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Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?
trawg writes: It's been more than 10 years since Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, one of their first steps in their mission to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. Firefox was instrumental in shattering the web monoculture, but the last few years of development have left users uninspired. "Their goal was never to create the most popular browser in the world, or the one with the best UX, or the one with the most features, or the one with the best developer mode. ... It would be foolish to say a monoculture will never arise again (Google are making some scary moves with Chrome-only web applications). But at this point in time while Chrome is the ascendant browser (largely at the expense of Firefox), Mozilla’s ability to impact the web in general is greatly reduced." Perhaps it is time to move on to the next challenge — ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.
I've used Chrome on BSD for years but recently moved back to FF. The main reason I moved in the first place is sync of personal data across instances. FF now has this.
Also Chromium isn't as open source friendly as one would think so it's feature set is largely reduced on BSD's. Now that they've removed the ability to run 32-bit NPAPI plugins, I can't use java/flash anymore either. Plus all the Chrome UI Nazi stuff was getting annoying like the malfunctioning middle click to paste. Chrome devs calling it a feature not a bug didn't help either. Regardless, things are good again in BSD w/ FF.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
"...Chrome-only web applications..."
It isn't a web application if it requires non-web-standard features or a very specific software platform.
The original goal of Phoenix(?) or whatever name they chose for the code-split from Navigator; was to build a fast, responsive and resource-minimal web-browser. When it was first released it was a HUGE success because not everybody wanted an all-in-one email/browser/calendar/contact/NNTP client.
Then they added the ability to run 3rd-party scripts, they called those 'extensions' (omg what is this new thing!) and that was super popular.
I like many of the /. readership was there at the birth of what we now call Firefox. We have loved it for what it was, and have tolerated it for what it became.
It is still my primary browser, but if I ever find a minimal-resource browser that offers functionality equal to 'NoScript' and 'Adblock-Edge' I'll switch.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I thought the goal was to take Netscape communicator, strip out all the crap, leaving just the lean, fast web browser. Funny they seem to have forgotten that as every release adds more and more bloat and unwanted "features". It might as well be Netscape all over again.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
In fact I think email should either die or have a massive protocol update of some kind to block spammers, otherwise it's a lost cause.
I'm not aware of anyone who used to use email who has stopped using email, are you? Given how effective spam blockers are these days, I'm not feeling a need to drop SMTP quite yet myself.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.
TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."
I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.
The goal may not have been to take over the world. But the goal was also not to become a bloated browser with an unusable UI that is driving users away.
Well, presumably that's what we were told at the time, but truly what was going on was Netscape throwing as much open source code out there before being gobbled up by AOL. There was zero promise AOL would continue browser development, they had a deal with IE. Netscape was very much aware that IE might be the only game in town. Much of the email code couldn't be open sourced because I don't think Netscape had full rights to the code.
----- obSig
For a long time, I was pretty sure that Firefox's goal was to suck up all of the free memory space in the universe. It's better now, but they damn near succeeded there for a while.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Firefox does not use WebKit. It uses Gecko.
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).
Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.
R.Mo
you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash
If it limits your ability to browse today, especially to site you want to visit then it is relevant when choosing a browser to use.
Unlike some other mobile operating systems, FirefoxOS is completely open and uses HTML5 to deliver content. BlackBerry and Windows Phone each have small market shares, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So we mostly have only two choices of mobile OS. Don't get me wrong: I very much like my Android phone (Sony Xperia Z3 Compact) and my iPad, but I think that it's a worthwhile challenge to contribute to the FirefoxOS platform and/or to build apps for it.
So now I use a combination of IE and Firefox. And I have Firefox loaded on my phone as well as Chrome.
Why didn't I try Opera instead? I would have, but it failed to install. C'est la vie.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash, that's really not how the web should work or will work in the future.
How the web should work or will work in the future is less important to me than how it works right now -- and right now, flash is still (unfortunately) important.
>"Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?"
Here is what I *HOPE* is next:
1) Stop trying to be and look like Chrome. Just stop.
2) Stop trying to force users to not have tabs on bottom, having a menu bar, having separate buttons, etc. Let users control their user interface how they want.
3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.
4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.
5) Focus on speed, security, stability, bug-fixing, and documentation. You don't have to be a feature-of-the-month club.
6) Continue to support as many platforms and systems as possible, including old ones.
Oh- and thank you for all the hard work that went into Firefox- the browser of my choice (and that for my users, family, and friends) for the last decade.
monoculture = all one thing. How exactly is having several different browsers all based on the same engine NOT a monoculture? It's not a *proprietary* monoculture, and as such may avoid many of the pitfalls that made the IE monoculture so toxic, but it is definitely a monoculture.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I can't see myself using webmail. Ultimately, I download all my email.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Pidgin desperately needs help, as it hasn't successfully had an easy-to-use voice (let alone video) capability.
And it's never going to....now.
The plan was to add voice/video support to pidgin, but then some console dwelling neckbeards took over development. They freely admitted that they didn't use the graphical client or non-XMPP protocols so those wouldn't get much work done on them. They were the ones whose basic philosophy was: "who needs voice and video? Running finch (text mode pidgin) in screen/emacs is good enough for anyone"
They're the jerks who changed perfectly good UI like the terms login/logout to enable/disable.
Firefox is our weapon to tame misbehaving behemoths. Be it Microsoft. Be it Google. Be it Apple.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Keep in mind that happy users are silent users. I use Firefox, and enjoy it. It runs fast, supports the plugins I want, and seems to be quite stable. More than that, it largely keeps out of my way, so honestly, I don't think about the browser all that much. I've never thought of submitting feedback on that site, because I have no real feedback to offer. That is, I have no real problems, and can't think offhand of anything the program is really lacking.
The only way you can get a true picture is if you get a random sampling among regular Firefox users. Any action initiated by the user to send feedback automatically will skew the result.
If 86% of users didn't like Firefox, I don't think they'd have the market share they do now. BTW, let's take a look at one of the sad faces I picked from the top of that list:
Stop that annoying paranoid shit about "update you flash or it will burn all your family to ashes and eat your left eye while pooping in your mouth". It's not THAT dangerous, user should have a possibility to shut it OFF. And not by clicking on every damned page to allow older plugin work, but by just choosing that option in the settings. I thrusted(sic) you, you were the last normal browser in a pile of shiny useless shit that thinks that user is an idiot. Now you doing this. Damn.
This user apparently wants an option to stay silent about older versions of Flash, which undoubtedly have security issues that need fixing. Should Mozilla "fix" this problem to the user's satisfaction? It's ironic that the user complains the browser "that thinks that user is an idiot" when he's advocating doing something incredibly stupid - not keeping all his plugins current.
Here's another frowny faced gem:
Please fix Norton toolbar 2014.7.8.23 been to long now makes me not want to use Firefox .....
Mozilla apparently needs to fix the Norton toolbar, or this user won't be happy. Good luck with that Mozilla!
I'm not saying that Firefox doesn't have legitimate issues, but my point is that looking at a feedback site such as that one is going to give you very, very skewed results. I've just pointed out two examples on the front page.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Out of interest (I'm primarily a web dev) what sites / content do you use that demands flash? I browse with plugins enabled on a click to play basis but i'm finding very few places these days where i ever need or want to enable flash content, especially with video content being fairly quickly replaced by h.264 and so forth.
It's a good idea to now and again go to gmail and check the spam folder for false positives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The only thing worse than being stuck on an airplane someone talking to someone on their phone: being stuck next to someone talking to no one on their phone.
(You just know that they only do that in public.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
Disband and move on with your life.
Mozilla has been a mess for a couple of years already. Just let it die.
Chrome has failed in this manner for lots of people. No problem with the os. Rather, a problem with, after moving the old files, trying to install a new set of files in the previous occasion - it fails.
Turns out the Opera installer hung up (because it launched 4 instances of itself for some strange reason, so it hung up). Killing all but one install processes let opera complete, but I'm not really impressed with the finished product. On another note, removing google drive really speeded up the machine. Considering I don't even use it, it shouldn't have been such a bandwidth hog for several minutes after boot.
Remember all those jokes about how it says "My PC" because Bill Gates thinks he owns it? Google is, more and more, the new Gates. Oh well.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Email is not just the way of the future. My kids use imessage to communicate with their trendy friends with Apple gear. Indeed we needed to buy them an ipad touch just so they could keep up. My wife uses Facebook to communicate. Less fashionable people communicate with Kick, and a few neanderthals even use Skype.
The idea that somebody on GMail or Outlook or even Thunderbird cam communicate with an iPhone is an accident of history. Why would anybody want to support technology that can help others steal the customers that they own? Blogs and RSS are already dead, long live Facebook! Email will follow.