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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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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
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