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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.
Uninstall
...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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I guess it does. wtf?
I wonder if they will be able just of that!!!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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.
"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 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?