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

361–370 of 405 posts

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#361

Post by krzyk »

atesti wrote: post #302
jefftk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and…

Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open. Even opening a select box is slow, if you have several 1000 tabs. Funny enough, opening a new window (and keeping all the other tabs open) makes it fast again, if you are in that window. Seems like Firefox has some slow code paths, like notifying every tab about going fullscreen?

> Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open.

Is it possible to have 1000 tabs open in Chrome? When I had like 50, it ate my whole 8GB last time I tried it.

In Firefox I frequently have 1000 tabs with no issues. (almost none, recently I noticed that there is some memory leak and the ram slowly disappears).

This is the reason why I went back to Firefox after using Chrome for like 2 weeks, it is great for 1-10 tabs.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#362

Post by treis »

irjustin wrote: post #183
ekianjo wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you've established yourself as the "default", it can be ridiculously difficult to convince people to switch to something else. Not very believable as FF actually gained a much bigger market share than default IE over time.

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…

>Firefox unseated IE because of how much better it was.

Nitpick, but Firefox never had the majority of the market or a bigger piece than IE. Firefox was on the way to reaching that but they peaked around 33% share before Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#363

Post by RonanTheGrey »

microtonal wrote: post #76
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…

I think this hits the nail on its head, but I would add v. Intentionally breaking other browsers subtly on Google properties. i, ii, and v are directly from Microsoft’s 90ies/00s playbook and the regulators are sleeping.

Google Calendar regularly breaks on Firefox. Switch to chrome? Nope not a bad deploy. Switch the user agent? Works fine.

Hard to say if incidents like that are intentional, passive aggressive, or accidental, but they happen pretty frequently.

Same with Youtube. Firebase console. GCP.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#364

Post by orthoxerox »

solstice wrote: post #129
joepie91_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Not judging you, but why do you have so many tabs open?

I also have no idea what they do with all these tabs. I routinely close my tabs at the end of the day.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#365

Post by pjmlp »

jefftk wrote: post #325
pjmlp wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yes I think so, all of them have bugs that web developers have to work around, again should we look at Chrome's bug database or maybe AdWords has a better source of information for such workarounds?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#366

Post by craftinator »

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…

Sometimes, a group makes no poor decisions, or no none that actually matter, but their goals are overcome by events, and they fail. It's not about what Mozilla did, it's about what Google did; Firefox is simply not going to win against Chrome in terms of marketshare. Of course they can still win in terms of making their browser more awesome for the people who actually use it!

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#368

Post by craftinator »

littlestymaar wrote: post #232
ksec wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: My opinion is that none of those actually matters. The "one" single reason Chrome won market share was the same playbook how Google Search Engine Started. Speed. I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. It was faster. The user experience was far better. You could advertise…

> I watched hundreds of users, given the choice, or doing so themselves installing / using Chrome by their own selection. I don't know who you are, but having watched “hundreds of people” installing a web browser sounds a bit dubious… Personally, I have discussed with a few dozens of websites users and most of them would answer the question “what web browser do you use” with “Google” no matter if they were using Chro…

This is a case of the problem of "most people are idiots in this realm". It pops up in many different domains.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#369

Post by tomc1985 »

marcinzm wrote: post #307
tomc1985 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are all things they could have fixed incrementially, over time, but chose not to.

The end result would have been the same: broken backwards compatibility. The fundamental design of the original extensions was incompatible with a modern browser model (APIs only rather than hacking internal functions, separate contexts for everything, multiple processes, etc.). They chose to do it one go rather than piecemeal. So rather than having to check every version if some functionality your extension depends…

It would have been gradual, and under most circumstances fixable with a bit of refactoring. Ripping the entire platform out from under people would not have produced the same result.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#370

Post by mandreyel »

momokoko wrote: post #280
mandreyel wrote: post #79

A possible alternative source of income for Mozilla I think would be, and one I haven’t seen mentioned before, providing consulting services in their areas of expertise. For example, demand for Rust engineers seems to be steadily increasing[1] and I can’t think of a better company with a larger concentration of Rust expertise than Mozilla. Perhaps the same could work for other areas (ex frontend), but I’m biased towa…

There are so many ways for Mozilla to leverage their core competencies. Unfortunately failed management with no means to remove them means none of that will happen. Executive leadership at Mozilla is a disgrace that has now caused a tangible negative result on the future of the internet. The fact that Mitchell Baker still leads this organization is insane. An absolutely inept failure somehow still leads Mozilla. It’s…

I completely agree. It’s depressing to see the whole thing steadily come apart at the seams due to their own leadership (or lack thereof, one could argue).

Actually I realize what I wrote above is less true now as they have fired a good number of their incredibly skilled engineers, many of them of course Rust developers. So I suppose my post should be rephrased along the lines of “what Mozilla should or could have done”.

[edit]: Rephrased to be less dramatic.

Post reply on HN