Inside Mozilla's Fight To Make Firefox Relevant Again (cnet.com) 276
News outlet CNET has a big profile on Firefox today, for which it has spoken with several Mozilla executives. Mozilla hopes to fight back Chrome, which owns more than half of the desktop market share, with Firefox 57, a massive overhaul due November 14. From the report: "It's going to add up to be a big bang," Mozilla Chief Executive Chris Beard promises, speaking at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters. "We're going to win back a lot of people." "Some of the stuff they're doing from a technology perspective is amazing," says Andreas Gal, who became CEO of startup Silk Labs after leaving the Mozilla chief technology officer job in 2015. "I just don't think it makes a difference." [...] You may not care which browser you use, but the popularity of Firefox has helped keep browsers competitive and build the web into a foundation for online innovations over the last decade. Are you a fan of Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube? That's partly thanks to Firefox. Mozilla's mission is to keep the web vibrant enough for the next big innovation even as companies offer mobile apps instead of websites, dump privacy-invading ads on you or try to confine your activity to their own walled gardens. [...] To Mozilla, each tap or click on a webpage in Firefox is more than you browsing the internet. It's a statement that you'd prefer a more open future where online services can start up on their own. The alternative, as Mozilla sees it, is a future where everyone kowtows to Apple's app store, Google's search results, Facebook's news feed or Amazon's Prime video streaming. That's why Mozilla bought billboard ads saying "Browse against the machine" and "Big browser is watching you," a jab at Google. [...] Improvements within a project called Quantum are responsible for much of the difference. One part, Stylo, accelerates formatting operations. Quantum Flow squashes dozens of small slowdown bugs. Quantum Compositor speeds website display. And Firefox 57 also will lay the groundwork for WebRender, which uses a computing device's graphics chip to draw webpages on the screen faster. "You can do user interface and animation and interactive content that you simply can't do in any other browser," says Firefox chief Mayo, speaking from his office in Toronto -- over video chat technology Firefox helped make possible. It all adds up to a very different engine at the core of Firefox. That kind of speedup can really excite web developers -- an influential community key to Firefox's success in taking on IE back in 2004.
Trumpzilla? (Score:2, Funny)
Cry me a river... (Score:2, Insightful)
Turns out, fucking with the technicians (breaking https, because *mozilla* feels i dont need to access my devices until they have a mozilla-approved certificate) was the wrong approach. Good luck getting them back. The non-tech-crowd is gone for good anyway ("Hey Chrome is just there on my PC, why would i install that Firefoggs?")...
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Turns out, fucking with the technicians (breaking https, because *mozilla* feels i dont need to access my devices until they have a mozilla-approved certificate) was the wrong approach.
Pretty much all the browsers make you jump thorugh hoops now for self-signed certs.
There probably should be a button when the destination is on the same subnet : 'I'm trying to connect to a local device on my LAN, and I know it has a self-signed certificate"
The non-tech-crowd is gone for good anyway ("Hey Chrome is just there on my PC, why would i install that Firefoggs?")...
Hey Edge is just there on my PC, why would i install Chrome?
Once whatever is there is good enough, people stop looking for alternatives. These days Chrome is coasting on a bit of momentum and heavily pushing itself by bundling itself with adobe, nagging
SWF has an EOL (Score:3)
These days Chrome is coasting on a bit of momentum and heavily pushing itself by bundling itself with adobe
Adobe what? Flash Player? Adobe and Google have jointly announced plans to remove Flash Player [slashdot.org] at the end of 2020, leaving digital restrictions management for streaming video as the only significant non-free component of Google Chrome.
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Adobe what?
I think I saw it bundled with Acrobat Reader very recently. I just checked now, and it was pushing some intel password management thing... so maybe im mistaken. Maybe Java? Or maybe acrobat rotates the bundles... I admit i don't pay that much attention to it.
leaving digital restrictions management for streaming video as the only significant non-free component of Google Chrome.
I simply don't trust Google/Chrome not to violate my privacy. That's worse than the DRM components.
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Pretty much all the browsers make you jump thorugh hoops now for self-signed certs.
Only one does what Firefox does, and its name is Firefox. Even the forks dont do what Firefox does in this case, which is to completely prevent accessing a site if it doesnt like the cert.
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Yes, that duplicate serial thing is a serious PITA.
I should be allowed to use any wonky cert that I wish. If the concern is that people will just blithely click a "use this anyway" button without knowing what they're doing, then make it an about:config setting.
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that is a GREAT suggestion.
Anyone still uses Firefox? (Score:2, Insightful)
I ditched it when they pulled a Canonical and decided "F the user, it's our product our way".
Technically true, but that's a great way to render yourself irrelevant and dry up your market share.
Firefox is the Ubuntu of web browsers.
Re:Anyone still uses Firefox? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, perfectly fine for 99% of the population but sends tech nerds into a frothing rage? Sounds about right.
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Firefox is the Ubuntu of web browsers.
So, perfectly fine for 99% of the population but sends tech nerds into a frothing rage? Sounds about right.
99% of the population doesn't even know what the fuck Ubuntu is.
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Firefox 57 (Score:5, Insightful)
When Firefox kill legacy addons and destroy the best of Firefox forever.
They are trying to hide this. Most of addon community is warning the core developers. Drop the capabilities of legacy addons while they say that webextension will replace it while it has not the same functionality will broke most addons FOREVER.
Turn Firefox webextension into a Chrome clone... Bullshit.
Re:Firefox 57 (Score:5, Interesting)
Revamping the plugin system is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. There are big problems with it that could stand improving.
The issue is if the new plugin system is less powerful and featureful than the old (which appears to be the case).
A plugin that does the same thing as NoScript is mandatory for me, and I can't stand using any browser that doesn't (which, currently, means any browser that isn't FireFox) -- the web is simply too risky and unpleasant to use without it.
If, as appears to be the case, the new plugin system does not allow something like NoScript, then I'll be using Pale Moon. I literally cannot think of a single thing that Mozilla could do with FireFox that would change that equation.
Re:Firefox 57 (Score:5, Informative)
It seems it will support NoScript:
NoScript’s Migration to WebExtensions APIs [mozilla.org]
You had me worried for a moment... =)
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This is potentially great news! I look forward to seeing how well this ports over. Certain things he said in the page you linked to have me worried, though (for example, that he's relying on HTML5 features to replace some functionality -- which implies that they would only work on sites that are HTML5 compliant).
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From what I understood, it is not the site that needs to be compliant, it is the browser. So, from what I undertand, some of the features that were XUL dependant, are now implemented with HTML5 features.
It seems Firefox is trying to "standardize" the way to build extensions, and force Chrome to accept their extensions to the extensions API. So, we would not only have every Chrome extension working with Firefox, but the other way around too. It would be great, for example, if NoScript would run on Chrome.
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Even better!
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Old extension system is a Bad Thing (Score:3)
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Agreed, but wishing for that is, I suspect, a pointless exercise.
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Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry for the nomenclature confusion.
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That was one - destroying compatibility b/w versions on Add-ons, wasting the effort one made on customizing. I guess one could go to Pale Moon or Fossamail instead, but the BSD platforms don't have it.
The other was FireFox copying the Chrome way of doing things, thereby destroying a key differentiator. Also, if in the 90s, Internet Explorer being preinstalled and un-removable from Windows then was a problem for Netscape, today, there is NO platform that needs to have FireFox. If one has Windows 10, the
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today, there is NO platform that needs to have FireFox. If one has Windows 10, there is Edge, if one has Windows 7, there is IE, if one has Android, there is Chrome, and if one has iOS, there is Safari.
But what on GNU/Linux? And what on Windows 7 or macOS when a web application displays a notice that what you're doing requires a web platform feature that Microsoft never got around to implementing in IE 11 or Apple in Safari (desktop version)?
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For anything where Chrome doesn't exist, Chromium is an option. Not sure what exactly it'd break, but I've had it, along w/ FireFox on this TrueOS laptop
For those uncommon features, how often do they prop up that they require you to download yet another browser?
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If one has Windows 10, there is Edge, if one has Windows 7, there is IE,
But these browsers are shit in every way. I mean, IE11 doesn't even let you know when things are happening behind the scenes, you click on a link and nothing appears to happen until it begins to actually load. WTF? The first rule of UI design is to let the user know that things are happening, and not just appear to have frozen.
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The first rule of UI design is to let the user know that things are happening
Is that rule still in force? It seems that UX designers have largely decided to ignore it and follow the philosophy of giving as little information as possible.
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Is that rule still in force? It seems that UX designers have largely decided to ignore it and follow the philosophy of giving as little information as possible.
It's not that you have to tell them what is happening. You just have to let them know that something is happening. Ideally, these days you should also give them a time estimate if it's going to take long, but that's not a necessity. This is why web browsers got throbbers to begin with.
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Indeed.
Wrecking legacy plugins needs a really, really strong justification. "Compatibility with other browsers' APIs" is not it. I'm not looking to run Chrome extensions; I'm not running Chrome. I want my _existing_ legacy plugins to work.
Mozilla (Firefox in particular) has become increasingly paternalistic over the years; the thing about mandating signed extensions most notably (although there is actually a viable workaround [ghacks.net] (at least for now). But the plugin API thing does not appear likely to have an
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Meh.
Browsers because plenty fast enough for me a long while ago. Having one be faster than another is not a meaningful differentiator for me.
Except, perhaps, on smartphones -- the last time I tried FF on my smartphone, it was so slow and resource-hungry that it was quite literally unusable.
Andreas Gal is right (Score:5, Interesting)
There's surely some people who can name technical, usability reasons, etc. But I bet the majority use it because:
So, if these are in fact most people's reasons it doesn't matter much what Mozilla do since Google have a much greater advertising power.
Also, that speedup would have to be huge for Joe User to notice and care.
Also 2, Isn't 57 the version where they remove support for classic extensions? The huge number and variety and power of Fx's extensions are one of the main reasons for choosing Firefox. They're gonna remove it and they think they'll gain tons of users. They're just bonkers. I predict lots of people will leave Firefox when 57 is out.
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I know many that use Chrome because it sync with their phone. They can be using a site on their desktop and save the password and go the site on their phone and the password is just there. Same with what sites you have visited recently. When you couple that with gmail the results are even more extreme. I recently went on a trip to the USA and my phone tracked all the flights, hotels etc including delays simply with the integration of android, gmail and chrome.
I don't see how firefox is going to beat that co
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You know that the same synchronization is possible between with Firefox, right?
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Firefox already lost all the non-technical users, for the reasons you mentioned.
Once Firefox destroys the ability to use your favorite existing extensions, the more technical users (i.e., the people who care about extensions) will switch to something else.
I switched to Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
Because Firefox became Chrome Junior with their interface and stopped making the browser better. Every release had some new feature that no one asked for. A paper airplane button for sharing links with friends? Until they make something faster and less bloated I'm staying with Chrome. Apparently no one at Mozilla is old enough to remember the bloat that was IE4.
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Many of us switched to Chrome because it felt way faster and it didn't have chrome (makes your screen feel bigger). We keep using Chrome because momentum until Chrome does something too annoying.
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Firefox vs Chrome (Score:2)
I'd use Firefox all the time if it supported Netflix on Linux and if Signal had some non-Chrome support
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Interesting turn of phrase there.
Enabling EME isn't really embracing customer choice, though. It's enabling corporate misbehavior.
Real world performance improvements recently. (Score:4, Interesting)
But I have to use Chrome for work, and no matter how well Firefox did in some Tom's Hardware browser shootouts in 2012 or so, and no matter what numbers they show on arewefastyet.com and so forth, Firefox consistently felt painfully slow next to Chrome. That finally changed for me with 56 nightly. I'm not sure if it's as fast as Chrome, but for the first time ever it feels close enough that the difference is not an annoyance.
The article also mentions Firefox OS. I think in 2025, when WebAssembly is a mature technology, when $25 smart phones have 4GB of RAM, and when Firefox on mobile is substantially more efficient than Firefox 56 or 57 now... then Firefox OS might be practical. In 2013, it was a great idea not ready.
Re:Felt slow? It is slow. (Score:4, Informative)
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Again, even with Firefox 54, the current stable release, it's still very noticeably slower than Chrome. But if you download the nightly build of Firefox I think the speed improvement is fantastic.
There is nothing that I do in Firefox that is slow enough to be an issue. I typically only want to see information. Displaying things is usually pretty easy.
I run NoScript. Religiously. Speed is not an issue for Firefox for me.
Give us back Firefox then (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, the browser that focused on rendering web pages fast and securely but left all the fancy schmancy UI and features where they belong: extensions.
Browsers are already gigantic and bloated as it is (all of them). You want to win me back as a customer? Start there. You want to fix the pulseaudio/alsa debacle? Make the sound server an extension so people can write a better one without having to fork all of Firefox. People get pissed off at your stupid UI decisions? Extension. People moved to Firefox because they were starved for choices, stop taking those away and you'll be relevant again. If we wanted a clone of Chrome, we'd use Chrome.
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Re:Give us back Firefox then (Score:5, Insightful)
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Try Palemoon (http://palemoon.com/). It's basically modern firefox rendering in the firefox 3 UI.
Last time I tried palemoon, quite a lot of sites didn't render correctly in it. That was a couple of years ago, though. Have they made major strides in compatibility since then? Or has the changing landscape kept ahead of them?
Re:Give us back Firefox then (Score:4, Informative)
I went to your link and it is some... thing, an actual old 90s website still up, you meant http://palemoon.org/ [palemoon.org]
Re:Give us back Firefox then (Score:4, Insightful)
People get pissed off at your stupid UI decisions? Extension.
Yes, I forgot about this. The default FF UI is painful, and it's the Classic Theme Restorer plugin that makes FF continue to be usable to me.
So, I'll correct my prior comments: If FF can't support plugins that do what NoScript does and there's no way to correct the awful UI direction that FF has gone, then it's Pale Moon or some equivalent for me.
Still a standalone application. Humf. (Score:4, Interesting)
Computing these days is about the ecosystem. That's the reason for the dominance of app stores and Chrome.
Chrome = integrates with everything else that I use, yes including Google slurping my data. That's *why* I use Chrome. To get my data slurped, so that other Google services that I use (say, Google Now and Maps) work better. Shares bookmarks, sessions, and cache data across devices. A bunch of apps that I use can go back and forth between in-browser version and in-window (as a Chrome app) version, with the same interface. Is the native OS on my Chromebook.
Firefox... is just a standalone app. When they release a smartphone OS that integrates with Firefox and competing services to Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. that are *better* than Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. then I'll consider Firefox again. Until then, it's just another web browser in an age in which the web browsers are obsolete and have been replaced by operating-eco-systems.
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you can use firefox on android and you get pretty much all the advantages you listed, plus ad blocking support on your phone
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you can use firefox on android...
To use Firefox on Android I'd need a MUCH faster phone than my Moto 3G - like maybe something water-cooled and with an auxiliary power supply. Plus, the user interface is among the worst of the Android browsers - all of which have UI's that are varying degrees of shitty anyway. I'd love to support the Moz on Android, but for me it's simply unusable.
Re: Still a standalone application. Humf. (Score:2)
That sounds more like a reason to have both. Use Chrome for all that Google-integrated stuff, and have Firefox for when you want to do some plain browsing separate from all that.
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I hope you get your wish -- as long as I can disable those integrations. I want none of that.
Mozilla has an opportunity (Score:3)
There are many reasons why Mozilla still has a chance to become the dominant browser. Google is nowhere near as security-conscious as Mozilla. They will not allow master passwords to protect saved password databases; Google doesn't allow plugins that support downloading of YouTube videos and a host of other things. If Mozilla can improve their performance issues, they are the best choice for a default browser due to Google's sacrificing of user security and flexibility in order to maintain their corporate control.
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If Chrome "will not allow master passwords to protect saved password databases", then why do I get prompted by KWallet 3 times whenever I launch Chrome?
All I really care about is that my browser (Score:5, Insightful)
Does not permit auto-play videos.
Has per-tab audio muting (and is muted by default).
Does not permit cross-site content by default
Supports ad blocking (esp. pop-ups and -unders), script blocking, tracker blocking, and includes anti-fingerprinting obfuscation.
Does not hide the cache files from me.
Has a download manager that will auto-resume on failure.
And while I have the bandwidth to handle it... I don't want my browser downloading videos and animations until I decide I want them. Don't waste my bits!
Right now, Firefox does most of that 99% of the time for me with a few select add ons installed. The only reason I have Chrome installed is that occasionally I like to use Google Maps 3D, and my kids' school uses Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for homework.
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I've used Google Sheets on Firefox. I would assume most Google web apps support Firefox.
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What doesn't work for you?
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>Firefox has this covered, by dropping non-PulseAudio sound.
I solved that by not upgrading. I suppose I'll have to make a choice some day when my current setup fails me... but I'm not there yet.
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Alas, old versions don't get security support, and browsers are among (if not THE) most sensitive to security vulnerabilities pieces of software.
Mozilla Relevant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thunderbird could have been the key to make Mozilla relevant. Browsers we have many. And while I personally still use Firefox for a few options I like, it could disappear tomorrow and I would barely miss a step.
But to this day, secure, *private* communication and messaging remains a challenge. Thunderbird has had the solution for years, and all it would have needed was a bit of clever marketing / positioning for people and organization to take full advantage of it. Mozilla instead wasted all their political capital trying (and failing) to change the standard everyone uses for video, even though the die had already been cast in embedded chips.
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Thunderbird is my primary email client. It works OK (better than the alternatives), but I would be thrilled if it had some badly-needed improvements.
Red flag words (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh oh.
Pretty much every one of the adjectives he used there are red-flag words to me. Particularly "sleek" and "modern". (At least he didn't say "minimalist", although that's implied).
In the past few years, every time I've seen software proclaim those things, the UI for that software has sucked.
Finish your damn plugin library (Score:2)
Here's an idea (Score:2)
Make a stripped-down, fast browser for browsing only. Call it something like "Phoenix" or perhaps "Firebird".
(I remember using Netscape 4.72 on Linux around 1999. Then as the new Mozilla engine was being developed, there were third-party browser projects using that engine for browsing only, such as Galeon. Phoenix was basically Mozilla's implementation of such ideas, and initially worse than the other projects. However, it soon became the only way to stay up-to-date with the Mozilla engine development.)
Seriously? (Score:2)
If people want to browse facebook.com and google.com and be logged into their accounts with Firefox, Mozilla should damn well let them. This sounds like some ideological crusade that sounds more like RMS in a suit than a company trying to deliver a good product. I'm more and more convinced that the only reason Firefox beat IE was that it was an ancient piece of crap Microsoft preferred that didn't work well so they'd stall web apps for as long as possible. It's like fighting a beat-up old boxer that's danci
Impossible to win (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox can't come back - this is a battle they cannot win. Let's take a look at why Firefox became a success in the first place. A monopoly (Microsoft) won the first browser war by bundling IE into their OS, and by pushing IE into the corporate setting. IE became the most widely used browser, and business intranets were forced to be IE compatible. IE stagnated and became a festering piece of crap because MS became lazy when they dominated the market. They wanted stuff like ActiveX (which is really just a windows program embedded into a web page) to succeed because it forced web pages to be dependent on the Windows OS. They began to bastardize and cause many issues with HTML in the way IE interpreted things - HTML was defined by the way IE interpreted it.
It was into this environment that Firefox (or Firebird) came to be a success. The technically proficient (aka you and I) began using it, then we began installing it on friends' and relatives' computers. We taught them if a website didn't work in Firefox then to try it in IE, otherwise always use Firefox first. And so it came to be that Firefox became popular due to a grassroots kind of movement begun by people who recognized the technical insufficiency of IE.
So a monopoly was broken up, and healthy competition ensued. HTML once again became a standard that was not defined by a single web browser and how it decided to interpret it. Firefox succeeded in its goal, which in my opinion was to create a healthy browser competition and make HTML browser agnostic.
Now, we still have a healthy (or as healthy as we can hope something like HTML can be) web browser environment, with multiple players backed by huge corporate entities, who not only have the resources to spend on pushing browser technology, but they can literally push millions of people into using their browser - Microsoft (Edge), Google (Chrome / Android / Chromebook), and Apple (Safari / Mobile Safari). These companies produce browser tech as a side process, because they have millions of users that will by default use their browser, so it makes sense to have more control over that environment.
Mozilla really has nothing more than Firefox (specifically, the do not control hardware, operating systems, or markets containing millions of users), so they cannot leverage people into their browser. Chrome, Safari, and yes, even Edge, are now more than "good enough" as web browsers, so the technical of us have no real incentive to push people away from them to Firefox.
So congratulations Firefox, and we thank you profusely for single handedly reshaping the HTML and browser market for the better. You did your job.
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I dunno... the browser space is filled with terrible browsers (including Chrome). There is room there for someone to make a really great one and take over the market. It could, in theory, be FireFox.
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I think that you missed the importance of Apple.
Apple pushed another browser onto its users, and that, in turn helped to push website developers away from the MS-only crap that they had been turning out. The more sites that work in non-MS browsers, the more users Firefox picked up.
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Somehow that seems to be the version of the story that everyone has heard. What those of us who were actually there at the time remember is that there were a lot of other anti-competitive things that Microsoft was doing to tilt everything in their favor, including...:
Still a faithful Firefox user (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with pretty much everybody else on here that if Mozilla wants Firefox to succeed, they should stop trying to give us more doodads in the browser. Hello! We want LESS. That was the whole reason for the existence of Firefox, if you remember. Strip out all that stuff that nobody uses and concentrate on making it lean and extensible.
I honestly don't see much performance difference between Firefox and Chrome these days. Firefox's lone remaining advantage is that Chrome is butt ugly. As a UI guy, I find the Chrome UI to be jagged, clumsy, and just atrocious. I want a menu bar. I want an app that looks like it was designed and not just thrown together by coders with zero design sensibility.
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I agree with pretty much everybody else on here that if Mozilla wants Firefox to succeed, they should stop trying to give us more doodads in the browser.
You want to know why they failed and everyone switched to Chrome? Firefox used to be horrible at memory management. It might still be, I don't know I haven't used it in years. If you had your browser open for a certain period of time it would slow to a crawl and you would find it eating up gobs of memory. When the Mozilla developers had this bug reported to them, they took an elitist position and shrugged their users off as being idiots for having their browsers open too long or with too many tabs or wh
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I have an idea (Score:2)
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Start by making the javascript engine not freeze while using Facebook.
Yes, WTF is that about? Facebook isn't the only site that hits Firefox right in the breadbasket, but it is by far the worst offender. (It will be interesting to see how this thread turns out, I have been modded down for pointing this out in the last couple of discussions about Firefox.)
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Is that a Firefox problem, a javascript problem or a Facebook problem? I'm going with the latter.
Mismanagement and stupidity comes at a price (Score:2)
Maybe they should just have practiced a bit less stupidity over the last few years? Anyways, that battle is over. The code-base may make a comeback in a few years, but not with the people currently in charge at Mozilla.
Mozilla has to get rid of two things (Score:2)
Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape (Score:2)
And they didn't even mention the first name was Phoenix?
Hmm, and then there was the naming controversy. Phoenix became Firebird, along with Thunderbird and Sunbird. Then, Firefox.
The naming things always kind of embodied the "close, but not quite there"-ness of FireFox. Hmm, and Thunderbird and Sunbird are dead. Just seems like a lot of work but a lot of wasted effort in places.
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Thunderbird isn't dead. I use it every day. Mozilla cut it loose, true, but that will probably save it, since they weren't maintaining it.
Hopefully one day (Score:2)
I'm probably gone for good (Score:4, Insightful)
I got tired of the apparently incessant need to change things. Just when I would get accustomed to the "Reload" button being on the left side some 18 year old at Mozilla decides to move it to the right side. And vice-versa.
Change simply to change something just about drives me crazy. And I'm happy to stick right where I am now, a Chrome (for better or worse) user.
Wishful Thinking (Score:2)
Wishful Thinking [statcounter.com]
You got this Mozilla, no really you do...
mobile only (Score:2)
Firefox new process- memory system is awesome. (Score:2)
Needs some small, but important features fixed (Score:2)
Two things stop me being able to recommend Firefox as the top preference,both trivial, but these are things that work in Chrome, and not Fx:
1. input type=date. Chrome has a native widget, Firefox simply doesn't do anything other than treat it as text - result, we have to embed lots of JS for this alone. Fx has had a huge debate on bugzilla about how to make the datepicker look best, and they got stuck with the debate for ages, and never implemented - I don't really care which widget set it uses, but it jus
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The Firefox extended support versions still support XP and Vista, and will for a while.
But, alas, not PPC macs. I'd rather use a PPC mac than an XP box any day, and I fucking hate Apple.
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Then you may want to consider TenFourFox compiled for specific PPC flavors.
I do have it on my ppc imac (last model.) But when I installed it, they were missing features. Looks like they are claiming feature parity now.
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Also Mozilla needs to keep supporting Windows XP as it still has 6 percent market share over twice that of Linux.
What's the point of providing security updates for an application on an operating system that itself doesn't get security updates? Someone could compromise Firefox for Windows XP by first compromising Windows XP.
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The point would be to reduce the attack surface. Also, it's not a given that everyone running XP are doing anything terribly risky (although most probably are). There are ways of securing XP even without security updates for it.
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I use bookmarks heavily, but I don't use the bookmarking system in browsers. I have a private bookmark server that I use instead, so that I can have easy access to my bookmarks no matter where I'm browsing from or what browser I'm using while at the same time avoiding using a cloud service.
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Right now, I'm using Online Bookmarks http://www.frech.ch/online-boo... [frech.ch]
It's sparse, but it works, and I haven't found anything else that will do the job. I'll probably end up having to write one someday.
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Best post of the day.
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In all fairness, I haven't had FF crash or hang in years, either on Windows or Linux.
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Restore a way to easily disable javascript WITHOUT any extension/ going though about:config
And do so on a case-by-case basis, like NoScript. That ability lets me use badly designed websites that are nonfunctional without JS without having to allow all the JS on the page to run.