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The Future of Firefox is Chrome (theregister.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla seems to think a new future for Firefox [lies in Chrome]. While they claim that it is only about new ways of browser design, it is also an open secret that they are running into more and more problems lately with web compatibility. [Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser. The project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology, Gecko, but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.] The benefit of Chromium/Electron would be that it is a solution they could pull much faster forward than their own Servo plans [Servo being Mozilla's Rust-based web engine]. What the real outcome of all this will be, only Mozilla knows so far. But inside Mozilla there is much resistance against such plans... Interesting times are ahead.
If you actually read the "Project Tofino" page, all they're doing it using Electron to much around with user-interface experiments, not adopt anything Chrome-like: https://medium.com/project-tofino/
Heck, even Positron is about REMOVING Chrome from Electron so they can use it for these kinds of experiments as well.
Look, Slashdot, I know we're all supposed to hate Firefox and Mozilla, but can we at least submit useful information, and not obvious misinformation?
Maybe it's not the quickest or safest plan, but they made their name as an independent browser and they should stand their ground and improve their technology to compete with chrome.
For me chrome ushered in the next generation of javascript performance, that's what made it stand out for me. Firefox should find some other aspect of the web experience to make their own improvements to.
If they succeed it will be good for all of us, it's not as if there aren't plenty of things that could be improved upon. If they play it safe they will not offer any new value and will fall into obscurity.
Nullius in verba
Are there no developers left?
>Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser.
>The project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology, Gecko, but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built
>on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.]
In God's name, WHYYYYYYYY????
Just merge the two teams and call it Chromefox. Firefox is dead. RIP.
First opera, now Firefox. Is IE next? The end is nigh!
Silence is a state of mime.
Why is the www so complicated, just give me my HTML 1.0
Let Firefox go, it sucks! But keep the Mozilla core well... Mozilla! I use Seamonkey since FF screwed over their user base after Ver. 3.2.8 so I really don't care about Firefox anymore. However, don't switch the entire Mozilla core over to that crappy Safari/WebKit clone called Chromium/Chrome, etc. This is not "interesting" at all, this is potentially horrifying!
This looks like bad news.
The good thing about firefox is that it pushed for standardization. If all becomes chromium, then Google essentially takes control of all the webbrowser aspects. When IE was the defacto standard, we took about 10 years to get out of that mess.
Personally, I don't care. As long as their browser manages to provide standards compliance (for example, the ACID tests) without opening any security holes, I'm in. Plugins would be a nice plus (I'm looking at you, Microsoft. Edge is fine for plain vanilla browsing, but it's just a lab rat of a browser without extensions).
I'm not looking forward to the Googification of almost everything. The internet will be a less free place when there is only one browser and one search engine (in practice), one video upload site, one mobile OS all produced by a company with a "do evil when the shareholders demand it" policy
What the heck is with all the square brackets in the summary. Don't they have parenthesis where you live? And even if they did, stop using them so much!
I don't get where this blatantly incorrect assumption comes from.
We don't hate Mozilla or Firefox. Slashdot's community has long been one of the most important supporters of Mozilla and Firefox!
Maybe you are just ignorant about the history of Mozilla and Firefox, and how it relates to Slashdot's community?
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Slashdot was the premiere technology news site. This is well before reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow and Twitter existed. Many in the computing and software fields read Slashdot daily, and many participated in the discussion. During this time Slashdot's community helped popularize and push for the adoption of open source software.
In fact, it's very likely that the Slashdot community's efforts to help promote open source software is at least partially responsible for why the technology that eventually resulted in Firefox was open sourced in the first place!
And once the Mozilla project got started, it was the Slashdot community that supported it. Then when Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came into the picture, the Slashdot community was among the earliest adopters, supporters and promoters.
Yeah, that's right. It was the Slashdot community who is mainly responsible for Firefox becoming what it became. It wasn't Digg, or Reddit, or HN, or SO, or Twitter. It was Slashdot's community!
Firefox, and by extension Mozilla, probably wouldn't even exist today if it weren't for Slashdot's community giving it so much early support.
It was thanks to Slashdotters installing Firefox on the systems of normal people that it went from 0% of the market up to around 35% at its peak.
Then Mozilla decided to shit all over us, despite our many years of support. They fucked up Firefox's versioning scheme, breaking many extensions for a long time. They started trashing the UI, eventually destroying it outright with Australis. They removed useful functionality we wanted. Long-standing performance issues went ignored. Then they started inserting shit we didn't want, including Pocket, Hello, and even advertisement!
The advertisements (deceptively referred to as "sponsored tiles" by some) were the last straw for many people. With ad blocking extensions being among the most popular extensions for Firefox, how the fuck could Mozilla possibly think that inserting ads into the browser itself would be a good idea?!
It didn't help that we saw so much other bullshit come out of Mozilla. There was the whole Eich debacle, which was shameful. Nobody should lose their job, voluntarily or not, just because of their views on marriage! Then there were the failed projects, such as Firefox OS. Everybody with any kind of a brain saw that Firefox OS was a fucking idiotic idea from the very beginning. How the fuck did Mozilla ever hope to compete with Android and iOS, never mind the many other mobile OSes, by providing software as truly sub-par as Firefox OS?!
Now we see Mozilla squandering more resources on dumb projects like Rust and Servo. Servo is, in my opinion, fucking atrocious. Try it for yourself. Really! See how goddamn awful it is. I tried it recently and I couldn't believe how bad it was. It makes Firefox look like a damn fine browser in comparison, that's how bad Servo is. Rust is just a hype-ridden joke in my experience.
Despite Mozilla treating us so badly, and despite the many mistakes that have been made, many of us here actually want them to succeed! Before making themselves irrelevant by driving away so many of Firefox's users, Mozilla played an important role in the development of open web technology and standards.
So when you accuse us of "hating" Mozilla and Firefox you're absolutely wrong. Slashdot's community is responsible for Firefox becoming popular, and for giving Mozilla the traction it needed to get massive funding from Google and Yahoo.
Yes, many of us are angry with what has happened to Mozill
Another useless browser, just what we needed.
Because people want desktop-like UI's in HTML browsers, and that's NOT what they were designed for, and kludges to get it are uglier than Trump's ass after a long sweaty horse-ride while lost in the mountains.
Time for new GUI-friendly standard. For one, get rid of client-side "auto-flow" and make it coordinate based so that each browser and version doesn't put things in different places. WYSIWYG, dammit.
It's why designers miss Flash: client-side autoflow doesn't fuck your design and spacing to hell. Fuck auto-flow to hell! Burn Baby Burn! Autoburn! It's the Iraq-invasion of IT standards decisions.
Dev was 5x faster without goddam auto-flow issues. Any window resizing calcs can take place on the server. If resize calcs happen on the server, then the results are consistent across device versions and makes (and custom OS settings). People don't resize that often, so it doesn't matter much if it's slower doing server-side sizing, so don't give that complaint.
Be Brave:
Throw it Out!
Do it Right!
Table-ized A.I.
What are these problems being alluded to? My assumption for over fifteen years has been: If you don't work with Firefox, your Web site is broken. Previously, compatibility issues were mostly down to a bunch of children writing their Web sites using IE-specific features which worked nowhere else. Happily, those days are largely behind us. So what's the alleged problem now?
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
4) Create a monopoly of web browser engines.
Firefox is the best browser to use for screen reader compatibility, and if it uses the same engine as Chrome, then there goes vision impaired users' sanity. Chrome - as much as I like it myself - is nowhere near as good as Firefox in this area. If Electron/Chromium get their engine up to scratch to match Firefox, then it won't be a problem (I find Firefox slow as a web developer anyway, though Firebug beats Chrome's developer tools, hands down).
The latest browser usage stats show that Firefox has only about 7% of the market. That's for all versions of the browser, across all of the platforms it supports.
To put that into perspective, that's only slightly above each of IE 11 and iOS Safari 9.2. That's right, even individual, platform-specific versions of non-Chrome competing browsers now nearly exceed Firefox's share of the market. Firefox is nearly lower than Opera Mini, even!
Chrome is utterly destroying Firefox. On the desktop alone, it has 3 to 4 times as many users as Firefox does. Chrome for Android has about twice as many users as Firefox does.
I don't think it matters what happens at this point. Firefox will likely not recover. I would not be at all surprised if it was well below 5% by the end of this year.
Servo is not going to save Firefox. It isn't making sufficient progress. Not only do they have to match at least Firefox's functionality, but then they have to match Chrome's, and then they need to overtake Chrome just to see any growth!
Things have never looked bleaker for Firefox.
One with all the chrome like UI and one with a classic UI that power users can use. Firefox classic would get a lot of market share from Slashdot while not many people will use chromefox.
.
It looks as if my prediction is beginning to happen. Firefox is being left behind by website developers. Which will contribute to its marketshare slide even more if Mozilla doesn't do something drastic.
Is "Chrome" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* New browsers FORCE javascript (& ads) - what ALWAYS "comes along for the ride"? Infestation by malware!
Diversity = greater resistance to disease & choice of 1 motor causes it to not work!
APK
P.S.=> "Chopera" won't have native adblocking (even MS realized doing what the LAST honest full natively featured browser, Opera classic, did on FLASH in Edge, stall it auto-detonating)!
CURRENT new browser junk is NOT coming w/ abilities to stall scripting/iframes/cookies/java/referers (harbingers of destruction)!
'Excuse' = "most users don't use it" by PURSE STRING PULLING MONEYMEN FUNDING (advertisers)!
Hostsfiles (better vs addons) @ IP stack (script block/detect sites make addons useless) & PAC files too!
(PAC do a DNS lookup on misses though, hosts offset it avoiding DNS issues if combined & a PAC file exploit surfaced http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... )
....seeing Firefox bashed for ads. On Slashdot !!!
While I agree, I don't see Mozilla in its current incarnation being a viable competitor to Chrome. It's unfortunate, but it is only one of many experiments in not-for-profit organizations, technical and otherwise, becoming obsessed with politics over product or service.
Perhaps this is a human foible; those whose interest is in setting goals for others often seem to find a way into management of non-profits, using the bottom-up philosophy of management, while for-profits' goals are set by directors who represent bankers and come down from on-high, using job-insecurity as an enforcement tool. Bankers don't change their goals, typically, over time, while not-for-profits' goals can change on a whim, apparently, if enough people back that whim.
There must be a synthesis hiding somewhere....damned if I can find it, though,
It needs proper programmers to write and maintain a standards compliant rendering engine.
When all you have are ui "experts" then all you can do is skin someone elses engine.
Chrome is not really an option for me since my girlfriend might use the chrome. Chrome is also owned by an advertising company so they take down extensions before they are even DMCA or verified illegal. I use chrome sync for personal and business, and part of my porn browsing experience is reopening tabs and windows from last fap, something that incognito window can not do.
I look at plenty of video porn, but also tons of pinups from tumblr and the like. When I want to open about 50 tabs of sexy broads and save them to my computer, firefox and its ample image manipulation extensions are the best choice for me. I am a huge fan of everything (image foreward, etc) by Sebastian Blask and I also really like Image picker by Wesley.
OT:
I seem to have removed the firefox chat feature for now, but I know its still in there somewhere. When the chromium project is THAT GOOD, its hard to blame them for trying to emulate it or base their project on it. The amount of cash that was spent on that engine makes using anything a bad decision right now.
Whenever I would report bugs with Firefox, devs would take them seriously and even fix them. Sometimes they took years, but even so, they didn’t try to tell me I was an idiot or anything like that.
Whenever I have reported Chrome bugs, I would get a relatively hostile response, with devs telling me that I was wrong, even when I could make a solid usability engineering argument or there were incompatibilities or crashes or whatever.
If Mozilla stops being in control of their browser development, it’s going to seriously suck a lot worse because the Google engineers who work on Chrome that I have dealt with are self-absorbed assholes.
Firefox is resisting some new HTML5 DRM systems too. Like with Amazon video in which if your using Firefox your stuck with Silverlight not HTML5 playback.
Chrome, Opera, IE 11, and Edge all on board. Their obsession with all open source is actually hurting it, much like with Linux. Its probably too late for Firefox anymore, it's on a downward spiral.
See subject: I didn't like how I had to word some of that either but their STUPID limits don't let me express my ideas fully... IF you really have any questions on ANY of what I wrote? Ask!
APK
P.S.=> 1st part is just "nerd humor" (sort of) but the rest is what I've seen in SOME newer browsers (admittedly NOT finished when I tried them, but then they're constantly patched anyhow lately - are they EVER done?) - & what I've heard from others here on /., is they don't HAVE the options I noted!
Odd, considering even CHROME itself + its variants or originals like Chromium have some 'unwieldy for most folks' -commandline switches, but no GUI interface for SOME of the settings I noted + others here too, on altering them working (or not)... apk
Chromium a 'rival' to Chrome, when Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome..?!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
Personally, I'm fully committed to Firefox because it's the only option for someone who cares about privacy. How many other browsers are open source AND have the suite of privacy addons available for Firefox AND are developed by a company that pushes hard for more privacy? You're not going to get this stuff with Chromium.
...status bar and the ability to block any scripts coming from google I'm fine with it. Anybody else remember when google wasn't evil?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Firefox made their name as a viable alternative the the crapfest that IE had become in the absence of meaningful competition. Then the got much, much bigger as google sought to ensure there was a platform for their adverts that wasn't under the control of a competitor with a history of using it's market dominance to crush otherwise stronger rivals. Well google has chrome for that now (and android, and ChromeOS) so FF can take a flying leap as far as they care.
/. geeks people use whatever software they first come across unless that software is painfully bad. IE 11 and Chrome are both just fine.
I think the browser's pretty much done innovating. At the end of the day it's a content delivery device. There's only so much it can do. Maybe it can do it better, but anything FF can do google can (and will) match with Chrome short of them patenting it and suing (which the community would savage them for).
It's not enough to improve when there's good enough. Outside of a few
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Chrome still works, but you have to use an old version. Google has made it clear it will not support chrome on Linux any longer. So, it's just a matter of time.
In recent years, Google has come to hate Linux.
"The Eich incident tarnished Mozilla's reputation."
That incident showed a shocking lack of social understanding. Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues.
The most amazingly sad recent action of Mozilla Foundation, in my opinion, is the fact that the 32-bit and 64-bit versions have the same file name!
think about the man decades saved... not having to troubleshoot why x feature doesn't work in y browser.
also think about how fast the rendering engine itself would evolve if everyone was working on the same one.
I wish we could do some housecleaning and pick some categorical winners (based on superior tech) in the open source world and devote man hours to refining the winners.. right now there is just too much overlap
which slows down how fast technology can evolve since everyone is working on their own version of the same thing.
This is offtopic for the subject but yes, I know the Slashdot effect. I had a website with around 1000 daily visitors. That was .. it. Then I got 2 million hits in a 14 hour period. Thank you Slashdot. Amazingly the webserver getting overloaded was not the big problem, back then the providers "Bandwith limit exceeded" error is what made the site go away.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I was concerned the e10s feature would lead to that Chrome dystopia of 4GB or 6GB use etc. , but it turns out only one process is added : Web Content, like plugin-container was added many versions ago (mainly used for Flash).
Back then the latter one was a big improvement. You could go from hourly crashes to daily crashes.
Now it seems more like I get a monthly crash.
It's funny how things actually get better from year to year.
E10s does not makes the browser much faster, it prevents some slowdowns instead. The memory management seems solid.
I don't remember what's the plans for palemoon but they likely could build on that firefox + XUL + e10s for a newer version.
Mozilla went into SJW mode and dove into politics. The proper response to the Bandon Eich situation was to say: "We're a business. Our employee's beliefs are their own, and their actions are their own as long as they are not in jail for violating the laws. We are not endorsing or opposing anyone's views on any social or political issues, we're making the world's best browser that everyone can freely and safely use no matter who they are and what they believe". Instead, they kicked the guy out in response to a particular socia-political group and large numbers of people associated with that group cheered the lynching asMozilla publicly grovelled before the angry mob. It's dishonest to say Eich was not fired - it was the typical corporate firing where a person is given a chance to quit before he is actually fired on paper. It was like offering the guy an aresenic pill and telling him he will be beaten to death with a baseball bat in 30 minutes if he is not already dead.
Before the Eich incident, I am unaware that Mozilla had fired anybody over his/her politics. The Eich incident was a turning point in which politics and culture took a role in the board room where previously tech matters dominated.
There's something rather disturbing in the way that so many in the Free Software movement were so quick to blot-out Brandon Eich for having the same position on "gay marriage" that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both loudly campaigned on way back in the bronze age (or rather, in 2008 when Obama even went on TV with w Christian pastor and insisted he was going to support the traditional value of marriage and not support any attempt to introduce gay marriage), and yet so many continued to use and support the ReiserFS file system even as its creator was convicted of brutally MURDERING his wife. (oh, and for those who have forgotten, in his later appeals he claimed to have justification for murdering her which he now admits to having done).
Question for all the supporters of the elimination of Eich: IF Mozilla had instead fired all pro-gay employees on the grounds that it was unethical to employ people who "support immoral actions" would you be equally happy? Do you TRULY support firing people from their jobs and killing their careers if they have the "wrong" social or political or cultural views? Should any company be able to do this using their chosen values or politics? Or is it just that you are in favor as long as it's the values YOU favor (in which case you are just arguing that YOUR values trump everyone else's) that are being supported?
One of the key components of "Freedom" in the US has, for our entire history, been that people are free to believe in anything they want to believe in. On those rare occasions where people have been punished on the job for their beliefs it used to be universally condemned by the left (Hollywood blacklist, where Hollywood executives, not the government, killed careers over perceived or real communist beliefs ring any bells?). To be fair, Hollywood is now more likely to blacklist somebody for not having communist ties... but that's a whole other issue. Perhaps in the future Mozilla will similarly flip and start firing people for supporting gay marriage.
I really think Firefox has already become irrelevant anymore. They are a popular niche browser a step above Opera. But hardly a big player and shrinking ever so slowly. Its their inability to accept that not everything is opensource on the web and to be a viable browser you have to support everything.
I'm really tired of developers taking projects and reinventing the wheel. Seriously Microsoft had a great interface on Windows and they blew it with Windows 8. Now they're being dragged back kicking and screaming to the Windows 9x interface for desktops. Gnome went from a perfectly good front end to touchy feely less is more look and caused users to backlash on that to creating MATE. Now Mozilla wants to ditch what made them great to start with and move to Chrome's look and feel.
Seriously if people aren't happy with the project they're working on could they please MOVE ON to a new project and not ruin the thing people are using and loving? If you can, fork it and take it with you but just leave the software I use and love as it without changing it so radically because you think it would be better.
To bring something as a web standard there is a W3C policy that at least two Independent implementation must exist (IndexDB won and not WebSQLite). If the biggest actor in the game Google want to have something standardized they cannot go alone. Instead, they pay via indirect deals Mozilla to back that proposal up. If Firefox team also implements it (100% compatibility is not needed) than Google and Firefox can push the standard through to be considered. Chrome is the present and future of Firefox, but not as the author intends. The Mozilla implementation has to be different for both Chrome and Firefox to be successful. Because most ideas generate in Chrome team, Firefox team has to re-implement them based on agreed specification, and it common that Firefox implementation while not fully compatible with Chrome is neared to the standard. There are no ideals involved, pure interest on both sides.
I haven't seen anyone pitch Pale Moon so far, so here goes. I've been using it since it first came out and have no complaints. It is what Firefox used to be.
Should have Eich around. Might have had a better technological direction to follow. The hetero-hating employees really shot themselves in the foot.
the reason I still use it is add ons - the chrome plugins still don't equal the firefox plugin library - so I always have both installed....
I stick with Firefox because, while not perfect technically (what is?), it's a "neutral" vendor in the large scheme of things. Google isn't. I don't want to have my browser reporting back to Google everything I do. I use Firefox running on some Unix-like OS, either Open- or FreeBSD or at work, OS X. I dislike the intensity with which Google thinks it has the right to collect and collate everything. I'm toying with the idea of using Seamonkey, as the UI is appealing to me for nostalgic reasons.
has been just the opposite, Chrome has been increasingly unreliable, slowing down, even crashing when trying to do things in more than 1 tab or window. Firefox has remained solid and more compatible with the various javascript/HTML5 front-ends used at work for database access. We've been installing Firefox on all new machines instead of using IE or Chrome.
If you miss the old Firefox before they fucked up with the Australis UI, give Palemoon a try. It's a modern browser optimized for traditional desktop usage, built with a modern compiler and forked off from Firefox (i.e. it is not just a rebuild of the same source code as some others like Waterfox are) with a few unique features and extensions of its own.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."