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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#91

Post by tannhaeuser »

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…

I think part of this deal must involve radically simplifying the web and reflect on the EU's sponsorship of W3C via ERCIM. We've seen web tech becoming more complicated all the time, with self-acclaimed "standardization bodies" (WHATWG) acting as fig leaf for Google's take-over of the web. Now with Firefox on the brink to drop out, like all other "browser vendors" (Opera, MS) except Google before, and failing to create a new browser engine in about 10 years of development (!) with highly competent developers, it must be clear to everyone there's something very wrong with trusting the web as the universal digital medium for accessing nearly every piece of information. It's also becoming extremely hard to find pages that used to be ubiquitous only 2 years ago, so we're heading into an information crisis (on top of information warfare). W3C may have acted in good faith, but in the end contributed to irresponsible CSS complexity (which, in turn, is the result of having no standing/statue and no representation but rather a "pay-as-you-go" sponsorship model). WHATWG have consistently denied including HTML/CSS profiles for simplified subsets (as eg suggested by MS). Time to stop playing this naive web march of progress game only benefitting very few US companies, at the expense of everybody else.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#92

Post by ohgodplsno »

harshitaneja wrote: post #81
ohgodplsno wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereas Chrome makes life miserable for users not using Chrome, because of the sheer amount of non-standard, Chrome-only features used in current webdev.

Which non-standard features?

Using google properties is a bit of an easy jab, but:

Youtube using polymer/shadowdomv0 and absolutely destroying performance on Firefox is a an easy example. Google Earth used non-standard APIs.

Otherwise, have a quick search for "non-standard" on MDN, and see how many of those Chrome implements.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#93

Post by [deleted] »

joepie91_ wrote: post #60
KingOfCoders wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Why is that? Because Firefox's "powerful extension model" basically constituted direct access to its internals, which prevented the Firefox developers from making the architectural improvements that were so sorely needed to make it performant. > Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF) Admittedly I'm on Linux, but I currently have approximately 7800 tabs open…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#94

Post by forgotpwd16 »

causality0 wrote: post #20
ulfw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who cares about the version number? Come on. People don‘t pick a browser based on a too high or too low version number.

Exactly my point. Mozilla used a rational numbering scheme where the larger the change, the larger the increment, with full integers being reserved for major changes. Then Chrome started changing its integer every few weeks and Firefox upended its own scheme to keep from looking unfashionable.

For a rolling-release model like this a scheme could include the date released, e.g. Firefox 20.07.x which is also used by Linux distros. Right now version numbers are pretty useless.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#95

Post by stekern »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #69
KingOfCoders wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ ?

I assume the parent means native support for vertical tabs in the browser as opposed to through a third party extension.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#96

Post by luckylion »

creato wrote: post #88
mvn9 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I think remote work is missing the point here. It's politically difficult for governments to spend their tax revenue by paying a largely foreign workforce.

Not just politically difficult, it's also generally unwise. In the event of deteriorating relationships, you'll suddenly lose access to what you've been funding, because the US would declare it "a matter of national security" and outlaw the export. You can still work with the sources you have, but it'd be hard to keep it running smoothly. Much better to not have that risk if you're going to spend billions on it.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#97

Post by luckylion »

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 to a superior and standard extension model, and HN loses its minds.

They did the same for Thunderbird recently. Given their approach to only provide the minimum of features and say "get an extension if you want anything more", that's an issue if you're killing those extensions.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#98

Post by forgotpwd16 »

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.).

One of the reasons I'm still on Fox is tree-style tabs (with "Tree Style Tab" extension) and being able to hide top tabs (using userChrome.css).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#99

Post by LockAndLol »

I'm starting to sincerely hope there'll be a fork of Firefox or at least a separation from Mozilla, and for Quantum/Servo to be separated and made an easily embeddable. The inability to donate directly to projects has imo has had a direct result of requiring Google money.

Firefox and Quantum don't need 100M to survive. That's that just absurd. Even if you had 250 people working on it for 100k each, you still wouldn't get to anything as crazy as 100M. 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

There's no need to branch out and make all kinds of other side projects that have to fit under the Mozilla umbrella. Splitting focus like that just makes it become a juggling game of who needs the money more, shifting focus between projects and making it difficult for donators to comprehend where the money is going to.

When I donate to KDE, it's doesn't come as a surprise that I can't request my donation to be earmarked for something. The project is for a desktop environment after all. It's in the name and it's the flagship product. But when your flagship product is a browser and you don't provide people the possibility to donate to that product... well, what's the point in donating?

Even the argument of "I know better what to do with your money than you do" sounds incredibly pretentious. We hear that all the time from politicians and we clearly see where that money goes to: their pockets, their friends pockets, some other project we never heard of and THEN it goes to the project we thought it would go to. If I wanted to give my money to an institution I didn't believe in, I'd pay more taxes.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#100

Post by pitay »

orra wrote: post #58
KingOfCoders wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Strangely I had the opposite thing happen, there were freezes after electrolysis, and it ran super fine before.

The freezes were the network, where if anything was required from the network the page would just pause for many seconds, this happened on all tabs, and after the pause they would all load/come back at the same time. Something was holding up all the network activity in Firefox.

Also there was a large amount of memory used, actually made it better by changing cache settings, the biggest being turning off the disk cache, for some reason that lowered the memory usage drastically.

But as far as I can tell the network pausing issue has mostly gone away now in the last year or so.

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