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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.

16 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 Pi1grim · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "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.

    3. 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.

    4. Re:I remember... by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Informative

      but Chrome is almost moving away from per-process tabs as they use more memory and don't really give you any improvement over the browser - if a tab dies, you'll still close the browser and reopen it, just in case the flaw had affected something else and besides, some tabs are grouped in processes anyway. (I don't know if this is still true, years later but it shows how the hype is often nowhere near what's desired)

      So why bother implementing something useless, just to make some people feel better. Its like 64-bit support. Why bother with that, it'll make no difference to daily use.

      Now, fixing memory usage, reducing cache usage by idle tabs, freeing up memory used by closed tabs so the overall memory doesn't grow... things like that are what's important. Not visible to most people, not "cool" by any means. Just boring, but solid, engineering discipline.

      But that's really what we want.

  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:Because... by Lennie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. Re:The Kitchen Sink by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    that POS called Firefox OS

    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.

  5. Re:My Plans for Firefox by Mashiki · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...
  6. Faster UI changes by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Faster UI changes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Oh yeah. There was a period of time during which usability was somewhat of a concern. In recent years, it has been totally forgotten. It's particularly visible in Firefox and GNOME/GTK... The most basic mistakes were made, and most of them are still there today, with new stupid issues in every releases... Critics are not welcomed.

      Basic evident examples I can see in front of my eyes right now in Firefox:

      - UI elements appearing and disappearing (forward button which even moves the address bar away, link target because of no more status bar).

      - Merging features on a single button (reload vs. stop).

      - Very small buttons (reload button in the address bar).

      - Important buttons are split on the two sides of the window (home/back/forward on the left, stop/reload button on the right).

      - Some areas have been compressed ("for phones and tablets"), while others have far too much empty room which could be used for better usability (including precisely on phones and tablets, because small buttons are more difficult to press accurately on small screens...).

      - I had to put my addon buttons on the top right, because no more status/addon bar, which is an area more difficult to access as a right-handed person with a mouse. Same for the stop/reload/bookmark buttons.

      - I couldn't bear having the address bar under the tab bar, so I reversed it, but it's not even in about:config, you have to use userChrome.css or an addon now. I can understand the logic of the addess bar affecting the current tab, thus respecting the general to specific order from the menu bar (well, because I reactivated it too...), but this means traversing the address bar all the time with my mouse to manage tabs, which is bad.

      - Merging menus on one single button... ... and countless other obvious mistakes...

      There is no other word for it but utter incompetence.

      But we're just killjoys, right. Same for accessibility and testing dudes.

      Well guess what, your shit ain't even shiny. And it's not simplicity, it's stupid emptiness. It ain't even at toy level. It's just shit. Sure you can do all kind of shitty things with it, but it's still shit. And it costs us more and more time and energy to try to avoid your shit.

  7. Mozilla ignoring basics of core usability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:

    • * Firefox's "Bookmark This Page" action used to pop up a window with a mouse-adjustable size. Hell, it's 2015 and all windows are resizeable these days by dragging their borders, aren't they? Well not in Mozilla's worldview. No modern Firefox provides this, so you have to locate your desired bookmark folder by scrolling through a tiny fixed-size keyhole window. It's a total pain.
    • * When saving bookmarks, it's common to save several consecutive pages on the same topic to the same bookmarks folder, which is why Firefox very sensibly used to remember the last save location to speed up your bookmarking. It lost the ability to remember this many versions ago, so you now have to find the appropriate folder from scratch every single time you save a bookmark. It's a total pain.

    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.

  8. Re:Because... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.
  9. 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
  10. Re:My Plans for Firefox by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  11. Re:My Plans for Firefox by jorgevillalobos · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.