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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
First opera, now Firefox. Is IE next? The end is nigh!
Silence is a state of mime.
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
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
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.
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!!!
I agree. Brackets ARE the correct way to insert your own assumed text into some one else's words in a quote. The problem is I'm not seeing any quotes.
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.
.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
Thank you! Your huge financial contribution is gladly accepted.
...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!
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 didn't like how I had to word some of that either
That would explain it. I though someone was doing an odd impersonation of you.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
IE6 saved a decade of developer efforts. Clearly we should go back.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
APK, you said you were leaving Slashdot, what happened? What brought about your return?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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.
He was trying to go to reddit, but his hosts file was wrong.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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."