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The Future of Firefox is Chrome (theregister.co.uk) 243

Posted by BeauHD from the the-future-is-now dept.
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.
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The Future of Firefox is Chrome More

The Future of Firefox is Chrome

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  • Pure FUD and bad journalism. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @05:48PM (#51895245)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:14PM (#51895347)
      Wait a minute .... 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.

      • Re:Pure FUD and bad journalism. (Score:5, Funny)

        by s.petry ( 762400 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @07:32PM (#51895941)
        Screw you and the bash shell you logged in with! Korn shell and VI 4EVAH!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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?

      • You forgot SystemD and how Linux has gone to shit recently, at least for what I've heard from Slashdot.

      • 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.

    • The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:22PM (#51895397)

      Look, Slashdot, I know we're all supposed to hate Firefox and Mozilla

      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

      • How can this be at a score:0? This is a brilliant summary. I wish I had mod points today.

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          > 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

          • 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.

      • I, too, want them to succeed. Which is why so many of their recent moves have been bothersome.

        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.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        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

      • 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

      • Re:The /. community does not hate Mozilla. (Score:5, Informative)

        by jmv ( 93421 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @08:22PM (#51896275) Homepage

        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.

        • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        You're right that the community as a whole doesn't hate Mozilla. The problem is there are a highly vocal minority whiners who complain every time Mozilla changes the slightest thing about the browser and take it as a personal affront. Mozilla isn't the only project on the receiving end - systemd, GNOME and others come in for their fair share of irrational hate too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 605dave ( 722736 )

        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.

        • 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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 605dave ( 722736 )

            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

            • 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

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by 605dave ( 722736 )

                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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 605dave ( 722736 )

            Googlers have money to burn. Non-profits don't.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mvdwege ( 243851 )

        Nobody should lose their job, voluntarily or not, just because of their views on marriage!

        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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rizole ( 666389 )
        I wonder if /. still has enough clout to get whipslash [slashdot.org] in as project lead at Mozilla?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Dogers ( 446369 )

        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 :)

  • They should go their own way (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @05:49PM (#51895253)

    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.

    • Firefox made their name as a viable alternative the the crapfest that IE had become in the absence of meaningful competition. Then the got much, much bigger as google sought to ensure there was a platform for their adverts that wasn't under the control of a competitor with a history of using it's market dominance to crush otherwise stronger rivals. Well google has chrome for that now (and android, and ChromeOS) so FF can take a flying leap as far as they care.

      I think the browser's pretty much done innov

  • Woe (Score:2, Interesting)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
    First opera, now Firefox. Is IE next? The end is nigh!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

    by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @05:59PM (#51895295)

    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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OhPlz ( 168413 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mykro76 ( 1137341 )
      The difference there being that Chromium is FOSS. IE was not.

      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.
    • But Chromium is open sourced vs closed source IE. If you don't like the direction Google is taking Chrome you can fork and go at a different direction and if you're right, then people will come and (likely) Chromium will pick up what you're doing and merge it back to the main project. The nice thing is that there is some level of standardization. Make a difference when and where it matters, being different for the sake of being different is dumb.
  • Personally, I don't care. As long as their browser manages to provide standards compliance (for example, the ACID tests) without opening any security holes, I'm in. Plugins would be a nice plus (I'm looking at you, Microsoft. Edge is fine for plain vanilla browsing, but it's just a lab rat of a browser without extensions).

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Firefox was and still is useful. Chrome is about as useful as an NSA keyboard logger in my machine. Google doesn't need to know anything additional about me, thank you.

  • This is not good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ickleberry ( 864871 ) <web@pineapple.vg> on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:19PM (#51895379) Homepage
    I'm not looking forward to the Googification of almost everything. The internet will be a less free place when there is only one browser and one search engine (in practice), one video upload site, one mobile OS all produced by a company with a "do evil when the shareholders demand it" policy

    • The internet will be a less free place when there is only one browser and one search engine (in practice), one video upload site, one mobile OS all produced by a company with a "do evil when the shareholders demand it" policy

      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)

        by hjf ( 703092 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @08:28PM (#51896307) Homepage

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          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.

        • 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,

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dgatwood ( 11270 )

            I think Charles Proxy might be the solution to your problem, at least in theory. I haven't tried it personally.

  • Problems? (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:37PM (#51895507) Homepage Journal

    ...it is also an open secret that [Firefox] are running into more and more problems lately with web compatibility.

    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)

    by mfearby ( 1653 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @06:46PM (#51895571) Homepage

    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).

  • ... once Firefox's market share falls to the 10% area and lower, websites will no longer care about making sure they are compatible with Firefox.

    .
    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)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @07:33PM (#51895947)

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2016 @08:43PM (#51896379)

    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.

  • 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.

  • I haven't seen anyone pitch Pale Moon [palemoon.org] so far, so here goes. I've been using it since it first came out and have no complaints. It is what Firefox used to be.

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