think this affects video decoding?

Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.

Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).

I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!

Re: Firefox 70

#273

Post by mkl »

Lio wrote: post #193
rusk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right ... It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.

There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather than the other way around. Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine. Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game…

I'm not sure that adds up. When Bing was introduced in mid-2009, IE had about 60% of the market, and it was dropping fast as Chrome's popularity exploded [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...

Re: Firefox 70

#274

Post by tylerhou »

Lio wrote: post #193
rusk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right ... It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.

There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather than the other way around. Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine. Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game…

> "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run"

Source? All I can find is http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done....

Re: Firefox 70

#275

Post by Klonoar »

dstaley wrote: post #260
Klonoar wrote: post #224

Switching to CoreAnimation is very, very nice - however, this still doesn't feel quite at home on macOS because of a bug that's pretty old at this point. Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years, especially since Chrome managed to do it -…

Firefox still doesn't render native OS elements like select boxes and right-click menus, so I have little faith overflow scrolling will ever be fixed.

Yeah... Firefox is probably the biggest example of why you shouldn't reinvent the wheel in terms of cross-platform GUI. It just looks and feels so out of place, whether it's macOS or some niche setup like running it under KDE. If you're in Gnome or Windows it can look fine, but I still question much of the iconography and general layout.

Any time you bring it up, though, you get batted away and beaten over the head with privacy, browser monoculture, or open source arguments. It's really frustrating; if you want open source to succeed, you have to also want it to compete on the same level.

It's like expecting people to eat vegan food when you call it the same as the non-vegan option... and then they don't want to, because it tastes nothing like what they expect.

In fact (I can't believe I'm saying this) I almost wish they were a Qt shell.

Re: Firefox 70

#276

Post by saagarjha »

pfranz wrote: post #190
freediver wrote: post #111

I am not a Firefox user but know that matching Webkit performance on macOS is going to be very hard. So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70. Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background. Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82 Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11 If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this rel…

I just can't imagine Firefox will ever be performant as Safari. One is written for a single platform developed at the same company that develops the hardware and OS (I'm not trying to belittle the Safari team--it's kind of amazing what they do). The other is developed separately, must equally support at least 2 other OSes and has an expectation for supporting older setups. My problem is that Safari won't work for me…

WebKit also works on other platforms.

Re: Firefox 70

#277

Post by zck »

gwern wrote: post #252
TeMPOraL wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people actually want it? Technological limitation or not, this is how things have been both in print and digital for as long as I can remember. Not to mention handwriting. I still find the non-overlapping underline weird (even if kind of neat).

I think people do; it's popular enough that many people implement it, not just Tufte-CSS, it was one of the first things I added to gwern.net once I saw it demoed, I believe Medium also does it, and no one's complained to me that they really like the overlapping obscuration.

I really like the overlapping underline. Well, really I like the non-broken underline, which happens to overlap with descenders.

If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links. To check if this is the case, I have to mouseover both the link before and after the break, and compare the URLs with my eyes.

I find this a much greater annoyance then I do the overlapping underlining.

Re: Firefox 70

#278

Post by otherblocks »

Scarbutt wrote: post #199
chrischen wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery life is my primary concern, and unless they release battery life benchmarks I’d be hard pressed to switch off of Safari.

Safari means no ublock, the web without is annoying.

FWIW, I started using 1Blocker recently with Safari and have found it to be quite good. YMMV.

Re: Firefox 70

#279

Post by saagarjha »

submeta wrote: post #235

Love the new mission statement: `Firefox is tech that fights for your online privacy.` Apple has demonstrated that privacy is a very effective value proposition. Maybe Apple should look into investing in Mozilla/Firefox.

But they ship their own browser?

Re: Firefox 70

#280

Post by bbanyc »

vondur wrote: post #233
bad_user wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium).…

Interesting, back in the day, I believe you were supposed to pay for Netscape. That changed once the Mozilla Foundation was started and Netscape's codebase was open sourced.

Netscape was "free for educational use" and anyone could download it free of charge. According to one old hand at Netscape (JWZ? Eich?) they checked their server logs for which corporate IPs downloaded it most often and had their sales team contact the freeloading companies. I think they were also planning to sell licenses to ISPs and modem vendors for use as pack-in software.

Then MS released IE for free, no strings attached, and killed their business model overnight.

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