Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

civilityandtruth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 405 posts

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#221

Post by Macha »

walterbell wrote: post #148
cxr wrote: post #49

Five years ago it was clear that possibly the best thing that could happened to the future of Firefox, Mozilla, and the Web would have been for Mozilla Corporation to have gone belly up. But we're past the point where that might do any good with respect to salvaging Firefox or Mozilla's name. Mozilla Corporation's role today is to siphon away any attention or enthusiasm that might otherwise be directed towards the id…

> unfortunately, the best bet at this point is probably in leveraging WebKit against Chrome and Blink, given what an untameable mess the modern Web has become Is there a maintained OSS browser based on Webkit? Do you think it's viable for a new Webkit-based OSS browser to become sustainable by user donations, assuming initial sponsorship by other non-profits or EU?

Konqueror[1] can toggle between KHTML and Webkit at runtime.

GNOME Web (formerly Epiphany)[2] is Webkit based.

Surf[3] (By the suckless st/dwm people) is WebKit based.

That said, Surf would be unlikely to move to chromium from my perception of the views of the suckless group, and their opinions of how software would work are really opposed to mainstream appeal, Konqueror undoubtedly will eventually replace QtWebkit with QtWebEngine for at least the Webkit support (if not dropping KHTML entirely - KHTML's own readme suggests not using it), so that leaves Gnome Web as the one open source browser aimed at a wider audience using Webkit.

[1]: https://kde.org/applications/internet/org.kde.konqueror

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME_Web

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_(web_browser)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#222

Post by emteycz »

kwanbix wrote: post #197
irjustin wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement is believable to me once there's context added. IE was a terrible browser. Everyone knew it and Firefox was better in every imaginable way especially for "web masters". The Firebug system was a godsend. Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was. Microsoft could not get its head straight in this particular case. Always a non-conforming, slow browser with far fewer features. That's what it tak…

Did you really measure the speed difference? I doubt it was that much. It was mostly about perception.

I really want to like and use Firefox, but the difference (on a top-end computer) is very noticeable and annoying. Perhaps Firefox should work on their perceived speed, if that's the difference.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#223

Post by whoisthemachine »

It's really interesting that Mozilla doesn't funnel donations to software development interests. There are successful open source projects that do so, such as Linux Mint [0]. Maybe what's really broken is the idea that a browser needs a backing corporation to fund it?

Personally, I can see no better way to keep an open internet than through the development of meaningful software that serves that purpose.

[0] "Donations are usually quite high after a release and Linux Mint 20 is no exception." https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3953

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#224

Post by slightwinder »

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…

> Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser

Not really. firefox rose tu domination as bland copy of the Internet Explorer, the dominating Browser that time. They also added parts of their own like tabs and addons, but that were just gadgets for those who knew about them.

> The 25% of internet users who wanted what Firefox offered ten years ago still want the same thing now,

What 25%? Addons are hardly used by anyone, except Adblockers. Even the most well known addons are only used by around 1-2% of the users. Adblockers are more popular, but even they seem to stuck by just 20 or 30% of firefox-users.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#225

Post by emteycz »

bishalb wrote: post #118
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The best things about tabs in Firefoxia the scrollable tab bar. I am not sure why chrome doesn't add this.

Can you imagine having to respond to all these "chrome ate my tabs" tickets?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#226

Post by jefftk »

LockAndLol wrote: post #99

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…

> 100k for working on open-source is a pretty good salary.

The kind of people you're trying to hire have the option to earn 3-4x as much working for a FAANG. Being excited about working on something you believe in can get you a long way, but that's still a lot to ask.

(See discussion above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24157803)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#227

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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

No, they made TWO. The original model was the XUL-based one. Then there was the Add-on SDK:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Add-ons/Add...

THEN WebExtensions.

So some extensions had to be ported twice, within just a couple of years. This alienated a LOT of add-on developers.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#228

Post by marcinzm »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #90
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…

The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL. They also deprecated plugins (NPAPI), a recent version has disabled userChrome.css and userContent.css by default and the pref is noted as legacy and the same is now considered for user.js if not removed. Also you cannot set a locally-hosted newtab page any longer.

>The WebExtension API even years later is afaik still less capable than XUL.

XUL extensions were an ungodly mess and arguably hurt Firefox more than they helped. Stability, performance, etc. issues were common to be caused by them. Which when everything is in a single execution context is not fun. Most of the popular extensions simply hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why they couldn't just be installed together.

edit: I wrote the first Tag Groups extension back in the XUL days so I contributed to the mess.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#229

Post by slightwinder »

quicklime wrote: post #202

> But as the number of Firefox users decreases (due to the growing market dominance of the Chrome browser), and those users click on fewer online ads (for example, because they’re spending less during the COVID-19 pandemic), the willingness of Google and other customers to pay the Mozilla Corporation for those users decreases accordingly. > Thus when COVID-19 hit and the Mozilla Corporation hit a brick wall in terms…

Companies are spending less money for ads, some even went bankrupt. People also have less money to spend, or are just careful not wasting it in uncertain times.

Though, yes, in most countries it normalizes, but the dent in income is visable.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#230

Post by marcinzm »

ekianjo wrote: post #171
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…

> superior and standard extension model, Superior as in, that can do less things than XUL extensions? I am at loss, has the meaning of 'superior' changed recently?

It can do less but won't cause your browser stability, performance and other issues. Nor will writing them require reading the Firefox source code. XUL extensions routinely hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why many had issues being installed together. Then all of it was executed in a single context (which is why they could hijack those functions to begin with) along with the UI and web page Javascript.
Post reply on HN