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Firefox Quantum Leader Takes Over All Mozilla Products (cnet.com)
CNET reports: Mozilla launched the faster Quantum version of its Firefox browser last fall in a bid to restore the nonprofit's reach and influence. Now, the leader of that effort has been promoted to oversee all Mozilla products. Mark Mayo, formerly senior vice president of Firefox, is now Mozilla's chief product officer, CNET has learned. That means he's taking over more projects, including the Pocket tool and mobile app. Pocket lets people save websites they'd like to revisit, but Mozilla also plans to use the resulting data to help recommend interesting or useful sites to Firefox users. In addition, Mozilla has promoted Denelle Dixon, formerly head of business and legal work, to chief operations officer. She's overseen an effort to diversify Mozilla revenue sources, including through the Pocket acquisition in February 2017.
If he doesn't have a manifesto I'm not even going to get excited.
Is he going to bring back the old add ons
If not, who cares.
I guess his family, but its a pretty small number.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
You mean like Carl Marx?
Seriously, their management can only get better. I finally had to abandon FF on my development PC because just so slow and buggy anymore. Launching FF on my relatively new PC will solid state drive takes 10 seconds. Chrome is instantaneous.
Inspecting elements on the page is painfully slow in FF and instant in Chrome. Both suck in regard to memory usage, though.
I really do hope they can right the ship and be relevant again, but they've lost ground. We really need competition in the browser market. Safari was once competitive, but as a heavy user on my Mac, it's sort of become the IE of browsers. Pages often don't render correctly, the freezes, etc. But it's still faster than FF.
Unfortunately, developing a good browser is almost as difficult as writing an operating system anymore, because it basically is one.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Firefox is really going downhill...
Even MS couldn't fuck it up THIS badly.
I still remember when castrated version of firefox came out, for about a month every single story about mozilla had a bunch of accounts that had the exact same marketing talking points they kept spamming. How it's so fast, and how these users migrated back to firefox from chrome because of it and how happy they are with the outcome.
A few months after, seems that the astroturfing bots are no longer on contract. Threads about "oh so fast new firefox quantum and how I migrated from chrome to it and am so happy" are all but dead, with maybe a couple of actual users who actually use it.
On the even more sad side, I still haven't picked what browser to migrate to after ESR gets the quantum castration too.
So this is a guy at Mozilla who can actually navigate the politics there are get shit done? Great, I say, about effing time.
If Electrolysis had happened fifteen years ago when users were asking for it and Mozilla was getting $350M/yr. from Google, Chrome would never have handed it its ass. I know, a billion here a billion there doesn't go as far as you'd like, and process isolation is so much more than a billion dollar project. /s
Mozilla claims to care about user privacy, but through mismanagement actually handed the dominant market share position to Google, which makes its revenues by piercing the very veil of privacy that Mozilla claimed to value.
Quantum is the best thing Mozilla has done in years, so let's see what happens. I'd love to have the Mozilla (.org) back that spun off from Netscape.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Quantum is awesome. You are wrong! ;-)
Honestly, I've given FF a hard time over recent releases but Quantum really does seem like a huge improvement... I find it waaaay more responsive.
Yawn. All the power users switched to Pale Moon and Waterfox after quantum. XUL forever.
Just please don't fuck up Thunderbird. It could probably use a few updates here and there, but it's been basically done and stable for years now, I've got my plugins that just keep on working right, and most importantly I can send and receive mail using SMTP, POP, and IMAP. I worry about the day they decide to "improve" Thunderbird with a major overhaul.
It seems to me that users bear responsibility here, and there's not much Mozilla could have done. Any user who wants to complain about proprietary software not respecting their privacy but chooses non-free software can't be taken terribly seriously on their claim of desiring privacy. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point in the above? I'll try to explain what I'm getting at: It seems to me that users who claim to care about privacy should have made choices commensurate with that claim—continue using a free software web browser (such as Mozilla Firefox or a Firefox derivative with only free software add-ons installed). These users are right to care about their privacy and others' privacy and to place a priority on privacy, even to the point of saying "no" to more featureful and robust browsers. Therefore such users should not have switched to a proprietary (user-subjugating, non-free) browser such as Google Chrome where no user can make any realistic claim to having their privacy respected.
Digital Citizen
Both him and this Dixon lady had prominent mentions of 'Mozilla Pocket' in their soon to be important duties, as well as SJWness.
The monetization they are talking about is monetization of the browser users... IE exactly what people were trying to get away from by using Mozilla.
We're now back to the same problem as the 90s: In order to avoid using the dominant operating system/browser we have to go back to largely unsupport niche browsers which don't have support for mainstream websites. Not that I will miss mainstream websites, but this situation is getting ridiculous.
Using Firefox ESR 52 works for about five more months, after which point the only supported Firefox ESR version (namely Firefox ESR 60) will support only WebExtensions. And unless Firefox ESR 60 includes a fix for [commands] Explicit support for overriding built-in keyboard shortcuts by WebExtensions (bug 1325692), there will be a lot of angry users.
Many people will not put up with having to scroll sideways for each line to be able to read it. there is a desperate need to be able to reflow columns of text to the size that you have zoomed in to make small text readable
Many people don't want to join up with some cloud service just to save their bookmarks. it would be great to be able to simply save your bookmarks as a file on your phone and then be able to copy these to another phone and import them that way
Just as you can make a simple self contained HTML page you should be able to make and run simple programs like a notepad easily in the browser, and save it as a compressed single file which can be copied to other phones and run in the same way as that simple web page, with no other dependencies or servers or anything like that needed. it may revolutionize programming
Can we have the mozilla suite back, please? This "lightweight" firebird/fox side project clearly was a terrible idea. Or at least revive the old Opera.
So, for disclosure, i use PaleMoon, Waterfox, FF-ESR, FFQ, for various browsing activities. Yes, i have chromium, chrome, opera and even several IE browsers (in virtual boxxen) for testing purposes; hell i even have the arcane wonder songbird fork nightingale (i think it is still the best music library for most use cases - except for the slimp3/squeezebox scenario)... But i digress. I see quite a bit of trouble brewing in and around the browser; and while I'm not bothered by the task of using various browsers (and even various profile configurations within each of those browsers) i see how users just want to concentrate on a single browser to address all of their needs. If FFQ is the best performing OSS browser and yet certain XUL add-ons are essential for a users needs i see a simple method to resolve the conflict and it would appear that time is available at least until Aug 28 to address these problems. Continue to use FF-ESR for the tasks requiring those unported XUL extensions and while doing that: approach the XUL programmer regarding the cost/schedule for porting to FFQ; evaluate whether your needs justify supporting the porting process in some way, or if the original XUL is unportable for reasons beyond your influence, then assess the cost of creating a new add-on from scratch. For add-ons requiring functionality not provided by FFQ, ie "video downloadhelper" development may need to include an additional external program installation via .deb .rpm or package flavor du'jour. Include that task in the development plan.
If the inconvenience caused by loss of an unported add-on does not justify your involvement as sole support for continued development; consider becoming involved in a crowdsourced funding pool or other distributed mechanism to provide support. In any case where those mechanisms won't justify your level of support then i would argue it is not a NEED.
Free software is Free as in "Free Speech" not as in "Free Beer" :
we should each reward the efforts of the people who make our lives better, this is an essential action of anyone who lives with integrity.
Now, if it does justify your support but you would rather complain instead, well, please FFS Quitcherbitchin!
Can't agree more Quantum is very responsive. Feels equivalent to chrome for speed. They have done a really good job with it.
Mozilla since 2014 has really ranked up the social Marxism after the purge of Eich.
Thankfully, Quantum turned out pretty decent, though still using Google as the default search rather than Startpage or DuckDuckGo is pretty weak. Of course, almost ALL of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, so diversifying revenue sources is something they very much need. Hopefully they also save some expenses by cutting the Marxism from the budget.
I was using Brave for a while, but it's still too buggy and needs a lot of work. They raised $30M in an ICO last year so I expect them to do a little engineering with that money. Hopefully it will be competitive against Firefox and Chrome when they can refine it.
It's a pain to run on Windows or OSX, but it is readily available in and auto-updates our of the Linux repos. Open source, no proprietary Google code, but still has all the security benefits of Google engineering.
I wish someone would create a repo-like auto-updated version of Chromium on Windows and Mac, like hosted at EFF or the Open Source Initiative or somewhere as a public service. Basically doing the work of what is done by a Linux repo so that Windows/Mac users can download Chromium and know that it will regularly update without manual patching.
If that were to happen, I suspect Google would find a lot of its Chrome business cannibalized by Chromium itself.
My initial reaction was to hope that the words "Buy Palemoon" are not in his business plan. On second thoughts, I am hoping for something more nuanced:
1. Announce intention to buy Palemoon
2. Webmasters across the planet pull fingers out from warm comfy nether parts and write some code.
3. Moz/FF reverse their decision, decide to leave Palemoon alone.
4. Palemoon users worldwide celebrate because they no longer get "Your browser is out of date" pop-ups from certain web sites.
Good things can come from this.
And it's likely to get even better. So far the major improvement is to replace a CSS rules engine with one that runs concurrently. Future plans include doing the same to the layout engine.
Is this the guy who has ruined firefox as a development platform by constantly breaking loads of plugins all the time for the last several years and that a few years ago started having people post whacky stuff to things like the release changelogs (whoever is doing content for their website appears to be high on crack cocaine)? As in hey we're breaking everything but it's all good because now we're quirky, edge, hip, cool, etc? And then adding loads of features like syncronisation and cloud rubbish people don't want.
It seems to me that users bear responsibility here, and there's not much Mozilla could have done.
BULL SHIT. That is victim-blaming cockery. The users had two choices; use Firefox, or use Chrome. The option "complain about Firefox's problems so they are addressed" was taken away from them by the Firefox devs, who simply ignored any and all user input. They have continually added bloat and jerked around the userbase. WebExtensions won't do everything that classic XUL extensions will, and they shouldn't have been implemented until they would. But no, the users clearly know fuck-all, and they'll do whatever they want over there because we are not the customers. Just like Chrome. Google is also spectacularly unresponsive to user complaints, which is why Android still doesn't do pinless bluetooth pairing (like Windows or Linux will do) even though there's been a bug open since around gingerbread.
These users are right to care about their privacy and others' privacy and to place a priority on privacy, even to the point of saying "no" to more featureful and robust browsers.
It's not enough to care about privacy. You also have to care about security, because if that is breached, you don't have any privacy either. You're trying to distill a complex decision down to a simple one, but that cannot be done.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not impressed.
Any software could be massively sped up by just removing huge chunks of its functionality.
Why is anyone at all using the new Firefox? What does it do that Chrome doesn't?
which extensions?
One such extension installed on my copy of Firefox ESR 52 is Keybinder. It cannot be ported because XUL keysets have gone away, and the feature request for adding a WebExtensions counterpart to XUL keysets shows no meaningful activity.
Try this test:
1. Install Firefox Quantum on any GNU/Linux distribution.
2. Start Firefox Quantum.
3. Open Slashdot and some other tab.
4. Log in to your account.
5. Browse to this comment.
6. Click "Reply to This" and compose a reply to this comment.
7. Attempt to press Ctrl+Tab to switch to the other tab in order to do research for your reply, but accidentally press Ctrl+Q instead, which invokes File > Quit. Watch Firefox Quantum close all tabs in all windows.
8. Restore your previous session and notice that Firefox Quantum failed to restore the contents of the "Comment:" text area. You have just lost data.
Previous versions of Firefox for GNU/Linux had extensions to prevent this data loss by unbinding Ctrl+Q. None of them work in Firefox Quantum for GNU/Linux.
I get your frustration with loss of functionality, but that specific example seems like a reason to petition the developers to add this as an option or to fix the bug, not to keep a feature that I understand had adverse security and performance implications.
that specific example [of unwanted Ctrl+Q presses] seems like a reason to petition the developers to add this as an option
From the petition in question: "NEW bug which will not be worked on by staff"
Quantum is terrible.
the SOLE reason it seems faster is the lack of API availability for its addons.
>Admittedly, for someone who enjoys addon-less chrome, there is no apparent difference ;)