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Firefox 94

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Re: Firefox 94

#331

Post by soundnote »

Taywee wrote: post #166
calvinmorrison wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more intrigued by Brave every day My long term question is - will there end up being one browser implementation of the virtual machine? Browser rendering engines are basically that these days, a big virtual machine for web apps. Is there value having a separate implementation? Some languages that run inside a virtual machine only have a single implementation. Is that bad? Would it be bad if Mozilla used the interne…

Others may disagree on philosophical grounds, but I don't think it's inherently bad to have only one implementation of the core web browser technologies. That's similar to what we have with Linux, where the kernel has one canonical implementation, and OSes based on Linux use that, modify it, switch configurations, and build the OS that they need on that core. The problem here and the difficulty, is that upstream Linu…

And the entity has massive incentive to be user hostile because that's how they make their money.

Re: Firefox 94

#332

Post by account42 »

detritus wrote: post #69
Turing_Machine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Colorways"? Like what everyone else calls "themes"? Yeah, you don't actually need to make up your own word for that. That, plus the fact that this is the lead bullet point for their new release makes me think "way too many marketers, not enough engineers".

'Colourways' is a fairly standard term to describe different colour options on various different product types. Mozilla haven't made this up for themselves. 'Theme', to me, suggests ye olde browser customisation wherein you could have animated gifs of Homer Simpson barking D'OH as your 'Home' button, &c. I'm assuming that's not the case here?

It's a completely nonstandard term to descripe color schemes for UI themes. That the word is used in an unrelated industry is irrelevant.

Re: Firefox 94

#333

Post by account42 »

blueflow wrote: post #8

I'm not enthusiastic these days. Which aspect of the UI will they change this time? Is there an about:config hack to get it back? And how long is that gonna work? I think i'll have to ship a userchrome.css with my dotfiles soon.

What makes you think they won't remove userChrome.css support too? It already is disabled by default.

Re: Firefox 94

#334

Post by blueflow »

account42 wrote: post #333
blueflow wrote: post #8

I'm not enthusiastic these days. Which aspect of the UI will they change this time? Is there an about:config hack to get it back? And how long is that gonna work? I think i'll have to ship a userchrome.css with my dotfiles soon.

What makes you think they won't remove userChrome.css support too? It already is disabled by default.

I just pray because i haven't found a alternative to firefox yet that is suitable for me.

Re: Firefox 94

#335

Post by concinds »

Taywee wrote: post #166
calvinmorrison wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more intrigued by Brave every day My long term question is - will there end up being one browser implementation of the virtual machine? Browser rendering engines are basically that these days, a big virtual machine for web apps. Is there value having a separate implementation? Some languages that run inside a virtual machine only have a single implementation. Is that bad? Would it be bad if Mozilla used the interne…

Others may disagree on philosophical grounds, but I don't think it's inherently bad to have only one implementation of the core web browser technologies. That's similar to what we have with Linux, where the kernel has one canonical implementation, and OSes based on Linux use that, modify it, switch configurations, and build the OS that they need on that core. The problem here and the difficulty, is that upstream Linu…

If Mozilla switched to Blink, they'd be maintaining their own version, and it could diverge from Google's. That would be the "trustworthy, community Blink". But they'd also be able to much more easily benefit from Blink's security (already had site isolation for years, apparently a better sandbox, etc) and the contributions thousands of other companies make to Blink (Intel, Samsung, etc), companies that don't contribute to Gecko and Webkit as much if at all. They'd also have better webcompat, and take away one reason to switch to Chrome (i.e., sites that break in Firefox that render fine in Chrome; and sites that rely on cutting edge draft standards that Firefox won't implement for a few months/years).

I argued this before[0], and I still stand by it:

> I can see that being an issue if the web is centralising around one proprietary engine, but why does that apply to Blink? If Google turns completely evil that won't take away from all the webcompat, optimisations, and security in Blink, and any bad feature (ManifestV3) can be patched out easily. Mozilla could switch to Blink (and I think they should, and Apple too, they clearly don't have the manpower to maintain a whole engine and keep it modern and secure, see my other comment in this thread; there are many more 0days with Safari and Firefox than Chrome) and it wouldn't harm the web in any way, because they can just swap out bad components with their own, and still reduce their dev time requirements by orders of magnitude compared to today. You have Intel, Samsung, tons of companies contributing to Blink, to a much, much greater extent than Gecko or WebKit.

> If every browser switched to Blink, that would actually benefit consumers, because right now Chrome basically has the enterprise market on lock, since nobody cares to test internal webpages on other browsers, and Chrome has better enterprise features (though I don't know how much of that is to do with the engine); and many consumers also just switch to Chrome as the first thing they do, because they've run into compatibility issues with Firefox or Safari and they just want to access the web without issues. If every browser used Blink, you'd have a lot more people using Safari and Firefox, just because most people don't want to keep two browsers around (Firefox + Chrome or Safari + Chrome) when websites break (which is not often, but often enough, trust me). I really hope we see this.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941866

Re: Firefox 94

#336

Post by detritus »

account42 wrote: post #332
detritus wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Colourways' is a fairly standard term to describe different colour options on various different product types. Mozilla haven't made this up for themselves. 'Theme', to me, suggests ye olde browser customisation wherein you could have animated gifs of Homer Simpson barking D'OH as your 'Home' button, &c. I'm assuming that's not the case here?

It's a completely nonstandard term to descripe color schemes for UI themes. That the word is used in an unrelated industry is irrelevant.

For you, perhaps - I've come across it a lot in similar contexts and all the people who upvoted my comment seem to disagree with you too.

I'm not saying I like it necessarily, but it's quite clear what it means in context and language does have a tendency to evolve despite our best efforts.

shrug

Re: Firefox 94

#337

Post by ProAm »

Vinnl wrote: post #329
ProAm wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its a bug for people who have upgraded in the past (Im not sure how many upgrades I have gone through but its been years worth). The issue is not with URLs when you start to type (those I can shift+del) but rather when you have a new tab (or empty URL bar) and you click into the address bar, it prepopulates with a list of URLs from somewhere, probably an internal db. It is these suggestions that I cannot shift+del on…

Another possibly unhelpful suggestion: find the site in your history, then right-click and select "Forget about this site"?

I will try this.

Re: Firefox 94

#338

Post by hoseja »

ProAm wrote: post #337
Vinnl wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another possibly unhelpful suggestion: find the site in your history, then right-click and select "Forget about this site"?

I will try this.

Do NOT do this for any large domains like google by the way, unless you want to wait ten minutes and have all your google history/cookies wiped.

Re: Firefox 94

#339

Post by Turing_Machine »

detritus wrote: post #69
Turing_Machine wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Colorways"? Like what everyone else calls "themes"? Yeah, you don't actually need to make up your own word for that. That, plus the fact that this is the lead bullet point for their new release makes me think "way too many marketers, not enough engineers".

'Colourways' is a fairly standard term to describe different colour options on various different product types. Mozilla haven't made this up for themselves. 'Theme', to me, suggests ye olde browser customisation wherein you could have animated gifs of Homer Simpson barking D'OH as your 'Home' button, &c. I'm assuming that's not the case here?

> 'Colourways' is a fairly standard term

Not in software it isn't. It appears to be a marketing term, just as I said.

Re: Firefox 94

#340

Post by sfink »

hilbert42 wrote: post #308
sfink wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla "inside agent" here. (Not really, but I work for Mozilla. Don't speak for them etc.) I didn't consider downvoting, but since you mentioned it below it would kind of make sense, since much of what you say here is objectively false. But you're raising legitimate concerns, so I have no reason to prevent your post from being seen. Mozilla is very open about what is collected, and all of it can be turned off. We'd…

First, I actually do respect your views and I'm pleased you've had the fortitude to responded as such. To respond adequately to your post would require me to start detailing what I (and many others) reckon what's wrong with Firefox (and similarly so with Thunderbird). Clearly that's not very practical here, as to do so we'd be bogged down in detail and the key points of the argument would be lost. That said and not w…

This may be too short a response to be satisfying. I agree with some of your points, disagree with others, and end up coming from a somewhat different place. And my salary comes from Mozilla, so I will freely admit to being biased.

Ironically, constant add-on breakage is exactly why we broke all the addons. The situation really was as bad as you describe; every release broke large numbers of addons because the addon architectural was far too invasive. It was unsustainable. Bug fixes, security fixes, and new features all required changes that broke addons.

That doesn't happen anymore. (Or at least, it is now rare instead of ridiculously common.) Addons are much more limited, they break very rarely, and we have been able to make some changes necessary for some survival-threatening shortcomings (eg Spectre vulnerabilities that the competitors do not have). I miss Lazarus too.

We have not done as good a job as we liked at implementing the new extension model. The massive layoffs made that much harder.

Arguing over what users want is a losing proposition. I know I've often been surprised (and disappointed) by the data. And I freely admit that there are some major deficiencies still present. Often, though, I find that results are different in different environments. The context menu thing works here, for example. Please file a bug if there isn't already one. I have other cut & paste bugs that irritate the hell out of me, though, so I'm not surprised by another one.

The printer stuff was completely ignored and abandoned for a very, very long time. It has dramatically improved in the last few versions.

Supporting older UX is always a hard one. I feel it too, I generally don't see the point in most changes, but I'm not going to second-guess the people who say that UX refreshes make more people happy than sad. And maintenance of past stuff has a surprisingly high cost that can't be waved away as devs being lazy. Especially in the face of mass layoffs.

> ...Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why it takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate.

I tend to agree. I don't think it's as bad as you say, but I do think it's an area of weakness.

----

Anyway, not meant to be a comprehensive answer. I don't think you're completely wrong about all this, but it does look a lot different from the inside.

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