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Firefox 70

hacks.mozilla.org

201–210 of 468 posts

Re: Firefox 70

#201
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?) What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ... Bit of a stretch…

Yeah, I have to ask what percentage of Firefox developers are paid for by Google's money? I was somehow under the impression that Firefox was developed mostly by volunteers, and so Firefox development would be largely unaffected if Google was out of the picture.

It would be pretty bad if volunteers did most of the work and they spent the literally hundreds of millions in annual revenue on cigars and caviar.

Most of Linux and Firefox development is paid for professional work.

Re: Firefox 70

#202

Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.

With a previous update 1-2 years ago, the password manager seemed to lose the ability to force-create and edit new items, which is necessary if you are using it as a general purpose password manager, or for sites that stubbornly refused to play nice. I switched to LastPass, which worked out fairly well, with the family option, so that my spouse and I can share subsets of passwords with each other. But this FF update does look like they've fixed that issue.

Re: Firefox 70

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium).…

> Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you s uggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser? Jesus Christ reddit, stop.

I have no problem with the government paying to improve free software.

Re: Firefox 70

#204

I recently tried Firefox again and I liked a lot. Only drawback for me at the moment is the lack of hardware video decoding on Linux. I hope it arrives soon.

What does it mean?

Re: Firefox 70

#205
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right ... It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.

The triple negative in your sentence makes it confusing. I expected that you wanted to say : It is conceivable that they would have got funding from somewhere else

I don't disagree. You're not wrong.

Re: Firefox 70

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product). Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for? I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium).…

> Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you s uggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser? Jesus Christ reddit, stop.

What's "reddit" about that comment?

Re: Firefox 70

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, please. You make it sound like Mozilla is equivalent to Facebook. Is that a smear campaign ? You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ? Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.

Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the Foundation). Money donated towards the Foundation doesn't go towards Firefox development. The Corporation has it's own income sources (including money from Google), and actually a lot of money from the Corporation ends up going to the Foundation, to further the mission of "Making web free".

Thank you for reminding us. Every time I somehow forget how the corporation was set up so that money could still be made from SE deals.

Re: Firefox 70

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, please. You make it sound like Mozilla is equivalent to Facebook. Is that a smear campaign ? You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ? Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.

Mozilla fired their CEO, the founder of JS, Brendan Eich, because he made a donation 10 years before to a Christian charity. Many SV people are missing the scope and scale of the impact of having OSS charities engaging in the political campaign – it is renouncing all donations from the other side. It is not their role. Every year I have thousands of dollars that I try to affect to OSS charities, but I’m yet to find a…

I don't think you are ever going to find such a charity. The Red Cross maybe ? (then again, when donating blood, and depending on the country, you have laws in place that prevent some people to donate if they are transgender for instance).

Re: Firefox 70

#209

I am not a Firefox user but know that matching Webkit performance on macOS is going to be very hard. So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70. Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background. Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82 Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11 If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this rel…

Test: open 10 tabs of techmeme.com, on OSX Catalina (10.15 Beta), on a 2015 retina 13" macbook pro. Firefox: Threads 71, %CPU 2.5. Energy: 0.4. Opening the tabs all at once took up ~68% CPU. Energy went up to 75. Safari: threads: 8, %CPU: 0.7-2. When opening the tabs: %CPU: 28%. Energy usage: 2.4. Firefox grew sluggish when opening that many tabs at once. Safari handled it like a champ. Pretty bleak for firefox.

Mozilla's priorities are (and have mostly always been) for FF on Windows. It's a gripe that me (and the great majority of FF devs who use Macs and Linux boxes) have been suffering under for years) that those OSs will just never be the highest priority--and the reasons why have much to do with Apple and their Apple-first mentality for their platform. It is only partly a joke that the last users of Firefox will be software developers and their grandmothers. But there are a lot more grannies than devs.

Re: Firefox 70

#210

Not mentioned in this article (although it's in the Release Notes [1]): the amazing work done regarding the macOS compositor. This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks. [1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new

This is what I am most excited about. I have been using the improvements through nightly since they were released, I think little more than a month, and I couldn't be happier. I'd hate to have to use Chrome and I welcome the competition to webkit.
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