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Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla is reexamining and revamping the way it builds, communicates, and decides features for its browser. In short, big changes are coming to Firefox. Dave Camp, Firefox's director of engineering, sent out two lengthy emails, just three minutes apart: Three Pillars and Revisiting how we build Firefox. Both offer a lot more detail into what Mozilla is hoping to achieve.
...partnerships give MONEYYYYY.
Everything that's popular attracts people and companies who are out to make money.
You can have your crap in our Firefox, as long as you pay us MONEYYYYY. $.$
I remember when a new version of firefox invoked excitement for what wonderful features they've added.
Now I just wonder what they've broken, redesigned or removed for no good reason this time.
I remember when Firefox was the amazingly simple and expandable alternative to Explorer. Now it's just bloatware.
This stuff they talk of is exactly why I don't use Firefox anymore. I don't want partnerships, and I don't want add-ons (okay, mayyybe one or two). A web browser displays the content... when it works properly, I should barely be able to notice the web browser is anything more than a window.
Wow, -1, really? That's a bit harsh, don't you think?
Faster updates leads to more bugs and increasing technical debt that strangles development. It is slowly ruining chrome, so please don't do the same.
I'd still use Firefox. I would probably continue to use it until I couldn't access my credit card website to pay my bills.
Maybe I'm not a very imaginative guy, but it feels like in the last decade that we've moved through most of the growing pains and going forward we'll only have to deal with a slowly evolving web. (or maybe that's the optimist in me)
I still have Presto-based Opera installed on a few systems (Mac and Linux), I can't imagine much practical use for supporting Opera 12 anymore. It think I keep it around for nostalgia more than anything. I do test against it, but for failures I might not do much other than file a bug against my project and let it stagnate just to see if anyone else even cares. (they won't)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Quite a few of Mozillas under-talented, overpaid devs post here. Don't be too surprised.
Remember when everyone made fun of Mozilla because it had everything including the about:kitchensink in it? Remember how Firefox was supposed to get rid of all that bloat and modernize the web browser? Guess Mozilla is back to bundling a ton of junk together in to one package.
Only this time its far worse, at least with Mozilla it was useful stuff like a web browser and an HTML editor. This time we get junk of dubious value like Firefox Hello and Pocket which would be much better kept as downloadable extensions. Of course, it is painfully obvious that the reason they are not separate extensions is because of the financial upside they get from bundling them. Same thing with the "sponsored tabs."
I guess they just view Firefox as a cash cow that they need to milk to keep funding non-browser projects like that POS called Firefox OS, the Mozilla Science Lab, and all those grants they have given out over the years.
Oh and most their paid programmers/QA staff make little more than minimum wage. Just because Mozilla is "cool" doesn't make it okay to pay vastly under market value for their employee's services. Unfortunate to see how much Mozilla has become poisoned with mission creep and lack of a clear direction to the point that they have to lower themselves to the level of Java and bundle sponsored junk.
Yep. I quit updating FF quite a while ago. Didn't want them sneaking in stuff any more.
Meeh. Firefox is not hi-tech anymore. The engine is crusty and slow. Not that good hardware acceleration either. The e10s project is not making enough progress and there will not be full tab process separation for a very long time. There is also no sandboxing.
Chrome and Microsoft Edge are nice choices. They have cutting-edge engines and big active development teams.
Why this is marked troll I have no idea. I've dumped firefox myself, most of my 'tech' friends at work have done the same. At work the only person still using firefox is our web dev guys to make sure there's compatibility. Most have switched to chromium, palemoon(FF branch), or Opera. I honestly believe at this point, there's a group of people inside mozilla that are just going out of their way to destroy FF, the decisions have been braindead for the last 4 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
Maybe focus on writing good code so you don't have to update it as much? Plus, you can save money by firing all your UI developers.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Firefox's days are probably at an end, and it's entirely the fault of the lead developers at Mozilla who seem to have lost the concept of improvement, replacing it instead by a focus on change. There's a difference between these two things. Improvement implies holding onto good things, while change does not. Mozilla has not been holding onto good (or even essential) features of basic usability.
Here are two examples to illustrate this, both in the area of bookmarking:
Neither of these are advanced features. They are totally elementary fundamental functionality which most modern applications provide, but Mozilla devs appear not to care about such fundamentals, since they disappeared and never returned. I assume there's nobody left on the team to care about such non-sexy core usability, and instead it's all about "What can we change today?".
There's no shortage of other examples of core usability that just mysteriously disappeared for no good reason from one version to the next, giving you the impression that there is nobody looking after such things and making sure they are preserved. (Another example is Customise, which was partly destroyed several versions ago and many things became hardwired.) It's as if no QA is being done anymore, since you'd expect QA to block releases that fail regression testing of usability features that were available earlier.
If they can't look after the fundamentals, they're not going to survive.
When will they fix the automatic update service?
Every time I check my relative's computers, their Firefox and Thunderbird are outdated, and I have enabled the Mozilla automatic update service.
And I could live without Pocket, Sync, Marketplace, or the useless chat system in Thunderbird.
All of these should be addons.
Sync is a good idea, but it should be possible to run your own Sync server using standard software instead of a half-baked python script.
I admt to still using it. (mac, latest builds in os and ff) Oddly enough, it's impossible to permanently remove Bing as a search. Everytime I do, upon restarting FFthere is Bing, back again as the default search.
So what does /. recommend as a resplacement? And why?
Firefox has been my one of the favorite browser but now and then it frequently crashes. The most unfortunate things is that I am unable to recover my bookmarks save in it.
Think if of a monkey at the zoo, flinging excrement, but with less forethought - at least the monkey might be trying to fling poo on someone. Mozilla doesn't have a plan for Firefox - they're flailing about in a panic, trying everything just to see what sticks.
Which just annoys what's left of Firefox's users, driving the numbers smaller.
Translation: "Mozilla plans for firefox more CRAP, better add-ons (this one i like), and faster frustration."
Instead of better performance, hardware acceleration, sandboxing, multiprocess, multithreading etc etc...
I've switched to Palemoon. The thing I worry the most about with that decision is that retarded UI changed in FF might sneak its way into Palemoon just because it is bothersome to maintain a branch with too many differences from the main one.
There is "dillo" if you want the simple & fast browser. Super quick - and not bloated with any extensions to html. Well, it does images . . .
Firefox has lost touch with its users over the Adobe DRM pact , redirecting searches to Yahoo - not because it's a better search engine - it's a worse one! - but because Yahoo paid them to, and now the new IN YOUR FACE page promoting "partners" when you open a new tab - mentally interrupting you.
Firefox remains a slow memory pig. I'd ditch it in a minute if there's something better. Opera and Chrome are perhaps better, but are slowish with a large memory footprint too Someone, please give us a fast browse with a small memory footprint. How hard can that be?
PS Some people will say you can't be fast and have a small memory footprint, but if they take 30Mb of memory per page, that takes time to read and write.
Fuck you. You broke the best one with v39.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bork-bork-bork/
I honestly believe at this point, there's a group of people inside mozilla that are just going out of their way to destroy FF, the decisions have been braindead for the last 4 years.
Yeah, but reading your other posts it looks like you believe a lot of crazy shit.
The reality is that Firefox has been struggling figure out where to go next for years now. There have been some improvements to the core tech like the Javascript engine and HTML layout engine, but beyond that it was fairly feature complete long ago. There are some major architectural issues that need sorting (one process per tab, the add-on API, the plug-in API etc.) but those are hard to fix without breaking everything.
So they started to muck about with the GUI. If there's one thing that Slashdotters hate, it's GUI changes. Firefox was kind of a mess though, with two different menu systems (the Firefox button and the system menus), a preferences Window that reminds you of 1998 and IE6, lots of stuff that is only exposed via about:config etc.
Incompetent though the UX people at Mozilla may be, there is no evidence of malice here. Just not knowing what to do with a browser that has a lot of historical baggage in the code base that is blocking some of the real improvements people want to see.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I've switched to Palemoon. The thing I worry the most about with that decision is that retarded UI changed in FF might sneak its way into Palemoon just because it is bothersome to maintain a branch with too many differences from the main one.
Valid fear. With luck that will be a no, but if it does they'll simply be shooting themselves in the foot people will also say 'fuck it' and move to something else.
Om, nomnomnom...
Engineers love to change things. And every time some software engineer starts talking about "new and improved" I start expecting "different but worse". And "worse" usually comes in the form of unnecessary complications, improvements that don't interest me, and decisions taken out of my hands, such as the number of times per hour some program degrades system performance by checking for "updates".
So, in warning to Dave Camp, I'll just quote Bones again: "I've found that evil usually triumphs...unless good is very, very careful."
Is Microsoft intentionally destroying Firefox? Microsoft pays to have Bing search be the default search engine in newer versions of Firefox. That viciously destructive dishonesty is causing people who don't know how to re-configure Firefox to abandon Firefox. Version changes should NOT cause configuration changes.
Most people don't have the technical knowledge to know how they've been manipulated, or how to restore the default search engine to Google search.
In the past, Google paid Mozilla Foundation $300 million each year to make Google search the default search engine in Firefox. Google apparently didn't cause problems, even though it paid a shocking amount.
Now, I understand, Mozilla Foundation gets most of its money from Microsoft. Microsoft pays Yahoo. Yahoo pays Mozilla Foundation to make "Yahoo search" (actually mostly Microsoft Bing search) the default search engine in Firefox.
The Thunderbird and SeaMonkey Composer GUIs have been damaged, apparently deliberately. File saves in the newer versions of both ask for a new file name, and don't suggest the last one chosen. The damage was reported several months ago, but has not been fixed.
Is that another example of Microsoft's Embrace, Extend, Extinguish? People who feel forced away from Thunderbird may choose Microsoft software to replace it. Is that something Microsoft is trying to accomplish?
In my opinion, dishonest people should not be employed in management. In my opinion, the managers and members of the board of directors of both Microsoft and Mozilla Foundation who approved the dishonesty of sneakily re-configuring Firefox should be immediately fired, and not allowed to have management positions in the future.
Mozilla Foundation may be desperate now that it has lost the incredible amount of money paid by Google.
Unlikely, the maker of Palemoon doesn't like Australis as he explains on https://www.palemoon.org/layou....
No Auastralis is the main thing why most current Palemoon users use it instead of Firefox.
Yes - never call it malice if it is adequately explained by stupidity.
That said, bloating feature-complete programs is unfortunately commonplace. And adapting GUI's according to the largest idiot's preferences seems to be the latest hype in UI development.
In what way is it significantly bloated compared to 1,0?
I remember the days where to be usable you needed about 10-20 extensions, and THAT made it a bloated, leaky, hoggish mess; when javascript took the browser to a crawl; and when simple updates (like 1.0 - 1.5, which as I recall primarilly were visual updates and adding a new tab button) took something like a year to come to release. Trust me if you werent there, this is better.
I couldn't take it no more. The slowness, the crashing, the halting (Amazon, GitHub Atom pages, etc). So after about 2 years of fighting with Firefox I changed to Chrome about 3 months ago and I didn't look back. Sure Chrome is not perfect, but it's better than Firefox. And that's the deal right now, it comes a point when people finally fed up enough to finally ditch Firefox. Users can only put with a definite amount of bad choices by the devs and Firefox keep making worst and worst choices.
Like me, more and more people are doing the same and Firefox is being relegated to a curiosity, and that's a good thing, it may open the door to a new strong open project that poses a real alternative to Chrome.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
When is Firefox finished ? its a solvable problem right ?
thats why software development isn't engineering, because their "bridge" is never finished, that driveway is never quite paved, that tower is never fully erected.
See the May 12, 2015 Mozilla Foundation article, Update on Digital Rights Management and Firefox Quoting: "... the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM) to play back DRM-wrapped content ... will be downloaded from Adobe shortly after you upgrade or install Firefox."
Adobe has a long history of being invasive and abusive and releasing buggy software, in my opinion. Basically, installing new versions of Firefox now appears to give Adobe complete control, even though it is "sandboxed". Mozilla Foundation apparently does not disclose if it was paid by Adobe.
A huge problem, apparently, is that technically knowledgeable users will complain intensely. So, Mozilla Launches A New Firefox Version Without DRM Support. (See the U.S. English version 39.0, for example.)
Apparently the idea is that the technically knowledgeable users will get what they want, but most users will be sneakily manipulated, and the technically knowledgeable users will accept that.
See also this May 12, 2015 article: That DRM support in Firefox you never asked for? It's here. Quoting: " The first version of Adobe's CDM for Firefox is only available on Windows Vista and later and then only for 32-bit versions of the browser. Windows XP, OS X, Linux, and 64-bit versions of Firefox are not yet supported, and there's no word yet on when they might be."
Weird.
I was there before Mozilla existed, and I respectfully disagree.
To answer your question about how it's bloated since 1.0, please consider this: which updates in the past year or so have not added an extra icon to the main toolbar and/or come with a splash screen about the update that primarily advertises a new feature that isn't a core part of the browser and would previously have been handled with an add-on (if at all)? Why is there an "Apps" entry on my "Tools" menu now? Pocket? Hello?
Meanwhile, quality seems to have dropped significantly since the rapid release schedule. There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox. I literally have to fire up another browser to use them, and that could be IE or Chrome or even Safari on iOS, so it's not that someone has written an IE-only site in 2015 or anything like that. Of course it's particularly annoying with Firefox because unlike every other major browser for many years, taking out one tab in Firefox can still take out everything else as well.
Perhaps instead of trying to be all things^W^WChrome to all people, they would do better to go back to their roots as the simple, expandable browser the AC mentioned, and perhaps focus on the robustness issues with plug-ins and cross-tab contamination that have plagued them for so long. They might not take over the entire Web that way, but at least they'd still be the best choice for a significant part of the market instead of slowly drifting into obscurity on their current course.
I really hope they do, because the two reasons I still tend to use Firefox by default on most PCs are the add-on ecosystem and my general distrust of Google and more recently Microsoft. Mozilla seem to be going the wrong way on both fronts right now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If Mozilla focused on the basics and left all the fluff in the add-ons they'd be better off.
Basics
1. Standards compliance.
2. UI that reflects the users choices from a basic menu/tab system on a desktop to the swipe and go tablet look depending on the machine it's installed.
3. Keeping plug-ins from hosing the entire browsing experience.
All the rest can pretty much sit in plug-in land so the user can pick and choose their poisons of features to add. No pocket, no built in dev tools, nada. Small, simple, compact, and complete.
The reality is that Firefox has been struggling figure out where to go next for years now.
Call it done and ship it.
If the struggle is to figure out new things to add rather than getting what you figured out done then that is a pretty big indication that you are done.
Time to clean up the code, optimize, call it finished and start a new fun project to work on.
Mozilla switched to Yahoo as default search, not Bing. Apple's the one that's had a flirtatious relationship with Bing.
It is hard to believe, Brendan Eich was the last one to be purged over a thoughtcrime. Will there be more, or have people learned to hold their tongues and hide their identities better?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Unfortunately these two things are somewhat conflicting. They are working on a process-per-tab/plugin implementation ("Electrolysis") but it will require changes to many add-ons.
Here at work, we can't with good conscience recommend using IE, so we recommend using Firefox for daily browsing. And to use IE only when a website requires it. So more frequent updates to over 200 clients proves to be laborious. And with things like when version 19 was released and the in-browser rendering of PDF's was somewhat broken...well, let's just say I don't like the idea of more frequent updates.
In the old days of 1.0 I could run it happily in a 64Mb PC. Now I can't run it for more than a day without it filling up 3-4G of memory, frequently crashing at this point (I assume because it's a 32 bit application now.)
There's been something very wrong with Firefox since 4.0, and while I know the developers have made heroic efforts to fix the constant leaks and bloating, every time they do, it just takes another version to break everything again.
I love Firefox, and keep coming back to it after using Chrome for a little bit and being repelled, but it's not what it was.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Palemoon isn't Firefox any more, it's not tracking the Firefox source tree like it used to. It's a separate browser now, and while it does pick up some security updates it won't bet getting Australis or any of the other crap.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I really feel for Mozilla because all their political correctness, poorly implemented updates, and wasting resources on other worthless projects have just put them in a a position that only attracts the truly loyal users. Which by the way is shrinking every month. More updates and more add on's is their answer?? Good luck with that. Obviously the people at Mozilla still does not get it. Maybe its just that the majority of people at Mozilla are just not in tune with the rest of browser users and they still reject every constructive criticism that might help make Firefox better.
So, Mozilla management thinks - Firefox users want more releases? Are they kidding? They think users want more bundled proprietary junk added to the browser with those releases? Mozilla management wants to drop support for the architectures most Firefox plug-ins use - so that a mass of existing plug-ins just die, that's a good idea? Sad to see Mozilla management just hastening the destruction of their user base like this.
I was there since phoenix was .2 or so. Back when they were still firebird, the browser was at its peak.
Bloat that i can name off-hand: tab candy, sync, new tab page ads, apps, pocket, firefox button, web developer shit.
In that specific case it would be understandable. Frankly I'm expecting Perl 6 and Half-Life 3 before Electrolysis ships anyway, but if it ever does, I think most people would understand that it's a significant architectural change and there are very good reasons for making it.
It's the frequent breakage of useful extensions just because someone felt like rearranging the UI or some superficially unrelated APIs that winds up a lot of users and extension developers, I think.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The reality is that Firefox has been struggling figure out where to go next for years now.
The reality is that Firefox shouldn't be trying to go anywhere. It's a fucking web browser. If I want more bullshit in my browser, I'll open another site. If I want to integrate that site into my browser, I'll go looking for a browser extension. I don't want it done for me. If I did, I'd have opened some site-specific app. I just want the goddamn browser.
Also, the other reality is that Firefox is supposed to be a platform which is highly themeable, so actually changing the GUI shouldn't even be necessary. If it was necessary, then Firefox is nothing it was supposed to be. If it wasn't necessary, then they are big fuckups for forcing the change instead of just making a different theme available to users who wanted to try it. So is Firefox a big piece of shit, or are the devs big fucking idiots? There's no third way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Virtual +1 Funny
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Well, I guess it does. wtf?
The reality is that Firefox shouldn't be trying to go anywhere. It's a fucking web browser. If I want more bullshit in my browser...
I should have mentioned that their market share was falling too. Chrome was rising fast, and even IE didn't suck too badly by V10. So they knew that they needed to change to maintain their position, but didn't know how.
Of course market share isn't necessarily such a good metric. If the number of browser users is growing but the number of Firefox users remains static their share will drop, for example. As much as some geeks dislike it, people really seem to love Chrome. Perhaps Mozilla's mistake was in not catering to their core user base, and instead trying to be popular with causal users by copying the market leader.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are currently several sites I visit regularly -- as part of work, mind, so these are professional business sites not bleeding edge web geek blogs -- that will crash Firefox.
Have you filed bug reports for those crashes? Care to share more information about the websites that cause them?
I'm serious, I can try to help get those bugs resolved.
Would it take you more than a weekend to roll your own Blink-based browser?
The high point was 3.6. Starting with the UX-mandated removal of the status bar in 4.0, and continuntuing all the way through the elimination of the option to disable Javascript, and on through the marketshare-destroying Australis, users have relied on third parties to develop an extension with every release in order to undo the decisions of the UX team. We're now up to 10-20 extensions, all over again.
I should have mentioned that their market share was falling too. Chrome was rising fast, and even IE didn't suck too badly by V10. So they knew that they needed to change to maintain their position, but didn't know how.
No. That's a false assumption. Sometimes there's nothing you can do to preserve market share. You know what they could have done that would have resulted in market share rising again after it dipped? Nothing. That's right, they should have done nothing. I mean, sure, bug fix, keep up with standards, help drive the standards even. But you don't change things that people like in order to make yourself more popular. That's goddamned idiotic at best.
If Firefox had changed nothing, then when Chrome actually got all the same functionality as Firefox used to have and became bloated and slow and memory-hungry just like Firefox then many users would have come back to Firefox naturally. Instead, they added bloat and crap to the point where it became slower than even the new improved Chrome, and users didn't come back.
They should have done nothing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let me guess - you don't want ads on the internet either, right? Do you also want free groceries, free gas, free clothes etc?
I wonder if they will be able just of that!!!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Thanks for the offer. And yes, in a couple of cases I've reported a URL via the Firefox made me sad feature.
I'm torn about doing more. On the one hand, of course I'd like to see the issues fixed and in principle I'm happy to help. As a software developer myself I understand the usefulness of detailed technical information and test cases.
On the other hand, every time I go near Bugzilla I seem to spend 15-30 minutes trying to figure it out, before sometimes getting to the stage of actually submitting a useful issue but more often just giving up. I'm sure it's great for people who use it regularly, but for an occasional contributor it's awful. And unfortunately the reality is that I can't justify spending a client's money like that every time I find a bug in a browser if I have four other browsers available to me within 10 seconds that can load the site just fine, and as selfish as it sounds, there's only so much income that I'm willing to give up by working on non-billable activities.
So again, thank you for the offer, but if you have any pull with Mozilla I would encourage you to spend it on either improving the reporting systems so we can all contribute more effectively in the future, or on improving the built-in diagnostics in Firefox so if I come across a site that does hang there is still a mechanism available to capture what was really going on internally at the time and report it back.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They should have done nothing.
Completely agree, and it's what makes me more angry than anything else related to the mess that is Firefox today.
They utterly discarded their core user base, the people who loved and brought the browser to the point it was, chasing some pipe dream of market share percentage points. They became convinced that trying to maintain that share was more important than anything else, and so, like an anorexic person, went on a self-destructive rampage trying to achieve that impossible and truly undesirable goal.
Firefox should have let Chrome cater to simpletons, if that's the direction Google wanted to go. We now have four(ish) primary browsers -- Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE/Edge -- all of which seem to be made for the clueless. All the edges have been sanded down, extra buttons and knobs removed, and privacy only an afterthought. Instead of a bright standout in that lineup, Firefox is just another loser, trying to blend in with the "cool kids".
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Seriously, what's the point?
Everyone knows Amazon brings Firefox practically to a halt. Many people also know that Atom GitHub pages crash Firefox. These are know issues for many months and nothing (really, literally nothing) has been done about it by the devs. So, there is really no point to keep filling but reports about this issue when the devs don't even solve those related bugs that they already know that exist for a long time.
All we want is what Firefox 3.5 and earlier were like. A capable and extensible, yet lightweight by default, browser with a sensible and usable UI, and a versioning scheme that accurately reflects the true significance of any changes. And it should be independent, too, doing what's best for its users, rather than poorly imitating Chrome many months later.
It's particularly bad at Hacker News. If you dare to express any sort of valid criticism about Mozilla, Firefox or Rust, you will get unjustly downvoted. For a community so closely tied to an organization that supposedly supports freedom, openness and tolerance, they sure do like to suppress the expression of any ideas that they may disagree with!
Yes, we're aware Bugzilla is a significant barrier for people who aren't used to it. I've heard talk of making big changes there, but I don't know if there are concrete plans for it. Bugzilla is a fairly integral part of the Mozilla project. Submitting crash reports and using the feedback tool are easier and better ways to report issues, so thanks for doing that.
The point is that developers rely on reports from users to figure out what problems are out there, and which ones are more prevalent or more damaging to the user experience. Bugs are reported all the time about all sorts of things, so the dev team needs to prioritize them somehow. Filing bugs with good steps to reproduce (which can be rare) helps a great deal in resolving problems in Firefox.
Dillo, great. Now you have a BIG fingerprint. You stand out in the crowd. Kudos.
I agree in the generality, but like what I've said, there are a lot of people complaining and bug reports about Amazon for a long time now and the devs did absolutely zero. I don't see the point in telling the devs yet again about related problems when they are just plainly ignoring major bugs about the same issue.
What good is prioritizing the bug reports if Mozilla just ignores them all, and instead wastes its resources on stupid crap that Firefox users don't want, like Australis, ads, the social media integration, and so forth?
I would just switch to Chrome if disabling the "auto-update all the time" wasn't such a chore. In particular, the auto-updating of extensions without my control ticks me off; I've had several where the author removed features that I depended upon.
I've personally submitted over 500 bugs to bugzilla and been involved with 600+ other bugs that I did not file. Given that, I stopped submitting bugs when Mozilla became a business which is also when they started going downhill. If Mozilla wants to earn some credibility back in the community that made them a success, they could start by fixing any of the dozens of unfixed bugs over a decade old that are still driving people crazy today.
Unlike a lot of whiners here I use Firefox as my primary browser, it uses less memory than Chrome and is as fast. That said, the first thing I do after updating Firefox is figure out how to get disable or remove the extraneous parts they keep adding.
Installing on a new box now consists of about 10-15 minutes of trying to remember and searching for the about:config options to ditch them. Further, I also have no plans to create a Firefox account in order to continue to use sync..
Don't try to copy what Google is doing with Chrome, you're alienating the core userbase who are capable of adding these features if we want on our own. If this sort of stuff continues I imagine we'll see a credible fork.
So more "partnerships" as in paid bullshit we don't want to use or see like Yahoo Search. Better add-ons so more malware, more adware, and slower performance while neglecting the core browser. Then the mother of them all, faster updates. You know, the thing that ruined Firefox over the last 2 years.
One process per tab would mean FF would use the excessive amount of memory that Chrome uses.
Meaning that you can change it the way it suits you. Now, if youre incompetent to do that, that's your problem. I'm living la vida loca with it; lots of fun. Because I can. ;)
Everyone except those being paid to make GUI changes hate having them forced upon them. If it works, it works. If you have a new idea, allow the user to adopt it *or not*.
Continue to follow incompetence long enough and it becomes maliciousness.
And yet, Chrome runs much smoother and it's much stable than Firefox. Besides, if that memory is needed by some other process, Chrome doesn't stick to it.
The nicest thing I can say about FF is that it opened the floodgates, before Firefox/Phoenix/Mozilla Suite you had crappy IE, broken NS, and adware Opera.
Today there is Comodo Dragon (what I use, better security features and no phone home to Google) Chromium, SWIron, and Opera which my oldest boy swears is the greatest thing ever (hates the new version, went back to using presto) and on the gecko side there is PaleMoon (the other browser I use, I prefer the UI over IceDragon and it seems snappier), SeaMonkey, IceDragon, if you need really low resource there is always Kmeleon which runs really well even on a P3 running Win98SE and if you want to avoid BOTH the Chromium and Gecko engines you can go with QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a cross platform browser that uses Webkit and the QT framework...quite nice actually and of course Safari if you are into Apple.
I was using FF before it was called Firefox, and the Suite before that and....yeah, its just not very nice now. The UI feels like a bad Chrome ripoff and it still has "senior moments" where the entire UI can just "hang" for several seconds, which when you have 8 fricking cores and 16GB of RAM? is just inexcusable. I don't know what went wrong with Moz, but for the past few years they seem to have gone out of their way to just ruin the browser, do they no longer care? Has the UI team been taken over by Google? All I know is If I wanted Chrome I'd use Chrome and the current FF feels like a really bad Chrome knockoff, its the "Hipad" that looks kinda sorta like the real thing but once you use it? Yeah its just a knock off.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That' exactly what I did yesterday after it updated to FF39, and I wrote to FF to tell them why. Simple, websites like amazon are a burden to load in FF while they are still speedy in chrome and opera. And these days, even extensions built primarly on FF run better in chrome, so I made the decision to switch(but to opera, I don't trusth chrome)
Besides the fact that Mozilla is a non-profit (Which most people don't know.) with a mission of web standards, I argue Firefox is the the most customizable and all around best browser for everyone but especialy for those of us who work in the IT industry.
Chrome is the only other browser in the running for customization however the fact that Google makes the lion share of its revenue collecting and selling there users personal prefrence data is worrisome to put it mildly. (Eventually the board is gonna come calling for more profits and trusting a company like google for critical software like a browser will bite us in the ass.)
Performance is remarkably similar between Firefox and Chrome so the choice is not so clear from a technical point of view and probably should come down to personal taste. (Although I would like to see Firefox adopt the "1 tab = 1 process")
Perhaps as important is that Webkit (Perhaps soon Project Spartan also.) needs competition and Mozilla's Gecko engine is just that, we are entering an age where Webkit will take a huge share of the browser pie so competition and diversity is key to our continued development. (Webkit is the rendering engine that powers Apple IOS, Safari, Google chrome and even Opera among others.)
This is all remarkable similar to the Processor industry where we have/had limited compettion and AMD is in real danger is being plowed over by Intel, leaving us with the uncomfortable reality that one company may well hold all the market share and have NO need whatsoever for R&D or innovation until perhaps competition returns, if ever.
The difference between the Processor and Browser markets is that in this case we are blessed with the underdog that pushes open standards and writes software that benefits the whole community having similar or better underlying tech, this can arguably be attributed to the fact that FireFox is the choice of most IT professionals and the open source community.
I pay for my bandwidth, you can pay for yours. Fuck your ads.
Biggest bug I have with Firefox is their inability to deal with large corporate organisations. There are several features within FF either broken or not supported - if some of these were fixed it might make a huge difference in enterprise (fixing ntlm support behind proxy, GPO support, windows certificate support). Its got to the point where I work where we are about to actively block Firefox as it is considered an insecure browser due to its inability to support enterprise.
Mozilla was a different browser suite all together. FF wasn't the first name, they got sued then it became Firefox but the reason for FF was to create a much less bloated browser that has as we all know failed. Its become just as bloated as the original Mozilla browser ever was. I use it because of the superior ad-blocking i get using addons with FF nothing more. I pretty sure its not popular because its being updated all the time people don't want to be pestered by software and FF is doing just that IMO.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Dude when are they going to fix the bug that when i load this web site or open a story it loads to the bottom/middle of the page? That's been a bug for years.Mozilla IMO is far too concerned with speedy upgrades/updates instead of good working code. And ya Ive reported it..many times its a bug at least since 2005
http://pressf1.pcworld.co.nz/showthread.php?53961-Firefox-loads-page-then-goes-to-bottom-of-the-page
Jack of all trades,master of none
Mozilla can (and arguably must) work on many things at the same time. Just like there are people working on shiny new features, there are also plenty who are fixing bugs all over the code base. That you disagree with the direction we take on new features hopefully shouldn't discourage you to help us address the bugs that cause problems for the majority of users.
Can you point me to the bug report, please?
"Yahoo" search is Bing with modifications in who gets paid. Evidence: The Microsoft article, Advertise on the Yahoo Bing Network - Bing Ads.
Since Microsoft is now apparently the major way that the Mozilla Foundation makes money, Microsoft essentially owns Firefox, or is in a position to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I actually meant before the Mozilla Foundation and by extension Mozilla Corp, but either way works. In any case, yes, one of the things I really don't like about the way Firefox seems to be heading recently is the kitchen sink strategy. As you say, that was what led to Firefox (and Thunderbird) taking over from the old Mozilla suite in the first place. I've no objection to having a co-ordinated range of communication tools, but I'm not sure why they all need to be built into the browser like some sort of 21st century Zawinski's Law, particularly when that browser famously has a vibrant ecosystem of extensions for those users who do prefer to customise it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
https://input.mozilla.org/en-U...
that's where i put it. less the 39.0 i reported it oh at least 3 years ago 5 years before that. There may be a Bugzilla report, i wouldn't have a clue in the world where it is as i said this bug has been around since at least 2005. I have long since gave up any kinda hpe it will get fixed so i don't save Bugzilla reports i made 10 years ago.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Another poster here. I don't have any crashing sites handy, but there are many dog slow sites in FF, regardless of plugins or OS.
For example, all the campground maps on recreation.gov and reserveamerica.com are dog slow in FF and decently fast in every other major browser.
Example: http://www.recreation.gov/camping/map_of_Blackwoods_Campground/r/campgroundMap.do?page=map&search=site&contractCode=NRSO&parkId=70990
Just install 'Classic Theme' addon in Firefox to revert Australis changes.
Simple.
So why else use palemoon??
Anecdotally I have chrome tabs crash, I do not see firefox crash. What do you mean stick to it? If the OS needs the memory it will be relegated to swap, at which point if you resume using the tab you need to wait for the OS to retrieve it from disk hardly 'smooth'.
I feel like most technical people - the people who you really want filing bug reports - know that big open source projects are something of a blackhole for bug reports.
I think Firefox especially has an uphill battle at the moment - threads like this demonstrate that users clearly think that most dev effort at Mozilla is focused on new features rather than bug fixes.
The thought of going to the effort of battling Bugzilla, logging a bug report only to see it languishing (or WONTFIXed) for months or years is certainly a strong motivator not to bother.
Nope just no ads in an open source project made by a company who was originally king due to a distrust of competitors who did their best to monetize end users.
A more apt example would be not wanting ads on cable TV.
There are some major architectural issues that need sorting (one process per tab, the add-on API, the plug-in API etc.) but those are hard to fix without breaking everything.
So putting something serious in the too hard basket while doing their best to crap on what made Firefox great in the first place just so the developers can look busy is the correct response?
Yeah, but reading your other posts it looks like you believe a lot of crazy shit.
I'll bet many people would say the same thing about you and your other posts. By the way, did Gamergate steal your lunch money yet? Oh wait, that should be "steal your clickbait sites..."
How strange a person can't pick up on something that's been mentioned numerous times, by other people with regards to FF and the mozilla team in general.
Om, nomnomnom...
I agree that FF has gotten a worse UI in recent versions; the one change that would make sense (IMHO) is to eliminate the "x" (= close this tab) on all but the active tab. At any rate, I just set up Pale Moon to see if I liked that better.
But FF isn't the only Mozilla program to have bizarre UI changes, Thunderbird did too. (I think the single thing that any email program could do that would help would be fast lookup based on search. I hate to say it, but Outlook does this reasonably well.)
And Mozilla isn't the only outfit to make UI changes for the sake of changes. Google did this with Google New, Google Forums, and most recently Google Maps (see the outrage in the forums over the changes). And Chrome lacks a real menu. Microsoft did it with the Ribbon, and more recently with Windows 8 (although in the latter case they had the sense to repent). I guess Gnome did it with v3.
Why do the programmers (or someone in these companies) think they know best what we users want/ need?
Adding an icon to make WebRTC actually useful is bloat? WebRTC is the bloat, the icon is just a couple kilobytes of code. And WebRTC isn't Mozilla's dog, they're forced to keep up with the times on web specs or your lot will accuse them of being "behind Chrome". They can't win, they can't distinguish themselves in any way except to "catch up to Chrome", and when they do they're left open to accusations of "copying Chrome". It's basically impossible to please you people. Especially with your rose-colored vision of how much better things used to be (hint: they weren't. The quality of Firefox has always been questionable, but it was so much better than the alternative at the time we WANTED to believe it was better than it was).
Pale Moon is Firefox, just pretending otherwise. Frankly it's part of the problem now, because it's fallen behind the times, and instead of catching up, they're blaming Mozilla for not doing all of the work for them. But it's easy to want to pretend you know what you're talking about to get modded up, so I'll let it pass.
It *is* Firefox, it just doesn't want to admit it. It's an old Firefox with cherry-picked updates from newer Firefoxes. That doesn't make it different enough to deserve pretending it's not really Firefox. Next you'll be telling me that Pale Moon devs have added substantial improvements to what they already had, rather than disabling a few features and slapping the old UI code back in to pretend they're clever. TenFourFox - now THAT is something that is substantially different from Firefox - it has its own implementation of IonMonkey and other PowerPC-specific changes dwarf the original contributions that have been put into Pale Moon.
If you had actually bothered to read my posts before commenting, you might have noticed that at no point did I suggest Firefox must or even should try to keep up with Chrome's bleeding edge features. In fact, I think the drive for quantity of features over quality of implementation that Chrome exemplifies is the worst thing to happen to the Web since the stagnation of the IE6 era, and I would be the last person to suggest that Firefox mimicking that policy is desirable.
And no, the quality of Firefox has not always been as questionable as it is today. I do this stuff for a living, and the bug tracker does not lie. Issues in all real world projects I work on jumped sharply in the period after Firefox transitioned to Chrome-style rapid releases and have never settled back down to their previous level, and I've never identified any other plausible explanation for that.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Let me guess - you don't want ads on the internet either, right?
With the amount of bandwidth and RAM that I would save by not downloading ads, I could use 1990s technology for all web related stuff, even for my modern needs. RAM and bandwidth requirements have gone up massively, but except for YouTube or such, my actual requirements have not changed much at all.
So yea, I'd be willing to pay to cut out the crap.
Everyone knows Amazon brings Firefox practically to a halt.
Damn, I thought that was just me. I've been trying forever to find what combination of add-ons was causing it.
Damn, I thought that was just me.
Yes, I know the feeling, when we encounter such a major bug our reaction is: "this must obviously by a problem with my personal setup, there's no way the devs would let such a major flaw unsolved". But well, it's not. This is Firefox and the devs just put the bug aside, don't address it exists, and go on adding video chat and some new icons in the tab bar.
otoh, Hacker News has a pro-MS anti-FOSS slant.
I got savagely downvoted there by suggesting you *should* look a gift horse in the mouth when it came to 'free shit' from Microsoft.
mod parent informative.
links has framebuffer, x11, images and javascript.
But you pay for cable TV. And you don't pay for Firefox. Yet, Mozilla pays its employees.
In the old days everyone and their mother complained about the massive memory leaks in firefox, not to mention in all of the extensions you needed to come anywhere close to parity with what we have now. Tab improvement extensions particularly-- remember needing tab mix plus to get undo tab close?
That doesn't justify the method of obtaining money. No one would complain if Mozilla took on the view that every other opensource company does (Ubuntu being the obvious exception). But you'll find that they are one of only a few companies with employees that are going down the path of selling out users while at the same time being outright hostile towards them.
They deserve all the criticism they get for not meeting the expectations they themselves set forth when they became an open source project.
"Every other open source company" makes money on support - what's there to support in Mozilla's products for end users?
Good question why not ask them, but before you do I have a better question for you: Mozilla have existed for 17 years as an open source company. Mozilla evidently have the time, effort and resources to attempt a push into the mobile phone market and make whole operating systems.
Why the sudden need to sell out users after 17 years?
Or worse, why sell out the users in the name of a product that few people wanted, most people predicted would fail all the while neglecting their core product and treating their customers like shit?
No one is asking for anything dramatic, if we rolled the clock back on the company by 4 years I think everyone would be happy.
What's an "open source company"? Mozilla, like any company, has to generate enough revenue to pay their employees, do R&D, marketing and cover a bunch of other expenses. How they do it is up to them. Whether to use their products is up to you. I'm ok with the current version of FF and I don't feel sold out. Sure, there are a few picky things I'd like improved in FF, but the alternatives are way worse.
How they do it is well and truly up to them.
Reserving the right to call them a horrendous sell out for a change in their funding model in the past few years is up to me.
Remember this isn't about them. This is about you criticising me because I use a free product and the claim because they have employees to pay they are magically free from my criticism. This is about me saying that for 15 of their 17 years of operation they have managed to do all the above without pissing off and selling out their users.
I reserve the right to show them my middle finger. But each to their own. If you like Firefox and don't feel sold out then by all means keep using it. I feel similar about Chrome which is not a double standard because Google has always operated in the same way and I feel I get the right value (an ever improving product) for my personal data vs what I get from Mozilla (complaints ignored, social crap that shouldn't be part of a browser, and a product that seems to perform worse with every rapidly increasing version number).
That's all this is about.
I never said Mozilla was/should be free of criticism. I just disagreed with you comparing free Firefox with paid cable.
Actually you were calling out entitlement to free things. But it's fair. It can't be compared to paid for cable.
It most definitely can be compared to a trend that cable in the past was ad free, but now has ads.
The point going back to the original reply by someone else is not that we want endless free stuff, just that we want things the way they used to be, a decent product provided by a company who had no problem paying its employees without somehow throwing their product and end users under the bus in the name of partnerships, integrating closed APIs, and generally taking the product in a direction contrary to their original charter.
Things can not be what they used to be forever, especially in IT. Things change.* A few years ago there was no Chrome - it was FF and IE. Now the browser market is completely different. Maybe Yahoo isn't paying Mozilla as much as Google used to so Mozilla needs new partnerships. It's complicated, we can only guess what's going on behind the scenes in Mozilla's business, but ultimately, they do what they think is best - for them and for their users. Those priorities don't necessarily align all the time.
* Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!