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Ninth Anniversary of Firefox 1.0 Release
Nine years ago today, Firefox 1.0 was released. Mozilla writes "Mozilla created Firefox to be an amazingly fun, safe, and fast Web browser that embodies the values of our mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. In the nine years since we first launched Firefox, we have moved and shaped the Web into the most valuable public resource of our time."
The first release of the little project to write a lighter alternative to Seamonkey is a bit over a year older.
phoenix was where it was at.
it all started going downhill after politics and marketing departments of mozilla got involved.
the 1.0 release was pretty much meaningless milestone in the big picture for the project. imho phoenix 0.2 should be the release to celebrate if any.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Sorry to say, but Firefox is kind of irrelevant these days.
Chrome is developed by a company whose sole purpose of existence is to spy on people in order to sell more advertising - a lot of it via their browser.
Mozilla is just out to make a browser, email client and other useful tools.
Also, any perceived superiority shall be removed in a release or so - the browser market is just too competitive.
to that 'lean' browser of yesteryear?
It's an updater.
To be fair, my computer now has ninety times more memory than it did 9 years ago. well that may not be true, but Lynx is not invulnerable to malware, it is just not worth exploiting.
FF1.5 was and still is the only good version.
After that it went downhill with them adding crap features, bloating the hell out of the browser and breaking the API EVERY SINGLE GOD DAMN TIME. THEY STILL DO THIS NOW. LEARN WHAT AN API IS YOU MORONS, APIS AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BREAK, THAT IS THEIR POINT!
I gave up caring about their nonsense when Chromium became stable enough. (v0.3, still on my desktop for some reason)
I still have one installed, webdev, etc.
The only thing I mainly use it for is for a couple extensions that are not on Chromium, such as mass downloader or interception of data.
It is an absolute chore dealing with their crap all the time. No wonder every damn developer has left for other browsers. Thanks Mozilla, not only did you ruin your browser you went against your original aim, to create competition. You shot yourself in the foot so much that everyone abandoned you. Genius.
I would agree, but all of a sudden I'm having huge issues with Chrome :(
Tabs becoming unresponsive, mysterious downloads in the background stopping me from quitting, tabs taking ages to close etc etc.
No extensions, no java, no flash.
Uh yeah, think for a minute --- what large company pays all the bills for Mozilla?
Well, at least we can celebrate the first years. Before the new versioning system and adding everything but your mom's dong instead of letting addons do the work.
It's worse than that. With every new version, useful features are changed or removed and people are being forced to use more and more extensions to regain functionality that has been ripped out. Which leads to the current ridiculous situation:
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need
-- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox
-- Or you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to write extensions yourself just so you can restore functionality that never should have been removed in the first place
-- Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
Yep, the Lynx html parser is supposedly riddled with bugs, but nobody really cares.
Lynx is not invulnerable to malware
or ascii goatse :(
You should try it on OS X and Linux. It is not really worth using apart from in testing.
Text based browsers are great, when that's all you need or want. We can bemoan the waste and bloat on the internet, but at the same time, all of us like a pretty browser with some bells and whistled. Of course, "pretty" is in the eye of the beholder, but for most of us "pretty" is something more than a mostly blank with simple print. The solution seems to be, install your favorite (or least despised, as the case may be) and tweak it to your liking.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Pfft. Firefox 2.0.0.x was pretty good, it was with 3.x that it got slower and I eventually switched to Chrome for better speed.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I have no problem with it on OSX.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
This is the part where Internet trolls mod each other up and start thinking they're relevant.
I want this account deleted.
They got off track when the goals stopped being about speed, standards, stability and security.
At that point it became just another app.
No. I used Chrome for a few years there but I got unhappy that it was the only closed source application I was using on a daily basis. So I moved back to Firefox and have found it a good experience. The only gripe I have after 9 months is that the dev tools feel slugish.
I'm even using Firefox on Android and find that better than Chrome.
Almost every new iteration of FF removes or detrimentally alters a feature that people use and rely on.
It's really starting to piss me off as I have to find extensions or workarounds to replace the functions they keep taking away.
The most recent annoyance is to the find-in-page function, before it was well laid out and I had absolutely no issues with it, but now it's ruined, the close bar X button has been moved from immediately left of the search box to the right edge of the bar which is really far away on a widescreen display, the search next/prev boxes have been reversed and no longer have Next and Previous words on them which makes them a smaller target for your mouse pointer, and the Highlight All and Match Case buttons have also been moved to the right edge of the bar.
Seriously Mozilla, what the fuck?
Chrome Is Better
I think you'll find it's possible for other people to have different opinions to yours and for both of you to be correct. Amazing, eh?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Installing too many extensions is well known to cause performance and/or stability problems with Firefox.
Having too many extensions does not cause performance/stability problems. Individual, poorly written extensions do, when they leak memory.
Every time Firefox comes up as a topic on /., people say they want it simpler and smaller, and follow the newest trends young browser projects bring. It's ridiculous to expect it to not change the UI at the same time.
-- You have to hope that the random person continues to update the extension so that it works with future versions of Firefox
Firefox extensions don't need to be updated by the developer for future versions.
-- You have to depend on some random person to create the extensions you need
If that is true, then there are not enough people that have your problem, and are happy with the change Firefox devs introduced.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
No, it's not.
It keeps Chrome civilized, and feels niches where Chrome is not viable.
In this exact moment, my Atom 330 box remains useful only because FIrefox runs fine on it - I don't know why, but Chrome performs extremely poorly on it.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Take a look at these numerous different measures of browser usage shares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_share#Historical_usage_share
The most obvious trend concerning Firefox is the steady downward slide in its usage share. It has gone from over 30% of the market back in 2010 to down near 15% these days.
Firefox 4.0 was released in March of 2011, although it was obvious before then that bad decisions were being made, and would continue to be made. This is when people in the know moved on to other browsers, followed by stragglers.
The decline is very much due to how they've treated their users like absolute rubbish. They've focused on stupid UI changes, adding useless features and functionality that nobody wants, and removing very critical functionality that many users depend on, all while ignoring the pleas of the community to fix some very major issues like Firefox's slow performance and unbelievable memory usage.
People aren't dumb. They know when they're getting shit upon, and they'll deal with it. That's why they've mainly moved to Chrome. It may have a shitty UI, but at least it's fast, at least it doesn't use far too much memory, and at least Google manages to not piss off most users with each release.
When a product loses 50% of its usage share over just a few years, it'll most likely become a dead product within a few more. I hate to say it, but Firefox is on its way out. The numbers show it, and there's nothing being done to reverse this trend.
Seamonkey
-Download Size 20mb
-Browser, Mail, News, IRC
-Feature Rich
-Fully Customizable Interface
-Lower Memory Use
Firefox
-Download Size 31.2mb (Aurora, Firefox uses stub installer, but was over 30mb)
-Browser
-"Streamlined" Cut Down Feature Set (With more features cut all the time)
-Fully Customizable Interface
-Higher Memory Use (I have seen 50% more memory used than Seamonkey with same pages loaded)
On the other hand, that API issue is serious.
For a lot of time, I were using Firefox instead of Chrome because of my NetBanking plugin. Chrome was a bit faster than Firefox at that time, but not that faster - and I enjoyed my Firefox add-ons.
And then, suddenly, Mozilla start to spit new versions in a crazy way, and my NetBanking stop working after every single new (sub)version of Firefox. Hell by hell, I decided Chrome's "hell" was a bit more worthy - at least, I got some faster renderings and the Google's account syncing. Little time after, my NetBanking plugin for Chrome became more stable than the Firefox version, and the rest is history.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Because of their new versioning system I have absolutely no interest in installing their upcoming Firefox "26.0". What a shitty number. They should call it Firefox 30.0 and increment by 5.0 from now on.
This is why I use Opera for day to day browsing. I've got it setup to load pages with everything off, Javascript, CSS, graphics, and display text in a font that suits my eyes best. It acts very much like Lynx, but if I want to, I can turn on styling and graphics with a couple of key presses / mouse clicks, and see how perty or ugly a site is.
Good side effects: I can click on most links without fear, knowing that even if the page is full of ads or other bloat, they won't get loaded unless I choose to, much easier to read those forums with 2-line messages surrounded by huge avatars and graphical signatures.
For media-heavy sites like YouTube, I just start Firefox... Nothing forces people to use one single browser for everything.
what features were removed? I am sure there have been a few, but I used firefox from version 3 to version 19 and didnt notice any features removed (at least once that I used)
I however was getting sick of firefox, and find chrome to be a much better experience (even though they are at version 30 already.. but at least they don't even advertise it)
They should use build numbers. Firefox 11,873 anyone?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
2 was by far the slowest Firefox in history. It also had that annoying misfeature where it grabbed all the memory in the system expecting that it could dole it out to other application as needed.
3 had an enormous speed boost over that, and it's been getting steadily better since then. HOWEVER, the for the last few versions having Firebug running causes serious slowdowns. That will be fixed in time, but until then I strongly recommend disabling it and using the (excellent) build-in dev tools.
Yes, that's exactly what they do. I believe you entirely, because every time I've reported a bug, they've completely ignored it and Firefox has been consistently getting slower and buggier over the years. That's because I'm living on bizarro earth.
Look, Firefox doesn't need your help to die a slow death. Stop lying through your teeth already. It's painful to see this kind of childish nonsense get upvoted because like it's the truth. Even I, who've had some painful experiences with Firefox, am not so petty and vindictive that I have to pretend that Mozilla don't care.
No problems worth talking about here in Linux Land. Chrome compares favorably with Opera and Firefox. There is not a great deal to choose between the three, IMHO.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
...and it STILL can't print many web sites correctly.
This is beyond frustrating. I print many web pages to PDFs on a weekly basis for research purposes, and I have to remember which sites (like The Guardian's) never print, as well as check the output of every single attempt so I know when I have to fire up IE to get a readable, complete PDF of a freaking web page.
Here's a hint, Mozilla: If IE does something as simple as printing a web page vastly better than your browser, and it's been that was for several years, then your priorities are severely screwed up.
If that's the best case you can make, then I feel ashamed to be a Chrome user, just because I'm associated with the likes of you. Let Firefox have their fun too. Chrome has its issues and has done its share of stupid things.
Chrome these days is only generally better at a few things: the process-tab model (arguably), better performance in some areas, and better integration with Google's services.
Firefox doesn't need our help to die off. It's "fans" are doing a good enough job of that by demanding that it only cater to their narrow whims and stay the same forever, rather than becoming more relevant to a larger userbase.
It'll be hilarious when Firefox finally dies off, and all the people who moved to Seamonkey and Palemoon suddenly have to do all the work themselves. They bitch about having to install a half-dozen UI addons, so I'm sure their brains will implode.
UI for Disable Javascript.
You either have to use about:config or NoScript (which you should probably be using anyways).
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
the awesombar removed the feature of having a normal behaving urlbar without it doing unwanted things.
The statusbar
The ridiculous versioning numbering removed the functionality of knowing when you were given a security update only, or a functionality breaking / user interface altering update. Before this only happened at major version changes. now it can happen during any random security update. The ESR is a farce. A token version, it is not taken seriously by the developers.
The feature to not have bloat on you system. It just increases the attack vector. Like social API, PDfviewer, webrtc. These are not core browser functionality and should be add-ons. The first security bug in the PDF viewer has already been found (and fixed btw).
The feature of choice. Some settings are removed and can only be set via about:config. not nice, but ok. The problem is that the setting in case is not only removed, but also changed without asking while you update. (disable images, disable javascript, disable tab bar, settings to allow allow javascript to do certain things or not)
and, like Internet Exploder and Fuckle Chrap...
It's at this point when I begin to tune out the geek.
Just use a text based browser like Lynx instead, uses almost no memory or processor resources and is virtually invulnerable to malware.
Accessibility makes the case for Lynx. Extreme constraints on bandwidth makes the case for Lynx. Cekkular
Also Chrome is the only choice on Linux if you want to have a up to date Flash plugin (you can also transfer that plugin into Chromium, although it's a PITA). The old NPAPI Flash plugin (version 11.2) still seems to linger in various distros though (package flashplugin-installer in Ubuntu).
Well, HTML5 video is already working quite well, and seems to have better hardware acceleration. Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment and just go full HTML5.
The difference is Google pay Mozilla to be number one in the search box and, I believe, when people use the search box whereas Chrome begs you to login with your Google account so it can link every god damn thing you do in your browser with your account. Google didn't make Chrome for any other reason than it gets them more and more data. Same reason they made Android and Google+ and Gmail.
Mozilla/firefox has been perverted, corrupted.
"You can haz many many $$. Just insert some more tracking hooks for, you know, advertising and whatnot. Here, take a look at dis nifty spec for etags." [Wink-wink. Jingles the coins in the pocket.]
What is an alternative to a random person? A well-organized corporation? Then we would be still stuck with IE4.
Learning to write code, specifically to write extensions is a good investment.
Firefox is my favorite browser, and I would like to thank the Firefox team and congratulate with the ninth anniversary.
Like adding support for vertical writing for which people have been asking for 10 years, instead of tweaking and tweaking the UI and worrying about version numbers.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145503
Yes, this bug is older than Firefox 1.0 itself...
Try Seamonkey instead... they haven't fucked that up... yet...
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
"Fuck you," explained the Mozilla developer.
Even YouTube could as well end the long-lasted HTML5 experiment and just go full HTML5.
Google has some lies and secrets here.
Their defacto behavior, which I'll call a "claim" is that you must have flash to play video xyz even in the HTML5 mode. This happens with MOST popular videos because they are monetized (the secret there is that Google's advertisement modules aren't ready in HTML5 yet)
To debunk this, just load an iPad or iPhone and see if you're *ever* forced to suffer even half of the consecuences... when sir Steve Job decided to ignore Flash on mobile. The takeaway is that faking your UA string with a FF extension yields those nice mp4 files without fuss, and I don't recall seeing video ads in player with that variant. The annoying thing is you have to put up with the mobile navigation, AND as of about 9 months ago, clicking a playlist link to with a preordered list of long series of videos (videogame Let's plays) would link you to a standalone vid. When you have about 100 videos and need to continue from #86, it's a major pain to rely on searches and the unreliable sidebar randomly hinting episode #2 or #98 but not #87. I'm pretty sure there's some express secret reason youtube doesn't like you binging^W playing sequential videos.
It's worse than that. With every new version, useful features are changed or removed and people are being forced to use more and more extensions to regain functionality that has been ripped out. Which leads to the current ridiculous situation:
This is the reality of the browser market. It happened to Netscape. Then Netscape, bloated shitpile it was, ended up usurped by IE. Which in turn became a bloated, bug-ridden shithole, and was replaced by Opera. Which in turn, blahdiblah, FireOHGODWENEEDTOCHANGEOURNAMEALOT. Which in turn, Chrome.
Any browser, no matter how good, no matter how small, no matter how fast... Will eventually become bloated, bug-ridden crap.
Verily - we've been stuck on the current generation forever. It's been far too long since we've had a sleek young browser whose only purpose is to browse the fucking web.
It's time.
Get on it, people.
Yep, you are correct. Some months ago I was able to set my UA simply to Internet Explorer 10 and got every video as HTML5. That trick seems to not work anymore though.
Wasn't SeaMonkey discontinued in 2009 or something?!
Does it even get security updates? Support HTML 5? I am not a troll here but curious as I thought it was abandonware for quite some time.
http://saveie6.com/
I have to disagree; personally, I don't understand why so many people like Chrome. I find it to be very unstable, quirky, and buggy. Bugs that are so obviously bugs and are difficult to ignore still exist years after being reported. In theory I love the browser, so every time a new version comes out I give it a shot, and we're at version 30 now and I'm still disappointed that it still feels like an alpha or beta, not a final release.
In all of the years I've used Firefox (since 2004) I think I may have reported one or two bugs, and they were obscure bugs that were easy to ignore. Only one is still oustanding. I've reported close to 10 bugs in Chrome and most still aren't fixed.
Take one of the latest updates for example. Now whenever I scroll on a page I see a checkerboard pattern as the page loads. Seriously?
Firefox might not be the most minimalistic browser out there, or have the snappiest user interface, but it's by far the most stable browser with the best set of standard features and extensibility.
Maybe I'm getting hung up on the wrong thing here, but how the fuck do you measure how "fun" a web-browsing experience is? What does that actually mean? What is it that makes Firefox fundamentally more enjoyable during recreational use that, say, Chrome/Opera/Safari/IE/etc. are missing?
I'm fine with the rest of this and happy birthday to Firefox and all, but what is it that actually makes for a "fun" browsing experience, other than the specific websites that I choose to use?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
The Linux version is xturd86.
seamonkey project website says you are wrong.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
It went from Phoenix to Firebird, then to Firefox
Really? How the fuck is Lynx not invulnerable to malware? Does it run Java? Does it run extensions? Fuck no, it doesn't even run Javascript so how the fuck can it run or become infected with malware?
> we came dangerously close to a world where Microsoft
> Internet Explorer was the only accepted web browser.
We dodged that bullet but now we're heading to a world where facebook.com plus a small few other sites are the internet.
It's not Mozilla's fault but, as Stallman says, freedom is about controlling your computing on your computer, so it's a real problem that a lot of computing is being done on Facebook's servers.
(That said, it would be useful if Mozilla Firefox did more to make its users aware of what free software is - such as putting a clearer link in the menu or in the About dialogue box.)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I agree, it's easy to find examples where the majority on people in a /. discussion are wanting the first two.
But, Mr. Mozilla Developer, can you point to any examples where the majority of people in a /. discussion are wanting the third?
I suspect you might have a lot of trouble with that - which is why I'm just going to sit back and consider the Mozilla developers in general to be an out-of-touch autocratic cabal, and you specifically to be a liar, until there's evidence to the contrary.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Yep, you are correct. Some months ago I was able to set my UA simply to Internet Explorer 10 and got every video as HTML5. That trick seems to not work anymore though.
You didn't say if the other UA tricks were tested so...
try an extension with selectable agents and pick Safari for iPad or iPhone. Coupled with adblock, disabling flash and using noscript is closer to my setup and probably confuses their sniffing.
I haven't tested in while
Chrome's tab-model is a literal Fork-Bomb. If I have to explain it to you, you need to get off /.
Unlike Firefox where it JIT loads tabs as you need them. Try restoring a 30+ multi-tab session with Chrome, good-luck.
I love FF. It has some features that make it much more usable than Safari for me. I never considered Chrome because I'm happy with FF and see no reason to change browsers. And now I have an extra reason not to change.
-- Cheers!
If you don't like the spiked dildo in your ass... STOP PUTTING IT THERE. We don't care about your butt hurt. Use a different browser and STFU. You're like a one of those small yippy dogs that barks incessantly no matter how many times you throw it against wall it just won't shut up! On and on and on with high pitched yipping. For god's sake give it a rest. 9 years of bitching hasn't worked. Prove you're smarter than a fucking bitch and move on.
They've stalled development of the email client, and the "usability" team is hell bent on making the browser unusable.
Every time Firefox comes up as a topic on /., people say they want it simpler and smaller, and follow the newest trends young browser projects bring.
Yes, some people say that. But why don't these people use Chrome and shut up? Why must they wreck Firefox for the rest of us? If Firefox is unrecoverably dumbed down, we have nowhere to go.
The feed button. Feed autodiscovery. Search plugin autodiscovery. UI for disabling images and Javascript. Click-to-play per element. Consistent search engine for addressbar independent of active search engine in searchbar (keyword.URL). Nowadays half of my addons are hacks that try to restore removed functionality in Firefox.
The Mozilla Suite (codenamed "SeaMonkey") was discontinued. A new project, outside of (but not on bad terms with) the Mozilla Foundation, was started to continue development under the name "SeaMonkey" (now as a brand, not just as a codename). As far as I know, they use recent upstream versions of Gecko and thus automatically support HTML5 and so on.
This is only confusing to people who followed Mozilla development closely enough to have seen "SeaMonkey" used to refer to the Suite. I'd guess that it was somewhat inspired by the origins of the Mozilla project - "Mozilla" was the old codename for Netscape Navigator.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
The awesomebar hate was never justified. You could use browser.urlbar.maxRichResults to disable the results. But the people who whine about it don't care. They think it's the end of the world to have to disable it. I'd argue the "awesomescreen" is the worse offender here, at least on mobiles where you can't disable it for some reason.
The numbering problem is basically in your own head. They still do point releases for critical fixes, it's the rapid release cycle that's the root cause of the actual problems. They finally started doing ESR releases, but I agree they're more token than anything at this point.
The bloat argument is inane. It's the most minor of the minor gripes. If you care about that kind of thing, Firefox and its spin offs are the only browsers with addons like RequestPolicy and NoScript that work properly, and the only browsers that let you generally disable new features easily (Chrome does too, but usually only for experimental features).
The "feature of choice" thing is another vapid argument. After 9+ years of Firefox there are only a meager handful of things you can't customize back in some relatively simple way. You just don't care because you happen to be one of the people inconvenienced, and it's easier to whine about it then find the oh-so-painful solution. It's not like other browsers and software don't do the same bloody thing.
If this is the worst people have to complain about then Firefox is WAY ahead of the curve.
When they decided to start hiding or removing useful settings while adding so much bloatware into it that they might as well have renamed it FireIE 6.0, I quit using it for daily browsing habits.
Now that it is up to version 25+ (which is fucking stupid in its own right, trying to play version catch-up with Google just because), I still find that I don't use it for anything but Twitch.tv and Disqus.
For some reason the chat interface for Twitch never loads in Chrome no matter what I do, and Disqus comments never load in Chrome no matter what I do.
Not that I interactively use the Twitch chat, since it requires a Facebook account to post, but I can at least read the commentary and maybe send the developers a more full-fledged response via email when I am watching something from Digital Extremes or Trion for instance.
As for Disqus, I can't figure out what it is - it may be Chrome mangling the Disqus cookies in some way or hating the number of redirects the Disqus system itself uses when logging in and loading comment sections, but it just sits and spins and never loads. Loads instantly on IE10 or Firefox though (yes, I use Windows 7 exclusively at the moment).
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.