Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters 260
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments."
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
Only open source standards compliant browser (Score:5, Insightful)
What They NEED to do... (Score:4, Funny)
...is to make a version of Firefox that is essentially a fat client for web applications.
Think client server architecture, but the client is generic and provides complete access to the OS GUI API, robust security and complete control of the app.
No more alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions to provide a real GUI interface. They could even leverage AJAX to eliminate the fucking PostBacks.
Of course it will all end up in some standards committee, get raped by Microsoft and finally killed as everyone rewrites the apps yet again to support I.E. 23.
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Java WebStart + SWT.
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That was what XUL and XPCOM were for. XULRunner [mozilla.org] is still a very respectable development environment. (The Firefox and Thunderbird UIs code is written almost exclusively in XUL/JavaScript.) Unfortunately, while these technologies have been around for quite a while, they haven't really taken off beyond Mozilla's apps. Up until recently, it was still possible to load XUL from a remote site and get an interface with native widgets, but no longer.
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Do you have any idea how incredibly retarded it is to synchronize an imap cache and nntp cache via dropbox?
imap and nntp are MADE to keep you in sync across multiple clients on a per message basis, dropbox is designed sync files that it considers binary blobs.
Re:What They NEED to do... (Score:4, Interesting)
XULRunner didn't take off because of a couple things.
Its just too much of a bitch to get started. Its not hard, its just slow and tedious as you spend 90% of your time googling and pulling in bits of information from all over the web in order to finally get a working XULRunner package. The Mozilla documentation is out of date, in multiple ways. You can see that some bits have been updated, but they aren't current, just newer than some other things. Never can you find any current documentation, unless you consider poor people stumbling through it and sharing their work on newsgroups to be documentation. I certainly don't.
Too fat. Simple apps take too much. Too much of a download for something simple. In theory you only need it once for all apps but ... see below.
Bad integration with the OS due to chaotic API. The API is constantly in massive flux, you can pretty much rest assured that any moderately complex app is going to have hacks for EVERY damn version of XULRunner, FORGET supporting nightly builds, you might be able to bounce off an installed firefox or thunderbird installation, which limits the number of releases you're trying to hit, but there are still far too many to cope with, so that means ... you ship your XULRunner app with a known good XULRunner. Hope the user doesn't update it to fix security issues!
Because of the above, getting an xulrunner package to download and double click to run doesn't work for crap if the user tries to use another one as well, unless maybe you're doing in house apps that share the same XULRunner version compatibilities. Good luck with that, we found that two internal teams working on seperate based XULRunner apps couldn't/wouldn't keep themselves in sync just cause it wasn't work it. Should they waste several hours of time validating code every time someone wants to bump to a newer version of XULRunner for some feature, or ship another 20-60 megs of course instead? Well, the only intelligent choice at face value is to waste disk space since its not an immediate cost.
The update mechanism is a couple clusterfuck as well, thanks to various bits of half implemented features.
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...access to the OS GUI API...
No more alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions to provide a real GUI interface. They could even leverage AJAX...
Sorry, I accidentally cut off your post and emphasized what I thought was great fun.
I'm a fan of JavaScript and asynchronicity (not a word? It should be), but to say "no more alphabet soup", then go on to mention AJAX and GU[Interface] while previously spouting out OS GUI API just made me chuckle.
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They could even leverage AJAX to eliminate the fucking PostBacks.
... welcome to 3 years ago for every major web development toolkit on the planet
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Monday's XKCD strip (https://www.xkcd.com/934/) had a joke about how modern browsers are recapitulating the history of window managing. And while it's funny, I think this whole idea of rethinking the browser misses the point that the browser was the "unthinked" platform,
The web wasn't thought as an application platform, but as a document store. It turned out that some simple forms and parameterised queries was all that was required to make applications out of pages. My point is that the beauty of web applic
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The douchebag behaviour started earlier than you may think. They do plenty of user agent sniffing on their services. For example, their reverse image search is a simple file upload to use, yet they sniff for it. Got SeaMonkey (even the latest)? Doesn't work. Firefox 2.0? Not good enough. Firefox 3.0? Still not good enough. Firefox 3.5? Nope. Firefox 3.6? Now we're talking.
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You say "simple file upload" as if it was easy. HTML5 allows you to do drag'n drop file uploads, but it requires a very recent browser, hence the user-agent sniffing. Older browsers get the old "Choose file" button upload method.
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That's what I was referring to. Older or unknown web browsers don't even get that thanks to user agent sniffing.
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Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want.
Yes, because as we all know, the ever changing UI and Addons/Extensions are squarely in the realm of "standards".
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Little one sided don't you think?
That you can find an obscure site that works only in a specific browser, means nothing. What about all the Firefox specific pages out there? Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox? [switched.com]
Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive [google.com] than Firefox's!!!
The site you mention was NOT written by google contrary to your assertion. And Chrome is open source [google.com].
I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament. I
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So chrome(ium) isn't open because someone made some chrome specific websites?
Its not open because it has its own special features?
By that definition, neither is Firefox then, I can think of plenty of websites that look like shit in browsers other than firefox. I can also remember when firefox basically took IEs place as far as having websites labeled 'looks best in firefox'. 'looks best in a standards compliant browser' would be one thing, but thats not what gets said.
I can think of plenty of firefox spec
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That's so true, and is such a sadly insightful comment about Apple's position in the tech industry.
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And web standards don't specify how fonts should be rendered, so that's nothing but a nice straw man anyway.
I am pretty sure there are standards saying that a 10 pt is 5/36 of an inch. Firefox ignores your DPI settings and renders fonts in sizes that has nothing to do with the specified measurements.
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And how are you supposed to mark up graphics to fit in with text that varies depending on the screen? CSS is great, but it's not exactly resolution-independent for all practical purposes - unless you want scaling on pixel-perfect graphics designed for being displayed 1:1.
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And how are you supposed to mark up graphics to fit in with text that varies depending on the screen?
GUI 101 tells you to not put scalable elements on a fixed size canvas.
You have no control over the ratio between scalable and non-scalable elements, and you shouldn't pretend you do. Either have your graphics scale with the text, or allow it to float freely unscaled as the scalable elements scale.
It's not rocket science.
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Exact font size has little to do with web standards. It's the meaning ( semantics ) that counts , not how it is interpreted.
For example : is not a standard for making text appear bold , it's a standard for providing strong emphasis on the text.
A visual browser may render that by showing a text as bold , while a text to speech engine could render it by speaking the text louder than the rest of the text.
For font-size , it's the difference between font-size:xx pt , and font-size:small
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Exact font size has little to do with web standards. It's the meaning ( semantics ) that counts , not how it is interpreted.
For example <strong> is not a standard for making text appear bold , it's a standard for providing strong emphasis on the text.
A visual browser may render that by showing a text as bold , while a text to speech engine could render it by speaking the text louder than the rest of the text.
For font-size , it's the difference between font-size:xx pt , and font-size:small
Fixed that for myself
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Its the common meaning in the desktop publishing world, however points are not standard and never really have been. The DTP world used the word point instead of pixel, and a point was 1/72 of an inch ... just like ... the standard DPI used for monitors until rather recently. So because of that, now days, points mean roughly 1/72th of an inch, IF you're doing DTP. Your OS is welcome to assume a point is a pixel, or half of one, or like some Windows 7 apps (Looking at you Outlook/Word HTML renderer) a poin
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Of course, for readability and accessibility purposes, your a douche for setting a fixed font size anyway.
In my own browser?
No, I really think I should be allowed to say that I want a default font size of, say, 10 pt. Firefox' font rendering won't allow that - you can only set font sizes to a number that varies in size from display to display.
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What part of "you can only set font sizes to a number that varies in size from display to display" did you fail to understand?
The font size you set in Firefox is not points, nor anything else except a number that varies between displays.
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http://www.allisnotlo.st/index_en.html [allisnotlo.st] is a newer one, spoofed my user agent and it would not run at all in FF.
Aaaaah copying features ? (Score:3)
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My sentiments exactly.
If they weren't copying features how could they claim standardization? He really can't have it both ways.
The four mainstream browser engines all have pretty much the same customer-facing capabilities. They differ in the back ends.
Is that such a bad idea? Perhaps Mr Nightingale would want Ford to use a joy stick instead of copying every one else's steering wheel, and floor pedals? Maybe elevators should respond to foot stomping rather than have buttons? Voice command of camera's in
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On one hand we have Slashdot saying "SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE BAD [because copying is good]" and the other "COPYING IDEAS IS BAD [if it's from a major competitor]."
This fear of taking good ideas from your competitors is a bit silly. I really hate it when developers prioritize being different from their competitors above everything else. They go to great lengths to be different than previous versions or their competitors and then justify it after the fact claiming it's somehow better for the user. If you hav
Education (Score:4, Insightful)
It is also usually the only browser many learning management systems like Angel support other than Internet Explorer ..
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I'm proud to say that the LMS I designed and developed doesn't bother with browser sniffing. The Javascript UI toolkit I used does in fact feed different markup (mostly classes and styles) to different browsers, but the end result looks the same and I didn't have to do anything extra. There's no reason an LMS needs to support a subset of browsers, even my Javascript-only AJAX-heavy beast of an LMS works in everything from IE6 to Opera 11. An LMS isn't doing anything mindblowing that only one or two brows
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You said it. We switched to Angel from Blackboard 3-4 years ago and will be switching to something else.
OTOH the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, quite often because there's more bullshit over there.
Platforms (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Platforms (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty bizarre what some people are saying is desired. Supposedly we're all going to ditch our desktops for mobiles, and we're going to ditch our applications for browser applications. And yet, so many people simply don't want that, and bitch about how unimaginably it sucks, whenever they try it.
The very idea of leaving a comment on Slashdot without a keyboard is laughable (yes, you can do it, but it's painful compared to "old" tech), as is the idea of seriously editing any sort of text (whether it's code or Google Docs' word processor) in any browser, or (best of all) editing in a mobile browser.
I guess they think that if they keep on repeating these silly ideas, people will get used to how much the future is going to suck compared to 2011, and they'll accept it. The problem with that, is that anyone who doesn't buy into the bullshit, is going to be at such a competitive advantage with those who do, that there will be constant pressure to restore the desktop. How can anyone really think the do-everything-in-browser and do-everything-on-mobile prophecies have what it takes to be self-fulfilling?
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You mean like how Chrome included developer tools akin to Firebug... then IE did the same?
Too many links. (Score:2)
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Re:Too many links. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you know what it feels like to try to choose a Linux distro.
Like it or not, too many choices is bad.
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What do you expect from an editor who calls himself Unknown (read: unaccountable) Lamer?
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One thing Mozilla has that the others do not (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Open Source. Unimportant to the apathetic, however it is a factor which will become more important as corporations increase their role in governments.
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Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.
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Yup, and I suspect that most people running the browser on linux are using the chromium version, unless they downloaded it directly from Google. I imagine that most distros would prefer to start from the source, rather than try to support whatever version of libfoo Google chose to link against.
I've got chromium on Gentoo, and Chrome OS on a CR-48, and the only browser-related differences I can see are the ones listed above.
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The only difference I've noticed so far is that Chromium doesn't have the built-in PDF viewer.
I see what you did there (Score:3)
Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine,but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
-1 Flamebait - emacs vs. vi. :)
However, I have to tip my hat for cleverly bringing up emacs in an article about browsers. Or, wait, is emacs a browser now? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
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Emacs had a web browser for quite a while now, pretty much as far as I can remember.
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Emacs/W3 [gnu.org]
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Of course it is.
http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/ [namazu.org]
Take that vi :P
Noscript (Score:5, Insightful)
Elephant in the room (Score:2)
I find it funny that every time there's a discussion about browsers, most articles won't even mention Opera.
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It's a mouse that thinks it's an elephant. When you ignore it, it gets REALLY pissed off and starts smashing over floor splinters with its whiskers.
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I find it funny that every time there's a discussion about browsers, most articles won't even mention Opera.
That's ok, because there is always an Opera user who will point out that even though few use it.
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I know! And what about Lynx? Every time there's a discussion about browsers nobody mentions MY pet browser that has a microscopic market share even among geeks. How offensive!
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I think IE is the only one without 'Paste & Go' now.
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Opera is a decent browser. Not sure why it gets grief here on Slashdot.
What good is extensibility... (Score:5, Insightful)
.
All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.
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Are you under the impression that the trunk does not receive security updates?
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No, he's under the impression that plugin developers who don't want to follow the public release cycle almost certainly aren't going to follow trunk, since will, the obvious fact that they'd be following the public release cycle if they were following trunk. Not everyone spends their entire life tracking someone elses chaotic mess of a code base, no matter how much they want to use the product.
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... if Firefox's new and unnecessary rapid development cycle renders plug-ins invalid every three months, and the plug-in developers choose not to participate in Firefox's inane rapid development cycle. I, a Firefox user, am left with an egregious choice of keeping the browser secure by jumping on the rapid development cycle bandwagon, or using the plug-ins I want to use by skipping the security updates embedded in the rapid development cycle.
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All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.
How on earth does this nonsense get moded "Insightful"?
Three years ago, I fixed a bug in Firefox. It took two years before the fix was in a widely used version. By that time, all the sites that put in a hack to work around the bug forgot why the hack was there, and the hacks had to be supported by browsers forever. With a six week release cycle, the fix will take six weeks to get to a beta, and another six weeks to get to stable. Twelve weeks from fix to release means more users have a browser with few
Firefox will matter to me again... (Score:2)
Re:Firefox will matter to me again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, i don't get this complaint. The belief that Firefox has progressively gotten slower and more bloated over the years is an outright falsehood that keeps getting recycled over and over again on Slashdot and elsewhere. Go ahead and install Firebird 0.7, Firefox 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0, then explain to me where you believe the bloat has crept in... Yes Firefox 4.0 is more feature-rich than previous versions, but if you don't want to use things like sync, you don't have to use them. With a clean comparable profile, each successive Ffx release has delivered some combination of:
* greater stability
* better memory management
* faster javascript
* faster DOM rendering
* faster startup time
* support for new standards/technologies
Frankly, I don't think anyone remembers how rough around the edges Firebird was, because it was comparatively so much better than it's only real competition at the time (IE6).
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Just curious, have you ever actually used Firefox ... or maybe have you never used anything OTHER than Firefox?
New technology support? Sure, I'll give you that one. Faster javascript, yea, thats true ... thanks to Macromedia/Adobe, not really Mozilla's doing though. ... the rest of them? No way, flat out false statements that aren't true in this dimesion. It may occasionally become 'stable' ... relatively, but that comes and goes, it most certainly has not gotten better at memory management. Just becau
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Really? Bloated? Browser speed might have mattered back in the 90s, but I'll take that Firefox just works over a nanosecond improvement in page loading any day of the week, thanks. I mean Google are aware that basic off the shelf hardware can run 3D FPS MMORPGs without blinking, right? What web page do they imagine will beat that for a system hog? For a marketing company they didn't pick a very good selling point.
And then we get to the way chrome breaks a lot of websites. Who would have guessed that strippi
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My computer is one of the latest MBPs, 8 gigs of ram, whatever snazzy processor they throw in them for the high end 15" models ... Firefox still runs like fucking ass compared to ... well everything else.
$5 says it won't even run on a standard machine from 5 years ago for more than a few hours without exploding all over itself. Seriously, who the fuck are you trying to kid?
I'd miss NoScript and shitload of other add-ons (Score:4, Insightful)
The closest thing you can get to NoScript on Chrome is NotScripts. And I'm sorry but that sucks ass by comparison.
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oh there is a plugin? I thought that the X button in the top right stopped scripts in chrome.
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Oh, you have to do it manually? You see, I use NoScript, which automates the whole process.
I'd miss firebug and web developer (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox is really the bees knees for web development....
firebug for javascript...
http://getfirebug.com/ [getfirebug.com]
and the poorly named web developer plugin for css make firefox a potent tool.
http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/ [chrispederick.com]
1- make it not crash (Score:2)
1- make it not crash: I've got Chrome, IE 9, Opera, and Firefox. Firefox is the only browser that can't go a day without crashing.
2- make it work without addons: Firefox code don't run too well... but it still runs better than addons, and addons create headaches at upgrade time. So, instead of dreaming up a cloud-based quasi OS with a laundry list of sci-fi features, how about they just put mouse gestures, ad blocking... in it ? You know, as if it were a browser ?
I'm getting the same vibe from Firefox as I
Strange.. (Score:2)
I guess it depends on your workload. Opera freezes up on me a few times each month. Luckily just one thread keeps spinning so I can easily shut it down on my dual-core machine. CHrome/FF/IE have all been stable for me...
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He's trying to make it mate with his Bonzi Buddy.
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Extensible browser? (Score:3)
Try UZBL. It's rendering engine is based on WebKit, and all other features are provided by scripts. You can customize it in any way you want.
Gecko is the rendering engine (Score:2)
Chrome may have a nice interface and WebKit may be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko [mozilla.org] , but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).
TFTFY. Seriously, how do you publish a story about browsers and get stuff like this wrong, or use such confusing language? And I don't want to get into another pissing contest between WebKit and Gecko, but do we really need a shout-out to Chrome in a Firefox story just to placate the /. users that prefer it? While we're at it, why such a dismal outlook on Firefox's future? It's not becoming a niche browser any time soon; anyone see concrete signs of that happening? Even if it did, I'm sure Mozilla will
Money from Google (Score:2)
Re:Money from Google (Score:4, Interesting)
> If Google pulls out in favor of Chrome, you have to
> ask what will happen.
You can ask... or you could look up the answers.
The 2010 data is not out yet, but the 2009 numbers are at http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2009-audited-financial-statement.pdf [mozilla.org] which means you don't have to worry about citing 2006 numbers.
As of 2009, Mozilla had $120 million in net assets. Expenses in 2009 were $61 million. Revenues were $104 million. They were hiring as fast as they could find good people, and earning more money than they could spend. They had 2 years worth of operating costs in the bank. All of this is public data, as it is for any other nonprofit.
So if trends continued in that revenue and expenses grew at the same percentage rate, and if you assume that Google is still 85% of their revenue stream (the data on that doesn't seem to be available), what would happen if Google pulled out is that Mozilla would have about 2.3 years to find funding sources to replace that revenue. Assuming they kept spending as much as they do now in the meantime instead of trying to stretch the money out.
On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.
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On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.
Of course they don't want to lose 20-30% of the search market. But a lot of people speculate that Google has been propping up Mozilla, paying them a lot more than strictly necessary so that they can fight IE and Bing on Google's behalf. With Chrome Google is now taking that competition directly, possibly only paying Mozilla the barest minimum that's commercially necessary. Let's say Google now offers Mozilla a pittance, what are the alternatives? Well the closest alternative would be Microsoft, who now powe
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change browser rather than change search engine
We are only talking about the default search engine, not being forced to use a certain search engine, so everyone with clue would just change the search engine back to Google (and complain loudly on Slashdot). Only the clueless would keep using the default search engine, and those people wouldn't be switching browsers anyway (likely they're still using IE).
How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox? (Score:2)
Honest question. I know little about the source code of both projects, but Chrome does have extensions (I know b/c I use a lot of them) and is based on an open-source product, making it very hackable. So in what way is Firefox extensible that Chrome isn't?
Integrated Gopher browser and ICQ client suite? (Score:3)
I'm sure Bob Seamonkey and Jill Firefox can sympathise.
wrong direction (Score:2)
Anyone else feel that the last decade control has been taken out of the hands of developers, in return for a big increase in compatibility headaches? I personally feel as if I'm being taken hostage by all these new environments. I cannot even have the guarantee that the javascript/HTML code I write now will still work in 1 year from now. This is of course ridiculous and completely contrary to the idea that technology should improve our lives as developers. And I think it cannot continue in this way.
The main
"Something all other browsers lack"??? Er... wha? (Score:2)
Er.... all browsers I know of allow you to write extensions. And Chrome's extension system is arguably vastly superior to Firefox's in almost every single way, from overall speed to not having to restart your browser to seamless synchronization to superior forward compatibility to everything else.
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In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.
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The theme is the very appropriately named Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+ [mozilla.org].
Re:Make a Firefox classic (Score:4, Interesting)
View->Toolbars->
- Menu, Navigation
- Turn off Tabs on Top
Tools->Options
- General: Always ask me where to save
Add-Ons:
- Status-4-Evar 2011.07.20.21
- New Tabs at the End 1.0 (not always necessary? Why not?)
- Menu Editor 1.2.7
- Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4.0
- Switch to Tab No More 1.0
- Active Stop Button 1.4.9
- Back/forward dropmarker 1.0
- Remove New Tab Button 1.0
- Stylish 1.2
Right-click on toolbar->Customize
Move home/stop buttons (currently have to put stop before reload, or they'll merge)
Make sure "Icons" and "Use Small Icons" are selected
Stylish:
#menu_tabview,
#alltabs-popup-separator
{display: none !important; }
That's a bit more than "a few clicks" and enough that i think a "classic" version of Firefox would be justifiable. Not to mention the risk that at any future upgrade they could re-break one of these fixes, or break something entirely new, possibly in a way that can't be easily corrected with just "a few clicks."
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stolen idea after idea from Opera. Tabs
Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.
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It's a bit more complex than that, Opera sort of had tabs since about version 4 / 5 before Firefox started as a project (I don't think the Mozilla Suite had got to 1.0 either?), but seeing as it hadn't really been decided that the UI for tabs should be tabs, it presented tabs using a Windows taskbar style metaphor. The UI for "tabs" was adjusted to be tabs after a while, which was after a few other browsers started using tabs, but that was mostly a skin change, and not some major rewrite.
I guess the questio
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Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.
Damn kids these days.
In 1995 the Opera browser version 2 ("MultiTorg Opera") had a "multi-document interface" where you could view several pages at the same time in the same application window. Opera introduced tabs as we know them today in version 4, in June 2000. Several browsers I haven't heard of had tabs before then, starting in 1988 with a browser for browsing news (not a "web" browser). The Mozilla browser introduced tabs in Oct. 2001, and Phoenix (Firefox) a year later in Oct. 2002. Safari got t
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And yet with all that innovation, Opera is still the red-headed stepchild of web browsers. I suspect it's because they tried to create revenue with a browser directly as opposed to OS bundling (MS/Apple) or advertising (Google/Firefox).
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