I don't do much to manage them; it's more due to neglect than anything else.
They were in about eight browser windows spread across 2 displays and several virtual workspaces, on a work machine. It has ample RAM for development and running VMs so space wasn't an issue. The tabs were the usual mixture of issue tracker tickets, related wiki pages, google searches, relevant mail-list posts or blog pages, and things to read "when I have a spare minute". I just opened tabs far more often than I sorted through or closed them, and after a few months they'd collected.
Finding tabs wasn't particularly hard, thanks mostly to the fact that the so called "awsome bar" autocompletes on open tabs (in fact with the % shortcut it completes against just open tabs). Performance didn't seem particularly poor either. Maybe slightly less snappy, but not noticeably so.
I only realised how many tabs I had when an add-on started leaking memory in large amounts. While tracing down what was causing the leak, I was copying the info from about:memory and using the "copy tab URLs" extension to export lists of what was open. I was rather surprised, but very impressed with firefox, when I ran it through wc. Though I did then spent a whole afternoon reading/closing/bookmarking until I brought the count down to double figures.
I have seen some discussion by firefox devs on blurring the line between tabs and history. Once the (already planned functionality) to evict non-recently-used tabs from memory is in place, the distinction between tabs and history item becomes mostly a matter of UI anyway. I think that rather fits my disorganised browser usage.
I've been running recent firefoxen on 64 bit Ubuntu with over 340 open tabs. It used over 1.5Gb RAM, but that seemed reasonable in the circumstances. Chromium failed entirely with a fraction of the tabs.
On the other hand, I did find a firefox extension a couple of months ago which managed to leak over 1Gb/day (I'm afraid I can't which it was).
The tragedy is not that no-one is using OpenOffice, it's that millions of Windows and Mac users who downloaded it directly from the OOo website still are.
The Linux users are fine, their distros will either transition them to LibreOffice or provide security patches to OpenOffice, but the vast majority of OOo users were not slashdot readers who follow the twists and turns of OpenSource politics, they're people who don't know that Oracle bought Sun (nor care about such details); they just downloaded a free office suite. They are not getting any security updates, even as vulnerabilities are fixed in LibreOffice. They are not even getting any good information that they're being given a vulnerable, unsupported product. The OpenOffice website still has all the same download links, and the same security information, including a Security Bulletin with no mention of vulnerabilities beyond 2010.
I really think Apache and any ASF members should be ashamed. Whatever you think of having separate code-bases and a whole new incubator project, treating OOo users like this (especially when a maintained fork exists) is awful and detrimental to the standing of OSS in general.
No, no, no -- it's most definitely not java. Google are being sued by Oracle over their use of Java in Android, don't you know. Any new language from Google is not java, not at all. Any superficial similarity you think you see is a mistake, so don't you go mentioning it Larry Ellison.
A couple of more recent examples, now in wide use:
* LLVM (University of Illinois) * Xen hypervisor (University of Cambridge)
In general, if a University project becomes widely used it will either have been spun off into a commercial operation or become an open source project which gains outside contributors.
I saw one playing back full screen H.264 just this afternoon, and if not full games the GPU can certainly handle quake 3. Apparently the broadcom chip it's based around was targeted at set top boxes so it certainly pays back video.
Of course this means that more than $1 of its $25 price goes on H.264 and AAC licenses. Whether that's appropriate is a separate discussion...
Now I've never been to Arkansas, but I believe it is some way from the UK -- the subject of the original article. Here in Britain we elected (well more we ended up with, since we didn't give any party a majority) a coalition government which promised significant budget cuts to limit the deficit (I think you know about these arguments).
One of the ways they promised to square the circle of a population that didn't like budget deficits, but neither cares for the removal of services, was to promise that there are services which can be delivered more cheaply by moving online. This then leaves them open to attack about those households who are not online, and the rural areas where there is little provision.
Now none of our country is as sparsely populated as the rural midwest, so the problem's not so hard as in the US, but the £400m that they have promised to spend on rural broadband still won't go very far. Depending on your political point of view, you can see this as welcome deregulation which will allow private sector innovation to step in and solve the problem, or a political fig leaf which won't make any real difference but gives the current government the chance to say they're doing stuff.
Imagine that you are visiting slashdot, wouldn't it be better to use SSL than en-clair if the site supports it? Wouldn't it be better to have encryption with a duff cert than no encryption at all?
Why do you think it would be better to use SSL with a 'duff' cert than an unencrypted transport? What does it protect against, most of those in a position to read your traffic would be in a position to mount a MITM attack?
Maybe it was too pessimistic a view. I certainly wasn't suggesting that Firefox should be preserved in aspic. I'm glad to see the progress: features such as canvas and usable typography are revolutionising web sites. I can see that in a year or so's time there might be all the features to replace flash. I want that progress; I just don't see the need to have 10 releases to get there rather than 2.
There's a continuum in release speed between Microsoft in the IE6 days, and Chrome. If Firefox want's to be different from IE and Chrome, I don't think it should be at either extreme.
Now, I agree with you 100%, but I don't think its a big enough niche to survive in. It appeals to slashdot readers (and only a subset of them) not the wider world.
I don't think there is no possible niche, just that what you've moved further away from it over the last 6 months as you become more Chrome-like than Chrome (and it's possible it's now too late to change course).
In one of my work roles I develop web apps and for many years Firefox was our recommended browser. It's cross platform, with good standards compliance etc. Chrome, when it came along, we didn't recommend; it seemed too much of a moving target. It was pretty standards compliant so likely everything would work; we'd collect bug reports and aim to fix them if possible, but not offer user support or claim it was tested. Now FF has made the decision to go with continuous roll out of new versions, it makes it hard for us to test and valid. And what's the point if by the time it's in users hands that version is obsolete. Once our tools are in use, just getting the funding agreement to make updates would typically take longer than a Firefox cycle. Now, as you remove version numbers from the users, even getting them to report issues to us becomes more complicated. You've become harder to support than Chrome. You've gone from the recommended option to below Chrome.
We're not alone. My bank roles out changes to their site a couple of times a year. Currently FF 3.6 is what they claim to support. I wonder what they're going to do. I do actually appreciate the fact that they're cautious about updates and have testing and validation, no doubt slowed down by management and oversight, before they release changes.
Not everyone appreciates change. In fact the majority don't. My partner, my parents, her parents, all use Firefox. They don't do so to get more features, faster and more often. They use it for security, and a trustworthy reputation, and in part to have the same browser on multiple platforms. They don't like change -- when I've been in the room and thing have changed due to upgrades they complain to me as the nearest tech. Asa says websites change without user's permission or knowledge, so why shouldn't browsers. I think that's a spectacularly bad argument since people around me don't like it when google or facebook make changes to their interfaces either. Users are totally unempowered to prevent changes to public web services at the whim of large corporations, that's no argument for taking it from them in their browser.
What I read in the mozilla blog is all "Drive the Web Forward", "faster and easier". What many want is something they can trust to be there nice and stable. I think that ties well with Mozilla's open aims, more than continual upgrades, more than spending your hard-won trust capital on releases that break users' add-ons.
I guess, I think there was a greater niche to compete as more of a cross platform, open source, extensible and customisable alternative to IE, than as a direct competitor to Chrome. I appreciate that's a bit less coo, but while I take you point about Mozilla being beyond the Silicon Valley bubble, I do think you're overly interested in the tech vanguard and it may well come home to roost.
For now I continue to use Firefox (either beta or aurora), but I foresee a steady decline as Mozilla devs spend the diminishing Google Ad money on their increasingly irrelevant tech interests. On a brighter note, there's a reasonable future for said devs; Firefox will look great on their CV and no doubt the remaining megaCorps left to control the browser market will snap them up. It's us supporters of a free independent browser who'll lose out in the end.
Yes, Mozilla needed to invest in Firefox speed, and did so in the FF4 cycle as you're doing so currently in Memory use. Firefox(1) currently works better for my 100+ tab browser habit than Chrome, so despite your older code base and smaller size I think you can produce a competitive browser engine even if you're playing catch up now.
But I think you've way overcompensated for the FF4 development cycle. Face it, you were losing users to Chrome, and you will continue to do so. Chrome is a competitive browser from a well known name, backed by the kind of company that can drop $12B on an acquisition without breaking sweat. I see dozens of Chrome ads every day as I browse on Linux (they're on this page!). You just can't expect that not to affect market share.
In reacting to this you seem to have pushed hard to produce a more Chrome-like experience. No-one objects to investment in speed, memory use, multi-process support etc., but Google is either ahead or capable of catching you in all of these. At the same time you're destroying your USPs. You must occupy a different niche to Chrome or you will lose.
You used to have a huge add-on and customisability advantage, but as already discussed are damaging that (plus putting off the users who depend on add-ons -- if they do stay on FF it'll be harder for them to trust add-ons if they've broken before).
You used to have a browser that competed with IE, not so good for enterprise use, but it was competing and it was cross platform. You're abandoning that for version free upgrades. That's too much external trust and too little control for most enterprises, who don't want the extra risk. Asa says web applications don't show versions, but we only use web applications where we have a business relationship with the supplier, have done our own testing on the site and have clear idea of its support; having such an external dependency is not taken lightly.
You used to have the advantage of being Open Source, and the army of contributors who went with it. But webkit is open source too, and Mozilla is now pretty strict in what it accepts. If you want to add new functionality to web browsers it's certainly not harder to get code into Chromium.
What is Firefox's Unique Selling Point now? The fact that you're tough enough to take a principled stand against H.264? I love you for it, I really do, but I know it's irrelevant to the world at large, even most of the tech world. It won't be close to enough.
Maybe I'm wrong in characterising Mozilla's attitude, but your mission does seem to have become using the power that our browser share gives us to "do good for the internet". Which is not so very far from farting around worrying about the next big idea rather than serving your users best. I'm unconvinced you'll keep them; you're burning community goodwill like there's no tomorrow, and with them goes your influence.
Seriously, what is your market positioning in comparison to Chrome, I really can't see it?
(1) Today's bit of crazy is that version numbers are not webby enough, so I guess there's no point referring to a specific version any more.
Mozilla now has lots of engineers and has been hiring more. If you cared so passionately about these things you would allocate the resources to provide them.
Instead you get developers of other systems dropping support for Firefox in their website/service/appliance to the same level as Chrome. i.e. we don't stop you using it but won't support it if you have a problem. It's sad to have to do it, but neither browser fits into standard product development and testing timelines. That's not a problem for huge websites with accordingly large resources, nor for the perpetual-beta start-up, but for everyone in between it's an issue.
I'm just annoyed by all the "Mozilla haven't really changed anything, you just need to reinterpret the numbers" comments when they've actually made a major change to their process and what it means for users.
I think your list above gives the wrong dates; it's the end-of-life dates that the shop owner should be using to judge outdatedness. The new release model creates EOL browsers like no-bodies business; though since they now automatically update people through major release numbers you shouldn't see so many random machines with FF4 or FF5. The downside of this is automatic change/breakage for users.
I do understand that there are evolving answers to these issues, but I'm not sure it was worth making the changes before you'd fixed the issues. Post 4.0 you could have made a concerted effort to develop add-on APIs and get extension devs to move over. Then switch to the new process once users extensions won't get disabled. Many, many users can live with not being faster than IE9, in return for stability and not having things break (and indeed not having UI change too often).
I fear that by the time you've found a solution it will be too late: the power users who depend on add-ons will have left; Chrome will have expanded its extension API and more will have been created. I was already getting "what you're still using Firefox?" comments from other techs before FF 5. Firefox might have a large install base of less technical users now, but once the tech vanguard move on and stop recommending it you're in trouble.
I have a feeling that Mozilla lives in its own little bubble where competing on features and speed, setting the standards pace, and "pushing the web platform forward" seems critical. I'm sure it all feels great in Silicon Valley, but not all web development happens in cool startups champing at the bit for the latest canvas 3D gizmo. I'd hazard that there's even more spread across businesses large and small. The type of business which doesn't move so quickly and can take a long time to adjust to any change. Many of us aspire to a stable, open source browser to act as a basis for the web, rather than a Chrome-clone.
Sadly, I predict you'll all enjoy getting to do your cool vanguard standards stuff without that legacy support to worry about, but only for a short while, as your market share declines and any remaining competitive advantage is overtaken by a corporation with an agenda of pushing its own web-based services. I think the new process suits you more than it does most end users.
But n.n.x releases were automatically applied; didn't look any different to users, and didn't break and functionality (such as add-ons).
Users are quite used to applying security updates, but that's rather different from changing versions with potentially incompatible changes every 6 weeks.
It's not quite comparable. Earlier releases had security patches for a fair period after the next major version was released (FF 3.6, is I think still supported) Firefox 4 is already unsupported and as soon as version 6 gets released, FF5 goes unsupported immediately.
Changing banks is quite a lot hard than changing browser. I know from experience several years ago of changing my bank for not supporting anything other than IE6.
On the other hand, I do expect my bank to be fairly conservative in the rate at which it makes site changes (unless to patch a security issue); I understand that testing, validation and sign-off of new versions takes quite a while in a large organisation and I realise that operations people may want to schedule upgrade to a new version of the site for a particular time with some notice.
I don't work in finance, but I do deliver web-based systems, and have been wondering what to do about the rise of Chrome and its frequent silent upgrades. My strategy on projects has been to promise support for the most important IEs (soon, I hope, that won't include IE6), the last couple of major Firefoxen, and current Safari. Chrome is on a best efforts, should work but no guarantees, basis which has worked while it had fairly small share.
Now that Firefox moves its update regime in the same direction as Chrome (incidentally, as it's been doing in many choices for interface, multiprocess Electrolysis work, etc.), it's less clear what to do. I can deliver a version that works with the current Firefox, but I couldn't promise in a contract that it'll continue to work with as yet unreleased versions. If I deliver a site tested with Firefox 6 today (and tested, but not certified, with the FF7 branch) then it'll still sound out of date by the end of the year when we're all on FF9 or FF10.
Mozilla's answer is that we should all just forget about version numbers and trust that the stream of updates probably won't break things (and if it does it'll be for good reasons -- honest). All well and good but doesn't fit with the way many organisations manage things. Since 4.0, I've stopped evangelizing about Firefox; Mozilla have become yet another software company who cause me grief rather than something to be proud of.
I blame the netbook falloff on market saturation and faliure to upgrade the specs (along with maybe a little competition from tablets). I have a netbook from 2008, one of the first models with atom CPUs. I make plenty of use of it, and was thinking, as it passed 3 years old the other day, perhaps I should upgrade. I could find absolutely no reason in the specs of current models to upgrade. I was feeling that it was occasionally slow when browsing, but a new netbook with basically the same chip gives me zero benefit from a new model. Despite me being happy to pay for a new netbook, there's no point and I'll keep using my current model until it physically fails.
I think most people who want one have one. If this 'new' ultabook segment comes with a little more poke than a netbook, but similarly good battery life then I'd be all for one.
Or perhaps you've failed to grasp the point of a v0.2 pre-release on github? In fact TFA specifically states that pixel perfect rendering _is_ their goal.
The blog post describes the current progress; it now has good rendering on one platform, progress from last week.
Interesting. Though the call hasn't come through very loud or clear.
Mozilla has quite a considerable PR capability, particularly in the technical press, and as a reader of Planet Mozilla I'd say I'm more than averagely informed about Mozilla's actions. I know of many Mozilla Labs and other activites, yet I've not even heard of any of these initiatives! I was not talking about some items on a wiki list or a posting on a Mozilla newsgroup, but a genuine project.
Above you say:
...it needs build system changes, build and test infrastructure changes, additional test infrastructure resources, and ongoing QA time investment.
Getting outside contributes to help with this would require a fairly significant investment of effort to get it going, it would also cost Mozilla some of their domination of the Firefox project. The payoff might be a larger and healthier community looking after the codebase.
It would also require a less contemptuous attitude towards fellow (potential) contributors. To be honest I've seen no sign that it's within Mozilla's culture to work this way.
This is true. And the older they are, the less they want it. Change "under the hood" is fine, but change that involves the UI is hated. I know one person who refuses to upgrade from FF3.x because the little "back pulldown" button isn't in 4 or 5 (and I can't find an extension that replaces it). Yes, she knows now that if you hover over the "back" button you get the same thing (they didn't make it easy to find out, though). It might have helped if FF4 came with a way to make the look and feel exactly the same as FF3, but they don't do that. I was able to tell her how to fix the tabs so they weren't upside down (WTF? why are we changing something like that, that doesn't actually make any difference?) but that wasn't enough.
Amen. My partners first comment when she saw FF4 was, "how am I going to upgrade my parents?"
People feel responsible for the software they installed for friends and family members, and this was often the way Firefox spread in the first place.
The cost has in fact been estimated, several times. Unfortunately, it's been to high each time.
And yet, I posit, less than the total amount of effort lost by countless admins around the world due to its lack.
If Mozilla cared about this they could be calling for help from the community of admins out there; guiding the process and offering Moz infrastructure to help people work together to save everyone effort. It's hard for things like this to get off the ground with large Open Source projects without some support from the centre/project leaders (particularly for a project like Firefox with tightly controlled trademarks).
One viable option might be to fork the beast into two - one bleeding edge for "home users", and one long-term-stable for businesses and those who don't like having to trash half of their plugins every three months. The latter can take the good things from the former, and implement them on a sane schedule.
It's not obvious who other than Mozilla could afford to do this. The browser market is one where all desktop browsers are either bundled with OSs or a free download. Unlike RHEL, I doubt there's a market in paid for support. Mozilla are mostly funded by search referral income. This model is mass market and they may well be right that the number of enterprise seats (whose users may not even be allowed personal browsing) is disproportionate to the costs with meeting enterprise needs.
On the other hand they need to consider the reputational costs of not being seen as a general purpose browser supplier suitable for use everywhere. As much as large institutional users such as IBM or the French Government provided good publicity as Firefox was growing, the negative publicity as they move away could effect the Firefox brand.
A change in Firefox's perception could harm Mozilla's market share more than simply counting lost enterprise installs -- the browser market has become very competitive and Mozilla doesn't have the marketing budget of their rivals; they depend on good impressions from enthusiast users and tech bloggers, plenty of whom work in enterprise jobs. This is on top of the users unhappy about UI changes, or add-on compatibility. More time to upgrade often allows more time to adapt to change, and more time for extensions which ameliorate the change to appear.
If Mozilla themselves warm to the idea (despite Asa), they may be able to get some extra contribution from large corporations who benefit, but I think it would still need significant Mozilla involvement.
Personally I think that, as penance for his comments, Asa should be assigned to nothing but security patch backports for the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't do much to manage them; it's more due to neglect than anything else.
They were in about eight browser windows spread across 2 displays and several virtual workspaces, on a work machine. It has ample RAM for development and running VMs so space wasn't an issue. The tabs were the usual mixture of issue tracker tickets, related wiki pages, google searches, relevant mail-list posts or blog pages, and things to read "when I have a spare minute". I just opened tabs far more often than I sorted through or closed them, and after a few months they'd collected.
Finding tabs wasn't particularly hard, thanks mostly to the fact that the so called "awsome bar" autocompletes on open tabs (in fact with the % shortcut it completes against just open tabs). Performance didn't seem particularly poor either. Maybe slightly less snappy, but not noticeably so.
I only realised how many tabs I had when an add-on started leaking memory in large amounts. While tracing down what was causing the leak, I was copying the info from about:memory and using the "copy tab URLs" extension to export lists of what was open. I was rather surprised, but very impressed with firefox, when I ran it through wc. Though I did then spent a whole afternoon reading/closing/bookmarking until I brought the count down to double figures.
I have seen some discussion by firefox devs on blurring the line between tabs and history. Once the (already planned functionality) to evict non-recently-used tabs from memory is in place, the distinction between tabs and history item becomes mostly a matter of UI anyway. I think that rather fits my disorganised browser usage.
I've been running recent firefoxen on 64 bit Ubuntu with over 340 open tabs. It used over 1.5Gb RAM, but that seemed reasonable in the circumstances. Chromium failed entirely with a fraction of the tabs.
On the other hand, I did find a firefox extension a couple of months ago which managed to leak over 1Gb/day (I'm afraid I can't which it was).
The tragedy is not that no-one is using OpenOffice, it's that millions of Windows and Mac users who downloaded it directly from the OOo website still are.
The Linux users are fine, their distros will either transition them to LibreOffice or provide security patches to OpenOffice, but the vast majority of OOo users were not slashdot readers who follow the twists and turns of OpenSource politics, they're people who don't know that Oracle bought Sun (nor care about such details); they just downloaded a free office suite. They are not getting any security updates, even as vulnerabilities are fixed in LibreOffice. They are not even getting any good information that they're being given a vulnerable, unsupported product. The OpenOffice website still has all the same download links, and the same security information, including a Security Bulletin with no mention of vulnerabilities beyond 2010.
I really think Apache and any ASF members should be ashamed. Whatever you think of having separate code-bases and a whole new incubator project, treating OOo users like this (especially when a maintained fork exists) is awful and detrimental to the standing of OSS in general.
No, no, no -- it's most definitely not java. Google are being sued by Oracle over their use of Java in Android, don't you know. Any new language from Google is not java, not at all. Any superficial similarity you think you see is a mistake, so don't you go mentioning it Larry Ellison.
A couple of more recent examples, now in wide use:
* LLVM (University of Illinois)
* Xen hypervisor (University of Cambridge)
In general, if a University project becomes widely used it will either have been spun off into a commercial operation or become an open source project which gains outside contributors.
I saw one playing back full screen H.264 just this afternoon, and if not full games the GPU can certainly handle quake 3. Apparently the broadcom chip it's based around was targeted at set top boxes so it certainly pays back video.
Of course this means that more than $1 of its $25 price goes on H.264 and AAC licenses. Whether that's appropriate is a separate discussion...
Now I've never been to Arkansas, but I believe it is some way from the UK -- the subject of the original article. Here in Britain we elected (well more we ended up with, since we didn't give any party a majority) a coalition government which promised significant budget cuts to limit the deficit (I think you know about these arguments).
One of the ways they promised to square the circle of a population that didn't like budget deficits, but neither cares for the removal of services, was to promise that there are services which can be delivered more cheaply by moving online. This then leaves them open to attack about those households who are not online, and the rural areas where there is little provision.
Now none of our country is as sparsely populated as the rural midwest, so the problem's not so hard as in the US, but the £400m that they have promised to spend on rural broadband still won't go very far. Depending on your political point of view, you can see this as welcome deregulation which will allow private sector innovation to step in and solve the problem, or a political fig leaf which won't make any real difference but gives the current government the chance to say they're doing stuff.
Imagine that you are visiting slashdot, wouldn't it be better to use SSL than en-clair if the site supports it? Wouldn't it be better to have encryption with a duff cert than no encryption at all?
Why do you think it would be better to use SSL with a 'duff' cert than an unencrypted transport? What does it protect against, most of those in a position to read your traffic would be in a position to mount a MITM attack?
Maybe it was too pessimistic a view. I certainly wasn't suggesting that Firefox should be preserved in aspic. I'm glad to see the progress: features such as canvas and usable typography are revolutionising web sites. I can see that in a year or so's time there might be all the features to replace flash. I want that progress; I just don't see the need to have 10 releases to get there rather than 2.
There's a continuum in release speed between Microsoft in the IE6 days, and Chrome. If Firefox want's to be different from IE and Chrome, I don't think it should be at either extreme.
Now, I agree with you 100%, but I don't think its a big enough niche to survive in. It appeals to slashdot readers (and only a subset of them) not the wider world.
I don't think there is no possible niche, just that what you've moved further away from it over the last 6 months as you become more Chrome-like than Chrome (and it's possible it's now too late to change course).
In one of my work roles I develop web apps and for many years Firefox was our recommended browser. It's cross platform, with good standards compliance etc. Chrome, when it came along, we didn't recommend; it seemed too much of a moving target. It was pretty standards compliant so likely everything would work; we'd collect bug reports and aim to fix them if possible, but not offer user support or claim it was tested. Now FF has made the decision to go with continuous roll out of new versions, it makes it hard for us to test and valid. And what's the point if by the time it's in users hands that version is obsolete. Once our tools are in use, just getting the funding agreement to make updates would typically take longer than a Firefox cycle. Now, as you remove version numbers from the users, even getting them to report issues to us becomes more complicated. You've become harder to support than Chrome. You've gone from the recommended option to below Chrome.
We're not alone. My bank roles out changes to their site a couple of times a year. Currently FF 3.6 is what they claim to support. I wonder what they're going to do. I do actually appreciate the fact that they're cautious about updates and have testing and validation, no doubt slowed down by management and oversight, before they release changes.
Not everyone appreciates change. In fact the majority don't. My partner, my parents, her parents, all use Firefox. They don't do so to get more features, faster and more often. They use it for security, and a trustworthy reputation, and in part to have the same browser on multiple platforms. They don't like change -- when I've been in the room and thing have changed due to upgrades they complain to me as the nearest tech. Asa says websites change without user's permission or knowledge, so why shouldn't browsers. I think that's a spectacularly bad argument since people around me don't like it when google or facebook make changes to their interfaces either. Users are totally unempowered to prevent changes to public web services at the whim of large corporations, that's no argument for taking it from them in their browser.
What I read in the mozilla blog is all "Drive the Web Forward", "faster and easier". What many want is something they can trust to be there nice and stable. I think that ties well with Mozilla's open aims, more than continual upgrades, more than spending your hard-won trust capital on releases that break users' add-ons.
I guess, I think there was a greater niche to compete as more of a cross platform, open source, extensible and customisable alternative to IE, than as a direct competitor to Chrome. I appreciate that's a bit less coo, but while I take you point about Mozilla being beyond the Silicon Valley bubble, I do think you're overly interested in the tech vanguard and it may well come home to roost.
For now I continue to use Firefox (either beta or aurora), but I foresee a steady decline as Mozilla devs spend the diminishing Google Ad money on their increasingly irrelevant tech interests. On a brighter note, there's a reasonable future for said devs; Firefox will look great on their CV and no doubt the remaining megaCorps left to control the browser market will snap them up. It's us supporters of a free independent browser who'll lose out in the end.
Yes, Mozilla needed to invest in Firefox speed, and did so in the FF4 cycle as you're doing so currently in Memory use. Firefox(1) currently works better for my 100+ tab browser habit than Chrome, so despite your older code base and smaller size I think you can produce a competitive browser engine even if you're playing catch up now.
But I think you've way overcompensated for the FF4 development cycle. Face it, you were losing users to Chrome, and you will continue to do so. Chrome is a competitive browser from a well known name, backed by the kind of company that can drop $12B on an acquisition without breaking sweat. I see dozens of Chrome ads every day as I browse on Linux (they're on this page!). You just can't expect that not to affect market share.
In reacting to this you seem to have pushed hard to produce a more Chrome-like experience. No-one objects to investment in speed, memory use, multi-process support etc., but Google is either ahead or capable of catching you in all of these. At the same time you're destroying your USPs. You must occupy a different niche to Chrome or you will lose.
You used to have a huge add-on and customisability advantage, but as already discussed are damaging that (plus putting off the users who depend on add-ons -- if they do stay on FF it'll be harder for them to trust add-ons if they've broken before).
You used to have a browser that competed with IE, not so good for enterprise use, but it was competing and it was cross platform. You're abandoning that for version free upgrades. That's too much external trust and too little control for most enterprises, who don't want the extra risk. Asa says web applications don't show versions, but we only use web applications where we have a business relationship with the supplier, have done our own testing on the site and have clear idea of its support; having such an external dependency is not taken lightly.
You used to have the advantage of being Open Source, and the army of contributors who went with it. But webkit is open source too, and Mozilla is now pretty strict in what it accepts. If you want to add new functionality to web browsers it's certainly not harder to get code into Chromium.
What is Firefox's Unique Selling Point now? The fact that you're tough enough to take a principled stand against H.264? I love you for it, I really do, but I know it's irrelevant to the world at large, even most of the tech world. It won't be close to enough.
Maybe I'm wrong in characterising Mozilla's attitude, but your mission does seem to have become using the power that our browser share gives us to "do good for the internet". Which is not so very far from farting around worrying about the next big idea rather than serving your users best. I'm unconvinced you'll keep them; you're burning community goodwill like there's no tomorrow, and with them goes your influence.
Seriously, what is your market positioning in comparison to Chrome, I really can't see it?
(1) Today's bit of crazy is that version numbers are not webby enough, so I guess there's no point referring to a specific version any more.
My copy of this page has not one, but two adverts for "Chrome, by Google for Linux". Google offering the carrot where Mozilla offer the stick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Release_history shows all the point releases. Given the speed at which vulnerabilities appear, shortly after the last point release seems a good approximation.
Mozilla now has lots of engineers and has been hiring more. If you cared so passionately about these things you would allocate the resources to provide them.
Instead you get developers of other systems dropping support for Firefox in their website/service/appliance to the same level as Chrome. i.e. we don't stop you using it but won't support it if you have a problem. It's sad to have to do it, but neither browser fits into standard product development and testing timelines. That's not a problem for huge websites with accordingly large resources, nor for the perpetual-beta start-up, but for everyone in between it's an issue.
I'm just annoyed by all the "Mozilla haven't really changed anything, you just need to reinterpret the numbers" comments when they've actually made a major change to their process and what it means for users.
I think your list above gives the wrong dates; it's the end-of-life dates that the shop owner should be using to judge outdatedness. The new release model creates EOL browsers like no-bodies business; though since they now automatically update people through major release numbers you shouldn't see so many random machines with FF4 or FF5. The downside of this is automatic change/breakage for users.
I do understand that there are evolving answers to these issues, but I'm not sure it was worth making the changes before you'd fixed the issues. Post 4.0 you could have made a concerted effort to develop add-on APIs and get extension devs to move over. Then switch to the new process once users extensions won't get disabled. Many, many users can live with not being faster than IE9, in return for stability and not having things break (and indeed not having UI change too often).
I fear that by the time you've found a solution it will be too late: the power users who depend on add-ons will have left; Chrome will have expanded its extension API and more will have been created. I was already getting "what you're still using Firefox?" comments from other techs before FF 5. Firefox might have a large install base of less technical users now, but once the tech vanguard move on and stop recommending it you're in trouble.
I have a feeling that Mozilla lives in its own little bubble where competing on features and speed, setting the standards pace, and "pushing the web platform forward" seems critical. I'm sure it all feels great in Silicon Valley, but not all web development happens in cool startups champing at the bit for the latest canvas 3D gizmo. I'd hazard that there's even more spread across businesses large and small. The type of business which doesn't move so quickly and can take a long time to adjust to any change. Many of us aspire to a stable, open source browser to act as a basis for the web, rather than a Chrome-clone.
Sadly, I predict you'll all enjoy getting to do your cool vanguard standards stuff without that legacy support to worry about, but only for a short while, as your market share declines and any remaining competitive advantage is overtaken by a corporation with an agenda of pushing its own web-based services. I think the new process suits you more than it does most end users.
But n.n.x releases were automatically applied; didn't look any different to users, and didn't break and functionality (such as add-ons).
Users are quite used to applying security updates, but that's rather different from changing versions with potentially incompatible changes every 6 weeks.
It's not quite comparable. Earlier releases had security patches for a fair period after the next major version was released (FF 3.6, is I think still supported) Firefox 4 is already unsupported and as soon as version 6 gets released, FF5 goes unsupported immediately.
Changing banks is quite a lot hard than changing browser. I know from experience several years ago of changing my bank for not supporting anything other than IE6.
On the other hand, I do expect my bank to be fairly conservative in the rate at which it makes site changes (unless to patch a security issue); I understand that testing, validation and sign-off of new versions takes quite a while in a large organisation and I realise that operations people may want to schedule upgrade to a new version of the site for a particular time with some notice.
I don't work in finance, but I do deliver web-based systems, and have been wondering what to do about the rise of Chrome and its frequent silent upgrades. My strategy on projects has been to promise support for the most important IEs (soon, I hope, that won't include IE6), the last couple of major Firefoxen, and current Safari. Chrome is on a best efforts, should work but no guarantees, basis which has worked while it had fairly small share.
Now that Firefox moves its update regime in the same direction as Chrome (incidentally, as it's been doing in many choices for interface, multiprocess Electrolysis work, etc.), it's less clear what to do. I can deliver a version that works with the current Firefox, but I couldn't promise in a contract that it'll continue to work with as yet unreleased versions. If I deliver a site tested with Firefox 6 today (and tested, but not certified, with the FF7 branch) then it'll still sound out of date by the end of the year when we're all on FF9 or FF10.
Mozilla's answer is that we should all just forget about version numbers and trust that the stream of updates probably won't break things (and if it does it'll be for good reasons -- honest). All well and good but doesn't fit with the way many organisations manage things. Since 4.0, I've stopped evangelizing about Firefox; Mozilla have become yet another software company who cause me grief rather than something to be proud of.
I blame the netbook falloff on market saturation and faliure to upgrade the specs (along with maybe a little competition from tablets). I have a netbook from 2008, one of the first models with atom CPUs. I make plenty of use of it, and was thinking, as it passed 3 years old the other day, perhaps I should upgrade. I could find absolutely no reason in the specs of current models to upgrade. I was feeling that it was occasionally slow when browsing, but a new netbook with basically the same chip gives me zero benefit from a new model. Despite me being happy to pay for a new netbook, there's no point and I'll keep using my current model until it physically fails.
I think most people who want one have one. If this 'new' ultabook segment comes with a little more poke than a netbook, but similarly good battery life then I'd be all for one.
Or perhaps you've failed to grasp the point of a v0.2 pre-release on github? In fact TFA specifically states that pixel perfect rendering _is_ their goal.
The blog post describes the current progress; it now has good rendering on one platform, progress from last week.
Interesting. Though the call hasn't come through very loud or clear.
Mozilla has quite a considerable PR capability, particularly in the technical press, and as a reader of Planet Mozilla I'd say I'm more than averagely informed about Mozilla's actions. I know of many Mozilla Labs and other activites, yet I've not even heard of any of these initiatives! I was not talking about some items on a wiki list or a posting on a Mozilla newsgroup, but a genuine project.
Above you say:
...it needs build system changes, build and test infrastructure changes, additional test infrastructure resources, and ongoing QA time investment.
Getting outside contributes to help with this would require a fairly significant investment of effort to get it going, it would also cost Mozilla some of their domination of the Firefox project. The payoff might be a larger and healthier community looking after the codebase.
It would also require a less contemptuous attitude towards fellow (potential) contributors. To be honest I've seen no sign that it's within Mozilla's culture to work this way.
The majority of users does not WANT change.
This is true. And the older they are, the less they want it. Change "under the hood" is fine, but change that involves the UI is hated. I know one person who refuses to upgrade from FF3.x because the little "back pulldown" button isn't in 4 or 5 (and I can't find an extension that replaces it). Yes, she knows now that if you hover over the "back" button you get the same thing (they didn't make it easy to find out, though). It might have helped if FF4 came with a way to make the look and feel exactly the same as FF3, but they don't do that. I was able to tell her how to fix the tabs so they weren't upside down (WTF? why are we changing something like that, that doesn't actually make any difference?) but that wasn't enough.
Amen. My partners first comment when she saw FF4 was, "how am I going to upgrade my parents?"
People feel responsible for the software they installed for friends and family members, and this was often the way Firefox spread in the first place.
The cost has in fact been estimated, several times. Unfortunately, it's been to high each time.
And yet, I posit, less than the total amount of effort lost by countless admins around the world due to its lack.
If Mozilla cared about this they could be calling for help from the community of admins out there; guiding the process and offering Moz infrastructure to help people work together to save everyone effort. It's hard for things like this to get off the ground with large Open Source projects without some support from the centre/project leaders (particularly for a project like Firefox with tightly controlled trademarks).
One viable option might be to fork the beast into two - one bleeding edge for "home users", and one long-term-stable for businesses and those who don't like having to trash half of their plugins every three months. The latter can take the good things from the former, and implement them on a sane schedule.
It's not obvious who other than Mozilla could afford to do this. The browser market is one where all desktop browsers are either bundled with OSs or a free download. Unlike RHEL, I doubt there's a market in paid for support. Mozilla are mostly funded by search referral income. This model is mass market and they may well be right that the number of enterprise seats (whose users may not even be allowed personal browsing) is disproportionate to the costs with meeting enterprise needs.
On the other hand they need to consider the reputational costs of not being seen as a general purpose browser supplier suitable for use everywhere. As much as large institutional users such as IBM or the French Government provided good publicity as Firefox was growing, the negative publicity as they move away could effect the Firefox brand.
A change in Firefox's perception could harm Mozilla's market share more than simply counting lost enterprise installs -- the browser market has become very competitive and Mozilla doesn't have the marketing budget of their rivals; they depend on good impressions from enthusiast users and tech bloggers, plenty of whom work in enterprise jobs. This is on top of the users unhappy about UI changes, or add-on compatibility. More time to upgrade often allows more time to adapt to change, and more time for extensions which ameliorate the change to appear.
If Mozilla themselves warm to the idea (despite Asa), they may be able to get some extra contribution from large corporations who benefit, but I think it would still need significant Mozilla involvement.
Personally I think that, as penance for his comments, Asa should be assigned to nothing but security patch backports for the foreseeable future.