Firefox no longer has XP support. There are a lot of XP users with older Firefoxes that cannot upgrade. Plus Microsoft Edge isn't as bad as Internet Explorer was.
According to Microsoft there's about 1.5 billion Windows users, about half a percent are still on XP. So that'd be about 7-8 million XP users. Say a third are potential Firefox users, that'd be a drop in the bucket in this statistic. And for the sake of the market share on other platforms it's probably a good idea that they're not investing resources in XP.
None of the other current browsers support XP either. Chrome stopped supporting XP a few years back. Edge isn't available at all on XP. Even IE wasn't backported so XP users are stuck with the last version of IE with XP support. If anyone is still on XP they should upgrade to an OS (either Windows 10 or even Linux) that can run a modern browser.
JFYI, there are forks of Firefox adapted to work on XP, that are not at all bad.
I am reluctant to provide a link because they are highly experimental, but if you wish to try them, knowing that YMMGV, here it is what I personally find the best one (serpent/basilisk):
I may be the odd one but I dropped FF after the drama over brendin eich and his support of prop 8. I just did not feel the same after seeing how he was attacked for his personal contributions.
There was just some hateful stuff that came from both sides that really uncovered some toxic personalities in the FF legion.
When you're a CEO, you're also the face of the company. His "personal contributions" were to support banning of same sex marriage, and it was just 5 years earlier. That's just unacceptable, even in 2014. It really showed how politics work inside companies like Mozilla.
But you're not alone. That year lots of users dropped Firefox.
Proposition 8 passed in California 52-47. [1] Slightly more than seven million people voted for it. That's a lot of people who did something unacceptable.
I wish all disagreements didn't have to be framed in such stark terms.
I don't live in or care much for California, so I had no dog in the fight, but I also did not like the gang-up on Eich and I don't understand the argument that he had to be kicked out because of how people might feel - it seems like it's the default position to work for someone who thinks you shouldn't have some right or another, or some other person should have more rights than you. It did not affect my usage of Firefox.
I did eventually download Brave and I use it for maybe a quarter of my web browsing, but that happened because a site I like stopped working in Firefox. I use Edge for a lot of other stuff - known safe sites, basically. I use Firefox simply out of inertia and because I like NoScript and the exact way NoScript works. A lot of the stuff I like about it is gone now, as they keep removing features I use. I don't have any affection for Mozilla or Firefox anymore. Metrics-based development is always a fool's errand - removing feature after feature that 1% of your install base uses is a great way to lose half your users when you remove > 50 features.
In the end, I don't think Mozilla understood where their strength came from. They weren't installed by default. They didn't have massive marketing campaigns like Google/Chrome. They weren't bundled in installers. They had one thing: power users, and power users evangelizing to their friends and family. They've alienated power users, and now all that's left is people running on inertia and people really worried about open source. Not a winning combination.
Voting directly affects the outcome. Donating money indirectly supports the outcome. In the end, only votes decide the outcome - many times the side with more money loses. The side with more votes always wins, unless you count the Electoral College. A vote is a much more material support than a 1k donation.
> He publicly materially supported it.
Nobody knew about Eich's 2008 donation until 2014, years later. Many people who worked with him and knew him for years, like Baker, expressed surprise and said they had no idea he held these views.
> Eich chose to resign.
Eich was allowed to resign rather than be fired. When you have the board and Executive Chairwoman saying that it's impossible for you to work there with your views, and you resign, that's not exactly a free choice.
> Curtailing their civil rights is.
I don't think we can put things beyond debate simply by declaring them a civil right. The entire debate was over whether it was/should be a right or not. I don't think this is a productive way to frame it. It just leads to argument rather than discussion, and persecution rather than post-victory rapprochement. I also don't think it's uncommon. I find it hard to think of someone I've worked for or even know that would not like to curtail what I regard as my civil rights in one area or another.
The LA Times reported Eich's donation in 2012. Mozilla leadership including Baker knew about it before 2014. Eich knowing not to broadcast his support for discrimination is the minimum expected of most employees.
Eich himself said he resigned because the controversy was hurting Mozilla. He also said it would have been illegal to fire him.
Baker publicly supported Eich's promotion.[1] At least before he botched a predictable and winnable PR crisis. Other people did say his actions and standing by them meant he couldn't credibly promote Mozilla's claimed values. And his belief his discrimination wasn't discriminatory called into question how he could do the CEO's job of preventing discrimination. But basically no one said he couldn't work there with his views. He remained CTO after his views and actions were widely known. And board members asked him to stay in another role after he resigned.
The US Supreme Court recognized marriage as a civil right in 1967. It's the law of the land. And same sex marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8. Believing reducing some people's rights is justified doesn't make it not reducing their rights. And calling it what it is isn't persecution.
I've never worked for someone who publicly said I should be a 2nd class citizen. I feel sorry for you if you have. It sounds like you might have your own definition of civil rights though.
> In recent months, Mr. Eich’s Twitter feed has largely alternated between promotion of the privacy-focused Brave browser and questions about the policy and science related to the coronavirus.
> His posts on Twitter have expressed skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic, including the effectiveness of masks and the honesty of Anthony Fauci.
Oh no! What a bigot for having questions and skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic!!
Imagine how much better everything would be if everybody would just agree all the time without any skepticism?
Skepticism is a reasonable default position for most things, as is distrust of powerful political entities, as is an assumption that incentive-caused bias is at play when big pharma is involved.
He may be wrong about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll be able to speak confidently about societal harm until this has all played out and can be viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
Instead of reworking the UI they should have just added an ad blocker out of the box (preinstall uBlock Origin for example).
The main reason Brave is used and recommended is because a lot of people don't want to bother installing plugins. At least 90% of recommendations for that browser I've seen mention this as reason. Meanwhile most people either don't like the new Firefox UI or just don't care.
And I agree, FF Send was great. It was really convenient to transfer a big file in a pinch without having to setup some cloud sync app with registration etc.
Is there anything you could imagine he could be doing with personal contributions that you would consider worth "attacking" him over (at which point I guess we could reverse engineer that you consider that activity notably "worse" than what Brandon Eich actually did) or do you feel like there is nothing that someone could be doing in their "personal" lives that should cause them to not be a good public face of a project like Firefox?
The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values. There can be some claims made to natural law or objective truths. However; Your truth is not mine, Plato's cave, etc.
Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages.
In a nutshell:
I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture.
I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level.
I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest.
What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it.
> The world is a big place - we don't all share a monolith of values.
I am not asking the world: I am asking you, an individual human who assuredly stands for something (and hell: we know you at least stand for this, as you decided to stop using Firefox over it ;P).
> Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages.
FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't.
> In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture.
You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox, to prevent future generations from seeing it--the equivalent of your pretty-ridiculous scenario--right? That hasn't even been in question AFAIK even in jest, as Brandon Eich didn't even personally make Firefox. Nor, FWIW, is this about people deciding to abandoning JavaScript or something, unless I missed something?
Hell: your framing here is extremely strange when you realize that this isn't even about Firefox the product... except for you! You are in fact the person who decided to "cancel" (as they say) Firefox: you are the person who decided to stop using Firefox because it was being made by people who refused to actively stand up and support a man who donated money towards Prop 8. The people you are upset with were not attempting to destroy the work that is Firefox, they wanted to not work with the person who is Brandon Eich.
And that's solely what this is about: "should Brandon Eich have been removed as CTO of Mozilla?". Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that, and that CTO is a position of power over a number of people who work on tech at the company... some of whom Brandon Eich was actively saying "I don't respect your existence" by way of his donating to ban gay marriage. I'm not gay, but I know and care deeply about a number of gay people... hell, I would be surprised if you didn't also (even if you didn't know they were gay).
By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with--which is something you claim to have serious moral issues with while not being something the people you are seemingly trying to punish were doing (so you can't claim "I'm only doing it because they would do it to me" or whatever)--but you are seriously saying that you expect that all of those people who were at Mozilla should suck it up and keep working with and for someone who, in his "personal life", worked to undermine their lives.
Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not.
> I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level.
> I am not asking the world: I am asking you, an individual human who assuredly stands for something (and hell: we know you at least stand for this, as you decided to stop using Firefox over it ;P).
How about standing for leaving politics at the door of the work environment and freedom of expression?
> FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't.
Once you've gone out of the way to show it on one account, going out of the way to not do it on another is essentially the same thing and hasn't drawn ire.
> You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox,
You're feigning ignorance and creating a strawman. The movement that forced Eich out advocates for censorship and destruction of ideas and information. You were the one who made up the story about deleting all copies of Firefox.
> Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that
Now that is an argument. If the organisation has made efforts to climb into bed with a modern religion and the CTO commits a sin then yes, removal makes sense but it should never have got to this point.
> By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with
No "cancelling" as you put it and most likely as the person you are replying to understands it involves mob justice forcing people out of careers and forcing the removal of ideas from platforms. Deciding not to use something is a personal choice.
> Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not.
When you make a three paragraph strawman argument it can seem that way but while "your truth" may be that it is unrelated, the reality is different.
> Ummm... are you missing that Brandon Eich made the first move here, taking action against gay people by fiscally
He expressed his political opinion through excepted channels. He didn't incite a mob. Again there's an argument he couldn't be at the head of an organisation with the religious connections it has but again it should never have got to that stage.
Eich wasn't removed as CTO. He remained CTO after his material support for discrimination became public knowledge. He resigned as CEO after it became clear he couldn't lead the company effectively.
The Mozilla corporation has to contend with a substantial portion of their community that thinks a $1,000 donation (an unrelated donation, no less) weighs similarly on the scales as something like 20 years in service vigorously supporting the open internet and a long history of technical success.
They're going to struggle to focus on their mission with friends like that.
Which is why they have no choice but to continue to take in Google's money which accounts to 80% of their entire revenue.
Not only they failed to find a sustainable business model, they completely failed in their mission of promoting a privacy-focused browser. The users couldn't care less on this message or 'advantage' and are dumping them for Chrome.
The only message Mozilla has stuck to for years is 'if you can't beat them, join them.' (and get paid by them).
So let's say you work for Mozilla and you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay, or hell: you just are willing to care about people who aren't that close to you and you know that some people somewhere are assuredly gay; and so now, you have to come in to the office every day to work under a guy who, sure, has made an invaluable contribution to the web... but also actively dislikes gay people and wants to make their lives harder, donating to a political cause that deeply affects gay people. Remember: that's what is at stake here... Mozilla is a tech company, and Brandon Eich was their CTO, acting as the public face of the company and as a leader internally; asking them to continue to support him is not some academic question of whether to leave his name on a plaque somewhere... it is a very practical daily question of them having to read e-mails and take direction from someone who actively--and fairly directly... prop 8 wasn't some extremely indirect mechanism or one with a ton of tradeoffs--works to undermine the lives of either themselves or someone they care about.
I'd work for someone who voted to raise my taxes. That is years of my life's work redirected to causes I don't agree with. Worse than someone being against me getting married. If I could swap marriage rights for lower taxes, I wouldn't be married. It is more symbolic these days than practical.
I think the gays can cop it.
> you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay
Possibly this is a case of poor phrase choice. I mean "can cop it" in the Australian informal sense of "Accept or tolerate a disagreeable situation without complaint." as opposed to the surprisingly wide [0] range of other interpretations.
Some in the world are capable of working without being emotionally incapacitated by the thought that those they work with don't agree with all that they believe in.
Mozilla is there to build browsers. Politics should have been left at the door.
Instead it wasn't and so Firefox happened and then Brave happened.
> Mozilla is there to build browsers. Politics should have been left at the door.
I think you misunderstand Mozilla. Just have a look at their mission statement[0], and their manifesto[1]. Mozilla's goal is not "build the best browser and get the most market share". Their goals are inherently political, and building a browser is just part of how they try to achieve their goals. To expect that the people working for such a political organization with such a strong ideology is pretty bizarre to me.
Perhaps it would be better for me to say ostensibly there to build browsers (and other software).
In response to the manifesto I'll ask how recent that manifesto and mission statement is? Surely they weren't always a politics first, software second organisation? They must have started out as free software and then morphed into what they are now at some point.
Or was it that case that the politics was there but it was that that changed?
The manifesto exists since 2007, but they describe principles that Mozilla has held since it was founded in 1998[0]. I wouldn't personally describe them as a "politics first, software second" organization, but that's mostly because I think the distinction between "politics first, software second" and "software first, politics second" is pretty vague and useless. Perhaps you would describe them as such, and if so, they've probably been like that since the start, or at least since before the start of their market-share decline.
Would you say the same about iFixit backing right to repair, or the FSF/EFF etc fighting for privacy and software freedoms while also developing their core products? I feel like "politics" has a very selective definition in this forum.
What’s the difference between dislike and disagree with? Ginsberg and Scalia were Supreme Court justice’s know for this. Disagreeing with something, even fundamental, doesn’t mean people need to dislike each other.
Imagine, for a moment, this idea was placed on religious belief. Should people working for someone with a different religious affiliation assume their boss dislikes them?
I appreciate this is a hot topic. I just don’t like where we are going as people when we treat disagree as if it’s dislike and act on that.
Actions are even more important than disagreements or dislikes.
You can disagree with someone who believes in slavery, and you are free to still like them if you want, sure.
But if it was me in your place, even if I liked that person, I still would not want to work for them based on their actions. And I think this is a fair position for anyone to take.
Or if you are saying it is conceivably possible that Brendan* likes gay people, also I’d say sure. Actually it’s likely he likes at least one certain closeted repressed gay person in particular, I’d guess. Still, it’s reasonable to not want to work for such a person who takes such actions.
Let’s flip this around. Around the world there are many people who have belief systems disagree with homosexuality. Right or wrong, this is presently the case. If some have money in support of the other direction on prop 8 should they have tried to get the person fired or left themselves?
A core thing at issue here is right and wrong and lifestyles. No matter what I think, there are people who disagree on this. I’ve been hard pressed to get folks to share a logical reasoned case for their take. It’s very much about belief and assumptions.
Is it time we divide up based on some issues like this or try to destroy “the other side”? It should like that’s what’s being said.
Please note, my take on this here is how we as a society deal with these disagreements.
Pretty sure Brendan donating to a cause trying to influence law was already a case of society dealing with disagreements with action. So if your beef is with taking actions based on disagreements, you should start with being bothered about Brendan’s actions.
As to flipping it around, I get that but didn’t really follow how that helps. Bigots would be perfectly free to not want to work for a non bigot if they want… and they can try to get others onboard with joining them to ask the leader to step down.. good luck with that though. There’s a certain evil to being a bigot that goes beyond just disagreement and dislike.
So just because you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay... then totally unrelated people are not allowed to have their opinions, because you don't approve them?
20 years in service vigorously supporting the open internet and a long history of technical success are CTO qualifications. Basically no one opposed Eich remaining CTO.
Now you're using Lynx or what? Because something tells me you will find people with stupid opinions in every corporation of a reasonable size. Moving to Google is a really counter-productive move if you value minorities.
These right there, and all the other issues in the same vein are the probably the reason.
Sure, make a simplified browser interface by default. But don't forget to give power users an escape hatch to get more control over the browser, and make it do what they want. They are the ones that recommend the browser to other users.
Here's what one of Firefox's Android developers thought of users after they raised concerns over the abolition of extensions and the rushed, buggy and inferior release:
Meanwhile Mozilla's CEO continues to fleece increasing millions of dollars while being responsible for a massive collapse in market share (she increased her pay 400%, while destroying the company).
I was under the impression that Apple doesn't allow ad blockers but only request filters that are maintained by the OS and have an upper limit. How can one browser be better than another if that's true?
I don’t know, but Brave on iOS works very well. I can watch YouTube with no ads (and even a one-click button to download for offline viewing/ listening). Websites load quickly, with no ads that I can see, except in the rare cases where the ads are selfhosted.
This is what annoys me most. And most of all, UI changes that they've made to promote features I don't want; Pocket, Sync. I shouldn't have to dive into about:config to make a useless UI component disappear (after googling to find out what setting I need to fix). Sync should not default to storing my data on Mozilla servers. The sync icon shouldn't appear unless I've configured Sync. There should be a single option in Preferences to disable ALL suggestions.
DoH is a rotten idea. Or at least, it's not ready for prime-time; it's less secure than plain old DNS (through a local recursor).
Dropping support for ALSA output also got my back up; I won't have Poetteringware on my system.
I'd pay money for a browser that only connects to the internet when I tell it to; doesn't care what I'm interested in; and whose devs are responsive to (paying) user demand.
I'll go on using FF until I can no longer crowbar it to meet my requirements. Then it will disappear in my rearview mirror.
It's very sad; Mozilla made maybe two good products, FF and Thunderbird. They dropped Tbird (which I love), and they're trying to wreck FF. I wish I knew what cock-eyed incentives are making Mozilla behave this way.
personally, i knew things were headed in the wrong direction when they added that big orange button in the top left corner. i guess that was version 4. i felt like it was the beginning of the end.
Around that time, they also added that Keyhole shaped back and forward buttons that looks off on all platforms. That's one of the first instance where I felt they prioritized what they want - a brand identity, over what the users want - a consistent user interface.
Fun fact: Under current conditions (200M users) it looks like Google is paying $2-2.25 per active user annually to be the default search engine in Firefox.
"Mozilla renewed its search deal with Google in 2020 for three years. The organization will receive an estimate of $400 to $450 million per year from the deal alone. "
That is a very good deal for google. As ads on the search results are looking more and more like normal results any user without adblocking will click multiple times on these ads in a year. And the cpc prices depending on the topic are really high.
Mozilla pays millions of dollars per year to their CEO, despite the decrease in usage and user base. Could be a symptom of a larger problem in the organization.
In general, I don't donate to non-profits where anyone earns more than I do.
I've worked for nonprofits for most of my career, and have seen the insides of several. The most effective ones tend to have a small team on shoestring salaries and really need money. The least effective ones have a CEO making $5M and an executive team above $400k.
I've seen a lot of people argue that good people cost money, but they don't. I know $5M CEOs, $1M CEOs and $100k CEOs. The $100k CEO was by far the most effective.
That said, the Mozilla 990 doesn't look crazy. Many big nonprofits are bad. It's not an organization I'd donate to myself, but it's not one I'd discourage others from donating to either. CEO makes $3M, which isn't really reasonable, but the next-highest salary is $286k. That said, the whole for-profit Mozilla Corporation bit sketches me out. It feels like it might be a way to dodge IRS reporting regulations. I'd want to do due diligence before donating to a non-profit that has a structure like that (it may be innocuous), but I don't have time for due diligence when there are transparent nonprofits too.
They have paid products like Pocket, VPN etc. Those are sold by the for-profit corp that develops Firefox, not the non-profit foundation that owns the corp.
> how on Earth is Mozilla not swimming in cash?! How high can their expenses be?
Mozilla launches a new idiot side project like once a month. As a Firefox user, it's deeply frustrating to watch bug tickets go unfilled while a multimillion-dollar rebranding rolls out.
Come 2023, pray that Google doesn't alter the deal further, with the remaining FF user base in the low single-digit figures. It's a matter of when, not if, Mozilla goes down given this trajectory. Or, Mozilla get's actually paid for working with Google on "web standards" and producing a browser as a fig leaf for the monopoly the WWW has become and counter measure against antitrust (with US antitrust a lame duck anyway), in a Mafia-esque way. It's not like we haven't been telling this all the time, with the HN crowd however cheering Mozilla's erratic ventures into Rust, WASM, and whatnot.
(For the record: I'm using FF and actually prefer it over Chrome, especially their DevTools for CSS which I find pretty meh on Chrome, and of course for ad blocking).
I am a Firefox user on all my devices and will be so until the Mozilla Foundation stands, but my gut feeling tells me that Firefox won't bounce back from its downfall.
I still wish for it to become the browser with most users.
My personal favorite, it complains when it can't update itself on my Debian workstation and tries to get me to re-install it from the web, on every launch. Yes, I know google, it is intentional. That is why I installed it from the repos.
It's honestly a pity. Firefox is it perfect but the Internet is becoming worse because of chrome. Google is able to fast track any non standard Web tech and the hordes follow. Soon after, that become the standard. I don't want to cheer for a broken browser, but only Safari is able to stop this madness now.
Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.
Chrome is already the standard. Firefox usually works, but more and more often nowadays I encounter a glitchy or poorly performing page, which I switch to Chrome to use properly.
I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
Chrome is not better because you witness some pages to render better in Chrome. It is actually the opposite: pages are more and more built for and with Chrome in mind.
And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall.
Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google.
The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
Especially with the prevalence of sites that "work" in browser but really expect you to download yet-another-Electron-app (i.e. Slack)
Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"
I have used Firefox for about a decade now and I can't think of a single page that did not work. I'm not saying it's impossible, but incredibly rare. I'd be more inclined to just give up on the site than install Chrome.
Stuff doesn't always completely break -- e.g. Google forcing new Chrome-only web standards on certain sites and making other browsers like Firefox resort to alternatives which can end up being 5x slower [0], or serving a more dated design of google search on FF mobile vs Chrome. I suspect this sort of thing might be enough to make some people switch.
And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing.
Just out of interest I looked at Windy.com on Firefox/Linux and it looks fine? No blue/yellow banding. Wind gusts seem to show up fine. I've also had a look at the other stuff (e.g. waves, clouds, etc) which all seem to work as expected. This is with Firefox 78 LTS. Unless things have regressed in between version 78 to 90, I wonder if there is something else causing your issues?
So it seems like it was caused by FF blocking HTML5 canvas fingerprinting. Enabling that allowed it all to load correctly. I guess I must've hit disallow without thinking when I first visited, and that response was saved even after clearing cache, so that example at least is probably my fault.
I do wonder if every user would be aware that the 'Allow site to extract canvas data?' popup can break site functionality though -- its not as though there's a warning to that effect in browser.
Sony PlayStation’s support pages did not work on Firefox. Texas’s franchise tax payment pages did not work on Firefox. Boy Scout certification pages did not work on Firefox. My kids’ baseball registration pages did not work on Firefox. As a front end dev, it seemed really hard to get things to NOT work on Firefox and still work on Chrome.
That's my experience too. Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end.
At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it.
The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code.
I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
> complex standards to be well specified in human language instead of in code so a reference implementation is what will always win in the end.
> At least chromium is open source.
That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. They implement literally thousands of specs. Chrome adds 40-70 new web APIs [1] with each release which happen roughly once every 40 days and contain god knows how many code changes.
Good luck deducing "precise specs" from that.
> I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core
That would mean cementing Google's monopoly of the web.
Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics. That's why the spec has to be in code, in the form of a reference implementation and/or test suit.
The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
> Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics.
On the contrary, this implements specs that are defined in a human language. For example, the full semantics of rendering HTML were standardised with HTML5, and now all browsers render HTML the same way.
The problem isn't the human language. The problem is the sheer number of these specs. Hundreds, if not thousands.
However, good luck understanding these specs by reading code or unit tests (and yes, there's a multitude of tests [1]). How do you know what a piece of code encodes? Or a test tests? You really propose to reverse engineer behaviour from code?
What exactly does it test? Why? Is this a correct test for this behaviour? Care to pinpoint the exact precise location of this spec in Google Chrome's code? [2] It's only 12 or so million lines of code, should be easy to find.
> The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
Is this sarcasm? Writing web apps that work the same across browsers is still the most painful part of web development. The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
It's not. How HTML is rendered was literally not defined between browsers until mid-00s. Hence the difference in the boxing model, for example.
Bt yes, besides HTML there are hundreds of other specs, and those may or may not be implemented across browsers.
> The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
You keep saying this, and I don't think you even understand what you're saying.
> Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
Yes, they are. What you keep proposing though, is to reverse engineer behaviour from millions of lines of code. I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about datalistoptions test.
I'm curious. I'm not "frontend", but I do write code that runs in the browser, and write parts of the visualization UI for our products. I do get to determine how we build our products. I've gone with vue/typescript, and that hasn't caused any problem so far. A part of our software has to be able to run everywhere, and that unfortunately still includes IE11, so there I do take care of using a minimal feature set, but I can't remember the last time Safari caused me a problem. What problems does Safari cause?
The problem with their comment is that they're too busy dunking on people.
I do deal with different browsers, hence why I get headaches from Safari. If I didn't, I wouldn't complain about it.
I've been a web developer for a long long time. I know what a pain IE was, and I'm just experiencing it all over again with Safari, although they've gotten better lately.
My comment was maybe a bit provocative but you didn't just say Safari had a few quirks (like the slow release cycle for bugs like the recent ones with LocalStorage and IndexedDB that is a pain), you said it was your bane. That usually mean using Chrome as the main development browser and waiting years for new experimental API to be (sometimes) implemented in other browsers, particularly Safari. In that case like the parent said the pain is more similar to the one a IE dev would have experienced back in the day (early 00's, not late) when some IE specific advanced features would not have been widely available on other browsers.
No, it's the bane of my existence because of bugs, on stuff that people actually use, like flexbox. I use firefox for the record.
IE devs didn't give a shit about any other browser, and never had a problem with using the IE specific features because of that.
The past few years I've been saying "Safari is the new IE" in terms of web development. I can't tell you how many bugs I've had to fix because Safari was doing something weird with JS/CSS.
IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).
maybe you should go back and read your own comment. Also, it's not terribly hard to install extensions through the App Store — what makes it more difficult than going through the Firefox/Chrome extension store?
I keep using Firefox on the desktop as a kind of resistance factor,. however the truth is that the war is lost, the Web has turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes.
Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop.
Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
I dont worry. I have seen these cycles with IBM and Microsoft. And they all blow up eventually because the unintended consequences keep increasing.
So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.
That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.
Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.
Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
Yeah chrome features stopped being features a long time ago. Why else would they force upgrades to be so persistent yet secretive? Because that's what you have to do when people value the existing feature set over security updates, if they're attached to new features like cookieless tracking.
Exactly. They just shipped a UUID implementation to stable chrome before it was even finalized. They barely discussed and now it’s live. But hey they wrote a proposal so it’s all good.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.
The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite.
I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great.
Why bother the current version hangs constantly forcing a re-launch to get it moving again, has been a known issue since the new updated version which is quite old now. They removed about:config and most addons.
May they burn on the pyre they have built. This is what happens when MBAs fire the engineers and chase the bottom line.
You can view all the “about“ pages on about:about, e.g., about:performance, about:processes, about:networking, about:profiles, about:protections, about:crashes, about:support.
Have you tried refreshing Firefox using about:support or giving the Troubleshoot Mode a go? It sounds like there may be either something wrong with your profile or some incompatibility somewhere. Hope that helps!
I moved back to FF after Quantum but haven't been happy with the latest round of UI changes (which also seems to have turned the buttery performance of quantum into a stuttery mess on my machine)
Let's say they fire all existing execs. Poach some talented ones from other tech companies who are capable of righting the ship. How much do you suggest to pay them? If less than what they currently make, how many do you think will be willing to jump?
I forgot to backup installed extension names and other stuff from the FF version I uninstalled, and ESR corrupted the previous profile after I installed it so even after going back I wasn't able to recover.
At that point I wiped all traces of FF and started with FF ESR "from scratch". It was well worth the trouble - no stupid tabs. Who knows for how long.
FF CPU usage is terrible compared to Safari on OSX, they need to put more effort to make it as efficient as Safari. May be increased sales of ARM based Macbooks will help them.
Just watch a twitch stream on Firefox vs Safari, there is at least 10c CPU temp difference between 2 browsers
Me too. Firefox on both my Windows and GNU/Linux laptops. Firefox Focus in my phone - I use a phone browser only for reading and Focus works perfectly for that use case.
I have been trying to switch to Firefox since long but have never been able to completely switch. There have always been some problems that send me away.
On my phone (Android), Firefox is quite good except a few UX issues (that I don't mind too much) but the sync with my desktop has NEVER worked.
On the desktop, FF has always been slow - in booting, loading pages. The same with Edge and Chrome just work.
If I could get it to sync, and if the desktop version worked, I would never go back to Chromium.
I can imagine how frustrating it would feel as a Firefox dev reading reports like this and wondering wth is going wrong. Because I'm "just a user" and I've never seen FF being slow to start or loading pages.
Same with sync, I recently install Firefox on a new laptop. Clicked the sync button, logged in with my account and done. In 2-3 minutes all history and addons sync'd \o/
UX wise I really love that Firefox Android has the address bar on the bottom :D
Same. I use it hours a day. I don't get it. There is something broken or misconfigured on these users machines, at least from FF's position. I use it on Linux, windows, mac, and mobile with no issues except when I've enabled so much adblock stuff that I have to start backing it off for that website :) (only if I really, really, really need the site)
I am too, but I have telemetry disabled since their stunt with the Mr Robot extension they installed remotely for everyone [1]. I also run uBlock on both desktop and mobile. I am one of the 50M users counted as lost?
>Mr Robot extension they installed remotely for everyone
Absolute bullshit. The Looking Glass extensions was installed through their SHIELD experiments program, only for people who had enabled it, and to a very small proportion of those, too. Additionally, it did not capture any data, as creepy as it was.
Happily returned to firefox a couple years ago when they jumped ahead in speed and have been happy to stick around. I experience absolutely no bugs nor compatibility problems on desktop and mobile is A-OK as well.
I fear it will. I use it daily because it is the best at protecting my privacy, no other browser has containers, but it seems too few people care. At least as long as mobile Safari exist, Chrome isn't able to swallow everything and resistance is not yet futile.
THIS. The first damn thing I do on a new PC/VM. I work with multiple clients, they each have their corporate SSO stuff and its so damn convenient to keep them all in their own containers. Same with Google stuff, containers are so much more consistent to switch between Google accounts than their own switching thingy (just try switching between accounts in AdWords).
Its funny that you mention the not really annoying shit and forget about the push for pocket, the constant push for some of their free services like firefox sync, send, vpn, etc that, the reappearing ebay bookmark i deleted like 12 times by now, the removal of live bookmarks, etc... and those are just the things they can control.
They've been chasing Google's tail for a while now. They keep making decisions that make little sense. Given the drop in user count I'd say those decisions aren't even paying off. Every time I update FF, I actively dread to see what they ruined this time.
Sadly, creating a new browser is impossible these days, unless you're sitting on a very considerably sized pile of cash. There's over a thousand W3C specs, and you'll need to implement most of them in order to have a functional browser.
It's maddening that the steward of the best browser codebase is doing such a shitty job. They fired a whole bunch of people last year, even though they seem to sitting on plenty of cash, they don't seem to give a crap about what their users actually want. But, sadly, there is no alternative, and there won't be.
I'm sort of used to it by now, but I also don't see it as a real reason to stop using Firefox. Chrome also changes. So how big of a factor would UI changes be in this user loss? I'm suspecting there are more trivial and indirect causes too, such as people changing machines: Firefox isn't pre-installed, and then they just pick whatever that also works.
Possibly quite big. It basically drives down the cost of switching. If someone has to learn a new interface anyway, why not switch to the best supported browser at the same time?
And if you add up enough annoyances that don't matter, eventually it becomes something. Mozilla still hasn't reclaimed the lofty peak when something like ChatZilla was feasible. A minor annoyance. One among many.
Firefox is basically in head-to-head competition with Chrome and has a very similar vision of what a web browser should be - just with less dev hours doing maintenance. That plus this user data suggests there isn't any reason to use Firefox.
The best example of failing to understand your users was releasing all these updates on Firefox for Android and actually thinking it was a good idea to regress and disable access to 'about:config'.
Being able to have that level of control and configurability is exactly why I and many users put up with all the other downsides of Firefox.
Who ever is in charge of Mozilla the corporation has lost their way. They should trim everything back to having Mozilla the foundation only.
had no idea people have that much trouble with the new UI. Looks quite alright to me, although I did lose compatibility for 2 plugins so that was a pain in the butt.
FF has not done anything to push me away yet. I am open to change and not always happy with their decisions, but their product remains usable and favorable to me.
All thanks to the Chromium ecosystem that have made it 'desirable' for web devs to build on, companies like Microsoft, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi all have their browsers depending on Chromium and for users to be running almost everything in either a browser or an electron desktop app.
This is a two horse race. Chrome vs Safari and Chrome is still winning.
Not only that, Chrome is 'the standard' and we happily helped them become that after pushing out IE. The control of the web standards has just switched hands from one tech giant to another.
Firefox has no chance of catching up. They are already on life support by Google.
Allow me to mention that we are adding another horse to the race, a WebKit based browser no less, Orion [1]. There are many things we believe Safari could do better and we are set to do them.
The big issue I see with Firefox is that they lost a lot of power user's when the removed XUL extensions and the underlying engine doesn't have good third party wrappers like QtWebEngine (that I know of) so creating reskined browser's is pain.
I don't pick a browser for the Firefox or Chromium engine (unless a site needs it), I pick a browser based on the UI and configuration management. So I use Qutebrowser that is keyboard based and a declarative configuration. It happens to use QtWebEngine but that is not why I picked that browser.
Since I don't use Firefox... I don't really recommend it to anyone. Firefox's early success was driven by educated user's telling other people to drop IE for the better product. It also means a lot fewer developer's are using the Firefox engine when developing websites... especially the developer's that would put in the effort to submit bug reports & patches.
(At least last I checked, recreating a Qutebrowser like experience in Firefox was at best just really annoying and would still lack features).
The end of XUL was necessary to make Firefox faster. Doenload an old XUL Firefox version and surf the web. If you don't notice a difference in page load speed, startup time, and overall responsiveness, you might have a very, very fast computer, which most people around the world don't have.
The 3 or 4 thousand power users that needed native interop were (and still are) of no interest compared to the then bad performance of Firefox in relation to Chrome. Even HN was full of people who complained about Firefox' performance. Now it's full of people who recommend to give Firefox another shot because it's fast again.
Firefox is also currently the only browser where uBlock Origin can use all of its features, Chrome is intentionally limiting APIs. Are people using Firefox because of it? No. So XUL add-ons would not have helped Firefox.
If you still want XUL, there are many forks out there that claim to support it.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadI am reluctant to provide a link because they are highly experimental, but if you wish to try them, knowing that YMMGV, here it is what I personally find the best one (serpent/basilisk):
http://o.rthost.win/basilisk/
There was just some hateful stuff that came from both sides that really uncovered some toxic personalities in the FF legion.
But you're not alone. That year lots of users dropped Firefox.
I wish all disagreements didn't have to be framed in such stark terms.
I don't live in or care much for California, so I had no dog in the fight, but I also did not like the gang-up on Eich and I don't understand the argument that he had to be kicked out because of how people might feel - it seems like it's the default position to work for someone who thinks you shouldn't have some right or another, or some other person should have more rights than you. It did not affect my usage of Firefox.
I did eventually download Brave and I use it for maybe a quarter of my web browsing, but that happened because a site I like stopped working in Firefox. I use Edge for a lot of other stuff - known safe sites, basically. I use Firefox simply out of inertia and because I like NoScript and the exact way NoScript works. A lot of the stuff I like about it is gone now, as they keep removing features I use. I don't have any affection for Mozilla or Firefox anymore. Metrics-based development is always a fool's errand - removing feature after feature that 1% of your install base uses is a great way to lose half your users when you remove > 50 features.
In the end, I don't think Mozilla understood where their strength came from. They weren't installed by default. They didn't have massive marketing campaigns like Google/Chrome. They weren't bundled in installers. They had one thing: power users, and power users evangelizing to their friends and family. They've alienated power users, and now all that's left is people running on inertia and people really worried about open source. Not a winning combination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8
Refusing to follow someone isn't ganging up on them. Curtailing their civil rights is.
Eich chose to resign.
> He publicly materially supported it.
Nobody knew about Eich's 2008 donation until 2014, years later. Many people who worked with him and knew him for years, like Baker, expressed surprise and said they had no idea he held these views.
> Eich chose to resign.
Eich was allowed to resign rather than be fired. When you have the board and Executive Chairwoman saying that it's impossible for you to work there with your views, and you resign, that's not exactly a free choice.
> Curtailing their civil rights is.
I don't think we can put things beyond debate simply by declaring them a civil right. The entire debate was over whether it was/should be a right or not. I don't think this is a productive way to frame it. It just leads to argument rather than discussion, and persecution rather than post-victory rapprochement. I also don't think it's uncommon. I find it hard to think of someone I've worked for or even know that would not like to curtail what I regard as my civil rights in one area or another.
The LA Times reported Eich's donation in 2012. Mozilla leadership including Baker knew about it before 2014. Eich knowing not to broadcast his support for discrimination is the minimum expected of most employees.
Eich himself said he resigned because the controversy was hurting Mozilla. He also said it would have been illegal to fire him.
Baker publicly supported Eich's promotion.[1] At least before he botched a predictable and winnable PR crisis. Other people did say his actions and standing by them meant he couldn't credibly promote Mozilla's claimed values. And his belief his discrimination wasn't discriminatory called into question how he could do the CEO's job of preventing discrimination. But basically no one said he couldn't work there with his views. He remained CTO after his views and actions were widely known. And board members asked him to stay in another role after he resigned.
The US Supreme Court recognized marriage as a civil right in 1967. It's the law of the land. And same sex marriage was legal in California before Proposition 8. Believing reducing some people's rights is justified doesn't make it not reducing their rights. And calling it what it is isn't persecution.
I've never worked for someone who publicly said I should be a 2nd class citizen. I feel sorry for you if you have. It sounds like you might have your own definition of civil rights though.
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/03/26/
I don't feel bad for this guy - He says and does things regularly that are hurtful to society with no signs of becoming a better person.
> His posts on Twitter have expressed skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic, including the effectiveness of masks and the honesty of Anthony Fauci.
Oh no! What a bigot for having questions and skepticism about many prevailing assumptions around the pandemic!!
Imagine how much better everything would be if everybody would just agree all the time without any skepticism?
Eich is a visionary and a talented engineer, that's all I ask of him when it comes to webtechs.
Right now the current "better persons" team at Mozilla is certainly running Firefox into the ground...
He may be wrong about all of this, but I don’t think we’ll be able to speak confidently about societal harm until this has all played out and can be viewed with the benefit of hindsight.
Really wish they'd focus on one mission (making the web free) and not address anything else.
The main reason Brave is used and recommended is because a lot of people don't want to bother installing plugins. At least 90% of recommendations for that browser I've seen mention this as reason. Meanwhile most people either don't like the new Firefox UI or just don't care.
And I agree, FF Send was great. It was really convenient to transfer a big file in a pinch without having to setup some cloud sync app with registration etc.
Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. They would antagonize their biggest “donor” google.
And god knows they really need that huge yearly money influx to whatever the heck they do with that money.
Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages.
In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture.
I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level.
I guess I feel like what happened with Brandon is a good example of that fear manifest.
What if, for example, my support of Edward Snowden makes me the next Emmanuel Goldstein, target of two minutes hate for the altar of some agenda? That scares the shit out of me- I don't like it.
I am not asking the world: I am asking you, an individual human who assuredly stands for something (and hell: we know you at least stand for this, as you decided to stop using Firefox over it ;P).
> Ask yourself why there is no outrage at every company that posts rainbow flags on US brand pages but refuses to do the same on their UAE brand pages.
FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't.
> In a nutshell: I am glad that the Christian monks kept the work of all those 'evil pagans' through the dark ages. The candle of Western Civilization could have gone dark if they had religiously burned the works of those they disagreed with... I worry this is a direction we are headed as a cyber culture.
You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox, to prevent future generations from seeing it--the equivalent of your pretty-ridiculous scenario--right? That hasn't even been in question AFAIK even in jest, as Brandon Eich didn't even personally make Firefox. Nor, FWIW, is this about people deciding to abandoning JavaScript or something, unless I missed something?
Hell: your framing here is extremely strange when you realize that this isn't even about Firefox the product... except for you! You are in fact the person who decided to "cancel" (as they say) Firefox: you are the person who decided to stop using Firefox because it was being made by people who refused to actively stand up and support a man who donated money towards Prop 8. The people you are upset with were not attempting to destroy the work that is Firefox, they wanted to not work with the person who is Brandon Eich.
And that's solely what this is about: "should Brandon Eich have been removed as CTO of Mozilla?". Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that, and that CTO is a position of power over a number of people who work on tech at the company... some of whom Brandon Eich was actively saying "I don't respect your existence" by way of his donating to ban gay marriage. I'm not gay, but I know and care deeply about a number of gay people... hell, I would be surprised if you didn't also (even if you didn't know they were gay).
By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with--which is something you claim to have serious moral issues with while not being something the people you are seemingly trying to punish were doing (so you can't claim "I'm only doing it because they would do it to me" or whatever)--but you are seriously saying that you expect that all of those people who were at Mozilla should suck it up and keep working with and for someone who, in his "personal life", worked to undermine their lives.
Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not.
> I want discourse because that is how we learn and bring others to enlightenment. I (correctly) saw that move with firefox as a broad move in the general us political ecosystem to "unperson" those on the right/left who don't feel the same as you. I.e. "Trump is Hitler", "Obama is a Terrorist" the schoolyard branding in concerning because it does not help any of us get better or connect on a human level.
U...
How about standing for leaving politics at the door of the work environment and freedom of expression?
> FWIW, I would presume the answer is "because most people don't realize that companies might be doing that"; however, I also take issue with the example: not going out of your way to display support for something is, in fact, different than actively taking action to undermine it... someone who doesn't show a flag might still support something, but someone who actively donates against something clearly doesn't.
Once you've gone out of the way to show it on one account, going out of the way to not do it on another is essentially the same thing and hasn't drawn ire.
> You do realize that no one has suggested deleting all the copies of Firefox,
You're feigning ignorance and creating a strawman. The movement that forced Eich out advocates for censorship and destruction of ideas and information. You were the one who made up the story about deleting all copies of Firefox.
> Remember both that CTO is a a very public position for an organization like that
Now that is an argument. If the organisation has made efforts to climb into bed with a modern religion and the CTO commits a sin then yes, removal makes sense but it should never have got to this point.
> By saying that you have decided to stop using Firefox because the employees of Firefox should not have revolted against Brandon Eich, you are thereby not only cancelling the work of a number of people you disagree with
No "cancelling" as you put it and most likely as the person you are replying to understands it involves mob justice forcing people out of careers and forcing the removal of ideas from platforms. Deciding not to use something is a personal choice.
> Truly: all of your fretting over people destroying the work of the "evil pagans" is off topic, whether it makes you feel better to frame it like that or not.
When you make a three paragraph strawman argument it can seem that way but while "your truth" may be that it is unrelated, the reality is different.
> Ummm... are you missing that Brandon Eich made the first move here, taking action against gay people by fiscally
He expressed his political opinion through excepted channels. He didn't incite a mob. Again there's an argument he couldn't be at the head of an organisation with the religious connections it has but again it should never have got to that stage.
They're going to struggle to focus on their mission with friends like that.
That said, I agree that Moz have failed to find a stable business model,which is a pity.
Not only they failed to find a sustainable business model, they completely failed in their mission of promoting a privacy-focused browser. The users couldn't care less on this message or 'advantage' and are dumping them for Chrome.
The only message Mozilla has stuck to for years is 'if you can't beat them, join them.' (and get paid by them).
I think the gays can cop it.
> you are gay, or your sibling is gay, or your best friend is gay
At least one of those is true.
[0] https://www.lexico.com/definition/cop
Mozilla is there to build browsers. Politics should have been left at the door. Instead it wasn't and so Firefox happened and then Brave happened.
I think you misunderstand Mozilla. Just have a look at their mission statement[0], and their manifesto[1]. Mozilla's goal is not "build the best browser and get the most market share". Their goals are inherently political, and building a browser is just part of how they try to achieve their goals. To expect that the people working for such a political organization with such a strong ideology is pretty bizarre to me.
0. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
1. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
In response to the manifesto I'll ask how recent that manifesto and mission statement is? Surely they weren't always a politics first, software second organisation? They must have started out as free software and then morphed into what they are now at some point.
Or was it that case that the politics was there but it was that that changed?
0. https://www.protocol.com/mozilla-plan-fix-internet-privacy
It's only politics when it's "other people's problems I don't care about", it seems.
What’s the difference between dislike and disagree with? Ginsberg and Scalia were Supreme Court justice’s know for this. Disagreeing with something, even fundamental, doesn’t mean people need to dislike each other.
Imagine, for a moment, this idea was placed on religious belief. Should people working for someone with a different religious affiliation assume their boss dislikes them?
I appreciate this is a hot topic. I just don’t like where we are going as people when we treat disagree as if it’s dislike and act on that.
You can disagree with someone who believes in slavery, and you are free to still like them if you want, sure.
But if it was me in your place, even if I liked that person, I still would not want to work for them based on their actions. And I think this is a fair position for anyone to take.
Or if you are saying it is conceivably possible that Brendan* likes gay people, also I’d say sure. Actually it’s likely he likes at least one certain closeted repressed gay person in particular, I’d guess. Still, it’s reasonable to not want to work for such a person who takes such actions.
A core thing at issue here is right and wrong and lifestyles. No matter what I think, there are people who disagree on this. I’ve been hard pressed to get folks to share a logical reasoned case for their take. It’s very much about belief and assumptions.
Is it time we divide up based on some issues like this or try to destroy “the other side”? It should like that’s what’s being said.
Please note, my take on this here is how we as a society deal with these disagreements.
As to flipping it around, I get that but didn’t really follow how that helps. Bigots would be perfectly free to not want to work for a non bigot if they want… and they can try to get others onboard with joining them to ask the leader to step down.. good luck with that though. There’s a certain evil to being a bigot that goes beyond just disagreement and dislike.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/03/14/mozilla-plans-to-remove-th...
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/04/08/how-to-restore-the-old-fir...
Sure, make a simplified browser interface by default. But don't forget to give power users an escape hatch to get more control over the browser, and make it do what they want. They are the ones that recommend the browser to other users.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200731235001/https://twitter.c...
Meanwhile Mozilla's CEO continues to fleece increasing millions of dollars while being responsible for a massive collapse in market share (she increased her pay 400%, while destroying the company).
https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/23/1528219/firefox-usa...
Kiwi on mobile from an HN recommendation
I do align philosophically with OSS, and community organization, though, so I may switch back at some point.
I do think Mozilla’s executive team needs a real shakeup, though.
Edit: haven’t heard of Kiwi. Looks interesting. Why’d you land on that vs Brave or whatever else?
This is what annoys me most. And most of all, UI changes that they've made to promote features I don't want; Pocket, Sync. I shouldn't have to dive into about:config to make a useless UI component disappear (after googling to find out what setting I need to fix). Sync should not default to storing my data on Mozilla servers. The sync icon shouldn't appear unless I've configured Sync. There should be a single option in Preferences to disable ALL suggestions.
DoH is a rotten idea. Or at least, it's not ready for prime-time; it's less secure than plain old DNS (through a local recursor).
Dropping support for ALSA output also got my back up; I won't have Poetteringware on my system.
I'd pay money for a browser that only connects to the internet when I tell it to; doesn't care what I'm interested in; and whose devs are responsive to (paying) user demand.
I'll go on using FF until I can no longer crowbar it to meet my requirements. Then it will disappear in my rearview mirror.
It's very sad; Mozilla made maybe two good products, FF and Thunderbird. They dropped Tbird (which I love), and they're trying to wreck FF. I wish I knew what cock-eyed incentives are making Mozilla behave this way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120725235602/https://blog.mozi...
I can use Firefox Focus as ad blocker with Safari, but not with Firefox!
"Mozilla renewed its search deal with Google in 2020 for three years. The organization will receive an estimate of $400 to $450 million per year from the deal alone. "
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/12/10/mozillas-revenue-jumped-to...
I've worked for nonprofits for most of my career, and have seen the insides of several. The most effective ones tend to have a small team on shoestring salaries and really need money. The least effective ones have a CEO making $5M and an executive team above $400k.
I've seen a lot of people argue that good people cost money, but they don't. I know $5M CEOs, $1M CEOs and $100k CEOs. The $100k CEO was by far the most effective.
That said, the Mozilla 990 doesn't look crazy. Many big nonprofits are bad. It's not an organization I'd donate to myself, but it's not one I'd discourage others from donating to either. CEO makes $3M, which isn't really reasonable, but the next-highest salary is $286k. That said, the whole for-profit Mozilla Corporation bit sketches me out. It feels like it might be a way to dodge IRS reporting regulations. I'd want to do due diligence before donating to a non-profit that has a structure like that (it may be innocuous), but I don't have time for due diligence when there are transparent nonprofits too.
If anyone knows a way to only support Firefox and not Mozilla at large do let me know!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22058629
But also, the answer to your question is at https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201... and https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-2019-fo... (the 2020 numbers are not up yet because the audit starts when the tax return is filed and lasts for several months, so isn't completed yet).
Just for comparison, last I checked Chrome's marketing budget was estimated to be in the ballpark of Mozilla's total budget.
Disclaimer: used to work for Mozilla.
Browser: ~20
Web rendering engine: ~100
Worldwide average senior C/C++ developer salary: $100k/year
So $12M/year should do it. Let's say $20M to allow for management and overhead.
Disclaimer: founder of a browser company
* There are server side components (bookmark sync for instance)
* They need infrastructure to run the tests, do the builds, handle the bug reports, etc...
I don't know where you got your 20% overhead, but from what I heard it's wayyyy off.
Mozilla launches a new idiot side project like once a month. As a Firefox user, it's deeply frustrating to watch bug tickets go unfilled while a multimillion-dollar rebranding rolls out.
It's almost like the Mozilla execs get paid the big bucks no matter how badly they do their jobs. Go figure.
(For the record: I'm using FF and actually prefer it over Chrome, especially their DevTools for CSS which I find pretty meh on Chrome, and of course for ad blocking).
I still wish for it to become the browser with most users.
Also, Firefox on the Desktop is really good and still let's you do so much more than chrome clones. But it suffers specially when using Google websites.
I use Firefox to not be part of the Chrome monopoly, not because it's actually a fundamentally better browser.
When you have the time, you should note it here: https://webcompat.com/
And that omnipresence of Chrome allows Google to force their own moves as de facto standards, which is dangerous overall.
Firefox is better because it follows standards and it is open-source and it is not tied to a behemoth like Google.
The authors of pages you see perform better in Chrome are indeed not building for the web but rather building for Chrome.
Develop for Chrome first, all other browsers second. Why worry if other browsers don't work when the solution is "download our desktop Electron application :)"
And I have had a few experiences with sites not loading properly in the last few months. Try windy.com for example: on FF 90 with no extensions enabled and tracking protection on 'balanced' I get blue and yellow banding on the map, and the wind gusts graphics fail to load properly. I have reported a few of these instances in the past, but a lot of the time I'd rather just switch to chromium temporarily and continue with what I'm doing.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-exec...
I do wonder if every user would be aware that the 'Allow site to extract canvas data?' popup can break site functionality though -- its not as though there's a warning to that effect in browser.
But it turns out the difference was the I was running ublock-origin in Firefox and sometimes that was causing issues for some sites..
A hassle but well worth it to avoid touching Chrome ;-)
At least chromium is open source. The best we can hope is maybe that organizations adopting chromium other than Google can wield more influence over it.
As I point out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27222818 human language is not precise enough to write good specifications. Natural language words are polysemic and contextual. See the meaning of "break" for example: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break
Kolmogrov showed that fully specified information distills down to computer programs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_description_length
The ideal language for a specification might be a mix of natural language and code with a test suit, something like Literate Programming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) or its descendants along with modern pull request based discussions that are tied to version controlled code.
I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core. We really need a well funded non-profit managed release of the reference browser.
> At least chromium is open source.
That source code is 12-15 million lines of code. They implement literally thousands of specs. Chrome adds 40-70 new web APIs [1] with each release which happen roughly once every 40 days and contain god knows how many code changes.
Good luck deducing "precise specs" from that.
> I wish Mozilla or a similar organization adopted the chromium core
That would mean cementing Google's monopoly of the web.
[1] https://web-confluence.appspot.com/#!/confluence
Exactly, it's impossible to describe that in human language which doesn't have precise enough semantics. That's why the spec has to be in code, in the form of a reference implementation and/or test suit.
The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
On the contrary, this implements specs that are defined in a human language. For example, the full semantics of rendering HTML were standardised with HTML5, and now all browsers render HTML the same way.
The problem isn't the human language. The problem is the sheer number of these specs. Hundreds, if not thousands.
However, good luck understanding these specs by reading code or unit tests (and yes, there's a multitude of tests [1]). How do you know what a piece of code encodes? Or a test tests? You really propose to reverse engineer behaviour from code?
Example: here's a test: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/blob/master/html/s...
What exactly does it test? Why? Is this a correct test for this behaviour? Care to pinpoint the exact precise location of this spec in Google Chrome's code? [2] It's only 12 or so million lines of code, should be easy to find.
> The goal should be to move chromium away from being controlled too much by Google.
By doing what exactly?
[1] https://web-platform-tests.org
[2] https://github.com/chromium/chromium
Is this sarcasm? Writing web apps that work the same across browsers is still the most painful part of web development. The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
It's not. How HTML is rendered was literally not defined between browsers until mid-00s. Hence the difference in the boxing model, for example.
Bt yes, besides HTML there are hundreds of other specs, and those may or may not be implemented across browsers.
> The underspecified natural language specs lead to subtly different behaviors in different browsers.
You keep saying this, and I don't think you even understand what you're saying.
> Full specs of a complex systems are very complex.
Yes, they are. What you keep proposing though, is to reverse engineer behaviour from millions of lines of code. I'm still waiting for an answer to my question about datalistoptions test.
The technical blueprints are as important than the natural language notes in the blueprints. In software, code is blueprint.
For me there is - in addition to not wanting to support Chrome - still a few things that Firefox does better.
As for websites that only support Chrome I consider them broken which means I don't use them or if I have to I try to notify the operator.
Safari is usable on less than 20% of machines, it absolutely will not be stopping anything. It's also the bane of my existence as a web developer.
https://brave.com/25m-mau/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_engine
You forgot mobile, iOS users are big chunk of it and websites want to work on iOS browsers.
I would say as a Chrome developer then.
Being IE only made life a lot easier.
Same today. Some people think it is OK to test only in Chrome. That lets one get away with a lot of bad habits.
Dealing with different browsers is part of what makes one a competent web developer.
I do deal with different browsers, hence why I get headaches from Safari. If I didn't, I wouldn't complain about it.
I've been a web developer for a long long time. I know what a pain IE was, and I'm just experiencing it all over again with Safari, although they've gotten better lately.
IE11 is going EOL "soon" and at that point Safari is really going to be the odd one out. Chromium and Firefox are at least _mostly_ consistent with each other, save for when Chromium adds some crazy new feature that's nonstandard (but at that point only niche websites are usually using the new feature).
Safari is a hard sell when one can't install an ad-blocker on it (work on the street is you can but not easily)
Specially since Microsoft has always been on the same boat as Google, remember that such kind of features go back to Active Desktop.
Additionally, everyone pushing Electron apps is basically contributing to Chrome market share.
So Google has got itself locked into that same trajectory for a long time now. "Features" are total bullshit. Its all about making sure every small thing is in the cloud or eventually gets pushed into it.
That vision is as dumb as moving the DNA in every cell in your body into a nearby lake and visiting the lake everytime you want to read 1 bit. With a Google toll booth at the lake entrance. Its doomed to fail.
Just look at the consequences. If you have a webpage on your local hard drive and want to use the browsers javascript to access it to make it look better, the Google Chrome team will come running like well programmed alert robots to call it a security violation and disable api access to your own disk.
This is how empires fall.
Chrome is being used on the browser (with a mobile footprint Microsoft never had), the desktop (VS Code, Slack, etc), and v8 is driving a substantial part of the web's backend (Node). Even the smaller use case of web scraping is moving towards Puppeteer.
Apple stopped developing Safari for Windows nine years ago.
I keep seeing this rhetoric, but I've never experienced this myself. I use Firefox as my main driver and use Google Search, Docs, Mail, Sheets, Slides, YouTube, and whatever other Google products literally every day and everything works just fine. I've tried them out in Chrome/Edge/whatever and they all work exactly the same.
The only thing that doesn't work 100% is search on Firefox on Android, but there's no reason for it and changing the user agent fixes all the problems (Google intentionally makes it bad to try and drive you to Chrome).
I strongly disagree with this statement. My opinion is that it's the opposite.
I always get sad when I think about modern Firefox. I loved Firefox dearly before the transition, and I tried really hard to love it after the transition, too. But it failed me and lost much of what I loved about it. Then every subsequent release was just a little worse, excising more of what made Firefox great.
Eventually, I just had to give up on it.
Audio issues, logged out of everything issues, auto fill issues, it just doesn’t work in Firefox issues.
Containers made me want to like it, but cmon.
May they burn on the pyre they have built. This is what happens when MBAs fire the engineers and chase the bottom line.
Obviously us users are using it wrong.
They even added a new page recently about:third-party though only available on Windows: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/90.0/releasenotes/
You can view all the “about“ pages on about:about, e.g., about:performance, about:processes, about:networking, about:profiles, about:protections, about:crashes, about:support.
Have you tried refreshing Firefox using about:support or giving the Troubleshoot Mode a go? It sounds like there may be either something wrong with your profile or some incompatibility somewhere. Hope that helps!
I would argue that Chrome is better in some aspects, but using Firefox is the least thing one can do to stop Googles dominance.
I also quite like the UI changes and would say that Firefox now has the best looking chrome after Safari (highly subjective).
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/firef...
I forgot to backup installed extension names and other stuff from the FF version I uninstalled, and ESR corrupted the previous profile after I installed it so even after going back I wasn't able to recover.
At that point I wiped all traces of FF and started with FF ESR "from scratch". It was well worth the trouble - no stupid tabs. Who knows for how long.
Just watch a twitch stream on Firefox vs Safari, there is at least 10c CPU temp difference between 2 browsers
On my phone (Android), Firefox is quite good except a few UX issues (that I don't mind too much) but the sync with my desktop has NEVER worked.
On the desktop, FF has always been slow - in booting, loading pages. The same with Edge and Chrome just work.
If I could get it to sync, and if the desktop version worked, I would never go back to Chromium.
Same with sync, I recently install Firefox on a new laptop. Clicked the sync button, logged in with my account and done. In 2-3 minutes all history and addons sync'd \o/ UX wise I really love that Firefox Android has the address bar on the bottom :D
Except some Google stuff like the GCP console.
EDIT: formatting
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozilla-back...
Absolute bullshit. The Looking Glass extensions was installed through their SHIELD experiments program, only for people who had enabled it, and to a very small proportion of those, too. Additionally, it did not capture any data, as creepy as it was.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/retrospective-l...
I'm wondering how they count users, and whether installations with telemetry disabled are counted at all.
THIS. The first damn thing I do on a new PC/VM. I work with multiple clients, they each have their corporate SSO stuff and its so damn convenient to keep them all in their own containers. Same with Google stuff, containers are so much more consistent to switch between Google accounts than their own switching thingy (just try switching between accounts in AdWords).
I’m pretty sure Brave profiles are the equivalent or at least an analogue.
Maybe you need to delete it, just the once, from whatever device it keeps getting synced from?
Sadly, creating a new browser is impossible these days, unless you're sitting on a very considerably sized pile of cash. There's over a thousand W3C specs, and you'll need to implement most of them in order to have a functional browser.
It's maddening that the steward of the best browser codebase is doing such a shitty job. They fired a whole bunch of people last year, even though they seem to sitting on plenty of cash, they don't seem to give a crap about what their users actually want. But, sadly, there is no alternative, and there won't be.
And if you add up enough annoyances that don't matter, eventually it becomes something. Mozilla still hasn't reclaimed the lofty peak when something like ChatZilla was feasible. A minor annoyance. One among many.
Firefox is basically in head-to-head competition with Chrome and has a very similar vision of what a web browser should be - just with less dev hours doing maintenance. That plus this user data suggests there isn't any reason to use Firefox.
Being able to have that level of control and configurability is exactly why I and many users put up with all the other downsides of Firefox.
Who ever is in charge of Mozilla the corporation has lost their way. They should trim everything back to having Mozilla the foundation only.
This is a two horse race. Chrome vs Safari and Chrome is still winning.
Not only that, Chrome is 'the standard' and we happily helped them become that after pushing out IE. The control of the web standards has just switched hands from one tech giant to another.
Firefox has no chance of catching up. They are already on life support by Google.
[1] https://browser.kagi.com
The third most popular browser globally is Edge: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
I don't pick a browser for the Firefox or Chromium engine (unless a site needs it), I pick a browser based on the UI and configuration management. So I use Qutebrowser that is keyboard based and a declarative configuration. It happens to use QtWebEngine but that is not why I picked that browser.
Since I don't use Firefox... I don't really recommend it to anyone. Firefox's early success was driven by educated user's telling other people to drop IE for the better product. It also means a lot fewer developer's are using the Firefox engine when developing websites... especially the developer's that would put in the effort to submit bug reports & patches.
(At least last I checked, recreating a Qutebrowser like experience in Firefox was at best just really annoying and would still lack features).
The 3 or 4 thousand power users that needed native interop were (and still are) of no interest compared to the then bad performance of Firefox in relation to Chrome. Even HN was full of people who complained about Firefox' performance. Now it's full of people who recommend to give Firefox another shot because it's fast again.
Firefox is also currently the only browser where uBlock Origin can use all of its features, Chrome is intentionally limiting APIs. Are people using Firefox because of it? No. So XUL add-ons would not have helped Firefox.
If you still want XUL, there are many forks out there that claim to support it.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...