Mozilla Leaves Out Linux For Initial Web App Support

darthcamaro writes "Guess What? Linux is not a primary platform for Mozilla. For Mozilla's upcoming Web Apps marketplace, Linux support is not part of the initial release. Some Mozilla developers simply are shrugging this off as Windows and Mac dominate the Mozilla user landscape today."

Comments

Fork it, then

[crazyjj]

Unlike with Internet Explorer, if the Linux community feels strongly about this, they could always do their own fork. So stop bitching and start coding.

Re:Fork it, then

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right Fork it! And fork them!

I'll just use another browser!

Forking summa batches!

It mighta as well, too! The spiel checker hasn't worked on Linux in many many releases.

Re:Fork it, then

[Anonymous Coward]

You most likely wouldn't even need to fork it, it's not like Mozilla is fundamentally opposed to the idea, they just can't justify the resources necessary for it at the moment. If you were to fully implement it with some decent code, I'm pretty sure Mozilla would be more than happy to integrate it.

Re:Fork it, then

[Ramin_HAL9001]

There are like 20 forks of Firefox for Linux already, I can't even keep track of them all: Iceweasel, Seamonkey, Icecat, Swiftfox, Flock, ...

There are even more based on WebKit.

Re:Fork it, then

[cpu6502]

Forking is what causes forking confusion.

It makes newbies runaway from GNUlinux rather than try it, and even experienced people like me say, "I'm tired of 10 different variants of Mozilla browsers, and the desktop changing every release. I'm going back to Win or Mac OS for some multiyear stability."

Re:Fork it, then

[GameboyRMH]

Iceweasel is really just a rebranding, technically it's a fork but the code is identical to Firefox.

Re:Fork it, then

[Vintermann]

Seamonkey isn't a fork of Firefox, it's the other way around. Seamonkey is what remains of the old Mozilla suite. I'm surprised it's under active development.

Re:Fork it, then

[localman57]

According to Barry Schwartz (Let the spaceballs jokes begin...) it not only confuses people, it actually makes them less satisfied:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice:_Why_More_Is_Less

One of the reasons for this is percieved "Missed Opportunities". The idea that, yeah, maybe you picked Firefox, but you have a nagging feeling that you might have been happier with IceWeasel. This makes you enjoy FireFox less, through no fault of FireFox itself.

Re:Fork it, then

[Shifty0x88]

Some people like stability, which then I would tell them to get a LTS (Long Term Support) version of your favorite GNU/Linux OS (although not every OS has one)

Others like the support, some the easy of use, others just aren't technically inclined enough to get things to work if they don't work "out of the box" (out of the CD? no, no one gets linux on CD, so I guess: out of the download? Ah, I digress....)

Re:Fork it, then

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost but there are extra patches added in hence why they had to rename it in the first place so yes it's a fork that's tied closely to the main branch.

Re:Fork it, then

[Brad1138]

It reminds me a bit of the cola wars, so many different variants, there isn't room on the shelves for all of them. It is what is killing Linux as a viable alternative to Windows/Mac. For us computer geeks, it is fun to switch between variants and pick our favorite. To the average computer user it is confusing, and just more work for software developers.

Like it or not, Ubuntu is the best hope for Linux in the real world. It is becoming big enough that software companies and consumers can focus on one Linux product. If Ubuntu is just the flavor of the day and fades like Red Hat etc, I will give up hope of Linux ever really "making it" to the desktop for the average user.

Re:Fork it, then

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, you just don't even know enough about software development to form an opinion

Re:Fork it, then

[FictionPimp]

I suffer from some kind of mental problem where when presented with a choice, I break into a near frenzy of research on said choices. It can almost paralyze my choices as I try to discover the best choice. While I enjoy the research, sometimes I think I would be happier to just have one choice.

Re:Fork it, then

[donaldm]

For most users it is not a good idea to get first release applications. The best testing initially comes from the developers as well as the alpha and beta users and the last thing you want are annoying bugs appearing in the finished product since the customer usually gets annoyed. Actually if anyone has read the first link you will read that the people are discussing getting the Linux Community involved. Even if you read the second link you will see that while Linux apps comes third after MS Windows and Mac it is by no means going to be dropped. By Mozilla apps I would assume they are seriously considering charging (ok some will be free) just like you get on Android (Linux kernel) and iPhone.

Personally I do like Firefox (version 12) which does run on my Fedora 16 (soon to be 17) laptop and I do like the fact that its upgrades are small. I don't really have any issue with native Chrome (version 18.0.1025.168-134367) on Linux (I have not used Chromium for a few years which was replaced by Google Chrome 64 bit and 32 bit) although I wish they would arrange for delta updates rather than a 34MB update. Still that's not too bad for an excellent browser.

Even if Firefox was dropped from Linux (the Articles don't allude to that though) there are always plenty of other browsers available.

Re:Fork it, then

[twistedcubic]

Seamonkey provides a mail client with a much better interface than Thunderbird. The browser is nice too. You should try it.

Re:Fork it, then

[Zero__Kelvin]

Er .. ah ...no. They renamed it to get around trademark issues. Furthermore, each Linux distribution provides a separate kernel build (or more than one) with various patches applied and different configuration options enabled, etc. This does not constitute a fork. A fork happens when active development of source code occurs in a software product.

Re:Fork it, then

[Zero__Kelvin]

"I'm going back to Win or Mac OS for some multiyear stability.""

I approve highly of the use of your logical or in this case, but even though the compiler will get it right, it is best to include parenthesis for ease of readability and maintainability. Best Practice recommendation is: ((win) or (Mac OS for some multiyear stability));

Re:Fork it, then

[jedidiah]

Nonsense.

They all run the same kernel and libraries.

You can "install" an app on Linux just by decompressing a tarball. Windows style "installers" run on any version of Linux you want.

It doesn't matter if Ubuntu fades. It doesn't matter if Red Hat fades. Software made for either will run on any other Linux out there.

Linux is like an aisle full of soda that differs only in the shape, size, and mechanics of the containers.

Re:Fork it, then

[marcosdumay]

The "trademark issues" were that you can't patch Firefox and keep calling it Firefox. Thus people had to rename it for applying patches.

Re:Fork it, then

[jedidiah]

It should. You are abusing statistics.

It's like you're trying to claim that MacOS has greater market share than Windows when we all know that it doesn't really.

The market doesn't mind choice. Windows has thrived and marginalized Apple in that kind of environment for decades. Now Android is set to do the same to Apple again.

Re:Fork it, then

[marcosdumay]

Does anybody still run Mozilla's Firefox on Linux? Every distro already switched to a fork ages ago.

Re:Fork it, then

[Pausanias]

It's also one of the better lightweight HTML editors out there. Perfect for when someone without experience needs to edit a web page for content.

Re:Fork it, then

[cpu6502]

Yeah but the average user doesn't know that. They hear Redhat, Ubuntu, Lucid, Puppy, and think they are all different OSes. They get confused.

Re:Fork it, then

[Pausanias]

The problem happened at some point during the transition from Mozilla suite to firefox. At that point, the developers decided they hated Linux. Not sure why and I can't dig up a citation but when Firefox came out essentially they decided to focus on speed gains in windows over Linux.

Re:Fork it, then

[chrb]

The "trademark issues" were that you can't patch Firefox and keep calling it Firefox.

You can if you have permission e.g. Ubuntu patch their Firefox, and yet it is still called Firefox. Debian also had permission, once upon a time. The dispute with Debian wasn't over source code patches, it was over the patch that removed the Firefox logo, because it was provided under a non-free license.

Re:Fork it, then

[washort]

You're right, and people are doing just that. A patch for Linux support is under development here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744193

Re:Fork it, then

[chrb]

You are not the only one. I remember one of my former colleagues standing in front of a vending machine, just looking at it, for over 5 minutes... I asked him what was up, and he replied "There's too much choice. There should just be one chocolate bar." He was only half joking.

Re:Fork it, then

[Brad1138]

I stand by the "average user" part of my statement. As for the software developers, I know I have read "Company X doesn't want to write code for / release a Linux version because of all the different distros" a few times (although I can't find it now). Maybe I miss-interpreted that.

Still, the average user needs consistency. A recognized name that persists to get behind and stay with.

Re:Fork it, then

[Lashat]

Forkin' a' !

Re:Fork it, then

[hazah]

How is it that they can comprehend car models then? Selective stupidity? (More like selective ignorance that we should NOT cater to)

Re:Fork it, then

[Tarlus]

I've been car shopping for five years for just this reason.

Re:Fork it, then

[zidium]

In 2005, with the official suspension of the Mozilla Browser project, it was expected that the 30+ Mozilla devs would, naturally, just switch development to Firefox, the new child, which at the time only had 3 core developers.

The Mozilla devs, however, upon looking at the bastardized, sloppy, memory-leak-filled Firefox pre-2.0 codebase balked. They considered the Firefox devs to be rank amateurs and there was a move to change up the org structure of Firefox. That backfired when the Moz Consortium, encouraged by Google, entrenched support against Firefox and basically shunned the old guard developers.

The old guard then decided to fork the old Mozilla browser and, against the wishes of the AOL Corp., completely diverge from Netscape towards a more lean, memory-resilient browser/email/chat program called **SeaMonkey**. It took a while, and they didn't have the hundreds of millions of dollars, or even a modicrum of the advertising money or corporate backing that Firefox has had, but their product is vastly superior where it counts to Firefox and Thunderbird and maintains binary compatibility with their plugins.

You should really check out SeaMonkey http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ It's how Firefox outside of the Moz Corp would be, and I enjoy it substantially more. Plus, they do a GREAT job keeping up with the Gecko Engine and are virtually always on a newer, better version than Firefox. Oh, and they don't have the memory problems, either.

Re:Fork it, then

[interval1066]

... then comes Windwos 8.

Re:Fork it, then

[groovepapa]

Mozilla *is* hiring aggressively - http://careers.mozilla.org/ - *and* actively recruiting more community contributors - https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introduction. There's no such thing as "____ is not part of Mozilla's ____" because we can all be part of Mozilla. See washort's link to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744193

Re:Fork it, then

[NatasRevol]

I seriously, seriously doubt it. Android basically makes no money relative to Apple.

http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/15/android-revenues-in-perspective/

Re:Fork it, then

[Karlt1]

That must be why all of the Android and Windows OEMS are reporting record profits and Apple is struggling....

Re:Fork it, then

[TheDarkMaster]

Well, the reasons for that are pretty simple. It's much harder to program a complex, performance critical GUI application in Linux than in Windows, as recent example I can cite the issue of hardware acceleration. In Windows you can use DirectX or OpenGL and always works (only cause problems if your driver is really broken), while on Linux you need to deal with a hell of different standards and implementations, most of then inconsistent and incomplete.

Re:Fork it, then

[nschubach]

I kid you not... I worked with a designer that didn't know what model car he drove. He knew it was a Chrysler and had a steering wheel.

Re:Fork it, then

[dbcad7]

It's not like your choice is permanent like a tattoo or anything.. Forget browsers, I used to do the same thing with whole distros until I found trends in what I liked and narrowed down my choices.. I realized that for the most part I could make pretty much any distro to my liking with some work. There are some fundamental things (mostly package managers/reps) that do work better in others that matter.. But if I felt that I was missing out, it would be no big deal to test drive something else to usually find that my original choice was better after all.

Re:Fork it, then

[s.petry]

Like it or not, Ubuntu is the best hope for Linux in the real world. It is becoming big enough that software companies and consumers can focus on one Linux product. If Ubuntu is just the flavor of the day and fades like Red Hat etc, I will give up hope of Linux ever really "making it" to the desktop for the average user.

There is a reason Redhat is the number one selling Linux in the world, followed by SUSE (mostly in Europe) and why Ubuntu can't take their place. Enterprise Support.

Maybe for script kiddies and wannabes yelling 'Ubuntu is the shizznit', it's the shizznit ((We heard that same argument for Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, Lindows, and God only knows how many other variants)). Enterprise grade support is not there, and without it you end up with a mickey mouse support structure that chokes itself out in a short time.

Look, if all you want is to watch pr0n on your Linux box, I'm sure Ubuntu is better. In an enterprise, you need to have a support structure. Go ahead and try to manage a few thousand Ubuntu boxes at 87 different release levels and either a nightmare puppet/chef setup or free for all (usually the case is free for all).

Sorry, I deal with the mentality every day that "Ubuntu is free, and everything free is what we should be doing in a corporation". It's the wrong mentality, especially for us in the trenches. Microsoft makes a killing not because their support fixes most of the issues. They make a killing so that system admins have someone to blame and buy time while they fix the problems. We pay for Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX support mostly for that same reason.

Don't like RedHat something? Hell volunteer to make changes. I do, have, and will again.

Re:Fork it, then

[MightyYar]

Most people don't "comprehend car models". They do the same thing that the average computer buyer does - walk into a store and buy what the salesman talks them into.

I'd bet good money that my wife knows that she drives a Toyota, but not what model. I'm mostly sure of this because she refers to it as "the red car". I know for a fact she does not remember what her last car was (manufacturer or model).

Re:Fork it, then

[lordmetroid]

Alright, I'll use UZBL from here on. The twats at Mozilla obviously doesn't care for their Linux users anymore so now I am turning my back to them as well.

Re:Fork it, then

[hackula]

Easier said than done. Making software cross platform can be extremely time consuming, and often requires rewrites of entire modules for each OS. Even multi-OS platforms like Java have a reputation for being "write once, debug everywhere". The cost of adding another OS to the mix can be enormous.

Re:Fork it, then

[jones_supa]

Unlike with Internet Explorer, if the Linux community feels strongly about this, they could always do their own fork. So stop bitching and start coding.

It's still a bit too trivial issue to start a fork. Those resources could be used simply directly to improve the original Firefox Linux support.

There's already too much silly stuff like distros not agreeing on desktop environment or packaging format, LibreOffice/OpenOffice, etc. Maybe a fork is sometimes needed, but these are just politics, the focus should be on creating good and useful open source software.

Re:Fork it, then

[Goaway]

The Mozilla devs, however, upon looking at the bastardized, sloppy, memory-leak-filled Firefox pre-2.0 codebase balked. They considered the Firefox devs to be rank amateurs and there was a move to change up the org structure of Firefox.

If those devs were that far divorced from reality, I really have no interest whatsoever in whatever they might have worked on since.

The Mozilla Suite was a bloated piece of complete and utter crap. Phoenix was actually a usable browser, and miles and miles better than the Mozilla Suite ever was.

This is just sour grapes by stubborn developers.

Re:Fork it, then

[Randle_Revar]

It is doing quite well, in fact. I use FF for this and that but Mozilla, er, SeaMonkey alpha builds are my primary browser. Really fantastic for someone that isn't afraid of a more featureful UI (and none of the Chrome-like nonsense) and more options. The latest stable release (2.9) is the same codebase as FF 12 or possibly 11.

Re:Fork it, then

[Jonner]

There is no need to discuss forking since Mozilla is already working on it. It's simply that the Linux support has been given a lower priority than OSX and Windows. If you want it to happen more quickly, contribute to the already existing Mozilla project rather than talk about forking.

Re:Fork it, then

[localman57]

Yes, but who has the power is sometimes surprising. For instance, me and 6.8 billion other people all choose not to buy a PlayBook. Take That RIM! I got the Power!

Re:Fork it, then

[Randle_Revar]

That isn't exactly accurate.

SeaMonkey is a renaming of the Mozilla Suit, not a fork. The Mozilla Foundation/Corporation abandoned the Suite, but with the rename, didn't have a problem with the SeaMonkey Project existing. And of course AOL had zero to do with MoCo or the SeaMonkey Project by then.

Re:Fork it, then

[localman57]

How is it that they can comprehend car models then? Selective stupidity? (More like selective ignorance that we should NOT cater to)

The Car Companies are well aware of this fact. Aside from some models which sell on more technical merits making them suitable to a particular niche (Heavy Duty Pickups, some sports cars, Wranglers), most car companies are moving more and more to a "Pick one of three trim levels, and a color." The days of mixing and matching your own special blend of options, power trains, etc are going away rapidly in the mainstream market.

Re:Fork it, then

[Randle_Revar]

Icecat is GNU's thing, I don't personally know of anyone using it. I do know a number of people (including myself) using SeaMonkey which is merely the new name of the classic Mozilla Suite. I also know of people using Iceweasel, which is a DFSG-free version of Firefox, with some additional patches.

Flock is dead for several years, AFAIK so is Swiftfox (which again was hardly a fork, just some speed patches and config tweaks).

Webkit is an engine, equivalent to Gecko, not Firefox. It is true there are many forks of it, though (all called Webkit!). At least the Gecko browsers pretty much all use the same Gecko (different versions numbers maybe, but not fully forked like webkit)

Re:Fork it, then

[Tough Love]

Come to think of it, this curious move by mozilla.org is about the only way to make a Linux dev actually care about web apps. Like they planned it?

Re:Fork it, then

[rubycodez]

but this is like cars costing $0. and you can have a VW Bug this season, or Porsche the next or an 18 wheeler tomorrow...whatever you want, whenever you want. Heck I've got three browsers installed for different purposes, because I CAN

Re:Fork it, then

[ohnocitizen]

I don't get why "stop bitching and start coding" is good advice. At the very least, bitching leads to interest, which leads to coding from those who can code. But the larger issue is that there aren't always enough motivated developers with applicable skills to fill in the gaps for every organization that decides to drop support for a platform. Even when there is, their efforts can really lag behind that of the primary developers.

Re:Fork it, then

[Tough Love]

Seamonkey isn't a fork of Firefox, it's the other way round. And by the way, I still use Seamonkey regularly because of the wysiwyg html editor which for some lame reason got dropped from Firefox.

Re:Fork it, then

[rubycodez]

Hey, I know my Dodge Caravan is a Plymouth Voyager is a Town and Country is a Lancia.... with slightly different trim and logos, much like many GNU/Linux distros

Re:Fork it, then

[Tough Love]

...I swear I didn't did your post before I posted mine.

And note why I still use it. Thank goodness for open source.

Re:Fork it, then

[rubycodez]

nice argument, for three years ago, now Ubuntu Server is the fastest growing server distribution while SuSE and RedHat market share are flat or sinking

Re:Fork it, then

[Grishnakh]

Or they can just switch to Chromium, which is also open-source and doesn't have all the problems that Firefox has been having lately. Of course, that will cause the Mozilla people to bitch and whine.

Re:Fork it, then

[Tough Love]

the Moz Consortium, encouraged by Google, entrenched support against Firefox and basically shunned the old guard developers

For all the spin, and all the actual good that it does, which is considerable, Google actually does a lot of evil in the open source space. Throwing its weight around to influence an open source project like Firefox in the direction it wants is far from an isolated occurrence. But its fair to say that Google can still be shamed into doing the right thing when caught, in contast to some corporations in Cupertino and Redmond I could mention. The key is to know when our big friendly gorilla friend is misbehaving and publicize it. It does work to some extent.

Re:Fork it, then

[Tough Love]

The Mozilla Suite was a bloated piece of complete and utter crap.

That's the spin, and the spin was that Firefox would be really lightweight and cleaned up. But the fact is, nothing was cleaned up, just some essential components were dropped. The original Firefox fork was really just an exercise in XUL development by an inexperienced developer. Plus loads of spin. I'm not complaining about the final result of course, but let's get our history straight, and please ease back on the vitriol. It's all good.

Re:Fork it, then

[Spicerun]

"Making software cross platform can be extremely time consuming" BULL! Do your software right, and you'd be surprised how easily and effortlessly it will integrate into cross-platforms. Of course, that would require you to consider well your approach as you start to code, which would be 98% more work than most developers want to do.

Re:Fork it, then

[hazah]

Thanks for the replies... I guess I live in a different world. Though I had never thought this redneck town knows more about anything than anyone.

Re:Fork it, then

[s.petry]

MMhmm, I heard that same thing with CentOS last year. Sorry, but you don't build corporate support over night. No cert process, no infrastructure, but yes now you 'can' pay for Ubuntu support. This is where RedHat and SuSE were about 10 years ago.

Now, about 90% of the corporations in the US have two versions of Linux in the supported and approved category. RedHat and SUSE. Those took years to make the lists. Maybe Ubuntu will get there, but it may also go the same way every other flavor of the month distro goes. Way to early to tell.

Re:Fork it, then

[s.petry]

320.00 USD for basic, $700.00 for standard, and 1,200.00 for advance support. So much for "free Linux" right? And more expensive than RedHat, plus pay for items like Landscape. Redhat basic is like 70 bucks.

Re:Fork it, then

[Darinbob]

These are linux users. They are undoubtedly smart enough to recognize "web apps" as pure fluff that they don't need or want.

Re:Fork it, then

[HiThere]

I thought so too...until they started pushing Unity. OTOH, Gnome3 isn't that much better.

There wasn't anything major wrong with Gnome2 or KDE3. Gnome3 and KDE4 are (still?) far inferior. So much so that when neither Gnome2 nor KDE3 are available (and supported) anywhere, I expect to switch to LXDE or some such. I've experimented with them already, and they may not be as good as Gnome2 or KDE3, they are, for my purposes, far superior to any of Gnome3, KDE4, or Unity. If I used a tablet my opinions might be different, but I don't expect that to happen, as for my use case a tablet if far inferior to a desktop, or even a laptop.

As a result, I'm quite happy that there are lots of options. I currently have my wife on Ubuntu stable, but when Unity if forced on us, it's going to be over to Debian, and possibly one of the less publicized window managers. She's quite sensitive to visual elegance, so it's likely to not be the same one that I would prefer. But it's quite *unlikely* to be Gnome3 or Unity. KDE4 has some potential, though, even though it isn't as good as KDE3 was. (Good means "easy to use and get things done in". I'll agree that it's prettier, but for me that doesn't cut much ice. And my wife wants something that will run the electric-sheep screen-saver, something that's for me a minor consideration.)

So options are good. My wife wouldn't like to make the choice, but she delegates that to me. I just need to choose something that she likes.

Re:Fork it, then

[Isaac Remuant]

Do you have examples of your work or experiences so as to learn best practices?

Re:Fork it, then

[s.petry]

KDE4 has been superior to everything else I have used for Linux Desktop. Kiosk features make it friendly for the company, and the windows-like feel makes it simple for showing new people how to use Linux.

I have never liked Gnome myself. It's slow, non-intuitive, and not very flexible. Unity takes flexibility to an all new low point for Desktops. RedHat + KDE or Fedora + KDE at home is how I have worked for the last 10 years. I'm a fan of KDevelop, which plays a role in that also. At the DoD, Linux on the desktop was almost impossible to get approved until KDE3 finally had all the kinks worked out of the Kiosk features. As soon as we showed them it worked, it was approved.

Re:Fork it, then

[Wyzard]

As I recall, Mozilla was willing to grant Debian a license for the Firefox trademark, but they weren't willing to grant it recursively to all Debian users who might want to make (and distribute) their own modified versions of the code they got through Debian. Since Debian doesn't accept licenses that are specific to Debian (DFSG #8), Debian couldn't accept Mozilla's offer of a Firefox trademark license, and thus had to rename it.

The discussions at the time — this is based on my memory from reading the list archives — were all about the fact that Debian applies patches to the code; I don't think the logo issue came about until later.

Re:Fork it, then

[makomk]

Google also markets Chrome quite heavily at Linux users, unlike Mozilla...

Re:Fork it, then

[Isaac Remuant]

The real question is... how and why are we comparing an open source (AFAIK) operative system and a hardware/OS Company?

Re:Fork it, then

[jonadab]

> Seamonkey is what remains of the old Mozilla suite.
> I'm surprised it's under active development.

I suppose that depends on how you define "active development". It's not getting its UI needlessly rearranged every six weeks, for example. In terms of that sort of thing, Seamonkey is mature, stable software. It needs (and gets) periodic Gecko updates, but those changes are being made anyway (for Firefox and other things) and just have to be integrated.

Re:Fork it, then

[jmorris42]

> Android basically makes no money relative to Apple.

Who the hell cares? I don't own Apple stock and shareholders (and apparently fanboys since they seem to devive a lot of personal self worth from Apple quarterly reports) are the only ones who should care about that. The question is which ecosystem is (or will be) bigger. Right now Apple leads in both installed base and the readiness of their sheep are to be sheared at the App Store. But the numbers show that will prpbably not hold much longer. Android devices are starting to ship 4.0 in mass quantity and since it isn't reserved to only devides priced at Apple levels the power of the marketplace is about to make itself felt. Just like the generic PC destroyed both IBM (it's creator) and Apple, the widespread availability of both quality AND cheap Android devices will allow a top to bottom domination of the marketplace and that will eventually drive the apps to chase the installed base.

So again, who cares if Google won't ever make the kind of obscene profits Apple does? They ain't exactly going broke ya know and that is all that is needed to avoid fear of platform abandonment to weigh down adoption.

Re:Fork it, then

[jonadab]

> The Mozilla Suite was a bloated piece of complete and utter crap.

Perhaps, but it had all of the major features that a browser needs to have. Firefox did not become similarly feature-complete until... ever, actually: you still have to install at least half a dozen extensions to get a Firefox up to where the suite's browser was in 2000. This isn't such a big problem now that your extensions are retained across upgrades and automatically updated as necessary, but Firefox didn't get that until well after the fork in question was a done deal.

The larger issue, though, is one of direction: Firefox has always, since it was called Phoenix, been too concerned updating the look and feel and not concerned enough about far more important things like quality control and whether the browser actually works correctly. There have been a handful of relatively decent Firefox releases (mostly: a couple of releases after the aforementioned retain-and-update-your-extensions changes went in, when the bugs therein were starting to get mostly sorted out; SessionSaver went in right around the same time), but on the whole Firefox has a long history of systemic issues in terms of how development decisions are made. Poorly-considered changes are dictated from on high. Important features are discontinued on one developer's whim. Data-loss bugs go unfixed for years while the developers fiddle around pointlessly redesigning the toolbars for the fourth or fifth time. Important security issues like how https is handled are approached in entirely the wrong way, adding more of what has already been clearly demonstrated to be inadequate (namely, getting somebody on an official list of trusted certificate authorities to sign off on every site -- now the CA can sign off on your site in an extended way, which costs sites more and provides exactly zero additional security) and completely ignoring the obvious need to rework the basic model, taking into account what has worked and not worked for other kinds of services (e.g., ssh).

Is it any wonder Firefox usage share plateaued around 20% once Microsoft started actually working on IE again and a couple of vendors released additional real competitors?

Does anyone who doesn't get paychecks from Mozilla think this web-app support is what Firefox needs, even if it were properly cross-platform?

Re:Fork it, then

[YoungSaint]

holy shit, I switched to opera cause it has slightly better memory management. It doesnt leak like an empty sieve, but still leaks. 3gigs of memory after 3 hours? fuck that noise. You just gave me a very good reason to try seamonkey. thanks

Re:Fork it, then

[turbidostato]

"but this is like cars costing $0"

Only if you don't value your time.

Re:Fork it, then

[turbidostato]

"Nonsense.
They all run the same kernel and libraries.
You can "install" an app on Linux just by decompressing a tarball"

Then I challenge you to make a multinode Openstack deployment on anything not being Ubuntu.

Yes, it can be done but, hell, don't tell me all distributions are born equal because they are not (and it's the case that I don't even like Ubuntu).

Re:Fork it, then

[turbidostato]

"Go ahead and try to manage a few thousand Ubuntu boxes"

You mean, like Google?

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/05/12/219226/google-talks-about-its-ubuntu-experience

Re:Fork it, then

[s.petry]

Read TFA that you linked for yourself instead of defending garbage.

He talked about how Ubuntu, its derivatives and Goobuntu (Google's customized Ubuntu based distro) are used by Google developers.

It's so enterprise ready Google custom built their own version. Mmhmm, good show.

Re:Fork it, then

[Volguus Zildrohar]

IOW, "making software cross platform can be extremely time consuming"? In the sense that if you don't design it right from the start, it's going to take a lot of time, and designing it right from the start... also might take a lot of time and/or effort. Holy shit, it's good you were here to clear this up.

Re:Fork it, then

[lennier]

I don't get why "stop bitching and start coding" is good advice.

Indeed. Especially since that sentiment usually translates as "stop giving intelligent feedback about the fundamental needs of the user and jump straight to implementing a poorly-thought-out solution to the wrong problem." It seems like it should be obvious that user requirements feedback is also a form of code.

Users are not subhuman creatures. We have intelligent contributions to make. But low-level C/C++ is entirely the wrong language in which to describe the design goals of a piece of software. If you jump straight to submitting a source code patch, you're not going to communicating the why of what you're trying to do. At the moment, English is the right language to describe the higher-level layers.

Personally, I think the answer lies in rethinking our OS and software architecture, and giving users the ability to modify their own environment (as the creators of Unix and Smalltalk originally intended) in clean and safe ways. Changing the look and feel of a user interface shouldn't involve, as it does now, ripping the guts out of a dozen daemon subsystems. It shouldn't be possible to introduce subtle security or timing bugs just by trying to change an icon, or rewire a button. But neither should a UI designer just plow ahead with their grand vision in the face of a thousand frustrated users saying "Hey, this doesn't work".

Re:Fork it, then

[turbidostato]

"It's so enterprise ready Google custom built their own version. Mmhmm, good show."

Yeah, exactly like every other big company which have their own Windows image to deploy onto their PCs. Your point is?

Re:Fork it, then

[unixisc]

It is very much free, or just the cost of the distro if one doesn't need the support. If one wants the support, it costs what it costs. Does Windows 7 LTS cost any less?

Re:Fork it, then

[Goaway]

Perhaps, but it had all of the major features that a browser needs to have. Firefox did not become similarly feature-complete until... ever, actually:

Utter nonsense. As evidenced by the incredible success Firefox had over the suite.

Re:Fork it, then

[Goaway]

No, Phoenix was an exercise in actually producing something people wanted to use, and it was massively successful at that, while the suite was a complete and utter failure at it.

Re:Fork it, then

[NatasRevol]

Bigger by what measure?

Money is really the only measuring stick because it's the only incentive to keep using an ecosystem - for hardware developers, software developers, carriers, third parties, etc.

Everyone involved should care about which ecosystem is sustainable. And money is the only way to make sure an ecosystem is sustainable.

As for platform issues, you might want to look into how much of Android's profits the purchase of Motorola cost Google. Something like 30 years worth. All the while, pissing off other hardware makers. Not sure how that doesn't bring up the issue of platform abandonment.

Re:Fork it, then

[NatasRevol]

From the article:

"Comparing revenue “run rates”, on a yearly basis Android is 2.5% of iPhone or 1.6% of iOS."

OS to OS comparison.

Re:Fork it, then

[HiThere]

I can accept that you already find KDE4 quite good. I don't. Kiosk, e.g., means nothing to me. (At one point it would have, but that isn't now.)

But this is what I mean about choice being good. I'd *prefer* to choose KDE3. Maybe I eventually will have that option. In the meantime there are usable options...but those usable options don't include Gnome3 or Unity, and KDE4 is inferior (in my use case) to other existing choices. That these other choices are, themselves, inferior to Gnome2 and KDE3 doesn't matter, as those choices are no longer viable. (Unless Pearson finally gets Trinity into Debian.)

N.B.: If I had access to plenty of spare systems to test on, and plenty of bandwidth to download on, Trinity might already be usable. But installing it on my current system would require removing things that might break things horribly. So I've been avoiding that, just as I avoid upgrading Vala for the same reason.

Re:Fork it, then

[SurfsUp]

No, Phoenix was an exercise in actually producing something people wanted to use, and it was massively successful at that, while the suite was a complete and utter failure at it.

You're rewriting history. The Mozilla suite was already on an upward trajectory before Ben Goodger "rebranded" it and Google got on board. After all, Firefox/Phoenix was just Mozilla rescripted with some useful components discarded. At the very least you are guilty of gross exaggeration, but to tell the truth, it sounds more like you have an axe to grind.

Re:Fork it, then

[Goaway]

No, that is rewriting history. Mozilla was pretty much a failure by the time the Phoenix project started.

Re:Fork it, then

[marcello_dl]

I thought experienced people went for the distro that has your fave GUI and packaging system. If you like gnome2, kde3, fluxbox, even gnustep, you can have it.

It's not like the mere skinning of the official OS to resemble the oldest iterations like you have on windows.

Re:Fork it, then

[Tacvek]

Correct. Both issues did come up, but it is likely that some form of compromise could have been found. The real problem though was that the firefox logo was under a non-free copyright license, in addition to the trademark license. Debian does not allow any software under a non-free license (except for license texts themselves) in main, and they take that very seriously.

Debian wanted to use the empty globe logo, but Mozilla declined to permit that.

Debian would have been willing to use a redrawn version of the logo that had a free copyright license, but Mozilla declined to permit that.

Thus the "fork" was required if Debian wanted to ship a Firefox compatible browser in main.

Re:Fork it, then

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I don't understand why anyone would care. Gecko is leaky and kinda buggy folks and it isn't like there aren't other nice browsers that are cross platform.

Here is one you may not of heard of but is quite nice and frankly i don't understand why more aren't using it...QTweb. Its sleek, elegant, FOSS, cross platform, has Adblock and plugin support, its even portable and runs great from a flash.

Frankly seeing some of the "Metro-ifed' mockups for the future roadmap doesn't give me much confidence in the future of Moz anyway. their numbers have been falling pretty consistently and its pretty obvious they aren't gonna listen to the users, so why care? let 'em go.

Re:Fork it, then

[hairyfeet]

Mind a suggestion? Give Vector Linux a spin. They have a supported KDE 3 (called KDE Classic) and they have several versions tailored for different uses, such as light, standard, and SOHO editions. They of course also have Live CDs so give it a spin, its nice.

Re:Fork it, then

[hackula]

Oh great advice. Next time I am building some software I will be sure to follow your advice. Let me get this straight:

1) Do my software right
2) Be surprised how easy it is
3) Consider well (sic) my approach as I start to code
4) I work 60 hour weeks so 98% more means I only need to go to a 118 hour work week
5) ...derpa derpa derpa...
6) Cross-platform Profit!!!!!

You should really patent that process.

PS: This has to be the most demoralizing 5:insightful I have ever seen. Obviously you and your 5 stooges have absolutely no experience actually doing anything like this.

Re:Fork it, then

[hackula]

Thank you. People do not seem to realize that design takes time and money and more or less IS the entirety of software development. People who do not design their software are not software engineers, they are typists.

Re:Fork it, then

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. This is why the Soviet Union has been such a success, and the western powers with their (semi) free-market economies have all fallen. People simply don't like choices; it causes nothing but confusion and people are unable to get anything done. People in the west had so much trouble just shopping, because there were so many different choices, and it was pointless to have so many. Whereas in the Soviet Union, things were simple and efficient: if you needed shoes, you'd go to the shoe store, and there might be two choices. If you were hungry for some fruit, you'd go to the grocery store, and there would be one kind of fruit there, maybe two. With so much simplicity, Soviet industry rocketed far ahead of their western competitors, making theirs the economic world most other countries in the world have adopted.

Re:Fork it, then

[HiThere]

Thanks. I'll give it a look.

OK. I gave it a look. All the purchase options make specific mention of KDE4, and *NO* mention of KDE3. I didn't see anything that indicated support of KDE3. So my expectation is that it will soon go away in an update, if it isn't already gone.

Re:Fork it, then

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh..friend? The purchase version is for SMBs and is based on KDE 4. What you want is under "VectorLinux 6.0 Standard Family" and is clearly labeled "KDE Classic Edition".

So i'm sorry buddy you just missed it. BTW the purchase version is really not for home users but businesses that need support or for those that want to donate and get a CD in return. The KDE Classic edition has been going for over 2 years now so I don't think you have any worries there and again they have your choice of an installer only version or live edition, take your pick. it really is quite nice if you want something stable and don't care about bleeding edge packages.

Oh and if you want something even lighter go down to the bottom of the page and they have a light edition with IceWM or JWm as the desktop. Not really my cup o' tea but that version will run great even on ancient hardware.

Re:Fork it, then

[Spicerun]

I have 40 years experience porting code and Drivers to various OSes and processors...OSes like Freescale MQX, TI DSP Bios, WxWidgets APIs, and/or Linux. Most of my C code is written with the 'write once' philosophy.

I know I shouldn't reply to an obvious troll like this, but this attitude of yours bothers me. I've seen that 'can't be done' attitude fthat you are demonstrating in your post.....quite frankly it sucks.

Saying "easily and effortlessly it will integrate into cross-platforms" does not imply that the software is easy to write to begin with. I was implying that the 98% more effort to consider your approach was actually more work up-front when writing your code.....like maybe making your code 'Modular' to begin with, and also follow the standards that all compilers follow (C programming following ANSI standards for example) rather than picking those shortcuts that, for example, only MS compilers let you use, or the Qt macros that require the MOC compiler (ie - compiler shortcuts that no other compiler for other platforms understand).

I'm sorry you are working 60 hour weeks....I used to do that too, until I learned how to work more efficiently (Write source once again) which lets me work normal business hours. Maybe you should consider the 'Work smarter, not harder philosophy', instead of this 'It can't be done because I can't imagine it philosophy' you seem to have.

And, with your post, you have proven it is you without any experience. Maybe you should back off and learn something?

Re:Fork it, then

[SurfsUp]

Unfortunately for your aggressively stated theory, the net has a memory. see here. In November 2004, Seamonkey was already clearly taking market share from IE. And 16% of the market at that time can in no way be construed as "pretty much a failure".

Re:Fork it, then

[Goaway]

I'm not sure why you are trying to cite a 16% figure as some kind of generally applicable fact from a site that now lists IE at 18.3%.

Those statistics are in no way representative of general usage.

Re:Fork it, then

[HiThere]

Perhaps I don't understand how Vector Linux works, but when the site is advertising version 7.0 for download, I end up with a strong suspicion that version 6.0 is deprecated, and that support (security fixes) will soon be ending. (This is increased by the announcement that the current verison of Vector Linux 6.0 is the final realease of the series.)

If I wanted an ultralight window manager, Debian would provide lots of options. That's not what I'm after. I'm after a maximally usable one, for a desktop system. With one screen. And no fancy graphics cards.

P.S.: I *have* considered running an old version of Debian in a virtual machine. In fact I do that kind of thing to keep old games working. But that kind of indirection isn't acceptable for major uses, even though it's the only way to keep non-supported systems relatively safe. And if that's what I wanted to do, I could run an old version of Debian.

If Vector Linux were actively supporting KDE3, then I would be extremely interested. But that's not what it sounds like is happening. Moving to a version that's being obsoleted isn't all that attractive a proposition, even if it does run the desktop I want. (I spent several years distro hopping, but it really interferes with getting much else done. Now when I switch distros, I want the new one to be one I can plan to stay with.)

Re:Fork it, then

[Sosarian Avatar]

You might want to check out the Trinity Desktop environment, then -- it's KDE 3 under continued development by another team. I've been using it part-time alongside KDE 4 (which has some better points & some inferior ones) in SimplyMepis for quite a while with no less luck than I did when I last used KDE 3 in 2008.

Re:Fork it, then

[hackula]

Honestly I can see where you are coming from, and would concede that low level stuff could be more portable. Most of us do not live in that low level of an environment, however, and often code can be next to impossible to export to another OS without rebuilding all of the dependencies you have on particular OS. The software I write is in the Geospatial Analytics field. There are many frameworks I use that allow me to write the software without having to reinvent the wheel and hire 10 more programmers. Most of these have no OSX or Linux equivalent. I do not see how I could easily write this sort of software in a way that would be portable. I write modular software so that I can switch out components with upgrades or new vendors, but in my field, there are not components to plug in on non Windows platforms. I suppose I could write each of those modules myself, but I do not have time for that; I am busy writing my own framework.

Turnabout is fair play

[DickBreath]

Web and Javascript developers can leave out Mozilla for initial web application support. Chrome is looking pretty good these days.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[L4t3r4lu5]

JS execution in Chrom(e/ium) is unrivalled. I have it on my Mint install at work just for accessing our JS-heavy KB/ticketing system.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[crazyjj]

I still have a hard time stomaching Chrome. Even looking past the fact that they don't have NoScripts, I'm very reluctant to turn yet another part of my life over to a huge corporation with a checked past when it comes to privacy issues. Mozilla may be largely in Google's pocket too, but at least they maintain some semblance of independence. I trust them a lot more than Google itself.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[c0d3g33k]

Try ScriptNo for Chrome/Chromium. Not quite as comprehensive as NoScript, but has a better user interface, IMHO.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[cpu6502]

Runs like shit on my 1/2 gigabyte PC. Starts out okay but after about half-an-hour, Chromium spawns 5+ processes that hog memory. It's insane.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Jords]

Yeah - Funnily enough, even though the initially chrome wasn't available for Linux, since it's release it's been supported much better. For a long time Firefox didn't even have JIT on Linux 64bit.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[zidium]

A sad solution to a truly depressing state of affairs!

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[zidium]

You should try Comodo Dragon or Srware Iron. Both have 0 privacy problems and are direct forks of Chromium.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

Even looking past the fact that they don't have NoScripts

Why does this lie get repeated every time Chrome/Chromium is mentioned? There has been built-in script blocking for years. Javascript can be disabled and white-listed on a per-site basis. Plug-ins can be disabled and whitelisted or click-to-play. Cookies can be disabled and whitelisted. Hell, you can even disable image rendering if you want. It's all in Settings-->Content Settings.

Now stop spreading this crap.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time on internet when Google didn't exists. 50% of all adds where about penis enlargers, at least now I get adds which are somewhat relevant to me. But I guess you just have a small dick.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Maybe he meant adblock? Not much percentage in an advertising company allowing adverts to be blocked.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Killjoy_NL]

Isn't it a shame however that because more and more people get more and more powerful machines, that the developers code more sloppily because "the machines can take it"?

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[KingMotley]

Firefox runs like crap on my 16KB calculator. Can't even get internet access!

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[tobiasly]

I still have a hard time stomaching Chrome. Even looking past the fact that they don't have NoScripts, I'm very reluctant to turn yet another part of my life over to a huge corporation with a checked past when it comes to privacy issues. Mozilla may be largely in Google's pocket too, but at least they maintain some semblance of independence. I trust them a lot more than Google itself.

I hear ya... I resisted the switch from Firefox to Chrome for a long time. I love Mozilla. They singlehandedly saved the friggin' web and are one of the few organizations who consistently at least tries to hold true to their ideals of a free, open, user-focused web. But at some point I just could no longer live with the dog that Firefox had become.

Who would've thought that the company who let their browser stagnate & become bloated in the absence of real competition would be Mozilla. It looks like they're on the right path to steer Firefox back into its leadership position and I hope they succeed & I can switch back. But until then Chrome is faster, lighter, more versatile, runs everywhere I want it to & has all the features I need.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Shompol]

Wtf is "ads which are relevant to me" and how is this a good thing? These are the worst kind! When I want to buy something, I go for the best product for my needs, no the one -someone- wants me to buy. There is plenty of data on the web to find such a product myself, without being led astray by ads.Not to mention all the information pollution they create.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Push Latency]

Use SeaMonkey! I've made the switch recently, after being a die-hard Firefox user since the beginning. I couldn't be happier. The interface is old-school, and it functions well enough for the simple work for which I use a browser. Just try the darned thing - you'll be very happy you did. If you're the kind of person (like me) that was seething with every release of new "features" in Firefox (awesomebar, et al.), give SeaMonkey a try.

It makes me very sad to say it, but I've moved on from Firefox, (and I don't like to touch Chrome or IE), but then again - the world seems to have moved-on from the ideal of clean code and efficient applications, as much as it has moved on from that old idea of language evolving logically from etymologically sound roots.

There's no stopping the tide, but there are indeed viable options. I highly recommend reading Paul Venezia's post about quarantining services to specific browsers. It's not hard to do. Use Chrome for watching crud on Youtube or using any Google services, (and nothing else!), and block it on your usual browser with NoScript, etc. Use a different one for Facebook (if you use that gawdawful service), and block the scripts on your usual browser. It's a simple solution, but it probably helps mitigate tracking a tiny bit.

Can anyone provide any good reasons to not use SeaMonkey?

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it a shame however that because more and more people get more and more powerful machines, that the developers code more sloppily because "the machines can take it"?

If you want to run software from 20 years ago, go ahead. What you call "sloppy" I call "defense in depth". For example, chrome spawns a process for the renderer in each tab, so that a buffer overflow in webkit doesn't allow malware to do anything to your file system. It uses more RAM. This is a good tradeoff, because RAM is dirt cheep and cleaning up malware is expensive. Don't like it? Buy a VAX.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[cpu6502]

>>>This is slashdot, how do you have only 512MB?!?!?!

This is slashdot, you're a well paid developer. How do you have less than 100K in the bank?
Touche'

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he meant adblock? Not much percentage in an advertising company allowing adverts to be blocked.

Here is a list of ad blockers for chrome, hosted by google in their extensions gallery:
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/adblock?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon&_ac=0

Blaming google for things it isn't doing is childish.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[worf_mo]

Chromium is the project from which Google draws the source code for Chrome. You can get Chromium builds for various platforms, and they do not contain any Google tracking code (which is added to Chrome by Google).

AdBlock and NotScripts are both available, and I find them to work well.

I've been using Firefox for years, when it was still called Phoenix (actually, when it was called Netscape Navigator), but about two years ago I got finally fed up for a variety of reasons.

I installed Chromium and haven't looked back. It's lightweight and fast, the interface looks slick and stays out of the way, and the daily builds run stable on Macs and under Linux.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

I get REALLY good ads from Google. "VPS hosting", "DNS names", "Sales on Xeon blades", etc. All from reputable companies. Maybe if you actually let Google collect info about you, it could give you decent ads.

Like the other person said, I would rather get Google targeted ads, than ads about penis enlargements. Yes, I could block ads, but then I wouldn't be supporting the web sites that I browse and I only find it a minor inconvenience to even get ads. I like knowing that I am supporting the sites.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he doesn't need more than 512 or doesn't want it for some reason. Perspective matters a lot. Hell, It reminds me of this this epeen measuring conversation I heard on the bus on campus. "I can't wait to get my new computer." "How much memory did you get?" "Umm... I think 256MB." "256MB!? WTF dude. I mean seriously, what kind is it? A Pentium 3 you dug out of the garbage?" "ARM." "Wha?" "It's a Raspberry Pi." "So cool. I want one of those!"

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Goaway]

Do not use Iron. It is a nonsense fork created solely to earn ad money for its developer, while he spreads FUD about Chrome.

If you don't like Chrome, use Chromium. It has all the privacy features of Iron, but it is not developed by a lying asshole.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Randle_Revar]

I love SeaMonkey, it is my main browser, but this:
> If you're the kind of person (like me) that was seething with every release of new "features" in Firefox (awesomebar, et al.), give SeaMonkey a try.
is just silly.

SM is thankfully immune to FF UI silliness (tabs on top, disappearing status bar, etc), but it (thankfully) has feature parity with FF, including the Awesomebar. It also seems more stable and better about memory than FF, but I am on Linux and even FF itself is better there (despite FF devs not caring much about the platform).

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Jonner]

I currently use Firefox most of the time, but I don't think there's anything wrong with people using Chromium. Competition is good. Mozilla took on Microsoft while they were complacent and helped improve things for everyone. I don't think Mozilla was ever as complacent as Microsoft, but the increased competition from both Google and Microsoft is now pushing them to try new things. It may not always look pretty, but I think the end result can only be higher quality Free Software for everyone.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[shutdown -p now]

Does it actually use more RAM, though? How many pages between all those Chrome processes are shared? I bet the OP who complained about memory use just summed the numbers he saw in top.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[serviscope_minor]

But until then Chrome is faster, lighter, more versatile, runs everywhere I want it to & has all the features I need.

I'd heard that a lot, and I was finally forced to switch from firefox to chromium since an update of firefox made it segfault (now fixed).

I really preferred chromium at first. I managed to insall a bunch of addons like script blocking. It felt fsater and snappier, with new tabs popping up more or less instantly. Kind of. Certain operations seemed faster, but once the tabs popped up they would take longer to load. Or tabs would often freeze out for a long time while they rendered. Other tabs were scrollable (unlike firefox).

But also, every so often, chromium would spike the load up to 20, making the entire computer slow to a crawl.

Basically, it felt faster in some areas, like general UI response, and slower in others like actually making pages readable. Overall, the experience was negative and I switched back to firefox as the actual browsing experience (not the feel) was faster.

Also, the add ons for firefox are better which is an added bonus.

That's on a single core netbook, which is probably not representative, but firefox overall gives a better experience.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Shifty0x88]

Thank you parent, and who said I was getting paid for development?

RAM is $40 for 8GB, having 512MB is just inexcusable. Shut up and fork over the money, it's worth it. Unless you have DDR in which case, get a new computer

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Isaac Remuant]

For the same reason the memory lie gets touted by people who dislike firefox: Rationalizations to excuse subjective choices.

Re:Turnabout is fair play

[Confusador]

Hear, hear! I disagree about the "has all the features I need" bit (I'm haven't found replacements for all my extensions yet), so I do split my browsing between Chromium and Firefox, but I am sad that it's even gotten to that point. Lets hope that Mozilla's leadership can turn it around, but in the meantime I'm thankful that they made it possible for me to have a choice.

Useless anyway

[Hatta]

What's a "web app marketplace" and why would I need one anyway? There's plenty of useful software available to me in the repositories. There are plenty of websites I can browse with a regular browser. There are plenty of extensions I can use to customize my browsing experience.

Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

Re:Useless anyway

[firex726]

Ease of use for the lay-users.

People have gotten used to using "Apps" all over the place, and expect them to be all neatly collected in one area for them to browse.

Re:Useless anyway

[Lumpy]

"Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?"

A way for Mozilla foundation to have direct access to your wallet.

Re:Useless anyway

[metalgamer84]

Welcome to to the tablet/smartphone age, where everything is an app. Apps on your tablet, apps on your phone, apps on your desktop, apps on your laptop. "Software" is no more, "apps" are the future...or something like that. I despise this market shift of the last four or five years of everything needs to be mobilized as an app so no matter if you are on a tablet, smartphone or laptop/desktop everything is an app.

Apps have a place, I guess, on phones and tablets. Keep that crap off of my machines that I actually use for productivity(laptop/desktop).

Re:Useless anyway

[lfacchinelli]

A few weeks ago, a bunch of Firefox developer came here to talk about this new "marketplace" And one of the crowd asked exactly the same question. They said a bunch of rubbish things. It will suck ..

Re:Useless anyway

[vlm]

Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

Monetize that, so you get to pay for noscript, adblock plus, etc. I'm thinking this is not going to turn out well.

For years I've been waiting for chrome to have addons as good as FF. Maybe being forced to pay will be the big push.

Re:Useless anyway

[SCHecklerX]

That's what repositories are for. Re-inventing the wheel to do that within every app is, well, retarded. Adobe on windows, anyone?

Grandparent is correct. This is rather useless on a platform such as linux that does software management the right way.

Re:Useless anyway

[game kid]

But...but...they're non-profit! User-driven! Innovative! Exclamation marks! I mean...that's what they told me just now...so they can't really be influenced by any tech giants with mobile phone and tablet interests or anything.

Re:Useless anyway

[GameboyRMH]

Ding ding ding! Winner!

Re:Useless anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

What it does is funnel web hits through the market place instead of directly to your own web site. Instead of people coming to your web site, then clicking on a link to get to your app (thereby also seeing other apps you may have on offer) - they go to the app store, and "install" the app on their machine...thereby bypassing your site.

That means that the application marketplace owner scores advertising revenue - and you lose it.

These things are evil. The web doesn't need them - search engines can search for and find web sites where apps are on offer. No more middle-men are required.

Web apps in themselves are portable - why the heck the engine that offers you the chance to "install" them isn't is beyond me.

Re:Useless anyway

[hendridm]

Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

Agreed. I need a fucking web browser. Does it still do that? Great.

How about focusing on making it run faster?

Re:Useless anyway

[Rogerborg]

How else are you going to leverage your cloudsourced synergies and focus your thinkspaces across the board going forward?

Re:Useless anyway

[firex726]

Your point being? OP makes no referance for it being on Linux, just that it's "useless".

This is being rolled out on Macs and Windows.

An 87 year old grandmother is not going to know what all these new-fangled "repositories" are. Nor will she Google around and search a dozen sites for a plugin she is wanting.
She does know that her phone has an App store where she can get games and apps, and now here on her computer's browser is something also named App Marketplace, so that must be where she is supposed to go to get Apps here.

What Apple, Microsoft, Google, and now Mozilla are doing is called Marketing.

Re:Useless anyway

[Vintermann]

It's not for you, it's for the developers. Who can make cross-platform apps with less pain. Which means you will find some excellent software there. Take a look at Chrome's marketplace to get an idea.

Re:Useless anyway

[SteveFoerster]

"Non-profit" is not a synonym for "never needs revenue".

Re:Useless anyway

[Shifty0x88]

yes they are making repos but for lusers, but it just makes it that much easier to get software you want.

Also I don't like just downloading random plug-ins and exes from websites, because most of the time I don't trust them.

Re:Useless anyway

[Knuckles]

She does know that her phone has an App store where she can get games and apps, and now here on her computer's browser is something also named App Marketplace, so that must be where she is supposed to go to get Apps here.

The OP quite clearly talked about linux distros even if he does not mention it. And all linux distros that target lay users have such a thing already, like the Ubuntu Software Center (and yes, it does also appear in the Dash menu when you search for "apps)

Re:Useless anyway

[asa]

The thing that sets the Mozilla Web Apps ecosystem apart from others is that you can run your own marketplace. There can be dozens of competing marketplaces, each with different incentives, economics, target audiences, etc. Mozilla is building a Marketplace but the specs and the formats for receipts and the like are all open source and freely re-implementable.

Set up your own Markeplace and prove the centralized stores wrong.

Re:Useless anyway

[firex726]

Then OP is an idiot for bitching about something that not even slated to be available on Linux.

And when that grandmother wants into Best Buy to buy a new computer, whats the sales person going to sell her on? Sure as hell wont be a Linux computer.

Re:Useless anyway

[Knuckles]

Bitching? The freakin' story is about how the app store is not available for Linux. The OP just said that it's not required for Linux anyway.

Re:Useless anyway

[Knuckles]

The OP is a fucking retard then. This is targeted towards Windows and Mac OS X. No one gives a shit about Linux.

Read the OP again.

Re:Useless anyway

[Robert Zenz]

Monetize that, so you get to pay for noscript, adblock plus, etc. I'm thinking this is not going to turn out well.

That's a little dramatic, isn't it? I mean, to really realize that, they'd have to lock down Firefox so that inly accepts AddOns from their store...and, yeah, we all disagree with them lately, but that's just too stupid.

Re:Useless anyway

[Knuckles]

I did you condescending fuck. Try writing. OP is bitching that something his platform isn't getting is useless. Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You can save face and act like he was saying Windows and Mac should have repositories, but that would just be wild speculation rather than what the OP wrote.

Jeez, did someone piss into your shoes? The story is about how linux does not get the app store. The OP says that it's not needed anyway. Big deal.

Re:Useless anyway

[jedidiah]

More importantly: Why would a "web app" marketplace be platform specific anyways?

Isn't the whole point of the web and the browser the fact that it is it's own platform detached from the underlying operating system?

Re:Useless anyway

[Chemisor]

App is merely the new name for software. It isn't even all that new; weren't we talking about "killer apps" twenty years ago? I, for one, welcome our new, shorter named, software.

Re:Useless anyway

[idontgno]

Indeed. The article is essentially whining that Linux FF won't get the sparkly My Little Pony training wheels that the Windows and Mac variants will get.

Yeah. Color me confused. I suppose that there are still the Open Source populist advocates that argue that we need to have those training wheels available so that we can get some sweet sweet market share from those other platforms. I say, those platforms can keep their training wheels. I prefer to use my platform among other people who actually know how to use it without training wheels (i.e., real functional package management, etc.)

Re:Useless anyway

[marcosdumay]

They've already destroyed their reputation for with the people that care about the desktop Linux when they made tha trademark bitching. That's a no change.

Re:Useless anyway

[marcosdumay]

Maybe it's time to port Iceweasel to Windows.

Re:Useless anyway

[idontgno]

Their rolling upgrades policy and initial hostile stance on browser version stability don't give me much confidence in anything being "too stupid" for them. Mozilla "leadership" seems to fall in love with their own brainstorms and implement them, come hell or high water, user concerns be damned. So all it takes is one influential dev or architect catching a fever or dropping some particularly good hallucinogens or developing just the right brain tumor and the "no plugins except through our store" policy will be the wave of the day. And the user community will have to grin and eat it.

Or fork. I guess secession is a viable response.

Re:Useless anyway

[Knuckles]

Ubuntu Software Center does the job just fine

Re:Useless anyway

[vlm]

No, once a store is available, all you need is to have the devs behind adblock plus only distribute thru the store. I have exactly 13 addons. All I need is a couple to decide to switch from free mode to store mode and that makes FF much less useful to me.

The danger is making it necessary to switch addons makes it not look all that much harder to switch to Chrome.

For example, say somebody tries to monetize noscript or firebug... I'm sure there is a "almost as good" replacement that'll remain free on FF... but if I'm going to do the effort to substitute, I'll find a "almost as good" replacement on Chrome.

Re:Useless anyway

[squiggleslash]

Those H.264 patent licenses aren't going to buy themselves.

A voluntary tax on Windows and Mac users seems, actually, to be a decent way to fund that actually.

Re:Useless anyway

[Tom]

Actually, it's not too new a concept on OS X. The Apps you download from the Mac App Store are identical to the software you could download for OS X ever since it got started. That's because OS X has always bundled up applications into one folder, instead of scattering their files all over the place like windows does. That's why uninstalling an application in OS X consists of dragging it into the trashcan.

Basically, when the Mac App Store opened, it was another place to find Mac software, nothing more and nothing less.

Windows and Linux, on the other hand, now face this "new" concept due to the popularity of iPhone and iPad.

Re:Useless anyway

[lister king of smeg]

I would laugh at that if it did not sound like a lecture in the HR class I am forced to sit through for my degree

Re:Useless anyway

[lister king of smeg]

Yes but they wanted to piss on the Linux users. If they wrote it for linux first they could simply compile it on Mac and it should work both being *nix.

Re:Useless anyway

[hazah]

The OP:

What's a "web app marketplace" and why would I need one anyway? There's plenty of useful software available to me in the repositories. There are plenty of websites I can browse with a regular browser. There are plenty of extensions I can use to customize my browsing experience. Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

AC:

OP is suggesting repositories replace this which is completely ridiculous.

My conclusion: AC has reading comprehension problems.

Just in case you missed it AGAIN: Linux ALREADY has repositories. There is NOTHING to replace. The question is the OP is asking is "What do I need another repository for?"

Just to make it as clear as possible... because this seems to be a problem for some reason... he is asking what he would need ANOTHER repository for. Are we there yet?

Re:Useless anyway

[hazah]

History repeats itself. Nothing is learned.

Re:Useless anyway

[TheDarkMaster]

Fashion. Someone just decided that now everyone must have an "app marketplace" to be "cool", as absurd as that may be on most platforms. And the shareholders liked the idea because they think they just need to create one too to earn "billions" as Apple. I think is the same hype as "The Cloud".

Re:Useless anyway

[Quantum gravity]

Of cause they are working on making Firefox faster. There is even a site set up for tracking progress in Javascript performance improvements.

http://www.arewefastyet.com/?a=b&view=regress

Re:Useless anyway

[chrissigler]

Ease of use for the lay-users.

Yeah. And I bet those lay-users are pissed that they're not supporting Linux yet.

Those fiendish Mozilla folks, playing their vendetta against everyday grandmas who just want to run Farmville on their latest Slackware build. Next thing you know, they'll start only supporting Unity or some crap. What's a granny to do?

Re:Useless anyway

[Lisias]

Grandparent is correct. This is rather useless on a platform such as linux that does software management the right way.

But not the "profitable" way.

They're trying to monetize.

Re:Useless anyway

[s.petry]

Your argument is mute because Windows nor Mac nor Linux do everything consumers want it to do. Every OS requires that you go download something. Shit until Windows 7 you had to download software on Windows just to burn a DVD. That's not even including all the browser plug-ins you need on pretty much all platforms.

Re:Useless anyway

[Randle_Revar]

>Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

If it isn't a "web app marketplace", it can't dynamically leverage the synergies of Web 3.0 nosql clouds!

Re:Useless anyway

[aztracker1]

I actually find the dev tools in chrome to be better than firebug... just imho. Though Firebug was a gigantic leap from Venkman.

Re:Useless anyway

[mcgrew]

I was wondering the same thing as hatta, your explanation makes sense. It also explains why Linux isn't supported -- most lay users don't even know Linux exists, and few Linux users would use this. I mean, we already have repositories, this "app market" is redundant.

Re:Useless anyway

[Shifty0x88]

Hmmm maybe I should have said:

Also I don't like just downloading random plug-ins and exes from RANDOM websites, because most of the time I don't trust them.

instead of:

Also I don't like just downloading random plug-ins and exes from websites, because most of the time I don't trust them.

I trust adobe(kindof), microsoft.com, etc, but not joe-schmo.com, see the difference?

Chrome has done a lot to remove the need for plug-ins. Not completely as Adobe won't let anyone except Adobe make a flash player, but you get the idea

Re:Useless anyway

[Isaac Remuant]

Every computer is a linux computer. You just have to set it up.

Re:Useless anyway

[YoungSaint]

Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

Agreed. I need a fucking web browser. Does it still do that? Great.

How about focusing on making it run faster?

How about focusing on the monstrosity that is Firefox's memory usage?? I've yet to have my browser as the network bottleneck, but i have had firefox take down my system due to never releasing memory ever.

Re:Useless anyway

[Raenex]

They've got so much revenue that they created a for-profit company to handle it all.

Re:Useless anyway

[Confusador]

The apps in the marketplace should be OS independent, you have that correct, but they accomplish that by having the browser do all the interfacing to the OS. That means that the marketplace itself does need to be tailored to it.

Re:Useless anyway

[Confusador]

I'm sure Amazon will.
(Or rather, I'm sure they will integrate this capability into their existing market.)

Re:Useless anyway

[Zoxed]

> Seriously, what does a "web app marketplace" have to offer that isn't already done better through one of the above resources?

My thought exactly: when I read "web app marketplace" not available on Linux I think "feature", not "bug" !

Re:Useless anyway

[hazah]

What point? The one you haven't made? The nonsensical rant that had nothing to do with the question to begin with?

And yeah.. it's more than just a repo, it's a SUPER repo. Suddenly a different front-end changes the underlying concept?

You're the one stroking your cock here, going on personal rant and attacks, failing to respond to what is said, and adding nothing of actual value.

Re:Useless anyway

[hazah]

I'm not attacking you. I haven't even insulted you. I put up two quotes. One was supposed to be a reply to the first. I pointed out that it was simply not that. I am unsure why it is you think that I'm supposed to read your mind if your intended message was completely absent. If your concrete message is that it's more than a repository, then I find it curious that it came out only after your post had been desputed (several times, actually as I'm finding this out in your replys to me).

Also curious is how every single reply to you is along the same lines, and yet everyone else but you is wrong. Further more, you're consistenly insulting those that reply to you. The only one foaming at the mouth is you, and you're projecting it. I detect a hint of narcissism or extreeme immaturity due to young age. For your sake I hope it's the latter.

Be at peace, brother.

Re:Useless anyway

[gparent]

I'm at peace, sorry for using you as entertainment. I write a sentence and you write 10 more hilarious ones. Welcome to the internet.

Re:Useless anyway

[gparent]

Actually looking back at this, I posted in a different thread and it wasn't nearly as aggressive. Your AC sucks.

Re:Useless anyway

[hazah]

Fair enough.

Re:Useless anyway

[Rakarra]

And, a way to ensure that you only ever have access the latest approved version of the app, and a way to deny you use of the app at any time for any reason.

This is about switching to the "software as a continuing service" model rather than give you programs that you could run as they are in 10 years.

Linux Abandoned

[smittyoneeach]

Linux abandoned
For more lucrative bet
As classic straight razor
For lame new Gilette
Burma Shave

Re:Linux Abandoned

[Confusador]

Oh for mod points. You do make me wonder if there's a correlation between men who use Linux and those who use straight razors. I certainly do both...

Chrome / Chromium

[Psyborgue]

Runs pretty nicely in Linux. It's a good deal faster than FF anyway.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[AltF4ToWin]

And the marketplace works. Not that I or anyone in the known universe uses it. But at least it works.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[meow27]

[citation needed]

i've frequently found FF and chromium to be fairly competitive when executing the sunspider bench. sometimes FF is faster, sometimes chromium

with pgo, chromium has never been FF though,

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[zidium]

First, all of my anecdotal experiences differ, strongly, from your's. Chrome always seems to beat Firefox by several multiples, if not an order of magnitude.

Second, benchmarks smenchmarks... I'm much more interested in how snappy the user experience in Chrome is compared to Firefox (which feels like molasses) and how I can close every single tab and reclaim nearly 90% of the used memory.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[donaldm]

Runs pretty nicely in Linux. It's a good deal faster than FF anyway.

Personally I don't really notice any difference in performance by eye between Chrome and Firefox under Fedora 16. Both browsers do what I want. Personally I like Chrome for is minimal interface but I also also like the Firefox interface as well. It really depends on what I am doing and on some occasions I actually use browsers in tandem.

Running the benchmark on both the latest versions of Firefox (12) and Chrome I get 1064, html 5 4/7 for Firefox and 3169, html 5 6/7 for Chrome which I am sure most people would say that Chrome is the outstanding winner for that suite of benchmarks. So well done Chrome, however this still won't stop me using both Chrome and Firefox.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[mcgrew]

Runs pretty nicely in Linux. It's a good deal faster than FF anyway.

How is it with Flash compared to FF? I'm using FF right now, and the Linux box is mostly used for radio and TV streams, most of which use flash. Which stopped working Sunday when I updated to 12.04...

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[hodet]

Everybody says this. So I install Chrome on Linux and seems ok. I have been running Firefox for years and have never noticed that it is a dog. It seems to work as well as I would expect it to on both my Linux and Windows laptops. Are we talking nanoseconds on page loads, or just the launching of the app? Is it when you have a million tabs open? Does it "dog" down when you install all those addons? (i only run Flashblock, ABP, and a proxy switcher) Maybe I just use my web browser differently then most people, but the speed of Firefox seems much ado about nothing. I have no political hangups about commercial browsers. I just haven't seen much in Chrome that would make me look down on FF.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[Jonner]

I don't think the issue is the existance or basic functionality of a "marketplace". The Linux support is for "installing" web apps so they appear to be native. I don't think the app itself behaves any differently regardless of whether it came from a "marketplace."

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[hobarrera]

Tried it last week, and also about 2 months ago. Used 99% of four CPUs on a phenom II 945 with less than 20 tabs. I can spare a couple of gigs memory (mozilla). I can't spare all four CPUs.
And I tend to have >100 tabs on firefox open.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[jez9999]

Why would I give a flying fuck about a 'marketplace' for my PC's web browser again?

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[Confusador]

For a while flash playback was choppy for me on Firefox, but not on Chromium. About a month ago performance degraded on Chromium as well, so at this point it doesn't really work at all. Of course, I'm still back on Isadora, so that specific example isn't relevant for you, but it's worth noting that it can be worth trying on the other if one doesn't work.

Re:Chrome / Chromium

[meow27]

better UI =/= speed

What?

[Corson]

I thought that Web App = platform independence? If it's not not then what's the point of developing Web Apps?

Re:What?

[Merk42]

THIS. Any features the Web App would have would be dependent on the browser (in this case Firefox) not the host OS*

*unless you want to count the possibility of h.264 encoding being relied on the OS.

Re:What?

[EMN13]

In other shocking news, different platforms requiring different implementations of this rather non-critical feature don't get the feature exactly simultaneously. And here I was hoping they'd have quantum entangled programmers whose coding is either both done or not done.

This isn't a story.

Re:What?

[snadrus]

That's a reality. Use a tiny OS shim and all the above features once added are instantly available in the nightlies for all platforms. It's been this way for decades.

Re:What?

[Confusador]

You got halfway there, but the point here is not about the apps themselves (which would indeed be platform independent), but about the ability of the browser to support standalone apps. Since the browser has to handle all the hooks into the OS on behalf of the app (in case it wants e.g. storage, or printing), the browser does have to be customized. The good news is that once (not if) they finish the Linux support, the apps that work on Windows and Mac won't have to be ported.

Re:What?

[Corson]

Right, but then they should stamp the same browser release number on all platforms only if and when the same full API is supported on all platforms.

Meh...

[Lumpy]

Chrome works better anyways, most guys I know that use linux are using Chrome and it's app store.

Mozilla has become a also ran lately, they need to get their focus back if they want to get back in the race.

Re:Meh...

[h4rr4r]

I use chromium and chrome at times, but does anyone actually use the app store?

As far as I can tell it is just a bunch of bookmarks. Totally pointless.

Re:Meh...

[bleedingsamurai]

I use it to grab adblock+ but that is about it.

Re:Meh...

[Shifty0x88]

I second that (adblock+), other than that, I never even look at the web store or app store or wtf it is called

Re:Meh...

[Jonner]

The reign of the lizard is dead. I, for one, welcome our shiny synthetic overlords.

Re:Meh...

[kangsterizer]

Meh, Firefox runs better in Linux than Chrome for me.
Chrome web store are not webapps they're just extensions or native code via nacl.

Won't judge mozilla market place before ive seen it running, but can certainly judge the devs that though supporting linux was not important. and I judge them bad.

A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[cpu6502]

Pretty obvious.
85+ for Windows
12% for Mac OS
2.5% for GNUlinux

Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[hendridm]

It would be interesting to see what % of Mozilla code is developed on each platform.

Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[Robert Zenz]

I use Gentoo with clang (instead of GCC) and go OUT OF MY WAY to avoid the GPL ...

I *bet* that you didn't know until a day ago what Clang actually is!

Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[asa]

Actually, Firefox usage is more than 92% Windows, and less than 6% Mac.

Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[BZ]

Install base amongst Mozilla developers is almost certainly Mac, Linux, Windows in that order, or so claims my anecdotal evidence. And even past that, laptops are predominantly mac, desktops are predominantly Linux.

Percent developed on each is hard to measure. Say a developer writes a patch partially on Mac and partially on Linux and then tests it locally on Windows (including performance profiling and some fixes based on that) before upstreaming. How do you even begin to assign the percentages? ;)

Re:A matter of share: 85%, 12%, and 2.5%

[chrb]

I guess you are quoting desktop market share. That is the wrong statistic to account for the number of Firefox users on each platform. Most Linux users are probably using Firefox. Don't most Windows users still use IE? And most Mac OS users use Safari? So the total desktop market share won't correspond to the distribution of Firefox users on each desktop.

(Also, Mac OS only recently got 5% market share. Not 12%.)

pathetic

[AntEater]

"...shrugging this off as Windows and Mac dominate the Mozilla user landscape today."

And that is a big part of why Windows and Mac continue to dominate the landscape. The Linux versions of many apps tend to be second rate. Then the developers look at it and say "see, nobody really wanted it on that platform anyway."

That's a pretty sad statement for an open project to make.

Re:pathetic

[EMN13]

It's also a fictional summary designed to grab your attention rather than represent the truth.

Re:pathetic

[AntEater]

That was intended as a generalized reflection of the attitude, not a quote from anyone in particular. I can fake quotes if I wanted to but they'd be much more entertaining than that.

Re:pathetic

[TheDarkMaster]

Add the fact that it is harder to make a good GUI application on Linux than on Windows. You can of course make a good GUI in Linux, but you spend more time and resources than to do the same thing in Windows.

Re:pathetic

[AntEater]

Add the fact that it is harder to make a good GUI application on Linux than on Windows. You can of course make a good GUI in Linux, but you spend more time and resources than to do the same thing in Windows.

That can't be true. Look at the GIMP!

Re:pathetic

[Jonner]

I'd agree if I thought the project was worthwhile overall. However, I don't see much point in "installing" a web app in a platform-dependent way since that's antithetical to the basic concept of a web app. I think a better area to work on is more general management of browser sessions, processes and profiles. I can currently launch Firefox with a different profile and have independent sessions going on but it's not as convenient as it should be.

GSoC Project for Open Web Apps support on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a GSoC project about Open Web Apps support for Linux: https://wiki.mozilla.org/SummerOfCode/2012/LinuxNativeWebApps

And?

[HangingChad]

I'm using Chrome on Linux and only rarely dust off FF.

The question is not if this was a good policy decision, the question is whether anyone will notice.

Re:And?

[robmv]

As much as I dislike being left behind for the first version, pleople forget that the same happens on Google side, Google Talk plugin, Drive client, even the initial version of Chrome where Windows and Mac only, We are always left behind by Google, There is no Drive sync client for Linux yet (but it will come).

Bad move

[denn1s]

Terrible move on mozilla's side, even if most of their end-users are mac/windows based clients a good part of us web developers use linux. I least I know I ain't developing a thing for the store as long as there is no linux support, not because I don't want to but because debugging would be too hard over a virtual machine or whatever.

So, how do you install an application on "Linux"

[Skuto]

So please tell me, how does one generically "install" an application on "Linux"?

It's silly to complain about Linux not being supported when Linux itself doesn't support the basic concept. It will probably be up to the distribution vendors like Ubuntu to customize this for their own desktop environment.

Moderate parent up.

[Kludge]

Subject says it all

Re:on-board intel?

[Skuto]

Updates to the browser are provided in a .DEB file, easy to install

At least in Ubuntu you get Firefox updates automatically. Clearly easier than getting .deb files.

... Has anyone actually bothered to RTFM (#744193)

[gilboad]

Nothing in the linked bug report suggests that Linux is being mis-threated and/or ignored.

- Gilboa

Web apps ==

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of web apps is to tie you to an online service, make your data less secure, and lose your privacy so that you become a marketing unit on their business plan.

And the 2nd point of web apps, or perhaps not a point but an effect nevertheless, is to try to make you forget what decent Human Interfaces on native apps used to look like, so that you don't mind using an in-browser GUI that is more primitive and less responsive than anything we had in the 80's, and badly designed to boot because webbies have no clue about HI ergonomics.

Re:What's actually going on here . . .

[Skuto]

Mozilla is a community project with only a part of the actual contributors being paid devs. They are indeed paid to work on stuff where the open source community is less interested in, like Windows integration. So yes, this is probably indeed what is happening, but you make it sound like it's a bad thing, by calling it a "fuck you" whereas its more of an "I know you can do it better anyway".

That said, I suspect this one is due to technical reasons, like there being much more desktop environment fragmentation which makes integrating something like this a mess on Linux.

Biting the hand that feeds you.

[Severus Snape]

A lot of the people who contribute to Mozilla do so because of their their belief in libre software in which they found through the Linux. Linux isn't just enother platform, it is much more valuable to the Mozilla, their foolish if they can't see that.

Re:Biting the hand that feeds you.

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the people who contribute to Mozilla do so because of their their belief in libre software in which they found through the Linux. Linux isn't just enother platform, it is much more valuable to the Mozilla, their foolish if they can't see that.

Citation needed. When I worked on Firefox, virtually all the work aside from translating documentation was done by Mozilla employees. There are quite a few "external contributors" but they did not contribute much in terms of code or tests. Do you have data to show that this has changed, or are you so enamored with your software-themed ideology that you don't bother to look at what is happening in the real world?

Firefox is bloated - Use Chromium

[mrpacmanjel]

I sort of understand why Mozilla have done this - they're only talking about the "App marketplace" not development of the browser itself - they are trying to raise funds for Firefox development by selling apps. (I assume).

That's how I understand it, then again I stopped using Firefox last year and switched to Chromium - the open-source version of Chrome - they are also forks of Chromium designed to remove all sorts of tracking code too.

Most people I know have switched away from Firefox and are using Chrome or Chromium instead.

The best thing about Chrome/Chromium is they are part of the "webkit family" which means wider support and consistent HTML5 adherence.

Firefox is feeling a bit dated anyway - All I can say is "Good Luck with that" Mozilla!

Re:Firefox is bloated - Use Chromium

[BZ]

> and consistent HTML5 adherence.

No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means things like https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=78887#c8 (comment 8, in case your browser doesn't scroll down that far).

But they do have _very_ good marketing, and an excellent approach of implementing features just enough to make the simple case work and then claiming support.

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[daid303]

Tell me the same for MacOS and Windows please?

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[BanHammor]

Select the file to install with your mouse, doubleclick. Works in pretty much any desktop distribution. Also, if you want it to work in any distribution, make an archive with static-linked compiled files. Skype has done that, so can you.

Why bother to RTFM: indignation over FUD is fun!

[EMN13]

I don't think anyone's bothered to read the bugzilla case. Possibly including the idiot @ internetnews.com - seriously, I don't understand how you could possibly come to those conclusions based on that bugzilla case.

No need to fork, article is nonsense

[EMN13]

Seriously, RTFM: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744193

Re:No need to fork, article is nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "This is not targeted ..." don't you understand? Yes, someone will pick it up and port it to Linux eventually, but like a fish, Mozilla rots from the head.

Re:Chrome crashes - especially with youtube

[knuthin]

Maybe you should be blaming Adobe for that?

Re:... Has anyone actually bothered to RTFM (#7441

[Alex Belits]

Seriously, what the fuck is going on here? The comment about supported platform is from more than a month ago, the rest of the responses are about resolving it.

Choices

[unixisc]

First there's Chromium. Then, those using Debian already have IceWeasel. But even aside from that, there are the DE based browsers - Konqueror/Rekonq in KDE, GNOME Web (Epiphany) in GNOME, and for those not hung up on open-source, there's even Opera. Quite a few choices out there. Also, given what Mozilla has been doing lately, maybe Linux can be thankful that they're leaving them out. Although surprising, given that Windows has IE and Apple has Safari, it's a bit strange that they are the primary target for Mozilla, market share notwithstanding

Damn the submitter

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't about Firefox. This is about some Web App store. What is the Web App store? The GP doesn't know; there isn't a link. There is a link to a bug, and there is a link to internetnews.com.
 
This is not a Boot to Gecko discussion, or a Firefox discussion. It could be an html5 discussion: here's a link to the marketplace page. HTML5 varies from browser to browser, some pages demand Chrome for viewing even though other browsers support HTML5. As things are developing, the browser groups are needing to make their own stores to list pages tested with their HTML5 renderers. The Mozilla marketplace, like Google Play, are both browser and OS dependent.

Re:Chrome crashes - especially with youtube

[NatasRevol]

Why?

http://www.youtube.com/html5

I don't develop with Mozilla.

[Tsingi]

Firefox isn't the best browser to develop with anyway. I use SVG and it doesn't support the whole spec.
I still use it as a browser, but it's not part of my dev ide. I use Chrome.

Re:I don't develop with Mozilla.

[Kagetsuki]

I've done SVG work in Firefox years ago - before Chrome was even popular. It worked fine then and a quick test says it works now (for me at least?).

Of course SVG is a pretty broad spec (it's almost like a generic container format...) - I guess you're dealing with some SVG features that just aren't supported in FF.

Re:I don't develop with Mozilla.

[Tsingi]

I've done SVG work in Firefox years ago - before Chrome was even popular. It worked fine then and a quick test says it works now (for me at least?).

Of course SVG is a pretty broad spec (it's almost like a generic container format...) - I guess you're dealing with some SVG features that just aren't supported in FF.

What is there is more or less correct. The lead developer has decreed that they will not support SVG fonts, Chrome does, and it's faster, so I use it.
In what way is SVG a container format?

Re:I don't develop with Mozilla.

[Kagetsuki]

Aaah, that is interesting and that is pretty web-relevant.

As for SVG being like a container format you'd be amazed. You can embed bitmapped image data (as in actually inside the SVG if you encode it - I used Base64), scripts, even non XML data formats (wrapped in XML of course). I'm positive if you wanted to you could find a way to embed video and sound - and I don't mean just links inside the SVG to an external file I mean actually inside it. After having dealt with SVG I had to write a COLLADA parser and I could easily draw some parallels, but I would say SVG is actually more flexible right out of the box.

Re:I don't develop with Mozilla.

[Tsingi]

You could invoke video and sound in SMIL animations and control them that way. I haven't experimented with that. With ForeignObject you should be able to embed HTML5 sound and video.

Not ideal perhaps, but I'll stick with Iceweasel.

[Robert Frazier]

I've not looked a Chromium for some time, so given the comments here, I installed it (Debian). The opening screen on a standard install takes you to the Google login page. A bad start. I don't have a Google account. Not even for using my Android phone (Dell Streak 5). I get along nicely on the phone without a Google account using K-9 mail (to my imap server) and CalDav for calendar and contacts (to my davical server). I even use Firefox (Fennec) on the phone.

Iceweasel (FireFox) has vimperator, which gives it a serious (winning) advantage over any other browser. Subjectively, Iceweasel seems as least as speedy as Chromium on my underpowered Atom D525 system. But, either is plenty fast for my purposes.

While it would be a good think if the Mozilla folks were as concerned with linux desktop users as with MS Windows and Apple OS desktop users, it isn't a big deal if they aren't. I think that I'll stick with Iceweasel.

Best wishes,
Bob

Re:Why bother to RTFM: indignation over FUD is fun

[Severus Snape]

Well that makes me feel like an idiot. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Linux Web Apps Development - How to Help Out

[jds2501]

Hi Everyone, Linux support for web apps is actively being worked on. Our contributor (Marco) is driving the implementation of it here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744193 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=744190 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745018 If you would like to help out, then feel free to drop a comment in those bugs!

Re:Linux Web Apps Development - How to Help Out

[Confusador]

I just want to take a moment to thank you for the work you're doing. Linux support has always been important to Mozilla, and it's appreciated. I think (hope) that most of the criticism here is not of the work that you're doing, but of the decision to not wait to release the feature until they could have it on all the platforms the browser supports. That's certainly a debatable point.

Personally, I think the sooner it gets out there, the more apps will be available when Linux support arrives.

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[barjam]

In the case of windows you double click on the MSI/EXE and go through the installer.

On linux you type apt-get install uh hrmm I forgot the syntax. Or maybe it is yum something or other. Oh wait there is this distribution specific marketplace app that occasionally works.

Come on, be fair.

[Dcnjoe60]

While the summary it technically correct, Linux is not included in the initial release, it is very misleading as it implies that Mozilla is ignoring linux. However, reading the thread that is mentioned in the summary, it appears heavy development work is being done to get things working with linux. So, in effect, what is happening is that the initial release is not being delayed because of problems with linux. But it definitely appears that the developers are working on making it work with linux and will release it when it does.

Yes and No

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yes and No, but first and foremost it was a trademark issue with regard to use of the graphics: The immediate problem caused by the new policy was Debian's inability to use the official Firefox logo due to its proprietary license failing to comply with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

The wiki also states: Additionally, as Debian releases are frozen on a long-term basis, software in the frozen stable releases needs to be patched for any newly-discovered security issue. Under the revised guidelines, in order to use the Firefox name, approval from the Mozilla Corporation would have been required for all security patches, but the Debian project felt it could not put its security in the hands of an external corporation in that manner.[15]

Note that the fact that Debian renamed it does not constitute proof of validity of Mozilla's claims that people can't apply patches from Mozilla's codebase and still call it Firefox. That claim never got tested, since they already changed the name anyway.

Yeah

[SmallFurryCreature]

You are going to HATE Windows 8. Then again, who isn't.

Not a story

[washort]

Hi, Mozilla marketplace developer (and Linux user :) here. As you can see by looking at the Bugzilla bug linked in the summary, development is actually proceeding on Linux support for this stuff. So it might end up being finished a few weeks after the Windows/Mac platform support; is that really a big deal? The platform guys have a lot of stuff to do to support all the features we want for open web apps, this was strictly a prioritization issue. Oh and note that the _big_ platform for open webapps is our Linux-based B2G phone environment.

Re:Chrome crashes - especially with youtube

[squiggleslash]

Leaving aside the fact it's Google's site and Google's browser, why? One of the selling features of Chrome is that it doesn't crash just because a plug-in crashes. Adobe Flash can be as crappy as a company whose name means "A fragile building material made from shit" could possibly make it, and it'd still be Google's fault if it takes down Chrome, just as it's Microsoft's fault if Chrome can take down Windows 7.

Just sayin ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Linux is already making it to the desktop of the average user. Instead of giving up, maybe you could help the poor clueless bastards like I do. ... Just sayin'

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[spire3661]

.mpkg installers arent as rare as you make out.

Re:What's actually going on here . . .

[BZ]

What's going on is that you didn't bother to even read the story, and the summary is misrepresenting the situation. But don't let that stop you from jumping to conclusions!

Yeah, but this is also an insult

[suso]

Linux is the premeire open source desktop. Mozilla is the premiere open source web browser. Many OSS people use both and have supported both. This kinda of decision is a slap in the face to the years of time invested on both sides. Indeed Mozilla has become more like a company than an open source project.

Re:Yeah, but this is also an insult

[hobarrera]

Came here to say exactly that, it's a shame I don't have any mod points. Mozilla no longer cares about freedom, and open source software, but rather about market share and userbase. This is also quite obvious with the h.264 debate they decided needs to be re-thought.

Re:Yeah, but this is also an insult

[ThePhilips]

Indeed Mozilla has become more like a company than an open source project.

Before Mozilla was an open source community.

Now it is literally corporation, sponsored pretty much exclusively by Google.

Before the project had to survive on the merit. Not anymore, and for as long as Google keeps writing them fat checks.

P.S. This is a rare moment when I regret about not collecting links to interesting materials I come across. The best and more insightful discussion on the topic was taking place on Debian mail lists in context of accepting corporate contributions especially when a corporation pays a Debian developer to work full time on the Debian.

That's still greater than Windows RT

[jader3rd]

Whatever percentage that Linux has on end user computer is still higher than Windows RT. Who knows, for all we know Linux will always have a higher marketshare than Windows RT. Would Mozilla still worry about Windows RT then?

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The less common way is the most common one on Windows: you go to a web site, download the installer and follow instructions (usually unzip and run a setup script). The last time I did it was for SamIam.

The more common way is similar to what other companies are calling "a store": you open your OS package manager, search for the application you need and click to install.. On my Ubuntu it is Applications menu, Ubuntu Software Center. There is also a command line version very handy to perform long installations on servers (easier to document and maybe you have only a CLI anyway.)

A variant of the latter method is going to the web site of a company, find the name of their own repository, and add it to the software sources in the package manager. I did it to install duplicity from this repository. Then it's included in the package manager.

Most programs are for free, some are for purchase.

The hell agenda does the article have?

[Kagetsuki]

So they target larger markets first for their app thingy - big deal. If they were "dropping" support or something that would be a different issue but it's just what releases they are focusing on initially. I say let them - there will surely be a few bugs they'll be able to work out before an official Linux release. And besides, as others have mentioned if you're so interested getting it right now on Linux then grab the code and start at it.

*I'm a dedicated Linux and Firefox user and I don't feel particularly "betrayed" at this point.

Portability

[Skapare]

This is just because they are programmers who are simply not capable of doing portable programming. When you get a bunch of these incompetent people coalescing in groups, you end up with things like this, or companies like Adobe. To be honest, they do have some skills in some areas. Portable coding just isn't among them. And given the persistent flaws of Firefox rendering things goofy like text running outside of DIVs they are placed inside of, I have too keep wondering about what few competencies that group even has.

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[VortexCortex]

So please tell me, how does one generically "install" an application on "Linux"?

Well, first the user has typically "subscribed" to an "app store" called a software repository, this is typically already done for them at OS install, but you're free to add other "app stores" if you're an "advanced" user (read: average Linux user).
Then the user searches for an app, and is presented results from EVERY app store they've registered (or "advanced mode": select only specific app stores to search in). The chose app is then automatically downloaded, configured and installed from the "App Store". On Ubuntu: Applications > Ubuntu Software Center. Via terminal (debian): sudo apt-get install $APP_NAME

Then the App is installed... You can even "que up" a bunch of things to install then walk away, come back and they're installed. The process is the same on Fedora/Red Hat (yum instead of apt-get) and even the source code based distributions do things this way, with the added step that the source code compiles itself after download and before installation. Some "app stores" (repositories) can be downloaded as a complete set of disks so you can install them offline. Individual applications in a "package" can also be transfelred via disk, email, flash drive, etc and double clicked to install. A program called "Alien" helps install apps that are in different package formats than your own.

Let me reiterate, for the typical application installation: You search your app store and click "install".
o_O

Now if you have developed a platform independent system like Java or a Web Browser, then creating an "App Repository" typically follows the same model, as evidenced by Mozilla's very own plug-in repository.

Let's s/application/plug-in/ and s/Linux/Firefox, then see if your question isn't down right obvious:

So, how do you install a plug-in on "FireFox"

Re:on-board intel?

[hobarrera]

As is true with most unix-like OSs (which includes most linux distros).
Windows and Mac are the only desktop OSs I can think of that don't provide the means for developers to push software and updates (ie:repositiories).

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[hobarrera]

Linux is a kernel, you'd need a working installation of a full OS to install desktop applications, not just a kernel. Distributions ARE OSs, so I don't the the issue with needing a distribution (an OS) to install applications.

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[hobarrera]

That's because Linux isn't an OS, it's a kernel.
Ubuntu is an OS, fedora is another; that's why they have differente usage.

I'm pretty sure this isn't news...

[DanielSmedegaardBuus]

...and also, Firefox hasn't been a primary choice for most Linuxers for a long, long time, considering the abysmal performance.

Not unusual

[allo]

For Mozilla, windows was the most important platform since a long time. Most features are tested on windows most of the time, and fixes are faster for windows. You really can see, where the priorities are. But thats not that bad, because ugly stuff like autoupdaters, firefox-button, etc. are just not coming (that bad) to linux, because mozilla keeps its more traditional stuff on linux (as default).

Re:Well...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Since it is Open Source, there is no reason to put unbridled trust in Debian. You did know they are Open Source, right? You did know that the reason the OpenSSL issue was caught was because it was open, right?

Re:on-board intel?

[Confusador]

GP is apparently confused, Chrome will add it's own repository if you let it (apparently he didn't), so it will update automatically as well. Of course, I got Chromium from Mint's repositories*, so I have no idea why he was installing from a .deb at all.

*by which I mean the preloaded repos, which are of course Ubuntu's

Re:So, how do you install an application on "Linux

[TrueSatan]

To be entirely correct neither Ubuntu nor Fedora are OS's...they are distributions of the GNU/Linux OS. You are, however, quite right in pointing out that may of the postings on this topic misuse the term "Linux" to mean GNU/Linux. The FSF has a very readable explanation of this issue http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html

Small correction

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Red Hat just posted 1 billion in profits.

No, they posted a billion in annual revenue.

I pretty much agree with everything else - the linux world is a mess, a mish-mash wasted effort on too many forks, each of which has to duplicate 99% of the work before adding their own 1% of "differentiation bling" that is supposed to "add value."