It's easy to criticize from the outside. The question we should ask ourselves is what we should have done, and can still do, to help Mozilla's mission. I just set up a monthly donation, as I should have done a long time ago.
Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
211–220 of 405 posts
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#212Personally 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…
Pretty much every Firefox discussion on Hacker news you have commenters that say they just can't stand Firefox because it's 10ms slower than Chrome. Google also has been advertising Chrome heavily for the last ten years. And there was a time when Firefox was undeniably significantly behind on performance.
On our Javascript heavy app Chrome is still about twice as fast as Firefox. Admittedly it is not your average app, but I cannot confirm claims that Firefox is almost as fast as Chrome.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#213Earlier 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.).
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).
I recently switched to "Simple Tab Groups" after years with "Tree Style Tab" and I do prefer it.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
a.) Yes
b.) With changing their extension API several times it was not clear the plugin would make it.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#215Earlier 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…
>Firefox is slow with many tabs open on Win10, Ryzen X3900 with 32gb of RAM (writing this from FF) How many is many? I'm using up to 10-20 and it never felt slow on worse setup.
I currently have around 120 open in "Simple Tab Groups". But this can go up to 200+
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#216Earlier 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…
What extension do you use for 7800 tabs? Do you search for the tab if you want to go for one?
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#217Earlier 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…
>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…
I'm using FF since Mosaic days and it was always slow. But how come if everything was bad back then, it isn't blazing fast with 100x faster hardware from my SGI days and several rewrites?
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#218Revenue well north of $200 million every year since 2011. How hard would it have been to do the obvious thing and build up an endowment?!
They have a pretty significant cash pile which they mentioned last year. The quarantine kinda threw a wrench in things, but they are still paying the people they let go through the end of the year. So it's not like they're imminently about to run out of cash.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much every Firefox discussion on Hacker news you have commenters that say they just can't stand Firefox because it's 10ms slower than Chrome. Google also has been advertising Chrome heavily for the last ten years. And there was a time when Firefox was undeniably significantly behind on performance.
On our Javascript heavy app Chrome is still about twice as fast as Firefox. Admittedly it is not your average app, but I cannot confirm claims that Firefox is almost as fast as Chrome.
How much is that biased because everything has been optimized to Chrome? From frameworks to your implementation.
Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future
#220Revenue well north of $200 million every year since 2011. How hard would it have been to do the obvious thing and build up an endowment?!
I don't think that would have made sense: Mozilla stays relevant by producing a browser that lots of people want to use. This requires substantial investment in developer salaries, or else other browsers get better and you don't.
If they had taken your approach, I think they wouldn't have been able to get out Quantum, and then Firefox would be much smaller now, and be even less able to influence the direction of the web.