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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.
> Just because Mozilla is "cool" doesn't make it okay to pay vastly under market value for their employee's
> services
Why are people working for less than their market value? If there are genuine reasons, don't you think those reasons lower their market value? Perhaps they want to work for a non-profit. There's plenty of other places they could be working (if they're any good).
Have you tried it recently? I'm running a nightly 3.0 on my phone which has served me well for the past 12 months.
FxOS got a series of bad reviews based on early releases and nasty hardware but is evolving.
"I remember when the grass was greener and water - wetter."
At least they've admitted that all sorts of "partnerships" should come as removable addons. As of right now, there is only one opensource browser that can compete. Microsoft's Edge, Google's Chrome are proprietary and don't even pretend to care about user privacy. Palemoon and other forks keep touting themselves as the "next big thing" and true open-source and privacy aware, but the truth is, most of the work they do is just cutting stuff out and disabling features that cause concern, main force that drives Gecko's development is Firefox, and I, for one, respect that. Mozilla's team is looking for funding in order to provide a truly opensource browser with a more transparent development model, then, say, Chromium that is 100% dependent on it's proprietary brother and Google's goodwill. The way Mozilla is now trying to attract additional funding may not be great, but it's far from a fiasco, and most of the features added are a painfull and delicate balance between non tech savvy user's needs and privacy and extensibility. And they need that to keep funding flowing, to create the codebase. If you are a purist and hate them for that, then imagine Firefox not exitsing. Opensource community would end up with Cromium, dependent on Google and a bunch of webkit browsers, that have a long way to go before they can compete.
Average users are plagued with malware and all sorts of addons that inject content into pages, display extra adds and such. Mozilla introduced addon signing and moderation. For those that need to add unsigned and unverified addons they still provide unbranded builds, that are an equivalent of signing "I know what I'm doing" waiver.
All in all, you might hate Mozilla's monetization model, but you have to admit, that they spend the money they earn to write the code and give to everyone for free with a libre license to boot.
Firefox is not google, is not microsoft. Nothing else matters.
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.
Firefox's plugins are both it's greatest strength and it's greatest weakness. The "API" isn't really an API at all, it's just Javascript running in the browser process where it can hack about with the UI. It's extremely insecure and prone to conflicts, or breakage as the UI changes.
It's hard to say what would be the best option now. Clean up the add-on API to make it more robust, at the expense of requiring add-ons to be rewritten. Keep it as it is and try to do something about the slow decay of abandoned add-ons where the author can no longer be bothered to fix the breakage from the unstable API, and deal with security issues as they come.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC