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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
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.
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.
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.
>"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.
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