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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.
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
Google is better at embrace-extend-extinguish than Microsoft ever was. Let's hope this idiotic idea falls through.
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.
Firefox was and still is useful. Chrome is about as useful as an NSA keyboard logger in my machine. Google doesn't need to know anything additional about me, thank you.
Wait a minute .... I thought we were supposed to hate microsoft, no apple, no google, no php, no ruby. Gosh I can't keep up with you kids with what to hate these days.
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
Probably.
So, instead of extending the functionality of a perfectly acceptable browser (or even fixing existing issues), they keep adding useless crap like Pocket and Hello in, because none of them are competent to actually work on the browser code.
And now their next endeavor is to basically reskin Chrome and call it Firefox.
Why, exactly, they have this unsettling crush on Chrome is anyone's guess.
I propose that the current inhabitants of the Mozilla corporate structure go and simply get rooms with the Chrome developers and fuck this unhealthy fixation out of their systems.
Then Mozilla should hire people who actually know their way around browser tech and understand Mozilla's place in the scheme of things and stop leaving software engineering decisions to a bunch of "designers".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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).
But firefox usage isn't going down for technical reasons. It's simply going down because Google shoves chrome down your throat on every fucking web impression. No one has that kind of advertising money... except google, who controls the advertising media.
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.
A long time ago, Slashdot was very popular and influential. I'll even give Slashdot credit for the early success of Google.
How popular? A link from the Slashdot homepage could bring down a webserver. A DDoS attack we called a 'Slashdotting' (alt. 'Slashdot effect') as the fraction of users that did read the articles flooded the site. On 9/11, while every news site was drowning, Slashdot was still accessible. They were well prepared for massive traffic. It spawned countless imitators, but few managed to grow in Slashdot's shadow.
Today, of course, Slashdot has a much smaller audience and virtually no influence. It's easy to think things were always this way, just a tiny relic of the past catering to a few curmudgeons who don't understand Reddit.
It's fallen pretty hard. Remember the "Slashdot effect"? It's no longer a thing. I had a personal project hit Hack-a-day, Reddit, and Slashdot all within a month. I got a massive boost of traffic. Though, at it's peek, the traffic from Slashdot that month was well-under the traffic I still get from Reddit when someone links to it in a comment. It was even under the traffic I got from a tiny one-word link buried in a long blog post on textfiles.com! I get more traffic from the post on Hack-a-day monthly (over 2 years later) than I got from the article on the front page of Slashdot.
So, yeah, I can see why you'd think that Slashdot couldn't possibly have influenced or shaped the web in any meaningful way today. That would be impossible. But at one point, they were a real powerhouse that could make or break a project like that.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Clearly Rust isn't giving them a big boost in productivity, because Servo is making so little progress.
So Gecko is the result of thousands of man-years in development. On the other hand, servo probably had a few dozens of man-years of development time. How does that lead to the conclusion that Rust sucks exactly? I'm not qualified to say how successful Servo really is, but it was never expected to produce a direct Gecko replacement with 1/100 of the resources. Keep in mind that the stack of W3C specs browsers have to implement is *huge*.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec