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Mozilla's Plans For Firefox: More Partnerships, Better Add-ons, Faster Updates

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-future dept.

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.

5 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. I remember... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I remember... by KIngo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.

    2. Re:I remember... by Demonoid-Penguin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the "electrolysis" project for per-tab processes is such a feature to be excited about. Of course Chrome already has this, so maybe the excitement is not all that great. But I think that the unconditional Firefox bashing that is so cool these days is totally counter-productive. Just like me, most Firefox-bashers don't want a Chrome monoculture. Be careful, or you'll manage to kill it and then good night.

      Agreed, choice is good. I prefer Firefox (Iceweasel actually) - but it's competition that keeps them honest.

      Thanks Mozilla for making Pocket removable. Special thanks for supporting srcset - especially for not jumping the gun on it when it was uncertain that it would become a defacto standard.

      Could Mozilla produce as good a browser if they were entirely unfunded - maybe. But I very much doubt they'd be able to make such positive contributions to W3C, internet privacy campaigns - and especially, making M$ pickup their browser game. I rarely a week goes by that I don't make extensive use of the their developer documentation for web design.

      Note: to be fair, the developers of all the major browser have all worked hard, together, to make the intertubes a better place. Kudos to the employees - nice to see employer loyalties don't stop them communicating and sharing.

  2. Re:My Plans for Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:My Plans for Firefox by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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