Still true: https://xkcd.com/949/
Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
181–190 of 203 posts
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#182While sad to see Notes go, I've been pretty impressed with the continued support of the free Simplenote https://simplenote.com from Automattic. It's basic but nice, and I've actually gotten help from them the few times I've had issues.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#183That's progress. I just want the browser, not a "cloud service". Now to lose "Pocket" and bring back a bookmarks toolbar that lets you find things locally.
What do you mean, "bring back"? The bookmark functionality is still there, so are bookmark toolbars and search. The awesomebar searches your local bookmarks as well. Both on desktop and on mobile. This irrational Pocket hatred needs to stop.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You sure? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung... > Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way.
1) That was written in 2013 2) It was an attempt to rebuild a browser engine up from the ground up on modern hardware - and large parts of that work landed in Firefox. I've tracked their progress for quite some time. There was never a concrete plan to replace the DOM handling components of Gecko with the DOM handling components of Servo.
It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon.
Saying "large parts of that work landed in Firefox" is misleading. A browser engine is a huge thing, and most of Servo is not in Firefox. If you just want to replace a few parts, creating an entirely new engine from scratch is far from the most efficient way.
Why does this matter? Well, because decisions have consequences. Way back in 2013, they were feeling pressure from Chrome, and decided the best way to compete was to rewrite the browser engine (in a brand new language to boot). The original engine stagnated, and here we are 7 years later. What a colossal failure.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never officially. But I think once they started to migrate components into Firefox it seemed obvious that the experiment was a "success" and that it was on the path to replacing gecko (starting piece by piece and maybe eventually making a switchover).
Mozilla developer here. The Gecko team was mostly spared from the layoffs. There is no intention to cease Gecko development.
I really hope this is true, but there as been absolutely zero clear communication from Mozilla VP and above managers about being committed to Gecko. Why is Firefox CTO not writing a blog post about that?
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mozilla's deal with Google is worth 500M per year. For Firefox to be independant of Google, you'd need around 4M people subscribing to Firefox, with your $10/mo suggestion. Now, whether Firefox NEEDS 500M per year is a different matter, but the whole idea of 'some people want to pay for Firefox' seems rather naive as a suggestion for how Firefox can be viable without Google.
I didn’t suggest that the subscription could replace the Google deal. I merely said, why not make the services paid instead of closing them.
Perhaps because of opportunity cost. Compared to how dependant on Google they are currently, maintaining a comparatively low-revenue service whose existance must be justified to a board, may be worse than doing the 'startup' thing of just pivoting _again_ and using those same developers to try and find something that _can_ sustain Firefox; something that can be a core offering and keep Firefox relevant in the market, rather than a small add-on subscription service.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#187Wrong title, Mozilla; title should have been "Firefox Send and Firefox Notes to be discontinued soon", or something like that. Don't hide behind the fact. Tell the fact in the title.
It was “Mozilla gives up on …” before IIRC, the mods probably over-corrected the editorializing
Actually was “Mozilla give up Firefox send and Firefox notes”
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out this project as well: https://github.com/kern/filepizza
Last time I looked, FilePizza failed on large files, seemingly because it wanted to pull them entirely into RAM. Has that changed?
I don't believe so. It's definitely still got some stability issues.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) That was written in 2013 2) It was an attempt to rebuild a browser engine up from the ground up on modern hardware - and large parts of that work landed in Firefox. I've tracked their progress for quite some time. There was never a concrete plan to replace the DOM handling components of Gecko with the DOM handling components of Servo.
It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon. Saying "large parts of that work landed in Firefox" is misleading. A browser engine is a huge thing, and most of Servo is not in Firefox. If you just want to replace a few parts, creating an entirely new engine from scratch is far from the most efficient way. Why does this matter? Well, becau…
> It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon.
Here is a quote from the Servo wiki from 2014, which is the earliest snapshot present in the WaybackMachine archives.
>Servo is explicitly not aiming to create a full Web browser (except for demonstration and experimentation purposes). Rather it is focused on creating a solid, embeddable engine. Although Servo is a research project, it is designed to be "productizable"—the code that we write should be of high enough quality that it could eventually be shipped to users.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140718030420/https://github.co...
The words "Firefox" or "Gecko" do not appear a single time in the blog post you cited originally. This is because there were no plans to replace Gecko with Servo at that point in time. They did plan for that possibility, and it was probably a minor goal, but the primary goal was research, as they stated in both the blog post and the wiki entry. They were hoping that they could replace parts of Gecko, I'm sure, but it was never a given.
Re: Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon. Saying "large parts of that work landed in Firefox" is misleading. A browser engine is a huge thing, and most of Servo is not in Firefox. If you just want to replace a few parts, creating an entirely new engine from scratch is far from the most efficient way. Why does this matter? Well, becau…
> It was written in 2013... when Servo was announced. Servo was originally intended to replace Gecko. Anything else is a retcon. Here is a quote from the Servo wiki from 2014, which is the earliest snapshot present in the WaybackMachine archives. >Servo is explicitly not aiming to create a full Web browser (except for demonstration and experimentation purposes). Rather it is focused on creating a solid, embeddable en…
Thanks for taking the time to reply!
In your quote, they didn't want to create a full browser, but they did want to create a full engine. And it was designed to be "productizable." I think it supports what I'm saying.
Servo was the last big plan from Mozilla to turn things around. Since then, we've just gotten Pocket, random bundled add-ons, etc. It seems like they are mostly just content to slide into irrelevance. And I am very sad about that. I do honestly wish Servo had succeeded, although I thought it was pretty obvious it wasn't going to.
Also, while I'm airing grievances, I think it's very likely that having a few big chunks of Firefox/Gecko be written in Rust is going to be a maintenance burden that will slow down development even more. Now that Mozilla has laid off the Rust and Servo people, what are they going to do?