19 ms·

Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive

441 points by jonchang 9y ago

Santosh83 9y ago
A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a deal-breaker reason they can't. Your vote (usage) counts, so use it!
- cknight 9y ago
  I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone asks for help, I know I have some sway. I'm just waiting for Quantum to land on Android, because I know enough of them will have issues with the current version and I want to skip over those problems to leave a good first impression.
  - steve19 9y ago
    Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but it seems the designers of the app don't use other browsers, or have no interest in making the switch and Android FF easier.
    - LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
      Things like no swipe down to refresh This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.
      - csydas 9y ago
        I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action. That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying sometimes, but usually it's only on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism which have no other way of refreshing the page without going somewhere else first. HN is convenient enough on mobile with FF because you can just tap on the HN Title to refresh the page. Other pages are not as kind.
        khedoros1 9y ago
        I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do. Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.
        Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture. I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.
        birksherty 9y ago
  - mwilliaams 9y ago
    Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great
    - tempestn 9y ago
      You're not going to install a nightly build on your friend's or mom's phone though. Your parent is already sold on FF; just waiting for Quantum to be released on Android before pushing it.
      - chrismorgan 9y ago
        I can think of only one crash in the best part of a year of using Firefox Nightly exclusively on my phone. (Firefox Nightly on my laptop has been far more heavily used for a number of years and has had a handful of crashes and a few other issues, but still fewer crashes at least than I get the impression production Chrome has.)
        mwilliaams 9y ago
        I've had a few crashes with it. But nothing serious or really different from Chrome. There's also FF developer edition, which is more stable.
    - mattmanser 9y ago
      Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.
      - ams6110 9y ago
        Have you tried Firefox Focus?
        moz23 9y ago
        Focus is chrome with a different skin and ads blocked. Literally, it's WebView which is Chrome.
  - ksec 9y ago
    I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resistant, Chrome was faster, and better from those employees who knew IT, and may be 4 years ago, someone who is absolutely computer Illiterate came and asked if she could use this Google thing (Chrome). I asked for a reason, because I was curious how she knew, it turns out someone helped her using Chrome, and the speed was much better. She since then loved using it. And that wasn't only case, there were many other similar examples. And others from friends and family as well. It was at that time I gave up. Before then many within the Mozilla communities were begging for a better, more performant browser. That was right after Firefox 3, the goal of Firefox 4, the project of e10s. We thought JS was the problem, we advocated Spidermonkey being faster in benchmarks, but not much in UI or general feel of the Browser. Mozilla then literally gave up making a better browser and its users, and went on to built Firefox OS. Their ideology of Javascript is the best, build an OS with JS. It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum. From the outside it was what i call a management and vision issue. And Mozilla left a very bad taste in my month. There used to be Article from Ars every month showing the decline of Firefox usage. I kept wondering at some point they should become worry as with less market share means less money from Search Engine, I dont think they see that as a problem until fairly recently. It wasn't until a month ago, someone on HN posted an comment on Mozilla that helped me Grief. It was never their intention to have the best browsers, or to care for user experience, that wasn't their main Goal. Their goal, as it always has been, is an Open Web; all others are secondary and merely the results for their first goal. They weren't here to compete, they were merely here to make sure the Web is open. It is good they are now back to Focus on Firefox. With WebRender, more Quantum parts, Firefox's future is bright. I am using Firefox now, but I wont be advocating for it any more, I guess everyone just choose what they want. Sorry for a long rant, but that is the results of someone who has been following them since Netscape era.
    - dangoor 9y ago
- userbinator 9y ago
  ...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful.
  - baddox 9y ago
    I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.
    - nrhk 9y ago
      Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.
      - colehasson 9y ago
        And with Puppeteer/Devtools programmers can stay in text editors.
      - Vinnl 9y ago
        Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.
        rlanday 9y ago
        Given enough time, it does. People used to talk about a “WebKit monoculture” on mobile back when both Safari and Chrome were built on WebKit (although, they enabled different features and used different JavaScript engines). After Google forked WebKit to create Blink, WebKit and Blink started to diverge with different development priorities resulting in different improvements being made and different features being implemented. So as time goes on, and code gets added, removed, and rewritten, much of the commonality eventually disappears over time.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
  There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
    If only ms would just make their software available cross platform.
    - sverhagen 9y ago
      Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)
      - kitsunesoba 9y ago
        The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.
        erikbye 9y ago
        > The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) Which is why viewport values like maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable do not work on iOS10+, no matter the browser.
        Sylos 9y ago
        Yes, the Android-version is also just a Blink wrapper. It's almost impossible for Microsoft to port Trident/EdgeHTML to other operating systems, because it's so deeply integrated into Windows.
- nasso 9y ago
  I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on the website. That is so worked into my daily routine. It just became an annoyance and a dealbreaker. :( I really really want to switch. But chrome works really well and my browser is such an important tool for me so i really want to use the absolute best.
  - bojan 9y ago
    Google Maps crash Quantum for me on a regular basis. I am trying not to become a conspiracy theorist, but this is making it difficult.
  - fastball 9y ago
    As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome. The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here. Kinda like how Apple managed for a long time to make everything a lot more "buttery" than the competition, even though they usually pushed hardware with specs that aren't at the tippy top. Additionally, I think whatever version of flash is bundled with Chrome is less CPU-inflaming than the actual current version of flash, as flash sites seem to perform worse on Quantum as well, and Quantum relies are your system-installed flash.
    - lossolo 9y ago
      There was an article some time ago by someone from Chrome/google in which you could read that they optimized for benchmarks before but benchmarks are not real world usage so they stopped and started to optimize for real world usage. They did it because they optimized for some benchmarks while making real world average usage less efficient. Benchmarks do not show real browser performance.
- greggman 9y ago
  I'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say in the spec. Then we have C++ where there are independent implementations but every implementation embraces and extends with optional non-standard features you can enable. Linux doesn't seem to have much of a standard. Is there a spec? Are there multiple implementations or are there just multiple distributions of the same implementation. There's effectively no spec or standard for phones. There's 2 proprietary OSes, Android and iOS. Android happens to be open source but there's no spec that multiple teams can implement AFAIK. There's just an API that Google decides on it's own what to add/change. I guess you're free to make another implementation by copying the API but there's no spec to follow you'd just have to try to keep up. Would Android and/or Linux be better if there was a standard, committees deciding what gets in it and multiple implementations?
  - strawcomb 9y ago
    Do you want one already very large company to be the only browser provider? That company could start to make its implementation less user friendly/less friendly to competition; but users would have no alternative but to use it. e.g. "Let's track everyone's usage, and prevent adblockers". Not sure that applies to language implementations. Imagine if C++ started trying to send user data to some organisation.
  - Macha 9y ago
    The last time we had a web monoculture (IE6), it was not a pleasant experience. MS had decided it was over, they won, no more need to invest resources in that (and really, they would have preferred you write native Windows apps, but IE-only web pages which still only ran on Windows was a good second choice to them). It's also easy for a single dominant vendor implementation to impose terms on required periphery tech even if the primary standard is open (see the fate of Apache Harmony) You could argue the Python/Linux case are safer because: * They are themselves independent open source projects. While Chromium is open source, if Google pulled out, I'd expect the remaining development effort to be on par with e.g. Pale Moon * You could argue there _are_ multiple implementations of Linux-as-OS, if you're not just looking at the kernel. See Ubuntu, Red Hat, Arch, Alpine, etc. There's no standards body (unless you count stuff like POSIX or LSB, but then they are only subsets of functionality compared to what users expect of a full OS) but still things become standard by community consensus (e.g. systemd)
- jrs95 9y ago
  Well we have 4. That's more competition than we have in a lot of other software platforms.
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again. Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything. If the pain of everybody using the same browser is real, people will get around to building a worthy competitor to Chrome. I suspect that the issue is a bit overblown though.
  - skinnymuch 9y ago
    You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.
    - hungerstrike 9y ago
      Mozilla obviously doesn't turn people into what they are already. It just attracts that certain type of person. My poor choice of words doesn't change the fact that Mozilla annoys me, but thanks for the correction... > half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. They don't have to when the top comment patronizes everybody by telling them what's "ideal". Gimme a break! > Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. No it's not.
      - skinnymuch 9y ago
        Why did you use ...? You admit you had poor choice of words. I can't mind read so I didn't know your intended meaning. > No it's not. How does saying that help or inform in any way? I didn't elaborate on Firefox 57 because but others had in the thread and the post itself is about the browser.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations I don't think it does. It could just do (and do better) with a single client implementation, as long as it wasn't controlled by a single company.
jensv 9y ago
Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"
- CapacitorSet 9y ago
  I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    It does seem counterintuitive, but the justification is that cutting a top employee's salary in half only frees up less than a percent increase in all the lower-level position salaries. I know about 20 years ago, Ben & Jerry's tried to hire a CEO for a reasonable salary and decided they couldn't make it work. So maybe it really does make sense.
  - Sylos 9y ago
    It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.
    - Shorel 9y ago
      As if no other city or country in the world had any competent developer willing to work with them. Frankly, whoever solves the remote work 'problem' will make a lot of money.
    - hennsen 9y ago
      Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month. I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t need either.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Mozilla is only "independent" if you take an extremely loose interpretation of that word. Follow the money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... I only dug into this after having a mildly unproductive run-in with what-wg. Mostly Google and Mozilla guys, and not terribly open. Asking them "why" typically gets very evasive replies, if any at all! The guy Phillip at Opera was a class act though. Been using Opera ever since!
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Mozilla has many flaws, lack of transparency is not one of them. I don't even know where to start with your comment. You're linking the Mozilla Corp wikipedia page, insinuating they're "not terribly open" (and putting Google in that basket), on a subject you give almost no hints about, but hey Opera is a thing? And somehow this comment means that Mozilla is not independent?
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Read again. I doubted Mozilla Corp's "independence" in the first sentence. "not terribly open" in the last paragraph was in reference to the WHAT-WG group, which is "[m]ostly Google and Mozilla guys". From the posts in that group, those guys seem more like co-workers than competitors. For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing, it isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy. edit: And apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???
    - jopsen 9y ago
      I know first hand that Mozilla is a highly competent organization, but it not an organization capable of keeping a nefarious secret :) Leadership at Mozilla have already shown themselves willing to break with Google. And I doubt it's any secret that they've been looking for alternative revenue sources. If you want to question Mozillas independence please bring something more substantive than baseless speculation.
jensv 9y ago
I really hate it when things are not for sale to the highest bidder. Everyone knows that’s the best way to go.... ;)
tombert 9y ago
About three years ago, I decided that I was going to build my own browser from scratch, and I thought it would be really easy to implement as long as I strictly followed the web standards. Within a few minutes, I got stuck with the fact that I could not get any performance out of even a simple attempt at a CSS engine. After about three days of mucking with that, I gave up on the project, and gained a lot more respect for Mozilla.
- hossbeast 9y ago
  You had a running css engine in a few minutes?
  - tombert 9y ago
    Heh, bad wording; I should say that I had performance problems within a few minutes. I did eventually get something that kind of worked, but that took about a day, and still suffered performance issues, probably because I had no idea what the hell I was doing (and still don't, really)
    - nnethercote 9y ago
      You had a running CSS engine within a day?
      - tombert 9y ago
        Yeah, a really crappy one that parsed a CSS file using Bison, and could change text colors, background colors, and position things based on pixels (no em or %). I never got around to implementing class support, but I did allow targeting an element via ID. I did this in C++ for some reason, and used Xerces to parse the XML, and I used Allegro to render everything. If I were to try and make this now, I probably would not use a rendering system designed for games, but I was naive back then. I'll have to look to see if I can find the old files on my NAS; if I can I'll put it on Github.
        9y ago
rtpg 9y ago
I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be broken up into more independent parts. We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work to be shared. We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS style sharing, even if higher level strategies are different.
- qznc 9y ago
  The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign that it is quite modular already?
  - gsnedders 9y ago
    The CSS style side got replaced with a Rust implementation (that matches selectors and computes the used CSS value of each property for each node). The layout side is still all C++ (and Servo's implementation has nowhere near parity with what Gecko already has).
  - metajack 9y ago
    The CSS engine does not have a very modular boundary, because abstractions would kill the performance. It would not be very easy to use it in another browser. However, lots of pieces of the CSS engine are modular and published as their own crates, like rust-cssparser, rust-selectors, etc. Other Servo projects are more modular; WebRender in particular just has an IPC boundary with specific messages. Servo layout would probably be more like CSS than WebRender in terms of modularity. So it's not perfect, but we're trying very hard!
- kodablah 9y ago
  Agreed, I've been pounding the "embeddability" drum for FF for a while. I'd love to easily use pieces in my own projects.
richdougherty 9y ago
I have so much admiration for Firefox. With the increasing market share of mobile I'd love to see a well-funded, independent, compatible variant of Android.
rlv-dan 9y ago
This begs the question: Is it healthy that one of the most important technologies today (web) is also very complicated (=expensive) and thus effectively limiting number of players.
- roca 9y ago
  It's not healthy, but unfortunately maintaining compatibility and staying abreast of modern platform features (so that apps and content don't fully migrate to the single-vendor platforms) just mandates a lot of complexity.
  - edejong 9y ago
    The reason why it’s expensive is that no HTML5 proposals are taking into account the cost of development and maintenance. “Anything goes” as long as it competes with the walled-garden platforms. Spending without budgeting nor cost evaluation is similar to going to a casino spending your life savings thinking you’re the lucky one.
    - roca 9y ago
      Deciding just to cede applications and content to single-vendor platforms isn't that appealing for the open Web.
      - edejong 9y ago
        That implies a binary decision. The war is won in many battles. Deciding which ones to go into is the deciding factor. Bringing your men to each is a sure way to lose, and it’s what is currently happening with the modern web.
        roca 9y ago
        If individual browser vendors decide that some feature is not worth the effort, they can just not implement it and not support those apps fully. Maybe change that decision if the feature gets popular. If the feature never gets popular it can be removed. This actually happens all the time. But vendors getting together and saying "no, we're just not going to compete with native platforms in this space" seldom happens. As a proponent of the open Web, I think that's a good thing.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dmitriid 9y ago
Maintaining an Independent <Software Project> Is Expensive
profalseidol 9y ago
Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight against capitalism.
- krapp 9y ago
  If you're supporting Firefox with money, it's still capitalism even if Mozilla is a non-profit. You're paying an entity to continue maintaining a product, and attempting to bias market share in favor of that product over its competitors.
- cisanti 9y ago
  They support antifa, it's cancerous organization.
staunch 9y ago
Mozilla does not need 1200 people to make Firefox. Mozilla has 1200 people because they blow all of their money irresponsibly, and that's apparently how many people you can hire with the bribes/revenue from Google it pays to maintain its monopoly. The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. It's not surprising these same "leaders" spend all the organization's money on one failed project after another. Firefox should be spun off into its own focused organization. It should do nothing but the browser and only employ people working directly on the browser. The other 800 people working at Mozilla should be working on important projects like Firefox, not wasting time at a dysfunctional organization.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  In that alternate reality, there would be no Rust and no Servo, which would mean there would be no Firefox Quantum (as well as no ripgrep, fd, exa, Parity, etc.)
  - fooker 9y ago
    Rust and Servo doesn't have much to do with Firefox 57/Quantum, it is still mostly Gecko inside.
    - chrismorgan 9y ago
      Following pcwalton’s line of thought: in that alternative reality, Firefox would be doomed, because it would be stuck where it is, unable to leapfrog the competition and eternally playing catch-up, and falling steadily further and further behind. In Firefox 57 the CSS engine is the only part that’s been replaced, but the Quantum project is a lot more than that—integrating Stylo is just the beginning. WebRender, for example, is basically about fixing rendering issues once and for all, including things like making it possible to switch tabs instantly. (There’s a video floating round of holding down Ctrl+Tab and having it render each tab completely as it rapidly cycles through them. In that alternative reality, this could never happen.)
    - 9y ago
techsupporter 9y ago
I wish the Mozilla store hadn't gone away. I've used Firefox for a very long time but it's been three or four laptops ago that I was able to adorn my machine with Firefox (or Thunderbird!) stickers. Yes, it's a small thing, and I tout Firefox whenever I can, but I'm also a sucker for something I can slap on something that I carry around. (I suppose I could also just make my own or have someone print them up for me alongside giving money to the Mozilla Foundation.)
- marpstar 9y ago
  I totally forgot about the Firefox shirts I owned in college until I read this. I can't believe they closed it.
Endy 9y ago
Question: Is there actually a good Independent browser for Windows at this time? That is, not Firefox, not Chrome, not Chrome-Opera, not Vivaldi (alias Chrome-Opera-2), and also not based on Chromium, WebKit, Blink, Gecko, Trident, or any of the major bits of one of the corporate browsers? The closest that I can see is Pale Moon, but even they are just a "better" fork of Firefox.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  There are exactly four major engines, each of which has a flagship browser: Blink/Chrome, WebKit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, and EdgeHTML/Edge.
  - BerislavLopac 9y ago
    Wouldn't introduction of Servo make it five? Gecko is not going away yet, IIRC it's used in some browsers, like Pale Moon. https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/
    - Sylos 9y ago
      Servo is not a major browser engine. It's a small research project. And Firefox continues to use Gecko. It has some bits and pieces from Servo in it and the Mozilla marketing team has dubbed everything "Quantum" for the Firefox 57 release to communicate that lots has changed, but it is still Gecko.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Manishearth 9y ago
      I work on Servo, I wouldn't count it here. It doesn't support everything to make the web work; i.e. you can't use it as a daily driver (for some sites, perhaps, but not all). We're getting there.
  - Endy 9y ago
    That's fine that there are four "major" engines. I'm looking for a minor one anyway, whose dev does not need nor want to become part of a major flagship product, or who at least isn't tied to Mozilla or Google. The lack of real development in the browser field is kind of appalling.
markpapadakis 9y ago
I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am too naive or clueless.
- astura 9y ago
  However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.
  - markpapadakis 9y ago
    On the flip-side though, the tools, expertise/skills and means for building browsers some 25+ years ago don't match what's available today.
- roca 9y ago
  There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be. And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you don't work in this area.
  - markpapadakis 9y ago
    I never worked on a browser, though I did implement the HTML5 spec, twice, and I wrote a JS engine(compiler, runtime). I know that it was a lot easier because I could count on infromation and other advances that were available to me, and anyone else really, at the time, the kind of resources and information I probably wouildn't have had access to it("whats javascript?") 20+ years earlier. Browsers have evolved - because standards did, and expections along with them, but in the past they too were quite complex(see also Netscape's play: browsers, email, usenet client etc, suit) and again, it was harder then that it is nowadays to build such systems.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?
- Vinnl 9y ago
  You can trust both of them to do that well. Other than that it's hard to make a comparison not reliant on anecdotes, I guess.
- Sylos 9y ago
  With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture. There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab. Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves essentially equivalent parallelism with much lower resource usage, so overall better performance. If you'd rather have the security than the performance, you can set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to a higher number. This is the maximum number of processes that it will use for tabs, so setting it to something like 1000 will essentially make it start a new process for each tab. Then there's something to be said about add-ons. Mozilla does manual code reviews of most extensions and extension updates. (They have some criteria for when they don't do a manual code review and instead just an automated check, based on how damaging the extension is able to be with the things that it accesses.) As a result, AMO has essentially no problems with malware, whereas on the Chrome Store you hear every other month of some trojan or adware spreading. Mozilla also has a policy that disallows telemetry without user opt-in as a whole, so recognizing adware or a trojan is just a matter of observing network traffic where it shouldn't necessarily be going. Lastly, Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. Chrome Sync is not, you need to set up a second password for it to be end-to-end-encrypted. And Google will store and work with your Sync data, if you do not opt for E2EE, so that's another possibility for a pretty big data leak. Not a problem, if you are security-conscious and don't mind setting up that secondary password, but recommending it to average users on the merits of it being secure is essentially out with this.
  - 9y ago
NetOpWibby 9y ago
I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out here: https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries Since then, I’ve been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes of how certain things are done. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Servo as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.
- kevincox 9y ago
  This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable effort do to a good job of course).
  - NetOpWibby 9y ago
    Ah yeah, that's true. I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
moocowtruck 9y ago
and it's only getting more difficult because the browser is turning into an operating system
zimbatm 9y ago
My hope with HTML5 was that complexity would be removed in the standard; reduce the platform to smaller generic components. Instead we have this ever-expanding feature set, a constant stream of new standards that have to be implemented. It's death by complexity. This plays in the hands of Google; each new feature is another opportunity to fingerprint the user. If things continue like that, a new platform will have to emerge to replace the web.
digi_owl 9y ago
Yes it is, because what we keep referring to as a browser has, thanks to commercial pressure, become a OS in its own right. And rather than stop and ask if this is in any way sensible, they keep pushing more stuff, like USB and Bluetooth, into it. Whenever i run into a site that is either just giving me a blank page or a error when i have JS turned off, i wonder when the train jumped the rails. And i fear it may well go as far back as the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.
ThomPete 9y ago
So here is a question. If one was to undertake the challenge of building a new browser how would you go about doing it conceptually? What would at least convince a small group of technically advanced users to adopt it?
- rlanday 9y ago
  You would probably want to build a browser on top of Chromium, like Opera does (and also what Microsoft is doing on Android), and would want to try differentiating based on user-facing features. You could also build on top of Gecko, but this doesn’t seem to be as popular. Building on WebKit probably doesn’t make sense because its corporate backer (Apple) mostly only cares about supporting macOS and iOS. Eventually, if you become big enough that you think it’d be better to be independent, you can fork Chromium. This is basically the approach Google took with Chrome: they built on top of WebKit (which itself was originally an Apple fork of KHTML), then forked it eventually.
feelin_googley 9y ago
Annual salaries from 2015 (reportable compensation from IRS Form 990): Mitchell Baker, Chair $977,382 + $45,530 Bob Lisborne, Director $92,000 Mark Surman, Exec. Dir./President $170,699 + $40,602 Jim Cook, Treasurer $934,526 + $45,530 Angela Plohman, Secretary/VP Operations $121,322 + $30,342 Christopher Lawrence, VP Learning $153,492 + $62,538 An-Me Chung, Dir. Partnerships 154,946 + $72,672 Daniel Sinker, Dir. Partnerships 123,630 + $64,215 Hiram Paul Johnson, Marketing Lead 126,605 + 54, 903 Andrea Wood, Online Organizing/Fundraising Lead $135,048 + $46,322 Samuel Dyson, Director Hive Chicago $114,860 + $63,549 source: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found... Perhaps the author is telling the truth. Consider the salary costs of retaining skilled "maintainers" like the above personnel. Note I am not condemning Mozilla. They do good work. However I am not quite sold on the idea that their purpose for existence is to "keep the web open" or whatever tagline they are going with. For example, an "open" web would be one made for all browsers to access, not just a select few who have chosen to try to keep up with an arms race of recently-added, non-optional "features" that carry serious costs to users. The key word I wish to emphasize is "non-optional". Users are not given choice and that is most likely intentional. Many a web developer presents the user with a small selection of "acceptable browsers", the ones that will run third party code and readily show heavy, third party advertising. Anything else is "prohibited" and must be a "bot". Users are sometimes even shamed for not using the web browser or version that the web developer wants them to use, calling the user's software "outdated" when they have almost no information about the user's software except its behavior and some easily forgeable HTTP headers. In many cases, e.g., where the user is just retrieving some information, that is just silly. Not every website needs to show advertising. Not all information is commercial. Not all information is graphical. I am not using one of the select few targeted browsers to read HN or post this comment, but I am getting the same information as the readers who are. And for some reason(s), web developers flock to this "outdated" website. Why? Clearly the web can be both accesible by simpler user agents, and fully-functional for the most bleeding-edge features of corporate-sponsored browsers at the same time. The original web standards, e.g. basic HTML, still work, very effectively. The web as a means to offer basic functionality such as HN can be "backwards compatible" with user agents that are far more simple than Firefox, Chromium, etc. The select few browsers that many web developers target overwhelmingly controlled by corporations and other advertisers. Netscape and the idea of corporations paying to use a browser may exist only as entries in the historical record, but I do not think we can say that browsers are truly separated from corporate funding (and influence). Browsers are still commercial, in a sense, IMO. While it might be viewed as "free software", the authors of these few browsers are well-paid by their corporate (or "non-profit") employers and the end goal is "market share", ideally a monopoly. This is fine if the web is 100% commercial. But it did not start that way and it still isn't 100% commercial. Non-commercial uses are still alive and well. It is not necessarily Mozilla's fault for the direction the web moves in, e.g., making content less accessible by simpler user agents. However, if their purpose is to make the web "open" or some such "non-commercial" aim, then what could they do to enable and promote use of simpler user agents (and thereby promote their acceptability among web developers)? I can think of a few things. I am sure others could as well. There is no shortage of users who are dissatisfied with the (lack of) variety of user agents that are available. http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die The question is whether Mozilla really wants to listen to users who might criticize dismiss their browser as, e.g., too bloated.
yuhong 9y ago
I have been discussing the debt-based economy and Google and Mozilla recently with BrendanEich on Twitter, including a debt diagram.

441 points by jonchang 9y ago

A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a deal-breaker reason they can't. Your vote (usage) counts, so use it!

cknight 9y ago
I switched back to Firefox 57 about a decade after abandoning it for Opera. I remember the advocacy movement around Firefox 1.0 which I was quite involved in. I thought (and still think) it was great. I don't plan to go quite as far this time, but do plan to try and convince all my friends and family to get on board. It'll be a harder task for sure since Chrome is not IE6, but as the resident IT guy that everyone asks for help, I know I have some sway. I'm just waiting for Quantum to land on Android, because I know enough of them will have issues with the current version and I want to skip over those problems to leave a good first impression.
- steve19 9y ago
  Firefox on Android is so frustrating. Things like no swipe down to refresh, despite all other apps implementating that pattern. On my phone, scrolling by swiping is slow, it scrolls such a short distance. Meaning going down a long NH page takes many swipes. All other Android browsers seem to get it right. Fonts also seem "off". It's these small things that make the experience frustrating. I truly want to use it, but it seems the designers of the app don't use other browsers, or have no interest in making the switch and Android FF easier.
  - LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
    Things like no swipe down to refresh This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.
    - csydas 9y ago
      I can see the flip side on this too though - the user action is pretty universal in apps, and it's disruptive when 9 out of 10 apps use this and you're trying to get fresh data out of app #10. There should be some consistency in user expectations across apps, or a clear way of performing the same action. That being said, I agree with you and really like that FF doesn't have a motion for refresh. It's mildly annoying sometimes, but usually it's only on sites very clearly constructed around the mechanism which have no other way of refreshing the page without going somewhere else first. HN is convenient enough on mobile with FF because you can just tap on the HN Title to refresh the page. Other pages are not as kind.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        I expect swiping down to take me to the top of the page. It's frustrating when it does more (like reloading the page). I guess I'm the wrong person to ask whether 9/10 apps do it; I usually find a replacement when they do. Firefox, Pale Moon, and Chrome all have a refresh command in the "3 dots" menu. I usually use that.
        Al-Khwarizmi 9y ago
        Swiping down only refreshes when you are already at the top of the page, and it even gives some visual feedback to see that you have indeed reached the top and you are now initiating a refresh gesture. I'm a quite energetic swiper and, to be honest, I have never found a situation where I wanted to return to the top and ended up refreshing due to too much swiping. But YMMV, I guess.
      - birksherty 9y ago
- mwilliaams 9y ago
  Check out FF nightly on Android. It has the new features. I use it and it's great
  - tempestn 9y ago
    You're not going to install a nightly build on your friend's or mom's phone though. Your parent is already sold on FF; just waiting for Quantum to be released on Android before pushing it.
    - chrismorgan 9y ago
      I can think of only one crash in the best part of a year of using Firefox Nightly exclusively on my phone. (Firefox Nightly on my laptop has been far more heavily used for a number of years and has had a handful of crashes and a few other issues, but still fewer crashes at least than I get the impression production Chrome has.)
      - mwilliaams 9y ago
        I've had a few crashes with it. But nothing serious or really different from Chrome. There's also FF developer edition, which is more stable.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    Firefox on android kills my phone, gobbles tons of memory. Nexus 5x, no plugins. I've given up on it now.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Have you tried Firefox Focus?
      - moz23 9y ago
        Focus is chrome with a different skin and ads blocked. Literally, it's WebView which is Chrome.
- ksec 9y ago
  I started before it was called Firefox, and it was similar story. I abandoned Firefox last year to the Chrome Opera, So i have been bitting my fingers for years, Firefox was slow, and I knew Chrome was better, and I had waited. I used to force the usage of Firefox as the resident IT, with over 150 computer's default browser and later grew to 250. But every year since the introduction of Chrome, I have had more resistant, Chrome was faster, and better from those employees who knew IT, and may be 4 years ago, someone who is absolutely computer Illiterate came and asked if she could use this Google thing (Chrome). I asked for a reason, because I was curious how she knew, it turns out someone helped her using Chrome, and the speed was much better. She since then loved using it. And that wasn't only case, there were many other similar examples. And others from friends and family as well. It was at that time I gave up. Before then many within the Mozilla communities were begging for a better, more performant browser. That was right after Firefox 3, the goal of Firefox 4, the project of e10s. We thought JS was the problem, we advocated Spidermonkey being faster in benchmarks, but not much in UI or general feel of the Browser. Mozilla then literally gave up making a better browser and its users, and went on to built Firefox OS. Their ideology of Javascript is the best, build an OS with JS. It was pure luck they had a small group of people crazy enough to work on Rust, and Servo as an experiment which later turned into what we had today, Quantum. From the outside it was what i call a management and vision issue. And Mozilla left a very bad taste in my month. There used to be Article from Ars every month showing the decline of Firefox usage. I kept wondering at some point they should become worry as with less market share means less money from Search Engine, I dont think they see that as a problem until fairly recently. It wasn't until a month ago, someone on HN posted an comment on Mozilla that helped me Grief. It was never their intention to have the best browsers, or to care for user experience, that wasn't their main Goal. Their goal, as it always has been, is an Open Web; all others are secondary and merely the results for their first goal. They weren't here to compete, they were merely here to make sure the Web is open. It is good they are now back to Focus on Firefox. With WebRender, more Quantum parts, Firefox's future is bright. I am using Firefox now, but I wont be advocating for it any more, I guess everyone just choose what they want. Sorry for a long rant, but that is the results of someone who has been following them since Netscape era.
  - dangoor 9y ago
userbinator 9y ago
...and ideally, we should also encourage the use of the "lesser" browsers like Dillo, NetSurf, and all the text-based ones. They can't really run "web apps" and the like, but will be fine for viewing the "long tail" of content-focused sites out there (including this one.) What has become quite obvious to me within the past few years is that the whole "move the Web forward" thing seems to be really about coming up with and implementing as many complex features as possible (and advocating for their use in new sites), making it harder over time for smaller efforts at creating independent browsers to produce anything useful.
- baddox 9y ago
  I wonder: who could even feasibly introduce another browser today? The task seems almost impossible.
  - nrhk 9y ago
    Well you could also fork Chromium I guess.
    - colehasson 9y ago
      And with Puppeteer/Devtools programmers can stay in text editors.
    - Vinnl 9y ago
      Except that that doesn't really broaden the ecosystem, unfortunately.
      - rlanday 9y ago
        Given enough time, it does. People used to talk about a “WebKit monoculture” on mobile back when both Safari and Chrome were built on WebKit (although, they enabled different features and used different JavaScript engines). After Google forked WebKit to create Blink, WebKit and Blink started to diverge with different development priorities resulting in different improvements being made and different features being implemented. So as time goes on, and code gets added, removed, and rewritten, much of the commonality eventually disappears over time.
lucaspiller 9y ago
There is a third major independent option: Microsoft Edge. I assume (like me) a lot web of developers aren’t using Windows, but we can at least help people out by making sure our applications work fine on those browsers. Since IE 9, with a polyfill, most things just work unless you need some very recent HTML5 APIs. Microsoft provides free VMs for testing different browsers here: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/v...
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
  If only ms would just make their software available cross platform.
  - sverhagen 9y ago
    Wasn't it just released for Android and iOS? (I get that that might not be what you meant...)
    - kitsunesoba 9y ago
      The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons), and while it’s possible they’ve ported Edge’s engine to Android I’d bet that Edge for Android either wraps WebKit or Blink/Chromium. The primary value proposition for Edge on mobile is syncing of tabs/bookmarks/history/etc, not its engine.
      - erikbye 9y ago
        > The iOS version is a WebKit wrapper by necessity (Apple mandates that all alternative browsers use the system-bundled WebKit for user experience reasons) Which is why viewport values like maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable do not work on iOS10+, no matter the browser.
      - Sylos 9y ago
        Yes, the Android-version is also just a Blink wrapper. It's almost impossible for Microsoft to port Trident/EdgeHTML to other operating systems, because it's so deeply integrated into Windows.
nasso 9y ago
I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on the website. That is so worked into my daily routine. It just became an annoyance and a dealbreaker. :( I really really want to switch. But chrome works really well and my browser is such an important tool for me so i really want to use the absolute best.
- bojan 9y ago
  Google Maps crash Quantum for me on a regular basis. I am trying not to become a conspiracy theorist, but this is making it difficult.
- fastball 9y ago
  As far as I can tell, anything Javascript heavy performs significantly worse on Quantum than on Chrome. The benchmarks I've looked at seem to indicate that this shouldn't be the case, but I'm thinking maybe Google has put in some "real life application" optimizations for certain configurations that can't be measured easily with benchmarks? Maybe they've learned some lessons from Angular? Just spitballin' here. Kinda like how Apple managed for a long time to make everything a lot more "buttery" than the competition, even though they usually pushed hardware with specs that aren't at the tippy top. Additionally, I think whatever version of flash is bundled with Chrome is less CPU-inflaming than the actual current version of flash, as flash sites seem to perform worse on Quantum as well, and Quantum relies are your system-installed flash.
  - lossolo 9y ago
    There was an article some time ago by someone from Chrome/google in which you could read that they optimized for benchmarks before but benchmarks are not real world usage so they stopped and started to optimize for real world usage. They did it because they optimized for some benchmarks while making real world average usage less efficient. Benchmarks do not show real browser performance.
greggman 9y ago
I'm curious, why does the web need multiple independent client implementations? Note I'm not trolling, I'm seriously asking the question. I think it's assumed to be true but not necessarily true. I'm probably wrong. As a counter example AFAIK there is no python standard that lots of teams make competing implementations. There is basically one python and a few incomplete copies but those copies have little to no say in the spec. Then we have C++ where there are independent implementations but every implementation embraces and extends with optional non-standard features you can enable. Linux doesn't seem to have much of a standard. Is there a spec? Are there multiple implementations or are there just multiple distributions of the same implementation. There's effectively no spec or standard for phones. There's 2 proprietary OSes, Android and iOS. Android happens to be open source but there's no spec that multiple teams can implement AFAIK. There's just an API that Google decides on it's own what to add/change. I guess you're free to make another implementation by copying the API but there's no spec to follow you'd just have to try to keep up. Would Android and/or Linux be better if there was a standard, committees deciding what gets in it and multiple implementations?
- strawcomb 9y ago
  Do you want one already very large company to be the only browser provider? That company could start to make its implementation less user friendly/less friendly to competition; but users would have no alternative but to use it. e.g. "Let's track everyone's usage, and prevent adblockers". Not sure that applies to language implementations. Imagine if C++ started trying to send user data to some organisation.
- Macha 9y ago
  The last time we had a web monoculture (IE6), it was not a pleasant experience. MS had decided it was over, they won, no more need to invest resources in that (and really, they would have preferred you write native Windows apps, but IE-only web pages which still only ran on Windows was a good second choice to them). It's also easy for a single dominant vendor implementation to impose terms on required periphery tech even if the primary standard is open (see the fate of Apache Harmony) You could argue the Python/Linux case are safer because: * They are themselves independent open source projects. While Chromium is open source, if Google pulled out, I'd expect the remaining development effort to be on par with e.g. Pale Moon * You could argue there _are_ multiple implementations of Linux-as-OS, if you're not just looking at the kernel. See Ubuntu, Red Hat, Arch, Alpine, etc. There's no standards body (unless you count stuff like POSIX or LSB, but then they are only subsets of functionality compared to what users expect of a full OS) but still things become standard by community consensus (e.g. systemd)
jrs95 9y ago
Well we have 4. That's more competition than we have in a lot of other software platforms.
hungerstrike 9y ago
Chrome does exactly what I want, the way I want it. Mozilla/Firefox OTOH has failed to respect me and my OS time and time again. Honestly, I'd rather see Mozilla go away and stop making software completely because I don't like them, their politics, the way they turn people into ideologues who beg you to use their inferior product or the way they do just about anything. If the pain of everybody using the same browser is real, people will get around to building a worthy competitor to Chrome. I suspect that the issue is a bit overblown though.
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  You're saying Mozilla is turning people into idealogues without joking? Besides the fact that people independently choose to be active, half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. So is Safari on Mac. Not sure about Edge as I haven't used it.
  - hungerstrike 9y ago
    Mozilla obviously doesn't turn people into what they are already. It just attracts that certain type of person. My poor choice of words doesn't change the fact that Mozilla annoys me, but thanks for the correction... > half the Mozilla fans in this thread aren't shoving Firefox down anyone's threat. They don't have to when the top comment patronizes everybody by telling them what's "ideal". Gimme a break! > Firefox Quantum is a worthy competitor to Chrome. No it's not.
    - skinnymuch 9y ago
      Why did you use ...? You admit you had poor choice of words. I can't mind read so I didn't know your intended meaning. > No it's not. How does saying that help or inform in any way? I didn't elaborate on Firefox 57 because but others had in the thread and the post itself is about the browser.
coldtea 9y ago
>A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations I don't think it does. It could just do (and do better) with a single client implementation, as long as it wasn't controlled by a single company.

jensv 9y ago

Hiring good people is not cheap! "Mozilla's highest-paid official, chairperson Mitchell Baker, now enjoys a pay package that tops $1 million. In 2014, she got a $400,000 base salary, a $594,000 bonus and some other benefits that pushed total compensation to $1,035,114.Nov 30, 2015"

CapacitorSet 9y ago
I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  It does seem counterintuitive, but the justification is that cutting a top employee's salary in half only frees up less than a percent increase in all the lower-level position salaries. I know about 20 years ago, Ben & Jerry's tried to hire a CEO for a reasonable salary and decided they couldn't make it work. So maybe it really does make sense.
- Sylos 9y ago
  It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.
  - Shorel 9y ago
    As if no other city or country in the world had any competent developer willing to work with them. Frankly, whoever solves the remote work 'problem' will make a lot of money.
  - hennsen 9y ago
    Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job? I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month. I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t need either.

jstewartmobile 9y ago

Mozilla is only "independent" if you take an extremely loose interpretation of that word. Follow the money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... I only dug into this after having a mildly unproductive run-in with what-wg. Mostly Google and Mozilla guys, and not terribly open. Asking them "why" typically gets very evasive replies, if any at all! The guy Phillip at Opera was a class act though. Been using Opera ever since!

scrollaway 9y ago
Mozilla has many flaws, lack of transparency is not one of them. I don't even know where to start with your comment. You're linking the Mozilla Corp wikipedia page, insinuating they're "not terribly open" (and putting Google in that basket), on a subject you give almost no hints about, but hey Opera is a thing? And somehow this comment means that Mozilla is not independent?
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Read again. I doubted Mozilla Corp's "independence" in the first sentence. "not terribly open" in the last paragraph was in reference to the WHAT-WG group, which is "[m]ostly Google and Mozilla guys". From the posts in that group, those guys seem more like co-workers than competitors. For anyone who believes money to be some kind of motivating thing, it isn't hard to come to the conclusion that Mozilla is Google-by-proxy. edit: And apparently I have to have "hits" to my name to state that getting 85% of your revenue from Google puts your independence into question???
  - jopsen 9y ago
    I know first hand that Mozilla is a highly competent organization, but it not an organization capable of keeping a nefarious secret :) Leadership at Mozilla have already shown themselves willing to break with Google. And I doubt it's any secret that they've been looking for alternative revenue sources. If you want to question Mozillas independence please bring something more substantive than baseless speculation.

jensv 9y ago

I really hate it when things are not for sale to the highest bidder. Everyone knows that’s the best way to go.... ;)

tombert 9y ago

About three years ago, I decided that I was going to build my own browser from scratch, and I thought it would be really easy to implement as long as I strictly followed the web standards. Within a few minutes, I got stuck with the fact that I could not get any performance out of even a simple attempt at a CSS engine. After about three days of mucking with that, I gave up on the project, and gained a lot more respect for Mozilla.

hossbeast 9y ago
You had a running css engine in a few minutes?
- tombert 9y ago
  Heh, bad wording; I should say that I had performance problems within a few minutes. I did eventually get something that kind of worked, but that took about a day, and still suffered performance issues, probably because I had no idea what the hell I was doing (and still don't, really)
  - nnethercote 9y ago
    You had a running CSS engine within a day?
    - tombert 9y ago
      Yeah, a really crappy one that parsed a CSS file using Bison, and could change text colors, background colors, and position things based on pixels (no em or %). I never got around to implementing class support, but I did allow targeting an element via ID. I did this in C++ for some reason, and used Xerces to parse the XML, and I used Allegro to render everything. If I were to try and make this now, I probably would not use a rendering system designed for games, but I was naive back then. I'll have to look to see if I can find the old files on my NAS; if I can I'll put it on Github.
      - 9y ago

rtpg 9y ago

I feel like there's a golden opportunity here to have things like Firefox be broken up into more independent parts. We've already seen this in the JS engine space, though it's still pretty hard to integrate alternate JS engines into browsers. Having more and more of the app broken up makes it _much_ easier for contributors to come in and for work to be shared. We don't all need to write our own implementations of CSS style sharing, even if higher level strategies are different.

qznc 9y ago
The CSS engine just got replaced with a Rust implementation. Isn't that a sign that it is quite modular already?
- gsnedders 9y ago
  The CSS style side got replaced with a Rust implementation (that matches selectors and computes the used CSS value of each property for each node). The layout side is still all C++ (and Servo's implementation has nowhere near parity with what Gecko already has).
- metajack 9y ago
  The CSS engine does not have a very modular boundary, because abstractions would kill the performance. It would not be very easy to use it in another browser. However, lots of pieces of the CSS engine are modular and published as their own crates, like rust-cssparser, rust-selectors, etc. Other Servo projects are more modular; WebRender in particular just has an IPC boundary with specific messages. Servo layout would probably be more like CSS than WebRender in terms of modularity. So it's not perfect, but we're trying very hard!
kodablah 9y ago
Agreed, I've been pounding the "embeddability" drum for FF for a while. I'd love to easily use pieces in my own projects.

richdougherty 9y ago

I have so much admiration for Firefox. With the increasing market share of mobile I'd love to see a well-funded, independent, compatible variant of Android.

rlv-dan 9y ago

This begs the question: Is it healthy that one of the most important technologies today (web) is also very complicated (=expensive) and thus effectively limiting number of players.

roca 9y ago
It's not healthy, but unfortunately maintaining compatibility and staying abreast of modern platform features (so that apps and content don't fully migrate to the single-vendor platforms) just mandates a lot of complexity.
- edejong 9y ago
  The reason why it’s expensive is that no HTML5 proposals are taking into account the cost of development and maintenance. “Anything goes” as long as it competes with the walled-garden platforms. Spending without budgeting nor cost evaluation is similar to going to a casino spending your life savings thinking you’re the lucky one.
  - roca 9y ago
    Deciding just to cede applications and content to single-vendor platforms isn't that appealing for the open Web.
    - edejong 9y ago
      That implies a binary decision. The war is won in many battles. Deciding which ones to go into is the deciding factor. Bringing your men to each is a sure way to lose, and it’s what is currently happening with the modern web.
      - roca 9y ago
        If individual browser vendors decide that some feature is not worth the effort, they can just not implement it and not support those apps fully. Maybe change that decision if the feature gets popular. If the feature never gets popular it can be removed. This actually happens all the time. But vendors getting together and saying "no, we're just not going to compete with native platforms in this space" seldom happens. As a proponent of the open Web, I think that's a good thing.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dmitriid 9y ago

Maintaining an Independent <Software Project> Is Expensive

profalseidol 9y ago

Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight against capitalism.

krapp 9y ago
If you're supporting Firefox with money, it's still capitalism even if Mozilla is a non-profit. You're paying an entity to continue maintaining a product, and attempting to bias market share in favor of that product over its competitors.
cisanti 9y ago
They support antifa, it's cancerous organization.

staunch 9y ago

Mozilla does not need 1200 people to make Firefox. Mozilla has 1200 people because they blow all of their money irresponsibly, and that's apparently how many people you can hire with the bribes/revenue from Google it pays to maintain its monopoly. The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. It's not surprising these same "leaders" spend all the organization's money on one failed project after another. Firefox should be spun off into its own focused organization. It should do nothing but the browser and only employ people working directly on the browser. The other 800 people working at Mozilla should be working on important projects like Firefox, not wasting time at a dysfunctional organization.

pcwalton 9y ago
In that alternate reality, there would be no Rust and no Servo, which would mean there would be no Firefox Quantum (as well as no ripgrep, fd, exa, Parity, etc.)
- fooker 9y ago
  Rust and Servo doesn't have much to do with Firefox 57/Quantum, it is still mostly Gecko inside.
  - chrismorgan 9y ago
    Following pcwalton’s line of thought: in that alternative reality, Firefox would be doomed, because it would be stuck where it is, unable to leapfrog the competition and eternally playing catch-up, and falling steadily further and further behind. In Firefox 57 the CSS engine is the only part that’s been replaced, but the Quantum project is a lot more than that—integrating Stylo is just the beginning. WebRender, for example, is basically about fixing rendering issues once and for all, including things like making it possible to switch tabs instantly. (There’s a video floating round of holding down Ctrl+Tab and having it render each tab completely as it rapidly cycles through them. In that alternative reality, this could never happen.)
  - 9y ago

techsupporter 9y ago

I wish the Mozilla store hadn't gone away. I've used Firefox for a very long time but it's been three or four laptops ago that I was able to adorn my machine with Firefox (or Thunderbird!) stickers. Yes, it's a small thing, and I tout Firefox whenever I can, but I'm also a sucker for something I can slap on something that I carry around. (I suppose I could also just make my own or have someone print them up for me alongside giving money to the Mozilla Foundation.)

marpstar 9y ago
I totally forgot about the Firefox shirts I owned in college until I read this. I can't believe they closed it.

Endy 9y ago

Question: Is there actually a good Independent browser for Windows at this time? That is, not Firefox, not Chrome, not Chrome-Opera, not Vivaldi (alias Chrome-Opera-2), and also not based on Chromium, WebKit, Blink, Gecko, Trident, or any of the major bits of one of the corporate browsers? The closest that I can see is Pale Moon, but even they are just a "better" fork of Firefox.

pcwalton 9y ago
There are exactly four major engines, each of which has a flagship browser: Blink/Chrome, WebKit/Safari, Gecko/Firefox, and EdgeHTML/Edge.
- BerislavLopac 9y ago
  Wouldn't introduction of Servo make it five? Gecko is not going away yet, IIRC it's used in some browsers, like Pale Moon. https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/
  - Sylos 9y ago
    Servo is not a major browser engine. It's a small research project. And Firefox continues to use Gecko. It has some bits and pieces from Servo in it and the Mozilla marketing team has dubbed everything "Quantum" for the Firefox 57 release to communicate that lots has changed, but it is still Gecko.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    I work on Servo, I wouldn't count it here. It doesn't support everything to make the web work; i.e. you can't use it as a daily driver (for some sites, perhaps, but not all). We're getting there.
- Endy 9y ago
  That's fine that there are four "major" engines. I'm looking for a minor one anyway, whose dev does not need nor want to become part of a major flagship product, or who at least isn't tied to Mozilla or Google. The lack of real development in the browser field is kind of appalling.

markpapadakis 9y ago

I think this is just too many people. No matter how you spin this it’s just too many. Do Google or Microsoft have half as many working on their browsers? I’d be very surprised if they do. It should also be interesting to look back and find out how many people Netscape employed at its peak. I would love to know the distribution of those 1.2k people ( engineers, marketing, whatever ). Of course, it’s likely that I am too naive or clueless.

astura 9y ago
However many people Netscape employed is irrelevant, browsers now are very different in complexity and security than browsers in the Netscape era.
- markpapadakis 9y ago
  On the flip-side though, the tools, expertise/skills and means for building browsers some 25+ years ago don't match what's available today.
roca 9y ago
There isn't public information on this, but in the past I have heard that Chrome had a lot more engineers than Firefox (though it's a bit difficult to make direct comparisons because of scope differences). I suspect that's still true. I also heard the same thing about Edge at one point, but I suspect that may not be true now. Comparisons with the past are meaningless because browsers are far more complex (and performant, and secure, and versatile, etc) than they used to be. And sorry, but your gut estimates are not likely to be that accurate if you don't work in this area.
- markpapadakis 9y ago
  I never worked on a browser, though I did implement the HTML5 spec, twice, and I wrote a JS engine(compiler, runtime). I know that it was a lot easier because I could count on infromation and other advances that were available to me, and anyone else really, at the time, the kind of resources and information I probably wouildn't have had access to it("whats javascript?") 20+ years earlier. Browsers have evolved - because standards did, and expections along with them, but in the past they too were quite complex(see also Netscape's play: browsers, email, usenet client etc, suit) and again, it was harder then that it is nowadays to build such systems.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?

Vinnl 9y ago
You can trust both of them to do that well. Other than that it's hard to make a comparison not reliant on anecdotes, I guess.
Sylos 9y ago
With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture. There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab. Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves essentially equivalent parallelism with much lower resource usage, so overall better performance. If you'd rather have the security than the performance, you can set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to a higher number. This is the maximum number of processes that it will use for tabs, so setting it to something like 1000 will essentially make it start a new process for each tab. Then there's something to be said about add-ons. Mozilla does manual code reviews of most extensions and extension updates. (They have some criteria for when they don't do a manual code review and instead just an automated check, based on how damaging the extension is able to be with the things that it accesses.) As a result, AMO has essentially no problems with malware, whereas on the Chrome Store you hear every other month of some trojan or adware spreading. Mozilla also has a policy that disallows telemetry without user opt-in as a whole, so recognizing adware or a trojan is just a matter of observing network traffic where it shouldn't necessarily be going. Lastly, Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. Chrome Sync is not, you need to set up a second password for it to be end-to-end-encrypted. And Google will store and work with your Sync data, if you do not opt for E2EE, so that's another possibility for a pretty big data leak. Not a problem, if you are security-conscious and don't mind setting up that secondary password, but recommending it to average users on the merits of it being secure is essentially out with this.
- 9y ago

NetOpWibby 9y ago

I wrote my own browser a few years back and it was quite challenging/fun trying to figure out how to do basic browser things. You can check it out here: https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries https://paulwebb.software/SciLab/Aries Since then, I’ve been using Opera, then Vivaldi, and now Firefox, taking notes of how certain things are done. Lately, I’ve been thinking about using Servo as my base insead of Electron and doing a whole rewrite.

kevincox 9y ago
This article is talking about a browser engine, now a UI. Creating an independent UI is considerable less work (although it still takes considerable effort do to a good job of course).
- NetOpWibby 9y ago
  Ah yeah, that's true. I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

moocowtruck 9y ago

and it's only getting more difficult because the browser is turning into an operating system

zimbatm 9y ago

My hope with HTML5 was that complexity would be removed in the standard; reduce the platform to smaller generic components. Instead we have this ever-expanding feature set, a constant stream of new standards that have to be implemented. It's death by complexity. This plays in the hands of Google; each new feature is another opportunity to fingerprint the user. If things continue like that, a new platform will have to emerge to replace the web.

digi_owl 9y ago

Yes it is, because what we keep referring to as a browser has, thanks to commercial pressure, become a OS in its own right. And rather than stop and ask if this is in any way sensible, they keep pushing more stuff, like USB and Bluetooth, into it. Whenever i run into a site that is either just giving me a blank page or a error when i have JS turned off, i wonder when the train jumped the rails. And i fear it may well go as far back as the browser war between Microsoft and Netscape.

ThomPete 9y ago

So here is a question. If one was to undertake the challenge of building a new browser how would you go about doing it conceptually? What would at least convince a small group of technically advanced users to adopt it?

rlanday 9y ago
You would probably want to build a browser on top of Chromium, like Opera does (and also what Microsoft is doing on Android), and would want to try differentiating based on user-facing features. You could also build on top of Gecko, but this doesn’t seem to be as popular. Building on WebKit probably doesn’t make sense because its corporate backer (Apple) mostly only cares about supporting macOS and iOS. Eventually, if you become big enough that you think it’d be better to be independent, you can fork Chromium. This is basically the approach Google took with Chrome: they built on top of WebKit (which itself was originally an Apple fork of KHTML), then forked it eventually.

feelin_googley 9y ago

Annual salaries from 2015 (reportable compensation from IRS Form 990): Mitchell Baker, Chair $977,382 + $45,530 Bob Lisborne, Director $92,000 Mark Surman, Exec. Dir./President $170,699 + $40,602 Jim Cook, Treasurer $934,526 + $45,530 Angela Plohman, Secretary/VP Operations $121,322 + $30,342 Christopher Lawrence, VP Learning $153,492 + $62,538 An-Me Chung, Dir. Partnerships 154,946 + $72,672 Daniel Sinker, Dir. Partnerships 123,630 + $64,215 Hiram Paul Johnson, Marketing Lead 126,605 + 54, 903 Andrea Wood, Online Organizing/Fundraising Lead $135,048 + $46,322 Samuel Dyson, Director Hive Chicago $114,860 + $63,549 source: https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Foundation_Forms_990_Public_Disclosure.pdf https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2015_Mozilla_Found... Perhaps the author is telling the truth. Consider the salary costs of retaining skilled "maintainers" like the above personnel. Note I am not condemning Mozilla. They do good work. However I am not quite sold on the idea that their purpose for existence is to "keep the web open" or whatever tagline they are going with. For example, an "open" web would be one made for all browsers to access, not just a select few who have chosen to try to keep up with an arms race of recently-added, non-optional "features" that carry serious costs to users. The key word I wish to emphasize is "non-optional". Users are not given choice and that is most likely intentional. Many a web developer presents the user with a small selection of "acceptable browsers", the ones that will run third party code and readily show heavy, third party advertising. Anything else is "prohibited" and must be a "bot". Users are sometimes even shamed for not using the web browser or version that the web developer wants them to use, calling the user's software "outdated" when they have almost no information about the user's software except its behavior and some easily forgeable HTTP headers. In many cases, e.g., where the user is just retrieving some information, that is just silly. Not every website needs to show advertising. Not all information is commercial. Not all information is graphical. I am not using one of the select few targeted browsers to read HN or post this comment, but I am getting the same information as the readers who are. And for some reason(s), web developers flock to this "outdated" website. Why? Clearly the web can be both accesible by simpler user agents, and fully-functional for the most bleeding-edge features of corporate-sponsored browsers at the same time. The original web standards, e.g. basic HTML, still work, very effectively. The web as a means to offer basic functionality such as HN can be "backwards compatible" with user agents that are far more simple than Firefox, Chromium, etc. The select few browsers that many web developers target overwhelmingly controlled by corporations and other advertisers. Netscape and the idea of corporations paying to use a browser may exist only as entries in the historical record, but I do not think we can say that browsers are truly separated from corporate funding (and influence). Browsers are still commercial, in a sense, IMO. While it might be viewed as "free software", the authors of these few browsers are well-paid by their corporate (or "non-profit") employers and the end goal is "market share", ideally a monopoly. This is fine if the web is 100% commercial. But it did not start that way and it still isn't 100% commercial. Non-commercial uses are still alive and well. It is not necessarily Mozilla's fault for the direction the web moves in, e.g., making content less accessible by simpler user agents. However, if their purpose is to make the web "open" or some such "non-commercial" aim, then what could they do to enable and promote use of simpler user agents (and thereby promote their acceptability among web developers)? I can think of a few things. I am sure others could as well. There is no shortage of users who are dissatisfied with the (lack of) variety of user agents that are available. http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die http://bitcheese.net/web_browsers_must_die The question is whether Mozilla really wants to listen to users who might criticize dismiss their browser as, e.g., too bloated.

yuhong 9y ago

I have been discussing the debt-based economy and Google and Mozilla recently with BrendanEich on Twitter, including a debt diagram.