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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#411

Post by emptysongglass »

kibwen wrote: post #245
tannhaeuser wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management. This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charita…

But I want to donate to Firefox development and Mozilla is straight up telling me to eff off. That sucks and should be changed. Let me GitHub Sponsor or whatever FF development not throw money at a foundation that doesn't put the money where I want it to go.

Why in God's name did Mozilla even do this to themselves? Sitting up Mozilla into a Corp and a Foundation. The Corp which is supposed to be a money-printing machine has been shanghaied by a person who has gone on the record saying it would be unfair to reduce their salary because of dependants yet has consistently run this machine into red.

Why isn't Mozilla taking any action? Why is Baker continuing to be allowed to destroy the dream of a multiplicity of browser engines? It kills me.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#412

Post by input_sh »

dblohm7 wrote: post #169
input_sh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention half of Mozilla's board of directors at the time quit because of him.

(I work for Mozilla and was there when this all happened) That is false. Only one of them quit "because of" him. You don't need to take my word for it: Stephen Shankland's piece [1] is the least-inaccurate account of what happened there. And in fact, your statement is not even logical. Think about it: Who hires a CEO? A company's board. Now you're saying that a huge chunk of the board quit because of a hire that they…

I guess that's what happens when I trust Wikipedia without looking it up further. Thanks for the correction!

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#413

Post by nitrogen »

minikites wrote: post #360
jeffbee wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with: - a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005) - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G - waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google - web "apps" with worse performance c…

(ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005)

It was still pretty sweet to run a transparent Squid proxy with an ads blacklist.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#414

Post by hpoe »

mekoka wrote: post #135

It seems to me that Mozilla isn't just technologically pessimistic, but they also just lack vision for the future of the web and what roles the browser could play in it. Right now, the only reason we're talking about them is that Firefox is sitting atop a sizable share of a practically impenetrable market. Very successful companies are being started around much less of a product, but Mozilla seems to genuinely have n…

I think that a better "Enterprise" edition would be one that allows remote administrative control and centralized management, that's what large orgs would want out of something like that. That's why AD and Azure MDM are so popular because of the level of control they provide.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#415

Post by lmedinas »

geogra4 wrote: post #359
jonathansampson wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Man, that would be something? Firefox forking Chromium to replace gecko would be a very sad day for the internet, but as of now it does kind of seem inevitable.

I might be wrong but i guess thats what Mozilla is about right now, is to have enough resources to continue to support Gecko. If things continue on the same way or turn worse its inevitable or they will just stop producing a browser.

I dont think there is a point to continue Firefox without Gecko. Of course im with you, if Gecko dies it will be a very sad day for the internet.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#416

Post by dleslie »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #295
dleslie wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox isn't even the best browser on Linux. On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.

Opposite experience. For starters, Chromium doesn't even support video hardware decoding on Wayland properly.

That's unfair. Not even Emacs master works under Wayland. It's nowhere near a replacement for X.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#417

Post by JohnBooty »

tsjq wrote: post #199
jlokier wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was in the age of desktop browsers. Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser. Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.

>all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser. that sounds a lot like M$'s IE before the antitrust case, no ?

No, not remotely.

It may be true that a particular company has a stranglehold on browser choice on your particular phone, but that is completely different from having an anticompetitive strangehold on the market as a whole, which is what matters from an antitrust standpoint. I'm not the biggest fan of capitalism but the market seems to be functioning rather well. Not perfectly but well.

Just a refresher: IE had 96% market share at its peak, and Microsoft were guilty of quite a few other anticompetitive practices as well w.r.t. Windows itself, more or less literally penalizing OEMs from shipping any other desktop OS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

Competition is thriving in the mobile space. Safari, Chrome, and derivatives of Chrome are competing with each other and they are well-performing, aggressively maintained and updated pieces of software.

Sure, there are plenty of technical reasons to be annoyed with either one of them. Mobile Safari sure is slow to adopt certain standards, etc. And don't get me wrong -- it is extremely regrettable whenever browser choice is restricted. It sucks, I hate it.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#419

Post by chrisseaton »

heavyset_go wrote: post #335
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

> 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.

MeeGo was a bizarre affair. There was I think Maemo, Moblin, LImo, SLP, Bada, Leste, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, Nemo... all forks, merges, reforks. They seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding, forming and disbanding consortiums, creating new websites and logos. They never just got on with it.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#420

Post by wackget »

myfonj wrote: post #400

> Remember what was really cool in Firefox? Tabs! Ah how this resonates with me so much, I remember the difference of tabless IE and oh so magical Netscape / Firefox when those were new. I consider myself Mozilla fanboy to this days. But alas, every time I try clean installation with default settings I cannot believe how … bad this became and how far it diverged from original experience: by now Firefox is browser wit…

Christ. I forgot about the default visual tab switcher. It's truly horrendous. That, and the "insert related tab after current" behaviour, are the first things I turn off. Horrible.
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