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Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

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Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#381

Post by MaxBarraclough »

fastball wrote: post #80
causality0 wrote: post #2

Personally and strictly my own ignorant and informal opinion, Firefox and by extension Mozilla Corp. was doomed the moment it decided to compete with Chrome by being more like Chrome. Firefox built its userbase by being different than the dominant browser, then decided the only way to not die was to be exactly like the dominant browser except with less icky behind-the-scenes privacy behavior. That was a fundamental m…

I don't use FF because I still find SpiderMonkey (its JS engine) to be slower than V8.

You mean you find the browser to be slower? There's more to a browser than its JavaScript engine. Firefox and Chrome also use entirely different rendering engines.

As for which browser really is faster, it depends on the workload. Someone already linked to https://areWeFastYet.com/

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#382

Post by MaxBarraclough »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #373

I have to chime in... Mozilla seems to pull back on its investment in web standards and browser engine development for revenue reasons. Instead focusing on Pocket, VPN services and similar stuff, all the while keeping up a dubious privacy-advocating public image. Pocket, Mozilla VPN etc might look like they promise more short-term revenue. My view is that Mozilla wants to complete its metamorphosis into a near-irrele…

> Sure, they struggled to survive going down the developer-centric "poweruser" road. I don't dispute that.

Did they really go down that road? The general perception is that they've just been copying Chrome for years.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#383

Post by glenstein »

lrem wrote: post #37
TimSchumann wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to disagree with this sentiment. I don't use firefox as my main browser because it's better than Chrome, I use it because it's not google.

Seeing Google from the inside, I have way more trust in it than the general public. But I do use Firefox as my personal browser because I like what they're doing with the tech stack. Having everyone just slap their logo on Chromium sounds like a way towards eventual stagnation.

This is the reason why I was initially excited about, and then disenchanted with Vivaldi. I initially had the impression that they weren't going to use Chromium, and that their return to Opera's roots meant returning to the spirit of innovation that made Opera so compelling back in the day (I will never stop singing the praises of Opera Unite). But then I learned that Vivaldi, too, would be based on Chromium.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#384

Post by hvis »

Lammy wrote: post #132
KingOfCoders wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left FF several times for being slow, being a memory hog, dropping extensions, not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) and come back from Chrome for ideological reasons. I might not be the core audience or user group, but I have not left because of i.) - iv.).

> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) They made a pretty huge deal about the Tab Groups (aka Panorama) feature of Firefox 4 in 2010; designed by Aza Raskin! https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azaras... But then it was removed in 2016 because few people really used it (or few people who had telemetry enabled, at least): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal

Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#385

Post by zzo38computer »

c-smile wrote: post #235
goto11 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you "radically simplify" the web without causing breakage?

Let's imagine a browser (UA) that supports basics of HTML (language portion of HTML5) and CSS (e.g. v 2.1). Yet it has WebVM instead of JS. WebVM is a virtual machine similar to JavaVM but with DOM, CSSOM and layout APIs exposed in it as a runtime. So if some site needs flexbox in its CSS then it can be included as: If JS then and so on. This would allow a) keep browser small and maintainable and b) open room for inn…

What is needed in some ability to identify the extension, so that the user may substitute their own, or may want to cache it instead. This would also improve speed, since it can avoid download it for each separate web page, and can also substitute a native code implementation.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#386

Post by seba_dos1 »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #289
Dahoon wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you didn't measure it. Worthless opinions as to me on my gaming pc chrome is most definitely slower. Both are opinions and worthless without numbers.

Real world benchmarks show they are neck and neck leap frogging each other all the time, so both of you are wrong; they're generally so close a human can't tell the difference, it's all biases these days unless someone shows you the numbers. Lots of people don't realize the extensions they add can also severely upset performance, but that's on the user. My 4 year old computer works just fine with both of them and 4 o…

It also depends a lot on use cases and available resources. When on a single or just a few tabs, my perception usually favored Chrome, but in real usage I'm often keeping hundreds of tabs open and Firefox keeps being speedy enough most of the time while Chrome becomes unbearable very quickly.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#387

Post by Lammy »

hvis wrote: post #384
Lammy wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not adding power features (vertical tree tabs) They made a pretty huge deal about the Tab Groups (aka Panorama) feature of Firefox 4 in 2010; designed by Aza Raskin! https://web.archive.org/web/20101105212333/http://www.azaras... But then it was removed in 2016 because few people really used it (or few people who had telemetry enabled, at least): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-removal

Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

I was already a full-time Tree Style Tab user by the time FF4 Beta came around in 2010 so I'm probably part of the reason Panorama wasn't popular enough :p

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#388

Post by freshsqueeze »

ghevshoo wrote: post #54

Yesterday I started donating $10/month to the Mozilla Foundation. TIL it’s not the Mozilla Foundation that develops Firefox. I stopped using Chrome when they added the “feature” that logging into gmail was the same as logging into the browser. If there was a little notification to the top right in the Firefox with a link to “pay”, even if it was optional, there is some proportion of users who would. And I would bet t…

Your $10/month donation will go straight into paying their CEO $3 million dollars per year and her inner circle.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#389

Post by freshsqueeze »

alcoholic_byte wrote: post #298
sp332 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's .org and the donation does not fund Firefox development or any other activity of the Mozilla Corporation.

When you go to https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ and you click on "Donate" you are directed to https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/ . The sidebar on the donation-page clearly states: "We are proudly non-profit, non-corporate and non-compromised. Thousands of people like ...." So I think donations are in good hands there.

Donations went to paying Mitchell Baker millions of dollars per year, and all the other execs.

Re: Mozilla’s Uncertain Future

#390

Post by dralley »

detaro wrote: post #352
dralley wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Mozilla Corporation needs to exist for various legal reasons, and that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons. Whereas Linux Mint literally just operates a Patreon / Paypal / Bitcoin account and distributes the funds between a couple of people.

> that it's impossible for Mozilla Foundation to channel funds to Mozilla Corporation for other legal reasons Do you know details about that? I can imagine that there'd be tax complications, but would have expected a foundation could buy things/services from an entity it owns.

I'm not a lawyer but I can only imagine it's quite tricky when the Foundation is a tax-exempt charity and the funds in question are being used to the primary benefit of a for-profit entity which it owns. It would be a bit like having your cake and eating it too, in terms of the legal provisions of the tax code.
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