71–80 of 405 posts
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The anti-IE generation is mostly to blame for that, they ended up adopting the behaviours they criticized so much.
IE made life miserable for developers. I am not sure we would have cared if it were not moribund.
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Functioning like Chrome in rendering and page features doesn't mean Firefox has to behave like Chrome in the UX. For example, why gut the ability of people to skin and customize their browser as they see fit? Why is Mozilla involved in a running battle against users who want the tabs below the address bar? Why entirely prevent us from sideloading extensions instead of letting us turn the ability on and off?
I guess that for the first two the answer is in part managing complexity
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…
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…
Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.
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> 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…
I think we all really under-appreciate the marvel that is our current web. We run large complex distributed applications with remote frontends on our sandboxed environments. For most of the things I don't have to install apps anymore, which means as a linux user I finally get to access a similar ecosystem as everyone else. From running businesses to having fun to tinkering around, everything happens in this single window in our computers.
I have my concerns about google as well but I am glad mozilla and google have led to the interesting new web that we have today.
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"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…
The old extensions were synchronous and ran in the GUI thread. Running firefox with extensions on a HDD would freeze all the time for me, before electrolysis. There also was not a good security model. WebExtensions fixed these problems.
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…
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…
v. Intentionally breaking other browsers subtly on Google properties.
i, ii, and v are directly from Microsoft’s 90ies/00s playbook and the regulators are sleeping.
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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.).
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…
The latest attempt at publicly funded software is Gaia-X, the EU's (actually mostly France and Germany's) plan to build a European data infrastructure. I really don't want to be negative but I have a really strong feeling that it will fail as well (of course not before all the money has disappeared).
It would actually be cool to see what a organization like Mozilla could do with a sizeable public grant, they can't possibly spend that money worse than it's being spent now.
For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing[1] and I can’t think of a better company with a larger concentration of Rust expertise than Mozilla. Perhaps the same could work for other areas (ex frontend), but I’m biased toward Rust. Due to lack of experience in this regard I’m not sure if this could actually work, but I could imagine allocating part of their engineering time budget to consultation, whose income would fund their core products.
[1] Besides all the articles popping up about starting to employ Rust by well known companies, my anecdote as a full-time Rust SDE is that I’m getting more and more requests on LinkedIn, and not just for the usual crypto roles.
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…