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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.
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.
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
"Folks said that Pocket should have been a bundled add-on..."
To which I would reply "Yeah, no shit." The integration of Pocket was a pretty obvious blunder, and not just in hindsight. What's concerning to me is that "folks" actually need to tell this to the Mozilla leadership, demonstrating that either they're horribly out of touch with their users or desperate enough for revenue that they're willing to ignore what's best for their users.
I'm a Firefox user, and don't have any intention of switching browsers, but it's pretty astounding and worrisome to see how they've managed to anger so many of their users in such a short time.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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 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.