The Future of Firefox is Chrome (theregister.co.uk) 243
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla seems to think a new future for Firefox [lies in Chrome]. While they claim that it is only about new ways of browser design, it is also an open secret that they are running into more and more problems lately with web compatibility. [Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser. The project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology, Gecko, but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.] The benefit of Chromium/Electron would be that it is a solution they could pull much faster forward than their own Servo plans [Servo being Mozilla's Rust-based web engine]. What the real outcome of all this will be, only Mozilla knows so far. But inside Mozilla there is much resistance against such plans... Interesting times are ahead.
Pure FUD and bad journalism. (Score:5, Informative)
If you actually read the "Project Tofino" page, all they're doing it using Electron to much around with user-interface experiments, not adopt anything Chrome-like: https://medium.com/project-tofino/
Heck, even Positron is about REMOVING Chrome from Electron so they can use it for these kinds of experiments as well.
Look, Slashdot, I know we're all supposed to hate Firefox and Mozilla, but can we at least submit useful information, and not obvious misinformation?
Re:Pure FUD and bad journalism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pure FUD and bad journalism. (Score:5, Funny)
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Bah, everything is just shit, and that's the way we like it. What good are comments if I can't use them to complain about everything?
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I thought we were supposed to hate microsoft, no apple, no google, no php, no ruby. Gosh I can't keep up with you kids with what to hate these days.
I'm really old-fashioned: I just really hate Microsoft, though I've grown a big dislike for Apple now too, and am becoming distrustful of Google. I haven't gotten around to hating all that other stuff yet.
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I run emacs with evil mode, so everyone can hate me.
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Sorry, that's a level of evil far beyond what even emacs is capable of. You may want to consult a priest, or perhaps a demolitions expert.
The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't get where this blatantly incorrect assumption comes from.
We don't hate Mozilla or Firefox. Slashdot's community has long been one of the most important supporters of Mozilla and Firefox!
Maybe you are just ignorant about the history of Mozilla and Firefox, and how it relates to Slashdot's community?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Slashdot was the premiere technology news site. This is well before reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow and Twitter existed. Many in the computing and software fields read Slashdot daily, and many participated in the discussion. During this time Slashdot's community helped popularize and push for the adoption of open source software.
In fact, it's very likely that the Slashdot community's efforts to help promote open source software is at least partially responsible for why the technology that eventually resulted in Firefox was open sourced in the first place!
And once the Mozilla project got started, it was the Slashdot community that supported it. Then when Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came into the picture, the Slashdot community was among the earliest adopters, supporters and promoters.
Yeah, that's right. It was the Slashdot community who is mainly responsible for Firefox becoming what it became. It wasn't Digg, or Reddit, or HN, or SO, or Twitter. It was Slashdot's community!
Firefox, and by extension Mozilla, probably wouldn't even exist today if it weren't for Slashdot's community giving it so much early support.
It was thanks to Slashdotters installing Firefox on the systems of normal people that it went from 0% of the market up to around 35% at its peak.
Then Mozilla decided to shit all over us, despite our many years of support. They fucked up Firefox's versioning scheme, breaking many extensions for a long time. They started trashing the UI, eventually destroying it outright with Australis. They removed useful functionality we wanted. Long-standing performance issues went ignored. Then they started inserting shit we didn't want, including Pocket, Hello, and even advertisement!
The advertisements (deceptively referred to as "sponsored tiles" by some) were the last straw for many people. With ad blocking extensions being among the most popular extensions for Firefox, how the fuck could Mozilla possibly think that inserting ads into the browser itself would be a good idea?!
It didn't help that we saw so much other bullshit come out of Mozilla. There was the whole Eich debacle, which was shameful. Nobody should lose their job, voluntarily or not, just because of their views on marriage! Then there were the failed projects, such as Firefox OS. Everybody with any kind of a brain saw that Firefox OS was a fucking idiotic idea from the very beginning. How the fuck did Mozilla ever hope to compete with Android and iOS, never mind the many other mobile OSes, by providing software as truly sub-par as Firefox OS?!
Now we see Mozilla squandering more resources on dumb projects like Rust and Servo. Servo is, in my opinion, fucking atrocious. Try it for yourself. Really! See how goddamn awful it is. I tried it recently and I couldn't believe how bad it was. It makes Firefox look like a damn fine browser in comparison, that's how bad Servo is. Rust is just a hype-ridden joke in my experience.
Despite Mozilla treating us so badly, and despite the many mistakes that have been made, many of us here actually want them to succeed! Before making themselves irrelevant by driving away so many of Firefox's users, Mozilla played an important role in the development of open web technology and standards.
So when you accuse us of "hating" Mozilla and Firefox you're absolutely wrong. Slashdot's community is responsible for Firefox becoming popular, and for giving Mozilla the traction it needed to get massive funding from Google and Yahoo.
Yes, many of us are angry with what has happened to Mozill
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How can this be at a score:0? This is a brilliant summary. I wish I had mod points today.
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> How can this be at a score:0? This is a brilliant summary. I wish I had mod points today.
How? Welcome to Slashdot standard moderation!
If Mozilla is going to use parts of Chrome, no problem, I suppose. Opera just did that and now Netflix also runs in Opera, too. I even find Opera to look better than Chrome.
That said, Chrome is way behind Firefox on Linux. I find some sites work better with Chrome/ium, but for serious use (like Internet Banking) Firefox seems to have the upper hand -- little things like
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With 512 MB?
I'd trim everything else down : lxde or fluxbox (with pcmanfm), wicd instead of network manager (or just nothing if you're wired), alsa instead of pulseaudio, and use Firefox.
Don't expect both full browser features and low RAM use. This ain't 2005.
Use dillo if you want something fast but it's just a step above text browsers.
Want something most robust?, you should be using a browser that runs on a 2GB+ computer through ssh -X or RDP.
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I've written to Mozilla several times asking them to stop removing popular features and "Chrome-ifying" their UI.
The fact remains that Mozilla is the only organization today making a browser that truly encourages electronic privacy, though they've stumbled over even that once or twice.
Its presence is valuable, and people should celebrate it, not try to tear it down.
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Slashdot's community loves Mozilla. We love Firefox. We just want them to get back on the right track.
The question is, was Mozilla the company ever that great? What we now know as Firefox was a runaway community fork from the Mozilla application suite, which was what they were originally backing. Early Firefox competed against IE6 that Microsoft intentionally kept non-standard and on life support to stall the rise of web applications, not responding to the competition from Firefox in the slightest before IE7 in 2006. Opera was adware and buckling under Microsoft "giving" IE away and only Mac people knew Saf
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It didn't help that we saw so much other bullshit come out of Mozilla. There was the whole Eich debacle, which was shameful. Nobody should lose their job, voluntarily or not, just because of their views on marriage!
Yes, no one should ever refuse to work with someone unethical! If his views are bad enough that too many good devs don't want to work with/for him, then it will destroy the company. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from people thinking you're an asshat and shunning you.
Now we see Mozilla
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Do you believe that you should be fired for supporting gay marriage?
Eich wasn't fired. He resigned, of his own accord with no pressure from the board, because he believed it was in Mozilla's best interest.
When you're the public face of an organization, your actions and beliefs reflect on that organization. Eich knew this and willingly resigned to prevent further conflict. I disagree with his views on Prop 8, but I'll applaud his commitment to Mozilla.
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Do you believe that you should be fired for supporting gay marriage?
Nope, and he wasn't fired so that's all OK.
After all it wasn't too long ago that your opinion was considered the "unethical" one
So?
Perhaps we are undergoing a change in our societies outlook on certain things and you shouldn't act like people who still have the beliefs they were raised with deserve to be outcasts.
He's not an outcast, a bunch of people said they wouldn't work with him however. He was after all trying to strip them of the sa
Re:The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Informative)
Now we see Mozilla squandering more resources on dumb projects like Rust and Servo. Servo is, in my opinion, fucking atrocious. Try it for yourself. Really! See how goddamn awful it is. I tried it recently and I couldn't believe how bad it was. It makes Firefox look like a damn fine browser in comparison, that's how bad Servo is. Rust is just a hype-ridden joke in my experience.
(disclaimer: I work for Mozilla, but on codecs, not browsers)
At this point, Servo is merely a proof-of-concept to experiment with new ways of doing rendering. The reason it sucks for you is that it's far from being feature-complete, and that's not even the point (yet). The point is to see if it's possible to write an engine that's both faster (because it runs in parallel) and safer (because of Rust) than current technology. Given the small team, the focus was on implementing things that were expected to be hard first (to show they were still possible), not implementing all the features. I've not been following the project too closely, but for the features it supports, it's already much faster than other browsers. And this is done by a rather tiny team (compared to Gecko). Turning it into a feature-complete would take a *lot* of people. I don't know if/when/how that decision will be made.
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Since you work for Mozilla, can you please ensure that your bosses read what the parent poster wrote? It hits the nail on the head about the community and Firefox. I championed Firefox on US Government computers and I feel betrayed by Mozilla management.
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They are already integrating several Rust components into Firefox now, and Servo just recently announced that they would being nightly releases as well as go alpha in June (along with an impressive WebRender showcase not that long ago). If you only get your news about the projects from the negativity brigade here on Slashdot, you're forgiven for not knowing anything positive about either project.
Re:The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly Rust isn't giving them a big boost in productivity, because Servo is making so little progress.
So Gecko is the result of thousands of man-years in development. On the other hand, servo probably had a few dozens of man-years of development time. How does that lead to the conclusion that Rust sucks exactly? I'm not qualified to say how successful Servo really is, but it was never expected to produce a direct Gecko replacement with 1/100 of the resources. Keep in mind that the stack of W3C specs browsers have to implement is *huge*.
Re:The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Informative)
No Silver Bullet [wikipedia.org]
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Here's a tip I always give orgs I am involved in. Never base your project on a Mozilla project. Some examples from the real world.
XULRunner - we had a project based on it before I convinced them to go native hybrid with webkit. Good move since later it was dropped and other apps like Songbird were screwed.
Popcorn - one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of, creating web videos by live linking other video sources. What could possibly go wrong? All that it needs is the links for the media to never change!
H.
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XULRunner - we had a project based on it before I convinced them to go native hybrid with webkit.
I hated them for abandoning this, it made no sense. The alternatives out there are all worse, as I can see.
Popcorn - one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of, creating web videos by live linking other video sources.
Other orgs have dumb projects too, most googlers spend their extra time they can work on a side project with something completely wasteful. However, some projects may turn out good.
You just need to watch out that the whole company just doesn't get too many dumb projects.
H.264/WebM - what a pointless fight they should have know was un-winnable.
It was not pointless. They fought against the principle of patenting standardized codecs. Only if you take the risk to lose a fight yo
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The h.264 fight was pointless from a strategic viewpoint. They were never going to win, and in the meantime Firefox lost marketshare because videos didn't play. Maybe there was a point in fighting from a purist-to-the-cause point of view, but it gained them nothing.
And as for Rust, enjoy spending your time learning it. The skill set will be nearly as useful as your XULRunner knowledge. It doesn't matter how great the tech is, there isn't industry or developer support and interest. You'd be better off learni
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It doesn't matter how great the tech is, there isn't industry or developer support and interest.
Saying there is no interest at all is wrong. Rust is "most loved" language in stack overflow's developer survey 2016, before Swift.
Yes, Swift's developer base is much larger than the base of Rust, probably because it is used for iOS app development, that's a big market. And it may become the language to write apps in for both Android and iOS. Swift has a successful future in front of it. That doesn't mean Rust has none.
Rust has areas it excels at, for example it does multithreading much better than go, a la
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I am sure Rust has many advantages, and obviously there are people who really love it. But "most loved" is the only category that Rust shows up in on that survey (just looked). It's not in most popular. Where is it going to get the momentum? Sure it may fill a niche role, but that's the whole point. Mozilla dreams up big tech that can't seem to live up to it's hype or hopes.
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Googlers have money to burn. Non-profits don't.
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There was the whole Eich debacle, which was shameful.
Agreed, this was one of the lowest points in Slashdot's history for me. It's the point at which people started openly declaring themselves to be against freedom of speech in a very dishonest way. They demanded that criticism of Eich end, and that people not choose to boycott him/Mozilla or encourage others to do so. The dishonest part is that they claimed this was to protect his freedom of speech, and of course that right does not grant freedom from consequences.
From that point on it became acceptable and e
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Just as nobody should feel to resign when their Jewish employees protest against their donations to Neo-Nazi causes. Oh wait...
Eich resigned himself, because LGB and allied employees of the Mozilla foundation protested against him donating money to a bigoted cause.
The constant whines of the thin-skinned bigots who seem to want to only want to live in a hug box where no-one ever criticises them is starting to get on my
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TLDR: We love Mozilla like Linus loves his submitters..
THIS IS ****, ONLY A BRAINDEAD DONKEY WOULD MAKE THIS - TRY HARDER NEXT TIME!
It's for their own good, honest :)
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Can you give us some examples of "good things" that Mozilla has done lately?
Let's Encrypt doesn't really count, because Mozilla is only one of many sponsors/contributors.
Aside from that, I can't think of even one positive thing they've done in many years.
Firefox clearly isn't any better than it was in, say, 2010. All the evidence shows it's much worse off, having lost so many of its users to competing browsers.
The Electrolysis project has been disastrous so far. They've spent years on it with little to show
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Let's Encrypt? Ha! You know the free Let's Encrypt gets stopped by the Firefox browser for being an untrusted certificate. Yup... I know, I've recently done it.
I've got a practice site so it's okay to link it, I guess. Go to https://peanut.ga/ [peanut.ga] and have a look. Do it with Firefox. Then do it with Chromium (probably Chrome too), Vivaldi, Opera, Midori, Lynx, elinks, elinks2, etc... Hell, compile Dillo with SSL support.
That said...
There's a sort of hidden version of Firefox. It's a special developer edition. I
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Slight correction...
It is now saying valid for Lets Encrypt in the dev version - an update may have changed that? I do not know. It still shits on StartSSL. I provided more information for StartSSL. With Let's Encrypt I used a link in DirectAdmin and was done in less than a minute. I believe it will keep updating on my behalf without my needing to click the button. Yeah...
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I'm not sure what problem you're seeing. Your URL works for me regardless of which browser I use.
The only time I see Let's Encrypt certs throw warnings are when the server isn't set up with the intermediate certs. Maybe check that you're serving the complete cert chain.
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I went to peanut.ga with Firefox 45 and it worked. I'm using Let's Encrypt certificates for my web sites and I browse them with Firefox all the times. LE always worked with Firefox. Are you sure you didn't remove LE's CA certificate from your Firefox?
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Looks fine using Firefox 45 on Windows (7, 64-bit) and Firefox 44 and 45 (updated the browser this morning) on OS X (10.6.8, 32-bit). It tells me the certificate was verified by Let's Encrypt. Hell, even Firefox 2 and 3 on IRIX (6.5.29, check your logs for a browser string along the lines of Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; IRIX64 IP30; en-us.... for the fun of it) works just fine. What configuration are you using?.
Sad recent action of Mozilla Foundation: (Score:2)
That incident showed a shocking lack of social understanding. Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues [usatoday.com].
The most amazingly sad recent action of Mozilla Foundation, in my opinion, is the fact that the 32-bit and 64-bit versions [mozilla.org] have the same file name!
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It's not really that big of a claim. I was here, I watched it, I even helped participate in it because I wanted competition. I'm a happy Opera user but not really a zealot. (Opera has made some stupid moves.) Hell, I paid enough (it wasn't much) to get my name printed in a NYT full page ad. So didn't many others.
See, I had an older ID. It was 7e+4 range. I don't know the name - but I know the password! I do not have access to the email address. (I don't want the account back.) But, the point is, I was here
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They've gone from a technical group to a political group.
I'm not convinced. I suspect you're referring to the Brendan Eich issue? If so, that's foolish. Mozilla had to respond in some way as they were already under-fire from outside groups for promoting Eich in the first place. So, aside from Eich voluntarily stepping down (he was not fired or asked to resign by the board; he did it all on his own), do you have any justification for calling Mozilla a political group?
I don't want politics in a browser.
Then you're safe using Firefox. The only politics you'll find there are the ones you've put t
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and yet so many continued to use and support the ReiserFS file system
They do? I don't think I've heard of anyone using resierfs for ages, especially after ext4 took over and then btrfs started getting some uptake.
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Why? You'll just argue and fight about it and the others are already aware of it. Eich is part of it, certainly but only one of a tiny thing and Eich's an idiot anyhow.
But, statements like this:
“Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. Equality is necessary for meaningful speech.”
No, Mozilla should believe in making a browser - just that.
I should have made it more clear - it's not just external things. I've known about a dozen people who worked there and another dozen who still d
Re:The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Insightful)
A long time ago, Slashdot was very popular and influential. I'll even give Slashdot credit for the early success of Google.
How popular? A link from the Slashdot homepage could bring down a webserver. A DDoS attack we called a 'Slashdotting' (alt. 'Slashdot effect') as the fraction of users that did read the articles flooded the site. On 9/11, while every news site was drowning, Slashdot was still accessible. They were well prepared for massive traffic. It spawned countless imitators, but few managed to grow in Slashdot's shadow.
Today, of course, Slashdot has a much smaller audience and virtually no influence. It's easy to think things were always this way, just a tiny relic of the past catering to a few curmudgeons who don't understand Reddit.
It's fallen pretty hard. Remember the "Slashdot effect"? It's no longer a thing. I had a personal project hit Hack-a-day, Reddit, and Slashdot all within a month. I got a massive boost of traffic. Though, at it's peek, the traffic from Slashdot that month was well-under the traffic I still get from Reddit when someone links to it in a comment. It was even under the traffic I got from a tiny one-word link buried in a long blog post on textfiles.com! I get more traffic from the post on Hack-a-day monthly (over 2 years later) than I got from the article on the front page of Slashdot.
So, yeah, I can see why you'd think that Slashdot couldn't possibly have influenced or shaped the web in any meaningful way today. That would be impossible. But at one point, they were a real powerhouse that could make or break a project like that.
Re: Slashdot effect (Score:3)
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To be fair, the main reason that sites don't get Slashdotted any more is that most hosting is backed by some kind of CDN that will handle transient loads.
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If Slashdot has virtually no influence, why is it that Putin's shills show up whenever there's a story that might say unpleasant things about Russia?
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... huh?
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I'll back him up on it. I started reading slashdot every day before they had ID numbers. I was reading it on a browser called "Netscape" remember them? What used to be netscape became mozilla's codebase. And I was doing that on a linux desktop on an old 486. Everything he says is true, slashdot had a *lot* of pull in the late 1990's... what happened on slashdot was often quoted in industry magazines, and being promoted by the regular crowd here was a great way to become another dot-com startup.
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Well ... what do you want? What would convince you? Be specific here, as I can't even begin to guess what would satisfy you.
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What sort of numbers or records or documents could there possibly be, given the nature of the claims being made? You're not making a realistic claim.
The nature of the claims being made are, almost by definition, anecdotal - that people who were around at the time saw these things happening: that a site which was host to several thousand of influential tech insiders were influential in promoting a new browser and associated technologies.
The notion that you can discredit any claim by shouting "show me a link
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This. Looking at this as a pure end user, who has used Mozilla since the very first milestones and then Firefox/Iceweasel, I have over 15 years of use of the browser. Now it's been several years of change after change which detract from its usability, while at the same time fundamental long standing problems like memory leaks and blocking the whole UI due to lack of per-process tabs have gone unaddressed. At this point, looking over to the Chrome/Chromium side, and seeing Mozilla as an inferior copy of t
They should go their own way (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's not the quickest or safest plan, but they made their name as an independent browser and they should stand their ground and improve their technology to compete with chrome.
For me chrome ushered in the next generation of javascript performance, that's what made it stand out for me. Firefox should find some other aspect of the web experience to make their own improvements to.
If they succeed it will be good for all of us, it's not as if there aren't plenty of things that could be improved upon. If they play it safe they will not offer any new value and will fall into obscurity.
Yeah but what? (Score:2)
I think the browser's pretty much done innov
e10s is not memory hungry either (Score:2)
I was concerned the e10s feature would lead to that Chrome dystopia of 4GB or 6GB use etc. , but it turns out only one process is added : Web Content, like plugin-container was added many versions ago (mainly used for Flash).
Back then the latter one was a big improvement. You could go from hourly crashes to daily crashes.
Now it seems more like I get a monthly crash.
It's funny how things actually get better from year to year.
E10s does not makes the browser much faster, it prevents some slowdowns inst
Woe (Score:2, Interesting)
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Google is better at embrace-extend-extinguish than Microsoft ever was. Let's hope this idiotic idea falls through.
bad for standardization... (Score:5, Insightful)
This looks like bad news.
The good thing about firefox is that it pushed for standardization. If all becomes chromium, then Google essentially takes control of all the webbrowser aspects. When IE was the defacto standard, we took about 10 years to get out of that mess.
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That certainly seems to be what's happening. I don't see much evidence that Edge is gaining much ground (and little wonder, it's a buggy piece of shit), so if Firefox adopts the Chrome engine, then we are basically left with Safari for the iDevices, and Google's engine creeping in everywhere else, and we're right back where where we were in 2005.
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I believe Edge has plugin support in Win10's fast update ring right now, as soon as that hits the slow ring, Edge's usage numbers should rise. I'd use it if it was stable and had an adblocker. Without that, it's pointless.
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We've had numerous problems at work with Windows 10 upgrades. Edge is badly unstable, to the point that we've used GPOs to make Chrome the default browser, and make sure Edge isn't the default application for anything. Even using Firefox's nightly builds back in the day didn't produce the erratic and buggy browsing experience that Edge does. But I don't think Microsoft had much choice. The IE engine is badly out of date, and if they didn't move to some other solution, they'd be completely screwed. Still, yo
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It's faster and less power intensive likely because it's so feature-poor. That's why both Firefox and Chrome, back in their early days, were faster browsers, but bloat is inevitable to support feature sets. But for me, Edge's instability is the reason I avoid it more than anything else. It's a long way from what I consider to be a production product, and I'm not much interested in helping Redmond work out the kinks in a beta product that shouldn't even be in a mainline distribution of their operating system
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To me the difference between Mozilla and Google today is their approach to privacy and user's data. Rendering is a "solved problem". If Mozilla are using Electron just for rendering, while still building a user experience that follows their core standards on privacy and data, I don't see a problem here.
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This is not good (Score:5, Insightful)
The Other Alternative is not good, either (Score:2)
While I agree, I don't see Mozilla in its current incarnation being a viable competitor to Chrome. It's unfortunate, but it is only one of many experiments in not-for-profit organizations, technical and otherwise, becoming obsessed with politics over product or service.
Perhaps this is
Re:The Other Alternative is not good, either (Score:5, Insightful)
But firefox usage isn't going down for technical reasons. It's simply going down because Google shoves chrome down your throat on every fucking web impression. No one has that kind of advertising money... except google, who controls the advertising media.
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Let's also not forget that Chrome comes bundled Ask Toolbar style (it even sets itself as the default browser) with many popular utilities like Avast Antivirus and CCleaner.
Chrome is indistinguishable from spyware.
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Firefox usage is going down for technical reasons in some places.
I've given up on it because too many SSL sites I need to access it has decided are "unsafe" and will not give me an option to override even if I know it's safe.
If time were not an issue then I'd write a mitm proxy that could run on the local machine. The browser would only ever see a single root certificate and the proxy would be responsible for all the checking of certs. The proxy UI could then be presented through the browser. Unfortunately,
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I think Charles Proxy might be the solution to your problem, at least in theory. I haven't tried it personally.
Problems? (Score:3)
What are these problems being alluded to? My assumption for over fifteen years has been: If you don't work with Firefox, your Web site is broken. Previously, compatibility issues were mostly down to a bunch of children writing their Web sites using IE-specific features which worked nowhere else. Happily, those days are largely behind us. So what's the alleged problem now?
This is bad for accessibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox is the best browser to use for screen reader compatibility, and if it uses the same engine as Chrome, then there goes vision impaired users' sanity. Chrome - as much as I like it myself - is nowhere near as good as Firefox in this area. If Electron/Chromium get their engine up to scratch to match Firefox, then it won't be a problem (I find Firefox slow as a web developer anyway, though Firebug beats Chrome's developer tools, hands down).
As I've been saying all along... (Score:2)
.
It looks as if my prediction is beginning to happen. Firefox is being left behind by website developers. Which will contribute to its marketshare slide even more if Mozilla doesn't do something drastic.
No more bug fixes in Mozilla then (Score:5, Interesting)
Whenever I would report bugs with Firefox, devs would take them seriously and even fix them. Sometimes they took years, but even so, they didn’t try to tell me I was an idiot or anything like that.
Whenever I have reported Chrome bugs, I would get a relatively hostile response, with devs telling me that I was wrong, even when I could make a solid usability engineering argument or there were incompatibilities or crashes or whatever.
If Mozilla stops being in control of their browser development, it’s going to seriously suck a lot worse because the Google engineers who work on Chrome that I have dealt with are self-absorbed assholes.
Privacy, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I'm fully committed to Firefox because it's the only option for someone who cares about privacy. How many other browsers are open source AND have the suite of privacy addons available for Firefox AND are developed by a company that pushes hard for more privacy? You're not going to get this stuff with Chromium.
So now neither browser will work on Linux? (Score:2)
Chrome still works, but you have to use an old version. Google has made it clear it will not support chrome on Linux any longer. So, it's just a matter of time.
In recent years, Google has come to hate Linux.
The Future of FireFox is Pale Moon (Score:2)
Rant: REBOOT the WEB (Score:3, Interesting)
Because people want desktop-like UI's in HTML browsers, and that's NOT what they were designed for, and kludges to get it are uglier than Trump's ass after a long sweaty horse-ride while lost in the mountains.
Time for new GUI-friendly standard. For one, get rid of client-side "auto-flow" and make it coordinate based so that each browser and version doesn't put things in different places. WYSIWYG, dammit.
It's why designers miss Flash: client-side autoflo
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It's called "PDF" and it doesn't work well on the web.
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Partly because PDF is based around paper's pagination; and it wasn't originally designed for interaction, which would be needed for GUI's. Parts of it could be borrowed for the new World Wide GUI when we replace the damned auto-flow crap and burn the bastard to the ground and dance around the fire. Oops, I forgot to shut off rant-mode.
Another thing, why are CSS and HTML different languages? Can we find a common language and/or syntax style? Do we really need them to be so different? Some kind of tag inherit
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Sorry, my indentation somehow went kaphlooey. Let me try underscores this time:
The wild-card tag looks to much like a comment. Ponder...
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Another problem with PDF is the fixed document size. You can make it whatever you want, but it can't change dynamically. It might be okay if everyone used a desktop with a graphical browser to access the web, but there was a fairly small window of time when that could be generally assumed. It's no secret that reading PDF's on a smartphone is very frustrating -- I'd hate to see the same happen to websites just to make it easier to develop application-like pages.
Right now, with a modern browser, it's prett
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I don't know that we're going to find much common ground. It seems that we're interested in completely different aspects of the problem. Thanks for taking the time to clarify your position, though.
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I found it fully intelligible with the wrong indent
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That might be fine for your desktop-like UIs but it would sure suck for web pages.
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Because everyone has perfect sight, wants the same size browser window as the developer, browses at 100% zoom level, with the same fonts, on the same screen resolution, with the same sub-pixel rendering, right? Sure, we're all machines.
Those silly users with their 4K screens should just set them all to 1366x768 like the crappiest notebook LCDs! Jaggies forever! Screw mobile users, damn hipsters can get stuffed.
You're right. Fuck screen readers, accessibility, personalization and anyone with even the slighte
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Zooming fixed-size content sucks. It's far too easy to wind up having to scroll back and forth each line. It's why I bought an Android tablet with a large screen, so I could easily read PDFs.
Exactly what do you want with server-side reformatting for specific devices? How much do you want the server to reformat, how much information do you think it needs from the device, and what's the advantage of doing that rather than having the client do it? What does the server do when it doesn't recognize what d
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A server-side formatter could provide a small-device-friendly layout. That's something PDF-related tech doesn't attempt to provide.
Note that one HUGE advantage of a PDF is that anybody with typical "cubicle" education can make them (via Word etc.) If one has to worry about device-specific flow, then a "layout expert" is also needed (such as a web dev), not JUST the content creator. That makes the document at least twice a
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Because people want desktop-like UI's in HTML browsers
Load those people on a rocket and fire it into the Sun.
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Well, of course there's a lot of nuance that can't be conveyed in one smart-aleck remark.
CUI and GUI exist side-by side on modern operating systems. I use both when it suits my purpose. The kind of people who I want to launch into the Sun are the ones who re-invent essential GUI components inside their web pages. For example, my web browser has a back button. That's a browser function. Don't disable that. Don't make me hunt on the page for your artiste's haute couture back button that looks like a dan
Re:SJWs really hollowed the place out. (Score:4, Informative)
And now their next endeavor is to basically reskin Chrome and call it Firefox.
This is informative? It's about as incorrect as it could possibly get. It's pointed out in the article and in early posts in this thread. I can see how you'd get that impression from the flamebait title and summary, but restating prominent misinformation sure as hell isn't informative!
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I didn't like how I had to word some of that either
That would explain it. I though someone was doing an odd impersonation of you.
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