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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If that was true, they wouldn't have rewritten their Javascript engine twice, been obsessing about hardware acceleration, wouldn't have bothered to make it the browser using the least amount of RAM after being the one that used the most two years ago, etc. They haven't even finished implementing HTML5 yet because they're so focused on performance, including threading the browser and efforts to improve their DOM engine's performance that won't pay off for at least another year at this rate.
In the face of those facts, I don't think it's necessary to point out how silly your argument sounds. Firefox has a lot of issues, so you really don't have to go out of your way to lie like that.
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.
> 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.)
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