51–60 of 384 posts
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the general state of firefox suggests that they are not large enough to do more than one thing.
What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
Wow, Mozilla is acquiring a side-project that's actually useful? Color me pleased. Beats wasting time on an a commodity VPN service.
That service is what earns them non-Google revenue.
I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
It took this massive effort 15 years ago to get Firefox onto people's computers back in the day. Mozilla kicked off the web standardization drive and transformed the Internet. That sort of thing is not feasible now because the commercial browsers are damned good.
They're either done or they have to find another way to use their resources to advance their mission. Unsurprisingly, they pick the latter.
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Basic keyboard shortcuts that worked in the 90s don't work on Firefox Android.
Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is woeful in general in most apps. '90s desktop browsers didn't work well with touchscreens.
Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
If your first step as PM of a browser that desperately needs to win back market share is to work on gnome-keyring, a feature only relevant on an operating system that less than 1% of people use your tenure is going to be very short-lived. This is engineering virtue-signaling, for lack of a better phrase.
The things I suspect could make a difference to Firefox marketshare are performance and transformative features.
For performance, UI latency needs to be near-zero to make it feel snappier than Chrome, and JS- and CSS-heavy pages noticeably faster than in Chrome. (Yes, pages shouldn't be so JS- and CSS-heavy, but they are, and users don't care that it's the web developers' fault. The browser that solves that problem wins.)
For features, tabs are one clear example, as were blocking popups, and session restore. Containers, adblock, Pocket integration, and Reader Mode all seem like they could have been this, but they weren't. Big features will be hit-or-miss, and will quickly be copied, but possibly a big deal for a short while.
Perf, of course, is a lot of hard engineering work, and features may be as well, in addition to being potential duds. Things like gnome-keyring feels like a relatively simple quick-win, despite being very low value compared to various other possibilities.
Personally, I thing I switched back to Firefox when they made restarting it when you have a hundred tabs retain the tabs, but not load them until you switch to them. That moved restarting the browser from a big deal to something I can just do whenever. (It was also when Quantum/Servo stuff was happening, but I think it was the tab thing that got me.)
I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.
Maybe that's the problem. Why Mozilla should be large enough to do those things? I'd rather have one good browser than 20 mediocre side projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Android is a touch-first OS, keyboard shortcut support is woeful in general in most apps. '90s desktop browsers didn't work well with touchscreens.
> Android is a touch-first OS Android has native support for keyboards since API 1.
An iPad can support a keyboard too. It's a touch-first device.
A Mac can support a touchscreen with a third-party driver, but it's a KBM-first UX and support of the touchscreen is horrible in most apps that only accept one input at a time.
I'd really love for Mozilla to focus on actually... you know... building a web browser. There are 1,000's of issues firefox needs to improve, from integrating native gnome-keyring support, to performance, to porting to rust, to... Let me PM or run Mozilla for a year. We won't buy any more companies, and we're going to focus on engineering.
I suspect Mozilla is large enough that they can do more than one thing at once. Some finance and legal people spending time on an acquisition is not the reason they haven't integrated gnome-keyring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
Same here. I've been using Firefox as my main browser for 20 years now. There was a period where it would have some issues, but it's been run great and smooth for the past few years. I don't get the hate.
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What state is that? I’ve been very satisfied with FF over the past 5 years.
no print feature in over 5 years. How can a browser not implement print? (on android) They removed it, then claimed they were working on it, and shut down every single github issue about it