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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.
First opera, now Firefox. Is IE next? The end is nigh!
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
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.
The difference there being that Chromium is FOSS. IE was not.
To me the difference between Mozilla and Google today is their approach to privacy and user's data. Rendering is a "solved problem". If Mozilla are using Electron just for rendering, while still building a user experience that follows their core standards on privacy and data, I don't see a problem here.
If Rust were any good then it would let the smaller number of Servo developers amplify their effort in order to accomplish much more with fewer resources. But that obviously isn't happening. Yet that's exactly what they need to have happen if they want Servo to accomplish anything. They need to catch up with their competitors, and then overtake them. Rust isn't letting them do that.