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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.
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
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.
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...
Firefox is not google, is not microsoft. Nothing else matters.
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.
"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've switched to Palemoon. The thing I worry the most about with that decision is that retarded UI changed in FF might sneak its way into Palemoon just because it is bothersome to maintain a branch with too many differences from the main one.
Valid fear. With luck that will be a no, but if it does they'll simply be shooting themselves in the foot people will also say 'fuck it' and move to something else.
Om, nomnomnom...
Unlikely, the maker of Palemoon doesn't like Australis as he explains on https://www.palemoon.org/layou....
No Auastralis is the main thing why most current Palemoon users use it instead of Firefox.
In what way is it significantly bloated compared to 1,0?
I remember the days where to be usable you needed about 10-20 extensions, and THAT made it a bloated, leaky, hoggish mess; when javascript took the browser to a crawl; and when simple updates (like 1.0 - 1.5, which as I recall primarilly were visual updates and adding a new tab button) took something like a year to come to release. Trust me if you werent there, this is better.
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.
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.
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.
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?
No, I doubt, many users have left or came because of it. But he was a major developer himself. Purging him caused very strong harm to the company, its design and development teams. Input of such a person is invaluable...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.