3 ms·

I am going to write up some extremely long-winded rant in blog form at some point before the FF57 release materializes, but suffice it to say, most developers t

by jd3 9y ago

I am going to write up some extremely long-winded rant in blog form at some point before the FF57 release materializes, but suffice it to say, most developers that I know who have been involved with Mozilla since the Netscape days (and also those who build most of the add-ons/products that I care about, such as SeaMonkey) have shown nothing but disappointment at Mozilla's reckless plan for the Firefox 57 release. Literally just read the developer comment response to almost any Mozilla blog post about web-extensions/complete themes from the past ~year and you'd see that more than "Very few people" are bothered by this. Perhaps normal users don't care (or just haven't noticed yet), but most of the features which make the Mozilla platform so enticing to power users (what ever happened to XULRunner?) are being decimated because Mozilla is losing market-share and needs free advertising. Let's not beat around the bush; Mozilla is losing market-share because people get flustered into downloading chrome due to that Microsoft-tier advert that gets plastered onto the google search page in any non-Chrome browser. Yes, Firefox had been feeling chuggier and bloated for awhile, but the core feature-set that made the platform a dream to use for power users never waned. Speeding up the browser while retaining its core feature-set are not mutually exclusive conditions. I think that if these "normal" users understood how powerful complete themes and the XUL/XPCOM apis are, they would be up in arms. It's not that people don't want complete themes, for example. Were it not for Mozilla's incompetence (there's a bug somewhere that tracks how the total reported download count for complete themes was inexplicably reduced to just 10% of what it previously was, never recovering; there used to be hundreds of thousands of users of complete themes around ~2007-2009), such as the time wasted making incessant changes to the core browser theme that nobody asked for (nothing has ever looked as good as the Suite/SeaMonkey), is what has truly been the cause of these 'modernizations.' XUL and the add-on SDK are so powerful that I basically re-created two old unix programs ('picons newscheck-faces' and 'xfaces' [0]) over the past couple of weeks. This simple XUL/XPCOM project of mine now brings an incredibly fast & powerful cross-platform solution to two of my favorite old mail visualization programs that have suffered extreme bit rot (I swear more people used Plan 9's vismon than the verious picons/faces programs). When the legacy add-on api removal finally hits SeaMonkey, my whole extension will cease to function. In fact, it doesn't even work in the current SeaMonkey 2.54a1 nightly. Can you explain to me a similar cross-platform browser/mail client that provides similar APIs for me to rebuild my extension? The answer is no, because in a couple of months the one that did will no longer exist. Anyway, my point is that I'm not exactly sure who Mozilla is targeting with the Firefox 57 release — perhaps their jet-setting upper management; perhaps nobody. [0]: http://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/demo/ http://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/demo/ https://i.imgur.com/EnDMKuO.png https://i.imgur.com/EnDMKuO.png https://i.imgur.com/k40BISq.png https://i.imgur.com/k40BISq.png https://i.imgur.com/lvv9REm.jpg https://i.imgur.com/lvv9REm.jpg (features not even pictured above: Face header decoding, X-Face header decoding, X-Image-URL header, and Contact Card Image support) edit: also, as the one guy that has been updating the internal chrome:// url page in recent years, show me a browser that gives this amount of access to its internal tools: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs#early_Mozilla_Suite_and_SeaMonkey_1.0.2F1.1 http://kb.mozillazine.org/Chrome_URLs#early_Mozilla_Suite_an...

digi_owl 9y ago
They are targeting something that only exist in the drug haze filling the marketing and design offices. The same marketing that insisted that Mozilla shift their major version on every release, and that keep producing sugar coated videos for the most vapid of reasons. Face it, the FOSS world has become a bastion of champagne pimping social climbers that just want to add to their score card that they have worked on something with a "humanitarian" angle. On that note, i guess there is always the option of helping out with Palemoon before they go through with their planned rebase on a more recent Firefox release...
- jd3 9y ago
  Their marketing problem is, in my interpretation, based around the flawed mindset that you should treat users as non-technical cattle. This is the chrome way. The problem is, Mozilla has historically thrived off of the opposite - the 'hacker' mentality. The only reason Mozilla even exists is due primarily to Jamie Zawinski! I agree with your point about the shift in major version releases — this was another marketing ploy to 'catch up' to Chrome (who, for whatever reason, popularized the ridiculous practice of tagging releases with huge numbers). When it comes to add-ons, this bigger-is-better mindset/fallacy is one of the things that Mozilla touts about the ~2000 new web-extensions on AMO. What they fail to mention is how many of these are just utterly useless (or whose core functionality is bested by something like youtube-dl, mpv, using the dev tools, etc.). People don't want the highly limited feature-set provided by web-extensions, they want add-ons that integrate themselves deep into the browser internals (noscript), leverage the add-on sdk, or modify the browser chrome:// in some way. Edit: I cannot speak about the FOSS community as a whole (I only have experience in academia/government work), but from what I have read online about Mozilla's internal leadership, it currently seems like a difficult place to work if you legitimately care about these kinds of issues. As for Palemoon, (I have made this clear in previous posts on HN and reddit), but I generally consider that project to be less than a joke. It would take an absolutely herculean amount of time and energy to keep their feature-set even with Firefox while retaining all of the stuff that is being decimated from mozilla-central. It's never going to work. They should focus their attention on SeaMonkey (comm-central) instead of wasting their time.

by jd3 9y ago

digi_owl 9y ago

They are targeting something that only exist in the drug haze filling the marketing and design offices. The same marketing that insisted that Mozilla shift their major version on every release, and that keep producing sugar coated videos for the most vapid of reasons. Face it, the FOSS world has become a bastion of champagne pimping social climbers that just want to add to their score card that they have worked on something with a "humanitarian" angle. On that note, i guess there is always the option of helping out with Palemoon before they go through with their planned rebase on a more recent Firefox release...

jd3 9y ago
Their marketing problem is, in my interpretation, based around the flawed mindset that you should treat users as non-technical cattle. This is the chrome way. The problem is, Mozilla has historically thrived off of the opposite - the 'hacker' mentality. The only reason Mozilla even exists is due primarily to Jamie Zawinski! I agree with your point about the shift in major version releases — this was another marketing ploy to 'catch up' to Chrome (who, for whatever reason, popularized the ridiculous practice of tagging releases with huge numbers). When it comes to add-ons, this bigger-is-better mindset/fallacy is one of the things that Mozilla touts about the ~2000 new web-extensions on AMO. What they fail to mention is how many of these are just utterly useless (or whose core functionality is bested by something like youtube-dl, mpv, using the dev tools, etc.). People don't want the highly limited feature-set provided by web-extensions, they want add-ons that integrate themselves deep into the browser internals (noscript), leverage the add-on sdk, or modify the browser chrome:// in some way. Edit: I cannot speak about the FOSS community as a whole (I only have experience in academia/government work), but from what I have read online about Mozilla's internal leadership, it currently seems like a difficult place to work if you legitimately care about these kinds of issues. As for Palemoon, (I have made this clear in previous posts on HN and reddit), but I generally consider that project to be less than a joke. It would take an absolutely herculean amount of time and energy to keep their feature-set even with Firefox while retaining all of the stuff that is being decimated from mozilla-central. It's never going to work. They should focus their attention on SeaMonkey (comm-central) instead of wasting their time.