I really like firefox and still use it as my main browser. But you guys started to force users to your own standards. By locking or removing many options.
For example, you have locked (left and right) arrows and now refresh button. What's next home button ? I don't mind arrows been locked, even throught I like to have a choice. But having my refresh button locked in one place without ability to move it to alternative spot is just rediculous.
Then you guys completely removed JavaScript disable option, even throught I can still enable it by going to "about:config" and switching "javascript:enabled" from "true" to "false".
Another weird option which is missing is ability to disable PDF view inside firefox browser. Again I can use "about:config" and switch "pdfjs.disabled" from "false" to "true".
But having this options in Preferences will be much better.
Not to mantion a lot of websites load much faster in Chrome or Chromium then Firefox.
I think this is why many people ether user it as second browser or switching from Firefox to Chrome/Chromium.
As for Google search engine, I have been using "DuckDuckGo.com" as alternative for some time now. For email use "ZoHo.com" instead of Gmail.com
We need a community-edited index of debatable changes, linked to bugzilla issues where the rationale is discussed. This would be a subset of the overall changelog, which has many technical changes that arent controversial among users or the developer ecosystem.
I think what they to with the settings is actually correct. I'd say most of the users don't even think about changing the stuff you just said. Therefore it's correct to, in order to make the settings easier, remove not widely used settings.
And, as you say, it's still easy to change the settings in about:config - which is exactly targeted at people needing to change more things.
I've gone back to FF after using Chrome literally form the day it landed. I changed because of vimperator + the ability to theme the header slimmer (i'm on laptop 24/7).
But frankly it kind of sucks a bit and I have to jump over to Chrome a lot because almost no videos will play in FF.
Can you elaborate a bit about how you've slimmed Firefox header? I am also working 24/7 on a laptop and I value my screen estate a lot so one of main reasons I dont use Firefox is that its header and tabs consume the largest amount of screen space from Chrome/Safari/Firefox trio...
I modified an existing theme [0] and now it looks like this http://imgur.com/kkXpFHX still not pretty but it stays out of the way so I don't really care at the moment.
I dont mean to insult you, but this looks just ugly, and the UI seems to be way too small to be used with comfort. I wonder if there's really no way to stop Firefox from wasting that space above the tabs, just like Chrome does it...
> I wonder if there's really no way to stop Firefox from wasting that space above the tabs
Don't put the tabs on the top of the screen. You are probably concerned about vertical real estate because you have a 16:9 display. Horizontal bars just don't make sense any more.
Install the Tree Style Tab extension. Shove all your tabs into a sidebar. Now your browser has an eye-friendly aspect ratio. Plus you can have more than twenty tabs open at once without reducing the page title to a mere favicon.
I use Vimium and I like it, but it's crippled by Chrome's extension model. Extensions aren't really part of the browser, they run in the context of the page you're looking at. This means Vimum's shortcuts don't work on the new tab page or when viewing PDFs, and they're unresponsive when repeatedly changing tabs. I'm trying to switch to Firefox + Pentadactyl, which seems much less hacky, but there are enough differences to make the change difficult.
Because Mozilla gets money from it and it is something familiar for users.
As a user who knows about "defaults" you're way ahead of everyone else and can probably figure out how to change them. For people who don't care Google is perfect.
Because they figured they'd get more money from sharing ad dollars through Google search than they could do through Bing I would guess.
Does anyone know if their Google partnership is worldwide or do they work with Baidu/Yandex in other parts of the world?
I do use Firefox, through inertia, but honestly it's not a good browser. It consumes 50%+ CPU constantly. It uses huge amounts of RAM. It crashes from time to time. Every few months I end up losing all my open tabs permanently. There's no isolation (process per tab). And they keep making gratuitous changes to the UI that don't improve the real UI problems but do require searching through about:config to revert them.
I would love there to be a minimal but usable browser.
Yup, my post was a bit incomplete: I loved to play with those browsers, but they always left me feeling frustrated. I was hoping that times had changed, but your response seems to say that hasn't happened yet.
That CPU and RAM consumption is likely due to extensions (AdBlock Plus being the most common hog). Unless you're running a really old version, Firefox is usually smaller than Chrome these days.
Actually almost forgot about this, but I tried watching a video on FF recently, and Chrome used about 5 percent of my CPU (with about 10 other tabs open), and a lot of extensions, too, while on Firefox I had just a few add-ons (some of the same as on Chrome), and only that video running. It used 15 percent of my CPU.
Yup ABP is killer. I'm also unwilling to upgrade to Australis at the moment, as I can't find a Mac-compatible theme that isn't painful to use with it. (Hate, hate, hate monochrome themes -- color coding the buttons may not be trendy but it improves usability, and has for the 20 years I've been using web browsers.) And Firebug has some major performance improvements with FF31 and newer.
I know it's horribly outdated and probably not for you, but if you have a really, really low-end system, K-Meleon is the best option that I could find, at least for Windows. It's not great but works fairly reasonable for how lightweight it is. This is what enabled me to surf the web on a Pentium 2 machine in 2010 where any other browser had issues even getting started.
I do see what you mean with a minimal browser though. It is what Chrome was initially: the basics that you needed and no clutter. I would like to see such a project based on Firefox, especially given how customizable Firefox already is it might be a pretty awesome project.
This guy writes against Google world domination using Blogger. A good example of how to shoot down your credibility. But hey, he is a hacker. Looks like its out of a hackers reach to host your blog. But choose Mozilla.
By the way isnt Mozilla like 90 percent financed by Google?
Google pays Mozilla to be the default search provider.
They actually get a bunch of Google search users from that deal and they don't pay a lot for the marketshare they got for it. If anything, Google wins with that deal.
Yes this is true which is even more risky for the fate of a standardized web. Right now and in the past it was very important for Google to do this for 2 reasons: 1. They get to be the default search for a huge amount of people, and 2: They support someone who was making a competing product against another company doing lock-in for their own benefit (Microsoft).
However, what if one day Google Chrome has 70%+ market share? Then the Chrome only creep will continue. You can already tell that they are doing a lot of Chrome only things on their web properties as with the nightly chrome builds you get occasional Google property only weird bugs. If Chrome had a massive market share they can then not have to bother supporting Mozilla or web standards. They can then leverage Chrome to have an advantage in performance and even monetization of Google products over others.
You can say right now Google has not done this, but they are doing small things here and there that are going down that route. Altruism is not a trait companies are known to keep for long, especially when there is no competition.
> However, what if one day Google Chrome has 70%+ market share?
Oh, I agree with the tonality of the article, alright, but i don't subscribe in the "White Knight Firefox" story. Firefox is in bed with Google already, I don't like one bit what they did with the recent update and UI changes, and the performance of the browser in general is so bad it's not wonder people are switching to Chrome.
We need a much better competitor than Firefox if we want to fight against Chrome's domination.
Isn't that a good reason as any to not put all our eggs in the Google basket? One of the two major browsers and two major blogging platforms are already run by Google; the world's biggest search engine; the dominant mobile platform; the most used free email/map service, to name a few. I love Google, so I don't want it to get to a point where corporate execs can turn it into something that its founders didn't intend it to be.
As someone who switches browsers about every six months, I feel that Firefox is still quite a bit behind in terms of stability and performance. I mostly blame the single-process model, which makes crashes and hangups way more global than they should be in 2014.
On Windows, there's also the 32-bit issue. On machines with 8+ GB of RAM, having all tabs share a 2 GB address space just doesn't cut it. Especially when your addon model, one of the key features that sets Firefox apart from other browsers, eats an additional 4 MB of this limited space per tab (and that's just for one addon).[1]
Having said all that, I know that brilliant people are working on fixing this, and there have been huge improvements in the past year. And that's how I hope they'll win back users: by building a better browser, not just by appealing to open-source ideals and fear.
Personally, I use firefox nightly and i get a couple of crashes a year...
I also use chrome extensively... and i get crashes about once... a month (im not talking about tab crashes but entiere browser crash)
So im not convinced by the whole multi process thing for stability reasons. It seems like a good idea for sandboxing or "webapps" and only so IF you also have separate cookie jars, etc.
(and i trust chrome more for security)
I'd rather have 2 processes, one for the GUI, one for the tabs ;)
I use Chrome on everything, no plugins. I can't remember a crash in the last year on Windows or Mac but Linux has lately been telling me it did crash but it really didn't. What are you on? Got any plugins?
Thank you. I had read about Electrolysis, probably back in February, but had managed to forget about it. "Didn't work, needs more love" results from back then probably contributed to my ignorance.
The second link just went into bookmarks. Even though it didn't mention anything about this particular feature (has content only until R34), it will be helpful for me to know something about the oncoming changes before they happen.
Firefox is definitely behind (on Linux) when it comes to UI fluidity. It also seems like pages load faster in Chrome, but that might also just be one of its UI optimization techniques.
Yeah, no offense to GP but that is possibly the worst way of looking at it.
There are platforms where developers need to stop developing. iOS was the main one; it has extreme lock in, an unfriendly development environment, an extremely unfriendly publishing environment and is actively doing evil things. But no, all aboard the ios apps train!
Windows I could say similar things about but given the competition I really can't. Android... Definitely not. Some of the most free mobile OSes run atop of android.
But when it comes to developing on platforms in general, developers absolutely need to use themselves as a voice to tell other platforms what is good, what is needed, etc. There are excellent general desktop features that people have found on mac os, windows and linux alike. Without developers to make use of them, regardless of the "open" or "closed" state of the platform, users are worse off.
This is a very important point. I switched to Firefox mainly due to intertial scrolling and better fonts (Chrome looks crap till this 37 beta and needs a flag).
Extensions are more powerful on Firefox but I think they are coplicated as well. There are many popular extensions that just don't have updates on Firefox. One example is Evernote. I used it a lot on Chrome but their Firefox extension is almost 1 year old version and Chrome/Opera extensions have much better UI now. I hope this improves soon.
Creating an add-on for a product with a smaller market share is not that bad. But for a product with 60%+ that also belongs to a company that "owns" Search, Maps and Email and is known to play dirty it's a different story.
What are we to do? We build data visualization software, but firefox is REALLY slow at rendering SVG (so no d3 for us). We have a choice of asking our customers to run ie11 or chrome, since both run quickly.
We would recommend firefox, since we really like the Mozilla foundation, but the performance of it is so bad we have to steer people away from it.
I'm a little surprised by this. I can believe that Firefox is slower (I haven't done the comparison myself), but even so it's still capable of rendering hundreds of thousands of points or thousands of complicated geometric shapes.
I would have thought it you had more data than that then the points will all be rammed together and hard to distinguish, so it would be better to switch to density plots.
I've also noticed it slower on an SVG based app. Not terribly slower, just enough to make it look slightly glitchy compared with the smoothness of Chrome with interactive actions like drag n dropping components around.
If you make software (which people want to use, of course) and notice a mainstream open source browser (in this case Firefox) being slow at something in particular, wouldn't it be advantageous to you and everyone else if some of you could briefly look under the hood to see what the problem is? Maybe not fix the bug, but at least let Mozilla know that there is a pain point somewhere (perhaps with specific source files or functions which take forever). Probably gets it fixed much faster as when you just keep using Chrome and disregard Firefox completely.
Have you ever "looked under the hood" ? Browsers aren't your average weekend open source project, they're behemoths :)
I once checked out chromium in order to test out whether file writing would be easy to do. The size of the project alone meant it took me forever to find out where to patch it.
(Edit: This was something like 5 years ago before I started to grow a distaste for Chrome)
Have you ever "looked under the hood" ? Browsers aren't your average weekend open source project, they're behemoths
I've sometimes wondered whether the barrier to entry is the biggest thing holding back FOSS.
I'm an experienced developer, quite capable of diving into the kind of code these projects run. Now and then I have enough spare time that I might be able to make a useful contribution. I would be happy to support some of these projects in the spirit of giving something back.
Every single time I look at a major FOSS project where I'd like to help, the very first thing I run into in the developer documentation is an installation/build process a mile long with absurd overheads. Large FOSS projects often require a whole set of custom tools. Many don't comply with normal conventions on the host OS; I'm on Windows, and assuming every developer in the world runs Linux is a particularly common problem. Quite a few require installation of a specific version of a certain compiler toolchain.
I understand that portability is difficult. I've worked on projects that had to be compiled on many different platforms. I've worked on projects that had to be cross-compiled from one platform to run on another. The issues raised by these environments aren't trivial.
Even so, I have never worked on a successful professional project that managed to make things as complicated as large FOSS projects almost always do. And while I'm happy to help out if I can, I simply don't have time to ensure that I've got this week's project's specific preferred version of a VCS, Bash, GCC, and so on installed so they clutter my standard file system, environment settings, registry, editor/IDE preferences, and all the other things that any developer surely wants as clean and tidy as possible while they work.
> Large FOSS projects often require a whole set of custom tools.
I was about to say that for the two projects I've tried this with, Filezilla and Firefox, it was actually quite reasonable. Especially Firefox, given its size, was surprisingly simply even if compiling took longer than I thought.
But then I read you are on Windows. Yeah, that's hell. I tried a few hours on Filezilla before deciding that it's just too messed up.
It's certainly worse overall on Windows, but problems like requiring a specific compiler toolchain apply everywhere. I am always amazed by project that want to encourage an open, community-style development process, and yet the first thing they do is start writing in non-standard C++ that relies on specific GCC functionality, and then linking to libraries that do the same thing. Before you've even started, you've limited your potential contributor base to those who are willing to install not only your choice of compiler (not such a problem on Linux or MacOS, at least) but maybe even a specific version of that compiler (much more of a problem, because usually dev tools are installed system-wide).
Do these projects expect that everyone will just set up a dedicated VM with exactly the right development environment for their code or something? I think that's probably the most practical solution in that kind of environment, but presumably it's a level of of commitment that only dedicated, long-term contributors are likely to make. Certainly it's a disincentive for anyone to contribute one-off fixes or improvements in specific areas, and a significant barrier to entry even for those who might become long-term contributors if they get that far, which surely can't be helping these projects.
It so much sounds like an apocalyptic cry. It has substance but the degree to which it is shown to harm is us not to be taken seriously, I believe. To be honest, Chrome is a good browser, both on desktop and mobile(at least Android). And Google does not have a hegemony on the entire Web.
EDIT - This thread is an example of 'That escalated quickly!'
Utterly stupid. The only reason that would make Firefox win is because it's a good piece of software, which it's currently not, especially when you compare it to chrome.
You're not going to convince the average joe with a rant like that ;)
They make great stuff but it is worrying they control everything and buy everything they don't and it feels like they're locking small businesses out of the search results these days, preferring to only link to major established sites.
If Google really wanted to show that they are for openness and privacy, they would have moved Chrome to a not-for-profit foundation instead of owning it themselves.
that would defeat the purpose of them creating Chrome in the first place - to have access to product (by which I mean people using the browser) activities.
What other advertising company has ever had as many fingers in as many pies?
It’s entirely possible for people in parts of the USA be getting a large percentage of their web content (search, news, video, social etc) from a Google web property, using a device controlled by Google, using an internet connection controlled by Google.
Just to remind you - Google is an Ad company.
People talk about the Apple “reality distorion field” because people willingly buy in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple have nothing on the religion like status Google has reached with some people.
They are a Tech company, they make most of their money from ad's for now, but I expect in the future, it will be from AI and robotics, since they are investing incredible amounts in those areas.
Nope, that's just to deceive you. They still just want/need your attention and more of it every year on more surfaces. Online Media is way too profitable to "pivot" away from it :)
They don't need to pivot, they just need the rest of the business to grow bigger then the advertising arm. Which it will, since robotics and AI have the potential to be much much bigger. Of course, then people will worry that Google will create the technological singularity.
The idea that Google will somehow abandon it's current advertising/data mining business model is ridiculous.
In 2013 Google's non-advertising revenue was less than 9% of their total revenue.
For average people, the $0 price tag is one of the big appeals about Google's various services - of course those things are really just ways to acquire product (i.e. people) data/eyeballs.
If you look at a lot of their online services outside of straight search, they do not have the best experience, they are simply free and "good enough" to squeeze out or marginalise paid services.
But how much of that growth is true growth and how much is about sudden new income streams because of purchases.
e.g. they buy a company like Nest, which has a commercial product. Suddenly they have a lot of extra non-ad based revenue, giving the appearance of growth.
If the premise here is that Google is the evil empire, why is Google still on the Home Page when running Firefox?? Apparently large sums of money can have an effect on ethics.
Obviously the underlying goal here is a plea for more FF marketshare, but it's a tad hypocritical if the message is to not use services from a company you're promoting yourself. That's do as I say, not as I do type stuff.
It's not like they have a choice now, the other choice here is to shut down the company.
That's also why they launched Firefox OS, they hope in the future to depend less on Google.
It's not hypocritical. Google pays Mozilla to be the default search engine, and this is the main source of Mozilla's money.
If you don't want them to be so dependent on Google, then donate - every dollar you donate to Mozilla brings them closer to being independent from Google: https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/contribute/Give-Now
Keep mind that Google was initially installed as the default search engine years ago, because FF users voted for it to be so. Only after Google saw how many search referrals they then got from FF, did they, that is Google, suggest an actual deal (which paid, incidentally, only a few percent of the market value for those referrals.). That deal doesn't include anything preventing users from changing the defaults.
Consider as well the Awesome Bar. The ability to search your history easily resulted in fewer users going back to Google and generating search referrals. Mozilla implemented it anyway, because it was good for the user.
You seem to be missing the point that overthrows your assertion. Yes, there is still a deal with Google, but Mozilla doesn't care if doing and advocating what's good for the user makes that relationship less and less valuable for Google. They are, in fact, sacrificing potential financial gain for the sake of their principles.
Mozilla has numerous, egregious faults, but this kind of hypocrisy and ethical lapses aren't among them.
> Mozilla doesn't care if doing and advocating what's good for the user makes that relationship less and less valuable for Google. They are, in fact, sacrificing potential financial gain for the sake of their principles.
Ahh, No. They're biting the hand that feeds them while they're still being fed, which just makes them look tacky. They admittingly see the writing on the wall, with declining mind and marketshare to Google which is what's prompted this post - which isn't in the users best interests, it's what's in their own. Users also end up using what they believe is the best or most convenient choice. Which is fine, everyone has the right to do what's best for themselves.
A practical reason not to use Chrome is the chrome app store.
It's littered with garbage-ware. Outdated extensions, broken extensions and extensions with fucking ads. It seems like anything can get in and you don't know if it's broken until you test it yourself.
It's a mess. At least with Firefox addons you can expect a certain level of quality, especially with the vetted addons, and you know before you install it whether it;s likely to be compatible.
Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so.
I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end on my PCs one a 32 bit m/c another a 64 bit both with about a Gig of RAM (one a shade below 1 Gig). Trying to do the same with Chrome has been a torture.
I have used Chrome, its pretty good, but am very happy with FF. Some people get allergic reactions when I mention keeping so many tabs open, I have commented about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936369#up_2936784
A few others have a snark ready, "buy some RAM", I perhaps could, but I would rather use my RAM for other purposes than clogging it with a browser (cat pictures), window manager eye candy etc. In addition, this low RAM environment has turned out to be a good filter, software written without much attention to detail or resource efficiency just doesnt run well, and thats perfectly fine with me. I like hanging out with better ones.
My experience with multiple tabs has been same. In my exeprience (and I read somewhere as well), Chrome shows up UI faster, then responds after 2-3 seconds. Firefox is respnsive from start.
Multiple tab management with Panorama is much better (Chrome has a few similar extensions but don't work that well!) and I like the scrolling interfacce of multiple tabs rather than Chrome's approach of compressing everything!
Recently, Chrome has crashed more for me than Firefox and some of the extensions and features on Firefox are miles ahead.
Have to agree: For me firefox performance is much better. I currently have 413 tabs open, use a 3 year old lenovo laptop, everything works flawless and is responsive, unlike chrome.
Not op, but I just use the built-in one. On OS X, press CMD+shift+e and you'll get a overview of tab groups, you can create new groups, etc. I have a "main" group (the default one) and one group per pet project, subject, etc. I tend to use these instead of bookmarks, since they stay around even if the browser crashes.
Its not you can search your open tabs in firefox. I also maintain sets through tab groups that allow me to bring up several things that I'm working on with out having to type in several urls.
As a Firefox stalwart, my only sustained complaint about it is that the plug-in architecture is pretty crappy, but that's mostly a minor complaint so long as you avoid installing anything but very well understood and mature plug-ins. Chrome doesn't do all that much better here, since although its plugin architecture doesn't suffer quite so badly reliability-wise, plugins can still violate your privacy pretty much arbitrarily (modulo the relevant appstore blacklisting it, which is a pretty impotent reactive measure, as we've seen).
Firefox memory usage has always been, and I suppose will likely to continue to be far ahead of Chrome, since the desktop implementation is now largely identical to that used in Firefox OS.
I want the independent processes for security reasons, not memory reasons. Firefox continues to be the most hackable browser because it's lacking that, and also a terrible choice for Tor, as long as it doesn't get it.
I also keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end. I use Firefox and have simply accepted that it will crash about four times per day, requiring me to wait a few minutes while it restarts and reloads the tabs.
I think that's the way my browser is set up, but there's still a huge spike in internet connections whenever I restart it. Maybe Firefox doesn't load every tab, but still loads one page per open browser window, and it feels slow because I sometimes have 30-40 windows open?
In fact, the infamous memory leak Firefox was 'famous' for was fixed in version 2.5 which tells me that anyone who still complains of memory leaks in Firefox is one who you do not want to listen to for advice.
EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.
The leak points to a slack development/release process (is there one?). Its expected to check for leaks, crashes before releasing a point build. That this dog got out points to a systemic problem. Was that fixed by 2.5? Or was just the leak fixed.
What makes you so sure that there was ever only one memory leak? What makes you so sure that one or more new ones haven't been introduced since then?
I've seen and heard a lot of reports from many different Firefox users about Firefox using an unreasonably large amount of memory, even when using fresh installations of the most recent version, and when engaging in very reasonable browsing patterns.
As a software developer faced with a large and frequent volume of reports of such a nature, the only responsible thing to do is to assume that there is truly a problem. This should be assumed even if the developers themselves may be having trouble reproducing the problem. Denying that the problem exists is usually the most counterproductive thing that can be done, because the problem likely does actually exist, and it doesn't get fixed.
By the way, I don't believe that there ever was a Firefox 2.5 release. Perhaps you mean Firefox 3.5?
Users have been reporting memory leaks in Firefox up to and including last week. Users should not be used a source of what a memory leak is cause 80% of users do not know what a memory leak truly is much less be technically competent to recognize and report one.
I often make the error of saying the fix was in version 2.5 but perhaps it was in v1.5 or v2.0. It doesn't matter. They were fixed long ago is my point.
Once again, nobody is denying anything about memory problems. But there are two things at play here:
1. One person's experience is not universal. With a web browser as customizable as Firefox, there will be certain configurations causing problems that aren't caught by tests or by dogfooding. Some people are probably seeing leaks that users with a default configuration don't see. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/08/15/the-story-of...
2. People need to report their problems in ways that are actionable. HN is not a bug tracker. If somebody on HN (Hacker News! News for programmers who presumably know how a bug tracker works!) is having memory issues, (s)he should have no problems filing a bug in Bugzilla. Firefox has had about:memory for years now; save that report and attach it to your bug.
No memory leak was fixed in 2.5, because there was no 2.5 release[1]. What firefox then became famous for was a team of developers who adamantly insisted there were no memory leaks in firefox... right up until some of them admitted there was a problem, and the healing process began[2]. Any software product of this size is going to have SOME memory management problems, and that's fine. Firefox's history of even admitting these exist is spotty at best.
There have always been memory leaks in Firefox, and before 4.0, they were always worse on a new release, and improved with bug fixing releases. I don't know whether it's aurora, or the increased pace of the development cycle, but I haven't noticed any serious memory leaks like there were back in the day.
Of course, any program the size of Firefox is bound to have memory leaks. So we can't totally eliminate them while we still use C++.
Some time ago I made a very (very) light-weight extension for myself that works well for situations in which I have hundreds of tabs opened. It closes them all and stores the linked titles in a simple HTML page (thus searchable), ordered by tab session. It is inspired by OneTab and it is open-source.
Thank you! I looked pretty hard for a OneTab-like extension for FF about a year ago, and couldn't find one. It's the one thing I really miss about Chrome; making my own was on my TODO list.
I have been a long time FF user and can only echo your experience. But sometimes, on (badly written) JavaScript heavy pages, the entire browser locks up instead of just the rogue tab. I've tried enabling electrolysis[1] on my nightly, but it isn't quite there yet. Firefox may not be perfect, but it really is the only option for me, and it's getting better thanks to the amazing community behind it.
How exactly do I quantify my productivity? I like the workflow better. It works better for me, and apparently it works better for the parent poster. What's it to you?
I had a similar experience with Chrome (or rather, Chromium) on my netbook. It consumed so much memory with normal usage that I had to switch to Midori[1] so I could do other things while browsing.
It's not strange. You might not care about or agree with the reasons behind this decision, but personally I find a concern for user privacy - don't send keystrokes to Google until and unless the user indicates that they're searching - very refreshing in this day and age.
I'm with you on the superiority of a unified search/URL bar, but why would you resist a one-time tweak that takes 15 seconds and fixes the problem forever? Or just install the Omnibar extension, for that matter.
If that's literally the one reason you don't switch, and that one reason can be handled with no more effort than swapping the shortcuts on your desktop, I just don't get it.
If I want get things from my history then that's one box, if I want to search then it's a different one. Two completely different sets of suggestions, for different purposes.
This is actually very true. Having Chrome/V8 out there has definitely improved the state of browsers as far as performance; especially in regards to JavaScript. But now we face a situation where Google is getting such a market share with Chrome and their other web properties where lock in is a very real possibility, and the only way to keep an open, standardized web is to make sure there are still other browsers with major market share.
I once switched from Firefox to Chrome as Firefox became bloated and drifted away from its original mission to be a light weight branch from Mozilla (the browser). Now it is much better, but I still end up using Chrome when doing front end development as the developer tools on Chrome are fantastic. I do notice lately though that Firefox is putting new emphasis on devtools.
I think the developer tools in the latest Firefox are absolutely fantastic. I don't think Chrome offers anything substantially better currently for frontend development.
Agreed, and each release they just get better and better. For example, the updated scratchpad in FF32+ is pretty neat with it's code hinting and completion.
And the integrated app-manager for FirefoxOS apps and devices is just icing on the cake. I say Mozilla is doing a good job here, improving integration on multiple fronts and giving developers something that works right away. I am impressed at how well it works.
Firefox built in dev tools are clunky as anything, right down to not being able to resize bits so you can see the data in the panels. However firebug fixes that instantly.
Lock-in has already begun on Chrome. Now you can't install Chrome extensions from anywhere else but the Chrome store (which means only stuff Google agrees with). Chrome is as closed-down as iOS and WP8 right now (For shame, Google!). It's actually the main reasons I'm waiting to switch from it soon. But not until Firefox gets a security sandbox.
This is not lock in (not for the purpose of lock-in anyway)
- it's for security reasons and it is in fact exclusive to Windows. Chrome was getting abused by thousands of extra-crapware installers which would install extra extensions etc. They have taken a gradual response to the issue but it always came down to ">99% of outside extensions installed on windows are crapware. This is exclusive to Windows due to its permission model. This gives users a very bad impression of chrome. Now what?"
I get it, honestly. But hey, if you don't want lock in, the hell are you doing on Windows?
additionally, on the google help page explaining all of that, it also has a guide explaining how to get around the restriction (which is easy as, drag from the download bar onto the extensions page (last time I used it at least))
Chrome was getting abused by thousands of extra-crapware installers which would install extra extensions etc.
Chrome is a prime offender in the "installing unwanted add-ons" game. I'm using Firefox right now, and it has a "Google Update" extension installed that I certainly didn't put there. My system has a silent Google Update process that runs in the background as well. Neither of these, to my knowledge, gave me any choice about installing or even actively announced their presence or what they're doing.
Chrome is a prime offender in the "undermining the system security model" game as well. Just look at how Chrome is installed and handles auto-updates on Windows. It actively circumvents the normal user access control system and pollutes a data directory with executable code, with all the negative consequences that come from that.
Maybe Google should clean up their own yard before they spend too much time criticizing everyone else's?
1. They are not criticizing, they are preventing.
2. You are full of it. Everything you are talking about is part of the Google Updater. An open source program which keeps Chrome (and various other google products if installed) up to date. Needless to say, these updaters don't even exist on Linux and are only there on Windows because of the latter's absolutely moronic handling of updates.
As for Chrome undermining the system security model: [citation needed]
It's possible to install extensions manually without having to go to the Chrome store. That's what I do. The only "inconvenience" (which is actually a convenience to some) is that you have to update the extension manually.
I was in the same boat as you, switching to Chrome when Firefox went in a direction I didn't agree with. I never really liked the uncustomizable Chrome but I tend to vote with my feet if I can.
Months (years?) later of chrome-only usage I still disliked Chrome and decided Firefox was superior after all (just can't get used to some Chrome things), especially now that I no longer needed Firebug (everything is now available in Firefox itself). So I switched back a while ago and have no thoughts of switching again if Firefox keeps this up.
> we face a situation where Google is getting such a market share with Chrome and their other web properties where lock in is a very real possibility
I agree that Chrome has a high market share among web developers. The statistics I've looked at for all users have never put Chrome above 50%.[1][2] I've even been seeing web developers saying "nobody uses Firefox" and "everyone uses Chrome now".
Mozilla's persistent over-promotion of the legacy technologies (HTML, JS, CSS) as the only acceptable way of web development is a very strong turn-off for me.
NaCl let's you use e.g. C# in-browser without shitty and low-performance workarounds like transpiling. I hope it will become mainstream.
I can see what you are saying, but NACL is a big deal.
It isn't ONLY c/c++ but any language that can compile with LLVM, which is almost every language.
Think about it, new scripting languages, new compiled languages, anything language you care about. You want to write in Haskell? fine... do so, and have it run instead of javascript.
This IS a big big deal. No language is perfect, so the ability to use any of them? It is huge.
Dart is awesome! I hope they will come up with something that fixes all HTML & CSS warts as well.
Don't tell me technology doesn't thrive on competition. Pigeonholing everyone into same set of legacy languages is simply not OK! (no transpiling suggestions please - it's crap)
Imperative languages - i.e., markup and scripting languages (HTML and CSS) have a shallower learning curve than programming languages, about which you need to learn about variables, objects, types, control structures, and so on through the entire catalog of logic concepts.
At least there's enough JavaScript out there that you can get usable native code on GitHub, or perhaps even just cut-and-paste. Even without jQuery, if you're sagacious enough. And then of course there are full-on jQuery plug-ins, some of which even run tolerably off-the-shelf.
THAT is why MozFound pushes the paradigm of progressive enhancement: not because it makes life easier for developers (it doesn't, as a rule) but because it makes Web publishing approachable to a far greater user population than developer-kit-based toolboxes.
In conclusion: is reliance on the basic native stack the ONLY way? Of course not!
It is, however, the way that's easiest to learn and (usually) the hardest to f* up.
Yes, even CSS, as long as you care to walk before you run.
I agree with Paul Graham on this one.
"Has any other company grown to Google's size and remained as benevolent? (Not saying they're perfect, just the best that big.)"
(https://twitter.com/paulg/status/495948643149426688)
I'll stick with Chrome for now as I find it slightly better than firefox.
> Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft.
With `bent` you mean like they're trying to build the best products people would want to use? What should they do instead, not try as hard?
> Google controls Android, which is winning; Chrome, which is winning; and key Web properties in Search, Youtube, Gmail and Docs, which are all winning.
No they should try as hard as they can. Bent meaning look at the amount of resources they put in to have a piece in every aspect of someone's internet/app experience.
The reason why they got involved with everything is that they faced threats to their web business from other companies bent on dominating the whole platform (web/cloud apps) This is a good thing too.
But as developers and techies we know what happens when one company becomes too dominant. This benevolent create competition part could end up with us being in the same situation the web was in 10 years ago. We can all get lazy and say well Chrome is great and so are a lot of these web services Google makes that are slowly but surely moving away from standards. But the tech community possesses the resources to help keep Google honest, and Firefox is a major tool in that.
Exactly. The reason Google succeeded is because they made really good (often the best available to date) products. I think whatever type of "monopoly" they now enjoy is well deserved, and apparently, they still don't abuse it and crank out great products instead.
> Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft.
Because they make a good browser? Firefox is still slow, hangs frequently and the developer tools are still not up to par to Chrome's. All IMO of course, but as a developer I don't have the patience to use slower, clunkier tools "just because".
Also, Mozilla gets most of its revenue from their partnership with Google[0]. Is there a difference between using a Google made browser or a Google funded browser?
315 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadFor example, you have locked (left and right) arrows and now refresh button. What's next home button ? I don't mind arrows been locked, even throught I like to have a choice. But having my refresh button locked in one place without ability to move it to alternative spot is just rediculous.
Then you guys completely removed JavaScript disable option, even throught I can still enable it by going to "about:config" and switching "javascript:enabled" from "true" to "false".
Another weird option which is missing is ability to disable PDF view inside firefox browser. Again I can use "about:config" and switch "pdfjs.disabled" from "false" to "true".
But having this options in Preferences will be much better.
Not to mantion a lot of websites load much faster in Chrome or Chromium then Firefox.
I think this is why many people ether user it as second browser or switching from Firefox to Chrome/Chromium.
As for Google search engine, I have been using "DuckDuckGo.com" as alternative for some time now. For email use "ZoHo.com" instead of Gmail.com
And, as you say, it's still easy to change the settings in about:config - which is exactly targeted at people needing to change more things.
But frankly it kind of sucks a bit and I have to jump over to Chrome a lot because almost no videos will play in FF.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for...
Don't put the tabs on the top of the screen. You are probably concerned about vertical real estate because you have a 16:9 display. Horizontal bars just don't make sense any more.
Install the Tree Style Tab extension. Shove all your tabs into a sidebar. Now your browser has an eye-friendly aspect ratio. Plus you can have more than twenty tabs open at once without reducing the page title to a mere favicon.
Personally I wouldn't care if it looked ugly as long as it renders stuff right.
personally I use it along-side
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ft-deepdark/
http://i.imgur.com/AvBjeSz.png is the result on windows 8 with a bit of settings changes
And the UI to be used? I haven't clicked a UI element in any browser manually for years (at least that what it feels like).
September 2nd will bring 33beta
So is using Mozilla in the interest of Google, or is it not?
As a user who knows about "defaults" you're way ahead of everyone else and can probably figure out how to change them. For people who don't care Google is perfect.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/15/mozilla-releases-annual-rep...
I would love there to be a minimal but usable browser.
The reason I switched back to Firefox from Chrome is the Self Destructing Cookie Extension which is just great.
- Midori http://midori-browser.org/
- GNOME Web https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web
- rekonq http://rekonq.kde.org/
I do see what you mean with a minimal browser though. It is what Chrome was initially: the basics that you needed and no clutter. I would like to see such a project based on Firefox, especially given how customizable Firefox already is it might be a pretty awesome project.
By the way isnt Mozilla like 90 percent financed by Google?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google
...and they are competing on: Chrome<->Firefox Android<->Firefox OS
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/01/22/so-why-is...
They actually get a bunch of Google search users from that deal and they don't pay a lot for the marketshare they got for it. If anything, Google wins with that deal.
However, what if one day Google Chrome has 70%+ market share? Then the Chrome only creep will continue. You can already tell that they are doing a lot of Chrome only things on their web properties as with the nightly chrome builds you get occasional Google property only weird bugs. If Chrome had a massive market share they can then not have to bother supporting Mozilla or web standards. They can then leverage Chrome to have an advantage in performance and even monetization of Google products over others.
You can say right now Google has not done this, but they are doing small things here and there that are going down that route. Altruism is not a trait companies are known to keep for long, especially when there is no competition.
Oh, I agree with the tonality of the article, alright, but i don't subscribe in the "White Knight Firefox" story. Firefox is in bed with Google already, I don't like one bit what they did with the recent update and UI changes, and the performance of the browser in general is so bad it's not wonder people are switching to Chrome.
We need a much better competitor than Firefox if we want to fight against Chrome's domination.
On Windows, there's also the 32-bit issue. On machines with 8+ GB of RAM, having all tabs share a 2 GB address space just doesn't cut it. Especially when your addon model, one of the key features that sets Firefox apart from other browsers, eats an additional 4 MB of this limited space per tab (and that's just for one addon).[1]
Having said all that, I know that brilliant people are working on fixing this, and there have been huge improvements in the past year. And that's how I hope they'll win back users: by building a better browser, not just by appealing to open-source ideals and fear.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/05/14/adblock-plus...
I also use chrome extensively... and i get crashes about once... a month (im not talking about tab crashes but entiere browser crash)
So im not convinced by the whole multi process thing for stability reasons. It seems like a good idea for sandboxing or "webapps" and only so IF you also have separate cookie jars, etc.
(and i trust chrome more for security)
I'd rather have 2 processes, one for the GUI, one for the tabs ;)
I feel the same way about Firefox's performance. If it can be overcome, I'd not have a reason to touch Chrome again.
Please let that be true. Do you have links at hand where these near-future roadmap decisions could be tracked?
Some general information regarding the features of coming-up versions can be found here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Release_Tracking
The second link just went into bookmarks. Even though it didn't mention anything about this particular feature (has content only until R34), it will be helpful for me to know something about the oncoming changes before they happen.
Not joking but Firefox just works for me.
It's annoying because, despite warning to the contrary here, the Google ecosystem just works.
Seriously, what are you trying to say?
Small technical correction: it's 4 MB per page + 4 MB per embedded frame on that page.
There are platforms where developers need to stop developing. iOS was the main one; it has extreme lock in, an unfriendly development environment, an extremely unfriendly publishing environment and is actively doing evil things. But no, all aboard the ios apps train!
Windows I could say similar things about but given the competition I really can't. Android... Definitely not. Some of the most free mobile OSes run atop of android.
But when it comes to developing on platforms in general, developers absolutely need to use themselves as a voice to tell other platforms what is good, what is needed, etc. There are excellent general desktop features that people have found on mac os, windows and linux alike. Without developers to make use of them, regardless of the "open" or "closed" state of the platform, users are worse off.
Extensions are more powerful on Firefox but I think they are coplicated as well. There are many popular extensions that just don't have updates on Firefox. One example is Evernote. I used it a lot on Chrome but their Firefox extension is almost 1 year old version and Chrome/Opera extensions have much better UI now. I hope this improves soon.
Creating an add-on for a product with a smaller market share is not that bad. But for a product with 60%+ that also belongs to a company that "owns" Search, Maps and Email and is known to play dirty it's a different story.
We would recommend firefox, since we really like the Mozilla foundation, but the performance of it is so bad we have to steer people away from it.
It is a sad state of affairs.
I would have thought it you had more data than that then the points will all be rammed together and hard to distinguish, so it would be better to switch to density plots.
I once checked out chromium in order to test out whether file writing would be easy to do. The size of the project alone meant it took me forever to find out where to patch it.
(Edit: This was something like 5 years ago before I started to grow a distaste for Chrome)
I've sometimes wondered whether the barrier to entry is the biggest thing holding back FOSS.
I'm an experienced developer, quite capable of diving into the kind of code these projects run. Now and then I have enough spare time that I might be able to make a useful contribution. I would be happy to support some of these projects in the spirit of giving something back.
Every single time I look at a major FOSS project where I'd like to help, the very first thing I run into in the developer documentation is an installation/build process a mile long with absurd overheads. Large FOSS projects often require a whole set of custom tools. Many don't comply with normal conventions on the host OS; I'm on Windows, and assuming every developer in the world runs Linux is a particularly common problem. Quite a few require installation of a specific version of a certain compiler toolchain.
I understand that portability is difficult. I've worked on projects that had to be compiled on many different platforms. I've worked on projects that had to be cross-compiled from one platform to run on another. The issues raised by these environments aren't trivial.
Even so, I have never worked on a successful professional project that managed to make things as complicated as large FOSS projects almost always do. And while I'm happy to help out if I can, I simply don't have time to ensure that I've got this week's project's specific preferred version of a VCS, Bash, GCC, and so on installed so they clutter my standard file system, environment settings, registry, editor/IDE preferences, and all the other things that any developer surely wants as clean and tidy as possible while they work.
I was about to say that for the two projects I've tried this with, Filezilla and Firefox, it was actually quite reasonable. Especially Firefox, given its size, was surprisingly simply even if compiling took longer than I thought.
But then I read you are on Windows. Yeah, that's hell. I tried a few hours on Filezilla before deciding that it's just too messed up.
Do these projects expect that everyone will just set up a dedicated VM with exactly the right development environment for their code or something? I think that's probably the most practical solution in that kind of environment, but presumably it's a level of of commitment that only dedicated, long-term contributors are likely to make. Certainly it's a disincentive for anyone to contribute one-off fixes or improvements in specific areas, and a significant barrier to entry even for those who might become long-term contributors if they get that far, which surely can't be helping these projects.
Actually, I have. I know it's not small, but Firefox' code was quite structured.
This may be true but it doesn't seem to do much to bolster the argument. I just want to know - what are those things?
EDIT - This thread is an example of 'That escalated quickly!'
What other advertising company has ever had as many fingers in as many pies?
It’s entirely possible for people in parts of the USA be getting a large percentage of their web content (search, news, video, social etc) from a Google web property, using a device controlled by Google, using an internet connection controlled by Google.
Just to remind you - Google is an Ad company.
People talk about the Apple “reality distorion field” because people willingly buy in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple have nothing on the religion like status Google has reached with some people.
The idea that Google will somehow abandon it's current advertising/data mining business model is ridiculous.
In 2013 Google's non-advertising revenue was less than 9% of their total revenue.
For average people, the $0 price tag is one of the big appeals about Google's various services - of course those things are really just ways to acquire product (i.e. people) data/eyeballs.
If you look at a lot of their online services outside of straight search, they do not have the best experience, they are simply free and "good enough" to squeeze out or marginalise paid services.
Yes, it is only around 9% now, but it used to be 0% and it is growing fast.
e.g. they buy a company like Nest, which has a commercial product. Suddenly they have a lot of extra non-ad based revenue, giving the appearance of growth.
Obviously the underlying goal here is a plea for more FF marketshare, but it's a tad hypocritical if the message is to not use services from a company you're promoting yourself. That's do as I say, not as I do type stuff.
Google is keeping Mozilla alive. Do as they do. Keep Mozilla alive.
If you don't want them to be so dependent on Google, then donate - every dollar you donate to Mozilla brings them closer to being independent from Google: https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/contribute/Give-Now
Consider as well the Awesome Bar. The ability to search your history easily resulted in fewer users going back to Google and generating search referrals. Mozilla implemented it anyway, because it was good for the user.
You seem to be missing the point that overthrows your assertion. Yes, there is still a deal with Google, but Mozilla doesn't care if doing and advocating what's good for the user makes that relationship less and less valuable for Google. They are, in fact, sacrificing potential financial gain for the sake of their principles.
Mozilla has numerous, egregious faults, but this kind of hypocrisy and ethical lapses aren't among them.
Ahh, No. They're biting the hand that feeds them while they're still being fed, which just makes them look tacky. They admittingly see the writing on the wall, with declining mind and marketshare to Google which is what's prompted this post - which isn't in the users best interests, it's what's in their own. Users also end up using what they believe is the best or most convenient choice. Which is fine, everyone has the right to do what's best for themselves.
Mozilla had their opportunity to go with another Search Provider in Dec 2011 when they renewed their agreement with Google: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2011/12/20/mozilla-and-google-...
It's littered with garbage-ware. Outdated extensions, broken extensions and extensions with fucking ads. It seems like anything can get in and you don't know if it's broken until you test it yourself.
It's a mess. At least with Firefox addons you can expect a certain level of quality, especially with the vetted addons, and you know before you install it whether it;s likely to be compatible.
I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on end on my PCs one a 32 bit m/c another a 64 bit both with about a Gig of RAM (one a shade below 1 Gig). Trying to do the same with Chrome has been a torture.
I have used Chrome, its pretty good, but am very happy with FF. Some people get allergic reactions when I mention keeping so many tabs open, I have commented about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2936369#up_2936784
A few others have a snark ready, "buy some RAM", I perhaps could, but I would rather use my RAM for other purposes than clogging it with a browser (cat pictures), window manager eye candy etc. In addition, this low RAM environment has turned out to be a good filter, software written without much attention to detail or resource efficiency just doesnt run well, and thats perfectly fine with me. I like hanging out with better ones.
Multiple tab management with Panorama is much better (Chrome has a few similar extensions but don't work that well!) and I like the scrolling interfacce of multiple tabs rather than Chrome's approach of compressing everything!
Recently, Chrome has crashed more for me than Firefox and some of the extensions and features on Firefox are miles ahead.
Firefox memory usage has always been, and I suppose will likely to continue to be far ahead of Chrome, since the desktop implementation is now largely identical to that used in Firefox OS.
EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.
I've seen and heard a lot of reports from many different Firefox users about Firefox using an unreasonably large amount of memory, even when using fresh installations of the most recent version, and when engaging in very reasonable browsing patterns.
As a software developer faced with a large and frequent volume of reports of such a nature, the only responsible thing to do is to assume that there is truly a problem. This should be assumed even if the developers themselves may be having trouble reproducing the problem. Denying that the problem exists is usually the most counterproductive thing that can be done, because the problem likely does actually exist, and it doesn't get fixed.
By the way, I don't believe that there ever was a Firefox 2.5 release. Perhaps you mean Firefox 3.5?
I often make the error of saying the fix was in version 2.5 but perhaps it was in v1.5 or v2.0. It doesn't matter. They were fixed long ago is my point.
1. One person's experience is not universal. With a web browser as customizable as Firefox, there will be certain configurations causing problems that aren't caught by tests or by dogfooding. Some people are probably seeing leaks that users with a default configuration don't see. For example: https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2014/08/15/the-story-of...
2. People need to report their problems in ways that are actionable. HN is not a bug tracker. If somebody on HN (Hacker News! News for programmers who presumably know how a bug tracker works!) is having memory issues, (s)he should have no problems filing a bug in Bugzilla. Firefox has had about:memory for years now; save that report and attach it to your bug.
[1] Go ahead and check. I'll wait: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink
Of course, any program the size of Firefox is bound to have memory leaks. So we can't totally eliminate them while we still use C++.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-grenade/
[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
Plus, show me how productive you are with hundreds of tabs EVEN with the tree style tab versus say just using bookmarks?
With bookmarks I can save it, export it, move to another computer.
But lets go back, how productive can one be with hundreds of tabs open even with a tree style versus bookmarks?
[1] http://midori-browser.org/
EDIT: Would much prefer Opera if it supported all my Chrome extensions.
Prior discussion
I know you can get rid of it, but then I have to fiddle around with about:config to get it working as I want it to out of the box. All very strange.
I really like that when I type the name of a local server, my browser doesn't search for it.
I also like that I can search my history and bookmarks without my keypresses being sent to google/bing.
If that's literally the one reason you don't switch, and that one reason can be handled with no more effort than swapping the shortcuts on your desktop, I just don't get it.
If I want get things from my history then that's one box, if I want to search then it's a different one. Two completely different sets of suggestions, for different purposes.
Works perfectly.
I once switched from Firefox to Chrome as Firefox became bloated and drifted away from its original mission to be a light weight branch from Mozilla (the browser). Now it is much better, but I still end up using Chrome when doing front end development as the developer tools on Chrome are fantastic. I do notice lately though that Firefox is putting new emphasis on devtools.
I get it, honestly. But hey, if you don't want lock in, the hell are you doing on Windows?
Believe developer builds and Chromium are the only choices.
build: 36.0.1985.143 (Official Build 287914) m
But on both OS, you can get around it by enabling the developer mode and installing unpacked extensions.
Chrome is a prime offender in the "installing unwanted add-ons" game. I'm using Firefox right now, and it has a "Google Update" extension installed that I certainly didn't put there. My system has a silent Google Update process that runs in the background as well. Neither of these, to my knowledge, gave me any choice about installing or even actively announced their presence or what they're doing.
Chrome is a prime offender in the "undermining the system security model" game as well. Just look at how Chrome is installed and handles auto-updates on Windows. It actively circumvents the normal user access control system and pollutes a data directory with executable code, with all the negative consequences that come from that.
Maybe Google should clean up their own yard before they spend too much time criticizing everyone else's?
As for Chrome undermining the system security model: [citation needed]
Months (years?) later of chrome-only usage I still disliked Chrome and decided Firefox was superior after all (just can't get used to some Chrome things), especially now that I no longer needed Firebug (everything is now available in Firefox itself). So I switched back a while ago and have no thoughts of switching again if Firefox keeps this up.
I agree that Chrome has a high market share among web developers. The statistics I've looked at for all users have never put Chrome above 50%.[1][2] I've even been seeing web developers saying "nobody uses Firefox" and "everyone uses Chrome now".
[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/ [2] http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpri...
NaCl let's you use e.g. C# in-browser without shitty and low-performance workarounds like transpiling. I hope it will become mainstream.
It isn't ONLY c/c++ but any language that can compile with LLVM, which is almost every language.
Think about it, new scripting languages, new compiled languages, anything language you care about. You want to write in Haskell? fine... do so, and have it run instead of javascript.
This IS a big big deal. No language is perfect, so the ability to use any of them? It is huge.
Do you remember Java Applets? Do you remember ActiveX controls? Do you remember Flash and/or Shockwave?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client
"Your browser does not support Flash/Java/ActiveX/Bert and Ernie's latest bullshit, please upgrade to X to continue"
Don't tell me technology doesn't thrive on competition. Pigeonholing everyone into same set of legacy languages is simply not OK! (no transpiling suggestions please - it's crap)
At least there's enough JavaScript out there that you can get usable native code on GitHub, or perhaps even just cut-and-paste. Even without jQuery, if you're sagacious enough. And then of course there are full-on jQuery plug-ins, some of which even run tolerably off-the-shelf.
THAT is why MozFound pushes the paradigm of progressive enhancement: not because it makes life easier for developers (it doesn't, as a rule) but because it makes Web publishing approachable to a far greater user population than developer-kit-based toolboxes.
In conclusion: is reliance on the basic native stack the ONLY way? Of course not!
It is, however, the way that's easiest to learn and (usually) the hardest to f* up.
Yes, even CSS, as long as you care to walk before you run.
Edit: looks like they changed it to a top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8186125
With `bent` you mean like they're trying to build the best products people would want to use? What should they do instead, not try as hard?
> Google controls Android, which is winning; Chrome, which is winning; and key Web properties in Search, Youtube, Gmail and Docs, which are all winning.
IOTW success of a competitor is bad.
The reason why they got involved with everything is that they faced threats to their web business from other companies bent on dominating the whole platform (web/cloud apps) This is a good thing too.
But as developers and techies we know what happens when one company becomes too dominant. This benevolent create competition part could end up with us being in the same situation the web was in 10 years ago. We can all get lazy and say well Chrome is great and so are a lot of these web services Google makes that are slowly but surely moving away from standards. But the tech community possesses the resources to help keep Google honest, and Firefox is a major tool in that.
Because they make a good browser? Firefox is still slow, hangs frequently and the developer tools are still not up to par to Chrome's. All IMO of course, but as a developer I don't have the patience to use slower, clunkier tools "just because".
Also, Mozilla gets most of its revenue from their partnership with Google[0]. Is there a difference between using a Google made browser or a Google funded browser?
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google