10 ms·

Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Servo, which I think is th

by jeswin 9y ago

Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should do it all over again.

kuschku 9y ago
I doubt that would help. As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made. As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market. The only solution now is the EU.
- fiala__ 9y ago
  can you elaborate on that last point? What does the EU have to do with this?
  - NiLSPACE 9y ago
    Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.
  - hacksonx 9y ago
    I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.
  - sciurus 9y ago
    The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-european-union-antitrust-charges.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...
    - fiala__ 9y ago
      Thanks!
- jeswin 9y ago
  Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.
  - chinhodado 9y ago
    Firefox's performance on Android is horrible though. I tried switching to it a few times but always have to switch back because of performance issue.
    - acjohnson55 9y ago
      Agreed. It's the browser I'm using right now, but it's got some big problems. It's draining my battery and it interferes with chromecast.
      - phillc73 9y ago
        I've been using Brave[1] on my Android phone for the past two months. It's been brilliant. A much better experience than Firefox, which was a bit slow and some pages loaded as a white screen. I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead. [1] https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/ [2] https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/
    - pmontra 9y ago
      It doesn't has text reflow after zooming, which Opera has. For all the other features I don't see anything horrible. It used to be slow at drawing pages but it's not anymore. I've been using it since Opera changed hands and it's nice to have uBlock on the phone too.
    - sirfz 9y ago
      It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.
- tambourine_man 9y ago
  Agreed with everything but your first sentence. MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help. (Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
  - valarauca1 9y ago
    Whoa. Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform. Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M? IE updated... just slower than Netscape.
    - jchw 9y ago
      IE ran on... CP/M? What CP/M are you talking about?
      - echeese 9y ago
        They probably meant Windows CE or Pocket PC (P/PC)
    - bobthedino 9y ago
      There was even briefly a version of IE for HP-UX and Solaris.
    - tambourine_man 9y ago
      IE6 was not updated for 6 years. On Windows. On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta) So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.
    - tapoxi 9y ago
      Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions. For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
- jaflo 9y ago
  Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    You can find an excerpt in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s Transcribing the subtitles: > "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?" > "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.
ablankst 9y ago
> Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.
- braveo 9y ago
  that's purely a business decision.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    Our business decision is that Firefox needs to be supported as well. The fact that most of the developers use Chrome as their daily driver, however, results in a lot of bugs being seen and caught early (or at all) there.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones. But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us. That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.
    - 2bitencryption 9y ago
      if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you. but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.
daddykotex 9y ago
What is Servo bringing to the table that will, in your opinion, make Firefox the browser of choice again? I'm asking genuinely here. Is Servo expected to be have a much better performance?
- NiLSPACE 9y ago
  It heavily makes heavy use of parallelism and the GPU which increases the responsiveness. It's also uses Rust as a programming language instead of C++ which will prevent a whole category of bugs like buffer overflows and use after free.
  - braveo 9y ago
    Are these category of bugs a constant problem in FF?
    - NiLSPACE 9y ago
      Some of these bugs could've been prevented with Rust: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-05/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-0...
      - wpietri 9y ago
        Do you have any evidence that's why users are switching away? My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.
        NiLSPACE 9y ago
        I don't, but a marketing campaign saying "using modern safe techniques" might get a little traction.
        pygy_ 9y ago
        Rust's fearless concurrency[0] allows devs to write and refactor performant parallel code without the risk of introducing bugs, enabling them to ship upgrades faster. It's the same benefit you get from strong, static types in a large project vs one with dynamic/weak types, but for another category of bugs. In large projects, it makes a difference. --- 0. Hopefully you'll forget the meme ;-)
jhoechtl 9y ago
Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.
- ShannonAlther 9y ago
  Mozilla claims that Servo's parallelization will improve performance, and that Rust's features will improve security.
- pygy_ 9y ago
  Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible. Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf. So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end users. Another advantage of Rust is that it allows devs to avoid a whole range of bugs making it easier for them to iterate and ship updates without introducing new tricky bugs (race conditions can be hard to debug). While dynamic languages may be nice when you want to explore a problem space, the stronger/most static type system is a benefit for upgrading large, mature code bases...
  - markdog12 9y ago
    > Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.
    - NiLSPACE 9y ago
      Currently WebRender on Firefox renders the page twice as explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/618p54/webrenderer_landed_in_firefox_nightly_here_is_how/dfckzjz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/618p54/webrenderer_la...
SimonPStevens 9y ago
Thousands of developers who probably also support 10's of thousands of family member's PCs and can just quietly switch the defaults. The price for me doing tech support for free on your laptop is the default browser gets switched to Firefox and Chrome gets uninstalled :-)
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  And a week later Chrome is back to being the default, since Google pushes it like it was malware. They learned a lot from toolbar installers
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  Eh, I'd rather not force my views onto people, against their interests, without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as pretty dishonest. I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google). In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.
throwaway-1209 9y ago
I can tell you exactly why I'm not using FF: due to extremely poor support for switching between multiple profiles. Oh, it's possible, but compared to Google's seamless support for the same, its very awkward, even if you install an extension (which is only available from a third party).
- KORraN 9y ago
  Then try containers from Test Pilot and probably you will not need profiles anymore :)
  - throwaway-1209 9y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, just from the screenshots it looks pretty good. Will give it a try.
SimeVidas 9y ago
It can. My father and sister use Firefox, because I told them it’s the best option for privacy.
bobajeff 9y ago
I think it's important to scale back expectations for Servo. Given that Servo itself won't be ready to be used as a main engine for quite some time do to insufficient site compatibility. Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off. Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.

by jeswin 9y ago

kuschku 9y ago

I doubt that would help. As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made. As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market. The only solution now is the EU.

fiala__ 9y ago
can you elaborate on that last point? What does the EU have to do with this?
- NiLSPACE 9y ago
  Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.
- hacksonx 9y ago
  I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.
- sciurus 9y ago
  The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-european-union-antitrust-charges.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/technology/google-europea...
  - fiala__ 9y ago
    Thanks!
jeswin 9y ago
Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.
- chinhodado 9y ago
  Firefox's performance on Android is horrible though. I tried switching to it a few times but always have to switch back because of performance issue.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    Agreed. It's the browser I'm using right now, but it's got some big problems. It's draining my battery and it interferes with chromecast.
    - phillc73 9y ago
      I've been using Brave[1] on my Android phone for the past two months. It's been brilliant. A much better experience than Firefox, which was a bit slow and some pages loaded as a white screen. I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead. [1] https://www.brave.com/ https://www.brave.com/ [2] https://iridiumbrowser.de/ https://iridiumbrowser.de/
  - pmontra 9y ago
    It doesn't has text reflow after zooming, which Opera has. For all the other features I don't see anything horrible. It used to be slow at drawing pages but it's not anymore. I've been using it since Opera changed hands and it's nice to have uBlock on the phone too.
  - sirfz 9y ago
    It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.
tambourine_man 9y ago
Agreed with everything but your first sentence. MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help. (Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
- valarauca1 9y ago
  Whoa. Internet Exploder was constantly evolving and multi-platform. Did you forget IE ran on PPC Macs, X86 Macs, Windows, and CP/M? IE updated... just slower than Netscape.
  - jchw 9y ago
    IE ran on... CP/M? What CP/M are you talking about?
    - echeese 9y ago
      They probably meant Windows CE or Pocket PC (P/PC)
  - bobthedino 9y ago
    There was even briefly a version of IE for HP-UX and Solaris.
  - tambourine_man 9y ago
    IE6 was not updated for 6 years. On Windows. On the Mac it went as far as version 5 only. And never made it to x86 (unless you count Rosetta) So, through the dark ages, IE was very much frozen and Windows only, for all intends and purposes.
  - tapoxi 9y ago
    Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions. For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
jaflo 9y ago
Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.
- kuschku 9y ago
  You can find an excerpt in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=51s Transcribing the subtitles: > "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?" > "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
wutbrodo 9y ago
> As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites Where do you see this? I have Firefox open and don't see this on Search, Drive, Google Music, etc.

ablankst 9y ago

> Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this. Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.

braveo 9y ago
that's purely a business decision.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  Our business decision is that Firefox needs to be supported as well. The fact that most of the developers use Chrome as their daily driver, however, results in a lot of bugs being seen and caught early (or at all) there.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones. But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us. That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.
  - 2bitencryption 9y ago
    if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you. but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

daddykotex 9y ago

What is Servo bringing to the table that will, in your opinion, make Firefox the browser of choice again? I'm asking genuinely here. Is Servo expected to be have a much better performance?

NiLSPACE 9y ago
It heavily makes heavy use of parallelism and the GPU which increases the responsiveness. It's also uses Rust as a programming language instead of C++ which will prevent a whole category of bugs like buffer overflows and use after free.
- braveo 9y ago
  Are these category of bugs a constant problem in FF?
  - NiLSPACE 9y ago
    Some of these bugs could've been prevented with Rust: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-05/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-0...
    - wpietri 9y ago
      Do you have any evidence that's why users are switching away? My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.
      - NiLSPACE 9y ago
        I don't, but a marketing campaign saying "using modern safe techniques" might get a little traction.
      - pygy_ 9y ago
        Rust's fearless concurrency[0] allows devs to write and refactor performant parallel code without the risk of introducing bugs, enabling them to ship upgrades faster. It's the same benefit you get from strong, static types in a large project vs one with dynamic/weak types, but for another category of bugs. In large projects, it makes a difference. --- 0. Hopefully you'll forget the meme ;-)

jhoechtl 9y ago

Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.

ShannonAlther 9y ago
Mozilla claims that Servo's parallelization will improve performance, and that Rust's features will improve security.
pygy_ 9y ago
Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible. Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf. So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end users. Another advantage of Rust is that it allows devs to avoid a whole range of bugs making it easier for them to iterate and ship updates without introducing new tricky bugs (race conditions can be hard to debug). While dynamic languages may be nice when you want to explore a problem space, the stronger/most static type system is a benefit for upgrading large, mature code bases...
- markdog12 9y ago
  > Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.
  - NiLSPACE 9y ago
    Currently WebRender on Firefox renders the page twice as explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/618p54/webrenderer_landed_in_firefox_nightly_here_is_how/dfckzjz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/618p54/webrenderer_la...

SimonPStevens 9y ago

Thousands of developers who probably also support 10's of thousands of family member's PCs and can just quietly switch the defaults. The price for me doing tech support for free on your laptop is the default browser gets switched to Firefox and Chrome gets uninstalled :-)

TremendousJudge 9y ago
And a week later Chrome is back to being the default, since Google pushes it like it was malware. They learned a lot from toolbar installers
wutbrodo 9y ago
Eh, I'd rather not force my views onto people, against their interests, without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as pretty dishonest. I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google). In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.

throwaway-1209 9y ago

I can tell you exactly why I'm not using FF: due to extremely poor support for switching between multiple profiles. Oh, it's possible, but compared to Google's seamless support for the same, its very awkward, even if you install an extension (which is only available from a third party).

KORraN 9y ago
Then try containers from Test Pilot and probably you will not need profiles anymore :)
- throwaway-1209 9y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, just from the screenshots it looks pretty good. Will give it a try.

SimeVidas 9y ago

It can. My father and sister use Firefox, because I told them it’s the best option for privacy.

bobajeff 9y ago

I think it's important to scale back expectations for Servo. Given that Servo itself won't be ready to be used as a main engine for quite some time do to insufficient site compatibility. Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off. Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.