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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#491

Post by icebraining »

nikcub wrote: post #425
nine_k wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably forgot to consider how much money / effort have Google wasted on projects that did not pan out. Their flagship products, like Hangouts, still have long-standing issues. Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.

Since Ruth Porat came in as CFO Google has reduced other projects spending to $3.5B p.a on $80B of revenue - less than 5% Mozilla has revenue of $420M p.a - I don't know what they spent on Firefox OS but it would have been a big bet (hundreds of millions?). At the same time their Firefox marketshare was reduced.

In 2015, they only spent ~$215M on software development in total, so they couldn't have spent hundreds of millions on FxOS alone.

Plus, I think that view - that FF marketshare was reduced, therefore they weren't investing in it enough - is shortsighted. The improvements that have been landing on FF lately are the result of work being done for a long time. And you can't just dump more money into a project and expect it to be finished sooner - see The Mythical Man-Month.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#492

Post by btschaegg »

mal808 wrote: post #445
ce4 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buzz, Wave, Orkut, Talk, Hangouts, Google Plus, Allo, Duo, forced YouTube comments merge to G+

Wave was amazing!

Yeah, totally. I'm still puzzled as to why they killed it - at one point they told us "We only want to show it to a couple of invited people" and the next moment the message was that it didn't get enough traction. Go figure.

Edit: Although, thinking about it, it's really ironic how the Google project inspired by Firefly got canceled way too early.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#493

Post by stuaxo »

bad_user wrote: post #422
koolba wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't say Mozilla and squander in the same sentence without referencing their phone OS.

Much of that effort has also gone into Firefox for Android. Which I might say, it has been the only Android browser supporting extensions and quite a nice browser overall ;-) Does Microsoft make a browser for Android? Does Apple?

Indeed, I'm pretty sure the phone efforts helped with memory usage and performance.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#494

Post by Brakenshire »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #478
int_19h wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.

As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the…

Google closed off the market with Android One. In another world they couldn't get it together, or weren't interested in low margin competition. Firefox OS was a reasonable bet, it could have paid off, even if the technology was manifestly limited at the time. I actually wish they'd kept it going as an ongoing experiment, with a very low budget, once they'd done the work to get it running on a device like the Nexus 5, you'd have thought improvements would flow almost automatically from the work on the browser.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#495

Post by imtringued »

jrnichols wrote: post #382
Sylos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and…

"It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share," I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.

I use firefox on linux but when I need flash (maybe once a year) then I use chrome. I wouldn't be suprised if normal users that regularly depend on flash just want a browser that always works instead of switching between two browsers.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#496

Post by wruza »

IanCal wrote: post #449
int_19h wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?

If I could have invested in half the tech things I've seen which I thought were bloody stupid ideas, I'd be a rich man.

Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#497

Post by sleavey »

I don't know what everyone's problem was with Firefox. I never noticed significant slow down with the browser, or at least the slow down I saw I blamed on Javascript bloat on websites these days (it started around the time Bootstrap and jQuery really took off). I was even running Adblock+ / later uBlock, had lots of tabs open all the time and browsed heavy websites.

I remember reading that comic that Google made to describe how Chrome worked back in 2009 or so, and thinking process-based tabs were a cool idea, but the experience I was having with Firefox was not bad enough to merit the switch, especially with all of the privacy invasion that switching to Chrome would have entailed. I also reckoned that Google would eventually start to block or make it harder to install add-ons like ad blockers - they are, after all, fundamentally an advertising company.

I'm glad I stuck it out with Mozilla. They're one of the few web companies worth trusting.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#498

Post by tzs »

kuschku wrote: post #461
tzs wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market. When LGPL code is linked with non-free code and the resulting work is distributed LGPL only requires that the changes to the LGPL code be open and that the object files for the non-free code are provided so that users can exercis…

The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements. First, they didn't publish anything for years. Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years. It took ages until they published some source code, even longer until they opened their repository. By that time KHTML was long dead, and development had centered on WebKit. No, Apple is no saint in…

(Responding out of order)

> No, Apple is no saint in this story.

Nowhere did I say or imply that Apple was a saint. All I said was that LGPL allows linking with closed code and distributing the resulting work without having to make the closed code open, and that Apple could have structured WebKit in such a way as to keep most of their code from having to be made open.

This is the main difference between GPL and LGPL, and a big reason why the FSF now discourages the use of LGPL.

> The reason webkit is known today, and not KHTML, is because Apple ignored their LGPL requirements.

> First, they didn't publish anything for years.

They published their KJS changes in June 2002, shortly before they released products using it. They published their KHTML changes shortly after Safari was announced.

> Then only obfuscated source dumps with all comments removed for many years.

Citation needed. My recollection is that they published their code in the form that they used it internally. The difficulty for the KHTML developers in incorporating Apple's code was (1) WebKit was designed to do what Apple needed, which was not necessarily what KDE needed, and so the two were diverging, and (2) Apple was making a lot of changes that touched a lot of code making it hard to break it down to individual improvements that could be incorporated independently.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#499

Post by imtringued »

Forbo wrote: post #211
starrychloe wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profits pay your salary, commie.

Profits are unpaid wages.

No. Think of profits as a measure of economic inefficiency. If there is enough competition the companies would lower their prices until their profits approach $0. Ideally income always matches expenses.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#500

Post by pritambaral »

tzs wrote: post #431
eslaught wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it was, but how much additional effort did Apple put into the code base by way of WebKit? Apple didn't need to open source that work, even if the original was open source, and I'm sure the leg up made a big time-to-market difference for Chrome. Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it final…

> Edit: Actually, KHTML is licensed LGPL, and that's a viral license if you make a derivative work. So I suppose Apple was forced to open source their changes when it finally went to market. When LGPL code is linked with non-free code and the resulting work is distributed LGPL only requires that the changes to the LGPL code be open and that the object files for the non-free code are provided so that users can exercis…

To be practical, it would have been significantly painful for Apple to adapt and improve KHTML by keeping their code and changes outside it and only dynamically linking to KHTML.

If it were just as easy (or even comparably easy) to carry on (and maintain) development via external linkage, LGPL would have been long useless.

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