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Firefox 62.0 Released

mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#271

Post by hazz99 »

Endy wrote: post #205
coffeefirst wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep trying to switch. The thing that stops me is it chokes on big single page apps. Arguably the problem is the sites being choked on (too much javascript) but there's not much I can do about that.

Stop trying to do things in your browser that should be their own independent programs.

I believe the future is with powerful web apps. They're cross-platform & often easy to use. I don't have to worry about downloading & installing. In the future, they'll be able to run as efficiently as non-browser applications.

What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-cases?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#272

Post by Nadya »

hazz99 wrote: post #271
Endy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to do things in your browser that should be their own independent programs.

I believe the future is with powerful web apps. They're cross-platform & often easy to use. I don't have to worry about downloading & installing. In the future, they'll be able to run as efficiently as non-browser applications. What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-case…

>What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-cases?

I'm an edge case, but nearly everything. I prefer to not only "own" the program so that I may use it beyond the lifespan of the creator or hosting company supports it but I also prefer to own my files (cloud storage is prohibitively expensive for me). At $0.02 per GB per month I would be spending in excess of >$4,000/yr - and that's just my photos. It would be in excess of $10,000/yr if I also wanted to store videos.

For me to move into an "online, cloud-based software" world online storage would have to be price competitive with purchasing my own local storage for the TB's of data I have and the software would have to be fast enough to work on the files and work with whichever cloud storage I was using. (Let's also pretend that internet is always-present and always-fast-enough.)

On the note of expensive cloud storage... non-affiliated shout-out to Backblaze. I'm probably a borderline "abusive user", $5/mo is an absolute steal to backup the huge amount of data I backup with them.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#273

Post by 394549 »

dblohm7 wrote: post #265
394549 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying it's unsustainable to maintain an application suitable for power users? It'll definitely take more effort than maintaining a restrictive, dumbed-down app; but it's certainly not impossible and I think the benefit is worth it.

I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use.

> I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use.

There isn't one kind of "power user," especially for something like a web browser. If you want to support power users, you probably will need to support hundreds of specialized features, many of which won't be used my everyone. If you don't do that, then I think it's very unlikely that you support power users [1]. Apps with feature-sets like this exist, so I think it's wrong to make a blanket statement that it's unsustainable.

I'm not saying it's always sustainable either: if you're a two man team at a small company, you probably can't manage to support much more than the core user group. However, Mozilla's big and I think they need to offer something unique compared to Chrome and Safari.

[1] As opposed to developers or extension-writers. My definition of power user excludes people who extensively modify the software themselves.

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#274

Post by Endy »

hazz99 wrote: post #271
Endy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop trying to do things in your browser that should be their own independent programs.

I believe the future is with powerful web apps. They're cross-platform & often easy to use. I don't have to worry about downloading & installing. In the future, they'll be able to run as efficiently as non-browser applications. What should be its "own independent program"? Where do we draw that line? Why should we be constrained to our own offline system, when the web enables millions of (more) user-friendly use-case…

For me, I want to download and install everything. I want every small thing I do to be its own program, with its own name.

I want to be able to remove my network card and still have programs which work. I want to own everything about my own PC and all the data that enters or leaves it. When everything's in the browser, that's not possible, because you're essentially turning a PC back into a network terminal. I want my computer to be mine. I want my data to be mine. I do not want anyone or any program to have the authority to edit data on my PC over a network without my clear consent. And if you say that installing and/or activating the browser executable means I'm giving consent to it to edit data freely on my machine, then I think I'm going to need to go a different way than the Web.

We need the freedom to have our own computers, our own thoughts, our own data. We need to be able to say at a user level that we wish to interact with this data in our way, rather than "the Web way". Not every piece of data needs to be viewed or manipulated in a way that works in a Web browser. And the processor load should absolutely be a concern. A well-written and optimized program written in asm will always run faster and better when compared to a "program" written in a web-deployed JavaScript on top of a browser.

Why should we be constrained by the lowest common denominator of the Web, when having the ability to use our own offline system enables the use of millions of more user-focused use-cases?

Re: Firefox 62.0 Released

#275

Post by dblohm7 »

394549 wrote: post #273
dblohm7 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use.

> I'm saying that it's unsustainable to maintain a hundreds of features for the benefit of different slices of 1% use. There isn't one kind of "power user," especially for something like a web browser. If you want to support power users, you probably will need to support hundreds of specialized features, many of which won't be used my everyone. If you don't do that, then I think it's very unlikely that you support po…

> Mozilla's big and I think they need to offer something unique compared to Chrome and Safari

Mozilla is tiny compared to the size of the Chrome team.

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