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No, you make it function properly before I consider “[giving] it a chance”. Firefox is ridden with decade-old compliance bugs, and is generally a pain to write

No, you make it function properly before I consider “[giving] it a chance”. Firefox is ridden with decade-old compliance bugs, and is generally a pain to write applications and documents for. That's just part of why web applications and documents work worse in Firefox than they do in Chromium. Mozilla should derive from Chromium, if they want to actually deliver a web browser worth choosing. They can even fight their small battles with niche concerns more efficiently this way; but alas they will choose to make their users suffer needlessly for the scintilla of a principle of “implementation diversity”, which in practice just means “Firefox workarounds”.

catalogia 7y ago
Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! whole browsers? Yeah no. If Mozilla made Firefox another chromium-derivative, it would become pointless to me. If you want to use a chromium browser, you have plenty of other options. Firefox is an option for the rest of us.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! I don't see why you have to be so nasty. I'm not lazy, nor bad at my job. Firefox has unique failures in standard compliance and the function of APIs. It's not just a matter of "supporting two browsers", it's a matter of working around the unique deficiencies of Firefox, for which there rarely exist equivalents in Chromium. For example, for the longest time, getBoundingClientRect and getBBox do not work properly for elements inside an SVG. Still today Firefox misuses 1/60 unit fixpoint numbers for SVG geometry, which means that if you scale a <use> element larger than the geometry in the <defs>, it will be positioned incorrectly and/or misshapen; they could keep their fixpoints and still implement SVG correctly, but they instead just leave the bugs. There is little evidence that this follows any performance necessity, as Chromium and IE manage to render SVGs on the CPU considerably faster than Firefox does, while using floats in this role; Firefox barely runs properly on no-FPU computers anyway. So shame on you for casting aspersions on web developers for not supporting this unpopular, IE-quality Netscape fork as easily as they support Chromium.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser. None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close.
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      > Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser. Are you maybe attributing the ill effects of the IE era to monoculture when they could be better explained by a single controlling interest? I don't think the current situation, where a set of related KHTML forks owned by competing companies make up about 90% of browser market share, is comparable to the IE6 situation. > None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close. Can you please stop being so uncivil? It's totally unnecessary, and discourages people from engaging in good faith (since they can predict that you'll throw it in their face). In any event. Chromium is not the new IE6, because it has infinite diverse controlling interests. If you don't like the direction Chromium is taking, and they won't take your patches, you can fork it or maintain a patchset. It is relatively cheap to fork Chromium, and definitely cheaper than developing your own separate browser engine for years, only to become almost competitive. If your patches are really that good, there's a great chance that they will make it upstream.
toastal 7y ago
I still have issues with Blink's CSS columns 7 years later, so this isn't a one-sided deal.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Sure, though the balance of issues actually affecting the viability of documents and web applications greatly favours Chromium. Like I said, I think Mozilla could put themselves in a great position to differentiate themselves on quality or any other important axis if they would just give up on maintaining Netscape. At this point they don't even support any of the old plugin or extension interfaces, so even if they wanted to rebuild all of their current UI gimmicks, it wouldn't be a crazy amount of work. As it stands, the least you could say between the two, regarding implementation quality, is that Firefox is almost not noticeably worse most of the time. That's not a terribly high standard. The an example of the sort of differentiation users appreciate, unbreaking content blockers like uBlock Origin with a patchset that forces Google to either merge it, or acknowledge that they had ulterior motives for deprecating the content blocking APIs in favour of ones with serious limitations. For example, a performance improvement to declarativeNetRequest with an increase of the rule limit from 30,000 to something more useful, with no loss in performance.

catalogia 7y ago

Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! whole browsers? Yeah no. If Mozilla made Firefox another chromium-derivative, it would become pointless to me. If you want to use a chromium browser, you have plenty of other options. Firefox is an option for the rest of us.

microcolonel 7y ago
> Create a browser monoculture just to satisfy webdevs who are too lazy or shitty at their job to support two(2)! I don't see why you have to be so nasty. I'm not lazy, nor bad at my job. Firefox has unique failures in standard compliance and the function of APIs. It's not just a matter of "supporting two browsers", it's a matter of working around the unique deficiencies of Firefox, for which there rarely exist equivalents in Chromium. For example, for the longest time, getBoundingClientRect and getBBox do not work properly for elements inside an SVG. Still today Firefox misuses 1/60 unit fixpoint numbers for SVG geometry, which means that if you scale a <use> element larger than the geometry in the <defs>, it will be positioned incorrectly and/or misshapen; they could keep their fixpoints and still implement SVG correctly, but they instead just leave the bugs. There is little evidence that this follows any performance necessity, as Chromium and IE manage to render SVGs on the CPU considerably faster than Firefox does, while using floats in this role; Firefox barely runs properly on no-FPU computers anyway. So shame on you for casting aspersions on web developers for not supporting this unpopular, IE-quality Netscape fork as easily as they support Chromium.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser. None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > Are you too young to remember the IE monoculture? Otherwise I cannot fathom how you could be so petty and short sighted as to suggest that Firefox become a chromium browser. Are you maybe attributing the ill effects of the IE era to monoculture when they could be better explained by a single controlling interest? I don't think the current situation, where a set of related KHTML forks owned by competing companies make up about 90% of browser market share, is comparable to the IE6 situation. > None of the bullshit you're talking about is more important than avoiding a browser monoculture. Not even close. Can you please stop being so uncivil? It's totally unnecessary, and discourages people from engaging in good faith (since they can predict that you'll throw it in their face). In any event. Chromium is not the new IE6, because it has infinite diverse controlling interests. If you don't like the direction Chromium is taking, and they won't take your patches, you can fork it or maintain a patchset. It is relatively cheap to fork Chromium, and definitely cheaper than developing your own separate browser engine for years, only to become almost competitive. If your patches are really that good, there's a great chance that they will make it upstream.

toastal 7y ago

I still have issues with Blink's CSS columns 7 years later, so this isn't a one-sided deal.

microcolonel 7y ago
Sure, though the balance of issues actually affecting the viability of documents and web applications greatly favours Chromium. Like I said, I think Mozilla could put themselves in a great position to differentiate themselves on quality or any other important axis if they would just give up on maintaining Netscape. At this point they don't even support any of the old plugin or extension interfaces, so even if they wanted to rebuild all of their current UI gimmicks, it wouldn't be a crazy amount of work. As it stands, the least you could say between the two, regarding implementation quality, is that Firefox is almost not noticeably worse most of the time. That's not a terribly high standard. The an example of the sort of differentiation users appreciate, unbreaking content blockers like uBlock Origin with a patchset that forces Google to either merge it, or acknowledge that they had ulterior motives for deprecating the content blocking APIs in favour of ones with serious limitations. For example, a performance improvement to declarativeNetRequest with an increase of the rule limit from 30,000 to something more useful, with no loss in performance.