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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#531

Post by freedomben »

fragmede wrote: post #358
freedomben wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sadly almost in this camp. Firefox is incredibly important to me and is critical for the open web to survive. Mozilla has proven to be really bad stewards, and as long as they exist nobody is going to pick up firefox. They've had many years to wake and up correct the course but choose not to, so it may be time to die. If Mozilla disappeared, a new organization could pick it up and run with it. If it weren't so ov…

Since implementing EME, I'm not sure Firefox is critical for an open web, since by almost definition, EME isn't open. As a practical matter I can understand why they chose to implement it (though that was not without controversy), but let's not fool ourselves here.

that's an interesting point to consider. I wonder what would have happened had they not done it? Would it have accelerated the decline? Or would it have been enough to get services not to use DRM? I'm not sure, but I think FF may have just dropped to irrelevancy faster had they not done it.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#532

Post by vorticalbox »

aembleton wrote: post #467
ndriscoll wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you describe aren't prevented by focusing on semantics, and are in fact enabled by it. Every modern app looks different for branding purposes, so users don't know what the buttons do. Things are complicated because we abandoned standard UIs that used to use the same widgets across every application. And government stuff should work differently from 99.9% of commercial websites. Again, the goal should be fo…

> It needs some boxes to type information Would an address lookup service be acceptable? One of those where you start typing your address into a box and it fills in all of the address fields based on which address you select. If a new version of this is created, shouldn't it be tested on browsers? Which browsers should it be tested on?

We could simple put an input for each part of the address and let the user fill it out.

Requires exactly zero lines of javascript, no third party api that may or may not work.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#533

Post by [deleted] »

ndriscoll wrote: post #446
pavon wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming that your developers were perfect and write sites exactly to the standard every time. In the real world they don't and XHTML lost, so all browsers tolerate and mask non-compliant pages to various degrees and in various ways, and will surface different bugs in your work. So it behooves you to test with the browsers your users are using to find those bugs before they do.

I am assuming that a professional can do their job, yes. The whole XHTML thing where allegedly it never caught on because people can't write valid markup has never made sense to me. They're able to get typescript to compile now, right? If a dev couldn't write react code that compiles, we would fire them, right? We have tools to check that your document parses and conforms a schema. We've had them for 20 years. It's e…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#534

Post by bdcravens »

Lately I've been using Firefox as a primary browser again, mostly to get used to it before ad blockers stop working in Chrome. Mostly it's good, though some things I'm still adjusting to: Firefox wants to claim the ESC key to get out of full-screen, resulting in a number of sites with different behavior (namely, many sites use ESC to close modals)

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#535

Post by nwah1 »

beretguy wrote: post #516
billiam wrote: post #320

The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being…

Firefox needs new useful features to attract people. Like tab groups, tab position, other useful stuff…

I, personally, hate those features. Tab groups were just added to my browser, and my first thought was how to turn it off.

Firefox initially won users by being the fastest. And then lost users when it wasn't the fastest.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#536

Post by fouc »

culi wrote: post #325
Buttons840 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, now keep them raised if you were also performing worse on every metric each year.

I actually don't think you'd see that many raised hands go down

The implied joke is they're talking about regular employees. Seems like you're thinking of CEOs?

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#537

Post by [deleted] »

billiam wrote: post #320

The organization that gave the world Rust, Web Assembly, and countless other useful technologies is in a probable death spiral, and most of the blame goes to Mitchell Baker. If Mozilla was not primarily driven by greed and laziness, smart people that still exist in around Firefox would have made the difficult technical decisions needed to continue to ship a useful product that protects user privacy while still being…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#538

Post by tomohawk »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #297
Chabsff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing fr…

There is no standard that you can use instead of a set of browsers. There is no way of making sure that a website works with a browser other then testing it with that browser. The reason people test with different browsers is not that they want to use non-standard features, it's that even standard features often do not work in certain browsers.

They're the government. They can create a spec or standard for browsers to be able to use government supplied digital services. It's done all the time.

This would be beneficial guidance for browser developers, but also for anyone developing government sites. Saying "whatever chrome is doing is our standard" is a cop out.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#539

Post by amanzi »

neltnerb wrote: post #508
amanzi wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Xero for years with Firefox without issues.

Maybe you can share your configuration? I wonder if you are lucky or they are unlucky.

I run Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled and set the Firefox enhanced privacy settings to the strictest settings. I haven't done anything special to get Xero working - never had any issues.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#540

Post by indymike »

A quick look at Mozilla's product page with 12 products of which five are different browsers, explains why the decline has happened:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/

That's a lot of products to support. Add to that this list of 27 discontinued products:

https://killedbymozilla.com/

And you can understand why the struggle is real for firefox. It should be the best, bar none at this point.

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