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Lots of negativity in these comments surrounding Firefox and Mozilla's direction with it. I've been using Rust, a Mozilla product, quite a bit recently and hav

Lots of negativity in these comments surrounding Firefox and Mozilla's direction with it. I've been using Rust, a Mozilla product, quite a bit recently and have even contributed to the project. I am throughly impressed with Rust, the language, the ecosystem, and most importantly the way it's maintained by Mozilla. It's an incredible gift by Mozilla to the community at large, and for that they've earned a lot of respect from me. I agree that Firefox's performance is quite bad these days, but Mozilla is already working on that (with Servo). Pouring more devs into it is not likely to make progress on that front faster (too many cooks). They could have taken a more gradual approach to the problem, by slowly evolving the existing codebase, chipping away at performance. But they've been trying that for a long time. Servo is, in my opinion, the better plan. And with it also comes a massive security hardening. It's a long road, but one worth waiting for. So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Firefox Hello and other projects like it are part of that effort. We may not agree that Firefox Hello is a good idea. Personally I don't have a use for it either. But bless them for trying and experimenting. And let's not forget that Firefox is a "free" product. I can't imagine Mozilla is swimming in money. They don't have the resources that Google or Microsoft have, and yet they still have a solid chance at leap-frogging their competition with Servo. Personally, I continue to use Firefox as my daily driver, because it appears to respect my privacy more than Chrome, despite its performance issues.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
panic 11y ago
So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Mozilla recently jettisoned Thunderbird, its email client, mostly because of its impact on Firefox development (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy...). Wouldn't a great native email client be a better way to grow the company than features like this? And shouldn't features be added to make the product better, not just because there are people sitting around with nothing else to do?
idobai 11y ago
> I agree that Firefox's performance is quite bad these days, but Mozilla is already working on that (with Servo). I've checked out servo and compiled and started it in release mode - it required 600MB RAM and 700% CPU to load google(!) with the same speed as my little firefox with tons of extensions - forgive my ignorance but I've expected more from the hype. I've tested some other websites but no luck - Servo is a heavy and slow beast. > I am throughly impressed with Rust, the language, the ecosystem, and most importantly the way it's maintained by Mozilla. Rust programs consume so much resources that it could just use a GC instead of the complex manual memory management. The syntax and the standard library is as 'modern' as in cpp - I'm not as impressed as I was a fan of Mozilla. > Personally, I continue to use Firefox as my daily driver, because it appears to respect my privacy more than Chrome, despite its performance issues. Search the internet for optimizations, my firefox feels like as fast as chrome - sometime even faster. It just needs some tweaks. Even if ff would be much slower I wouldn't leave it because of firefox's wonderful extension platform and its nice complete theme suites.
- kibwen 11y ago
  > Rust programs consume so much resources that it could > just use a GC I'm not sure where this is coming from. Everyone that I've spoken to about using Rust in place of managed languages has noted incredible reductions in memory usage. Indeed, this was one of the primary reasons for Dropbox adopting Rust for their core storage engine. Quoting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283688 : "The reasons for using rust were many, but memory was one of them. Primarily, for this particular project, the heap size is the issue. One of the games in this project is optimizing how little memory and compute you can use to manage 1GB (or 1PB) of data. We utilize lots of tricks like perfect hash tables, extensive bit-packing, etc. Lots of odd, custom, inline and cache-friendly data structures. We also keeps lots of things on the stack when we can to take pressure off the VM system. We do some lockfree object pooling stuff for big byte vectors, which are common allocations in a block storage system. It's much easier to do these particular kinds of optimizations using C++ or Rust." And the above paragraph is using Go as a baseline, which itself already tends to use less memory than Java.
- pcwalton 11y ago
gkya 11y ago
I really don't like this sort of comments, trying to make us feel guilty for criticising something. The stupidity of big browser producers makes the web worse for everyone, so it should not be allowed, even if done with good will. About since 1992 there is a very good tool for sharing tabs: their URLs. Anything that can't be shared with a URL is probably too private to be shared anyways. I'm a user, I don't care about Rust. Firefox may well be implemented in some object oriented brainfuck, but as long as it does not tuck into its interface irrelevant stuff that I can't remove, I won't touch Firefox. I actually recently considered a switch, and tried FF45, and what I saw: Pocket and this Hello, there, impossible to actually remove. I'd be fine with an addon that they officially developed/backed, and it'd be okay if they advertised it a bit, but this way, no. They certainly lost some people other than me with this inconsiderate manners of theirs.
- idobai 11y ago
  > I actually recently considered a switch, and tried FF45, and what I saw: Pocket and this Hello, there, impossible to actually remove. about:config loop.enabled = false -> disable hello browser.pocket.enabled = false-> disable pocket > They certainly lost some people other than me with this inconsiderate manners of theirs. They're wasting time and resources into things the users don't really need.
  - gkya 11y ago
    disable /= remove.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

panic 11y ago

So, Mozilla has already dedicated the necessary resources to handle performance. What are they to do with the rest of their company's resources, and most importantly, what can they do to grow the company? Mozilla recently jettisoned Thunderbird, its email client, mostly because of its impact on Firefox development (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAyVlhfEcXg/Eqyx1X62BQAJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.governance/kAy...). Wouldn't a great native email client be a better way to grow the company than features like this? And shouldn't features be added to make the product better, not just because there are people sitting around with nothing else to do?

idobai 11y ago

> I agree that Firefox's performance is quite bad these days, but Mozilla is already working on that (with Servo). I've checked out servo and compiled and started it in release mode - it required 600MB RAM and 700% CPU to load google(!) with the same speed as my little firefox with tons of extensions - forgive my ignorance but I've expected more from the hype. I've tested some other websites but no luck - Servo is a heavy and slow beast. > I am throughly impressed with Rust, the language, the ecosystem, and most importantly the way it's maintained by Mozilla. Rust programs consume so much resources that it could just use a GC instead of the complex manual memory management. The syntax and the standard library is as 'modern' as in cpp - I'm not as impressed as I was a fan of Mozilla. > Personally, I continue to use Firefox as my daily driver, because it appears to respect my privacy more than Chrome, despite its performance issues. Search the internet for optimizations, my firefox feels like as fast as chrome - sometime even faster. It just needs some tweaks. Even if ff would be much slower I wouldn't leave it because of firefox's wonderful extension platform and its nice complete theme suites.

kibwen 11y ago
> Rust programs consume so much resources that it could > just use a GC I'm not sure where this is coming from. Everyone that I've spoken to about using Rust in place of managed languages has noted incredible reductions in memory usage. Indeed, this was one of the primary reasons for Dropbox adopting Rust for their core storage engine. Quoting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283688 : "The reasons for using rust were many, but memory was one of them. Primarily, for this particular project, the heap size is the issue. One of the games in this project is optimizing how little memory and compute you can use to manage 1GB (or 1PB) of data. We utilize lots of tricks like perfect hash tables, extensive bit-packing, etc. Lots of odd, custom, inline and cache-friendly data structures. We also keeps lots of things on the stack when we can to take pressure off the VM system. We do some lockfree object pooling stuff for big byte vectors, which are common allocations in a block storage system. It's much easier to do these particular kinds of optimizations using C++ or Rust." And the above paragraph is using Go as a baseline, which itself already tends to use less memory than Java.
pcwalton 11y ago

gkya 11y ago

I really don't like this sort of comments, trying to make us feel guilty for criticising something. The stupidity of big browser producers makes the web worse for everyone, so it should not be allowed, even if done with good will. About since 1992 there is a very good tool for sharing tabs: their URLs. Anything that can't be shared with a URL is probably too private to be shared anyways. I'm a user, I don't care about Rust. Firefox may well be implemented in some object oriented brainfuck, but as long as it does not tuck into its interface irrelevant stuff that I can't remove, I won't touch Firefox. I actually recently considered a switch, and tried FF45, and what I saw: Pocket and this Hello, there, impossible to actually remove. I'd be fine with an addon that they officially developed/backed, and it'd be okay if they advertised it a bit, but this way, no. They certainly lost some people other than me with this inconsiderate manners of theirs.

idobai 11y ago
> I actually recently considered a switch, and tried FF45, and what I saw: Pocket and this Hello, there, impossible to actually remove. about:config loop.enabled = false -> disable hello browser.pocket.enabled = false-> disable pocket > They certainly lost some people other than me with this inconsiderate manners of theirs. They're wasting time and resources into things the users don't really need.
- gkya 11y ago
  disable /= remove.