Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

techcrunch.com

21–30 of 56 posts

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#21
post #19

> The problem, however, is that this doesn’t really fit into Mozilla’s brand image. It’s supposed to be an independent, mission-driven organization. Once it starts taking money from big brands, it will be harder to maintain this image. This is a rather silly statement - most of Mozilla's funding already comes from Google, and has for a while. If you want to make Mozilla less reliant on "big brands", it's very easy -…

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well. However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so. Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Fi…

> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client.

Yes, it is. NaCl is not portable. PNaCl is tied to the nonstandard and Chrome-specific Pepper APIs, to say nothing of all of the issues of LLVM bitcode.

> Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'll be out during 2014, like was claimed earlier this year.

As someone closely involved with Rust development, I do not share those doubts.

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#22
post #11

Until recently I felt that all the free services I am getting from different website are a blessing. I am starting to feel otherwise. Somewhat unfair, because I have the money to spend, but still. When the service is paid for, I as a customer have some voice over things like ads, or abrupt changes in product direction. For now I'll donate some money to Mozilla I guess.

It's a basic problem, advertisers most want people who can afford to not see Adds.

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#23

I'd love for the possibility to start paying for stuff again. Adds bore me. I wonder how much one would reasonably have to pay to make adds go away completely from Google and friends. It would also be in their interest to have customers pay a base fee as then It would be much easier for them to sell extended services like music, movies and privacy.

If you released a pay-for firefox then everyone would just start using iceweasel which could still happen if the ads get too annoying.

Just as people could install ubuntu and "just use wine" if they want to run windows programs without paying for windows.

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#24
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well. However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so. Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Fi…

> Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set... > Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience. compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water. > They've was…

Well, after each desktop Firefox update I ask myself, "Am I better off now than I was with the last version?"

In the Phoenix, Firebird and Firefox pre-4 days, I'd quite often find myself answering with "Yes". Since Firefox 4, though, I'm not sure if I've answered with "Yes" even once. Sometimes I'm not any better or worse off, but most times I'm worse off.

For example, extensions would break very frequently for a long time after Firefox 4 was released, although they eventually managed to get that straightened out. Then there's been the progressive dumbing-down of the UI, to the sorry state of affairs after the recent Firefox 29 release containing the Australis disaster. Useful functionality has also been removed, such as the status bar and the ability to disable JavaScript through the preferences dialog. With each update, a lot of us users now have to install more and more extensions just to restore useful functionality that has been removed.

Worst of all, I don't think there's been any significant improvement in its RAM usage, its speed, and other factors like those. Yeah, I know about the are-we-fast-yet style benchmarks, but those don't translate well to the actual experience when using Firefox. Chrome, as much as I dislike its UI, still feels far more responsive and efficient than Firefox.

As for Mobile Firefox, yeah, I'm comparing it to other mobile browsers from Google and Opera, for instance. I find it slower, I've had it crash more, and I don't think it really offers any significant benefits. If it's no better than its competitors, and worse in some ways, it inherently can't offer a good experience.

And it's nonsense to suggest that Persona was "widely used". It saw basically no adoption, compared to its competitors. The same seems to be happening with Firefox OS. Some people try it out, and there is some hype, but it's still a very, very marginal player in the big picture. It won't have any impact on "walled gardens" when almost nobody actually uses it. And in many ways it forces developers into a "walled garden" worse than that of its competitors, with JavaScript/HTML5/CSS basically being the only option for developing applications.

From a technical standpoint, the Asm.js versus Native Client debate is over. Native Client is a much more general, technologically-superior approach. Asm.js is basically just a human-unfriendly subset of JavaScript, without the benefits that a more general approach offers.

I think the Rust crew could have pulled off Rust 1.0 by the end of the year had they stabilized the language and standard library a few months back. But that didn't happen, and we're still seeing relatively significant breaking changes happening to this day. It just doesn't leave them much time all to freeze the language and libraries, and to then give it the significant amount of testing and bug fixing required of a respectable 1.0 release, before the end of 2014.

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you released a pay-for firefox then everyone would just start using iceweasel which could still happen if the ads get too annoying.

Just as people could install ubuntu and "just use wine" if they want to run windows programs without paying for windows.

I think iceweasel is much closer to firefox than wine is to windows!

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well. However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so. Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Fi…

> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client. Yes, it is. NaCl is not portable. PNaCl is tied to the nonstandard and Chrome-specific Pepper APIs, to say nothing of all of the issues of LLVM bitcode. > Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'…

What's the current roadmap for getting Rust 1.0 out the door?

Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with.

And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I've heard the "let's break it now rather than later" argument from you guys before. But these kind of changes don't instill confidence.

2014 is nearly half over. I know that production-grade programming language implementations don't just happen over night. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of thorough testing, and many bug fixes to result in a truly stable release. All of that takes a lot of time.

While I'd like to be wrong about this by the end of 2014, the current state of affairs is not very encouraging.

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#28

I'd love for the possibility to start paying for stuff again. Adds bore me. I wonder how much one would reasonably have to pay to make adds go away completely from Google and friends. It would also be in their interest to have customers pay a base fee as then It would be much easier for them to sell extended services like music, movies and privacy.

If you released a pay-for firefox then everyone would just start using iceweasel which could still happen if the ads get too annoying.

if you paid for a pay for firefox, the ads would still be there, since the ads don't come from firefox (to this day, firefox is still ad-free except for the default search engine setting)

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Asm.js is not a very sound approach, especially compared to technology like Native Client. Yes, it is. NaCl is not portable. PNaCl is tied to the nonstandard and Chrome-specific Pepper APIs, to say nothing of all of the issues of LLVM bitcode. > Rust seems promising, but won't be seriously usable until at least Rust 1.0, which still seems a long way off. As the year progresses, I get more and more doubtful that it'…

What's the current roadmap for getting Rust 1.0 out the door? Last I saw, there were over 1500 issues in the project's GitHub issue tracker. Even assuming a lot of those may no longer be relevant, and assuming minimal growth, that's still not a small number of potential problems to deal with. And we're still seeing disruptive/breaking language and library changes, like the box-related ones recently. I know, I know, I…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Is Moving Ahead With Sponsored Tiles On Firefox’s New-Tab Page

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I occasionally use Firefox and other offerings from Mozilla. And so I'd be very willing to directly donate money to them, as well. However, a lot of their recent actions have seriously dissuaded me from doing so. Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. A lot of useful functionality has been stripped out, and the Chrome-like UI these days is much less efficient and effective than the Fi…

> Desktop Firefox, for example, has gotten progressively worse over time. by what metrics? it uses less RAM, runs faster JS, renders faster, is easier to write add-ons for, is more in line with the HTML5 feature-set... > Mobile Firefox on Android doesn't exactly offer a very pleasant experience. compared to what? the stock browser? mobile chrome? in my experience it blows both of those out of the water. > They've was…

one advantage with firefox os is that - that it succeeds or not, they're forced to improve it for low cpu/low ram conditions and thus improve gecko.

these changes also generally go in the desktop client.

Post reply on HN