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Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

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Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#341

Post by userbinator »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #235
goatinaboat wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webdevs don’t seem to have much of a user-centric view of the sites they develop. The vast majority of use cases on the web are “I want to see a list of options then fill in a form”. All the tech needed to shop online or bank or pay bills or book travel or whatever existed 20 years ago (SSL being the last piece of the puzzle, all the rest is just plain HTML).

If form controls like select lists and checkboxes were style-able and compose-able I think it would reduce the need for JS in many cases. Multi select in particular feels like it's stuck in the 90's. Also select's lack of consistent search capabilities is painful.

Sorry, I'm not convinced that UI elements need to be "style-able" by the site. Every site ends up being slightly different from others as a result, because it feels the need to reinvent its own custom UI controls with their own behaviour inconsistent from the OS or even the browser's UI. (I have the same gripe about "native" Electron apps.)

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#342

Post by lightedman »

pjmlp wrote: post #336
notyourword wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the word schizophrenic like that contributes to the stigma associated with psychotic mental illness. It is ableist to use a disability you don't have as a metaphor.

So the censorship of how we are allowed to speak has arrived to HN?

It was always here, right in the rules dictating how you are to speak.

Corporations acting like dictators. Makes you feel all nice and warm, doesn't it?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#343

Post by torben-friis »

GeekyBear wrote: post #301
torben-friis wrote: post #215

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers…

The solution is to rebuild Firefox to use Core Animation to draw the window contents and then send only changes to that content to the graphics compositor after that instead of using the long deprecated OpenGL implementation it currently uses that repaints the whole screen over and over, so it's hardly surprising to see such a massive change take quite a while to implement. The earliest changes in this process have f…

Glad to hear that there's finally progress being made!(or if it has been on the way all this time, glad to see that it's finally getting to the point where final users can see a difference).

Are you involved in the fix? If so, do you have a rough ETA for the remaining changes?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#344

Post by paulcarroty »

Does Firefox really want to beat Chrome? Netmarketshare shows "Firefox - 9.28%, IE - 8.29%" on desktop/laptops, it's not the position to win the race.

Also, Firefox sends analytics/telemetry to Google - https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604...

Very strange decision for competing products, don't you?

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#345

Post by javajosh »

goatinaboat wrote: post #287
pjmlp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully agree, plain old cached SSR with a little sprinkle of JavaScript when it really matters.

The thing is too, anyone can do that. HTML forms are easy, generating HTML is easy. There just doesn’t need to be any webdevs, the dedicated role doesn’t need to exist. No amount of trying to rebrand themselves as “full stack engineers” will save them when that realisation dawns on the people paying their over-inflated salaries!

As long as the web is a viable software distribution platform, the world will need "webdevs". 2019 is still a chaotic time for the platform, and winners and losers still haven't really shaken out, not even at a basic architectural level. There are profound questions about what computation gets done where, what side-effects happen where, which in turn influences everything about how software is built, tested, distributed, and run, and yet they aren't really answered so much as philosophized about.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#346

Post by csdreamer7 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #172
csdreamer7 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand how Mozilla has over a thousand employees and over 500 million dollars in annual revenue. Mostly agree. > The whole point of Mozilla is supposed to be Firefox and Thunderbird. I can understand your view. With that said, I am quite happy they funded Rust and also gave a grant to the Godot project to develop their webassembly interface.

I'm not sure it's possible to put a price on Rust (probably in single-digit millions so far), but that Godot grant was $50k. That's pocket money for a $500m org.

It is, but it still a crucial amount of money for an open source project breaking through that obscurity barrier.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#347

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

Isinlor wrote: post #193
NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

I use Firefox all the time and use it for web development. But modern frontend stack - with the whole pile of transpilers, uglifiers, and what not - is almost unusable with Firefox, because source maps don't work with Webpack. https://github.com/webpack/webpack/issues/1194 This put me in a position where I had to choose between switching to Chrome for development or not using Webpack that comes nicely integrated into…

Your linked issue says that certain types of source maps will work with Firefox. Can't you just use one of the working options (e.g, "eval-source-map" works but "cheap-source-map" does not).

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#348

Post by huehehue »

green-eclipse wrote: post #333
echelon wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you cite this? I'm collecting a laundry list of reasons Google has degraded the web, and this is certainly evidence.

If you go back in time far enough, Google has improved the web exponentially more than it has harmed it.

This is a bit hard to say, right? Google is also responsible for the normalization of aggressive user tracking and the creation of the ad-ridden tire fire that is the modern internet.

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#349

Post by [deleted] »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #235
goatinaboat wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webdevs don’t seem to have much of a user-centric view of the sites they develop. The vast majority of use cases on the web are “I want to see a list of options then fill in a form”. All the tech needed to shop online or bank or pay bills or book travel or whatever existed 20 years ago (SSL being the last piece of the puzzle, all the rest is just plain HTML).

If form controls like select lists and checkboxes were style-able and compose-able I think it would reduce the need for JS in many cases. Multi select in particular feels like it's stuck in the 90's. Also select's lack of consistent search capabilities is painful.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox has lots of room to improve if it wants to beat Chrome

#350

Post by marmada »

NullInvictus wrote: post #32

I haven't really met anyone who is particularly bothered by these issues. They certainly should be addressed to some degree, but the issues I find people are bothered about in Firefox are something that Mozilla has very little control over: Bugs in sites. As a full-time firefox user, I commonly find that sites have bugs, and when I boot it up in Chrome just to check my hunch, they don't manifest. It's pretty easy to…

The thing is, chrome follows the spec. If the website breaks with Firefox, then maybe the problem is with Firefox (a bug, an unimplemented feature) itself rather then Chrome.
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