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Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates 208

Posted by samzenpus from the in-the-future dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is reexamining and revamping the way it builds, communicates, and decides features for its browser. In short, big changes are coming to Firefox. Dave Camp, Firefox's director of engineering, sent out two lengthy emails, just three minutes apart: Three Pillars and Revisiting how we build Firefox. Both offer a lot more detail into what Mozilla is hoping to achieve.
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Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates More

Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates

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  • I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:11AM (#50060685)

    I remember when a new version of firefox invoked excitement for what wonderful features they've added.

    Now I just wonder what they've broken, redesigned or removed for no good reason this time.

    • Re:I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KIngo ( 168933 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:43AM (#50060759)

      I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )

        The reason it took so long for Firefox to get e10 (electrolysis) is obviously because they don't want to break addons and were trying to find the best way to do it.

        And those bashing FirefoxOS as well, this is the place were they first deployed e10 to figure out what works and make it reliable.

        • And those bashing FirefoxOS as well, this is the place were they first deployed e10 to figure out what works and make it reliable.

          You don't need to develop a new product line targeting .... well I don't know what the heck they were targeting and waste an incredibly amount of effort on a completely different platform with a completely different interface to test a single feature.

          No thanks, I'll keep bashing FirefoxOS for the incredibly waste of time and effort not to mention a complete deviation from the core business of a company which doesn't have enough funds to pursue crap like this. Part of me wonders if they didn't try and aim fo

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Firefox's plugins are both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. The "API" isn't really an API at all, it's just Javascript running in the browser process where it can hack about with the UI. It's extremely insecure and prone to conflicts, or breakage as the UI changes.

          It's hard to say what would be the best option now. Clean up the add-on API to make it more robust, at the expense of requiring add-ons to be rewritten. Keep it as it is and try to do something about the slow decay of abandoned a

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

            Firefox's plugins are both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. The "API" isn't really an API at all, it's just Javascript running in the browser process where it can hack about with the UI. It's extremely insecure and prone to conflicts, or breakage as the UI changes.

            And with great power comes great responsibility.

            Addons have nearly unlimited control over the browser, allowing them to do all sorts of amazing and useful things. Part of the price of this is a flexible framework -- using Javascript inside the browser's context instead of some limited DSL or something -- and another part is a more fragile connection to the user interface -- directly creating and manipulating XUL via the DOM -- which really isn't horribly fragile since they've pretty good about keeping elem

      • Re:I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Demonoid-Penguin ( 1669014 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:21AM (#50060881) Homepage

        I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.

        Agreed, choice is good. I prefer Firefox (Iceweasel actually) - but it's competition that keeps them honest.

        Thanks Mozilla for making Pocket removable. Special thanks for supporting srcset - especially for not jumping the gun on it when it was uncertain that it would become a defacto standard.

        Could Mozilla produce as good a browser if they were entirely unfunded - maybe. But I very much doubt they'd be able to make such positive contributions to W3C, internet privacy campaigns - and especially, making M$ pickup their browser game. I rarely a week goes by that I don't make extensive use of the their developer documentation for web design.

        Note: to be fair, the developers of all the major browser have all worked hard, together, to make the intertubes a better place. Kudos to the employees - nice to see employer loyalties don't stop them communicating and sharing.

      • Re:I remember... (Score:5, Informative)

        by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @08:00AM (#50061625)

        but Chrome is almost moving away from per-process tabs [ghacks.net] as they use more memory and don't really give you any improvement over the browser - if a tab dies, you'll still close the browser and reopen it, just in case the flaw had affected something else and besides, some tabs are grouped in processes anyway. (I don't know if this is still true [superuser.com], years later but it shows how the hype is often nowhere near what's desired)

        So why bother implementing something useless, just to make some people feel better. Its like 64-bit support. Why bother with that, it'll make no difference to daily use.

        Now, fixing memory usage, reducing cache usage by idle tabs, freeing up memory used by closed tabs so the overall memory doesn't grow... things like that are what's important. Not visible to most people, not "cool" by any means. Just boring, but solid, engineering discipline.

        But that's really what we want.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          When a tab crashes in my Chrome browser the rest are fine. Just that one tab can be restarted. It's very handy when plugins crash, for example.

          64 bit support brings security enhancements. 64 bit apps can make use of various new CPU features to protect their memory and detect exploits.

          Google doesn't care much about memory use I think, as far as they are concerned the browser is the OS and the tabs are apps.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jbssm ( 961115 )

          if a tab dies, you'll still close the browser and reopen it, just in case the flaw had affected something else

          No we don't, and I've never saw anyone doing that. If a tab crashes you either reload the tab or if you are paranoid you open a new tab and input the address of the crashed tab and move on.

        • but Chrome is almost moving away from per-process tabs [ghacks.net] as they use more memory and don't really give you any improvement over the browser - if a tab dies, you'll still close the browser and reopen it,

          While that may sound like a good theory it isn't in any way the experience at all. I have at most had Chrome crash in a way that it crashed a few successive loading tabs but have *NEVER* needed to close and re-open the browser. It may not be a purely one-process-per-tab approach but the browser tabs are well compartmentalized.

          As for the memory usage. I don't care. I have 32GB and will happily let any program use as much as needed to keep the system snappy and working well. Memory is cheap. Firefox's issues

      • I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive.

        So can you name one more thing that Firefox has done in years that users want, let alone don't hate? Normal bug fix operation doesn't count. The people running Firefox are driving it straight off a cliff. Don't make apologies for them. They have their heads up their arses and aren't interesting in hearing about the fact.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      Don't forget what new bloatware monstrosity they've added and how many hoops you'll need to jump through to switch it off. Were it not for the excellent work of the plug-in community that is helping keeping people tied to Firefox I think they'd be firmly be in the "Other browsers" part of the market by now, but even that's not going to last for ever as Chrome's plugin options are catching up fast and more people are discovering forks like Waterfox and Palemoon. If Mozilla wants to add in this stuff of the

    • Re:I remember... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pi1grim ( 1956208 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:08AM (#50060837)

      "I remember when the grass was greener and water - wetter."

      At least they've admitted that all sorts of "partnerships" should come as removable addons. As of right now, there is only one opensource browser that can compete. Microsoft's Edge, Google's Chrome are proprietary and don't even pretend to care about user privacy. Palemoon and other forks keep touting themselves as the "next big thing" and true open-source and privacy aware, but the truth is, most of the work they do is just cutting stuff out and disabling features that cause concern, main force that drives Gecko's development is Firefox, and I, for one, respect that. Mozilla's team is looking for funding in order to provide a truly opensource browser with a more transparent development model, then, say, Chromium that is 100% dependent on it's proprietary brother and Google's goodwill. The way Mozilla is now trying to attract additional funding may not be great, but it's far from a fiasco, and most of the features added are a painfull and delicate balance between non tech savvy user's needs and privacy and extensibility. And they need that to keep funding flowing, to create the codebase. If you are a purist and hate them for that, then imagine Firefox not exitsing. Opensource community would end up with Cromium, dependent on Google and a bunch of webkit browsers, that have a long way to go before they can compete.

      Average users are plagued with malware and all sorts of addons that inject content into pages, display extra adds and such. Mozilla introduced addon signing and moderation. For those that need to add unsigned and unverified addons they still provide unbranded builds, that are an equivalent of signing "I know what I'm doing" waiver.

      All in all, you might hate Mozilla's monetization model, but you have to admit, that they spend the money they earn to write the code and give to everyone for free with a libre license to boot.

      • If you are a purist and hate them for that, then imagine Firefox not exitsing. Opensource community would end up with Cromium, dependent on Google and a bunch of webkit browsers

        Uh, no. You get this wrong above in your comment, too. If Google goes off the rails, then there will be a fork of Chromium.

        All in all, you might hate Mozilla's monetization model, but you have to admit, that they spend the money they earn to write the code and give to everyone for free with a libre license to boot.

        So does Google, with Chrome -> Chromium.

        The problem with Firefox ain't the licensing, it's that they're trying to cram five pounds of shit into a five pound sack which already contains a web browser. That only leaves room for shit, and best case your browser will end up shitty.

    • Yeah, these days it seems the first thing I do after hearing about a new Firefox update is search for the appropriate about:config string to disable the new features.

      And half of my add-ons these days are there simply to revert the interface back to something useable.

      Between the too-frequent updates and the user-necessitated fixes to correct the developer's blunders, Firefox is approaching a required level of maintenance I only expect from Microsoft products.

  • Faster updates leads to more bugs and increasing technical debt that strangles development. It is slowly ruining chrome, so please don't do the same.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jopsen ( 885607 )

      Faster updates leads to more bugs and increasing technical debt that strangles development. It is slowly ruining chrome, so please don't do the same.

      The "faster updates" I've heard about present was moving things into addons, and separating them from the normal release schedule.

      Not release firefox more often...

  • I'd still use Firefox. I would probably continue to use it until I couldn't access my credit card website to pay my bills.

    Maybe I'm not a very imaginative guy, but it feels like in the last decade that we've moved through most of the growing pains and going forward we'll only have to deal with a slowly evolving web. (or maybe that's the optimist in me)

    I still have Presto-based Opera installed on a few systems (Mac and Linux), I can't imagine much practical use for supporting Opera 12 anymore. It think I kee

  • The Kitchen Sink (Score:2, Informative)

    by nateman1352 ( 971364 )

    Remember when everyone made fun of Mozilla because it had everything including the about:kitchensink [mozilla.org] in it? Remember how Firefox was supposed to get rid of all that bloat and modernize the web browser? Guess Mozilla is back to bundling a ton of junk together in to one package.

    Only this time its far worse, at least with Mozilla it was useful stuff like a web browser and an HTML editor. This time we get junk of dubious value like Firefox Hello and Pocket which would be much better kept as downloadable exte

    • Re:The Kitchen Sink (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @03:59AM (#50060807)

      that POS called Firefox OS

      Have you tried it recently? I'm running a nightly 3.0 on my phone which has served me well for the past 12 months.

      FxOS got a series of bad reviews based on early releases and nasty hardware but is evolving.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      Funny how you mention Pocket, because this was one of they things they mentioned they wanted to improve:

      "Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on that could have been more easily removed entirely from the browser. We tend to agree with that, and fixing that for Pocket and any future partner integrations is one concrete piece of engineering work we need to get done."

      https://mail.mozilla.org/piper... [mozilla.org]

      ___

      FirefoxOS actually helps improve and streamline the Gecko engine and is the place where the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      At this rate Internet Explorer (or Edge, whatever they're calling it now) would be the only option as Chrome also has a lot of crap baked in.

  • Faster UI changes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:29AM (#50060921) Homepage Journal

    Maybe focus on writing good code so you don't have to update it as much? Plus, you can save money by firing all your UI developers.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Oh yeah. There was a period of time during which usability was somewhat of a concern. In recent years, it has been totally forgotten. It's particularly visible in Firefox and GNOME/GTK... The most basic mistakes were made, and most of them are still there today, with new stupid issues in every releases... Critics are not welcomed.

      Basic evident examples I can see in front of my eyes right now in Firefox:

      - UI elements appearing and disappearing (forward button which even moves the address bar away, link targe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        Man what a day to not have mod points! Hopefully mods will see your post and mod it to +5. Seems like most of these mistakes are made on purpose these days for some value of "because it's so cool." I see this happening all the time these days, particularly on web-based applications, even here on slashdot. Discoverability of UI functionality is at an all-time low and the removal of obvious functionality is happening all the time (the read more link, dice? Come on guys). We're just expected to already kn

  • Mozilla ignoring basics of core usability (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:33AM (#50060933)

    Firefox's days are probably at an end, and it's entirely the fault of the lead developers at Mozilla who seem to have lost the concept of improvement, replacing it instead by a focus on change. There's a difference between these two things. Improvement implies holding onto good things, while change does not. Mozilla has not been holding onto good (or even essential) features of basic usability.

    Here are two examples to illustrate this, both in the area of bookmarking:

    • * Firefox's "Bookmark This Page" action used to pop up a window with a mouse-adjustable size. Hell, it's 2015 and all windows are resizeable these days by dragging their borders, aren't they? Well not in Mozilla's worldview. No modern Firefox provides this, so you have to locate your desired bookmark folder by scrolling through a tiny fixed-size keyhole window. It's a total pain.
    • * When saving bookmarks, it's common to save several consecutive pages on the same topic to the same bookmarks folder, which is why Firefox very sensibly used to remember the last save location to speed up your bookmarking. It lost the ability to remember this many versions ago, so you now have to find the appropriate folder from scratch every single time you save a bookmark. It's a total pain.

    Neither of these are advanced features. They are totally elementary fundamental functionality which most modern applications provide, but Mozilla devs appear not to care about such fundamentals, since they disappeared and never returned. I assume there's nobody left on the team to care about such non-sexy core usability, and instead it's all about "What can we change today?".

    There's no shortage of other examples of core usability that just mysteriously disappeared for no good reason from one version to the next, giving you the impression that there is nobody looking after such things and making sure they are preserved. (Another example is Customise, which was partly destroyed several versions ago and many things became hardwired.) It's as if no QA is being done anymore, since you'd expect QA to block releases that fail regression testing of usability features that were available earlier.

    If they can't look after the fundamentals, they're not going to survive.

  • Automatic update service (Score:3)

    by alantus ( 882150 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @04:37AM (#50060945)

    When will they fix the automatic update service?

    Every time I check my relative's computers, their Firefox and Thunderbird are outdated, and I have enabled the Mozilla automatic update service.

    And I could live without Pocket, Sync, Marketplace, or the useless chat system in Thunderbird.
    All of these should be addons.

    Sync is a good idea, but it should be possible to run your own Sync server using standard software instead of a half-baked python script.

  • Translation: "Mozilla plans for firefox more CRAP, better add-ons (this one i like), and faster frustration."
    Instead of better performance, hardware acceleration, sandboxing, multiprocess, multithreading etc etc...
  • Is Microsoft intentionally destroying Firefox? Microsoft pays to have Bing search be the default search engine in newer versions of Firefox. That viciously destructive dishonesty is causing people who don't know how to re-configure Firefox to abandon Firefox. Version changes should NOT cause configuration changes.

    Most people don't have the technical knowledge to know how they've been manipulated, or how to restore the default search engine to Google search.

    In the past, Google paid Mozilla Foundation $ [allthingsd.com]
  • So, Mozilla management thinks - Firefox users want more releases? Are they kidding? They think users want more bundled proprietary junk added to the browser with those releases? Mozilla management wants to drop support for the architectures most Firefox plug-ins use - so that a mass of existing plug-ins just die, that's a good idea? Sad to see Mozilla management just hastening the destruction of their user base like this.

  • I wonder if they will be able just of that!!!

  • I would just switch to Chrome if disabling the "auto-update all the time" wasn't such a chore. In particular, the auto-updating of extensions without my control ticks me off; I've had several where the author removed features that I depended upon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luthair ( 847766 )
      Why would you switch to Chrome? It just has a different version of all this stuff baked in.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbssm ( 961115 )
        Cause Chrome just has a different version of all this stuff baked in but it's actually stable enough to be used, unlike Firefox and its ever growing bugs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luthair ( 847766 )
          And what bugs would those be? Anecdotally I don't see Firefox crash despite using it more whilst I do encounter Chrome tabs crashes (not daily, perhaps a few times a week).

  • No Thanks (Score:3)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @12:51PM (#50063697)

    Unlike a lot of whiners here I use Firefox as my primary browser, it uses less memory than Chrome and is as fast. That said, the first thing I do after updating Firefox is figure out how to get disable or remove the extraneous parts they keep adding.

    Installing on a new box now consists of about 10-15 minutes of trying to remember and searching for the about:config options to ditch them. Further, I also have no plans to create a Firefox account in order to continue to use sync..

    Don't try to copy what Google is doing with Chrome, you're alienating the core userbase who are capable of adding these features if we want on our own. If this sort of stuff continues I imagine we'll see a credible fork.

  • So more "partnerships" as in paid bullshit we don't want to use or see like Yahoo Search. Better add-ons so more malware, more adware, and slower performance while neglecting the core browser. Then the mother of them all, faster updates. You know, the thing that ruined Firefox over the last 2 years.

  • I agree that FF has gotten a worse UI in recent versions; the one change that would make sense (IMHO) is to eliminate the "x" (= close this tab) on all but the active tab. At any rate, I just set up Pale Moon to see if I liked that better.

    But FF isn't the only Mozilla program to have bizarre UI changes, Thunderbird did too. (I think the single thing that any email program could do that would help would be fast lookup based on search. I hate to say it, but Outlook does this reasonably well.)

    And Mozilla is

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