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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#301

Post by gruez »

rndgermandude wrote: post #201
Brakenshire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

Can you share your patches? I'm still using 52esr in some very limited contexts and an upgrade would be great

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#302

Post by atesti »

jefftk wrote: post #164
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster. Really the parent commenter is right: Chrome is dominant only because of its huge marketing budget. P.S. Chrome is also buggy as hell and crashes pages all the time , which Firefox doesn't do.

> I actually bothered to load both side-by-side and check. Firefox loads pages faster Are you comparing current Chrome to current Firefox? Relatively recently, compared to the overall trend we're seeing here, Firefox got much faster than it had been: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/introducing-firefox... The discussion above, however, is about how Chrome came to grow so much while Firefox shrank so much, and…

Going fullscreen in youtube is always instant in Chrome. In Firefox however, it is very slow (like 5s) when you have 1000 tabs open.

Even opening a select box is slow, if you have several 1000 tabs.

Funny enough, opening a new window (and keeping all the other tabs open) makes it fast again, if you are in that window.

Seems like Firefox has some slow code paths, like notifying every tab about going fullscreen?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#303

Post by atesti »

rndgermandude wrote: post #201
Brakenshire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25% seems like much too high a number for the group you’re talking about. I’d be interested to see some data on level of technical engagement and knowledge, but in my experience a large percentage of users don’t even have a clear idea of what a browser is. The reason Firefox has lost market share in my opinion is because: i) Chrome is pushed by Google.com, which has a near monopoly on search ii) Chrome was bundled an…

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

I noticed the same thing when the certificate fisasco happend: There was this one special XPI file they pushed via Normandy and I installed it manually (it was posted in some discussion forms) to get my extensions running again without restarting Firefox.

If one unzips this tiny XPI, one finds javascript code which can directly install a certificate into the master store.

So there is indeed a very powerful extension system available, but only to Mozilla itself who can sign such extensions.

Probably all the old stuff can be brought back easily.

Please put your comment in a blog! Back then I searched for these topics and found nothing

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#304

Post by csande17 »

chowells wrote: post #250
fartcannon wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh jees, is that what's happening? If they're only building for telemetry data, theyre screwed. Gonna end up with a browser for people who think the internet is a series of tubes.

You believe developers don't understand telemetry and leave it enabled because it helps development of the tools they use? This whole anti-telemetry outrage is so manufactured and boring.

I'm a developer, and I disable telemetry whenever possible, including in Firefox. I do this because I value my privacy (the same reason I use Firefox), and I don't want my system to make network requests unnecessarily. The way I see it, there are two possibilities:

(1) A significant portion of Firefox users think like me. In this case, Mozilla should not rely on telemetry because it excludes a sizeable portion of their userbase, and one that likely correlates with things like "believes in Mozilla's stated core philosophy" and "is passionate enough about browsers to recommend them to people".

(2) Not many Firefox users think like me. In this case, it's pointless for me to enable telemetry because they'll just ignore my needs anyway. "It is not worth supporting this feature, the data shows that 99% of people do not use it!" won't change if the number is actually 98.99%.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#305

Post by cassepipe »

I am really surprised they did not go for the VPN offer way sooner. It's a massive market in which all that matters in how much you trust your VPN provider. And the only insurance you've got is your VPN provider telling you they don't collect data which is hard to believe considering how much money user data is worth. The only thing Mozilla has plenty is people trusting that they are fighting for greater privacy as they've always have. It seems so obvious that I would like to know if there's a reason they did not go for that sooner. Consider also that integrating a user-friendly Mozilla VPN manager in the browser could bump Firefox downloads. So why?

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#306

Post by remexre »

setzer22 wrote: post #168
andybak wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't need the newest standards, 2000 web works perfectly fine for me How about layouts being broken because (funnily enough) web developers are desperate to use features such as grids and flexbox that make their jobs less painfully awful? Presuming you're a developer - surely you can sympathise with the desire to get people to upgrade their browsers so that webdev's lives are made more pleasant?

I, for one, think the HTML API (as in, the interface presented to the programmer, not talking about any other API meaning here) couldn't be worse. How many attributes do you need to enable to place two pictures side by side in vanilla CSS? Is that composable, would the same set of flags work for two paragraphs? What about two tables? HTML/CSS was never designed for the web we have ended up with, and I don't see how f…

I believe flexbox does actually work for those cases, assuming you set the images/paragraphs/tables to be block elements (or wrap them in divs)?

Flexbox and Grid seem to me like recognition that the existing CSS primitives were designed for laying out documents, and don't fit well for creating UIs.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#307

Post by marcinzm »

tomc1985 wrote: post #279
marcinzm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can do less but won't cause your browser stability, performance and other issues. Nor will writing them require reading the Firefox source code. XUL extensions routinely hijacked random internal Firefox functions which is why many had issues being installed together. Then all of it was executed in a single context (which is why they could hijack those functions to begin with) along with the UI and web page Javascr…

Those are all things they could have fixed incrementially, over time, but chose not to.

The end result would have been the same: broken backwards compatibility. The fundamental design of the original extensions was incompatible with a modern browser model (APIs only rather than hacking internal functions, separate contexts for everything, multiple processes, etc.). They chose to do it one go rather than piecemeal. So rather than having to check every version if some functionality your extension depends on is being removed you had to rewrite it once (well twice which was a mistake on their part).

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#308

Post by rndgermandude »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #291
rndgermandude wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s only relatively recently with Electrolysis and Firefox Quantum that Firefox has regained a technical parity or superiority. And those changes depended on specifying a proper UI and Extension API which is the reason why the browser is no longer so customisable. No, they did not. Electrolysis was around before WebExtensions. Sure, Electrolysis wasn't backwards compatible and a lot of existing extensions had to re…

The quantum versions of firefox are a lot more stable than the previous generation. Probably because they cut down on how many things extensions could get their grimey little fingers into. Also getting rid of more XUL helped. The new firefox is scads better than the old one. Sure I miss some extensions but that just is what it is.

Why do people keep saying they got rid of XUL? It's just not true. It's still there to this very day. Just look at browser.xhtml (the main browser UI file); it's a mix of HTML and XUL and the body tag is particularly interesting.
The first child element of that body is currently:
That's not HTML ;)

They are trying to replace XUL with HTML and made some progress towards that. For starters they removed most or all of XBL.

From the perspective of an add-on dev it wouldn't have made much of a difference, it used to be manipulating a XUL DOM, now would have been manipulating a mixed XUL/HTML DOM, in the future it would have been manipulating an HTML DOM, not much difference except for tag names and attributes names really, and the rest was js and css.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#309

Post by jasonv »

This thread, paired with the Google/deprecation thread, feel ironically aligned.

Mozilla seems to be deprecating parts of their organization, and Google deprecates products constantly... except for Chrome. Chrome has had a fairly reliable and well maintained product path.

I used to use Firefox constantly, but between Safari being excellent on my Mac, and Chrome being preferable for work related things -- and their decent profile synchronization, I find myself a little mystified every time I go back to Firefox for a spell. Just little things, but they definitely feel like the 3rd wheel now.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#310

Post by remexre »

gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #252
gvjddbnvdrbv wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really are not. Even Mozilla would not make that claim.

So would anyone care to explain how vimperiator style customization is possible with webextensions? Newer Firefox explicitly does not support that level of customization.

Never used Vimperator, but I'm happily typing this message in an embedded Vim using SurfingKeys on Firefox 97.
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