9 ms·

The journalists definitely got their facts wrong here, but they missed the overarching story. Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a no

• synotna 10y ago
  Electrolysis? Servo? Rust? I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out
  • sametmax 10y ago
    Indeed. From where I stand Mozilla is working hard at making the transition it's just: - it's a hard problem - they don't have the resources of MS or Google - they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it - the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promising technology of the decade, with a vibrant community. If it was a movie, this period of their life would be the scene with a small outsider named "Moz" training by night in a dirty gym or during the night under the rain. Next one will be the training paying off and him kicking the other guy's ass in the ring. But you need the unsexy and hard training first.
    • trome 10y ago
      It is a hard problem, and Mozilla has put a ton of effort into Rust, but at this point they aren't supporting any of their current extensions (XUL) and WebExtensions will not cover most use cases that XUL covered. This isn't a Python 2 to Python 3 event, this is Mozilla going from the equivalent of C to Java. Most of your favorite extensions will die, and it is directly forcing me to drop firefox for chromium at work, which I abhor. Sadly the feature I need (decent kiosk mode) will die in its current form (as a XUL addon) only a year after deploying this solution, versus with chromium its built in, and not going away any time soon.
      • sametmax 10y ago
        Yes they had to make a some very hard choice on this one. It's going to piss of a lot of people on the way. But on the long run I think it will result in a better browser. With less versatility, yes. But I got an entire OS at my disposal for advanced used, it's rather have a very good browser doing browser things. I'll the tab group extension though. I loved it and it won't be possible with webextensions.
        • homarp 10y ago
          >With less versatility, yes. isn't/wasn't that the point of firefox though. >a very good browser doing browser things. Chrome is the competition. Quite good at 'browser' things
          • sametmax 10y ago
            Yes. But do in need sqlite manager to be a firefox extension ? I can probably live without it. Do I need it to be at least as fast as chrome ? Yes.
            • mercer 10y ago
              Your comment is a good example tightrope that Mozilla is on. I've switched to Firefox a few times over the past years, but usually I'd switch back to Chrome because, whether true or not, it felt more performant/cleaner/better. The main reason I bothered trying to switch back to Firefox was always the versatility or 'freedom'. Stuff like the tree-style tab plugin. Realistically, for me to break my usual patterns and try Firefox again would have to involve at least one of the following: - equal (perceived) performance to Chrome - freedom/versatility in regards to plugins - some as-of-yet not seen before advantage With all else being equal, or even ever so slightly worse than Chrome, I'd go for Firefox simply because I distrust Google. Thing is, I'd characterize myself as much more security- and privacy-conscious than most people, and yet I'm still on Chrome despite giving Firefox a shot at least once a year for the past few years or so. I catch myself forgetting to test the stuff I make on FF occasionally (I'm a web developer). While I'm by no means a paragon of sticking with my beliefs, I'm still a bit of a privacy-weenie. The fact that I'm not using Firefox worries me a bit. The fact that I can't quite explain it frustrates me. If I had to give a reason as to why I use Chrome instead of Firefox, I'd say there are two primary reasons and a very vague third one: 1. Chrome is just more familiar at this point, especially its dev tools 2. Firefox feels like one of those Java applets: slow to boot and alien to my OS (moreso than Chrome). 3. Chrome feels snappier
  • trome 10y ago
    Electrolysis is here and fairly reliably working with my main XUL based extensions, but the ship for WebExtensions has sailed and I'm not gonna be on the wrong side of things (eg. Python 2 vs 3, Systemd vs "fun" init scripts), just gonna prepare for the realities of it, no matter that it breaks my heart to be forced to chromium at work :( I get that Mozilla wants to dump all the cruft added by XUL based extensions, and that they offed all the Firefox OS bits ASAP, but there are still markets for both those things. The latter prolly had more life in it if it were targeted as a Firefox chromebook type deal to give to the parents/kids, as that is eating into laptops marketshare in the double digits, and that on a Pinebook could easily make it the year of the Linux Laptop.
  • pluma 10y ago
    > Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out Unless you use extensions, which used to be one of Firefox's biggest advantages. I gave Firefox on Ubuntu a try for a week last month because I was looking for a replacement for Chrome and if I wasn't tech savvy I wouldn't have been able to figure out that Firefox was running in single-process mode and how to fix that. E.g. the default "Ubuntu integration" extension that Firefox ships with on Ubuntu (where it is the default browser) is not compatible with electrolysis. Additionally the (now outdated) Lastpass extension from the Firefox addon shop isn't compatible. I think the Trello Scrum extension also isn't compatible. The React developer tools also only just experimentally enabled compatibility. I'm not nitpicking -- users don't care why Firefox is slow or why electrolysis is disabled. If an extension is available for Firefox, especially if it's available on the official addon shop, users expect it to work and not to make Firefox slow to a crawl. That said, even with multiprocess mode I found that Firefox would often be considerably slower when having many tabs open (it's normal for me to keep 30-40 tabs open and this isn't rare, even among my non-developer friends). And as a developer the dev tools are still lightyears behind.
• coldtea 10y ago
  >where they have an illicit monopoly Not in any legal sense of the word.
  • trome 10y ago
    Its the exact same deal as with IE on Windows just a decade ago, by force bundling it, and then with Apple taking the additional step of blocking ALL competition, you get no choice. Today, I can build a SIP client for the browser and it will work well on every major platform except iOS, where Apple is still dragging ass years after WebRTC was standardized and implemented by every other browser.
    • coldtea 10y ago
      >Its the exact same deal as with IE on Windows just a decade ago, by force bundling it, and then with Apple taking the additional step of blocking ALL competition, you get no choice. No, Microsoft was a monopoly on the OS market. You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market). In other words, people and devs dissatisfied with how iOS does things, can always go to Android (or Windows Phone). People couldn't do that when Windows had 95%+ of the desktop and enterprise market, because there was no escaping it.
      • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        > You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market). You're assuming "iOS" and "iOS apps" are the same market, which they aren't in the same way that LibreOffice is in the same market with Microsoft Office but not with Microsoft Windows. The argument you could be trying to make is that Android apps and iOS apps, or Google Play and the iOS App Store, are the same market. But you can't install Android apps on iOS and you can't get iOS apps from Google Play. And iOS app developers are the customers of the iOS App Store. They pay Apple for it and have no alternative. "Switch to Android" doesn't work because it is the device customer who would have to switch to Android, not the app developer. The app developer is already in both. It's like facing a retail monopoly in California and what you're saying is to go buy retail space in Texas. That's not the same market.
• sangnoir 10y ago
  > Why is Mozilla acting like a tech company/startup, and not as a non-profit here to push Firefox and other projects under their management to new heights? Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now). A less cynical reason is that Mozilla shares the same hiring pool as startups and tech giants and people go back and forth; changing mindsets is hard.
  • trome 10y ago
    Sure, but quite a few employees are at Mozilla for significant periods of time, and (theoretically) Mozilla doesn't have free reign to run the non-profit into the ground by letting marketshare continue to slip away. Another perspective a friend recently shared with me is that perhaps it is time for Firefox to go the way of Icedove, Mozilla has taken it pretty far, but it is not its main focus even now, and it can be picked up and developed on into the future (not that there haven't been forks already).
  • dao- 10y ago
    > no one works at Mozilla for life Is that a fact? FWIW, I have little to no interest in working for any other tech company.