Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 296 posts

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

#161

Post by mikem170 »

lllr_finger wrote: post #133
danilocesar wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that? Firefox is way better nowadays than it was a few years ago. I have been using as my main work browser for some time and I don't face any performance issues with it.

On a BSD? It's great for me in Windows or Linux, but it's really choppy scrolling or watching videos in OpenBSD. There was a post on the mailing list somewhere that blamed excessive mallocs. This was with version 69, so not some ancient version either.

I've been running Firefox on OpenBSD on a Thinkpad X260, for about a year, and it's been working great, including videos and scrolling.

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

#162

Post by matoro »

Barrin92 wrote: post #148
zimbatm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>it would get more adoption in other markets and promote the variety of engines that we sorely need. we don't need variety of engines, we need a non-pofit alternative to google that can throw a punch, which firefox is. An engine is a technical undertaking (of enormous proportion), and there's essentially no need to have even more of them. If anything it'd just make building websites harder. The issue isn't with blink…

Strongly disagree with this. When you build on top of Blink you put yourself at Google's mercy: every Chromium knockoff from Opera to Brave or what have you now has to make a critical choice about whether to update their core to the new version that implements Manifest v3, or to keep their base on an insecure outdated version indefinitely.

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

#163

Post by carapace »

neiman wrote: post #153
carapace wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, crack open your history books and recall that the entire point of corporations is the relatively-risk-free exploitation of other people's resources (or even they themselves, as slaves.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company - - - - By contrast, most religions are not poor and do a lot of good works. - - - - Some people, like Bill Gates, make a lo…

> What about Elon Musk? He's making money, and arguably do good by humanity overall, eh? I wonder what will happen when Musk would have to choose between money and the benefit of humanity.

It depends on his values and metaphysics.

In the Gita, Krishna says, "He who works for the fruits of his labor is a miser."

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

#164

Post by simion314 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #41
simion314 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Firefox is not doing a full rewrite but incremental refactoring then attempting to swap components. The unfortunate truth is that writing a browser is almost impossible because of the complexity, IMO we need a new version of the web that breaks compatibility, make everything strict(no longer ignore errors and guess a fix for them) no more 12 ways to center an element , for the legacy web we can use the existing…

Write websites with Wasm, render UI with WebGL or something similar. Implement JavaScript as a compiler to Wasm (which runs on Wasmitself), implement HTML+CSS renderer as a library which runs on Wasm as well. So basically your browser need to implement Wasm and WebGL which sounds reasonable task. Well, that's simplification, of course, it need to implement some HTTP API like XMLHttpRequest, local storage API and so o…

Implementing an html rendered that is compatible with all the css rules and it also implements all the extra workarounds that the current browser implement ( like handling illegal markup is not trivial) markup . I mean think about it, you hit invalid html markup and what do you do? You need to continue but now you need to check what Firefox or Chrome do for each case (missing end tags , P inside span, weird nesting of elements ) I would not want to implement a browser that is compatible with the current garbage.

There was also an article earlier this month or previous month from a Firefox developer about font/text rendering, in case you missed it rendering text in a way that works with all writing system is super hard.

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

#165

Post by ragequitta »

ken wrote: post #155
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.

That's a convenient excuse on iOS, but Firefox is doing poorly on macOS, too, where no such restriction exists. According to the first statistics I found, Firefox is only about half as popular on the Mac as it in on Windows -- and it's still under 10% there, too. Privacy-compromising systems aren't winning today because people seek out systems that compromise their privacy. They're winning because these companies foc…

I'm trying to think of a UI difference in chrome or safari that is meaningful, can't come up with one. Can you elaborate?

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

#166

Post by kbrosnan »

freediver wrote: post #156
mthoms wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. This is so misleading that it borders on outright lying. What's your agenda?

Truth? I can understand 'unpopular', but 'misleading' without probably even looking at it? 1) This can be easilly reproduced. https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... 2) Over 95% of Mozilla revenue comes from Google for using Google as default search engine https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... 3) https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report - see first…

1) GA was removed from the first run page https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/pull/7621

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

#167

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ken wrote: post #155
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.

That's a convenient excuse on iOS, but Firefox is doing poorly on macOS, too, where no such restriction exists. According to the first statistics I found, Firefox is only about half as popular on the Mac as it in on Windows -- and it's still under 10% there, too. Privacy-compromising systems aren't winning today because people seek out systems that compromise their privacy. They're winning because these companies foc…

> Privacy is important, but it's a feature, not a product. You still need to have a great product.

Do you consider Firefox to be a less-than-great product?

I use it as my main browser, from Windows 10. No complaints. I don't experience performance issues or UI issues. Chrome and Firefox are both solid browsers, on Windows at least.

Perhaps Firefox for Mac is a weaker product, and loses to Safari 'fair and square' on quality grounds?

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

#168

Post by j-pb »

Never forget that mozilla puts meta bulls* before solving problems.

Their "spec hackers" decided to kill WebSQL, because of they feared that the available implementation was so HIGH quality that there wouldn't be any implementation diversity.

Instead they gave us the indexedDB garbage dump.

Firefox and Mozilla can go straight to oblivion for all I care.

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

#169

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

> I think you are free to build have other browser engines on iOS

I believe this is false, see 2.5.6 and 4.7 of https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

But they do allow Opera Mini, a 'browser' for iOS where rendering is done in the cloud.

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

#170

Post by detaro »

j-pb wrote: post #168

Never forget that mozilla puts meta bulls * before solving problems. Their "spec hackers" decided to kill WebSQL, because of they feared that the available implementation was so HIGH quality that there wouldn't be any implementation diversity. Instead they gave us the indexedDB garbage dump. Firefox and Mozilla can go straight to oblivion for all I care.

No, because the spec did not actually specify enough to allow implementation diversity or even just the available implementation be updated to a new version that breaks backwards compatibility, and apparently none of the proposers cared enough about the spec to do the work of documenting the intended behavior.

WebSQL implementations later proved to be insecure by not limiting the kind of queries allowed, and strictly speaking any fix of that would have broken the proposed specification.

Post reply on HN