18 ms·

This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the emb

by ljm 7y ago

This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink. Electron, various browsers that are just skins over the embedded framework... We were still dealing with legacy IE6 (and IE 7/8 by that point also) in 2013! Almost a decade since we got Firefox and the first version of Chrome. The web has empirically suffered through homogeneity and the lack of strong competitors in the browser space, not helped by the underlying HTML/JS spec becoming exponentially more convoluted to the point where building your own renderer is nigh impossible. And since everyone is standardising on a Google, their decisions on ad blocking and supporting APIs are automatically going to flow down into every dependent product. It’s frustrating that MS copped out and went Chromium. Like we never learned this lesson the first time. We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. These need to be protected if we don’t want Google and the ad network to totally control the browsing experience. Although, controversially, we as a web dev collective have learned nothing if we continue to only develop for a single browser. Not for the web itself, but for one particular rendering engine. “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept.

amelius 7y ago
> “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept. Can't we, developers, do the opposite? Like introduce a small annoyance, like showing a pop-up, when visitors use Chrome? It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
- thrower123 7y ago
  It's largely proven by decades of experience at this point that you cannot make the average software user care about ideological concerns. Especially if you use terms like libre that don't makes any sense to people that haven't drunk the FOSS koolaid.
  - amelius 7y ago
    Ok, then it could be played a little harder, for example by introducing a (small) performance penality for visitors that use chrome.
    - vageli 7y ago
      > Ok, then it could be played a little harder, for example by introducing a (small) performance penality for visitors that use chrome. Good luck convincing your product owner of the necessity of that change. Most large enterprises won't do something like this.
      - eganist 7y ago
        That's not the place to target such a change, if anyone's to do it. If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective. If there's no support from a major maintainer, then simply writing contributions which are largely tested in firefox for performance but are tested in Blink for mere functionality should succeed over time in inducing the same. In the end, the libraries are lock-in for larger SaaS providers far more than they might be aware, and if such changes start making it into e.g. React, there's not all that much that many product teams can do to work around it other than replying via support channels that Firefox seems to take less of a performance penalty. That's the black hat in me talking. Resuming white hat status now.
        vkou 7y ago
        > If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective. That library will get forked by industry. If its license does not permit forking, it's incredibly unlikely that it can get traction in the first place.
        yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        No need to blackhat; rather than intentionally degrading it for one browser, just optimize for the other. I'm reasonably confident that there are areas where FFx is more performant; use them.
- petre 7y ago
  HTTP status code 452: Unavailable for ideological reasons.
- roca 7y ago
  What you, as Web developers, can do, is use Firefox while developing your site to ensure it really works well on non-Chromium browsers. And do your level best to encourage your developer friends to do the same. If they're on Mac and would rather use Safari, that'll do too. Then, every time you see any site or any Web developer satisfied with "works in Chrome", do what you can to let them know that's not acceptable. In a polite, loving, and extremely firm manner of course.
  - tomjen3 7y ago
    A decent idea of course, but you are going to run in to the same issue as everybody else who tries that: unless Firefox has a significant market share, it is just not worth throwing resources after it. What you can do is develop automatic filters to make chrome specific CSS prefixes general, etc. Those are probably worth using since a few hours/days of engineering time easily is worth the larger market share.
    - roca 7y ago
      Firefox already implements a bunch of -webkit prefixed features for compatibility reasons. Are there specific Chrome-only features that aren't yet supported that you think should be? If so, file Firefox bugs!
    - stOneskull 7y ago
      Gotta help get the user base bigger
- danShumway 7y ago
  I'm still working out the details, but when I get to the point where I'm selling software on my site, I plan to offer small discounts (maybe a dollar) to anyone I detect on a Firefox browser. I'm considering doing the same thing for Ad Blockers. I know I can't convince normal people to care about the web ecosystem, and yelling at users about behavior is just another way to annoy them. I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture. If someone is visiting on an unconfigured browser, or something I don't recognize, they won't get an error message or performance hit or any notification at all. But if someone visits and they're doing the right thing, maybe they get a "good job" and a discount or extra download. And then hopefully if they recommend my software to a friend they'll also let them know about the "secret."
  - RealityVoid 7y ago
    > I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture. While that is nice, you run the risk of nobody noticing. For some strange reason, I wanted to comment to your post and you didn't have a reply button initially. I had to refresh and then is showed up. Huh, never seen that behavior on HN.
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Agreed, but the point is specifically not to nag people -- I don't think that works for Open Source communities; people just get mad. So yeah, tradeoffs. To put it specifically in advertising terms, I'm also optimizing for conversion rate, not impressions. I'll make a (light) prediction that the few people who know in advance about a system like this will be more likely to try out a browser to save a dollar than they will be to switch a browser to stop a negative experience they're already in. And on a less practical note, I think I'm OK with fewer people discovering something like this if the ones who do notice end up feeling really good. I want someone's reaction to be, "You noticed! You're right, I am awesome for using an ad blocker!" I want the feeling to be, "sometimes people don't hate me for doing this, and sometimes doing the right thing has benefits." > you didn't have a reply button initially. HN rate-limits replies to recent posts.
- eitland 7y ago
  > It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser" Love it! I'd suggest a small change: It could say something like "today and every other day is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
- brlewis 7y ago
  You could make use of features that work in Firefox but don't yet work in Chrome, such as SVG favicons and position: sticky (Chrome supports but only on th elements) There's probably a way to compile a list of such features from caniuse data.
- geodel 7y ago
  Huh, developers using electron and/or whole NodeJS/ Javascript ecosystem for their products are already causing big annoyance for users. If there were whole bunch of conscientious developers we would not be in place where browser engines embedded or otherwise would be the most dominant way to deliver services or products to users.
  - tatersolid 7y ago
    The market clearly wants a cross platform GUI runtime. Java didn’t cut it. Neither did Tcl/GTK/Wxwidgets. Web apps won because of universality and zero touch deployment. Nothing to install, it just works (mostly). Platform-native apps simply doesn’t achieve the major “it just works” goal, and always havw their own compromises.
user17843 7y ago
The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox). And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing. I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine. Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.
- btown 7y ago
  > smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked... Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Use an open-source DRM solution?
    - rnotaro 7y ago
      DRMs are integrated by websites owners. If a website is using Proprietary DRM A, your browser needs to be licensed to use DRM A.
    - josteink 7y ago
      Such a thing doesn’t exist because then it could be trivially broken.
ronsor 7y ago
People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.
- omeid2 7y ago
  You can't embed Gecko? Patently false. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
  - khuey 7y ago
    Speaking as someone who worked on Gecko at Mozilla for many years, that page is years (if not more than a decade) out of date and embedding Gecko is a rather miserable experience.
  - robotblake 7y ago
    Disclaimer: Work for Mozilla but not on the browser core, thoughts are my own, grain of salt, etc. My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be. With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5]. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components [3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ [4] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix [5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix
    - omeid2 7y ago
      Yes, it is not exactly easy, but it is not like Chromium Embedded Framework despite being design for embedding is any easier to build. The truth is the browsers are complicated beasts these days for better or worst and so goes the complexity of building and depending on them.
m-p-3 7y ago
I ditched Chrome and came back to Firefox, next step is to donate to Mozilla.
- kibwen 7y ago
  Note that charitable donations (of the 501(c)(3) variety) in the U.S. can only be employed for a very specific whitelist of purposes, and software development and marketing are not among those (the Mozilla Foundation uses donations to fund things like education programs instead). If you're a software developer who's interested in the health of Firefox specifically, consider instead donating your time by volunteering (not limited merely to Mozilla or Firefox; there are dozens of open-source projects whose development directly or indirectly ends up benefiting Firefox).
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    The Mozilla Foundation's education programs and the dozens of other things they do are actually worthwhile enough to justify donations, IMO.
  - zombieprocess 7y ago
    Is there a good starting point for this? Or like a "Getting started" page?
  - pabs3 7y ago
    I'm told that this is incorrect and that the FSF has been doing it for 34 years, the EFF does it, the ACLU has done it and others have even paid for proprietary software development (their apps etc).
- steve76 7y ago
  I'm willing to stay if we can get something mutual. Mineral rights payouts, or an end to Adsense bans. Open source the platform behind their entire revenue. What? They scared or something? I know they have investors, and research into new medicine and energy depend on consumer driven revenue. Instead of: "In the long run, we are all dead." I see it as: "Until further notice, unless someone gets really really good at math, we are going to die in horrible horrible agony. Loosing all your wealth is the last of your concerns." Burn the boats. Get that hunger back.
microcolonel 7y ago
> This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink Chromium is generally fine, until Google packages it as Chrome. The issues are not inherent to Chromium, they're failures of principle at Google. I know people like the idea, in concept, of engine diversity on the web, but the alternatives are terrible. Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying. On Windows, the story is a bit better, but it's still just not comparable. On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating. My take is that when Mozilla ousted Brendan Eich, something changed culturally at the place; it's no longer a culture of competence, but one of paranoia, reluctance, excuse-making, distraction, and (sometimes) bullying. Regardless of the causes, we are in a situation now where the only competent browser which handles basic webpages the way normal people expect, without much fiddling with configuration, is Chromium. Everything else relies on excuses and wishful thinking. Brave is looking good, it has all of the extremely popular and well-thought-out UI of Chrome, total compatibility, and a backbone. In the worst case, it can survive on its own. Chromium is really great, and whoever packages a principled, non-user-betraying browser based on Chromium (and convinces people to use it), will be on the most pragmatic path to preserving the open web.
- fourthark 7y ago
  +1 for your first point - surely Chromium can still be used to create an ad-blocking browser. I disagree with you after there.
  - justinrlle 7y ago
    My understanding is that this change in the extensions API will land in Chromium first, and so any browser depending on the extension mechanism of Chromium will be impacted, like Opera and Vivaldi. If I'm not guessing wrong, Opera and Vivaldi are compatible with Chrome extensions because they use the extension mechanism of Chromium, so they'll need additional maintenance burden to keep the `webRequest` API working.
    - 7y ago
behringer 7y ago
If it doesn't work in Firefox I don't use it. I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, probably shortly after it was made and Netscape died. And would never use Chrome. Chrome users are now going to be betrayed and just didn't see it coming. I look forward to Firefox' upcoming rebound which I have every faith this news will spur on.
- toddwprice 7y ago
  I came back to Firefox a while back - maybe a year or two? - and have never regretted it. It's a fast, modern, respectful browser. Maintained by a non-profit. I do all my front-end dev work in Firefox, and also test in Chrome. Never had a problem. Come on back folks!
  - starik36 7y ago
    My experience exactly. The dev tools have caught up to chrome and in some ways surpassed it.
    - TimTheTinker 7y ago
      The “workspace” and “blackbox script” features in Chrome devTools are real paradigm shifters and a huge productivity boost for me when developing/debugging in JS/TS or SCSS/CSS. With Workspaces, most changes to source files are reflected immediately without reloading (no LiveReload-type tooling is needed). Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
      - shstalwart 7y ago
        There will always be a trinket to keep you on the plantation.
        TimTheTinker 7y ago
        This is more like the GPS guidance on modern, DRM’ed tractors than trinkets given to plantation slaves. It’s not integral to my work, but it does contribute significantly to my productivity.
technofiend 7y ago
Time to build a Pi Hole since iOS Firefox doesn’t allow extensions.
- jachee 7y ago
  You don't even have to dedicate a pi to it. If you've got Docker, you can run it in a container: https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole
  - tomjuggler 7y ago
    Or in docker on a pi..
nerdponx 7y ago
Why do people act like this is all some great big accident, the result of eternal human fallibility? It's not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so. Just think how much money and manpower went into each of those free products we take for granted, not the least of which includes the Google search engine; now think about how they make so much money off your attention that they can offer it free of charge, because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable. Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there. Now that they have monopoly power, they can start tightening their grip with the good old embrace, extend, extinguish. Google isn't unique in this. Similar arguments could be made about Facebook. To be sure, Google and Facebook have produced tremendous advances in science and technology. But let's not forget what funded them, or why they were developed in the first place. Lest we forget why these things play out the way they do.
- bubblewrap 7y ago
  "because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable." Nevertheless, they offer good products. I'm not sure the negativity is really warranted. I've yet to hear about a case of anybody being hurt by Google collecting data to them and serving ads?
  - Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Just Google it! ... oh wait. (See the problem yet? For a significant part of the world, Google is Internet, or at least keeper of all the gates)
    - bubblewrap 7y ago
      So you claim that there are many people who have been hurt by Google's data collection, but Google has censored their cases away? Can't you find them with Bing? Give an example! It's a problem if Google bans your account, and you built everything on your services. But that is not the same thing, and any other company banning you from doing business with them would also hurt.
brianpgordon 7y ago
Is this decision really baked so hard into Blink that forked browsers like Edge and Vivaldi can't provide their own APIs? Seems unlikely to me.
nialv7 7y ago
> We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. Do remember though, Mozilla's income is heavily dependent on Google. If we want a browser engine that can remain completely free, we really need a engine that is community driven. Although that might not longer be possible given the complexity of the web nowadays.

by ljm 7y ago

amelius 7y ago

> “Only works in Chrome,” is poor engineering for anything more than a prototype or proof of concept. Can't we, developers, do the opposite? Like introduce a small annoyance, like showing a pop-up, when visitors use Chrome? It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"

thrower123 7y ago
It's largely proven by decades of experience at this point that you cannot make the average software user care about ideological concerns. Especially if you use terms like libre that don't makes any sense to people that haven't drunk the FOSS koolaid.
- amelius 7y ago
  Ok, then it could be played a little harder, for example by introducing a (small) performance penality for visitors that use chrome.
  - vageli 7y ago
    > Ok, then it could be played a little harder, for example by introducing a (small) performance penality for visitors that use chrome. Good luck convincing your product owner of the necessity of that change. Most large enterprises won't do something like this.
    - eganist 7y ago
      That's not the place to target such a change, if anyone's to do it. If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective. If there's no support from a major maintainer, then simply writing contributions which are largely tested in firefox for performance but are tested in Blink for mere functionality should succeed over time in inducing the same. In the end, the libraries are lock-in for larger SaaS providers far more than they might be aware, and if such changes start making it into e.g. React, there's not all that much that many product teams can do to work around it other than replying via support channels that Firefox seems to take less of a performance penalty. That's the black hat in me talking. Resuming white hat status now.
      - vkou 7y ago
        > If there's the support of a major maintainer of a popular library, merging changes which incrementally incur larger performance penalties in Blink may be more effective. That library will get forked by industry. If its license does not permit forking, it's incredibly unlikely that it can get traction in the first place.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
        No need to blackhat; rather than intentionally degrading it for one browser, just optimize for the other. I'm reasonably confident that there are areas where FFx is more performant; use them.
petre 7y ago
HTTP status code 452: Unavailable for ideological reasons.
roca 7y ago
What you, as Web developers, can do, is use Firefox while developing your site to ensure it really works well on non-Chromium browsers. And do your level best to encourage your developer friends to do the same. If they're on Mac and would rather use Safari, that'll do too. Then, every time you see any site or any Web developer satisfied with "works in Chrome", do what you can to let them know that's not acceptable. In a polite, loving, and extremely firm manner of course.
- tomjen3 7y ago
  A decent idea of course, but you are going to run in to the same issue as everybody else who tries that: unless Firefox has a significant market share, it is just not worth throwing resources after it. What you can do is develop automatic filters to make chrome specific CSS prefixes general, etc. Those are probably worth using since a few hours/days of engineering time easily is worth the larger market share.
  - roca 7y ago
    Firefox already implements a bunch of -webkit prefixed features for compatibility reasons. Are there specific Chrome-only features that aren't yet supported that you think should be? If so, file Firefox bugs!
  - stOneskull 7y ago
    Gotta help get the user base bigger
danShumway 7y ago
I'm still working out the details, but when I get to the point where I'm selling software on my site, I plan to offer small discounts (maybe a dollar) to anyone I detect on a Firefox browser. I'm considering doing the same thing for Ad Blockers. I know I can't convince normal people to care about the web ecosystem, and yelling at users about behavior is just another way to annoy them. I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture. If someone is visiting on an unconfigured browser, or something I don't recognize, they won't get an error message or performance hit or any notification at all. But if someone visits and they're doing the right thing, maybe they get a "good job" and a discount or extra download. And then hopefully if they recommend my software to a friend they'll also let them know about the "secret."
- RealityVoid 7y ago
  > I like the idea of having a small (likely secret) list of browser behaviors that reward users, rather than punishing them. It makes it feel more like a game or a cheat code or easter egg to me than a heavy handed lecture. While that is nice, you run the risk of nobody noticing. For some strange reason, I wanted to comment to your post and you didn't have a reply button initially. I had to refresh and then is showed up. Huh, never seen that behavior on HN.
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Agreed, but the point is specifically not to nag people -- I don't think that works for Open Source communities; people just get mad. So yeah, tradeoffs. To put it specifically in advertising terms, I'm also optimizing for conversion rate, not impressions. I'll make a (light) prediction that the few people who know in advance about a system like this will be more likely to try out a browser to save a dollar than they will be to switch a browser to stop a negative experience they're already in. And on a less practical note, I think I'm OK with fewer people discovering something like this if the ones who do notice end up feeling really good. I want someone's reaction to be, "You noticed! You're right, I am awesome for using an ad blocker!" I want the feeling to be, "sometimes people don't hate me for doing this, and sometimes doing the right thing has benefits." > you didn't have a reply button initially. HN rate-limits replies to recent posts.
eitland 7y ago
> It could say something like "today is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser" Love it! I'd suggest a small change: It could say something like "today and every other day is free web day, upgrade your browser to Firefox or any other libre browser"
brlewis 7y ago
You could make use of features that work in Firefox but don't yet work in Chrome, such as SVG favicons and position: sticky (Chrome supports but only on th elements) There's probably a way to compile a list of such features from caniuse data.
geodel 7y ago
Huh, developers using electron and/or whole NodeJS/ Javascript ecosystem for their products are already causing big annoyance for users. If there were whole bunch of conscientious developers we would not be in place where browser engines embedded or otherwise would be the most dominant way to deliver services or products to users.
- tatersolid 7y ago
  The market clearly wants a cross platform GUI runtime. Java didn’t cut it. Neither did Tcl/GTK/Wxwidgets. Web apps won because of universality and zero touch deployment. Nothing to install, it just works (mostly). Platform-native apps simply doesn’t achieve the major “it just works” goal, and always havw their own compromises.

user17843 7y ago

The problem is the only way to combat Google in this regards would be for smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork. (The train has already left the station for anything besides WebKit or Blink, since the lack of accessibility of Gecko means it will never be adopted by anyone else.) But most of them are directly financed by Google and have almost no common ground (e.g. Opera, Firefox). And unfortunately no single player involved can gain much by going against Google. What would Microsoft gain from forking? Nothing. I think 10 years in the future we might see WebKit and Blink merge together into a single core engine. Modern Capitalism almost dictates this development, as corporations strive to save money at all costs.

btown 7y ago
> smaller players to come together and form an open-source working group based on a chromium fork Google can and does use DRM to block even this from happening: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked-my-browser/ https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked... Even Mozilla needed to license Widevine from Google to support modern video: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm Based on the policy evidenced in Maddock's post, it seems impossible to develop an open-source browser in 2019 that supports video streaming.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Use an open-source DRM solution?
  - rnotaro 7y ago
    DRMs are integrated by websites owners. If a website is using Proprietary DRM A, your browser needs to be licensed to use DRM A.
  - josteink 7y ago
    Such a thing doesn’t exist because then it could be trivially broken.

ronsor 7y ago

People depend on Chromium/Blink because there's no other options. You can't really embed Gecko, and WebKit (Safari) can sometimes lack desirable web platform features.

omeid2 7y ago
You can't embed Gecko? Patently false. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embedding_Mozilla https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Gecko/Embed...
- khuey 7y ago
  Speaking as someone who worked on Gecko at Mozilla for many years, that page is years (if not more than a decade) out of date and embedding Gecko is a rather miserable experience.
- robotblake 7y ago
  Disclaimer: Work for Mozilla but not on the browser core, thoughts are my own, grain of salt, etc. My understanding is that on Desktop it's much more difficult than it ideally should be. With that said we've got a pretty solid story being worked on for mobile via GeckoView [1] and Android Components [2], there's a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog about our use of them in Focus [3] and they're also what is being used for building the "next generation" version of Firefox for Android currently code-named Fenix [4][5]. I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to get some of the GeckoView work back onto our desktop platforms. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview [2] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/android-components [3] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/ [4] https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix [5] https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix https://play.google.com/apps/testing/org.mozilla.fenix
  - omeid2 7y ago
    Yes, it is not exactly easy, but it is not like Chromium Embedded Framework despite being design for embedding is any easier to build. The truth is the browsers are complicated beasts these days for better or worst and so goes the complexity of building and depending on them.

m-p-3 7y ago

I ditched Chrome and came back to Firefox, next step is to donate to Mozilla.

kibwen 7y ago
Note that charitable donations (of the 501(c)(3) variety) in the U.S. can only be employed for a very specific whitelist of purposes, and software development and marketing are not among those (the Mozilla Foundation uses donations to fund things like education programs instead). If you're a software developer who's interested in the health of Firefox specifically, consider instead donating your time by volunteering (not limited merely to Mozilla or Firefox; there are dozens of open-source projects whose development directly or indirectly ends up benefiting Firefox).
- chris_wot 7y ago
  The Mozilla Foundation's education programs and the dozens of other things they do are actually worthwhile enough to justify donations, IMO.
- zombieprocess 7y ago
  Is there a good starting point for this? Or like a "Getting started" page?
- pabs3 7y ago
  I'm told that this is incorrect and that the FSF has been doing it for 34 years, the EFF does it, the ACLU has done it and others have even paid for proprietary software development (their apps etc).
steve76 7y ago
I'm willing to stay if we can get something mutual. Mineral rights payouts, or an end to Adsense bans. Open source the platform behind their entire revenue. What? They scared or something? I know they have investors, and research into new medicine and energy depend on consumer driven revenue. Instead of: "In the long run, we are all dead." I see it as: "Until further notice, unless someone gets really really good at math, we are going to die in horrible horrible agony. Loosing all your wealth is the last of your concerns." Burn the boats. Get that hunger back.

microcolonel 7y ago

> This is why it’s so unfortunate and frustrating that people are depending so much on Chromium/Blink Chromium is generally fine, until Google packages it as Chrome. The issues are not inherent to Chromium, they're failures of principle at Google. I know people like the idea, in concept, of engine diversity on the web, but the alternatives are terrible. Anyone who says that Firefox runs anywhere near as well as Chromium on Linux is either incredibly lucky, extremely knowledgeable about custom building Firefox, or just lying. On Windows, the story is a bit better, but it's still just not comparable. On top of this, in my experience, I've found the Firefox UI extremely frustrating. My take is that when Mozilla ousted Brendan Eich, something changed culturally at the place; it's no longer a culture of competence, but one of paranoia, reluctance, excuse-making, distraction, and (sometimes) bullying. Regardless of the causes, we are in a situation now where the only competent browser which handles basic webpages the way normal people expect, without much fiddling with configuration, is Chromium. Everything else relies on excuses and wishful thinking. Brave is looking good, it has all of the extremely popular and well-thought-out UI of Chrome, total compatibility, and a backbone. In the worst case, it can survive on its own. Chromium is really great, and whoever packages a principled, non-user-betraying browser based on Chromium (and convinces people to use it), will be on the most pragmatic path to preserving the open web.

fourthark 7y ago
+1 for your first point - surely Chromium can still be used to create an ad-blocking browser. I disagree with you after there.
- justinrlle 7y ago
  My understanding is that this change in the extensions API will land in Chromium first, and so any browser depending on the extension mechanism of Chromium will be impacted, like Opera and Vivaldi. If I'm not guessing wrong, Opera and Vivaldi are compatible with Chrome extensions because they use the extension mechanism of Chromium, so they'll need additional maintenance burden to keep the `webRequest` API working.
  - 7y ago

behringer 7y ago

If it doesn't work in Firefox I don't use it. I've been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, probably shortly after it was made and Netscape died. And would never use Chrome. Chrome users are now going to be betrayed and just didn't see it coming. I look forward to Firefox' upcoming rebound which I have every faith this news will spur on.

toddwprice 7y ago
I came back to Firefox a while back - maybe a year or two? - and have never regretted it. It's a fast, modern, respectful browser. Maintained by a non-profit. I do all my front-end dev work in Firefox, and also test in Chrome. Never had a problem. Come on back folks!
- starik36 7y ago
  My experience exactly. The dev tools have caught up to chrome and in some ways surpassed it.
  - TimTheTinker 7y ago
    The “workspace” and “blackbox script” features in Chrome devTools are real paradigm shifters and a huge productivity boost for me when developing/debugging in JS/TS or SCSS/CSS. With Workspaces, most changes to source files are reflected immediately without reloading (no LiveReload-type tooling is needed). Firefox has yet to release either of those features, as far as I know. I’ll switch dev browsers as soon as they do.
    - shstalwart 7y ago
      There will always be a trinket to keep you on the plantation.
      - TimTheTinker 7y ago
        This is more like the GPS guidance on modern, DRM’ed tractors than trinkets given to plantation slaves. It’s not integral to my work, but it does contribute significantly to my productivity.

technofiend 7y ago

Time to build a Pi Hole since iOS Firefox doesn’t allow extensions.

jachee 7y ago
You don't even have to dedicate a pi to it. If you've got Docker, you can run it in a container: https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole https://github.com/pi-hole/docker-pi-hole
- tomjuggler 7y ago
  Or in docker on a pi..

nerdponx 7y ago

Why do people act like this is all some great big accident, the result of eternal human fallibility? It's not. This was planned. It was the objective all along. Why else do you think Google Maps is free? Gmail? Why did they drive around 1,000s of cities with cameras on a car taking photos for Street View? Was it really just to become the world's most comprehensive search engine? Hell no, it was to get people into the ecosystem and to stay there, and be content with doing so. Just think how much money and manpower went into each of those free products we take for granted, not the least of which includes the Google search engine; now think about how they make so much money off your attention that they can offer it free of charge, because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable. Chrome is the same thing. Why would a for-profit company develop a web browser more or less unprompted and give it away for free? To draw people into the system and get them comfortable with staying there. Now that they have monopoly power, they can start tightening their grip with the good old embrace, extend, extinguish. Google isn't unique in this. Similar arguments could be made about Facebook. To be sure, Google and Facebook have produced tremendous advances in science and technology. But let's not forget what funded them, or why they were developed in the first place. Lest we forget why these things play out the way they do.

bubblewrap 7y ago
"because sucking you into the ecosystem is just that profitable." Nevertheless, they offer good products. I'm not sure the negativity is really warranted. I've yet to hear about a case of anybody being hurt by Google collecting data to them and serving ads?
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Just Google it! ... oh wait. (See the problem yet? For a significant part of the world, Google is Internet, or at least keeper of all the gates)
  - bubblewrap 7y ago
    So you claim that there are many people who have been hurt by Google's data collection, but Google has censored their cases away? Can't you find them with Bing? Give an example! It's a problem if Google bans your account, and you built everything on your services. But that is not the same thing, and any other company banning you from doing business with them would also hurt.

brianpgordon 7y ago

Is this decision really baked so hard into Blink that forked browsers like Edge and Vivaldi can't provide their own APIs? Seems unlikely to me.

nialv7 7y ago

> We still have WebKit and Firefox and (sooner or later), more of Servo at least. Do remember though, Mozilla's income is heavily dependent on Google. If we want a browser engine that can remain completely free, we really need a engine that is community driven. Although that might not longer be possible given the complexity of the web nowadays.