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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#61

Post by josefx »

outadoc wrote: post #40
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because…

> They made ONE switch

How many plugins work with the new Firefox on Android?

> standard extension model

One were Google already declared that APIs used for ad blockers are considered deprecated and might be dropped at any time? With one major browser vendor being actively hostile towards a large amount of plugins that "standard" doesn't do much. It certainly doesn't guarantee portability unless Mozilla completely jumps the shark and also kills ad blockers.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#62

Post by riffraff »

TimSchumann wrote: post #13
bickeringyokel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find I am not missing anything in terms of features or stability since the quantum engine except perhaps bookmark management being a bit clunky. If you truly prefer chrome why not use a chromium browser that is not Google? (Brave for example)

I question the longevity and/or motives of institutions maintaining any of those builds other than possibly Microsoft. And believe me, if you would have asked me if trusting Microsoft was the safe bet 20 years ago, I would have said you were nuts. But here we are.

I understand questioning the motives, but does the longevity matter? I have a ton of bookmarks and some extensions, but those carry over easily across chrome variations. If Brave died next year you could switch back to chromium relatively easily, I think.

I guess, I may be missing something, and would like to know what.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#63

Post by sfvisser »

mrweasel wrote: post #46

The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market? Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in se…

It makes so much sense for the EU to start investing in an open web and open source software. A relatively cheap option to move towards a society with better data protection and online civil liberties.

I’ve never took the time to really dig into the details of what the EU is exactly doing right now, but it seems regulation is higher on the list than investment and innovation.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#64

Post by toyg »

pjmlp wrote: post #33
MattGaiser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge with not competing with Chrome is that websites are now mostly developed with Chrome as the dev-tool. Even large companies are just optimizing for that one browser: https://thenextweb.com/dd/2017/11/28/please-build-websites-w... How many users are going to be willing to put up with stuff not working until they switch?

The anti-IE generation is mostly to blame for that, they ended up adopting the behaviours they criticized so much.

It is indeed sad how people who hated IE so much have now enabled the next IE not once but twice (Chrome on the desktop, Safari on mobile).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#65

Post by ohgodplsno »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #45
outadoc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the constant deprecation of power features and customizability They made ONE switch to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds. Do you really think you're in the majority here? Making it a more secure, faster and just better browser is just the only way forward. Without that Firefox would just be slow as hell, wouldn't play YouTube or Netflix videos, and not have any extensions left because…

"Firefox would just be slow as hell" Why is that? The problem is they get into to web standards game which is driven by Google to create pressure everyone else to spend millions on the newest standards. I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me (except HTTPs). Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF) They broke exetensions several…

>well for their own fun rewriting the browser and rendering engine several times, I guess it was fun at least doing "interesting things".

Go on, install Firefox 3. Go see how absolutely _awful_ it was with multiple tabs open. How a single page would freeze the entire browser. How extensions broke XUL when the slightest thing went wrong.

Rewriting the renderer is not something done for fun. It was necessary for the to be able to do per tab isolation, as well as a not broken security model.

> Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF)

I literally have 432 tabs open at the moment I'm typing this. Firefox has automatically unloaded about 400 of those and is only eating 3GB of RAM. Check your custom config if you have any, because you certainly have something wrong. Win10, Ryzen 1600X and 16GB.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#66

Post by rjzzleep »

mrweasel wrote: post #46

The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market? Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in se…

EU research grants have an incredibly high documentation burden and Europe in general still has a problem considering software development as research. It's usually everything that leads up to the development and then the development itself is mostly an afterthought.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#67

Post by mvn9 »

toyg wrote: post #59
mrweasel wrote: post #46

The mentioning of DoD contractors made we wonder: would the EU help fund the development of Firefox, in order to secure competition in the browser market? Mozilla would need to restructure and move Firefox to the foundation, but MDN, Firefox and possibly Rust could be funded by donations, corporate sponsors and perhaps the EU, assuming the money could be directed correctly. It would require a management skilled in se…

This would likely require the bulk of Mozilla to be based in Europe. It could be achieved for sure, but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge. I don't expect MoFo and MoCo leadership to be willing to entertain such possibilities, considering how "valley" their outlook seems to be.

>but it would take years to transfer the relevant knowledge.

A) The people with the knowledge just have been fired and are free to move and to be hired

B) Thanks to corona, remote work is a fully accepted option

Something new can be running next week or even tomorrow.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#68

Post by Dunedan »

Does somebody know what the remaining ~750 people are working on? How many of them work on Firefox, Pocket, Lockwise, VPN, HR, marketing, ...? Is there somewhere an overview about that?

Many here disapprove with the recent layoffs and especially the areas affected by them, but I'd like to better understand how many people still work on Firefox (desktop browser, mobile browsers, dev tools, servo, ...), compared to topics like Pocket and VPN and supporting roles like HR or marketing, to get a better picture of how how I feel about Mozilla's future.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#69

Post by ohgodplsno »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #55
Brakenshire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).

> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs)

https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#70

Post by petepete »

leokennis wrote: post #15

I have to say this is one of the instances where I’m glad Apple’s hunger for profit and privacy engineering intersect. On Mac at least with Safari there is a privacy oriented browser left. Maybe Apple could revive Safari on Windows?

What about Chromium isn't privacy focussed? It was my understanding that all of Google's grubby code isn't present.
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