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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#101

Post by doomlaser »

hellofunk wrote: post #97

It would seem that the Brave browser and Firefox share similar goals on privacy. It’s hard to navigate the differences in their perspectives on this, why would one choose one of these browsers over the other if concerned about online tracking?

Firefox has more power user features and a robust plugin system. One of my must-have features for a browser is the ability to define search engine macros for the address bar, to quickly and directly search sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, YouTube, Google Image Search, IMDB, Metacritic, RottenTomatoes, etc. It's a lot faster to type command-L t whatever - to do a search of Twitter than navigating in any other way. So far, Brave doesn't have this as a user-definable option, so Firefox is my main browser across platforms.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#102

Post by Despegar »

krzyk wrote: post #96
johnsea wrote: post #7

The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

I wonder why no antimonopolist issue was raised there by e.g. EU. Like they did for NFC in Germany - they forced all phones with NFC to be open to use by different apps, which might finally bring other pay solutions to iOS (or non NFC capable iphones to Germany).

The NFC issue isn't related to antitrust. If they thought they could make an antitrust case against Apple they would. But their market share is so low in Germany, and the EU, that they just passed a law instead (specifically an amendment to an anti-money laundering law). It remains to be seen if it's even constitutional.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#103

Post by jillesvangurp »

saagarjha wrote: post #79
jillesvangurp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad they built Brave on Chromium instead of Firefox. Which of course given that the company is run by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich is a bit of a shame. Firefox is showing that they are more than technically competent to keep up with Chromium and deliver great performance and functionality. With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping…

> With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++ implementation. I would expect Blink’s C++ implementation to perform comparably; wouldn’t the main benefits would be security-related?

No, it is very hard to take a complex rendering engine written in C++ and make it multithreaded, secure, and thread safe (i.e. correct).

In theory you could do this in C++ of course but in practice, both Google and Mozilla have struggled with this for many years and both have still some major bottlenecks in their browser rendering pipeline that are effectively still single threaded and can end up blocking the main thread.

This the main reason Rust was invented (by Mozilla) and they've delivered a few component rewrites that leverage e.g. multiple cores. They've been shipping this bit by bit for the last two years (since the quantum release) and they're not done yet. E.g with the latest releases they've started to ship the new web render on some hardware/os combinations.

Faster is a simplistic notion that is hard to quantify but having a more smooth loading page, with less visible stuttering, and higher frame-rates for animation is sort of the main goal here. People also care about memory usage, energy drain on laptops, etc. If you look at all of this then it used to be the case that people went from Firefox to Chrome to improve the experience and you now have people moving the other way.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#104

Post by neiman »

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations.

It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor".

Are there are any "shades" between those two organization models?

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#105

Post by marcosdumay »

scarface74 wrote: post #13
input_sh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't suggest an alternative funding model as much as guess what will it be maybe a year or two from now. Key quote from the article: > Mozilla has launched Monitor, a data-breach reporting service; Lockwise, a password manager; and Send, a privacy-focused alternative to services such as WeSendit. It’s also beta-testing a VPN (virtual private network) service, which it hopes to market to privacy-conscious users.…

I guess they can also add a messenger, news client, a calendar, and an address book and call it Firefox Communicator....

As long as it starts in less than 2 minutes and don't push Windows machine into trashing, why not?

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#106

Post by notduncansmith »

nfriedly wrote: post #90
johnsea wrote: post #7

The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

If Apple allowed Firefox on iOS - real Firefox with the rendering engine and extensions and everything, just like Android - I probably would have switched already. As it stands, I stay on Android mostly for Firefox.

Just curious, why does using “real Firefox” hold so much weight for you? Also, what steps have you taken to secure your device?

One reason I haven’t switched from iPhone is that I’m not confident in my ability to secure an Android, and I’d rather trust Apple than Google.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#107

Post by mapgrep »

ppfrc wrote: post #2

Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web, severely cramped by their complete economic dependency on Google and their inability to allocate their funds intelligently

The idea that Google would cut off Mozilla to advance Chrome seems to me at least rooted in a deep misunderstanding of how Google makes money.

Something like 75% or more of their revenue comes from AdWords - ads run against search. This is one of the most attractive streams for advertisers ever built. You have a prospect ready to buy (often) who is literally telling you in written software processable words what they want.

AdWords dwarfs all of Facebook in revenue, for context. It is the very foundation of Google. In a way, everything else they do is either support for AdWords or a side project.

The money they give to Firefox is not charity. It is to feed this cash cow. They have a similar arrangement with Apple for iPhone default search engine in mobile Safari. I would argue it is far far more valuable for Google to support Firefox in order to ensure search dominance than to waste that money to advance Chrome. Chrome exists to support AdWords not the other way around.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#108

Post by marcosdumay »

saagarjha wrote: post #79
jillesvangurp wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad they built Brave on Chromium instead of Firefox. Which of course given that the company is run by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich is a bit of a shame. Firefox is showing that they are more than technically competent to keep up with Chromium and deliver great performance and functionality. With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping…

> With the work they are doing rewriting Firefox component by component in Rust, Google will have their work cut out keeping up in terms of performance using their C++ implementation. I would expect Blink’s C++ implementation to perform comparably; wouldn’t the main benefits would be security-related?

Stability also improves when you have less bugs. And you get less memory leaks, what it a big worry for browsers.

But no, I do disagree. Rust is more expressive than C++ and much easier to debug. I expect the new Gecko development to be easier and faster than Chromium, what leads to more features.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#109

Post by beefield »

neiman wrote: post #104

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations. It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Are there are any "shades" between…

Co-ops.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#110

Post by shkkmo »

saagarjha wrote: post #71
sharpneli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot). Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow. Game engines such as Unity use il2cpp to go from the C# stuff into C++ that can be statically compiled as running the C# as bytecode would be too slow without a jitter.

> One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot). Nitpick: you can but you cannot ship it via the App Store.

Apple as does not allow side-loading, so wouldn't a jailbreak be required?
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