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Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps?
snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.
Just about everything in the summary is wrong. I'm going to assume that the article isn't much better.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Mozilla is non profit foundation while Sun was a publicly traded for profit corporation. Apples and Oranges.
except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?
Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?" The fact that Java, which was created and popularized by Sun is alive and (arguably) well is ample evidence that Sun is not defunct. It has simply been acquired.
Likewise, whatever the future of Mozilla may be, it's far more likely to trudge on and/or take on some other new life than to ever become "no longer in existence; dead; extinct." Just like the old Netscape browser that was its foundation.
Not making electrolysis their #1 priority a few years ago and turning on Eich. I just switched to Chrome and can't imagine what the hell people are thinking when they say that Firefox is now "just as fast as Chrome." Uh, no. It's noticeably less responsive in many cases. And with the Eich issue, they alienated a heck of a lot of conservative and libertarian users who switched to various forks or Chrome afterward in protest. Then their online magazine waded into the gamergate waters and took a pro-censorship of comments stance when the message didn't line up.
This is increasingly not a Mozilla that I want to support. If they want my support, they can make electrolysis their #1 priority so it becomes as fast and responsive as Chrome and then drive out the social justice warriors.
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Sorry, "Introduced tabs [to the masses]". No one uses opera.
A faster, leaner and generally less quirky alternative to Chromium-based browsers, especially on mobile. Lots of work on the standards front. Plus MDN is one of the best web development knowledgebases I know. Also Thunderbird, the only platform-independent mail client used by more then a handful of people. Oh, and they came up with asm.js, which allows massive performance gains for generated JS code.
Honestly, I have no idea what the article is talking about:
- The "waning market share" doesn't seem to wane all that much, going by international market share numbers (although I'm in Germany where Firefox is still the undisputed top dog so that may color my perception).
- The only thing close to "questions over tooling for their platform" I am aware of is that they're implementing Gecko's successor in Rust, their own programming language.
- While FirefoxOS has pretty much zero presence today it's still easy to run Firefox on Android (and I recommend it because the bundled browser is usually an antique, plus mobile Blink/WebKit ain't all that hot anyway).
- I have no idea what "Gecko-flavored JavaScript" is supposed to be and how it's supposed to deliver "standard tools" that other browser vendors somehow have.
Even if Mozilla sucked at what they're doing (cf. Microsoft, although they're at least trying these days) they'd create competition and thus drive the other players forward.
(No, I don't work for Mozilla. I'm just a web dev.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.
The destruction of it's ecosystem.
Too many choices have been made to simplify Firefox when maybe they should have done a bit more spelunking to see what the users were actually using.
Taking away the status bar. Yeah, there are multiple extensions to get that back, the trouble being that they aren't the original status bar and some of the extensions that I use expect the old status bar, not the extension status bar. Update that extension? Well, the person writing that extension has thrown in the towel. When other issues cropped up, somebody else did come along and fix the issues, but the original programmer can come around and kill it because it's still technically his copyright. Yeah, he didn't GPL or put any other kind of license on it. So, it might exist today, but tomorrow it won't.
Making Firefox look like Chrome is just stupid in my book. There was zero reason to change it. Talk about getting the desktop to look like the mobile is pure crap. They are different environments. What works on a phone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it works on the desktop, even Microsoft has figured that part out with Windows 10 coming out now. Extremely obvious to me, so I must be a genius. Or not.
They have changed things such that old themes no longer work. The old personas, which I guess are now considered to be theme extensions, seem to be the only new themes actually getting developed. And they're ugly.
Their mobile push (for Firefox OS) was interesting, but again, desktop seemed to suffer again because of it. They started actually pushing a 64-bit version of Firefox on their Nightly page. Then decided that tracking those bugs specific to it might be too much, so they decided to stop it, then after an outcry, decided to keep doing the 64-bit builds, but if you had a problem, don't bother filling a bug for it unless it also happened on the 32-bit version. And then they decided to back track on that as well. You just can't find the 64-bit version on the Nightly page anymore. But it can be found, at least.
I run the 64 and 32 bit Nightlies, release and beta versions. And they work for me. At least for now.
I don't like IE. Chrome works. I'm just not sure I want Google tracking me that much.
Bryan
The standard answer is Chrome.
I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.
This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.
In summary, this article is bullshit.