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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#551

Post by O_H_E »

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

The techAltar youtube channel might have some useful content on the subject.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#552

Post by betwixthewires »

dralley wrote: post #531
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…

I am going to quote directly from the following blog post from Mozilla.org

https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-recommended-extensi...

"Extensions can add powerful customization features to Firefox. However, we have noticed that the number of add-ons available for Firefox today can be overwhelming for some users. And even though our policy provides clear guidelines for the behavior of add-ons, they sometimes find it difficult to decide which tools and developers they consider most trustworthy. That's why we established the ‘recommended extensions’ program: a collection of curated extensions that meet our highest standards for security, functionality and usability, which we are now bringing to another platform with the new Firefox for Android."

If what you're saying is true, it is backtracking. They made a deliberate decision, as I have demonstrated with the link above, to restricted access to extensions on their mobile browser. And in the quote, they provide what I consider to be a phony bologna excuse plainly evident on its face. I don't trust Mozilla anymore and I do not want to use their products because of if this, and any time the topic comes up I will continue to talk about it.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#553

Post by betwixthewires »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #508
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…

I feel like we're in a very interesting place for main stream computing. The technology has matured enough that it's nearly impossible to add novel, valuable features. It feels like everything is just starting to break for no good reason. At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.

> At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.

What works for whom? Every place I go on the internet where technical people discuss things, there's a common thread: competing interests have incentivized companies to put user needs second and it has resulted in a broken web that does not work and does not serve the users. The most cynical of us say that the web is irreparable.

It seems to me, from a user perspective, that they haven't found what works at all. It also seems to me that they don't care about finding what works anymore, they're happy to rest on their megalithic laurels the way Blockbuster and Radio Shack thought they could ad infinitum.

I think you're right about novel features and things breaking for no good reason, and I think the next phase in innovation of communication and networking technologies are already beginning to adopt some new axioms: less is more, and the idea that there will be one place to do everything online is flawed and cannot be achieved.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#554

Post by betwixthewires »

nfriedly wrote: post #516
betwixthewires wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I assume they were for a good reason That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do…

For what it's worth, Privacy Badger is currently one of the top recommended add-ons for me in Firefox for Android. I just installed it and it seems to work fine. Not sure about the other two

So someone has updated me in this thread somewhere that Mozilla has backtracked on their solid "recommended extensions program" and begun to work towards implementing more. I'm glad to see that, for the sake of those who will continue to use Firefox. I won't, because the trust is gone for me at this point.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#555

Post by laumars »

atombender wrote: post #382
laumars wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox. > In 10 - 15 yea…

The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt. I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now.

> The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt.

Yeah I completely agree. There are extensions that make managing containers easier but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I still run into regular problems.

That said, the Facebook and Google extensions don’t require micromanaging. They only cover those two respective clouds but it’s still a really strong starting point.

> I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now

It is possible with the Temporary Containers extension in Firefox. In fact this is exactly how I’ve been browsing the web for around a year now.

It’s really liberating.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#556

Post by zelly »

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.

Mozilla was tired of getting smoked by Chrome, which actually invested in browser development using what the tools they already had ("engineering"), as opposed to subsidizing PhDs on programming language theory.

Now it's too little too late. They've passed the point where they could catch up on technical grounds, so they make appeals to morality to market their software. Yes, I agree it was bad leadership.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#557

Post by zelly »

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

A lot of smart TV apps are already HTML and JavaScript webviews. You can create a webview app on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, a ton of proprietary devices like cars or TVs. What benefit would Firefox OS bring here, besides creating another kludgy abstraction layer over the vendor hardware?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#558

Post by laumars »

atombender wrote: post #529
pabs3 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you compartmentalize all web sites? Seems like something that could be easily done.

There are a bunch of challenges with regard to what you allow a container to access. Here's one issue: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/4... .

That issue genuinely doesn’t come up often. I’ve ran into it once in a year of using FF containers and even then, that was because of a weird DIY SSO solution I’m running on my home LAN (certainly not something most folk are going to run into).

Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare.

There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience.

The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#560

Post by addicted »

thayne wrote: post #532
dralley wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Largely because Rust has grown massively and Mozilla isn’t even close to its biggest sponsor at this point.

Azure, AWS, Google Cloud are all major Rust sponsors at this point. It doesn’t make sense for Mozilla to remain a major sponsor for a product that almost certainly can and will exist, and likely flourish even more, as a more independent project.

At this point Mozilla’s ownership of Rust would likely only cost resources and serve to limit the growth and development of rust.

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