Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates 208
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.
I remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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)
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.
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Now if they would bring back the features we've had in the extension (be it as extension or not, I don't care how they implement it) then they might be on to something.
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Now if they would bring back the features we've had in the extension (be it as extension or not, I don't care how they implement it) then they might be on to something.
What extension do you mean?
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This: https://www.reddit.com/r/firef... [reddit.com]
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This: https://www.reddit.com/r/firef... [reddit.com]
OK, Understood (now, thanks for the expansion). I haven't tried Pocket. Hadn't even heard of it until this story. Since then I've asked someone to explore Wallabag (for various reason).
Re:I remember... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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HTML5 Video, especially H264
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Re:I remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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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.
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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.
Please Dont (Score:2)
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.
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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...
If all development stopped today (Score:2)
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)
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)
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.
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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
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Faster UI changes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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)
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:
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)
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.
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When will they fix the automatic update service?
Hopefully "fix" by removing it entirely. I don't want each and every piece of software to phone home looking for "updates". (That wastes time at startup when you wants things to be quick - especially when travelling and using slow networks. And when I want to browse - the last thing I want is an upgrade offer. "No, I am not about to waste time now - I STARTED the computer to read som mail/news/..."
Upgrades are very competently handled through the distribution these days. I decide when it it time to deal with upgrades, and then I have all sw on the machine upgraded simultaneously. Not just one particular browser. Perhaps windows users are not so lucky - but make an "upgrader addon" specifically for windows then. Don't bother the rest of us with such bloat.
The updating function can be removed at compilation time. I guess that most Linux distros do this. .mozconfig before compiling.
To remove it just add "ac_add_options --disable-updater" to your
In windows they have the normal updater (help / about will trigger a manual update), and the Mozilla updater service. The service concept is nice, but it just doesn't work.
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Sync isn't even a good idea. I don't want my professional browser to pick up ANYTHING from my home browser.
Mod this up, please!
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:2)
Instead of better performance, hardware acceleration, sandboxing, multiprocess, multithreading etc etc...
Mozilla Foundation is now paid by Microsoft. (Score:2)
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]
More about Mozilla Foundation management. (Score:2)
Adobe has a long history of being invasive and abusive and releasing buggy software, in my opinion. Basically, installing new versions of Firefox now appears to give Adobe complete control, even though it is "sandboxed". Mozilla Foundation app
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Mozilla switched to Yahoo [cnet.com] as default search, not Bing. Apple's the one that's had a flirtatious relationship with Bing.
Nope, Bing is the default search engine, and, even though I change it to Google, every time it updates, it reverts back to Bing as the default search engine.
Dishonesty, sneakiness: MS owns Mozilla Foundation (Score:2)
Since Microsoft is now apparently the major way that the Mozilla Foundation makes money, Microsoft essentially owns Firefox, or is in a position to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Where do they get these ideas? (Score:2)
make it works! (Score:2)
I wonder if they will be able just of that!!!
I'd use Chrome if only... (Score:2)
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.
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No Thanks (Score:3)
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.
the opposite of what anyone wants (Score:2)
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Many companies have this problem (Score:2)
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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I remember when Firefox was the amazingly simple and expandable alternative to Explorer. Now it's just bloatware.
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In what way is it significantly bloated compared to 1,0?
I remember the days where to be usable you needed about 10-20 extensions, and THAT made it a bloated, leaky, hoggish mess; when javascript took the browser to a crawl; and when simple updates (like 1.0 - 1.5, which as I recall primarilly were visual updates and adding a new tab button) took something like a year to come to release. Trust me if you werent there, this is better.
Re:My Plans for Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
I was there before Mozilla existed, and I respectfully disagree.
To answer your question about how it's bloated since 1.0, please consider this: which updates in the past year or so have not added an extra icon to the main toolbar and/or come with a splash screen about the update that primarily advertises a new feature that isn't a core part of the browser and would previously have been handled with an add-on (if at all)? Why is there an "Apps" entry on my "Tools" menu now? Pocket? Hello?
Meanwhile, quality seems to have dropped significantly since the rapid release schedule. There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox. I literally have to fire up another browser to use them, and that could be IE or Chrome or even Safari on iOS, so it's not that someone has written an IE-only site in 2015 or anything like that. Of course it's particularly annoying with Firefox because unlike every other major browser for many years, taking out one tab in Firefox can still take out everything else as well.
Perhaps instead of trying to be all things^W^WChrome to all people, they would do better to go back to their roots as the simple, expandable browser the AC mentioned, and perhaps focus on the robustness issues with plug-ins and cross-tab contamination that have plagued them for so long. They might not take over the entire Web that way, but at least they'd still be the best choice for a significant part of the market instead of slowly drifting into obscurity on their current course.
I really hope they do, because the two reasons I still tend to use Firefox by default on most PCs are the add-on ecosystem and my general distrust of Google and more recently Microsoft. Mozilla seem to be going the wrong way on both fronts right now.
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Unfortunately these two things are somewhat conflicting. They are working on a process-per-tab/plugin implementation ("Electrolysis") but it will require changes to many add-ons.
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In that specific case it would be understandable. Frankly I'm expecting Perl 6 and Half-Life 3 before Electrolysis ships anyway, but if it ever does, I think most people would understand that it's a significant architectural change and there are very good reasons for making it.
It's the frequent breakage of useful extensions just because someone felt like rearranging the UI or some superficially unrelated APIs that winds up a lot of users and extension developers, I think.
Re:My Plans for Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox.
Have you filed bug reports for those crashes? Care to share more information about the websites that cause them?
I'm serious, I can try to help get those bugs resolved.
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Thanks for the offer. And yes, in a couple of cases I've reported a URL via the Firefox made me sad feature.
I'm torn about doing more. On the one hand, of course I'd like to see the issues fixed and in principle I'm happy to help. As a software developer myself I understand the usefulness of detailed technical information and test cases.
On the other hand, every time I go near Bugzilla I seem to spend 15-30 minutes trying to figure it out, before sometimes getting to the stage of actually submitting a useful
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Seriously, what's the point?
Everyone knows Amazon brings Firefox practically to a halt. Many people also know that Atom GitHub pages crash Firefox. These are know issues for many months and nothing (really, literally nothing) has been done about it by the devs. So, there is really no point to keep filling but reports about this issue when the devs don't even solve those related bugs that they already know that exist for a long time.
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I feel like most technical people - the people who you really want filing bug reports - know that big open source projects are something of a blackhole for bug reports.
I think Firefox especially has an uphill battle at the moment - threads like this demonstrate that users clearly think that most dev effort at Mozilla is focused on new features rather than bug fixes.
The thought of going to the effort of battling Bugzilla, logging a bug report only to see it languishing (or WONTFIXed) for months or years is c
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http://pressf1.pcworld.co.nz/showthread.php?53961-Firefox-loads-page-then-goes-to-bottom-of-the-page
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that's where i put it. less the 39.0 i reported it oh at least 3 years ago 5 years before that. There may be a Bugzilla report, i wouldn't have a clue in the world where it is as i said this bug has been around since at least 2005. I have long since gave up any kinda hpe it will get fixed so i don't save Bugzilla reports i made 10 years ago.
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I actually meant before the Mozilla Foundation and by extension Mozilla Corp, but either way works. In any case, yes, one of the things I really don't like about the way Firefox seems to be heading recently is the kitchen sink strategy. As you say, that was what led to Firefox (and Thunderbird) taking over from the old Mozilla suite in the first place. I've no objection to having a co-ordinated range of communication tools, but I'm not sure why they all need to be built into the browser like some sort of 21
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If you had actually bothered to read my posts before commenting, you might have noticed that at no point did I suggest Firefox must or even should try to keep up with Chrome's bleeding edge features. In fact, I think the drive for quantity of features over quality of implementation that Chrome exemplifies is the worst thing to happen to the Web since the stagnation of the IE6 era, and I would be the last person to suggest that Firefox mimicking that policy is desirable.
And no, the quality of Firefox has not
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Virtual +1 Funny
Re:My Plans for Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
This stuff they talk of is exactly why I don't use Firefox anymore. I don't want partnerships, and I don't want add-ons (okay, mayyybe one or two). A web browser displays the content... when it works properly, I should barely be able to notice the web browser is anything more than a window.
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Yep. I quit updating FF quite a while ago. Didn't want them sneaking in stuff any more.
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Nope just no ads in an open source project made by a company who was originally king due to a distrust of competitors who did their best to monetize end users.
A more apt example would be not wanting ads on cable TV.
Re:My Plans for Firefox (Score:5, Informative)
Why this is marked troll I have no idea. I've dumped firefox myself, most of my 'tech' friends at work have done the same. At work the only person still using firefox is our web dev guys to make sure there's compatibility. Most have switched to chromium, palemoon(FF branch), or Opera. I honestly believe at this point, there's a group of people inside mozilla that are just going out of their way to destroy FF, the decisions have been braindead for the last 4 years.
Re:My Plans for Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly believe at this point, there's a group of people inside mozilla that are just going out of their way to destroy FF, the decisions have been braindead for the last 4 years.
Yeah, but reading your other posts it looks like you believe a lot of crazy shit.
The reality is that Firefox has been struggling figure out where to go next for years now. There have been some improvements to the core tech like the Javascript engine and HTML layout engine, but beyond that it was fairly feature complete long ago. There are some major architectural issues that need sorting (one process per tab, the add-on API, the plug-in API etc.) but those are hard to fix without breaking everything.
So they started to muck about with the GUI. If there's one thing that Slashdotters hate, it's GUI changes. Firefox was kind of a mess though, with two different menu systems (the Firefox button and the system menus), a preferences Window that reminds you of 1998 and IE6, lots of stuff that is only exposed via about:config etc.
Incompetent though the UX people at Mozilla may be, there is no evidence of malice here. Just not knowing what to do with a browser that has a lot of historical baggage in the code base that is blocking some of the real improvements people want to see.
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Yes - never call it malice if it is adequately explained by stupidity.
That said, bloating feature-complete programs is unfortunately commonplace. And adapting GUI's according to the largest idiot's preferences seems to be the latest hype in UI development.
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The reality is that Firefox has been struggling figure out where to go next for years now.
The reality is that Firefox shouldn't be trying to go anywhere. It's a fucking web browser. If I want more bullshit in my browser, I'll open another site. If I want to integrate that site into my browser, I'll go looking for a browser extension. I don't want it done for me. If I did, I'd have opened some site-specific app. I just want the goddamn browser.
Also, the other reality is that Firefox is supposed to be a platform which is highly themeable, so actually changing the GUI shouldn't even be necessary. I
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The reality is that Firefox shouldn't be trying to go anywhere. It's a fucking web browser. If I want more bullshit in my browser...
I should have mentioned that their market share was falling too. Chrome was rising fast, and even IE didn't suck too badly by V10. So they knew that they needed to change to maintain their position, but didn't know how.
Of course market share isn't necessarily such a good metric. If the number of browser users is growing but the number of Firefox users remains static their share will drop, for example. As much as some geeks dislike it, people really seem to love Chrome. Perhaps Mozilla's mistake was in not catering to their core user base, and instead trying to be popular with causal users by copying the market leader.
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I should have mentioned that their market share was falling too. Chrome was rising fast, and even IE didn't suck too badly by V10. So they knew that they needed to change to maintain their position, but didn't know how.
No. That's a false assumption. Sometimes there's nothing you can do to preserve market share. You know what they could have done that would have resulted in market share rising again after it dipped? Nothing. That's right, they should have done nothing. I mean, sure, bug fix, keep up with standards, help drive the standards even. But you don't change things that people like in order to make yourself more popular. That's goddamned idiotic at best.
If Firefox had changed nothing, then when Chrome actually got
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They should have done nothing.
Completely agree, and it's what makes me more angry than anything else related to the mess that is Firefox today.
They utterly discarded their core user base, the people who loved and brought the browser to the point it was, chasing some pipe dream of market share percentage points. They became convinced that trying to maintain that share was more important than anything else, and so, like an anorexic person, went on a self-destructive rampage trying to achieve that impossible and truly undesirable goal.
Fir
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Everyone except those being paid to make GUI changes hate having them forced upon them. If it works, it works. If you have a new idea, allow the user to adopt it *or not*.
Continue to follow incompetence long enough and it becomes maliciousness.
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There are some major architectural issues that need sorting (one process per tab, the add-on API, the plug-in API etc.) but those are hard to fix without breaking everything.
So putting something serious in the too hard basket while doing their best to crap on what made Firefox great in the first place just so the developers can look busy is the correct response?
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Yeah, but reading your other posts it looks like you believe a lot of crazy shit.
I'll bet many people would say the same thing about you and your other posts. By the way, did Gamergate steal your lunch money yet? Oh wait, that should be "steal your clickbait sites..."
How strange a person can't pick up on something that's been mentioned numerous times, by other people with regards to FF and the mozilla team in general.
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I've switched to Palemoon. The thing I worry the most about with that decision is that retarded UI changed in FF might sneak its way into Palemoon just because it is bothersome to maintain a branch with too many differences from the main one.
Valid fear. With luck that will be a no, but if it does they'll simply be shooting themselves in the foot people will also say 'fuck it' and move to something else.
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Unlikely, the maker of Palemoon doesn't like Australis as he explains on https://www.palemoon.org/layou... [palemoon.org].
No Auastralis is the main thing why most current Palemoon users use it instead of Firefox.
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Palemoon isn't Firefox any more, it's not tracking the Firefox source tree like it used to. It's a separate browser now, and while it does pick up some security updates it won't bet getting Australis or any of the other crap.
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If you had read TFA they are actually trying to fix some of the problems people had with this:
"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."
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"Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on..."
To which I would reply "Yeah, no shit." The integration of Pocket was a pretty obvious blunder, and not just in hindsight. What's concerning to me is that "folks" actually need to tell this to the Mozilla leadership, demonstrating that either they're horribly out of touch with their users or desperate enough for revenue that they're willing to ignore what's best for their users.
I'm a Firefox user, and don't have any intention of switching browsers, but it's pretty astounding and worrisome to see how they've managed to anger so many of their users in such a short time.
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"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."
Translation: The additional revenue per user from Pocket doesnt make up for the lost revenue due to declining install base from of our other monetization efforts.
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Firefox is not google, is not microsoft. Nothing else matters.
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IE was finished with IE6 and something like 90% market share. Until it wasn't anymore.