What We're Working on in Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#261

Post by pseudalopex » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 1:52 AM UTC

fabrice_d wrote: post #79

luyu_wu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to note here that Mozilla spends the majority of that money on non-Firefox projects (something that has pissed off people who have wanted to donate to Firefox specifically for ages). Firefox itself gets a sliver of that.

Like many you are likely confused by the Foundation (MoFo) vs. Corp (MoCo) finances. You can only donate to MoFo, and indeed it doesn't spend much (if anything) paying Firefox staff. This is because Firefox staff is on the MoCo payroll, which gets its revenue mostly from their search engine deal with Google. MoCo actually pays MoFo to use the trademarks that are owned by MoFo.

Specifically Mozilla Corporation paid Mozilla Foundation in 2022 under $20 million from over $585 million in revenue.

The relationship between Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation can make some details confusing. But most people who claim what they did never looked at Mozilla finances in my experience.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#262

Post by pseudalopex » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 3:44 AM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #213

strken wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, if only there was a separate corporate entity which could accept donations but which wasn't the Foundation. I wonder what Mozilla would call such a Corporation.

IANAL - I kinda thought a company can't take donations? So obviously the answer is a Firefox Pro that is 99% the same but lets us give them money. Maybe give it crazy features like a compact layout and the ability to run extensions locally.

For profit companies can take donations. Most Thunderbird funding is donations to MZLA Technologies Corporation for example.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#263

Post by JohnFen » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

cassepipe wrote: post #245

JohnFen wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike the "awesome bar" quite a lot. Fortunately, as you say, you can disable a lot of its "awesomeness" (enough that I can live with it), but not all of it. You do have to do a bit of research to find out the various magic "about:config" settings you need to change.

It's easy enough to bring back the search bar without about:config though : right-clik on the chrome then drag and drop the search box item

Sure, but that's a bit different. What I'm talking about is that I want the "awesome bar" to be just a plain URL bar and not be overloaded with other functions like search. You can get very close to this with a few setting changes.

Whether or not you can enable the search bar is unrelated to this. You can enable the search bar without changing the behavior of the "awesome bar". In my personal preferred configuration, I don't enable the search bar and I disable searching in the awesome bar. When I search, I use the search engine's website. That's just my personal preference and I'm not recommending it to others. I'm just mentioning it to illustrate that the two things are independent of each other.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#264

Post by stqism » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 2:17 PM UTC

finack wrote: post #188

mateusz_ wrote: post #184

Priority feature could be, well... Catching up with the standards? It hurts my meow meow when i have to run chrome to use bt or usb api

Those web APIs aren't actually standard (WebUSB, for example, is still in draft status), and they have some gnarly privacy implications. Google steamrolls over standards bodies, and then somehow people believe their browser is the standard. I'm not sure if this is a concerted marketing effort by Google, or simply intellectual laziness. Either way, though, Firefox is not at fault for not supporting non-standard Web AP…

While I’d never personally use Chrome, you can describe this in another way too.

“Chrome supports draft standards like webUSB, which more and more hardware tools and platforms have started to adopt to enable being able to support users regardless of platform, without needing to design native apps for them.”

You can argue this is good in other ways too, it means that instead of a potentially invasive hardware application for something you might configure or update once, you are using something heavily sandboxed that has to request permissions for anything outside the normal. Another benefit is that depending on what the hardware device is, suddenly these hardware devices can be configured on platforms like Linux and FreeBSD, where vendors are much less inclined to support or cater to natively.

Say what you want about draft standards, but Firefox not playing ball and adopting commonly used ones is a massive miss on its part that hurts its ability to be competitive.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#265

Post by stqism » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #11

dbg31415 wrote: post #8

For me, the big thing Firefox needs is better power management. Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Would love to see more focus on energy consumption optimization.

> Mac user here, and streaming video or doing a video call just kills my battery compared to Chrome or Safari. Is it not using hardware acceleration or something?

Probably need to check on this, but I’ve heard of issues around video decode and Firefox.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#266

Post by stqism » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 2:21 PM UTC

finack wrote: post #196

amluto wrote: post #62

I have a suggestion for Mozilla: find use cases that benefit your users and are not possible in other browsers . For example: Browsers are terrible at accessing devices on a local network. Make this work well in Firefox, extending protocols as needed. Browsers are terrible at configuring IoT devices. It device makers are terrible at making apps for this purpose that don’t suck. Make Firefox (on desktop and mobile!) b…

None of these things are in scope for a program that is supposed to browse the web (by fetching web pages and rendering them).

It sounds dumb, but honestly modern browsers feel way closer to the JRE than they did things designed to fetch and render sites.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#267

Post by kwanbix » Sat, Jun 01, 2024, 6:01 PM UTC

pseudalopex wrote: post #258

kwanbix wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that wouldn't be the same. Everybody can work on the engine. Worst case, if google wants to take over, the others can push their own version of the engine, compatible whenever they feel like, and different otherwise. IE was different because was totally closed and only MS could add features.

What do you mean if Google want to take over? They control Chromium now. And maintaining a fork is harder than you think. Even harder when the fork maintainers have different agendas. Even harder when the upstream maintainers are hostile. Look at Manifest V3. Microsoft said the harm to extensions would be acceptable. Opera hedged and echoed Google's FUD about the removed APIs. Brave acknowledged the problem, recommen…

Chromium is open source, so unless google closes it, in which case you can continue from the pre-close corde, you can maintain a fork without the parts that you don't like. I imagine it has to be much simpler than to maintain a full engine that is sadly almost irrelvant with 2.88%. Chrome (65%) + Edge (5.5%) + Opera (2.6%) have almost 75%. Again, I was a huge suporter of Firefox/Mozilla, but I think they didn't know how to fight chrome.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#268

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 9:32 AM UTC

And this is why I stick with Pale Moon. The desktop UX reached maturity years ago, Pale Moon in the spirit of pre 2011 Firefox (which introduced version 4 with many of the controversial Chrome imitating changes beginning from then) offers a powerful and fully customizable browser out of the box with no telemetry or third party bullshit needing 'hardening' tweaks to get rid of. You get the separate search bar, tabs below addressbar and other features that can be changed to your liking directly from the preferences without having to go near about:config.

And goes without saying, full support for powerful XUL extensions and full themes that actually extend the browser's functionality and change its appearance the way it used to be on Firefox back in the day.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#269

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 9:37 AM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #163

JohnFen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dumbing down of applications, including FF, is incredibly annoying and off-putting. I get it, though. FF probably wants to be friendly and approachable to the average non-techie person. I just wish that it (and other applications) would at least have an "expert mode" that isn't aimed just at the casual user.

I'm also for user choice but this consistent notion that uncluttered UIs are only for non-techie people is very annoying. I'm a software developer by trade but that doesn't mean I want every UI to look like the inside of an airplane cockpit or a 90s teletext. The trend in UIs to use space and reduce interface actions to the most important actions is both aesthetically more pleasing and more functional. I do not look…

It's a bullshit trend that goes away from the past where the UI was customizable to whatever level of simplicity or complexity one preferred to now where the developer decides what's good enough for you (in this case a totally dumbed down and limited UI targeted at the great unwashed, who despite all this effort continue to stay with Chrome). Don't like toolbars? Hide them. Remove buttons you don't want. This used to be the norm with all desktop apps until the 2010s when UX mandarins decided that nobody but smartphone users with their constrained screen space and system resources mattered anymore.

Re: What We're Working on in Firefox

#270

Post by willywanker » Sun, Jun 02, 2024, 9:44 AM UTC

Intralexical wrote: post #176

0x_rs wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're talking about the mobile application, where only a small subset of extensions was available for a few years. Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it). https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/21276

> Access to about:config was disabled in official builds (but forks and custom builds such as some on F-Droid still have it). From your link, there are problems that are specific to `about:config` only on mobile, due to Android OS and GeckoView API specifics: - There are preferences that …is reset when the app restarts. - There are many preferences that …do nothing. - There are preferences …which breaks interacting w…

>you’re not the ones on the receiving end when somebody breaks their browser because they didn’t know what they were doing!

about:config already has a warning when you first open it that you'll screw up your settings if you don't know what you're doing. So if someone borks their install as a result, it isn't Mozilla engineer's job to apologize or hand hold them through it.

Every software until the 2010s (Windows itself, with its registry) has had this implicit disclaimer that you forfeit all official support if you dick around with the internals in an non standard way. So why is it now at the other extreme of 'fuck all power users, we will only target those who can't walk and chew gum simultaneously' ?