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A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

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Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#11

Post by GrayShade »

msla wrote: post #3
GrayShade wrote: post #2

They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up all over the place. Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

To be fair, they communicated that change. Did you miss the chance to export your RSS list? I think it was supposed to export an OPML so you could add them to another feed reader. Some of them are even available as Firefox extensions.

> without even giving me a chance to opt-out

It didn't flip a pref, the infrastructure behind that feature was removed because it was a maintenance nightmare, and not enough people were using it. You could have opted out (for a while) by switching to the ESR.

I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#12

Post by headsoup »

msla wrote: post #3
GrayShade wrote: post #2

They didn't try to, they actually won. Microsoft switching to Blink was had news for Mozilla, and sites that are "optimized for Chrome" started to crop up all over the place. Yes, Firefox is slow on Macs, but you should consider switching to it. We know how it went with IE back then. On Android, the extension support alone makes it so much better than the competition.

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

Didn't Firefox automatically export them to an OPML file on your desktop?

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#13

Post by l1k »

ronilan wrote: post #8

Related reading (2008) https://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/the-go... (That’s a year an a half before Chrome launched with a leaked comic book)

It's also worth mentioning that the Firefox team did the same kind of "oopses" to browsers embedding Gecko. See this interview with Mike Pinkerton, who later went to Google to work on the Chrome Mac team:

"People will make changes to do something good for Firefox and because Firefox is the only really blessed project by the Mozilla Corporation and the Foundation, that’s their only focus. So they’ll make changes that work great in Firefox and then they’ll do—they’ll either like, break Camino’s build just entirely, or things will stop working, or things will slow down, and nobody will really understand why. Because, you know, there was no communication about, you know, this change might have this effect. There’s also a lot of strife back and forth between features that are implemented in the core Gecko in a way that they will only work with Firefox. [...] So we’d run into situations where we try and implement a feature and we discover we just can’t do it. And we kind of raise our hands and say, “Ah, can we get this fixed?” And the answer would invariably be, “Well, it works in Firefox. Who cares?” [...] And that’s something that eventually made me sour greatly on the Foundation and the Corporation and why we kind of took our ball and went elsewhere, and stopped trying to work directly with the Foundation for the majority of problems."

http://mozillamemory.org/detailview.php?id=7277

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#14

Post by msla »

headsoup wrote: post #12
msla wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

Didn't Firefox automatically export them to an OPML file on your desktop?

No.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#15

Post by msla »

GrayShade wrote: post #11
msla wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox killed RSS support, they mutilated my bookmarks to remove all of the RSS URLs. Those bookmarks were mine, and Firefox destroyed them without even giving me a chance to opt-out. I can't use Firefox if it's going to do stuff like that. I use qutebrowser, instead.

To be fair, they communicated that change. Did you miss the chance to export your RSS list? I think it was supposed to export an OPML so you could add them to another feed reader. Some of them are even available as Firefox extensions. > without even giving me a chance to opt-out It didn't flip a pref, the infrastructure behind that feature was removed because it was a maintenance nightmare, and not enough people were…

> I haven't tried qutebrowser, does it have extension or RSS support?

It has a userscript:

https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/misc/...

... but extensions in qutebrowser are admittedly in a very early and immature state now, and the codebase for them is going to be changed.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#16

Post by bprasanna »

I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Im still an active firefox user. I intentionally avoid Chrome and use it rarely to see if the site which doesn't work in Firefox also doesn't work in Chrome. IMHO Firefox didn't make me feel slow anytime. The whole point of Google Chrome automatically logging-in as Gmail user throughout the browser should have sounded alarm for people who care about privacy. I do agree Google brings latest of web tech to Chrome fast, but that makes other browsers falling behind in terms of features. Catching up wastes lots of time for the other browser makers. IMHO monopoly in browser is not a good idea. We know what a monopolistic attitude brings to plate. Also, when we see new extensions for Chrome with an explicit subject as "extension for Chrome", for Firefox users it feels like being sidestepped. Then it becomes the onus of the Firefox user to see if he/she needs to get in touch the extension developer to see the possibility of portability. A caring developer shouldn't sidestep Firefox or even other browsers per se. If every developer becomes selfish about developing tools/extensions for their own environment, they are blocking the goodness to others.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#17

Post by spiralganglion »

GrayShade wrote: post #10
irrational wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Firefox slow on Mac for you? I haven't noticed slowness in a long time.

I don't use a Mac, but it's a known issue with the high-resolution ones. I believe it doesn't use the OS compositor, so it ends up redrawing too much. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965

I've used a few retina Macs to do various kinds of web dev. Firefox tends to do some things fastest (eg: re-layout when resizing the window), some things the slowest (eg: certain large, complex CSS animations). For most things, it's perceptually equivalent to Chrome or Safari. Some things that are fast/good in Chrome will be slow/bad in FF, and vice versa. The biggest shortcomings I currently face are (1) a lot of banding when layering lots of complex gradients, due to a poor job of dithering and (2) weird handling of certain colors on my P3 display due to the assumption that colors are in the full display space rather than sRGB.

Re: A tale of how Google tried to win against Mozilla

#20

Post by pjmlp »

bprasanna wrote: post #16

I don't know whats going wrong with Firefox. Im still an active firefox user. I intentionally avoid Chrome and use it rarely to see if the site which doesn't work in Firefox also doesn't work in Chrome. IMHO Firefox didn't make me feel slow anytime. The whole point of Google Chrome automatically logging-in as Gmail user throughout the browser should have sounded alarm for people who care about privacy. I do agree Goo…

Latest example I became aware of, React team speaking with Chrome one for special APIs.
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