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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#281

Post by causality0 »

rndgermandude wrote: post #201
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…

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

but not really removed, as I noted, just disabled for everybody except mozilla's own stuff

That's fucking infuriating. You should write up a blog post about how easily you were able to turn them back on in Quantum.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#282

Post by tomc1985 »

badsectoracula wrote: post #193
orra wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There also was not a good security model. What security model? Pretty much every WebExtension i've come across asks for practically everything and even Firefox's own addon page tells you to only install extensions you trust. At that point if you trust the extension source why bother with the security model in the first place? You already trust the extension developer to not break anything.

The one issue there is with developers that sell out their extensions to shady people. While I love the XUL era way more than this current trash, the security model with XUL would have done nothing to limit the blast radius and the update system would potentially install it silently

That said there used to be a human review system in place for extensions. I'm not sure if they do that any more

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#283

Post by sanitycheck »

ekianjo wrote: post #170
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time , which Firefox doesn't do.

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. WHo cares? A Ferrari and a Lamborghini in 2020 provide about the same speed experience. What matters is that for the past 10 years Mozilla had the speed of an old Volvo versus the Ferrari that was Chrome/Chromium in comparison. The fact that Mozilla merely caught up in the end is rather a proof that they lost technical leadership a…

I used Firefox and Chrome simultaneously every day for many years on everything from a low-end laptop to pretty quick desktop. Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work.

Speed's always been similar for me, Firefox has generally been more reliable (partly due to being able to block so much crap, probably). Chrome used to break with alarming regularity and need a total reinstall. Sometimes there was a site which wasn't compatible with Firefox, and if I needed it I'd open it in a Chrome incognito window.

These days I've switched to Vivaldi for the work stuff (vertical tabs, "hibernate background tabs", tiling!), though I still debug JS in Chrome.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#284

Post by spenrose »

staktrace wrote: post #161

FWIW, as a Mozilla employee, I think this is one of the best summaries I've read of the state of Mozilla.

Agreed (Mozilla employee 2013-2017). If I were going to add something, it's how important Mozilla was c. 2004-2010 when "the Internet" was dominated by OECD knowledge workers using Windows. When iPhone brought "the Internet" to everyone (mainly via its clone Android) c. 2010-2015, browsers moved from the center of the action to plumbing. Like a retired sports star, Mozilla has never been able to cope emotionally with the idea that the world has moved on. Worse, because on some level they know it, the cognitive dissonance gets sharper every year.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#285

Post by tomc1985 »

eitland wrote: post #142
tester756 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

10-20 are so few you can get away with it in Chrome or even old IE. Many is somewhere north of 200. Many of us are routinely on 400 and more. As for why, I at least consider the computer an extension of my mind. What it remember, I don't have to. Edit: Chrome can handle way more than that, it just becomes very tedious when you cannot see the tabs. Also I don't know if omnibar can search for open tabs like awesomebar?

FFS, learn to organize "your mind" then. 400+ tabs tells me you need to be using bookmarks

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#286

Post by stjohnswarts »

Brakenshire wrote: post #29
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…

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…

the current mobile firefox browser works great and it's not "too slow". They just simply didn't like their experience and told you it was "too slow" because they're biased again new things. Benchmarks (real ones on real web pages prove it) I agree with you though that Chrome engines are just everywhere and it's going to take some big sea change for that to not be the case.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#287

Post by alcoholic_byte »

gregors wrote: post #262
alcoholic_byte wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-de…

I wasn't necessarily meaning the visual experience of having tab inception open, more along the lines of people feel that FF is slow. The 200+ comment was based around that there were quantifiers - it's the users fault for having slow software. "You're just doing it wrong". From a Product perspective Chrome is the better product. I want to believe that Mozilla is capable of making FF the better product. Maybe it all…

Luckily what you and I believe is irrelevant, unless we try to convince the masses by screaming at them long enough.

I wasn't referring to the tabs either, just as an example of people doing it wrong. No one stops them, but in the old days natural selection took care of it. These days people think, because they have a misconception, they have a right to an opinion which a misconception is not. This is known as "The terror of the masses". Desinformation and Fanboydoom(we against them) is based on that.

Yes FF was slow some 5/7 years ago, but speed up quite a lot. See here https://arewefastyet.com/win10/overview?numDays=60 . You can, of course, choose the Benchmark proving your point, or look at the bigger, quite different, picture. And just because 200+ people write the same comment in spirit does not make it true (see benchmark-site) . Also, as I have pointed out elsewhere in this thread, it is not just about speed. I agree that a site should not be agonizingly slow to work with, but that is not the case with FF (see benchmark). As far as the reference to the trajectory is concerned, it is not s.th. that securely predicts outcome. You never know what the future holds. Just think of the situation of MS or Amazone some 10-15 years ago. Besides Youtube and Facebook have nothing to do with the browser; also note that Alphabet purposefully sabotaged their own website so that it performed bad or even breaks on a non-Chrome browser. https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...

I would also like to remind the reader and you that I never said that the fault is with the user, I merely stated that you cannot demand a product owner, ANY product owner, to cater to ALL and EVERY extreme edge-case.

But since this debate of ours, I fear so, because you tried to warp above said statement of mine, is in danger of devolving into a fan-boy flame thread, let me close this with a quote I read in a facility of a philosphical faculty, in hopes that it gets people thinking before they regurgitate other people's/trolls/campainers opinion/misconception unreflected: "People, eat feces, for a 1000 flies cannot lie."

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#288

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #268
fastball wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is moving fast (and not doing a perfect job) trying to find a revenue stream that doesn't involve selling out their users. They're trying a lot of new ideas and from what I can tell are learning from their missteps (though I think the linked situation was blown way out of proportion for what it actually was). Seems like exactly what's needed in the context of the current situation, no?

Well.... move fast and break things it not necessarily a nice motto especially if you burn down the very house people live in. And let's not forget, it was deliberate move. I for one am glad I never used Brave. There are only a very few rules that shan't be broken. Breaking trust is one of them, because it is easy to loose and hard to regain, so far FF/Mozilla 1, Brave/Chrome 0, I do not know about Vivaldi.... MS and…

> so far FF/Mozilla 1, Brave/Chrome 0

Mozilla has had more missteps than Brave because it's been around longer. I can't name all the ones which betrayed trust, but the Mr. Robot scandal comes to mind:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

and:

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/02/12/firefox-focus-privacy-scan...

and:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/anxfz8/firefox_is_...

and many others.

Having said that, I still use both Firefox and Brave. It's ok to make missteps as long as you fix them and learn from them. Otherwise, I'd never use any product and never have any friends. No one is perfect.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#289

Post by stjohnswarts »

Dahoon wrote: post #249
emteycz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you didn't measure it. Worthless opinions as to me on my gaming pc chrome is most definitely slower. Both are opinions and worthless without numbers.

Real world benchmarks show they are neck and neck leap frogging each other all the time, so both of you are wrong; they're generally so close a human can't tell the difference, it's all biases these days unless someone shows you the numbers. Lots of people don't realize the extensions they add can also severely upset performance, but that's on the user. My 4 year old computer works just fine with both of them and 4 or 5 extensions.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#290

Post by dralley »

tomc1985 wrote: post #272
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…

It's soo more than that. They'd destroyed all the old UI in favor of Chrome-style HTML+JS instead of platform-native XUL They added all sorts of weird commercial initiatives to someonething that was supposed to be privacy-oriented and nonprofit They torched an entire ecosystem of extensions so they could be more Chromelike They put out landing pages and press releases full of weasely PR speak instead of the "mainstre…

> It's soo more than that. They'd destroyed all the old UI in favor of Chrome-style HTML+JS instead of platform-native XUL

It's a browser, the entire purpose of a browser is rendering HTML+JS quickly and efficiently. XUL primitives are not, on average, faster or more "platform-native".

>They added all sorts of weird commercial initiatives to someonething that was supposed to be ... nonprofit

You understand the problem here, do you not? People complain that they're almost completely reliant on Google for revenue, and they also complain about "weird commercial initiatives" to mitigate their reliance.

>They torched an entire ecosystem of extensions so they could be more Chromelike

XUL / XPCOM had significant, tangible problems. It's not just about being "chromelike", not at all.

https://mozilla.github.io/firefox-browser-architecture/text/...

https://mozilla.github.io/firefox-browser-architecture/text/...

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