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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#531

Post by dralley »

betwixthewires wrote: post #506

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad. They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major upda…

>Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.

They did not "artificially limit" the extensions available, you are misinformed.

They rewrote the engine of their mobile browser, and swapped the old engine for the new one before the new one had 100% support for all of the extension APIs. They have been working on this, and over the past few months I've seen several of my extensions which were previously disabled start re-enabling themselves as support for those APIs has been added. The eventual goal is to support all of the extensions that were supported before.

You can track that progress here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

It sucks that, for the span of a couple months, I lost a couple of my addons, but as someone whose team has struggled for years supporting two very different versions of a piece of software simultaneously, I understand why they did it. And the new browser is so much faster and more responsive that my annoyance about the addons was tempered somewhat.

>Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.

They did not fire the Rust team. They laid off a few of the people who had been working primarily on Rust, and retained several others. But significant components of Firefox are written in Rust, and the people who are working on those components are still employed. And significant amounts of new code is being written in Rust - but essentially they can't swapping out hundreds of thousands of lines of code at a time anymore.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#532

Post by thayne »

dralley wrote: post #520
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…

>Ditching Rust as a core component of the future of Firefox is also a demonstration that Mozilla isn't a tech focused corp anymore. Rust is going to yield a lot of result when it comes to security, memory saftely and maintainability and firing Rust devs was terribly short sighted. Ugh, this is nonsense. Mozilla has not "ditched Rust as a core component of a tech focused corp". Mozilla has ditched the idea of developi…

They did however ditch a lot of resources they were putting into Rust, and in particular making Rust a great language for making a secure browser.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#533

Post by skinkestek »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #484
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone. What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes a…

> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.

With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.

It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find".

When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well established that you won't get featured, no matter how great your app is if it is available on other platforms.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#534

Post by thaumasiotes »

skinkestek wrote: post #533
thaumasiotes wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone. What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes a…

> What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense. No YouTube, no Snapchat etc. With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way. It also wouldn't surprise me if someone told certain app developers that "that's a nice app you have there, it would be shame if there was a bug in the Play store that made it hard ro find". When it comes to App Store I have heard it is pretty well establis…

> No YouTube, no Snapchat etc.

> With YouTube Google used their position to keep it that way.

YouTube is available to anyone with a web browser, such as people using a smartphone.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#535

Post by thayne »

dralley wrote: post #518
twblalock wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can donate to the foundation. I'm not sure why that would turn out any different -- even if you paid a subscription for Firefox directly, what would prevent Mozilla from using that money for their other products? The problem with optional subscriptions is that most people will never opt-in. If subscriptions are made mandatory, the general public will be driven to one of the other major browsers.

The difference is that the Foundation legally cannot spend their tax-free money paying the salaries of employees of a for-profit entity, to develop a product that pulls in significant revenue. It's a matter of "can't", not "won't". Subscription revenue would go to Mozilla Corp directly and therefore has no restrictions, because it's taxed as income. It at least has the possibility of being spent on Firefox developmen…

However, money can go the other way. Paying a subscription might end up just sending at least some of the money to the Foundation, rather than Firefox (or even Rust) development.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#536

Post by nemothekid »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #484
heavyset_go wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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. I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone. What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes a…

>What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes any sense.

Windows Phone had great, snappy, intuitive UI (which was really surprising coming from Microsoft). However it had no apps. If you look at the top 10 iPhone apps in the app store, only Facebook and Netflix were officially supported on the platform. I recall there being (great) 3rd party apps for apps like Instagram, but there was a dearth of anything else.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#537

Post by mercutio2 »

jonathankoren wrote: post #307
jillesvangurp wrote: post #133

I'm a happy Firefox user. IMHO the thing that needs sorting out is the relation between Mozilla the company and Mozilla the Foundation. I just browsed the website of the Mozilla Foundation and to my surprise learned that Firefox development is not one of its responsibilities. I was assuming that that was in fact its primary mission. It's not apparently. Maybe I'm wrong and it's just a vague website but it reads to me…

The Foundation owns the Corporation. MoFo is tiny, probably tens of people. MoCo was huge with over a 1000, now I’d guess it’s about 700. MoCo exists to write Firefox and various other Mozilla products. MoFo exists to give out grants and to own MoCo. It’s a weird setup sure, but it wasn’t originally like this. Originally there was just the nonprofit Mozilla, but IRS rules got in the way. If I remember correctly, the…

Mozilla's setup is bog-standard for non profits with associated revenue-generating operations.

People thinking this is a strange setup usually just don't have much experience with non-profits with revenue.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#538

Post by eitland »

To anyone who works at Firefox :

I never left. There still isn't a good alternative for me.

But can someone please fix the extension API? A good start could be to add a supported way to move the tab bar around or at least remove it so it doesn't annoy me when I use vertical tabs.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#539

Post by lmm »

lucideer wrote: post #146

It's curious that the 4 bullet points in the final section don't make any mention of open source (in fact, the article doesn't at all). I think Opera Software circa 2012 was doing all of the things we would hope for/expect from Mozilla & Firefox, and doing them much better than Mozilla could. Bar one: it was not open source. When I made the switch to Firefox in 2012, it was my belief that I would not have been forced…

> I'm wondering if Firefox went away, would a fork be likely to survive in any impactful way; browsers are massive, complex & enormously expensive to maintain, whether you have rights to the source or not. Maybe open source isn't the panacea we thought in this particular context.

Even now Firefox doesn't feel like an open-source project in the traditional sense; it feels like its culture is still Netscape. It's still very much owned by a corporation that does most of the development.

Konqueror shows that a proper open-source browser is or at least was possible. It always had an order of magnitude fewer developers than the competition, but was able to keep up by using better tools and frameworks and relentlessly keeping the code clean. Even today I wouldn't be surprised if it received more outside contributions than Firefox.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#540

Post by zhte415 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #492
toastal wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.

Adding on to the other comments, I understand it is the default messaging app in Australia / New Zealand. More roughly, my understanding of the messaging space was: - USA: Facebook Messenger - Japan, Taiwan: LINE - China: WeChat - Everywhere Else in the World: WhatsApp And the comments here seem to basically bear that out.

I find it curious a lot of friends are getting back to Skype, for personal use, across continents, and not CorporateSkype/OC. Is this a huge selection bias thing? Don't know. Several have also recently deleted GMail.
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