10 ms·

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an inc

Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image. It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment. There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all. ____ ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.

hasenj 10y ago
Implying people who use Chrome are stupid is .. not a very nice thing to say.
- exceptione 10y ago
  You are right. I did and do not say every chrome user is stupid, there might be legitimate use-cases. But the vast amount of people just install chrome or get it side-loaded with some freeware and don't even think about their options and the impact of their choice. Now that is less than smart.
  - pvg 10y ago
    It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case.
    - smnscu 10y ago
      Citation needed. I found this [0] but maybe you have a better source. This was interesting though: > In the most recent Pwn2Own hacking competition, Chrome came out ahead of every other browser with only one exploit being successfully executed. 0: https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-browser/ https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-brows...
      - hackuser 10y ago
        FWIW, though I'm an avid supporter of Firefox and use it, my very consistent observation is that security experts believe, * Chrome/Chromium is more secure against attacks by governments or criminals (i.e., attacks against the integrity of the system; I can't think of the right word). * Firefox may be more secure against advertising and corporate confidentiality attacks. * Firefox with certain add-ons, too technical for most users, may be as secure as Chrome/Chromium.
        pvg 10y ago
        The fundamental difference is that Google is a gigantic engineering organization that dedicates enormous resources to security, benefiting Chrome directly and indirectly. Over the years, lots of work has been done to ensure and improve its security at a design and architectural level. Firefox, as this announcement shows, is just getting around to freeing itself from design decisions which may have made sense over a decade ago when Mozilla had 'software suite' ambitions but we now know are a liability for something with the security demands of a browser.
        johnsmith21006 10y ago
        Plus Google has much broader view and data to secure Chrome well beyond FF is going to be able to accomplish. Plus Google has far more to loose.
        hackuser 10y ago
        > design decisions which may have made sense over a decade ago when Mozilla had 'software suite' ambitions It doesn't change your overall point, but I think this part is incorrect. AFAIK abandoning those ambitions was the reason they left Seamonkey behind and developed Firefox.
        pvg 10y ago
        Firefox started well before Seamonkey was spun out, and they continued with Thunderbird anyway. But the details of the history of the ambitions don't matter, what matters is that these architectural decisions were made a long, long time ago but their consequences are still there. You can decide you're not going make an app suite, that doesn't magically re-architect the internals of the product you have. Take a look at this announcement from Netscape, in 2000 (AD): https://gilbane.com/2000/03/netscape-announces-gecko-adoptees-xul-netscape-6/ https://gilbane.com/2000/03/netscape-announces-gecko-adoptee... Support for XUL addons is being dropped now. That's a long echo.
    - josteink 10y ago
      > It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case. It may be Jesus on a popsicle, but I'm not going to trust something distributed via drive-by-installers, marketed through SPAM and made by the world's biggest data-hoarder and privacy-invader no matter what. It's adware/malware short and simple. Make it 100% FOSS. Remove any technical connection to Google. Don't require Google-logon to sync. Only distribute it to users who actually asked to have it installed. Etc etc. At that point I might consider starting trusting it. Not before.
      - pvg 10y ago
        So, like https://www.chromium.org/Home https://www.chromium.org/Home Personally, I'd at definitely consider using Jesus on a popsicle, if the opportunity arose, just to see what it's like. Not that it has so far, sadly.
        josteink 10y ago
        Chromium still requires you to log into a google account and share your private data with google to sync. Definitely not an option.
        pvg 10y ago
        To sync what? I use Chrome and never log into a non-web google account. In fact, I'm able to browse the web without 'syncing' anything.
        josteink 10y ago
        Bookmarks, history, passwords etc. I don't want to give those to google. Is that unreasonable?
        pvg 10y ago
        No, not at all but by the vehemence of your reply, you make it sound like Chrome or Chromium force you to give these things to google. And I don't think they do.
  - greggman 10y ago
    Go look at the CVE reports for each browser. Your taking a > 10x risk running anything other than Chrome. These changes Mozilla is making are to fix that.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      If I want to reduce computing security risks I'll use a calculator. Everything else comes with tradeoffs, and for many of us, these aren't worth it.
      - aseipp 10y ago
        The answer to "This piece of software has a track record of being more secure than this one, due to its design, and these changes in part help fix that disparity" IS NOT "I'm going to use a calculator now because nothing can be secure so what's the point anyway stop trying to force me to eat my dinner vegetables i'm not listening". I don't even know why this needs to be said, because it's fairly obvious nobody on Earth actually does risk analysis this way. I mean, unless you're a programmer with some sort of brain worm infestation, who cannot read between the lines, and have an inability to understand how people in the real world do (and must) operate, clearly.
        icebraining 10y ago
        From your other posts you seem like a reasonable person, so I'll try to explain myself better despite the verbal abuse. I realize that some software is more secure than others, and that changes can be made to make it more secure. My point is that you can't simply say "therefore these changes are necessarily good", because there is more to software than security, and those changes often involve tradeoffs in other areas, which have to be weighted. For some of us, in this case, those tradeoffs aren't worth it.
    - michaelmrose 10y ago
      Making up numbers doesn't help the discussion. Can you prove that firefox users are at all more likely to be infected in practice? I doubt it. You surely can't prove they are 10x.
lucideer 10y ago
I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition. Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making it's not entirely implausible. Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to choose the former over the latter.
- exceptione 10y ago
  I can't rule that out either. It might be that it is in Googles best interest to kill firefox. Here is an alternative view I have in mind. The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" -- should look like. Its imho feasible to launch a television and internet campaign promoting firefox after the transition by stressing the privacy qualities. Mozilla has a quality other venders don't have. By making it a pain free switch a big market share is possible for firefox. Still, i doubt the current board has this view really in mind. I am thinking if I should apply for a position :)
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    > The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" -- should look like. But that's what FF has been doing for the past ~5 years, and how has their share been doing? Not so well. Chrome has much more marketing behind it. And it comes from a name that people know and trust. Most people don't know who Mozilla is. And most people don't care about avoiding Google. So if I have two browsers, and the lesser known one is constantly following the other, why would I choose it? I'd rather take the leading browser. It seems as if the FF one is just playing catchup the whole time. I love Mozilla and FF because it respects me. But it often feels like they are losing that respect just to play follow the leader
MiddleEndian 10y ago
A car analogy is perfect here. Google Chrome is kind of like a sedan, something convenient for most people. Firefox is kind of like a pickup truck, less convenient for a lot of people but more powerful and useful for the people who need them. This move is kind of like a pickup truck manufacturer realizing that sedans are more common than pickup trucks, then thinking sedans don't have beds in the back, and removing the bed from their pickup truck. Then afterwards, they're confused why people don't like this change.
- msbarnett 10y ago
  A more accurate metaphor would involve the sedan have modern safety features the lack of which make the truck increasingly risky to drive but which the truck is unable to adopt without shedding technical limitations imposed by the bed.
  - MiddleEndian 10y ago
    Except in this case it's like removing the bed so I can't hypothetically transport large quantities of nitroglycerin (addons with tracking) but they're preventing me from transporting anything of interest (tab mix plus). I'll just use the Firefox LTS until it stops working with the modern web. By then hopefully the issue will be solved (perhaps by me, as I'm a dev).
    - msbarnett 10y ago
      > Except in this case it's like removing the bed so I can't hypothetically transport large quantities of nitroglycerin (addons with tracking) No? That's not what's motivating this at all. The problem is the XUL/XPCOM API are fundamentally incomposable with completely sandboxed per-tab processes a la Chromium and other isolating security changes, because of assumptions they impose on Firefox internals. If you turn on multiple processes in Firefox there's a bunch of complicated shims that half-keep some extensions working some of the time, but it's an uphill battle to support an API that never conceived of the idea. It needs to be shitcanned to move forward.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Politics killed the company. They have lost the plot, the leadership is more interested in ideology than technology.
lossolo 10y ago
Your comment is insulting, people are not "less than smart" because have different priorities or different view than you. I am using mostly Chrome because I had a lot of performance/memory usage issues with Firefox and because of security. You forget how someone got access to internal not disclosed list of vulnerabilities in Firefox? Compare amount of code execution CVEs[0][1] Chrome = 80 Firefox = 700! And I don't call Firefox users stupid. [0]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224 http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v... [1]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?vendor_id=452 http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...
- VodkaHaze 10y ago
  Now, now, I doubt FF has 700! ~= 10^174 CVEs
mtgx 10y ago
It's innovator's dilemma. The same thing that made Mozilla popular ("advanced" add-ons) is what kept it from moving to the "dumb" Chrome extension model that Google's browser adopted a long time ago. The older add-on model is what kept it from having better security and having less memory problems for so long.
tw04 10y ago
There are still tons of technical people (myself included) who use Chrome because Firefox became bad. The only reason I even have Firefox installed at this point is for extensions like DownThemAll - which will disappear after this move. The years of firefox memory leaks completely turned me off the product.
derf_ 10y ago
> Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. Humans are loss-sensitive. When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased. Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire. To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. You can estimate how many people use add-ons that can't (or won't) be ported to Web Extensions, how many people would benefit from the proposed improvements, what the relative changes in user adoption are likely to be for each, and make a call that gives the best result for the whole Firefox population. But that won't stop the people who are feeling the loss from being vocal about it, nor others who don't even use those add-ons attaching value to the thing they can no longer have, and resent that it's being taken away. To reverse course now would fail the other way: if you tell people you're going to hold off on full e10s deployment and the security and responsiveness improvements that will come with it to allow XUL add-ons to remain a while longer, they'll be upset that you've taken away the improvements you promised. Both times the conversation will only be about one side of the equation. No amount of marketing will fix that. Just ask Coca-Cola.
- alphapapa 10y ago
  > To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. Certainly you can: it's software--anything is possible. The issue is that they don't want to make the effort. I think this is because the developers are no longer the people who built Firefox, and they want to reinvent Firefox and put their own stamp on it--IOW, it's NIH. I think it's also a matter of the higher-up execs and board members having non-technical goals. It's similar to when a successful, focused company is bought by a larger one, and its popular product is canceled, its development team reassigned to other tasks in the new company. The users are left hanging, their software/product/service being yanked out from under them. At least Firefox is FOSS, so it can be continued, but of course that takes a lot of manpower nowadays. Hopefully Pale Moon will sustain the vision of the original Phoenix.
mlhaufe 10y ago
Don't forget about Brave: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
ReverseCold 10y ago
I last used Firefox in December 2017, and there was something else weird that made me stop using it. I'm waiting for Mozilla servo to be released as a standalone browser that doesn't use more memory than chrome, and doesn't have trash font support. Right now it's worse than chrome for battery life and RAM usage on Windows.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  I would be more concerned that you have figured out how to travel forward in time.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    It's moving backwards that is the hard part.
  - ReverseCold 10y ago
    Oops

hasenj 10y ago

Implying people who use Chrome are stupid is .. not a very nice thing to say.

exceptione 10y ago
You are right. I did and do not say every chrome user is stupid, there might be legitimate use-cases. But the vast amount of people just install chrome or get it side-loaded with some freeware and don't even think about their options and the impact of their choice. Now that is less than smart.
- pvg 10y ago
  It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case.
  - smnscu 10y ago
    Citation needed. I found this [0] but maybe you have a better source. This was interesting though: > In the most recent Pwn2Own hacking competition, Chrome came out ahead of every other browser with only one exploit being successfully executed. 0: https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-browser/ https://tiptopsecurity.com/what-is-the-most-secure-web-brows...
    - hackuser 10y ago
      FWIW, though I'm an avid supporter of Firefox and use it, my very consistent observation is that security experts believe, * Chrome/Chromium is more secure against attacks by governments or criminals (i.e., attacks against the integrity of the system; I can't think of the right word). * Firefox may be more secure against advertising and corporate confidentiality attacks. * Firefox with certain add-ons, too technical for most users, may be as secure as Chrome/Chromium.
      - pvg 10y ago
        The fundamental difference is that Google is a gigantic engineering organization that dedicates enormous resources to security, benefiting Chrome directly and indirectly. Over the years, lots of work has been done to ensure and improve its security at a design and architectural level. Firefox, as this announcement shows, is just getting around to freeing itself from design decisions which may have made sense over a decade ago when Mozilla had 'software suite' ambitions but we now know are a liability for something with the security demands of a browser.
        johnsmith21006 10y ago
        Plus Google has much broader view and data to secure Chrome well beyond FF is going to be able to accomplish. Plus Google has far more to loose.
        hackuser 10y ago
        > design decisions which may have made sense over a decade ago when Mozilla had 'software suite' ambitions It doesn't change your overall point, but I think this part is incorrect. AFAIK abandoning those ambitions was the reason they left Seamonkey behind and developed Firefox.
        pvg 10y ago
        Firefox started well before Seamonkey was spun out, and they continued with Thunderbird anyway. But the details of the history of the ambitions don't matter, what matters is that these architectural decisions were made a long, long time ago but their consequences are still there. You can decide you're not going make an app suite, that doesn't magically re-architect the internals of the product you have. Take a look at this announcement from Netscape, in 2000 (AD): https://gilbane.com/2000/03/netscape-announces-gecko-adoptees-xul-netscape-6/ https://gilbane.com/2000/03/netscape-announces-gecko-adoptee... Support for XUL addons is being dropped now. That's a long echo.
  - josteink 10y ago
    > It's the most secure browser available. That's a not a 'might be legitimate' use case. It may be Jesus on a popsicle, but I'm not going to trust something distributed via drive-by-installers, marketed through SPAM and made by the world's biggest data-hoarder and privacy-invader no matter what. It's adware/malware short and simple. Make it 100% FOSS. Remove any technical connection to Google. Don't require Google-logon to sync. Only distribute it to users who actually asked to have it installed. Etc etc. At that point I might consider starting trusting it. Not before.
    - pvg 10y ago
      So, like https://www.chromium.org/Home https://www.chromium.org/Home Personally, I'd at definitely consider using Jesus on a popsicle, if the opportunity arose, just to see what it's like. Not that it has so far, sadly.
      - josteink 10y ago
        Chromium still requires you to log into a google account and share your private data with google to sync. Definitely not an option.
        pvg 10y ago
        To sync what? I use Chrome and never log into a non-web google account. In fact, I'm able to browse the web without 'syncing' anything.
        josteink 10y ago
        Bookmarks, history, passwords etc. I don't want to give those to google. Is that unreasonable?
        pvg 10y ago
        No, not at all but by the vehemence of your reply, you make it sound like Chrome or Chromium force you to give these things to google. And I don't think they do.
- greggman 10y ago
  Go look at the CVE reports for each browser. Your taking a > 10x risk running anything other than Chrome. These changes Mozilla is making are to fix that.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    If I want to reduce computing security risks I'll use a calculator. Everything else comes with tradeoffs, and for many of us, these aren't worth it.
    - aseipp 10y ago
      The answer to "This piece of software has a track record of being more secure than this one, due to its design, and these changes in part help fix that disparity" IS NOT "I'm going to use a calculator now because nothing can be secure so what's the point anyway stop trying to force me to eat my dinner vegetables i'm not listening". I don't even know why this needs to be said, because it's fairly obvious nobody on Earth actually does risk analysis this way. I mean, unless you're a programmer with some sort of brain worm infestation, who cannot read between the lines, and have an inability to understand how people in the real world do (and must) operate, clearly.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        From your other posts you seem like a reasonable person, so I'll try to explain myself better despite the verbal abuse. I realize that some software is more secure than others, and that changes can be made to make it more secure. My point is that you can't simply say "therefore these changes are necessarily good", because there is more to software than security, and those changes often involve tradeoffs in other areas, which have to be weighted. For some of us, in this case, those tradeoffs aren't worth it.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    Making up numbers doesn't help the discussion. Can you prove that firefox users are at all more likely to be infected in practice? I doubt it. You surely can't prove they are 10x.

lucideer 10y ago

I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition. Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making it's not entirely implausible. Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to choose the former over the latter.

exceptione 10y ago
I can't rule that out either. It might be that it is in Googles best interest to kill firefox. Here is an alternative view I have in mind. The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" -- should look like. Its imho feasible to launch a television and internet campaign promoting firefox after the transition by stressing the privacy qualities. Mozilla has a quality other venders don't have. By making it a pain free switch a big market share is possible for firefox. Still, i doubt the current board has this view really in mind. I am thinking if I should apply for a position :)
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  > The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" -- should look like. But that's what FF has been doing for the past ~5 years, and how has their share been doing? Not so well. Chrome has much more marketing behind it. And it comes from a name that people know and trust. Most people don't know who Mozilla is. And most people don't care about avoiding Google. So if I have two browsers, and the lesser known one is constantly following the other, why would I choose it? I'd rather take the leading browser. It seems as if the FF one is just playing catchup the whole time. I love Mozilla and FF because it respects me. But it often feels like they are losing that respect just to play follow the leader

MiddleEndian 10y ago

A car analogy is perfect here. Google Chrome is kind of like a sedan, something convenient for most people. Firefox is kind of like a pickup truck, less convenient for a lot of people but more powerful and useful for the people who need them. This move is kind of like a pickup truck manufacturer realizing that sedans are more common than pickup trucks, then thinking sedans don't have beds in the back, and removing the bed from their pickup truck. Then afterwards, they're confused why people don't like this change.

msbarnett 10y ago
A more accurate metaphor would involve the sedan have modern safety features the lack of which make the truck increasingly risky to drive but which the truck is unable to adopt without shedding technical limitations imposed by the bed.
- MiddleEndian 10y ago
  Except in this case it's like removing the bed so I can't hypothetically transport large quantities of nitroglycerin (addons with tracking) but they're preventing me from transporting anything of interest (tab mix plus). I'll just use the Firefox LTS until it stops working with the modern web. By then hopefully the issue will be solved (perhaps by me, as I'm a dev).
  - msbarnett 10y ago
    > Except in this case it's like removing the bed so I can't hypothetically transport large quantities of nitroglycerin (addons with tracking) No? That's not what's motivating this at all. The problem is the XUL/XPCOM API are fundamentally incomposable with completely sandboxed per-tab processes a la Chromium and other isolating security changes, because of assumptions they impose on Firefox internals. If you turn on multiple processes in Firefox there's a bunch of complicated shims that half-keep some extensions working some of the time, but it's an uphill battle to support an API that never conceived of the idea. It needs to be shitcanned to move forward.

angry-hacker 10y ago

Politics killed the company. They have lost the plot, the leadership is more interested in ideology than technology.

lossolo 10y ago

Your comment is insulting, people are not "less than smart" because have different priorities or different view than you. I am using mostly Chrome because I had a lot of performance/memory usage issues with Firefox and because of security. You forget how someone got access to internal not disclosed list of vulnerabilities in Firefox? Compare amount of code execution CVEs[0][1] Chrome = 80 Firefox = 700! And I don't call Firefox users stupid. [0]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224 http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v... [1]http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?vendor_id=452 http://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?...

VodkaHaze 10y ago
Now, now, I doubt FF has 700! ~= 10^174 CVEs

mtgx 10y ago

It's innovator's dilemma. The same thing that made Mozilla popular ("advanced" add-ons) is what kept it from moving to the "dumb" Chrome extension model that Google's browser adopted a long time ago. The older add-on model is what kept it from having better security and having less memory problems for so long.

tw04 10y ago

There are still tons of technical people (myself included) who use Chrome because Firefox became bad. The only reason I even have Firefox installed at this point is for extensions like DownThemAll - which will disappear after this move. The years of firefox memory leaks completely turned me off the product.

derf_ 10y ago

> Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. Humans are loss-sensitive. When Coca-Cola did blind taste tests for New Coke, it was overwhelmingly preferred. When they told people which was which, the preference for New Coke increased. Instead, when they removed Coca-Cola Classic from the shelves, people clamored for it back. People want the thing they cannot have. Scarcity creates desire. To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. You can estimate how many people use add-ons that can't (or won't) be ported to Web Extensions, how many people would benefit from the proposed improvements, what the relative changes in user adoption are likely to be for each, and make a call that gives the best result for the whole Firefox population. But that won't stop the people who are feeling the loss from being vocal about it, nor others who don't even use those add-ons attaching value to the thing they can no longer have, and resent that it's being taken away. To reverse course now would fail the other way: if you tell people you're going to hold off on full e10s deployment and the security and responsiveness improvements that will come with it to allow XUL add-ons to remain a while longer, they'll be upset that you've taken away the improvements you promised. Both times the conversation will only be about one side of the equation. No amount of marketing will fix that. Just ask Coca-Cola.

alphapapa 10y ago
> To some, this is a simple engineering trade-off. You can't have sandboxing, tab isolation, and responsiveness improvements with XUL add-ons in any kind of feasible or sustainable way. Certainly you can: it's software--anything is possible. The issue is that they don't want to make the effort. I think this is because the developers are no longer the people who built Firefox, and they want to reinvent Firefox and put their own stamp on it--IOW, it's NIH. I think it's also a matter of the higher-up execs and board members having non-technical goals. It's similar to when a successful, focused company is bought by a larger one, and its popular product is canceled, its development team reassigned to other tasks in the new company. The users are left hanging, their software/product/service being yanked out from under them. At least Firefox is FOSS, so it can be continued, but of course that takes a lot of manpower nowadays. Hopefully Pale Moon will sustain the vision of the original Phoenix.

mlhaufe 10y ago

Don't forget about Brave: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/

ReverseCold 10y ago

I last used Firefox in December 2017, and there was something else weird that made me stop using it. I'm waiting for Mozilla servo to be released as a standalone browser that doesn't use more memory than chrome, and doesn't have trash font support. Right now it's worse than chrome for battery life and RAM usage on Windows.

antisthenes 10y ago
I would be more concerned that you have figured out how to travel forward in time.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  It's moving backwards that is the hard part.
- ReverseCold 10y ago
  Oops