Great, now can we have ubiquity back?
Firefox Test Pilot
81–90 of 152 posts
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Big fan of mozilla and firefox. I've been defending it for years, but now I'm having a hard time. It's slower in almost any case than the competition, from initial rendering to switching tabs. Some stuff hang the page completly. Watching too many videos or scrolling too much twitter slow down the browser to a crawl even after closing all tabs and require a restart. I'm not using firefox out of sheer ideology and supp…
As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features. Some are just starting to land after literally years of work: You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/ Or progres…
The problem is that many of the slowdowns I experience in Firefox are due to existing bugs, so I'm not at all confident that adding brand new code to the browser is going to solve anything. And the rewrite isn't likely to fix slowdowns, because unless the developers figure out what is causing the performance problems, rewritten code won't magically fix it.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features. Some are just starting to land after literally years of work: You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/ Or progres…
The problem is that many of the slowdowns I experience in Firefox are due to existing bugs, so I'm not at all confident that adding brand new code to the browser is going to solve anything. And the rewrite isn't likely to fix slowdowns, because unless the developers figure out what is causing the performance problems, rewritten code won't magically fix it.
While it's true that not all bugs are created equal, we do know that some bugs are exacerbated by architectural problems (single process versus multi-process is a good example of this), and new approaches like what Servo is doing in Rust make it possible to write parallel code in a way that is less likely to crash, and less likely to lead to security vulnerabilities.
In general, existing bugs (that I am aware of) are either not actionable because of existing architectural issues, or just because the nature of the bug is difficult and requires an expert whose time is constrained.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great! So now in like 2 years, hopefully I can simply use type="time" instead of implementing a half baked JS time picker or time validator. It's frustrating seeing them spend so much time on Firefox OS, Hello, etc. and not on making Firefox a really good, standards compliant browser.
A huge amount of the Hello work was really WebRTC, which is a standard--and an important one. Hello is a front end to that.
Hello (and Pocket for what it's worth) are relatively small add-ons that ship with Firefox nowadays, the bulk of the actual magic for both happens in web content. Hello has a new tab-sharing feature, but that also works by sending media streams through WebRTC.
I am starting to suspect that their prominent placement and sudden appearance in the default Firefox UI caused people to think that they are taking a larger amount of Mozilla's development resources than is actually the case.
To bring it back on topic to Test Pilot - hopefully this will help the overall Firefox community vet these types of ideas before they make it to the default UI.
Even if the outcome is ultimately the same (new feature is added/default UI is changed, which makes some subset of people legitimately unhappy), it gives a wider audience a chance to test and provide feedback and generally socialize new ideas.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features. Some are just starting to land after literally years of work: You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/ Or progres…
The problem is that many of the slowdowns I experience in Firefox are due to existing bugs, so I'm not at all confident that adding brand new code to the browser is going to solve anything. And the rewrite isn't likely to fix slowdowns, because unless the developers figure out what is causing the performance problems, rewritten code won't magically fix it.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my sibling comment - extensions are frequently pinpointed as the cause of (or a contributing factor to) performance problems. Additionally, many of them rely on older features in the Mozilla architecture, which makes it very hard to fix without breaking extensions that people rely on.
While there has been and continues to be significant work in this area, the Web Extensions project has been making great progress and provides a much better means to contain and control extensions, while making the development experience better:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/
This is already shipping today and many classic Firefox extensions have already switched over.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#86I was almost going to pass this up based on the HN discussion and the initial CTA[1] on the page. I'm still not sure this answers any of the many frustrations, and hopes, I have for browser development,[2][3] but it's of possible interest. For the love of all that's holy: Put a compelling argument for a CTA on the page BEFORE the CTA. And ... put a compelling argument there regardless . This lacks both. The features…
Somewhat an aside, but Sticky Reader View would be a great Test Pilot experiment.
Good suggestion.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#87if the drone fox needs a dome, he probably also needs rockets to replace the propellers
Looks a lot like the M200G Volantor, but with fewer fans.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#88Mozilla, please implement HTML5 input types. Thanks, frontend web developers.
> Thanks, frontend web developers.
Disclaimer: i'm a front-end web developer and rhinoceraptor's comments does not represent me.
Mozilla and independent contributors, please continue developing Firefox as openly and inclusively as you've always done. Web browsers have become a major tool of communication and information for many people, and i really appreciate having a good free (as in freedom) alternative on that front :)
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#89Honestly all I want from Firefox is better stability and performance - I don't care about almost anything else barring security. Firefox has become so unstable and slow (on OSX at least) that many people I know - myself included have switched to chromium. We don't want to use it but we have to because of all the crashes and massive slowdowns during long running sessions or when many tabs are open. This goes for stabl…
Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration. I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while y…
They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today.
Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?
Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.
Re: Firefox Test Pilot
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that many of the slowdowns I experience in Firefox are due to existing bugs, so I'm not at all confident that adding brand new code to the browser is going to solve anything. And the rewrite isn't likely to fix slowdowns, because unless the developers figure out what is causing the performance problems, rewritten code won't magically fix it.
Oh, I forgot to mention in my sibling comment - extensions are frequently pinpointed as the cause of (or a contributing factor to) performance problems. Additionally, many of them rely on older features in the Mozilla architecture, which makes it very hard to fix without breaking extensions that people rely on. While there has been and continues to be significant work in this area, the Web Extensions project has been…
No, don't blame extensions. I don't run any. Here is what a modern browser is expected to handle:
Open and close tabs and windows, browsing the modern web without extensions. Keep it up for weeks, having 10 to 30 windows, and an average of 10 tabs (some at 40). You have 5 to 12 gigabytes of RAM to work with, and at least a 1920x1200 screen. (maybe a 4k screen)
That's it.
Expectations for older hardware: run for weeks, 5 to 8 windows, average of 8 tabs (one at 30), 512 megabytes of RAM, and a 1600x1080 screen.