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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.
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.
He does - run Mozilla into the ground just like Firefox
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.
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.
Extensions that are relevant to many are not getting ported. New API is not able to support them in the form and functionality that they were supported on the old one.
Those of us on ESR waiting for quantum castration of this version are actively looking for replacement browser. There aren't that many choices unfortunately. But if one has to accept crippling limitations of webextensions, one may as well move to chromium-derivative browsers.
Pale Moon had its own "fuck your addons, we know better" addon apocalypse event. They nuked all jetpack based addons, and then moved to a completely new engine. As a result, many addons no longer work, and of those that do, many gets few if any updates, as browser's own dev team members have to mess with code by hand to make each addon work on it.
Waterfox is a major question mark. They are extremely dependent on mozilla for delivering their browser. With Mozilla having dropped XUL, how they plan on supporting it is a big unknown.
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
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.
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.
Can't agree more Quantum is very responsive. Feels equivalent to chrome for speed. They have done a really good job with it.
You do have one option in Firefox and that is run your own syncserver. It's badly documented and not well packaged. But not so bad to setup. Unlike chrome/chromium you can do this at all, only Google with them.
I didn't bother to setup the Auth server for the syncserver, that is even worse documented. But you can use their Auth against your own syncserver, I hide mine behind a VPN so no real danger of data leak with this approach.
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.
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.'"