Slashdot Mirror
'See the Future Firefox Right Now' (cnet.com)
"Mozilla is prepping a new version of Firefox in an effort to rally in the race for browser supremacy," writes CNET's Matt Elliott, who decided to test drive a new nightly build of Firefox 57 which "promises fast speeds and a new look." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
Firefox 57 has added a screenshot button in the top-right corner... It highlights different elements on a page as you mouse over them, or you can just click-and-drag the old-school way to take a screenshot of a portion of a page. Screenshots are saved within Firefox. Click the scissors button and then click the little My Shots window to open a new tab of all of your saved screenshots. From here you can download them or share them... The bookmark and Pocket buttons have been moved from the right of the URL bar to inside it, but the Page Actions button is new. Click it and you'll get a small menu to Copy URL, Email Link and Send to Device. The Page Actions menu also has bookmark and Pocket buttons, which seems redundant at first but then I realized you can remove those items from the URL bar by right-clicking them. You can't remove the new, triple-dot Page Actions button...
As with any prerelease software, Firefox Nightly 57 is meant for developers and will likely exhibit strange and unstable behavior from time to time. Also, there is no guarantee that the final release will look like what you see in the current version of Nightly. For example, I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block. It's part of the design of the current Nightly build but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dropped between now and November since most web users have grown accustomed to entering their search queries right in the URL bar. Just as you can with the current version of Firefox, however, you can customize which elements are displayed at the top of Firefox Nightly 57, including the search box.
As with any prerelease software, Firefox Nightly 57 is meant for developers and will likely exhibit strange and unstable behavior from time to time. Also, there is no guarantee that the final release will look like what you see in the current version of Nightly. For example, I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block. It's part of the design of the current Nightly build but I wouldn't be surprised if it gets dropped between now and November since most web users have grown accustomed to entering their search queries right in the URL bar. Just as you can with the current version of Firefox, however, you can customize which elements are displayed at the top of Firefox Nightly 57, including the search box.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look too bright.
Hopefully I'm not the only one, but I kind of lost faith in 'modern' browsers when they started hiding the menu and status bar by default.
Car analogy: Our engineers have found we can make the windscreen 30% larger if we remove the dashboard and AC controls, brilliant!
It's hard to get excited when numbers get too high too fast. No one cares for the next suckfest of features.
OK, few comments on the new "features":
1. Copy URL. Copying URLs is already trivial, either from the URL bar or by right-clicking on a link. Do we really need another way?
2. Email link. How does that differ from copy and paste into an email?
3. Bookmarks... really? So, like the bookmarks menu, only better hidden behind a heiroglyph?
4. Screenshots... I mean, really really? Because snipping tools and the old print screen button weren't enough?
5. A "triple-dot Page Actions button". Let me guess: more things that already exist in menus, now conveniently hidden behind heiroglyphs in a non-standard location?
6. "I have read reports that the search box next to Firefox's URL bar may be on the chopping block" it comes, it goes, it comes back again.
I would comment on pocket, but I'm to demotivated to bother googling what it does. Is this what progress is meant to feel like?
So why should I use this over Chrome? It sure looks the same to me.
As for tabs in the title bar, how does one even move the window now? There's almost no real estate left to even click on.
Screenshots... I mean, really really? Because snipping tools and the old print screen button weren't enough?
What set of instructions to start a snipping tool works on all supported Windows versions (including versions after the deprecation of MSPaint), all supported OS X/macOS versions, and all major X11/Linux distributions? Unlike the snipping tool that may or may not have been included with your operating system, one in Firefox would work on all major desktop operating systems.
Haha really, adding features? Who the hell is paid money to add features? Being a cynical douche decrying everything reflexively makes more sense.
Do these work (and how well)?:
uBlock Origin
Classic Theme Restorer
Tab Mix Plus
Self Destructing Cookies
Flash Control
Stop Youtube AutoPlay Next
Greasemonkey
Session Manager
Status-4-Evar
The latest web browser market share stats show that Firefox is in a terrible position right now. The desktop versions of Firefox only have about 5% of the market. Firefox for Android has only 0.04% (yes, that's way less than even just 1%!) of the market.
Chrome is over 50% of the market. Safari is at about 12%. UC Browser for Android is at about 9%. IE/Edge are at about 6%. So even in a best-case scenario, Firefox is now the 5th place browser.
With the Opera family of browsers and Samsung Internet at about 4% each, Firefox could soon find itself as the 7th place browser if it keeps losing users.
Firefox 57 is shaping up to be a disastrous release, due to the planned switch to only supporting WebExtensions extensions. This could very well cause breakage of a lot of existing extensions, some of which there are no WebExtensions-compatible equivalents of. This will likely cause many users to ditch Firefox in favor of some other browser. Some might use Pale Moon, while others will probably move to Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave or some other browser based on Blink or WebKit. So the possibility of Firefox losing a few more percentage points of market share in the near future is, I am afraid, very real.
In any sort of a real company, anything close to this kind of market share loss would result in panic and action. Heads would have rolled long ago. The existing staff would have been shaken up, if not completely removed and replaced. At the very least, a significant and in-depth inquiry would have been performed to figure out exactly what was going on to cause the drop in market share.
Yet I don't think we've seen any of this. It's like Mozilla is perfectly fine with Firefox's dropping market share. This is particularly strange, as Firefox is really the only product of theirs that people use. So many of their other projects have essentially been left to rot (Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla), or were soundly rejected by potential users right off the bat (Persona, Firefox OS, Pocket, Firefox for Android), or have been spinning their wheels endlessly accomplishing very little (Servo, Rust). It's even stranger when we realize that Firefox is likely their only source of income. So keeping Firefox's share of the market up should be their biggest concern.
I don't know what the hell is going on at Mozilla, but it's almost as if they have no idea that they're becoming irrelevant at a very rapid pace. Or if they are aware, it's like they're not taking any sort of action to prevent Firefox from losing the rest of its users. In many ways it's like the opposite is happening; they're making changes that will only serve to annoy and drive away the few users who do continue to use Firefox.
It's almost surreal. Given how low Firefox's market share is getting, Mozilla should be in a state of total panic right now.
Captain: "Thiiis is the captain speaking. The crew has told me that several of you have been making quite a commotion, and I've got to say, folks, that it's really such a shame that grown people can act like that. Just to allay your concerns, the crew will be handing out questionnaires where you can write your concerns, and not just shout like mad people."
Captain: "...Alright, we've reviewed your complaints, and I'm pleased to announce, that we will be playing your in-flight movie featuring Pauly Shore, a man I just love to see in a comedy role, and think should allay any of your concerns. We'll be landing in Antarctica in seven hours."
Captain: "Yes, YES, your tickets WERE to go to Wisconsin - and that a reasonable concern, but we had another place we wanted to go, and I hardly think it's in your business to tell me how to run my airplane. Now, you can all calm down, with a lovely movie featuring Yahoo Serious."
Captain: "In an unforseen set of events, we seem to be running short on fuel. I'm going to have to ask that anyone on board who would like us to reach our destination please consider donating to us on paypal or by credit card. And please, no smart asses asking us to change destination - we already discussed this, and agreed on the importance of reaching cool, wonderful Antarctica."
Captain: "I've been told that Antarctica was the location we STARTED FROM, and that it wasn't actually necessary to circle the entire planet to return to there. Also, that donations don't create fuel. Well, listen people, that's thinking inside the BOX - and we need innovative thinking to get us where we need to go. And I'm honestly not finding these aggressive suggestions helpful."
Captain: "I've been told that we've never actually taken off - well see, that's what I'm talking about... why are you people taking me? I BARRED that door for a reason!"
Ryan Fenton
The Print Screen key only works great if your screen shows everything you want to capture. If it goes off screen you need to use the developer full page screen shot command or use this new feature in 57. Just tried this feature and I'm not so keen on using it because it uploads the result to screenshots.firefox.com.
Fuck Firefox. Let it burn.
The twins of Mammon quarrelled. Their warring plunged the world into a new darkness, and the beast abhorred the darkness. So it began to move swiftly, and grew more powerful, and went forth and multiplied. And the beasts brought fire and light to the darkness. -- from The Book of Mozilla, 15:1
I liked the old look. So I run Seamonkey.
The latest web browser market share stats show that Firefox is in a terrible position right now.
And that's why I use Firefox.
I still keep needing to kill Firefox because it has leaked too much memory and is gets too slow. In addition, I sometimes see persistent CPU usage in an otherwise idle browser. They may think they hvae solved these problems, but they persist.
Why didn't you mention the name of this programming language that they've created? I'm sure you do know that its name is Rust. But I'm sure you also realize that if you had given its name, you would have been rightfully modded down.
Slashdot isn't Hacker News, or Reddit, or Stack Overflow. We aren't naive. We see through the Rust hype. We know it's nothing special. We know it gives no advantages over modern C++, and actually has a lot of drawbacks.
Shit, Rust has only one implementation! C++ has two mature, independent open source implementations, several other less-mature open source implementations, and multiple independent commercial implementations. We can't take Rust seriously until there is more than one implementation.
It's also trivial to avoid memory leaks when using modern C++. Efficient, safe, well-tested, open source smart pointer implementations have been readily available for many years now. If the Firefox devs can't figure out how to use them, then switching to a totally new language they've crapped out themselves sure as hell won't help them! Rust makes C++ look simple and comprehensible.
You also didn't mention the name of their new rendering engine. As I'm sure you're aware, its name is Servo.
I encourage people to try Servo. It can be downloaded from here. Try the nightly. Their latest and greatest. And witness for yourself how terrible it is. If your experience is anything like mine, and I'm pretty sure it will be, you'll quickly be greeted with terribly broken page layouts, assuming Servo doesn't crash out first!
Despite being described as "modern" on the Servo home page, I can generally get a better browsing experience from IE 3, which is probably about 20 years old now.
Firefox's future is looking bleak enough as it is. If Rust and Servo are supposed to help Firefox, then I think we might as well start writing its obituary.
Failing market share aside, Mozilla is the ONLY major browser developer that doesn't have a profit motive to fuck us all over. Once they're gone, it's profit motivated browsers, top to bottom.
Chromium-derived browsers are cute and all, but let's not kid ourselves that they are at Google's mercy when it comes to technical decision-making.
I'd mod you up but I've already commented.
Google has lots of reasons to want to control the web (and spy users) and thus Chrome was born. Also, they'd rather you use Android apps than websites
Microsoft also wants you to use their platform (Metro/Win32 Windows Store apps) rather than websites.
Apple likewise with iOS and OS X.
Mozilla are the only ones that they'd rather you use websites than their closed platforms.