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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.
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.
If you had read TFA they are actually trying to fix some of the problems people had with this:
"Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on that could have been more easily removed entirely from the browser. We tend to agree with that, and fixing that for Pocket and any future partner integrations is one concrete piece of engineering work we need to get done."
New things are always on the horizon
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...
but Chrome is almost moving away from per-process tabs as they use more memory and don't really give you any improvement over the browser - if a tab dies, you'll still close the browser and reopen it, just in case the flaw had affected something else and besides, some tabs are grouped in processes anyway. (I don't know if this is still true, years later but it shows how the hype is often nowhere near what's desired)
So why bother implementing something useless, just to make some people feel better. Its like 64-bit support. Why bother with that, it'll make no difference to daily use.
Now, fixing memory usage, reducing cache usage by idle tabs, freeing up memory used by closed tabs so the overall memory doesn't grow... things like that are what's important. Not visible to most people, not "cool" by any means. Just boring, but solid, engineering discipline.
But that's really what we want.
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.