Mozilla’s Uncertain Future • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#251

Post by alcoholic_byte » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

gregors wrote: post #245

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cannot verify and I am on Linux for a couple of years and on different hardware during those years. Arch-distribution, so maybe the defaults are what is different here?? Browsing, scrolling(with trackpad and without) startup time, etc. all fine. One thing that I find interesting to always ask: Performance under what circumstances? There are users who have literally 200 tabs+ open and then they complain that everythin…

If users have 200+ tabs open and are experiencing slowness, I'd suggest that altering the users behavior isn't a fix. To me that's pure failure from Product designers to realize that "they shouldn't do that" doesn't cut it. Fix it. Spending time and money on solving these issues isn't going to generate new revenue. I find it hard to believe engineers wouldn't want to try fix performance issues. I find it easy to beli…

I think you are wrong there. As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases. Besides having 200+ tabs open is very impractical, the way Chrome minifies all the tabs instead of making them slidable is just one prime example where the designers chose not to cater to the extreme. Even with a tab-behaviour like Firefox's it is a very unmanageable situation. Also note that one might encounter a tradeoff in system-design where you could choose a very memory/resource-efficient design over a very performant one. You cannot always get both.

Unfortunately, because Google is "In" just because it delivers mind-numbing ease via Youtube etc., this very vocal minority, claiming technical expertise scew impressions for the general population.

Similar to absolute views like :They do not care... I think they care, not about the particular problem, but the product and how it meets the requirements of a general audience swiftly and reliable. So the problem crossed their desk, they triaged it and closed it because it is an extreme use case which will not meet general requirements.

The same goes for all the multitudinous problems in that area.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#252

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #112

kanox wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> constant deprecation of power features and customizability Can you be more specific? Advanced customization is provided by extensions and they're as well supported as ever.

They really are not. Even Mozilla would not make that claim.

So would anyone care to explain how vimperiator style customization is possible with webextensions? Newer Firefox explicitly does not support that level of customization.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#253

Post by kinleyd » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

tarkin2 wrote: post #180

kinleyd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why, for the life of me, I just can't see the logic of firing the Servo team.

Hasn’t the quantum project been successful? It seemed like project accomplished to me. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24164058 It’s not like they binned servo and decided not to use it improve ff. It did improve ff. They seem to have decided that’s done and finished now. And there’s no longer any need to work on it - whether that’s a wise move or not is obviously up for debate.

Quantum was just one of the milestones, albeit an important one. Servo continues to develop and pass on many more features to Firefox. Shutting it down is basically shutting the major pipeline of progress that has gotten so many of us excited over Mozilla in the past several years. The decision does not augur well for Firefox and Mozilla.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#254

Post by dependenttypes » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

asddubs wrote: post #134

dependenttypes wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the good old walled garden approach. Not very "open", is it?

i mean I don't like it either, but I do believe them in this instance that it's mostly in service of not letting installers just sneak in a toolbar

I think that this is misguided. If a malicious installer sneaks in toolbars it can also install a keylogger/send all of your data to a server/install a firefox fork with the toolbar preinstalled/etc.

If anything this kind of thing only hurts the users that know what they are doing (such as someone wanting to install a 3rd party addon or someone wanting to install addons via nix).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#255

Post by dependenttypes » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:29 PM UTC

secondcoming wrote: post #144

dependenttypes wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to a superior Even now it lacks a lot of necessary APIs that the old one had - such as the ability to disable ctrl+q on linux. I would argue that only around now the new model became usable. > Making it a more secure In expense of usability. > wouldn't play YouTube It played youtube before and it would still play it without the switch. Regardless, the old extension model was not the only power user feature which th…

why would a web page expect to be allowed to control a user's keyboard?

It shouldn't, I was talking about addons.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#256

Post by rch » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

Why is it uncertain? They'll get acquired or wind things down. They've had a good run.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#257

Post by networkimprov » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:31 PM UTC

The unstated thesis of the article seems to be that Mozilla lacks a killer app.

So what are possible killer apps, given their history building user-facing internet infrastructure?

(I love FF and never touch Chrome except for testing, but <10% market share is not killer.)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#258

Post by squarefoot » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

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…

I think Firefox lost users to Chrome mainly because Google advertises their product constantly.

What you point out about trying to imitate Chrome is right though; when they dumbed down the very complete and functional settings window into an almost empty HTML page that forced to resort to about:config to do anything non trivial, or when they literally copied the terrible Chrome main window structure, I literally wanted to puke. I'm not sure however this is the reason why normal users distanced from the product. Firefox back then was the alternative to Internet Explorer and its load of security and privacy problems, so it started in a context where a good number of users actually wanted to switch to a different browser, despite some lock-ins such as Active-X and the like, I believe even Opera had some well deserved success at a moment for that reason, but none of them could compete anymore when the new kid in the block was a strongly and pervasively advertised product like Chrome. Firefox today is faster and more user privacy friendly than Chrome; to me if most people don't use it is simply because they don't know. Small personal example: of the many people I installed it, the number of those that went back to Chrome is a single digit percentage, which should suggest they didn't choose Chrome initially, but rather they didn't know about the alternatives.

Now it's the time for all Firefox users to tell others that they chose Firefox, and why, then for Mozilla to invest some damn money in advertising!

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#259

Post by quicklime » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

slightwinder wrote: post #246

quicklime wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, Google’s revenue only decreased by 2%, and Facebook’s increased by 11%. I can see Google making an argument not to increase the amount of money they pay to Mozilla this time, but not to decrease it.

Not really? Revenue in Q1 and q2 for Alphabet were sinking. What went up were other areas than advertisment, as also they were doing some budget-savings, to reduce the actual fall of revenue, saving some costs at the end.

Hmm, yeah I was talking about total revenue, but "Google Search & other" revenue went down by about 13% between Q1 and Q2. Which is not great, but the market seems to think this will be a temporary thing (their stock is trading at February prices).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#260

Post by no_wizard » Sat, Aug 15, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

I always felt that Mozilla should have seen nodejs as their future, and in kind tried to build a gecko powered version (and therefore could have a real successor to XulRunner - electron before its time) I think this may have been a seriously missed opportunity to unset v8. However quantum may have been a little late to the party.

I’m not as vehement against their other moves, though. Pocket could and maybe can be a real business, if they focused on delivering a top tier experience. I thought it could have been a better feedly and/or pinboard alternative, I just haven’t seen enough compelling features there as of of yet. After all, Mozilla Needs alternative revenue streams beyond their search deals.

I also think they could have been an internet identity broker, bringing a unified web identity via their Firefox account service. Alas that may have been too big to crack.

May need to reinvestigate Pocket, but aside from that and just using Firefox as my main browser, I feel like they lost a lot of steam and some goodwill with the developer community.