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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

#111

Post by zimbatm »

oefrha wrote: post #85
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…

It’s very easy to build a new browser on top of Chromium/Blink, which is why there are hundreds of Chromium-based browsers out there. In contrast, building on top of Firefox/Gecko, pretty damn hard. Even Firefox devs have admitted this. All too often I hear sentiments like “too bad they built... on Chromium instead of Firefox”, as if it’s a moral choice. It’s not. It’s an informed technical choice. If you want to cha…

This is one aspect that is not often talked about.

If Gecko was easier to build on top of, it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need. Mozilla doesn't only win by getting more Firefox market share.

Also not everything is lost. Chromium has a bunch of weird and custom build tooling that also makes it a pain to build on top. Anyone who has tried to package v8 can see that it's mainly catering for Chrome's needs.

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

#112

Post by Despegar »

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…

Profit or non-profit doesn't really have anything to do with it. The issue is market power. Chrome has 70-80% market share according to this article. That's monopoly levels of market power and it's maintained through Android, which also has 80% market share.

It's up to regulators to restore some semblance of balance to the market. If the browser market were less concentrated and there was more equal distribution, it wouldn't really matter whether you were a non-profit or not. In fact the web would be better off with competing interests jockeying over each other.

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

#113

Post by steveklabnik »

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?

Mozilla tried to parallelize their CSS engine multiple times in C++, and failed. Rust’s guarantees made it possible to do so. There was a talk about it at a Rust conference called “The Story of Stylo”; I’m on my phone or I’d link you.

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

#114

Post by lern_too_spel »

mapgrep wrote: post #107
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…

That money means that Firefox and Safari won't ship ad blocking by default because as soon as they do it, their users are worthless to Google, and Google will stop paying. It also means that their tracking prevention doesn't affect usage of first party cookies on other sites, increasing Google's and Facebook's advertising dominance.

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

#115

Post by steveklabnik »

fwn wrote: post #73
vbezhenar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that you can't even donate any money for Firefox. All donated money are going to other projects.

AFAIK there does not seem to be a way to donate to rust development for the same reasons. Maybe Mozilla should allow donors to specify the project they'd like to contribute to? That would give them additional feedback on how the community evaluates their programmatic direction.

Sort of similar reasons; while this is true, it’s also that we aren’t sure how we’d allocate that money if we got it. Discussions about a possible foundation for Rust are ongoing, and these kinds of questions are a big part of why that hasn’t happened yet.

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

#116

Post by gatherhunterer »

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?

Brave stops ads from tracking you but the browser itself records your browsing behavior and allows ads to use that anonymized data to target ads to you. Their marketing always mentions the former and never mentions the latter. The goal of Brave is to build a model for web advertising that pays the user but gives Brave the lion’s share; this essentially replaces the search engines and social networks as the nexus of web advertising with a browser.

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

#117

Post by Transfinity »

notduncansmith wrote: post #106
nfriedly wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One big thing is that you can't change the default browser, so any time you click a link you end up on safari. In my experience (I tried iPhone for 2 weeks after my previous phone died, before returning it and switching back to Android) that makes installing a different browser effectively useless.

The rendering engine restriction is less obvious to the average user. And, frankly, if you don't trust Apple with your data then what are you doing using their network stack?

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

#118

Post by padenot »

KonkeyDong69 wrote: post #39
radarsat1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, so it is all about the javascript engine? Ok I can see how that might put up some major technical barriers, but still it should be technically feasible to have the firefox rendering engine make use of the iOS javascript engine, no? Maybe it's not worth the effort of course. I am just trying to get a feel for what the barriers are.

In addition to what the other replies said, feel free to eyeball the code required to embed SpiderMonkey in Firefox at https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/tree/master/dom/binding... . It's rather large and complex.

This is not at all the code to embed SpiderMonkey in Firefox, those are the bindings from DOM APIs to the implementation of those APIs in Firefox. Above that, calling into this layer, is another layer that transforms JS calls into C++ calls (roughly).

The interface between SpiderMonkey and the rest of Firefox is here: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/js/src/jsapi.h.

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

#119

Post by sebazzz »

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.

Technically I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS. However, JIT or other dynamically compiled code is not allowed because that's a security risk. You can't have a browser in 2019 with interpreted javascript.

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

#120

Post by fauigerzigerk »

sebazzz wrote: post #119
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.

Technically I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS. However, JIT or other dynamically compiled code is not allowed because that's a security risk. You can't have a browser in 2019 with interpreted javascript.

But why is JavaScript JIT compilation tied to the rendering engine?
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