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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#331

Post by theamk »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #285
fragmede wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can be done with a browser in the future? There's no shortcoming of vision , the problem is monetizing it. A browser in the future is going to let me copy and paste seamless between mobile and desktop. What, are you going to charge 1 cent per completed copy and paste? Am I going to pay a dollar to get nightly builds of Firefox onto my device? If I have an Apple device that's not even possible!

I know this may sound like a blasphemy and anachronism rolled into one, but why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? All of a sudden, the incentives to deliver 'monetizable' product are gone, because you already got your money. Or that does not jibe with continuous rent seeking?

Not with the browser -- those have to constantly evolve, both for the security fixes as well as for the new web features.

Plus, as the other commenter says, I am not going to recommend Firefox to my non-technical friends if it requires non-trivial amount of money.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#332

Post by lambda »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #224
etempleton wrote: post #2

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

I hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers. Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will g…

This comment confuses me so much.

Mozilla absolutely has been helping to keep web standards in check. Maybe not to the degree that you would like, but if it were up to Google, we'd all have some ancient under-specified version of SQLite and LLVM encoded in web standards, as they tried to just drop those in for database storage and NaCL.

Mozilla pushed back on those, demanding documented standards that could have independent implementations.

WASM is the cross-browser, much better specified alternative to NaCL.

Formal standards in an executable language are by far the exception rather than the norm. For something with as big a surface area as web browsers, I'm sure they would cost an ungodly amount of time and money to complete. And while you may prefer to reduce the surface area to deal with this, no one wants to break compatibility with existing sites.

I'm a bit puzzled by what you actually want. Mozilla did scale back its investment in Rust, WASM, and the experimental browser engine Servo, to focus more on its core browser, in the recent round of layoffs. But the existing investment has paid off; a number of projects that started off in Servo, and were written in Rust, like the CSS parser and Webrender, are now part of Firefox, providing safe, parallel styling and GPU rendering. WASM is widely supported across browsers, providing an efficient compilation target which is much better specified and easier to work with than JavaScript as a compilation target, or something like NaCL.

And some of the other efforts, like Rust and WASM, have now achieved sufficient industry adoption that other companies are picking up the slack; Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Fastly, and others are all hiring and paying people to work on Rust and WASM full time.

It seems that other than funding Thunderbird development, Mozilla is doing what you want, but you somehow still seem unhappy with it. Why is that?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#333

Post by reubenmorais »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #261
Brakenshire wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, they’re currently locked in a negative spiral, the share needs to be higher to be stable, otherwise maintaining compatibility will not be a high enough priority for web developers. 8% on desktop means 3-4% on all platforms and less in selected markets. To regain market share they need to be the unambiguously better browser. I thought there was a really solid path to do that with their parallelising efforts,…

WebRender has already been integrated into Firefox.

WebRender is just rendering, layout is a different component of displaying web pages.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#334

Post by rhizome »

vineyardmike wrote: post #300
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this may sound like a blasphemy and anachronism rolled into one, but why can we not return to purchasing a copy of software? All of a sudden, the incentives to deliver 'monetizable' product are gone, because you already got your money. Or that does not jibe with continuous rent seeking?

Also because many things that people want require a cloud and clouds are ongoing expenses not one time expenses.

Eh, computingwise, the things that people want used to "require" a floppy or CDROM drive. The Cloud isn't a natural law, it's a stepping stone to a future which may be more service based, or more, say, appliance-based. We don't know which.

Sure, people with business interests will try to push the idea of what constitutes a valid option in various directions, but as someone more thoughtful than me once said, "prediction is hard, especially if it's about the future," and as another thoughtful person said, "even The Future has a future."

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#335

Post by heavyset_go »

krmboya wrote: post #313
throw_m239339 wrote: post #271

Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now. FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP st…

I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS. From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'. Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

> Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

This was WebOS in 2009.

Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#336

Post by jonathansampson »

geogra4 wrote: post #303
robertlagrant wrote: post #170

> I don’t have a read on Edge My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.

What's scary is that even Microsoft has essentially given up on an independent browser engine

I was at Microsoft (and on the IE/Edge team) when that movement started. The writing was on the wall; too many developers were targeting (and testing in) Chromium (and/or Webkit) alone. The iPhone in 2007 pretty much claimed the mobile-web as its own.

Massive efforts were made to bring IE up-to-speed. Support for -webkit- prefixes and more were added, but that proved to be too little, too late. IE 11 eventually even had pretty stellar ES6 support.

Forking Trident into EdgeHTML (for project Spartan) was a good move, but still not the right move. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, it was clear that Edge would need to adapt or die. I left before the decision was made to drop EdgeHTML (I went to Brave), but I think that was the right decision for Microsoft.

I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#337

Post by tristan957 »

bsdubernerd wrote: post #305
mybrid wrote: post #302

Firefox on Android still only has 10 Add ons. Ten. It just seems to me Mozilla is deliberately killing Firefox off.

I still use FF on a desktop, but on Android is not Firefox for me. It's just as dumb (if not dumber) than chrome, and serves no purpose whatsoever without addons. I also don't get the point of limiting addons to a vetted whitelist. I feared this would be the case since they introduced signing requirements, and that's precisely what happened. I waited a bit, but I completely lost interest since the new mobile redesign…

A browser with 10 add-ons is as dumb (if not dumber) than a browser with no add-ons.

A browser backed by a company committed to open-source and privacy is as dumb (if not dumber) than a browser backed by an ad company.

Dear god stop over-reacting. Open source communities are so toxic. Can't believe you actually typed these words into existence.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#338

Post by [deleted] »

geogra4 wrote: post #303
robertlagrant wrote: post #170

> I don’t have a read on Edge My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.

What's scary is that even Microsoft has essentially given up on an independent browser engine

[deleted]

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#339

Post by hollerith »

jeffbee wrote: post #317
minikites wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. Is the web better now than it was in 2005-2010? I don't think it is and I don't see the trend arbitrarily reversing. Tons of regular people (and even tech-savvy folks who should know better) voluntarily use, love, and advocate for using a browser (and email service!) made by the modern equivalent of DoubleClick.

Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.

Flash was easy to avoid unless you needed certain sites for work or for school; I kept it disabled by deleting some files starting about 2006 or 2007. HTML5 on the other hand is impossible to avoid unless you want to restrict yourself to a few familiar sites. And web fonts are getting harder to avoid because more and more sites are using them to draw icons and other small UI elements. For people whose tastes are sufficiently like my own, the web has been getting worse.

I used lynx as my daily driver for most of the 1990s and through 2005. In contrast, these days it is impractical for the average person to use a browser that is not maintained by an organization employing many hundreds of full-time developers. This dependency on money (to pay the developers) limits a person's options.

I never wanted to be able to replace my desktop apps with apps that run on the web, so I don't consider web apps to be compensation for the constant stream of annoyances (e.g., the moral equivalent of pop-up windows asking me to give the site my email address) that HTML5, web fonts, et cetera, enabled.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#340

Post by julenx »

aduitsis wrote: post #316
krmboya wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how Mozilla failed to execute on Firefox OS. From where I am at it was a massive opportunity for Mozilla and Web developers all round the world. They didn't have to take on Android and iOS directly, but may have gotten there eventually thru 'worse is better'. Imagine a web developer learning just a few APIs and being being able to customize their web app for smart TVs

For some reason, yesterday's HN post "I can't keep up with React" came to mind :)

Out of curiosity, which post is that? I cannot find it.
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