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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.
But Firefox got embarassed and offered to re-open my tabs.
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?
Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser. IE still sucks, and Chrome chews up so much memory that it is useless after a few hours. On Mac, I prefer Safari, although I keep Firefox around for those rare sites that don't support Safari.
So I think they're still doing a good job on the desktop/laptop browser market. I just hope that their struggles in the mobile market don't impact the desktop.
No sig? Sigh...
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.
It made Netscape's open-sourced browser actually work. At a time, when using IE was unpleasant, if not downright dangerous, this is very useful.
It later introduced tabbed browsing via middle-mouse-click -- a major 'productivity booster' (ahem!) for Internet addicts everywhere.
It wasn't so much that they innovated, because when they added new features they were typically already available in other browsers. It's that they provided a free, open source alternative to IE at a time when one was badly needed. In the early days they made big strides forward with things like tabbed browsing and SVG support. I suppose you could say they were in the right place at the right time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Too bad they were so narrowminded.
Extensions.
Sun died a slow death following 1970's midwest business principals in a 2000's world. Even its open source efforts, although noble, were crippled by managements tunnel vision. Sun was practically predicated on the phrase "cash money millionaires" and everything, absolutely everything was licensed and contracted in perpetuity. The allure of Linux combined with chipset advances and the culture, in my opinion, are what killed Sun.
the help was no help either. Suns doc portal online was a festering carbunkle with a search feature and their community of greybeards on IRC were nothing less than violent toward anyone who dared to question the OS without having studiously memorized the entire canon of SUN scriptures. Being gobbled up by Oracle/whatever was an inevitability.
now, does Mozilla fit that profile? maybe yes, maybe who cares. theyre already the realmedia player of the browser world with a video chat system and an inline tile targeted advertising program. They validate your searches with google by default, and often times new releases steamroll your configuration options like download path. They arguably havent worked toward their stated mission since 2006 but that isnt the point. Mozillas license alone gives the community so much power over its direction that its path and principle arent relevant. One profoundly stupid move is all it takes before a massive fork, and there have been forks. iceweasel itself is proof the mozilla brand is only as effective as its adherence to principal.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There were already holes in mine from 35. It did, however, ask for more after I updated.
How clueless is the author? Releasing updates that don't work on a monthly basis, dropping thunderbird support, and cancelling the contract with Google to make Yahoo the default search engine are killing the company. All they make that's noteworthy is Firefox and they're completely screwing it up and turning it into an ad-infested spam pile.
Firefox rose to prominence when the market desperately needed an alternative to the execrable Internet Explorer. Well, it worked. Firefox broke IE's stranglehold on the browser market, and now Chrome and Safari have kept it beat down. (And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Keeping a browser up to date and holding pace with the feature race is difficult and expensive. It's not surprising that Firefox has fallen behind while the commercial efforts keep steaming forward.
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
I'm grateful for what Firefox accomplished, but that doesn't mean we need it any more. (And there's no reason to think that should an open browser be needed again, one can't appear.)
Surely main stream-ish tabbed browsing was down to Opera (who was pre-empted by some other browser which was not Mozilla)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Alright everybody - if you think Firefox is better at everything, step over to this side of the line. If you think that Chrome is better at everything, step over to *this* side of the line. Yes sir? Yes, you. Opera? Listen - you just get the hell out of here, and leave your meal ticket on the table. Everybody else: being shouting!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.
I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.
Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but a few weeks ago I saw Chrome hit just a little short of 9GB RAM utilization on a machine that had been rebooted perhaps four hours before, with only a dozen open tabs. Was that a poor interaction between Chrome and my ad blocker and whatever the hell javascript and .GIFVs on Imgur does? Probably. But there's no way a browser's processes should be using more RAM than running virtual machines.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Because juggling RAM isn’t free in CPU time. It’s cool if you can fit it all in, but you still have to read and write data. If you have a lot of it, well your caches get trashed, and you’re still managing memory instead of doing meaningfull stuff.
the execrable Internet Explorer
Are you sure you didn't mean "excretable"?
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.
What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.
Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
And then there are the people using Mobile Safari sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the shitshow.
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.
.
Those companies that can transition from one to the other survive.
Those companies that cannot transition from one to the other falter.
In what way is it "Bloated"? It uses less ram than the Chrome/IE.
Chrome is bloated too, so #1 is a non-issue. #2 is the main problem.
I like Chrome and use it both at home and work almost exclusively.
Whenever I take a look at Firefox (mostly for compatibility testing) I just think "why bother?",
Why bother using something that is identical to the thing you already use?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You can thank Mozilla for being the first browser to seriously disrupt Internet Explorer's monopoly and bring us back to a standards based internet. It did plenty more besides that and continues to do so.
Sun's attitude always was "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Which was largely true, until they weren't cool anymore. But at that point the company was so big and entrenched that they'd lost sight of that. It was no longer "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Instead it was "If we keep making the things we've been making all along, people will buy them." The people in charge no longer understood that the engine of their success was constant innovation, and sat back and rested on their success. Assuming they ever understood that in the first place. It's entirely possible that Sun's success was entirely accidental. The gimmicks they started using to try to attract talent exposed their lack of understanding. It was not "Work for us and you'll get to design some of the coolest, bleeding edge technology in the world." It was "Work for us and we'll have a circus at work while we flail around aimlessly (And make you fill in a 12 page form to unlock version control.)"
Google's now in that position of making cool stuff that people will buy and use because it's cool. Their current leadership also seems to understand that they need to keep innovating to remain in the position they are now. Every so often you see some jackass writing about how Google needs to stop spending so much on "Useless R&D." I would suggest that you avoid taking stock advice from those people. Anywhoo, given that Google seems to understand that innovation is the key to success, the question is, can Mozilla keep up with them? Mozilla should have the advantage that they're able to focus on the one thing they do and do that really well. But to make serious advances in market share, they'd have to significantly stand out from the competition. I'm not entirely sure I can see that happening.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maybe they are where they are partially because they force people out or actually fire them for the employees' political beliefs.
The CEO that stepped down because of a vocal bunch who didn't like his politics is the first to come to mind. He was one of the founders of Mozilla! Likely a big voice in it's innovation.
I also have a personal friend who helped a client in the British government - and he was let go because his boss got angry - the British government has been known to spy on some of it's inhabitants apparently, and helping the client doomed my friend.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I've long since abandoned Firefox, but Thunderbird is still my email client of choice. The closest competitor in the Windows ecosystem is Postbox, and it's based on Thunderbird anyway.
Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.
Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.
As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.
The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.
IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.
What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!
Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.
I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.
I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.
Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Hmm...most folks I know still use Firefox. What browser is taking over from FF on the computer these days?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
As a sometime no one
While known for churning out showstopping innovation
applies better to Opera than to Firefox
At the time Opera was spyware/adware and was treated like plague blankets so for all intents and purposes it might as well have been Moz because nobody was shelling out $30 USD just to get Opera decrapified.
It is just too bad somebody at Moz is pulling an Elop and fucking the company for Google, because ever since they have turned Moz into a shitty ersatz Chrome their share has just nosedived, even those that are hooked on the extensions going to one of the alternate like PaleMoon,Waterfox, IceDragon,etc. I personally tossed FF from my software collection I give my customers, I now give 'em Seamonkey if they remember Netscape and PaleMoon if they don't. I mean if all I'm going to get from FF is an ersatz Chrome, why not just run Chrome?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
And then there are the people using Mobile Safari sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the shitshow.
Kinda like a special olympics medalist on the sidelines watching the real olympics.
Hey, if I wanted a barely functional web browser I'd use Lynx!
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Mozilla is a non-profit counterpart to other browsers. It started as a community browser with a call for donations - and many, many people (including everybody in my family) donated. However - with big Google and Yahoo deals and money, Firefox has left its roots. Market share has become more important than being a community browser. They incorporated interfaces for DRM content though there was strong opposition from the users, they changed their synchronization api and made hundreds of open source sync interfaces useless (and the new sync api is a nightmare), they now want all extensions to be signed by them exclusively, ignoring the pleas from the developers. I am still a friend of Mozilla. But no longer a fan. If they don't come back and start listening to the users and developers again, they will become just another browser. And there's still Chromium.
Which is another reason to continue to support Mozilla. Their code is open and there are other browsers based on that code tweaked and compiled for different needs. I switched to WaterFox because I wanted a fast 64 bit based version of FireFox and Mozilla hadn't released a 64 bit version at the time. I still use it. There are other versions targeted squarely at the fast/light crowd.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
You might want to give WaterFox a spin. I find it - slightly- faster than PM, and it handles massive amounts of tabs open better - and generally handles ram allocation better.
I use Firefox on desktop with some privacy related extensions like NoScript, Self Destructing Cookies, AdBlock (also for decluttering pages). I use Opera on desktop for Google Docs and a few work-related sites (Opera has the same engine as the latest Chrome). Basically I'm using Opera as if it were Word: one window, one site.
I use Opera on my Android devices because Firefox still has problems rendering some sites. It's part fault of those sites and part fault of bad decisions on the side of Mozilla. Go try reading the comments thread on Hacker News and you'll see (pick one with many nested comments.) Slashdot used to suffer from the same problem.
A bad handling of text inflation could have lost mobile to Mozilla, and maybe all the company. Some sites must work well because the people there are the ones that tell other people which tools are cool and which are uncool.
The extensions are good.. the open source is really nice... their problem may be their revenue model.
Chrome has been the most used web browser for the last couple of years:
http://www.w3schools.com/brows...
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.
If Mozilla's "paralleling" anything that would be Netscape, not Sun, which of course is ironic given where Mozilla comes from. Just as Netscape lost to Microsoft when IE was included in Windows, Mozilla's losing market share because Google puts the "Download Chrome" on its search landing page.
(And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Excuse me kind sir? Can I have a little bit of whatever it is that you are smoking? Because I don't know what it is, and it sure sounds like some REALLY good shit.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be. The most astounding piece of crap EVER. Even Microsoft has pretty much given up on it.
I won't even comment on your assertion that Chrome is better than Firefox in the memory-hogging department.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
Stop talking about revenue. Start talking about marketing.
Google has been promoting Chrome as if it was the coolest shit in the world. Chrome everywhere, Chromebook, Chromecast, Chrome this and Chrome that. Mozilla does not have much of a marketing budget (as far as I can tell).
It's not much of a mystery, if you like free shit, where YOU are the product being sold and bought, stick with Chrome. I'll stay with Firefox, thank you very much.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
You mean the shitshow browsing experience they get for using Mobile Safari?
According to those statistics, the most commonly used browser to access w3schools.com is Chrome. w3schools.com != web.
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 question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone? What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Without Mozilla the Microsoft/Google/Apple triumvirate will control all browser standards. I think Mozilla brings a different perspective that would be missed. It would be nice if Firefox OS gained enough traction to make a similar difference in mobile but the chance of that happening seems slim.
Known, by people who know about the history of the web-browser.
Can we all get along now?
http://gs.statcounter.com/
http://www.w3counter.com/globa...
It would be very bad if Firefox was gone.
The stock Android Webkit browser has a very bad security flaw - it does not properly enforce the Single Origin Policy (SOP) in Jelly Bean and below. It will not be fixed.
For Android devices that lack Google Play, Firefox is the best option.
Firefox would be an even better option if it was as fast as the stock Webkit browser. Let's hope that happens.
Potential Firefox wins:
Firefox is also the default browser in RedHat/Oracle/Scientific/CentOS Linux. That has to count for something.
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
Yes, absolutely.
Even if we assume there is no technical merit whatsoever to Mozilla's suite, they're still the only non-profit offering a web-browser, and they have an excellent track-record of advancing an open web. Google want to screw you for money through advertising. Microsoft seem to be doing ok with IE these days, but they don't have the open-web attitude Mozilla do: only Mozilla had a real objection to 'standardising' H.264, for instance.
Google release Chromium as FOSS, which is great. Still not sure why Chrome isn't FOSS, though.
On top of that, there are currently just 3 major HTML-rendering engines: WebKit, IE's Trident, and Mozilla's Gecko. It would not be good for the web to reduce this to 2, and take another step toward WebKit defining the web.
Firefox was once really innovative, and alongside the browser the Thunderbird mail client was a rising star - and it is still the case that Thunderbird is well utilised as probably the most comprehensive mail client that has more extensive functionality than any other existing MUA. What other mail client can deal with html mail, calendar sync, imap and have a pretty clean gui, and run on all the main computer operating systems, even if there are perhaps still too many unfixed bugs? Chrome is the preferred browser for both Windows and Linux users for many users, even though there remains a core of Windows users who for various reasons never moved away from I.E.! If Mozilla continues to wither, and Thunderbird then withers with the decline in the browser, it would be so nice if Google would build a Chrome-related email client that had as much functionality as Thunderbird but based on modern build tools, with efficient libraries! Anyone else have similar thoughts?
mike c
How can you compare a business that has only two real products (Firefox and Thunderbird) to a company that had several iterations of hardware and dozens of software products, as well as service, support, and contracting arms?
Of course Mozilla is on the downslide -- Chrome came along to compete with them, and Internet Explorer was improved, while Safari came into existence. Mozilla still make my browser and email clients of choice, but not all people make the same choice.
And so it should be.
But while Mozilla may be waning in popularity and market share, they are hardly imploding like Sun did. They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
That's weird, that's exactly the reason I switched back to Firefox, because that's exactly how Chrome behaved. Firefox isn't nearly as much of a memory hog.
Have you looked at the data Chrome sends around? It might surprise you. Of course that would require you to retire the old canard of "YOU ARE THE PRODUCT! blarf!" and actually come up with real arguments against them, so I doubt you'll actually do it.
My theory is that every release of Firefox that has come out for a few years now has been worse than the one before it. Their switch to rapid release has just made the situation worse. And the mobile version of Firefox is horrendous and borderline unusable.
The machines I regularly use have:
4GB
8GB
16GB
The last two need to run at least 2 and 4 VMs with 3Gb ram each respectively. Running chrome for day-to-day work would make these setups impractical, whereas firefox runs well (firefox needs to be restarted more frequently than the OSs, but not significantly).
Additionally, chrome/chromium have some display issues on one machine (linux, KDE, radeon).
No, I can't (or can't justify just for chrome when firefox is fine) adding more ram, most of the above are work machines, 1 already is fully populated with DDR2, upgrading the ram would be prohibitively expensive
If one is a professional web developer then the tools for Firefox are astoundingly good compared to about anything else. For daily browsing, Chrome is much faster. Horses for courses.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be.
I don't know if it always will be, but it's certainly a piece of crap, I agree, and getting crappier with each release. The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier. Although, admittedly, each browser has its own unique flavor of crappy.
Except that Opera is pretty much just a repackaged Chrome at this point.
While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80
After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.
The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.
-Matt
What makes you think that was auto-corrected at all? Spelling, grammar and just general knowledge of what the fuck a word means is abysmal nowadays.
The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier.
Wait, IE has gotten less crappy with each release, but Microsoft has decided that it's reached its lea of crap, and so they're delivering a new browser with their new Windows. That seems like IE just fell off the opposite trajectory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Arent' folks worried about Chrome sending massive amounts of info to Google?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
Exactly my experience, but with the addition of the Firefox devs basically telling me my memory leak problems were me "browsing it wrong".
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
even those that are hooked on the extensions going to one of the alternate like PaleMoon,Waterfox, IceDragon,etc.
This is only one step off the reservation. If Firefox gets decrapified and released as 64 bit then I'll step right back across the line. I'm running Pale Moon now, but the whole point of doing so is that it's still Firefox.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think they meant the rumored firefox phone that didn't materialize, or did it??
Think waaaaayyyyy back...
IE6 was a badly-written, compatibility-breaking, resource-hogging, security-bug written pile of fetid garbage that MS had pretty much stopped developing entirely. Firefox became popular to fight against that scourge. While subsequent versions of IE (when they finally came out) were not entirely great, they represented a significant step forward that realized what made Firefox so popular.
If IE 7 had been out at the time Firefox was released, I doubt Firefox ever would have become particularly popular. And the version of IE in the works discards MS's sordid standards-breaking legacy entirely, and will be no more broken, standards-wise than the other major browsers.
All I have to say about the memory leaks is that Chrome has never "locked" my hard drive light on for several minutes upon closing it to clean up the multiple GB of memory it decided to consume. The one-process-per-tab architecture of Chrome has real advantages, the biggest being when a tab leaks like a sieve (and this doesn't happen very often), you don't have to close every browser instance to clean it up.
You also forget it was first to have a pop-up blocker.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You might find dillo to be a fun browser, I've checked for CSS and it's easily disabled from the "tools" menu.
If you use Windows you have to (attempt to) build it for Cygwin and X11 (though using putty and Xming to run it from a tiny linux VM would be faster done nowadays)
I do miss the days it was able to login to forums (a decade ago)
No. Even if it was discovered that this was the case, they wouldn't care as long as it's shiny. Very few people really care about privacy or have any concern that having too much info out there about them could be a problem. Just look at all the people who use Facebook.
I recently dispelled that myth here at work, the HR dept claimed Chrome was faster accessing an outside resource through the network. I tested IE, Chrome, and FF.
In my test for this one resource IE performed the worst with minute + load times Chrome was near as bad at around 45 seconds, FF took the win at 20 second load times.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yes, you're right; Firefox OS is supposed to be a smartphone OS to my knowledge. Still, I want a browser, not a new phone OS. If they can come up with a phone OS that I can easily load on commonly-available phones (and I don't need to buy some shitty, overpriced, under-featured phone like the Ubuntu phone), then great, but I'd prefer they focused on their browser first. At this point, I really fail to see the appeal of a different phone OS, since the apps are so important and a different OS probably can't use existing apps unless they make it Android-compatible somehow (which would be difficult since Google controls access to the Play store). I'm much more interested in alternative Android-based ROMs than a completely different phone OS.
...that don't exist on Chrome. I like Chrome, but there are some things Firefox does better, and I'm glad Chrome has some competition to keep it honest. IE is still a hopeless mess, and I suppose Safari is multiplatform these days, but I don't see it getting much traction on Windows. thank god for Firefox.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, it's not distinct. That Sun is still alive is the sort of denialism I might have expected from the Nicean Council, not supposed rationalists -- well, rationalists being nothing more than non-practicing Judeo-Christians with a smug bourgeois paint-job, maybe I shouldn't be surprised!
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
And maybe we don't really need "progress" anymore, yet for some reason we seem to pursue it for its own sake. Some people seem to just live to put a coinbox between every itch and its scratch, and those people are tiresome.
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
And it's that kind of attitude that lead to 10+GB Operating Systems, GB+ Office suites and the need for 3Ghz dual core machines and 8GB RAM in order to do *anything* useful.
Meanwhile back in the '80s a C64 or Apple][+ could run a combat flight simulator in about 40K of RAM and 1 *MHZ* Cpu. In the '90s Amigas were used for special effects and genlocking.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I mean, if you were more interested in delivering a just society rather than blunting the corners of the one from which you profit just enough to keep your position (and that of the downtrodden) secure within the correct order, your actions would be effective toward that end instead of the other, wouldn't it?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
It's INFOWORLD: The Trabant of the IT journalism world. If you want Clue, look elsewhere.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Sorry guys, but I am not waiting for a Firefox specific in-browser chat tool. I got better chat programs that are compatible with the rest of the world. And if I want to chat with someone I enable my chat program. What I am waiting for is a browser that starts fast, loads pages fast, allows me to switch tabs and kill a tab instead of showing when a flash ad kills it's performance. I used to pay Mozilla some money. A long time ago.
Does an Athlon II x2-250 count as slow? Because I have one and I can't see any difference between Chrome and Firefox in day-to-day browsing.
I think they meant the rumored firefox phone that didn't materialize, or did it??
They've shifted gears, or "pivoted", or whatever you want to call a failed idea, again. FTFA:
Firefox OS has thus far been limited primarily to developing countries. Spreading to markets where Android and iOS already have a stranglehold on consumers' choices will be a challenge, but Mozilla is undaunted, seeing a sweet spot for a device between smartphones and feature phones -- flip phones, for example -- where Firefox OS can play.
Last I looked, my old flip phone was a feature phone. Nobody will be making flip phones within a decade because the low demand will push the unit cost through the roof. Same as it's now cheaper to buy a flat screen than a CRT (can you even buy a new CRT???), or a new 2/3/486 computer.
And yet, according to the article, this is their great hope for the future:
We are trying to move the mobile landscape toward more open standards and open technology. That's why we are doing with Firefox OS." Over time, Firefox OS could be monetized via means such as app stores, Gal says.
Idiots. Selling something to the lowest bargain-basement market in the world and expecting anyone to pay for apps - on a feature phone??? Someone should send the EPA (or maybe the DEA) to their offices - there's definitely something mind-warping in the air or the water.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Other people have given various examples, but I'd like to add two:
Mozilla proved (eventually) that open source development of a major, widely-used program was possible. It unfortunately wasn't enough to save Netscape (the company), but most people hadn't heard of open source before Mozilla (or only heard of it in relation to Linux).
Mozilla made web standards important. Netscape and IE added extensions all over the place, and due to their dominance (first Netscape, then IE) they were defacto standards, even when the W3C disagreed with them. Ask anyone who did web development circa 2000 how fun that was. The Mozilla team decided to follow the W3C standards, and when it gained enough marketshare to outshine IE, it forced IE to do the same. Neither are perfect, but they're a lot better than they used to be, and the situation for web developers isn't as bad.
(Granted, the whole HTML5 thing was more or less a revolution against the W3C and its unrealistic viewpoint that webpages should all look like research papers, and Mozilla did take a leading role in that, but that's just something that needed to happen. We have HTML5 now and the W3C seems to be better about things these days.)
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Have you looked at the data Chrome sends around?
I have and I wasn't happy about it when using Chrome for something that should have remained private to the application's users.
I tried every combination of command-line options, including undocumented ones, to turn off reporting to Google, including the options that are for this purpose, and there was still a trickle of reporting things that I didn't want reported.
But that was a few years ago. Maybe Chrome is more privacy respecting now :-)
I don't mind that it talks to Google by default, after all there are some good services if you like them, and phishing protection (for example) is a good thing.
But I was surprised and disappointed that using all the options to turn off reporting didn't turn it all off.
Every time I fire it up I cringe, it just looks terrible to me. It's mostly how it displays tabs and the url on the same level, just throws me off
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You mean the T2Mobile Flame that I've been using as my daily phone for the past 8 months?
They are.
firefox (iceweasel ) ESR just got an update on debian a couple of days ago with numerous security fixes (31.5.0)
What makes you think they can't be secure AND innovate?
I won't debate your test, but was it repeatable and did you have control of the other end? Now, test rendering of a complex CSS3 style on a large document. Then, test a single-page application with heavy use of JavaScript and lots of DOM manipulation. There's a lot more to a browser than download times or even rendering times. I have plenty of experiences showing Chrome is faster in most cases that stress the browser than is Firefox. It's not a myth. They do play catch-up with one another, but Chrome with the V8 JavaScript engine and the WebKit rendering system is very quick indeed.
at least not in early builds. It was MDI (multiple document interface). Maybe it was in betas or something, but back when tabs were first introduced in Firefox Opera still had an MDI interface. I remember trying it and being frustrated with how clumsy MDI was for changing between pages...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sun was run out of business by cheap Intel hardware + free Linux devouring their core business (expensive high performance workstations and servers). Nobody makes money on Java. Even IBM doesn't. They make money hiring out cheap Indian programmers. That didn't leave Sun a viable product. Intel hardware + Linux (Lintel?) got too cheap too fast. It didn't matter if you're Sun box was 10x faster. I could roll out 100 Lintel boxes for 1/10 the price.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There should have been plenty of businesses to buy up and use that hardware. There's never a shortage of people that could put computer hardware to good use. otoh I've seen economists talking about how in the 70s businesses spent 40 cents of every dollar on investment and now it's like 10 cents, with the rest going into the shareholders/investor's pockets, so it's possible we're just seeing the effect of run away parasitism sucking all the capital out of our economy (I think the quote was something like:"Finance used to be a way to get money into productive businesses, now it's a way to get money out").
But I think it's more likely that a lack of demand for Sun hardware existed. If you're selling something for 1/10 retail it's because nobody really wants it...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There's still a tonne of things that Firefox does for extension authors like myself to make our lives easier. I've been toying with a Chrome port of my plugin but it's been slow going since there's so much networking stuff Firefox does for me that Chrome doesn't yet (and maybe never will). Heck, I can't even use the "let" keyword yet without hacking into Chrome's config...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
the incident was 6 years ago, and FF has been struggling for longer than that. Losing Google and the revenue it brought was a big blow. I felt like they wanted him out and used that as an excuse. Not that people don't lose their jobs over stupid things all the time. It's just odd to see it happen to someone so high up. Usually their above all that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Firefox opens much faster than chrome because it only loads the active tab initially.
Yeah, what's with this anyway? This is the most brain-dead thing I've seen in Chrome. The Firefox way is smart because it recalls all your tabs, but doesn't slow your computer to a crawl for a minute or two by trying to load everything at once.
I will say I haven't seen FF crash in quite a while now; I'm using 36 on Linux. A couple years or so ago, it was pretty bad, but lately I haven't had any trouble at all, though I do have to restart it every other week like you say.
Let me start by saying that I have been using Mozilla (the suite) since the 0.x beta days and I am using SeaMonkey (the successor to the Mozilla Suite) to write this post.
The things I dislike about what Mozilla are doing:
1.The way they are forcing all sorts of new UI onto people without ever considering what its users (both users who have been using for years and those new to Firefox) actually want.
2.The fact that they have become conservative when it comes to supporting new web things. In particular new image formats like mng, jng and webp. It used to be that they would support all these new web things and push the envelope, now they are behind Chrome and even IE in some of these areas.
3.The way they dont care about the corporate market, dont provide official installers that the corporate IT people can use and push to all their machines, dont provide the configuration options the corporate IT people need, dont provide a way for the corporate IT people to block updates except when they are ready to push them locally and dont provide a way for the corporate IT people to turn off all the things (phoning home etc) that the corporate IT people dont want.
Meanwhile back in the '80s a C64 or Apple][+ could run a combat flight simulator in about 40K of RAM and 1 *MHZ* Cpu.
I wonder what Chuck Yeager thought about 4-color graphics.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That was just an example. Even with more realism, more colors and better graphics it doesn't explain why the same kind of game needs 4-5 GB today (except for bloated coding). Especially when you can do the following in under 100k (CPU power is needed because everything is done from procedures)
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Besides, colors and sound don't make a game, gameplay does. Look at DooM (the remake). Looks nice but gameplay is nowhere near the original, same goes for Half-Life vs HL2
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
That was just an example. Even with more realism, more colors and better graphics it doesn't explain why the same kind of game needs 4-5 GB today (except for bloated coding).
Well, mostly it's textures and audio. Look at any AAA game and that's where the bulk of the install comes from.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pale Moon arguably isn't Firefox anymore.
If I can use the same profile if I just swap one or two extensions, then it's close enough for government work.
Honestly speaking, if the only thing you valued from Firefox was the old UI,
It isn't. It's that it's the best browser available. It might not always be fastest, but I actually find that sites work better in it... even Google sites like Youtube. I don't know how google is failing so badly at the web, but they are. Example, Youtube in chrome. Pause a video and go away for a long time. Come back and start it up again. Instead of reconnecting to the stream and buffering and picking up like normal it chokes at the end of the buffer and actually reloads the page. In the process it fails to accurately remember where you were and restarts about the place you paused last time. WTF? What was the point of having their own browser again? Certainly it wasn't to have a platform on which their own site would work correctly, because it doesn't. So just for the purposes of tracking people? Right-o!
I do run Chrome all day every day, I use it for gmail, which is still slightly better in Chrome than in Firefox. I can spare the memory. But seriously, Chrome's only real justification for existing (sandboxing) has been shown to not actually provide meaningful security, so who gives a shit?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The feature phone market is being cannibalized by smartphones around the world. Even India is seeing declining feature phone sales and rising smart phone sales.
Why? Because the cheapest smartphones in India now sell for $31.00. That's right in the middle of the price range of existing feature phones, which vary from $16 to $50 or more.
And yes, Mozilla should have stuck with making a better browser, instead of futzing around with all sorts of "me-too" projects. Same as Canonical should have stuck with making a linux distro instead of all their vapor-ware. After all, if they don't even know that a flip phone is a feature phone, and not some "sweet spot between feature phones and smartphones", they're talking out of their ass, and need to take a chainsaw to both their "vision" and their management.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I absolutely HATED Opera. More bloated every year, and as far as firsts, the first to have a big advertising banner. I liked Mozilla but when they started changing the name every other issue, I lost interest. Never liked Firefox - I never found it to be remotely fast, buit rather a sluggish pig... When I was using windows and classic Mac OS, I stuck to Netscape. On Windows for quick browsing I used only something called ?one by one? (can't remember what it was called now, but it was quick). Same as on OSX, until it became unusable, Camino. All sorts of compatibility issues with Safari ( "please update your browser"), unfortunately, still have , with Java..! Tried Opera *twice* on OSX . Hated it. Same with iCab. Bottom line here is, most browsers SUCK. Finally, I stuck with Chrome from almost the day it became available for OSX, happily, until I found Torch.. Best broewser ever, but sadly, out of date now..
There's plenty of other open source browsers, such as Konqueror. Firefox is just the largest of them.
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.
Strange as it might be, I have both Chrome and Firefox, and not because of familiarity, I feel Firefox is a better browser. I know what it is tracking, and it performs well for me.
Chrome too performs well. I probably use Chrome about 2 hrs per day vs Firefox's 5 hrs per day. There is something about look and feel that prevents me from dropping Firefox for Chrome. There is a successor to Opera and I will be considering it in the coming days.
Chrome 3/10 FF 7/10 is my rating
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
If you like FF that much more than Chrome, why bother with Chrome at all?
The main use I've found for Chrome these days is for watching Netflix on my laptop; I simply can't do that with FF, but with Chrome it works out-of-the-box on Linux. It's also good for keeping around just in case I run into some site that doesn't seem to work right with FF, just to see if it's a FF issue or a problem with the site.