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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#321

Post by BugWatch »

tomc1985 wrote: post #285
eitland wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have to disagree. In my case, bookmarks are the place where "tabs" go to die. I use Tree Style Tab addon, and tabs (mostly self-)organize as I surf, do research on different topics and whatnot, and I jump in with a window title changing addon or grouping parent tab. I cannot even imagine using a browser without it. But bookmarks do not preserve any of that relational data. Session managers are also luckluster solution at best, because merging a few tabs, a tree or window with existing session is clunky at best. After many years of frustration, I have started working on my own tab syncher/organizer.

Bookmarks are only the coldest of storage for me, with exception of bookmarks bar where I place often accessed web sites.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#322

Post by eafer »

mwcampbell wrote: post #211

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.

That won't help: donations to Mozilla don't go to the development of Firefox.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#323

Post by anonymousab »

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…

>which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable.

That was the big one that cost a lot of users, but it was a jusitifiable big leap for them to take.

But they have also been suffering papercut after papercut power user losses with various regressions and removal of functionality since then.

The actual users lost are minimal, but I suspect the overall perception of Mozilla's priorities, among those kinds of users, has suffered much more.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#324

Post by anonymousab »

gruturo wrote: post #311
kinleyd wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I concur, it’s quite insane. All their initiatives brought back tiny, tiny figures compared to the google search deal. And that deal is so profitable because Firefox still has a decent market share. Torpedoing the technological future of their browser is bound to reduce that share, at which point Google will likely offer much less money. They are basically shooting their one trick pony in a leg, deliberately. It’s...…

It makes a ton of sense if you look at it from the perspective of what leadership has been seeing: All this effort on maintaining their own browser engine, met with continued decline and further irrelevancy. Despite best efforts, a likely trend towards disaster.

In the face of that, it would be reasonable to think that the cost is nowhere near worth the effort, compared to just adopting Chromium.

I think it'd be very easy for them to think that their goals for the modern web are not intrinsically tied to having their own, completely separate software.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#325

Post by jefftk »

pjmlp wrote: post #320
jefftk wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 had major compatibility bugs that were never going to be fixed. For example: * It considered width to include border and padding, when the spec and other browsers did not: https://www.jefftk.com/p/the-revenge-of-the-ie-box-model * Floated block elements would get their margins doubled, so people would typically use padding instead. * Its implementation of height was more like min-height. While I'm sure Firefox an…

Well, I can track down examples of similar critical bugs for Chrome, but then again, I guess it would just move the goal posts to another defence round for Chrome.

You think Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari (the main evergreen browsers) have bugs that have been open for years and are as critical as considering an element's width to include its border and padding? This misinterpretation of the CSS specification was something that essentially all front-end developers had to work around for 10+ years!

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#326

Post by mwcampbell »

eafer wrote: post #322
mwcampbell wrote: post #211

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.

That won't help: donations to Mozilla don't go to the development of Firefox.

They could though. If enough of us start donating, maybe the leadership will make the necessary organizational changes to make donations go toward Firefox development. It definitely won't happen if we don't do our part.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#327

Post by rndgermandude »

gruez wrote: post #301
rndgermandude wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Can you share your patches? I'm still using 52esr in some very limited contexts and an upgrade would be great

I never updated them beyond 60esr and that thing is outdated and insecure as well. I don't really see a point in doing so now, other than to prove I did it.

But here is the important bit regardless: https://gist.github.com/formerextensiondev/50f3ebf563048e75f...

And even back then I was too lazy to actually properly "fix" it as you can see.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#328

Post by anonymousab »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #251
gregors wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-de…

>As a product designer one never caters to edge-cases.

The edges are where some of the most faithful users live. But you're right, it's becoming more and more clear, over various updates and certainly with the recent news, that Mozilla thinks they could do without the trouble and their PMs act accordingly.

Whether it's an issue that only one in a hundred users has to deal with, or an issue that every user has to deal with once in hundred of their actions in a browser session, an edge case is just an edge case.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#329

Post by rndgermandude »

causality0 wrote: post #281
rndgermandude wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

https://gist.github.com/formerextensiondev/50f3ebf563048e75f... ;)

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#330

Post by eitland »

tomc1985 wrote: post #285
eitland wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Ahhh, finally I got you bug: I saw this just the other day when I looked at x" works so much better when x is an organized as a tree of tabs, in the memory of my browser, a short scroll and a click away instead of having to hunt through bookmarks reloading all of them in hope of figuring out which one it was.

At least with the work I do it isn't alway obvious what is going to be useful or not. But while I don't have a photographic memory (quite the contrary) I'm often able to figure out approximately where to look and also able to find it there.

I'd even recommend you try it. If it works for a simple farmer turned engineer like me, think what it could do for a smart person like you! ;-)

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