321–330 of 336 posts
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I last used Firefox in December 2017, and there was something else weird that made me stop using it. I'm waiting for Mozilla servo to be released as a standalone browser that doesn't use more memory than chrome, and doesn't have trash font support. Right now it's worse than chrome for battery life and RAM usage on Windows.
I would be more concerned that you have figured out how to travel forward in time.
Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of les…
> Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. Humans are loss-sensitive. When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased . Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire. To some, this is…
Certainly you can: it's software--anything is possible.
The issue is that they don't want to make the effort. I think this is because the developers are no longer the people who built Firefox, and they want to reinvent Firefox and put their own stamp on it--IOW, it's NIH.
I think it's also a matter of the higher-up execs and board members having non-technical goals. It's similar to when a successful, focused company is bought by a larger one, and its popular product is canceled, its development team reassigned to other tasks in the new company. The users are left hanging, their software/product/service being yanked out from under them. At least Firefox is FOSS, so it can be continued, but of course that takes a lot of manpower nowadays. Hopefully Pale Moon will sustain the vision of the original Phoenix.
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Sufficient extension points with APIs to reimplement the interesting addons should have been made available and working years before dropping compatibility. From the conversations happening around the most popular addons, that has not been the case. It may be that the old APIs need to die; but this way isn't the way to kill the old API. You need as near to complete overlapping for a long time to get people to port ov…
But this is not a secret. This has been discussed repeatedly for at least 5 years now. The current XUL methodology CANNOT sustain, and everyone knew this. But everyone also knew Mozilla was famous for putting off being confrontational, so nobody actually thought this was going to happen, so nobody really communicated with mozilla on what would be needed to avoid this happening. Now Mozilla has finally set a date (whi…
We have loudly protested. We have explained in excruciating detail how Firefox without XUL is not Firefox, and how a non-XUL Firefox will not meet our needs.
The correct response from Mozilla would have been to make XUL work with e10s, regardless of whether it's easy or fun to do so. The actual response from Mozilla has been, "Nah, that would be too hard. Besides, you don't really want XUL, because it lets in the malware bogeyman. We'll just rip it out. Don't worry, you'll thank us later."
This is heard as, "We don't care about you. We don't want your kind of users. We want those users, the ones who have switched to Chrome. You can sit on an old, outdated version until it won't load web sites anymore, and you can be constrained to the dustbin of history, where you belong."
I've no doubt there are Mozillians who do not feel that way (e.g. the Pentadactyl developers who work at Mozilla and quietly update it to work with newer versions), but that is how the message from Mozilla comes across. Most importantly, that is the net effect of Mozilla's policy.
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> The current XUL methodology CANNOT sustain, and everyone knew this. Yet we still don't have a replacement for even a tenth of what it could do today! Once Firefox 57 is released, I'll lose the ability to use Firefox at all, and won't be able to regain it for several years. Just because no one though to consider what APIs one might have to provide before deprecating the old ones.
Partially because when Mozilla initially said "XUL is going away, what do you guys need?" Everyone just laughed at them and said "No, it's not, you'll never replace it because it is too important in extensions", and then all went away. Where are the specs for what replaces it supposed to come from? And when they asked for those specs and got little answers, what were they supposed to do? Run around screaming "No we'r…
1. There's no guarantee that Mozilla will actually implement such APIs, and no guarantee that they will actually support them in the future. If past behavior indicates future behavior, they will support them for 12-18 months and then say, "It's not worth the effort anymore. But here's a new bundled Facebook plugin that we're totally not being paid to put in. Have fun!"
2. More importantly, many of these extensions would never have come to exist if their authors had had to beg Mozilla to implement an API first. If XUL had never existed, would ad-blocking extensions have ever been created? I can imagine the Bugzilla pages now: "This is not a priority for our limited manpower. Restricting this issue due to advocacy. You can discuss it further on the mailing list."
Firefox - XUL != Firefox
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Did you request this with your plugin/addon developers, or with mozilla yourself through their many methods of contact for this if you are a plugin/addon developer? I don't get why addon/plugin developers not communicating upstream is the problem of upstream.
I communicated it through the bugtracker comments and the comments on the Mozilla blog. On every announcement regarding this for the past months. I’ve not gotten any answer, nor has any solution been implemented or suggested.
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Thanks for the lengthy explanation, but my impression is that most people's assessments in here are of the form "Firefox is slow, but it has better addons". The choice you present therefore actually boils down to A) Continue being slow and have better addons; B) Become fast at the expense of worse addons (probably worse than Chrome rather than merely the same, as more users generally means more developers). Is it rea…
> Is it really sensible for FF to give up its advantage...? That's the bet-the-company question, isn't it? Only history will tell, but I think the judgement of Mozilla in this matter is better than that of the commenters on this website, who have less data, represent a minority of users, and are prone to complaining.
This is the same as saying, "The judgment of the company is better than the judgment of their customers who say they will stop using their product if the company follows through on their plans."
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Well, you may be right about the outrage. I don't have any outrage, and I want to see competition in the browser space, and I actually use firefox. I am, however, as a "power-user", mostly annoyed by the direction Firefox has gone in. It often feels like they're apeing Chrome, especially since Australis took a very similar feel to the Chrome UI. If I wanted to use Chrome, it's over there. No outrage, and for all I kn…
> once the extensions get comparatively neutered My impression is that's not an accurate characterization; do anyone know of a serious analysis that supports it? As I said in the GP, there's not much concern with the facts and merits; people (maybe not the parent) just want to act out.
They are completely killing the old extensions APIs and replacing them with a much more limited system. The browser is nowhere near as extensible with Web Extensions.
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I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to modify your workflow, etc.
Thanks for addressing my comment. Of course I can't speak for everyone (and neither can you or anyone else), but to my general point ... > people who advocated for them feel betrayed ... Consider how strong an emotional response that is to a search engine change, etc., especially from people very familiar with IT and capable of adjusting to change (changing the default search engine, for example), and in a context wh…
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But Mozilla cares about average users, not about making something for power-users only. That seems to be the big conflict here: power users saying "you've lost the masses, so make something for us" while Mozilla's mission is making something that would be good for the masses, and they'd rather fail trying than failing that mission by abandoning it.
Except this doesn't make sense. The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from down…