Mozilla's Nightingale: Why Firefox Still Matters

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering John Nightingale gave some insight on the past, present, and future of Mozilla and outlined why Firefox still matters. While Mozilla is accused of copying features from other browsers, the company says the opposite is the case. Nightingale says that a future Firefox will give a user much more control over what he does on the Internet and that Mozilla plans on competing with the ideal of an open web against siloed environments." Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).

Comments

Only open source standards compliant browser

[zget]

Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want. Chrome was there for a long time, but now immediately when they started to gain some market share Google decided to do what Microsoft did in the 90's and start implementing their own features and not documenting them good enough for others to implement. Then they went on and created websites that only work with Chrome. I have no idea why and when Google started acting like the new douche bag in town, but it's finally happening. And things were going so well for web designers now that Microsoft picked up their act and made IE9 standards compliant and HTML5 capable..

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[YodasEvilTwin]

I hadn't heard that site was violating any standards. From what I understand, Chrome has implemented a set of HTML5 features different from the set some other browsers have implemented, and occasionally the implementations clash because the standard is evolving and not fully defined.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[joek1010]

> Then they went on and created websites that only work with Chrome

There's a big button on that page that says "try anyhow" (ie allowing you to view it with Firefox/Safari/Opera).

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BenoitRen]

The douchebag behaviour started earlier than you may think. They do plenty of user agent sniffing on their services. For example, their reverse image search is a simple file upload to use, yet they sniff for it. Got SeaMonkey (even the latest)? Doesn't work. Firefox 2.0? Not good enough. Firefox 3.0? Still not good enough. Firefox 3.5? Nope. Firefox 3.6? Now we're talking.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Different, HOW?

And web standards don't specify how fonts should be rendered, so that's nothing but a nice straw man anyway.

Yes, we're all aware that Apple is obsessed with "accurate" fonts, i.e. blurry little characters that are the closest possible to a photographic reduction of the original character. Everything on Windows, on the other hand (except Apple software), uses hinted characters that are scaled slightly to make them fit into the square pixels better. Whether you like Apple's font rendering better or Windows' font rendering better is largely immaterial, which is why I asked HOW it's different. It's probably a matter of your personal taste. And it might depend on whether or not it's using hardware acceleration.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Yvan256]

You say "simple file upload" as if it was easy. HTML5 allows you to do drag'n drop file uploads, but it requires a very recent browser, hence the user-agent sniffing. Older browsers get the old "Choose file" button upload method.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Kamiza Ikioi]

Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want.

Yes, because as we all know, the ever changing UI and Addons/Extensions are squarely in the realm of "standards".

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[icebike]

Little one sided don't you think?

That you can find an obscure site that works only in a specific browser, means nothing. What about all the Firefox specific pages out there? Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox?

Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!

The site you mention was NOT written by google contrary to your assertion. And Chrome is open source.

I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament. In fact he can't cling to standards and abhor copying features and maintain a straight face.

I'm waiting eagerly for Firefox to catch up to and surpass Chrome again. I enjoy the leap-frog game played by these companies. I use them both. Its just that, today, chrome is my favorite and does more for me than Firefox.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Your trollish comment featuring an obsession with font rendering is trollish. The OP's reference to 'standards' is clear to most because of the overall context of the posting itself -- you redefine 'standards' to suit your own singular viewpoint while the rest of us assumed, maybe falsely but unlikely, that the featured topic is 'web standards'.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[maxwell demon]

I hadn't heard that site was violating any standards. From what I understand, Chrome has implemented a set of HTML5 features different from the set some other browsers have implemented, and occasionally the implementations clash because the standard is evolving and not fully defined.

Actually, I wouldn't call HTML5 a standard. Exactly because it's evolving. A standard is by definition a fixed thing. It may be replaced by a later standard (which is usually named the same except for a year of version number), but once it is a standard, it doesn't evolve. Anything which evolves cannot be a standard. It may eventually become one (at which time it stops evolving), but it isn't one (yet).

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[daenris]

The website has a link back to Google right at the bottom that says "made with some friends from Google" so I'm assuming that Google did, in fact, have a hand in crafting that site.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh boo hoo. You need a special browser to view the Arcade Fire website, as far as I'm concerned that's a feature. I never planned on going there to begin with, now that I know Firefox isn't even capable of rendering it fully I'm _definitely_ not going there. Problem solved.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[arth1]

And web standards don't specify how fonts should be rendered, so that's nothing but a nice straw man anyway.

I am pretty sure there are standards saying that a 10 pt is 5/36 of an inch. Firefox ignores your DPI settings and renders fonts in sizes that has nothing to do with the specified measurements.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Your example ran very nicely on my system . . . firefox 5.0 on ubuntu 11.04.

Neat video. Thanks for the link.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[omnichad]

And how are you supposed to mark up graphics to fit in with text that varies depending on the screen? CSS is great, but it's not exactly resolution-independent for all practical purposes - unless you want scaling on pixel-perfect graphics designed for being displayed 1:1.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Dishevel]

God forbid that when approached with a really cool idea that that the Google guys actually help someone out.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome is not open source or more permissive -- it is definitely proprietary software. If you want to talk about Chromium, say so: don't just imply they're the same thing...

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[AvitarX]

Let's see:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS_Reference/Mozilla_Extensions

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[kdemetter]

Exact font size has little to do with web standards. It's the meaning ( semantics ) that counts , not how it is interpreted.

For example : is not a standard for making text appear bold , it's a standard for providing strong emphasis on the text.
A visual browser may render that by showing a text as bold , while a text to speech engine could render it by speaking the text louder than the rest of the text.

For font-size , it's the difference between font-size:xx pt , and font-size:small

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[kdemetter]

Exact font size has little to do with web standards. It's the meaning ( semantics ) that counts , not how it is interpreted.

For example <strong> is not a standard for making text appear bold , it's a standard for providing strong emphasis on the text.
A visual browser may render that by showing a text as bold , while a text to speech engine could render it by speaking the text louder than the rest of the text.

For font-size , it's the difference between font-size:xx pt , and font-size:small

Fixed that for myself

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BitZtream]

So chrome(ium) isn't open because someone made some chrome specific websites?

Its not open because it has its own special features?

By that definition, neither is Firefox then, I can think of plenty of websites that look like shit in browsers other than firefox. I can also remember when firefox basically took IEs place as far as having websites labeled 'looks best in firefox'. 'looks best in a standards compliant browser' would be one thing, but thats not what gets said.

I can think of plenty of firefox specific css attributes and html attributes. Hint: They start with moz-

The way you're judging open, theres no such thing as anything open really, as pretty much everything has had something created specifically for it at one point or another.

Why the hell is this insightful? Has he even used firefox or any other web browser? Who the hell modded this post up?

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BenoitRen]

Older browsers get the old "Choose file" button upload method.

That's what I was referring to. Older or unknown web browsers don't even get that thanks to user agent sniffing.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BitZtream]

Its the common meaning in the desktop publishing world, however points are not standard and never really have been. The DTP world used the word point instead of pixel, and a point was 1/72 of an inch ... just like ... the standard DPI used for monitors until rather recently. So because of that, now days, points mean roughly 1/72th of an inch, IF you're doing DTP. Your OS is welcome to assume a point is a pixel, or half of one, or like some Windows 7 apps (Looking at you Outlook/Word HTML renderer) a point depends entirely on your DPI, but not directly proportional.

Pica's have a defined meaning, 1/6th of an inch or 1/72 of a foot. This is what you SHOULD be using if you want fixed sizes.

Of course, for readability and accessibility purposes, your a douche for setting a fixed font size anyway. Points and picas may be there, but you shouldn't be using them for anything, the renderer should be making those decisions for exact sizing.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[w_dragon]

While I agree, I seem to recall that HTML5 was going to be a standard that just constantly evolved. They weren't actually planning on locking down a final standard at any point. Contrast that with C++0x where at least they pretend that there will eventually be a standard and we'll just call it C++0A or C++0B...

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[maxwell demon]

Sorry, but if it constantly evolves, I refuse to call it a standard. They may claim it to be a standard as much as they want, it doesn't make it one.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is not open source or more permissive -- it is definitely proprietary software. If you want to talk about Debian, say so: don't just imply they're the same thing....

See what nuance brings to an argument? You're technically correct, but overlooking how 99.8% of both projects are either identical to one another or open source. The remaining .2% (Nvidia, PDF, Flash) doesn't make the total !OSS.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[arth1]

Of course, for readability and accessibility purposes, your a douche for setting a fixed font size anyway.

In my own browser?
No, I really think I should be allowed to say that I want a default font size of, say, 10 pt. Firefox' font rendering won't allow that - you can only set font sizes to a number that varies in size from display to display.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Tools, Options, Content, Fonts & Colors, Advanced, Minimum font size.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want. Chrome was there for a long time, but now immediately when they started to gain some market share Google decided to do what Microsoft did in the 90's and start implementing their own features and not documenting them good enough for others to implement.

Nonsense. The code is open source. How can a feature not be documented when the code is freely available under the Apache 2 licence as it is checked in? Read webkit's dev mailing lists: All the design discussions for web page visible ApIs happen in the open. They have to: Unless Google wants to fork WebKit, they need buy-in from the WebKit team at Apple.

Then they went on and created websites that only work with Chrome.

That web site requires features that no other browser ships yet. The standards are open, but google shipped a browser that implements them first. I guess you think participating in an open standard, implementing that standard, and shipping before others is an affront to open standards, but sane people disagree.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[arth1]

And how are you supposed to mark up graphics to fit in with text that varies depending on the screen?

GUI 101 tells you to not put scalable elements on a fixed size canvas.
You have no control over the ratio between scalable and non-scalable elements, and you shouldn't pretend you do. Either have your graphics scale with the text, or allow it to float freely unscaled as the scalable elements scale.
It's not rocket science.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[arth1]

What part of "you can only set font sizes to a number that varies in size from display to display" did you fail to understand?
The font size you set in Firefox is not points, nor anything else except a number that varies between displays.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Toonol]

Apple's love for rendering fonts is well known.

That's so true, and is such a sadly insightful comment about Apple's position in the tech industry.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying Chrome is open-source and linking to Chromium is half way to saying Safari is open source and linking to Webkit. Chrome is a closed-source product built from open-source Chromium plus some binary blobs. Hell, Windows is open source too if your standards are broad enough to not count "the bits we don't provide source for".

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Flere Imsaho]

"not documenting them good enough"

Were you being ironic?

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[TWX]

Requiring a minimum version in one's choice of browser software is not the same as requiring one to use only one company's product.

Firefox 3.5 came out a little over two years ago, in June 2009. 3.6 came out a little over a year and a half ago, in January 2010. I really can't blame them for trying to use modern tools when safety considerations for exploits and other vulnerabilities themselves should compel users to make an effort to keep up. The newer browsers also implement newer standards, and as there's a long way to go to get it right, we can reasonably expect there to be a lot of version releases to get there, unfortunately.

If anything annoys me, it's that Mozilla has chosen version numbers for their current browser revisions that make no sense. I see no reason to go from 4 to 5 to 6 so fast when the changes feel like maintenance releases or incremental improvements. I wouldn't have even jumped from 3.0 to 3.5; I would have incremented by tenths until being truly ready for a 4.0, so we would have had 3.0, 3,1. and 3.2 instead of 3.0, 3.5, and 3.6. I probably would have called them 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 instead of 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0, unless one of the revisions was truly big enough to justify the jump in versions.

As for the one site that is meant for Chrome, it says right on the main page that it's a test platform, effectively a technology demonstrator. It's wide open for any browser developer to play with in addition to Google. It's also an HTML5 implementation tester. If anything, it's showcasing what can be done and challenging others to match it, not just to lock in like IE used to do so much of.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[TWX]

Google did, in fact, have a hand in crafting that site.

So what?

It's certainly not a required service. It's technology demonstrator. It's a proof-of-concept showing that something can be done a certain way. If anything, that they're choosing to disclose to the world that this works this way in such a non-integral way is to be applauded. It means ANYONE can write their browser to work with this, or that this tech can be evaluated and considered for how future standards are written and implemented. It's not like Google implemented this kind of thing in all of their core services and required everyone to use a browser of their choice in order to get by.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Schmorgluck]

What about all the Firefox specific pages out there?

That's a pretty bold accusation. First time I ever heard of something like that. Do you have any example?

Or the addons that ONLY work with Firefox?

Are you being deliberately obtuse, or did you just hope no one would click on your link and notice you totally misrepresented what the article is about? It's an article about addons that only work with Firefox 4, written back in February when it was the fresh version, to give examples of the new capabilities of the browser. What the fuck does this have to do with standard compliance and compatibility of websites? If you had an example of, say, a website that would require a specific Firefox add-on to work, that would be relevant to the discussion. The article you linked mentions nothing like that.

Then there is that pesky Chrome License which is, - wait, MORE permissive than Firefox's!!!

Come on! This BSD vs. GPL debate is getting old...

I have no problem with browsers stealing features from one another as Nightingale seems to lament.

Where the hell have you seen him lament about that? That would be completely contradictory to everything Mozilla stands for!

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[lennier]

Older browsers get the old "Choose file" button upload method.

Which was never broken and worked just fine, thank you very much. Why did it need to be changed?

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea why and when Google started acting like the new douche bag in town...

Well.. they bought DoubleClick back in 2007...

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[lennier]

Firefox matters because it's once again the only open source browser that goes by standards instead of doing whatever they want.

ROFL.

Let me know when they have an enterprise story other than "go away you lousy business cretins, we don't like your type and your nasty automated installation ways. No security patches for you! Btw we heard you liked random UI changes, here's all your buttons, foom, now they're gone! Beg for us to put them back! Beg on four legs and bark like a dog! Nope, too late, we'll do something even stranger for the next release."

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[LibRT]

+1, and thank you. I use a 37" 16 X 9 monitor at a distance of about 2m, so I have set my minimum font sizes fairly large. About 3 in 10 sites have problems with this, ie: overlap of page elements. Very irritating having to regularly disable minimum font size in order to see the entire page or particular elements, and I suspect it's going to be an issue for more and more people as televisions attempt to integrate web pages, include browsers, etc.

Notably, Chrome seems to do a much better job rendering these same sites, so maybe it's the browser after all, and not the web designers I've been cursing...

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

CSS pt is fake by design anyway.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[arth1]

There's plenty web designers can do too, and it's not that difficult. See http://jontangerine.com/ for pages that scale gracefully (scale your text up or down, and see how the page follows) - he even has an article there explaining how.

I'm rather tired of how so many "web designers" make sites that only work well with 100 DPI, standard font sizes. If these "designers" worked as architects and carpenters, we would have doors that doesn't admit anyone tall or wide shouldered, and they'd shrug and say "works fine for me".

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BenoitRen]

Firefox 3.5 came out a little over two years ago, in June 2009. 3.6 came out a little over a year and a half ago, in January 2010. I really can't blame them for trying to use modern tools when safety considerations for exploits and other vulnerabilities themselves should compel users to make an effort to keep up.

Excuse me? What kind of twisted logic is this? The web browser is my responsibility, not Google's. Not supporting them is one thing, but locking them out is different.

How do you explain SeaMonkey (or any other minority web browser) users being left in the cold, then? Face it, it's pure discrimination.

If anything annoys me, it's that Mozilla has chosen version numbers for their current browser revisions that make no sense.

While I agree with you, Firefox's versioning has always been arbitrary. It's just more visible now. First we had Firefox 1.1 after 1.0, but then they preferred to use 1.5. Then instead of 1.6 they chose 2.0. Next was 3.0. You know the rest.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BZ]

The site was just broken in non-Chrome browsers in various ways. For example, for a while it was serving up both H.264 and Theora video, with Chrome using the H.264 and Firefox using the Theora. Except the Theora url was 404, so it didn't work in Firefox.

Similar things elsewhere, where the site takes different codepaths in different browsers and some of them are just not tested very well.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[BZ]

> It's wide open for any browser developer to play with

No, it's not, because it uses WebKit-specific prefixing. Other browsers implementing the same technology would use different prefixes, of course.

Re:Only open source standards compliant browser

[Anonymous Coward]

The part where it's a problem.

Set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to something other than 1.0 if you need to compensate for a display with a weird DPI, and setting a minimum font size isn't good enough.

What do you expect, anyway? If you have a 17" and 19" side-by-side both running at the same resolution with different DPIs, you want Firefox to magically re-render everything if you drag it from one window to the other? Because that's what you're asking for.

Aaaaah copying features ?

[unity100]

Isnt what ALL browsers did up to this point ? why any idiot dares criticize any browser outfit for this ?

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's an idiot.

Copying features is a good thing - every now and then one makes a great thing and everyone should copy it.

And so I do not sound to reasonable: except for IE. Fuck IE

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[bluefoxlucid]

I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[icebike]

My sentiments exactly.

If they weren't copying features how could they claim standardization? He really can't have it both ways.

The four mainstream browser engines all have pretty much the same customer-facing capabilities. They differ in the back ends.

Is that such a bad idea? Perhaps Mr Nightingale would want Ford to use a joy stick instead of copying every one else's steering wheel, and floor pedals? Maybe elevators should respond to foot stomping rather than have buttons? Voice command of camera's instead of shutter buttons?

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[NotBorg]

On one hand we have Slashdot saying "SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE BAD [because copying is good]" and the other "COPYING IDEAS IS BAD [if it's from a major competitor]."

This fear of taking good ideas from your competitors is a bit silly. I really hate it when developers prioritize being different from their competitors above everything else. They go to great lengths to be different than previous versions or their competitors and then justify it after the fact claiming it's somehow better for the user. If you have to spend a lot of time justifying your UI changes (especially if you actually have to explain now it makes things easier... !!! WTF???) then you've got it wrong.

Users and developers need to learn to evaluate ideas by some other criteria than weather or not someone else did it. If an idea is good, use it. Don't worry about weather someone else is doing it.

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[sexconker]

I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.

IE was the first major browser with per-tab processes, porn mode, tab coloring, TLD highlighting, hiding the menu bar by default, etc.

A single bar for search and navigation is pointless, and it breaks porn mode privacy when you have autocomplete on. You may as well argue for a single hole to stuff food into and shoot shit out of. It is trivial to make a navigation bar also function as a search bar when the entry isn't a URI. In fact, IE was the first to do this too.

Yes, you're on Slashdot, so you have to shit on IE. But at least get the factual things correct - IE was the originator of many of the features you love in Chrome. And everything else of any use was probably done by Opera or an FF/Opera plugin.

Re:Aaaaah copying features ?

[error_logic]

My impression was that he only wanted to argue against the people suggesting Mozilla was somehow worse for copying features, by pointing out reversed situations. "We're innovating too!"

Education

[i.r.id10t]

It is also usually the only browser many learning management systems like Angel support other than Internet Explorer ..

Re:Education

[YodasEvilTwin]

Crap software should not determine your browser choice. You should just stop using crap. I used Chrome with a faked user agent when I had to use Angel, and only used IE for file uploads (FF wasn't supported a couple years ago either).

Re:Education

[Anonymous Coward]

You should just stop using crap

Yeah I would like to do that. But oh my JOB needs that particular flavor of ff or ie. Or I want to use my bank (you know the one who I have had since a kid) and their page only works in those 2. etc, etc etc...

I'm sorry get off your high horse and realize it is a browser. I was around for the first browser wars. IE was the best at the time. I used that. But I eventually moved on for security/feature reasons. Not because it was in some way 'better' and not 'crap'. For a browser IE was decent. It showed me web pages... I have used chrome too. It is just like the others... a browser. It shows web pages.

Re:Education

[amicusNYCL]

I'm proud to say that the LMS I designed and developed doesn't bother with browser sniffing. The Javascript UI toolkit I used does in fact feed different markup (mostly classes and styles) to different browsers, but the end result looks the same and I didn't have to do anything extra. There's no reason an LMS needs to support a subset of browsers, even my Javascript-only AJAX-heavy beast of an LMS works in everything from IE6 to Opera 11. An LMS isn't doing anything mindblowing that only one or two browsers can support. I've got SCORM tracking, AICC tracking, tree structures with drag/drop nodes, panels expanding and collapsing, grids sorting and filtering both locally and remotely, all kinds of "DHTML" popup divs, embedded media players, etc etc. IE6 (slowly) supports all of that, as does every later version of IE, and any other major browser released in the past several years.

It sounds like this "Angel" was designed by sub-par designers and built by sub-par developers.

Re:Education

[njahnke]

what about people who don't know how to fake the user-agent string? there are a few of them ...

Re:Education

[Nimey]

You said it. We switched to Angel from Blackboard 3-4 years ago and will be switching to something else.

OTOH the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, quite often because there's more bullshit over there.

Re:Education

[Anonymous Coward]

Or I want to use my bank (you know the one who I have had since a kid) and their page only works in those 2.

You ARE aware there's more than one bank out there, right? And that sometimes tradition gets in the way of things? "I've been there since I was a kid" really isn't a worthwhile reason to keep going there if they're causing browser-related issues.

I mean, unless you were dumb enough to dump absolutely everything you own into a crap bank whose compatibility tests are effectively "does this work on the computer illiterate bank's president's computer?". I'm with a tiny little local credit union in southeastern Michigan, and they don't seem to mind what browser I use. They're not crap. But, it sounds like your bank is crap. Have you considered the possibility that your bank is crap?

Re:Education

[Lehk228]

last time i used angel was before it was bought out by blackboard, my guess is that it sucks ass now, but it used to be pretty light weight and not stupid

Platforms

[danbuter]

I don't need my web browser to be a full platform. I need it to be a web browser. I wish these guys would figure that out.

Re:Platforms

[hideouspenguinboy]

No one is forcing you to install add-ons, and without that it's just a browser. Hooray! Now you can love it! No? Are you against the fact that they offer a decent product with the capability to modify and make changes to it easily? Maybe you don't like how Firefox is available on almost any platform? Or that it's free? Lemme guess - you liked firefox before it was cool, and now you're bitter.

Re:Platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty bizarre what some people are saying is desired. Supposedly we're all going to ditch our desktops for mobiles, and we're going to ditch our applications for browser applications. And yet, so many people simply don't want that, and bitch about how unimaginably it sucks, whenever they try it.

The very idea of leaving a comment on Slashdot without a keyboard is laughable (yes, you can do it, but it's painful compared to "old" tech), as is the idea of seriously editing any sort of text (whether it's code or Google Docs' word processor) in any browser, or (best of all) editing in a mobile browser.

I guess they think that if they keep on repeating these silly ideas, people will get used to how much the future is going to suck compared to 2011, and they'll accept it. The problem with that, is that anyone who doesn't buy into the bullshit, is going to be at such a competitive advantage with those who do, that there will be constant pressure to restore the desktop. How can anyone really think the do-everything-in-browser and do-everything-on-mobile prophecies have what it takes to be self-fulfilling?

Re:Platforms

[jythie]

Yeah, but in each new version they bake more and more add-ons into the browser, so they kinda do force you to install them. That is actually why I ended up dropping firefox... they moved from being a lightweight pluggable browser into a 'developer's common use-case' one.

Re:Platforms

[nschubach]

You mean like how Chrome included developer tools akin to Firebug... then IE did the same?

Re:Platforms

[raddan]

While I generally feel the same way, if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers. Firefox has a large market share-- now-- but that's no guarantee that it always will. Firefox gained in popularity because, by and large, developers preferred standards over extra features (i.e., ActiveX, Flex, etc, etc), but you see that wherever the environment was tightly controlled (corporate environments), IE-only sites were frequently built in favor of standards-compliant sites. That's why IE6 just won't die.

The sad fact is that most of the people funding 'websites' want web-based applications, not open-semantic-y-HTML5-y things. Understanding how open standards are a benefit requires more creativity than many people possess.

As a longtime web programmer myself, it's not extra features that bug me-- JQuery has generally tamed Javascript's quirks, and HTML5 is f***ing cool-- it's the lack of standard user interfaces. In my opinion, right now, user interfaces suck worse than they ever did in the early days of the Macintosh and Windows. At least Apple and Microsoft had HIGs.

Re:Platforms

[lennier]

if Firefox fails to adopt rich client-side interfaces, developers will simply move on to other browsers.

Great, they're welcome to them.

As a web user (the natural prey and rival of web developers) I want less "richness" in my client-side interface, not more. I want the web developer to be extremely restricted in what they do, so that I as the user can choose how I want to view the site, and the malware developers have less ways to spoof my operating system.

tldr: "rich content" is a synonym for "doing it wrong"

Re:Platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

holy jeebus, thank you.

You must not write for the tech media, huh?

Re:Platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

Keyboard? How quaint!

sorry, couldn't resist

Re:Platforms

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not a web user. You're that guy wearing nitrile gloves and a dust mask in the office. You know... the one who wipes everything with bleach before he'll touch it. This is perpendicular to the developer/user and mostly just pisses everyone off.

By the way - I loaded the link in your sig and when I tried to preview the book I found myself using a rich client-side interface to an HTML5 web application that basically duplicates the functionality of Adobe Reader. Since you obviously think this sort of thing is bad, you might want to reconsider linking to it.

Too many links.

[ZombieBraintrust]

There are too many links in this summary. I don't want to hunt around for 5 minutes trying to find the correct article.

Re:Too many links.

[The Dawn Of Time]

There are so many links even the author got confused. Or he's under the delusion that XULRunner is synonymous with Gecko.

Re:Too many links.

[Missing.Matter]

I like the first one, to Mozilla.org. I means seriously? Why no links to Apple.com Google.com and Microsoft.com? I've never heard of these companies.

Re:Too many links.

[tpotus]

Dumkopf!

Re:Too many links.

[Yvan256]

Now you know what it feels like to try to choose a Linux distro.

Like it or not, too many choices is bad.

Re:Too many links.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd simply read the summary, you'd find it's very easy to tell which one leads to the interview article.

Re:Too many links.

[ZombieBraintrust]

Ok I did. I read it again. Nothing. No Clue. What link is the summary summarizing?

Re:Too many links.

[he-sk]

What do you expect from an editor who calls himself Unknown (read: unaccountable) Lamer?

Re:Too many links.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardly. There's only one choice that matters :
"Debian" or "Not Debian"

Re:Too many links.

[Schmorgluck]

Yeah, seriously, finding it was annoying as hell. I really really hope the job of whoever wrote this summary has nothing to do with user interfaces.

Re:Too many links.

[lennier]

"rending engine"

It tears your machine asunder when it tries to display a page? I think I have one of those installed already.

Yeah. Right.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they have to pay a man to convince you that Firefox is still worthwhile then it probably isn't. All the new "features" that the Mozilla Foundation have been adding lately (save for Asa Dotzler's comical diatribe against corporate users) have been directly lifted from Chrome, down to the new tab system. I started using Firefox because it -wasn't- all the other browsers, it was something different and open source. Now it's more akin to the Wine project, always playing catch up and never really getting anywhere on its own. If I wanted Chrome I'd install Chrome, but the Mozilla Foundation isn't giving me much of a choice. Particularly if I decide to roll out packages for a business...thank you again Asa for fucking up the plans of IT admins all over the world with your loud ass mouth. Half the reason the director is trying to re-assure everyone that Firefox is still a force to be reckoned with is damage control in light of Dotzler's uninformed babblings.

Re:Yeah. Right.

[BZ]

Really?

requestAnimationFrame wasn't lifted from Chrome. App tabs were not lifted from Chrome. Mozilla's audio API wasn't lifted from Chrome (and in fact, once Chrome saw it they scrambled to create their own, incompatible, API). The url bar behavior in Firefox wasn't lifted from Chrome and is, in my opinion, vastly better than Chrome's.

That's just the new features I've encountered recently. Or did you mean by "features" something other than features?

Emacs-like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least we don't need to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Num Lock+Scroll Lock+Z in Firefox in order to input a URL.

Make a Firefox classic

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically take the 3.6 interface and keep the gecko engine up to date on it, similar to how Seamonkey took over the old Mozilla. This will keep the older Firefox users, who got Firefox's market share up in the first place happy while the interface games can be played on the "new Firefox".

Don't let us go back the old days of 90%+ IE share just because you won't make a geek friendly browser.

Re:Make a Firefox classic

[SiMac]

In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.

Re:Make a Firefox classic

[Anonymous Coward]

In Firefox 4/5, you can still turn off tabs on top and turn on the menubar and get something that looks a lot like 3.6. I think the most you'd have to do to return the Firefox 3.6 interface to any future version of Firefox is to install a theme.

No shit. A few clicks and you're back to where you were. Apparently this is too much not only for normal "old Firefox users", but even for Slashdot readers - people who are assumed to be at least somewhat more technically-inclined. (At least technically-inclined enough to know how to use GUI menus, I hope.)

Re:Make a Firefox classic

[nabsltd]

The theme is the very appropriately named Firefox 3 theme for Firefox 4+.

Re:Make a Firefox classic

[Daetrin]

"A few clicks"? Here's the process i went through to get Firefox4+ looking like the old style Firefox i want. Note first of all that i'm not sure this list is complete, the last time i needed to use it i found that i'd missed a couple steps. I think i wrote them down at the time, but i can't be sure of that. Also, it's still not perfect. The status bar in particular is still a little wonky.

View->Toolbars->
- Menu, Navigation
- Turn off Tabs on Top

Tools->Options
- General: Always ask me where to save

Add-Ons:
- Status-4-Evar 2011.07.20.21
- New Tabs at the End 1.0 (not always necessary? Why not?)
- Menu Editor 1.2.7
- Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4.0
- Switch to Tab No More 1.0
- Active Stop Button 1.4.9
- Back/forward dropmarker 1.0
- Remove New Tab Button 1.0
- Stylish 1.2

Right-click on toolbar->Customize
Move home/stop buttons (currently have to put stop before reload, or they'll merge)
Make sure "Icons" and "Use Small Icons" are selected

Stylish:
// Remove "Tab Groups" from tab list
#menu_tabview,
#alltabs-popup-separator
{display: none !important; }

That's a bit more than "a few clicks" and enough that i think a "classic" version of Firefox would be justifiable. Not to mention the risk that at any future upgrade they could re-break one of these fixes, or break something entirely new, possibly in a way that can't be easily corrected with just "a few clicks."

Re:Make a Firefox classic

[rphenix]

Didnt know about tabs at the end, thats one of my biggest bugbears with Firefox 5 at the moment. That and the tab addon Ive been using recently (multi tab handler) so i can close multiple tabs at once will make things much easier, should be native functionality you would think by now (chrome can close multiple selected tabs at once).

One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[sl4shd0rk]

It's Open Source. Unimportant to the apathetic, however it is a factor which will become more important as corporations increase their role in governments.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Bloodwine77]

Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[danish94]

chrome just uses the google brand name, adds propriety pdf and flash plugins (in the past it also added h.264 support, but not anymore), and has all those usage recording and sending options.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Rich0]

Yup, and I suspect that most people running the browser on linux are using the chromium version, unless they downloaded it directly from Google. I imagine that most distros would prefer to start from the source, rather than try to support whatever version of libfoo Google chose to link against.

I've got chromium on Gentoo, and Chrome OS on a CR-48, and the only browser-related differences I can see are the ones listed above.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Anonymous Coward]

There are some differences that could have some theoretical impact, but they sure are hard to spot for the end-user. I think the main practical difference is that if you want to use Chromium you only get the daily builds, there are no sealed, tested releases.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Anonymous Coward]

Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.

Here is a chart explaining the difference:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Nimey]

The only difference I've noticed so far is that Chromium doesn't have the built-in PDF viewer.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to guess, then, that you haven't tried to push changes into Mozilla.

Read-only open source is still very useful, of course, but nothing like read-write open source.

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[BZ]

Chrome still has H.264 support last I checked. They announced that they were planning to take it out, but they never said when, and they haven't done it yet as far as I know.

Or do you have data showing otherwise?

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[danish94]

http://www.youtube.com/html5 youtube says chrome only supports webm. plus i can view some vidoes as html5 and not others. when i check with jdonloader the videos (on youtube) that do not open in html5 do not have webm download option only h.264. (This is on dev channel. i don't know what's going on on stable or beta) do you have any site (not netflix as i am not a us citizen) that shows h.264 video so i can check?

Re:One thing Mozilla has that the others do not

[BZ]

Sure. Vimeo only supports H.264 for its "HTML5" videos. Pick any video there (e.g. http://vimeo.com/5419749 ) then click on the "Switch to HTML5 player" link below the video description (doesn't get shown in Firefox, but does get shown in Chrome). That gives you a element that points to an H.264 video and plays fine in my Chrome on the dev channel.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I see what you did there

[Baloroth]

Chrome may have a nice interface and be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine,but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).

-1 Flamebait - emacs vs. vi. :)

However, I have to tip my hat for cleverly bringing up emacs in an article about browsers. Or, wait, is emacs a browser now? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Re:I see what you did there

[lahvak]

Emacs had a web browser for quite a while now, pretty much as far as I can remember.

Re:I see what you did there

[iceaxe]

Emacs/W3

Re:I see what you did there

[qmaqdk]

Of course it is.

http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/

Take that vi :P

Re:I see what you did there

[Anonymous Coward]

It even has a vi mode. Whenever you press a button it beeps, and you can't quit.

Re:I see what you did there

[Unknown Lamer]

I guess I should have written Emacs/vim-like instead ;)

Also: the horror, oh the horror.

Re:I see what you did there

[Anonymous Coward]

is emacs a browser now?

When you understand emacs, you transcend such meaningless distinctions.

What They NEED to do...

[sycodon]

...is to make a version of Firefox that is essentially a fat client for web applications.

Think client server architecture, but the client is generic and provides complete access to the OS GUI API, robust security and complete control of the app.

No more alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions to provide a real GUI interface. They could even leverage AJAX to eliminate the fucking PostBacks.

Of course it will all end up in some standards committee, get raped by Microsoft and finally killed as everyone rewrites the apps yet again to support I.E. 23.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[characterZer0]

Java WebStart + SWT.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[SiMac]

That was what XUL and XPCOM were for. XULRunner is still a very respectable development environment. (The Firefox and Thunderbird UIs code is written almost exclusively in XUL/JavaScript.) Unfortunately, while these technologies have been around for quite a while, they haven't really taken off beyond Mozilla's apps. Up until recently, it was still possible to load XUL from a remote site and get an interface with native widgets, but no longer.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, let me say it again:

alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions

Re:What They NEED to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

GP's post must have gone MILES above your head...

Re:What They NEED to do...

[aztracker1]

It's actually kind of a shame that XUL didn't take off... What I'd love to have is a remote hosted version of Thunderbird... I have my tbird profile sync via DropBox now, but when I forget to close it on one computer, it really mucks things up. I have several IMAP accounts which aren't so bad, it's the 2-3 NNTP accounts that are the problem...

Re:What They NEED to do...

[hfranz]

> Up until recently, it was still possible to load XUL from a remote site and get an interface with native widgets, but no longer.

If you are talking about "remote XUL"... this is still possible but has to be enabled on a per domain basis by the user. There is a firefox extension that adds a UI for that: Remote XUL Manager.

The Lotus Notes Webmail client uses XUL elements and it still works with Firefox 5.0 and even nightlies as far as I can tell.
 

Re:What They NEED to do...

[nschubach]

...access to the OS GUI API...

No more alphabet soup of languages, syntax and extensions to provide a real GUI interface. They could even leverage AJAX...

Sorry, I accidentally cut off your post and emphasized what I thought was great fun.

I'm a fan of JavaScript and asynchronicity (not a word? It should be), but to say "no more alphabet soup", then go on to mention AJAX and GU[Interface] while previously spouting out OS GUI API just made me chuckle.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[Anonymous Coward]

For the love of God, no! Oracle has enough money. Java can't die soon enough.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[BitZtream]

They could even leverage AJAX to eliminate the fucking PostBacks.

... welcome to 3 years ago for every major web development toolkit on the planet

Re:What They NEED to do...

[BitZtream]

XULRunner didn't take off because of a couple things.

Its just too much of a bitch to get started. Its not hard, its just slow and tedious as you spend 90% of your time googling and pulling in bits of information from all over the web in order to finally get a working XULRunner package. The Mozilla documentation is out of date, in multiple ways. You can see that some bits have been updated, but they aren't current, just newer than some other things. Never can you find any current documentation, unless you consider poor people stumbling through it and sharing their work on newsgroups to be documentation. I certainly don't.

Too fat. Simple apps take too much. Too much of a download for something simple. In theory you only need it once for all apps but ... see below.

Bad integration with the OS due to chaotic API. The API is constantly in massive flux, you can pretty much rest assured that any moderately complex app is going to have hacks for EVERY damn version of XULRunner, FORGET supporting nightly builds, you might be able to bounce off an installed firefox or thunderbird installation, which limits the number of releases you're trying to hit, but there are still far too many to cope with, so that means ... you ship your XULRunner app with a known good XULRunner. Hope the user doesn't update it to fix security issues!

Because of the above, getting an xulrunner package to download and double click to run doesn't work for crap if the user tries to use another one as well, unless maybe you're doing in house apps that share the same XULRunner version compatibilities. Good luck with that, we found that two internal teams working on seperate based XULRunner apps couldn't/wouldn't keep themselves in sync just cause it wasn't work it. Should they waste several hours of time validating code every time someone wants to bump to a newer version of XULRunner for some feature, or ship another 20-60 megs of course instead? Well, the only intelligent choice at face value is to waste disk space since its not an immediate cost.

The update mechanism is a couple clusterfuck as well, thanks to various bits of half implemented features.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[BitZtream]

Do you have any idea how incredibly retarded it is to synchronize an imap cache and nntp cache via dropbox?

imap and nntp are MADE to keep you in sync across multiple clients on a per message basis, dropbox is designed sync files that it considers binary blobs.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[Requiem18th]

Monday's XKCD strip (https://www.xkcd.com/934/) had a joke about how modern browsers are recapitulating the history of window managing. And while it's funny, I think this whole idea of rethinking the browser misses the point that the browser was the "unthinked" platform,

The web wasn't thought as an application platform, but as a document store. It turned out that some simple forms and parameterised queries was all that was required to make applications out of pages. My point is that the beauty of web applications is their simplicity.

Simplicity is an integral part of the paradigm. OS and hardware independence aren't nice features that were brought into web apps because they were desired. You actually have to take out compatibility from web apps by tying them to specific browsers and thus specific OSes, as was the case with IE only pages.

Access to the OS is a really bad idea, i think the less assumptions you make about the client the better, the old UNIX mantra is truer than ever:

Less is more

Re:What They NEED to do...

[sycodon]

Well, my point is that THEY would implement it or technology like it in the client and I wouldn't have to learn another damned technology. And by the OS GUI, I mean that if I wanted a Combo box, it would be there...the standard Windows Combox box, directly from the Windows API. I wouldn't have to download some extension or dll and then go through some bullshit implementing it.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[sycodon]

What I mean is that the code would execute on the client (unless I wanted it on the server) so you don't have to keep checking...is this a fucking post back? Then do this. If not, the never mind.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[lennier]

complete access... robust security... complete control

Given the abysmal security state of today's operating systems, you'll be lucky to get one of those at once.

Re:What They NEED to do...

[chemosh6969]

...is make it not such a memory hog. I don't use add ons, other than ad block and it's always been a fat, bloated hog. Right now, I'm sitting around my average 600MB for a freaking web browser.

Works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

websites that only work with Chrome

Seems to work fine in Safari 5.1.

Firefox 5 struggles to keep up on my Core i5, but it plays it in a jerky sort of way.

Re:Works for me

[king_nebuchadnezzar]

Aurora actually works rather well, given that I am running a 5 year old machine.

Re:Works for me

[BagOBones]

http://www.allisnotlo.st/index_en.html is a newer one, spoofed my user agent and it would not run at all in FF.

Noscript

[Holammer]

Noscript is the #1 feature why I'm using Firefox. I suspect a lot of medium to advanced users desire its functionality.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

The nice thing about noscript is that you can leave the scripts globally enabled but just by having it on, all sorts of attacks are blocked. The only thing they really need is better support for blacklists for scripts to block so that you can leave it globally enabled but still keep the really bad stuff away.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox only needs noscript because of its shitty security (if you are speaking more of privacy concerns then it is warranted).. If it was sandboxed like the rest of the browsers you wouldn't need to deal with that hassle. Install java and go visit the shadiest sites on the internet with Chrome and you will be fine. Do the same with firefox (without noscript) and watch you get raped in no time. If you think I'm just being flaimbait, go look at the year-overview secunia advisories for IE8, Chrome, and Firefox. Firefox takes the crown with the amount and severity of vulnerabilities. You could argue that they simply found more due to it being more open source, but in the real world I'm seeing way more owned firefox boxes. Lately it is via java from people who don't update it (since the updater doesn't even work half the time), I suspect through shady facebook ads.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

Noscript is more irritating than getting fucked by a javascript. I'm much happier since I decided to not be a pussy and get rid of it. Talk about making the internet a god damn chore.

Re:Noscript

[Anonymous Coward]

bingo! if not for noscript and adblock-plus i would have switched to chrome long back.

Elephant in the room

[Yvan256]

I find it funny that every time there's a discussion about browsers, most articles won't even mention Opera.

Re:Elephant in the room

[QuietLagoon]

Opera's not an elephant. It's more of a mouse.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Psychopath]

I find it funny that every time there's a discussion about browsers, most articles won't even mention Opera.

That's ok, because there is always an Opera user who will point out that even though few use it.

Re:Elephant in the room

[ZombieBraintrust]

My only exposure to Opera is on the Wii. Not impressed with Wii version.

Re:Elephant in the room

[GameboyRMH]

I know! And what about Lynx? Every time there's a discussion about browsers nobody mentions MY pet browser that has a microscopic market share even among geeks. How offensive!

Re:Elephant in the room

[GameboyRMH]

It's a mouse that thinks it's an elephant. When you ignore it, it gets REALLY pissed off and starts smashing over floor splinters with its whiskers.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

Konqueror FTW.

Re:Elephant in the room

[m1ndcrash]

Yup. They always forget the browser that started tabs and many other features, that to this day has the coolest feature "Paste & Go".

Re:Elephant in the room

[jythie]

To be fair, Opera is still a major player in the embedded market.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

I think both firefox and chrome have simular funstions to "Paste & Go" now

firefox- if you highlight text you can dicertly search for it. links you can dierectly open in a new tab...

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

That's OK, they know both Opera users will be along to make a fuss.

Re:Elephant in the room

[nschubach]

I think IE is the only one without 'Paste & Go' now.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Psicopatico]

That's fine, we know it fits our needs. Let the others think about *their* business.

And don't forget: an higher userbase translates to more exploits in the wild. I know I don't want that.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

For the most part I've given up trying to mention Opera on /. Most of these people probably work on FF, chrome, IE, and/or Safari. So it's a sure way to get modded to oblivion.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. They always forget the browser that started tabs and many other features, that to this day has the coolest feature "Paste & Go".

That is "the coolest feature"? Jeez. It's trivial, and limited to the browser. 'Classic' MacOS let you configure system-wide hotkeys for opening-as-URL or searching from any application well over a decade ago. You didn't even have to go through the intermediate steps of copying and pasting, just select some text, hit the hotkey, and it would go. That's far more useful.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Toonol]

I'm testing Opera. Used it a fair amount years ago, but switched to Firefox. Enjoyed that for quite a while, but FF4.0 has prompted me to start looking for alternatives. Haven't switched fully, but I probably will soon, considering firefox's trajectory.

Opera is a decent browser. Not sure why it gets grief here on Slashdot.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

Can do that in opera too...

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

Every browser gets grief... I mean this whole story is about criticizing FF. Will any /. user admit to using IE? (Opera user here)

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it funny that every time there's a discussion about browsers, most articles won't even mention Opera.

They don't have to. Everyone knows they just have to wait for their zealo^H^H^H^H^Hfans to get wind of it, and they'll all start crying in unison again.

Sort of like N900 fans whenever cell phones are mentioned*. In that they're ignored, too.

*: Ah, damnit, one of them are going to come hijack this thread, right? Sorry, shouldn't have mentioned it.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Trillan]

It's because Opera is, in fact, not worthy of mention. By anyone. Ever.

I feel like I've broken a rule just by responding to your comment on it.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

People will forgive a criminal but never forgive a visionary.

-- Oscar Wilde.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure more article writers would mention Opera if more than five people used it. No one mentions Lynx either.

Re:Elephant in the room

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera's not an elephant. It's more of a mouse.

You are right. Opera is fast and lightweight -- the opposite of a giant lumbering pachyderm. Unfortunately, it also has the visibility of a mouse, despite the fact that it's standards-compliant, packed with features, extendible with plugins, and introduced many of the features that modern browsers have copied (zooming, single-window multi-page browsing [evolved into tabbed browsing], mouse gestures, etc.).

What good is extensibility...

[QuietLagoon]

... if Firefox's new and unnecessary rapid development cycle renders plug-ins invalid every three months, and the plug-in developers choose not to participate in Firefox's inane rapid development cycle. I, a Firefox user, am left with an egregious choice of keeping the browser secure by jumping on the rapid development cycle bandwagon, or using the plug-ins I want to use by skipping the security updates embedded in the rapid development cycle.

.
All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla is now mostly assuming addons will be compatible as new versions come out instead of making developers check them.
http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Are you under the impression that the trunk does not receive security updates?

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? The rapid release schedule means less major changes between versions, so add-on developers don't have as much to worry about, especially number of things that break. They mostly just have to bump the version number and re-roll their release these days, yet a lot of them are so lazy they don't want to even do that. Blame Firefox!

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

Think it's bad now? Wait until Firefox has 'evolved into a platform'....

Re:What good is extensibility...

[BitZtream]

No, he's under the impression that plugin developers who don't want to follow the public release cycle almost certainly aren't going to follow trunk, since will, the obvious fact that they'd be following the public release cycle if they were following trunk. Not everyone spends their entire life tracking someone elses chaotic mess of a code base, no matter how much they want to use the product.

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

... if Firefox's new and unnecessary rapid development cycle renders plug-ins invalid every three months, and the plug-in developers choose not to participate in Firefox's inane rapid development cycle. I, a Firefox user, am left with an egregious choice of keeping the browser secure by jumping on the rapid development cycle bandwagon, or using the plug-ins I want to use by skipping the security updates embedded in the rapid development cycle.

.

All in the name of inflating the ego of some developers who are in a testosterone-enabled development war with other browser developers.

How on earth does this nonsense get moded "Insightful"?

Three years ago, I fixed a bug in Firefox. It took two years before the fix was in a widely used version. By that time, all the sites that put in a hack to work around the bug forgot why the hack was there, and the hacks had to be supported by browsers forever. With a six week release cycle, the fix will take six weeks to get to a beta, and another six weeks to get to stable. Twelve weeks from fix to release means more users have a browser with fewer bugs. "Release early, release often" is a good thing.

For some reason, a tiny number of neurotic loudmouths get very upset over the idea that a version number goes up often. Since no sane persion cares about a version number for anything other than tracking what release they have for bug reports, I can only conclude that these people are nuts.

Your add-ons don't work? As a maintainer of two add-ons, I sympathise with developers who now need to test and release more often. However, I am not so selfish that I expect mozilla to slow down updates to make my job easier. For the two thirds of users who don't have any add-ons, the faster release has no downside. If you want to run an obsolete program just for an add-on written by a developer who doesn't update their code, go ahead. But for the people who want a good browser, more releases are a good thing.

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

When the 'trunk' only lasts 4 weeks, practicality dictates that, yes, it does not receive updates.

Re:What good is extensibility...

[Anonymous Coward]

All plugins hosted on the Mozilla addons site are automatically updated to work with the latest version. I've not seen any issues in a long time with compatibility.

Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored.

[AlphaBit]

I've watched for years as other browsers have stolen idea after idea from Opera. Tabs, Start Pages, Gestures (via Mozilla plugin), Advanced cookie control, Saved Sessions, etc.

Firefox will matter to me again...

[uofitorn]

..when it gets rid of all the bloat. If the Mozilla foundation isn't willing to streamline the Firefox codebase they should release a stripped-down no frills version. They can call it something like Phoenix or Firebird to distinguish it from Firefox.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[GameboyRMH]

How about CometBird or Kazehakase? Or upgrade to a computer made in the last 5 years?

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[maxwell demon]

How about CometBird or Kazehakase? Or upgrade to a computer made in the last 5 years?

That last name is a bit long, don't you think? :-)

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Gordo_1]

Honestly, i don't get this complaint. The belief that Firefox has progressively gotten slower and more bloated over the years is an outright falsehood that keeps getting recycled over and over again on Slashdot and elsewhere. Go ahead and install Firebird 0.7, Firefox 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0, then explain to me where you believe the bloat has crept in... Yes Firefox 4.0 is more feature-rich than previous versions, but if you don't want to use things like sync, you don't have to use them. With a clean comparable profile, each successive Ffx release has delivered some combination of:

* greater stability
* better memory management
* faster javascript
* faster DOM rendering
* faster startup time
* support for new standards/technologies

Frankly, I don't think anyone remembers how rough around the edges Firebird was, because it was comparatively so much better than it's only real competition at the time (IE6).

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[BitZtream]

My computer is one of the latest MBPs, 8 gigs of ram, whatever snazzy processor they throw in them for the high end 15" models ... Firefox still runs like fucking ass compared to ... well everything else.

$5 says it won't even run on a standard machine from 5 years ago for more than a few hours without exploding all over itself. Seriously, who the fuck are you trying to kid?

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[BitZtream]

Just curious, have you ever actually used Firefox ... or maybe have you never used anything OTHER than Firefox?

New technology support? Sure, I'll give you that one. Faster javascript, yea, thats true ... thanks to Macromedia/Adobe, not really Mozilla's doing though. ... the rest of them? No way, flat out false statements that aren't true in this dimesion. It may occasionally become 'stable' ... relatively, but that comes and goes, it most certainly has not gotten better at memory management. Just because they come out once or twice a year an hearld about how AWESOME their memory improvements are doesn't matter since the spend all of the rest of the time making it worse. Their improvements never get them back to the previous baseline.

Car analogy: You take your car to the mechanic because it has gotten slower over time and now won't do more than 10mph, so the mechanic 'fixes' it and tells you it'll go 50 again, but thats the best he could do. 6 months later, your back at 10mph again, so you take it to the mechanic ... and he fixes it ... yipeee! Now it will do 45mph ... and the next time 40 ... 35 ... Do you see the pattern? The mechanic might be fixing the gross problem, but the net is worse than you started with.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Really? Bloated? Browser speed might have mattered back in the 90s, but I'll take that Firefox just works over a nanosecond improvement in page loading any day of the week, thanks. I mean Google are aware that basic off the shelf hardware can run 3D FPS MMORPGs without blinking, right? What web page do they imagine will beat that for a system hog? For a marketing company they didn't pick a very good selling point.

And then we get to the way chrome breaks a lot of websites. Who would have guessed that stripping out functionality would make a browser less functional? /rant

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[izomiac]

Firefox's Windows Installer Sizes:
1.0: 4.7MB, 2.0: 5.5MB, 3.0: 7.2MB, 3.5: 7.7MB, 3.6: 8.2MB, 4.0: 11.9MB, 5.0: 13.1MB, 6.0 (Beta): 13.9MB

So, Firefox grows increasingly complex with each release. Feature creep isn't a completely benign process, and I'd far prefer if Mozilla kept Firefox lean and added such things through plugins. Bloat is not a synonym for slow, albeit the two are strongly correlated.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Anonymous Coward]

For anoyone who's still on Windows, try Palemoon, it's an optimized re-brand of Firefox.

Slightly smaller and faster than FF. It has become my Firefox of choice.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Lehk228]

sounds like you want http://offbyone.com/offbyone/ob1_faq.htm

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Lehk228]

I wanted to add, i actually had OB1 as a main browser for a few days when my main PC was horked up something awful and i was waiting on parts so i grabbed an ancient windows 95 machine running some insanely small amount of RAM and IIRC an original pentium chip, i needed to get online and not get infected by every driveby installer on the web so i needed something tiny but modern enough and OB1 did the trick. it's also useful for web testing to see how a site will look on a generic low power/mobile platform if you can't be assed to test on everything

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Pentium100]

When I play a game, I only play that game and do not do anything else with the PC (though some programs would still be running) while I play it.

When I browse the web, I usually also listen to music have other software running (maybe word/excel to write down the information I find or whatever), so while a game can get away with using all resources on my PC, if a web browser did that, I would have to use a second PC for those other programs, which would be less convenient.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I have upwards of fifty tabs in three groups open in firefox on a $500 box right now, along with thunderbird, photoshop, notepad, reams of miscellaneous software like chat clients and antivirus, excel, a paused movie, and a music player, and I've had them open for the last two weeks straight with no difficulty.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Pentium100]

About the same for me, I was just replying to the comparison between web pages and video games.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[BZ]

A lot of this "feature creep" is web platform stuff. Audio+video support. More SVG support. SMIL support. CSS Transitions, CSS Animations. And so forth. If you just compare the size of the core rendering library across those releases you will see similar if not faster growth. Providing these things through "plugins" is not really desirable unless you mean something preinstalled. And that would actually _increase_ bloat due to the need to handle both SMIL being available and SMIL not being available.

Some more of the size increase, by the way, is a move toward compile options that optimize for performance at the expense of code size...

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[BZ]

> thanks to Macromedia/Adobe,

Uh... I suggest you do some reading about how JITs actually work and then try to understand how the differenet levels of a JIT interact with each other. Macromedia/Adobe put a bunch of work into nanojit (the one Adobe bit Tracemonkey uses), but then Mozilla did as well. And Mozilla built all the code that has to generate the LIR, which is where a lot of the optimization work happens.

Similar for Jaegermonkey: the assembler was borrowed from JSC, but the compiler code on top of it was written by Mozilla.

It's really worth learning about things before making false claims about them.....

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Gordo_1]

Installer size... really? That's the best argument showing that Firefox is bloated? A download that takes approximately 4 seconds on my cable connection, is within easy reach of even the slowest 28.8 dial-up users, is smaller than many Flash websites, supports HTML5 support, a JS JIT engine, GPU accelerated rendering and we look at the growth in installer size versus a slew of old releases that can't even be used effectively on the web today?

Perhaps you, like everyone else on the Goog-bandwagon would prefer Chrome, whose 'lightweight' 587KB installer hides the actual ~32MB zip file in a download manager.

Re:Firefox will matter to me again...

[Anonymous Coward]

They can call it something like Phoenix or Firebird to distinguish it from Firefox.

I think that should be modded funny, intentional or not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Early_versions

I'd miss NoScript and shitload of other add-ons

[elrous0]

The closest thing you can get to NoScript on Chrome is NotScripts. And I'm sorry but that sucks ass by comparison.

Re:I'd miss NoScript and shitload of other add-ons

[Anonymous Coward]

This.
Firefox extensions and add-ons are still beating the pants off their Chrome equivalents. If you say that they slow Firefox down, I say I run several all the time and then I turn on others when I need them. It's easy to do, requiring little or no effort.
Ad-block, NoScript, Better Privacy, Ghostery, CS Lite, Flashblock, Google Analytics Opt Out, Beef Taco, Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, Cert Patrol, Last Pass and NoSquint run all the time. I whitelist my everyday sites so they get the eyeballs.
Then when I'm developing I turn on Firebug, Web Developer and Colorzilla and others.

Yes, I'll admit that Chrome is faster, but that's just not enough. Some of these extensions have Chrome versions, but they just do not work as well. Here's hoping they get there soon. But perhaps by then Firefox will be slimmer and faster too.

Re:I'd miss NoScript and shitload of other add-ons

[kaizokuace]

oh there is a plugin? I thought that the X button in the top right stopped scripts in chrome.

Re:I'd miss NoScript and shitload of other add-ons

[elrous0]

Oh, you have to do it manually? You see, I use NoScript, which automates the whole process.

1- make it not crash

[obarthelemy]

1- make it not crash: I've got Chrome, IE 9, Opera, and Firefox. Firefox is the only browser that can't go a day without crashing.
2- make it work without addons: Firefox code don't run too well... but it still runs better than addons, and addons create headaches at upgrade time. So, instead of dreaming up a cloud-based quasi OS with a laundry list of sci-fi features, how about they just put mouse gestures, ad blocking... in it ? You know, as if it were a browser ?

I'm getting the same vibe from Firefox as I am from the Linux UI guys: devs have taken over and are working towards nerdgasm be working on stuff that nobody but they and their buddies care about. Real, unglamorous users' needs, such as reliability, usability, compatibility have fallen by the wayside.

Re:1- make it not crash

[Anonymous Coward]

1- make it not crash: I've got Chrome, IE 9, Opera, and Firefox. Firefox is the only browser that can't go a day without crashing.
2- make it work without addons: Firefox code don't run too well... but it still runs better than addons, and addons create headaches at upgrade time. So, instead of dreaming up a cloud-based quasi OS with a laundry list of sci-fi features, how about they just put mouse gestures, ad blocking... in it ? You know, as if it were a browser ?

I'm getting the same vibe from Firefox as I am from the Linux UI guys: devs have taken over and are working towards nerdgasm be working on stuff that nobody but they and their buddies care about. Real, unglamorous users' needs, such as reliability, usability, compatibility have fallen by the wayside.

I don't know what you are doing to your Firefox install, but I have not had a crash for years...

Re:1- make it not crash

[Anonymous Coward]

1 - Crashes on me too, but so do Chrome and Opera. Regularly. And not while I'm doing web development, either. The difference is that Firefox and Opera crashes take the browser down unless it's a Flash crash.
2 - What are you talking about? You don't need any addons to use Firefox unless you have special needs?

Re:1- make it not crash

[bartok]

He's trying to make it mate with his Bonzi Buddy.

Re:1- make it not crash

[Anonymous Coward]

1- make it not crash: I've got Chrome, IE 9, Opera, and Firefox. Firefox is the only browser that can't go a day without crashing.
2- make it work without addons: Firefox code don't run too well... but it still runs better than addons, and addons create headaches at upgrade time. So, instead of dreaming up a cloud-based quasi OS with a laundry list of sci-fi features, how about they just put mouse gestures, ad blocking... in it ? You know, as if it were a browser ?

I'm getting the same vibe from Firefox as I am from the Linux UI guys: devs have taken over and are working towards nerdgasm be working on stuff that nobody but they and their buddies care about. Real, unglamorous users' needs, such as reliability, usability, compatibility have fallen by the wayside.

You have a bad addon. I'd find it. I've used Firefox for an extremely long time and can't remember a time it ever crashed that wasn't caused by Flash. (And that was years ago by this point.)

Re:1- make it not crash

[Oligonicella]

Mine's a plain install and it crashed yesterday. First time in a very long time though.

Re:1- make it not crash

[jonahbron]

I run Firefox for days on end. Never crashed on me.

Re:1- make it not crash

[webheaded]

What are you doing that your Firefox crashes all the time? Seriously. I see this a lot and I don't understand it. I use Firefox all day at home and work and it is rare for it to crash on me completely. The UI locks up for maybe 10 seconds here and there, I'll give you that. Some computers it does not play nice with on the UI...but outright crashing I don't really experience.

Extensible browser?

[Hatta]

Try UZBL. It's rendering engine is based on WebKit, and all other features are provided by scripts. You can customize it in any way you want.

Re:Extensible browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see it adheres to the Open Source tradition of catchy, easily-pronounceable names.

Re:Extensible browser?

[allo]

and beeing absolutely useless to an average user.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[Skuto]

stolen idea after idea from Opera. Tabs

Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.

Gecko is the rendering engine

[seandiggity]

Chrome may have a nice interface and WebKit may be a bit faster than Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko , but if Firefox failed as a project I'd miss its Emacs-like extensibility (something all other browsers lack).

TFTFY. Seriously, how do you publish a story about browsers and get stuff like this wrong, or use such confusing language? And I don't want to get into another pissing contest between WebKit and Gecko, but do we really need a shout-out to Chrome in a Firefox story just to placate the /. users that prefer it? While we're at it, why such a dismal outlook on Firefox's future? It's not becoming a niche browser any time soon; anyone see concrete signs of that happening? Even if it did, I'm sure Mozilla will live on in some form...there are dozens of products out there still using code from the Mozilla suite. Y'know, stuff like that thing "XULrunner" from the summary.

Money from Google

[brit74]

Let's also not forget that Google has been paying for Firefox development for years. If Google pulls out in favor of Chrome, you have to ask what will happen.

Mozilla, the organization behind the popular Firefox web browser, has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum – in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company’s total revenue . The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/

Re:Money from Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, then you have MS funding SUSE Linux! Both deals stink!

Re:Money from Google

[BZ]

> If Google pulls out in favor of Chrome, you have to
> ask what will happen.

You can ask... or you could look up the answers.

The 2010 data is not out yet, but the 2009 numbers are at http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-2009-audited-financial-statement.pdf which means you don't have to worry about citing 2006 numbers.

As of 2009, Mozilla had $120 million in net assets. Expenses in 2009 were $61 million. Revenues were $104 million. They were hiring as fast as they could find good people, and earning more money than they could spend. They had 2 years worth of operating costs in the bank. All of this is public data, as it is for any other nonprofit.

So if trends continued in that revenue and expenses grew at the same percentage rate, and if you assume that Google is still 85% of their revenue stream (the data on that doesn't seem to be available), what would happen if Google pulled out is that Mozilla would have about 2.3 years to find funding sources to replace that revenue. Assuming they kept spending as much as they do now in the meantime instead of trying to stretch the money out.

On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.

Re:Money from Google

[njahnke]

On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.

you had me until here. what would the default search engine become? bing?

Re:Money from Google

[Kjella]

On the other hand, you also have to wonder what the bottom line for Google would be from 20-30% of internet users not having Google as the default search engine anymore, say. And if that were a possibility, why Google would want to risk that.

Of course they don't want to lose 20-30% of the search market. But a lot of people speculate that Google has been propping up Mozilla, paying them a lot more than strictly necessary so that they can fight IE and Bing on Google's behalf. With Chrome Google is now taking that competition directly, possibly only paying Mozilla the barest minimum that's commercially necessary. Let's say Google now offers Mozilla a pittance, what are the alternatives? Well the closest alternative would be Microsoft, who now powers Bing and Yahoo but a lot of open source people would choke on that, many users would hate it and possibly change browser rather than change search engine. Or to not have a default at all, but that probably brings in very little royalties and Google would get most users back anyway. Without a credible threat of doing something else, Mozilla has very little bargaining power despite having many users.

Whether they'll admit it or not, their royalties are also now in direct competition with putting more money into Chrome development and marketing. Paying Mozilla now costs $104M*0.85/0.30 = ~$3M per percent market share per year. If you can convert 1% from Firefox to Chrome for less (actually, less than the discounted cash flow if you assume the conversion is permanent) then that saves Google money. And companies love saving money. So no, I'm pretty sure Firefox will continue to use Google but I question how much they'll get paid and how hard Google will push Chrome. Mozilla may have money in the bank, but very little compared to Google if they are gunning for the same users.

Re:Money from Google

[danlip]

change browser rather than change search engine

We are only talking about the default search engine, not being forced to use a certain search engine, so everyone with clue would just change the search engine back to Google (and complain loudly on Slashdot). Only the clueless would keep using the default search engine, and those people wouldn't be switching browsers anyway (likely they're still using IE).

Re:Money from Google

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Maybe Mozilla could do its own open source search engine? Whatever Google's startup budget was, it wasn't tens of millions.

Re:Money from Google

[BZ]

Bing would certainly love that. Users may or may not; I suspect that Mozilla wouldn't change the search engine default for that reason. But would not having the Google contract reduce the bar for that switch? Could be. I don't know, and I bet neither does Google nor Mozilla so far. So then the question is how much mitigating that risk is worth to Google.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the Sheen Strategy:

First, the steal from you,
Then, they ignore you,
Then, you go on a crack bender,
Then, you winning!

Good for you, Opera.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[Anonymous Psychopath]

And yet with all that innovation, Opera is still the red-headed stepchild of web browsers. I suspect it's because they tried to create revenue with a browser directly as opposed to OS bundling (MS/Apple) or advertising (Google/Firefox).

Just your everyday browser...

[Anonymous Coward]

When it comes to the every day user browsing the internet, in my mind there is one thing that matters. Firefox has No Script. Thats it. Chrome I will use on websites I trust. But I want the browser known as my default browser to have No Script. Anytime Im opening a new webpage. Im protected. I have to whitelist websites. It gives me a chance to look at what Im dealing with before letting any of it in. Invaluable. I do however prefer Chrome for sites I know and trust.

Re:Just your everyday browser...

[hawkinspeter]

So true

How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[he-sk]

Honest question. I know little about the source code of both projects, but Chrome does have extensions (I know b/c I use a lot of them) and is based on an open-source product, making it very hackable. So in what way is Firefox extensible that Chrome isn't?

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Find me an extension for Chrome where I can Ctrl-Tab to the switch between MRU tabs.

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing is a Firefox extension can do that a Chrome extension cannot is to block URLs, not just page elements. So Adblock Plus for Firefox blocks in-line Flash ads (like on Blip.tv), but the Chrome version is incapable of doing so.

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare adblock-plus on firefox and why the adblock peeps with chrome can't do certain things... Seems like that is at least one reason...

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Unknown Lamer]

Part of it is that you can write Firefox extensions in Javascript whereas Chromium extensions require you to dive into C++ which is a pretty horrid language (I know, I spent years using it).

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UI of Firefox is built using an un-compiled text language with tags something like HTML along with javascript. It allows extensions to add to the UI or even tweak existing UI in ways other browsers can't. For fun enter the following URL, less the parenthesis into Firefox: (chrome://browser/content/browser.xul). It will render the browser inside the browser!

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[he-sk]

This page seems to suggest otherwise: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/getstarted.html

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[Unknown Lamer]

Ah, I hadn't checked the situation in a while and that was a pleasant surprise. It still looks like the interface is limited to more or less embedding snippets of HTML5 into the interface. Which is pretty powerful, but Firefox still has the advantage here (e.g. the entire XUL toolkit is available). There's also the theoretical advantage of Firefox extensions being applicable to most any xulrunner app (e.g. a lot of extensions work work with Conkeror), but in practice it doesn't always work out so well. Personally I'm not a huge fan of HTML5 (it looks impossible to implement from scratch...) and so having access to a (ever so slightly) saner toolkit for UI programming is handy. But I still write elisp regularly and that language certainly isn't going to win any prizes for consistency and sanity any time soon (sometimes popularity wins, eh).

It's still nice to see more browsers taking advantage of that little javascript environment they have to permit interface extensions nowadays.

Re:How is Chrome not as extensible as Firefox?

[BZ]

Firefox extensions can do a lot more than Chrome extensions can. That's both a plus (more powerful extensions) and a minus (harder to not break extensions when something changes somewhere in the browser).

I switched because of FF memory usage/leaks

[Chris Huelsbeck]

I finally had enough of endless Firefox updates that never fixed the memory leaks... it always gobbled up all my free memory in a very short time. Once I made the switch to Chrome, everything was running smoother and I can leave it running for days without memory problems. I bet it's difficult to win back customers who left...

Re:I switched because of FF memory usage/leaks

[neminem]

I'm using Aurora right now because I'd heard they'd done a lot of work on that end recently, and... I seem to have heard correctly. In my recent experience, FF7 gobbles way less memory, and is much better about giving it back, than any previous version. Well, other than one greasemonkey script that with FF7 started consuming all my ram and never gives it back, but I gather that's a bug in greasemonkey, not with Firefox per se.

Firefox as a platform will never be a major threat

[LostMonk]

Firefox as a platform will never be a major threat to Chrome/IE9 for the single sad reason, Google+MS+Apple have all the money and all the patents and can sue Mozilla's pants off.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[findoutmoretoday]

<quote>
<p>Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension)</p></quote>

"Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004" Did I use Opera in a parallel universe where it started life with a MDI?

Integrated Gopher browser and ICQ client suite?

[Dogtanian]

Was I the only person who read the headline and briefly mistook "Mozilla's Nightingale" for the name of yet another project they were starting up?

I'm sure Bob Seamonkey and Jill Firefox can sympathise.

Re:Integrated Gopher browser and ICQ client suite?

[Schmorgluck]

Nope, same here. Even though I had heard about the guy.

Holy war!

[m1ndcrash]

It is on!

wrong direction

[StripedCow]

Anyone else feel that the last decade control has been taken out of the hands of developers, in return for a big increase in compatibility headaches? I personally feel as if I'm being taken hostage by all these new environments. I cannot even have the guarantee that the javascript/HTML code I write now will still work in 1 year from now. This is of course ridiculous and completely contrary to the idea that technology should improve our lives as developers. And I think it cannot continue in this way.

The main issue is that the more complex webbrowsers become, the bigger the compatibility headache for developers.
I don't claim to have the solution, but what Mozilla could do is take a more layered approach:

layer 1: basic opengl type of graphics api
layer 2: low-level NaCl-esque virtual machine (see google code)
layer 3a: high-level garbage collected languages like javascript (in "user-space!)
layer 3b: w3c rendering engine (in "user-space"!)
layer 4: web apps

Now here's the crucial point: every layer above level 2 should be accessible and replaceable by any user (i.e., webdeveloper), thus also the rendering engine layer (heck even the W3C specs could be replaced).

An architecture like this would (imho) solve a lot of development headaches and allow for a much richer open-source ecosystem.

--
Please clean up your code behind you. Thank you.

Flash Anyone

[sarku]

Gee, "siloed environments." Looks like Flash still has a future. Apple's reason for killing Flash? It makes their platform irrelevant. If you can 'write once, run anywhere' who needs to buy a Mac for their "apps?" Please, let go of the technical arguments of why Flash sucks. Those are technical issues which can be overcome, but the real issues of greed and profit? Much harder to surmount.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[Fred Or Alive]

It's a bit more complex than that, Opera sort of had tabs since about version 4 / 5 before Firefox started as a project (I don't think the Mozilla Suite had got to 1.0 either?), but seeing as it hadn't really been decided that the UI for tabs should be tabs, it presented tabs using a Windows taskbar style metaphor. The UI for "tabs" was adjusted to be tabs after a while, which was after a few other browsers started using tabs, but that was mostly a skin change, and not some major rewrite.

I guess the question about if Opera had tabs [first / early on / whatever] depends one quite how far tabs have to be to the final version that most browsers use nowadays. If you go for the idea of a single window containing multiple web pages switched between though a row of widgets, than Opera had them. However if the switcher had to specifically be a row of tabs at the top of the screen and not a row of buttons on the bottom, Opera didn't.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[AvitarX]

That is so not even true.

Opera had tabs before there was a Firefox, or even a Firebird. I don't want to say it for sure, but I think it had them before there was even a Mozilla browser.

Why firefox doesn't matter anymore.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Firefox 4 crapped up the UI, but hey, I got used to it.
2. Firefox 5 came out a month later, broke all my plug ins, again.
3. Firefox released images of new release, which looks exactly like chrome.
4. Firefox states that no one needs a URL bar. (CBA to find the /. article)
5. Firefox states that it's not for enterprise users, then that it is soon after (both articles on /.)

Anyone else miss the days firefox was for the users, not it's owners?
When it didn't give a flying flip about how it's market share was, and just did the best they could to push down a wonderful product?
I miss those days. Goodbye firefox, call me when/if you guys wake up again.

"Something all other browsers lack"??? Er... wha?

[brunes69]

Er.... all browsers I know of allow you to write extensions. And Chrome's extension system is arguably vastly superior to Firefox's in almost every single way, from overall speed to not having to restart your browser to seamless synchronization to superior forward compatibility to everything else.

Not a nicer interface

[aahpandasrun]

How does Chrome have a nicer interface? We're stuck with the big ugly "other bookmarks" folder that can't be moved or deleted, and buttons that can't be rearranged. Firefox and Chrome have pretty much identical interfaces these days, but Firefox's can be customized. That's the difference.

Re:"Something all other browsers lack"??? Er... wh

[aahpandasrun]

Are you kidding? Chrome's extension API has always been limited by design. Extensions are not allowed to change the interface or even do simple things like disable autoscrolling. Remember how long it took for Adblock to even be available for Chrome? Google has been fighting customization the whole way.

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[amicusNYCL]

Tabs were first in Firefox (through an extension). Opera copied the idea from the extension. Pot. Kettle.

Damn kids these days.

In 1995 the Opera browser version 2 ("MultiTorg Opera") had a "multi-document interface" where you could view several pages at the same time in the same application window. Opera introduced tabs as we know them today in version 4, in June 2000. Several browsers I haven't heard of had tabs before then, starting in 1988 with a browser for browsing news (not a "web" browser). The Mozilla browser introduced tabs in Oct. 2001, and Phoenix (Firefox) a year later in Oct. 2002. Safari got them in 2003, and IE7 got them in 2006. You seem to think that tabs burst on the scene through a Firefox extension some time after Oct. 2002 when Phoenix got extension management. You, my friend, are wrong. Even the Mozilla browser had them before that. Hell, there was even a shell for IE that had tabs in 1997.

Here you go, fanboy, educate yourself.

A bit off topic ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrast that with C++0x where at least they pretend that there will eventually be a standard and we'll just call it C++0A or C++0B...

More then pretend: in April the final draft was voted for review and approval by the ISO and the final specification should be published later this year.

Strange..

[0ld_d0g]

I guess it depends on your workload. Opera freezes up on me a few times each month. Luckily just one thread keeps spinning so I can easily shut it down on my dual-core machine. CHrome/FF/IE have all been stable for me...

Only thing I hate is the UI

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I hate about Firefox is the interface.

Now, granted, I hated the UI changes in Opera too, but one of Opera's big strengths is it's customizability - I have been able to keep the UI the same as the version 5 UI I used right up to the current version including keyboard shortcut behaviour, menus, mouse gestures etc., despite all of these being COMPLETELY different in stock Opera 11.50.

Of all the well-known browsers, only Opera can do this easily.

I really hate this trend/plague of sweeping asinine UI changes that keep being forced on us in new versions of stuff that to try and make something that's had nothing new look new.

And what really gets my goat is how they tell you it "improves your work flow" and "is more intuitive" and shit like that. They DO NOT make things easier or better or anything like that! Stop bloody doing it! I want a nice stable and intuitive UI design! It can't be intuitive if you keep making such sweeping changes to it all the fucking time!!!!

It isn't just Firefox that is guilty of this; Windows is guilty. Office is guilty. KDE is guilty. Gnome is guilty. STOP. IT. NOW!

Re:Only thing I hate is the UI

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox UI changes are necessary, and if you'd used any new devices in the past few years (e.g. netbooks), you'd understand.

Plus, it isn't like it's really all that different at all. Honestly. I'll never understand what you and others carry on about so much.

"Oh no, they swapped the tabs and address bar. How will I ever understand this brave new new world?!"
"Where in the world is the status bar?! How can I get work done without this blank and completely unnecessary bar at the bottom of the screen?!"

There are your UI changes. Big deal. Grow up. There'd never be progress if developers catered to people so irrationally afraid of even the most insignificant changes.

Re:Only thing I hate is the UI

[neminem]

Changes aren't always progress. Hiding information that was previously available is definitely not progress. Completely unnecessary? I *like* knowing such things as a. where a link is going to take me, and b. the progress of loading a page I'm loading. More generally, though, for *any* program, if I've been using it for 10 years and have gotten used to looking for some piece of information in a particular place, I like being able to expect that, after updating the software to a new version, that information will still be in the same place. That's really just common sense UI design.

Now, yes, occasionally a new version of a program comes along and redesigns the UI and makes everyone think, "holy carp, I can't believe I lived with the old design for so long!" But that's why you test UI redesigns on actual users. If a decent fraction of your users say something like that, you probably have a winner. If, as in this case, almost everyone says, "alright, but how do I set it back like it was before?", you probably... don't.

The only good thing I can say about Firefox is that it's still just as customizeable and extensible as always, which is of course why I continue to use it in the first place. Absolutely every change I hated about the new Firefox, I found with only the slightest bit of googling someone posting about how to set it back how it was. I wish that weren't *necessary*, but it's still much nicer than just having to suck it up. (In comparison with, say, all the anti-progress Windows 7 made to Explorer (not IE), much of which was unfixable except by using an alternate file manager, which is what I'm now doing.)

Rather than working on the UI

[soramimicake]

Please work on something that will be actually useful, like those below. These are hard to do but it looks really bad when Mozilla ignore these for nearly 10 years to work on eye candy.

HTML5 <ruby> support
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33339

CSS3 writing-mode (vertical text)
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145503

Did anyone else read

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla Nightingale and thought of a new Xul application, adding to the collection of birds?

RequestPolicy

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be the #2 extension for Firefox that you install after Noscript. It'll seriously change the way you see many many many websites and open your eyes to just how many websites have "web bugs".

Re:RequestPolicy

[Schmorgluck]

The above AC is talking about RequestPolicy. I specify because it took me nearly 30 seconds to figure out that the subject of the first sentence had been misplaced as the comment subject, for some reason.

Re:RequestPolicy

[allo]

I would really like a blacklist mode. Everything loaded by default, but easy to blacklist from the RP-menu. Seems not that easy thing to do with the addon.

Re:"Something all other browsers lack"??? Er... wh

[Eskarel]

It's an architectural thing.

For all intents and purposes the entire firefox UI is one gigantic extension, you can change it, play with it, adjust it, pretty much however you want all without having to actually alter the source code in any way shape or form. Sure you still have to deal with APIs changing, but pretty much anything Mozilla can do you can do. Chrome isn't like this, the extensions are limited in what they can do, and the UI is not written in the same language and using the same APIs as your extensions are. Essentially Chrome has extensions, Firefox is extensible.

There are of course pluses and minuses to the whole thing, firefox extensions are able to do a lot more damage to the firefox environment than Chrome ones are, but there's a reason why there's nothing else quite like firebug or no-script on the market for any other browser.

As for open source code being hackable, that's always been a lie. Maintaining your own patch set for any complex product is pretty close to a full time job unless you can get the upstream maintainers to accept your patch into the trunk.

I'd miss firebug and web developer

[acomj]

Firefox is really the bees knees for web development....
firebug for javascript...

http://getfirebug.com/

and the poorly named web developer plugin for css make firefox a potent tool.

http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Re:Opera is often first, stolen from, then ignored

[allo]

and opera had usable tabs at bottom. a thing, which is missing from modern browsers. you can configure them to have the tabs at bottom, but not in a usable way, anymore

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

firefox is the best

[omfglearntoplay]

it does what ***I*** tell it to do.