601–610 of 949 posts
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"What is one single reason to use Firefox?" Better ad blocking.
Is it better than Chrome + uBlock Origin/Privacy Badger/Ghostery?
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I can't remember Firefox crashing in recent years and that includes times I approached 2000 open tabs. Though after using the same profile for over 5 years now it has trouble remembering the color scheme for whatever reason.
"Soft" crashes where websites simply don't load or function properly in FF, but do in Chrome, are far more common.
Many websites are just designed with the 80% of most frequent configurations. And when autoplay is disabled, the browser window is too narrow, a special font isn't loaded or a cookie is blocked all bets are off.
The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.
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Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns. A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are…
> Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns. As a browser maker your "concerns" should really be web/internet standards. If websites and webapp builders aren't complying with standards and are building their stuff to only work in non-standard compliant browsers that's a separate problem t…
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Just interpreting what the OP said and not really sure where I stand on the topic, but I think he means that "social justice" controversies have purged asshole devs that were competent developers producing good features and that firefox as a product is not as good due to that. Taking senior engineers off the roster will usually impact the product whether or not they were assholes.
In my experience Firefox has become a much better browser in the last 18 months, so if there was an asshole purge then maybe that helped? If Firefox is missing specific capabilities that make it noncompetitive, and those deficits are traced to the asshole purge, then @rpnx might strengthen their argument by citing those examples.
Granted, users don't know or care which engine they're using, but it would allow Mozilla to "control" important infrastructure that apps are deployed on. Maybe it would turn into a revenue stream by providing official support, or maybe it just helps keep Google's fingers out of everything.
- Google: Try to use anything made by them with another browser and without a blocker and see how long it takes until you get the "SURF BETTER WITH CHROME"-ads thrown into your face
- Microsoft: Edge is pre-bundled and you get little nags in the Google style noted above all the time. Various menus contain little "try out Edge, a browser made for Windows!"-ads
- Apple: Doesn't even allow other browsers on some of their platforms, deeply integrates the browser and the OS in others (i.e. exactly the behavior which got Microsoft in hot water in the 90s)
I don't think it's possible to fundamentally change the trend without intervention of government agencies that forbids Google, Microsoft and Apple from doing this and neither EU nor US show much interest in doing so. So, things will continue and at best Mozilla can hope for some stabilization at the bottom of the ladder.
Side note: Mozilla has done various things over time I'm not happy with, but all of these are at most accelerants. They didn't change the fundamental trajectory, so unlike other commentators I think they are not relevant to this topic, even though we could discuss day in or out if e.g. the pocket acquisition and all that came with it was a good thing.
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Quite on the contrary, even a team of 1000 won't be sufficient to maintain compatibility if your marketshare is so low that website and webapp builders ignore your concerns. A non-Chromium browser needs to maintain a critical mass of users to be sufficiently large to ensure that the world wants to stay compatible with it, and having 1% of marketshare is not sufficient for that, no matter how committed these users are…
That's not how web standards work - or how they ought to work, for that matter.
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Well a large part of the problem with a fork is that you don't see a lot of random drive by contributions. As a possible contributor myself a couple times, firefox is a development nightmare because it doesn't have a good autoconfig system that lets one download the code and start being productive quickly. Then like chrome, i'm betting most people can't actually built it in reasonable time on their laptops since it b…
And these are what is holding Firefox back?
I've been known to waste a weekend or two a year working on open source projects. These though generally are small things that scratch and itch for fix a bug. I don't work on projects where it takes a month+ of weekends just to get a working dev environment. I don't think that's unusual, you have to pay people to put up with that kind of pain.