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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

#31

Post by [deleted] »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #25
capableweb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that it's policy-enforced and what Apple really has problems with is not browsers as a concept (dynamically loading and rendering data) but rather the execution engine that websites usually use (JavaScript) and seeing that as a too-large-to-review area where they want to avoid having vulnerabilities in applications published on App Store. Or it's a anti-competitive move disguised as a "avoid vulnera…

interesting. But I can’t help but think by that logic Facebook should be too large to review.

[deleted]

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

#32

Post by robin_reala »

reubenmorais wrote: post #22
radarsat1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it technically enforced though, I am curious. I mean, if I wrote an application that downloaded text files and rendered the text to the screen, I am sure that would be possible. If I wanted to add images to draw next to the text I am sure it is feasible. So how can one technically prohibit doing that? Implementation-wise, how is a web browser really that different from e.g. a video game? Or is it only policy-e…

I don't know the details first hand, so take this with a grain of salt, but this is what I remember from talking to engineers who explored this possibility over the years: You can't ship a native JIT (execute native code from the heap), I think it's enforced automatically by the App Store. So shipping your own JavaScript engine is out. You can't download and interpret third-party code, I think this is enforced by hum…

This is exactly what Chrome on iOS did: they embedded their own networking stack, but reused WebKit and JSC.

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

#33

Post by ppfrc »

fwn wrote: post #26
ppfrc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine not being from the US, donating to Mozilla so they improve Firefox, and they instead spend the money on translating the USA presidential election.

Right now my parent is getting downvoted but I think that there's a great truth in this comment: A lack of focus generally hurts an organizations legitimacy in the eyes of it's donors. Increasing the quality of a countries national elections isn't a goal I'd immediately assume to be part of Mozillas mission, so I'd be disappointed about such a project. They could go the more transparent route and create a second orga…

That's exactly my point. The Mozilla Corporation executives want money for their left-wing causes, so they are basically stealing it from Firefox's pockets.

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

#34

Post by decasteve »

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.

Anti-trust? Or have the lawyers for Apple (and Google) found the legalese to prevent this possibility?

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

#35

Post by [deleted] »

radarsat1 wrote: post #18
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.

How is it technically enforced though, I am curious. I mean, if I wrote an application that downloaded text files and rendered the text to the screen, I am sure that would be possible. If I wanted to add images to draw next to the text I am sure it is feasible. So how can one technically prohibit doing that? Implementation-wise, how is a web browser really that different from e.g. a video game? Or is it only policy-e…

[deleted]

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

#36

Post by vbezhenar »

fwn wrote: post #26
ppfrc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine not being from the US, donating to Mozilla so they improve Firefox, and they instead spend the money on translating the USA presidential election.

Right now my parent is getting downvoted but I think that there's a great truth in this comment: A lack of focus generally hurts an organizations legitimacy in the eyes of it's donors. Increasing the quality of a countries national elections isn't a goal I'd immediately assume to be part of Mozillas mission, so I'd be disappointed about such a project. They could go the more transparent route and create a second orga…

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

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

#37

Post by pdpi »

scarface74 wrote: post #15
simion314 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need JS to get 2% more faster, the limits of those speed improvements were reached, web assembly combined with a compiled language could offer more speed. I would like to see Firefox move faster in implementing good web APIs, like the lazy loading of images, push for HTML and CSS improvements(like let me customize the numeric text input arrows with css instead of forcing me to use a JS library) . Maybe the R…

Wasn’t Netscape the case study of why you shouldn’t do a full rewrite?

Which is a lesson they learnt well. So they’re treating Servo as a research project, chunking it into libraries, and retrofitting those libraries into the Firefox mainline.

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

#38

Post by jeltz »

phatfish wrote: post #10
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

But they get shouted down whenever they try to monetise independently, can't have it both ways. Either more users start donating $5-10 a month (seems worth it to me given the time I spend with their product) or they take the Google money and deal with the conflict of interest best they can. A Shuttelworth style billionaire benefactor would work as well, but I doubt one will come from the tech community as Firefox is…

The reason that they get shouted down is because every time they have tried to make money in other ways it has been done in shady ways. Like giving away the browsing data of their German users to Cliqz (would probably have been illegal post-GDPR) or running guerilla marketing for Mr Robot in Shield Studies (which reduces the trust from people who enabled Shield to help Mozilla with studies).

Almost nobody complains about the them taking money from Yahoo and Google for higher placement in the search engine list. And if their other revenue streams had been as transparent I think people had been fine.

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

#39

Post by KonkeyDong69 »

radarsat1 wrote: post #21
sharpneli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One cannot have writeable executable memory on iOS (apple can, we cannot). Thus one cannot make a JIT compiler for js and thus pages are slow. Game engines such as Unity use il2cpp to go from the C# stuff into C++ that can be statically compiled as running the C# as bytecode would be too slow without a jitter.

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.

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

#40

Post by extropy »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #25
capableweb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess would be that it's policy-enforced and what Apple really has problems with is not browsers as a concept (dynamically loading and rendering data) but rather the execution engine that websites usually use (JavaScript) and seeing that as a too-large-to-review area where they want to avoid having vulnerabilities in applications published on App Store. Or it's a anti-competitive move disguised as a "avoid vulnera…

interesting. But I can’t help but think by that logic Facebook should be too large to review.

Facebook does have code that dynamically compiles arbitrary input to machine code.

That's the part Apple is not allowing in third party apps.

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