Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
And now their next endeavor is to basically reskin Chrome and call it Firefox.
This is informative? It's about as incorrect as it could possibly get. It's pointed out in the article and in early posts in this thread. I can see how you'd get that impression from the flamebait title and summary, but restating prominent misinformation sure as hell isn't informative!
Required reading for internet skeptics