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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#121

Post by DrBazza »

ndriscoll wrote: post #61

Why is the US government even supporting specific browsers? It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere. They're not Spotify. They're not trying to growth hack. They don't need to look pretty and have fancy animations and match some designer's dream down to the pixel. They can add CSS etc.…

> It should support a standard like HTML 4 with no CSS or JS required. i.e. make the actual functionality on their sites simple to reduce the chance it doesn't work somewhere.

You're right of course.

It's not really a case of 'supporting' browsers, it's a case of testing their sites against other browsers in case developers have accidentally written some non-portable Chrome only code.

This was very much the case in the IE6 era. Developers wrote and tested their sites for and with IE6, and were then surprised they rendered (in)correctly on Firefox and looked wrong. At least these days there are shim libraries, rather than having to explicitly rely on things like the box-model hack.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#122

Post by FirmwareBurner »

dheera wrote: post #103
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable. If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.

> Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days

Yeah, at successful high performing trillion dolar tech companies like Nvidia or Apple, not broke*ss underperforming companies like Mozilla.

>6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable.

It's unreasonable when you take into account Mozilla's lack of performance over the years. Where is their success, other than being kept on life support by being bankrolled by Google who's doing it solely to avoid anti-trust litigations over their monopoly on the browser market.

In a way, this is actually harming Firefox, knowing that they'll always be funded no matter how their product performs, just so that Alphabet has a legal David to their Goliath, gives them little incentive to try to be competitive.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#123

Post by jeroenhd »

BossingAround wrote: post #98
elashri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer edition for that, you can disable (make the value false) `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you have the choice to proceed forward. Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox, they have Firefox developer edi…

That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX. If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!

To be fair, "thisisunsafe" isn't exactly an advocated feature either.

I would like a better way to bypass these TLS errors, but hidden booleans and secret phrases aren't that dissimilar.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#124

Post by elashri »

BossingAround wrote: post #98
elashri wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not recommended, and I would run firefox developer edition for that, you can disable (make the value false) `security.ssl.enable_ocsp_stapling` in `about:config`. You will be able to view sites with invalid certs/config. But will still prompt you that that something is invalid, and you have the choice to proceed forward. Again, I would not recommend doing that on vanilla Firefox, they have Firefox developer edi…

That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX. If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!

> That's exactly the problem though. I know it's somehow possible, but the fact that I have to search for what's the internal boolean name for whatever feature I want to disable is simply a bad dev UX.

I think as a developer, searching for things are just part of the job, so if you have a niche need to debug or work with sites with invalid certs/configs, then it is not that hard to look on how to allow that. Firefox's docs are one of the best docs you can read to be fair.

> If there's a Firefox developer edition (I had no idea), they should enable all "I want to continue anyways" buttons by default. I mean, it's a developer edition!

To be honest, I use developer edition as my main browser and my profile is optimized and highly customized, so I don't remember is that was the default, or I changed it at some time (I keep it true).

But for vanilla Firefox which most of the users or potential users are not developers, I think this is reasonable default.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#125

Post by acuozzo »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #13
sergiotapia wrote: post #4

>Firefox peaked at 31.82% in November, 2009 — and then began its long slide in almost direct proportion to the rise of Chrome. It will be a sad day when Firefox is truly dead. But what did Mozilla expect? They spent so much time and energy on activist bullshit that doesn't really matter for THE BROWSER.

Maybe it was never really about the browser, but the platform. Safari dominates all Apple devices. Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere. Would Chrome have had a reason to exist to begin with, or would Firefox have become truly ubiquitous?

> Imagine if all computing was truly open and we could run any app anywhere.

This was accomplished in the 1990s by Bell Labs with Plan9 and later, at the application layer, with Inferno.

It was additionally accomplished in the 1990s at the application layer by Sun Microsystems with Java and its applets.

Frankly, the history of computing is littered with well-engineered solutions to this problem and many of its variants.

The fundamental issue here is that businesses are involved and giving a business a monopoly over something so fundamental is usually a bad idea. The WWW succeeded because it grew somewhat organically.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#126

Post by dheera »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #109
dheera wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's not that high for a CEO salary at a mature compnay. Staff-level engineers are routinely paid upwards of 1M these days (yay inflation). 6M for a CEO doesn't sound unreasonable. If these numbers sound high ... $1M today was $500K in 1996.

Routinely??? I don't know of one staff level that gets paid that much

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/apple/salaries/software-eng...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#127

Post by [deleted] »

ekianjo wrote: post #52
loganmarchione wrote: post #36

Mozilla also just posted their State of Mozilla 2022 (this includes financial statements). From what I've read, it seems that expenses are up and revenue from search deals is down. https://stateof.mozilla.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38530382 https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/05/mozilla-earned-close-to-60... Firefox's market share has been on the decline since 2010. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market…

> Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker's salary? What a ridiculous question. Obvious the chief captain on the Titanic is not responsible for the Iceberg jumping at the boat.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#128

Post by riskable »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #26
dartos wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox regularly crashes for me on wayland. It slows down my whole system when it tries to load a page in first boot (but librewolf doesn’t for some reason) the HID and webgl/webgpu support is bad… It’s just not a very good browser compared to chrome forks or webkit based ones.

I had that problem, too. It went away when I replaced my Nvidia card with an AMD one.

I was running Firefox in Wayland just fine with my AMD Radeon 6650 XT but recently switched to an Nvidia 4060 Ti (16GB) and suddenly I started having crashes. I don't blame Firefox for this since other applications started giving me issues too (e.g. Dolphin and Discord). I place the blame squarely on Nvidia.

Nvidia's drivers suck but if you want to do AI stuff their cards are basically the only option until Intel and AMD complete ramping up their support for AI stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now AMD takes the crown with Intel being a close second (providing the best bang-for-the-buck) but for that to happen AMD needs to focus more on making actual implementations faster (e.g. PyTorch) and not just making minor incremental improvements to ROCm (and also make it so you don't need to use `amdgpu-install` to use it!).

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#129

Post by Aerbil313 »

antiframe wrote: post #76
franczesko wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox would need to win mobile. This is where action takes place.

Well there isn't much browser action on iOS, so nobody but Apple can win that.

They can make a better browser on top of WebKit, technically. For the brand recognition.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#130

Post by DrBazza »

irrational wrote: post #23
dartos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s still safari at 34% usage. :badpokerface:

Only because of iOS, I assume. But it looks like Apple might be forced to open things up and allow other browsers to run on iOS. If that happened, I'd expect Safari to drop like a stone.

And MacOS.

And I hope Apple doesn't manipulate the "power usage" data that always claims Safari is the lowest-power best-battery-saver browser on their platform.

I run Safari on MacOS for only that reason, that it allegedly gives me an extra hour or so out of my laptop vs. Chrome or Firefox. Of course, I should actually benchmark myself and find out.

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