8 ms·

It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made me worry that the browser I've be

It's nice to see some actual good news involving Firefox. With all of the leadership and financial struggles lately, it's made me worry that the browser I've been using for the last 17 years doesn't have long to live. Hopefully that is not the case.

ATsch 6y ago
I think it will take more time to say that for certain. Warp is an exception, but most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. I think the thing to be worried about is: what will happen when they run out of stuff that's already in the pipeline? Will they be able to execute the sweeping changes they'll need to do to stay within reach of blink long term? Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did.
- IainIreland 6y ago
  > most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note, for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of writing its own JS engine from scratch: https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on Servo.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    This is correct. Servo's Stylo parallelized CSS parser shipped in Firefox's "Quantum" performance release, but a huge part of the overall performance improvement came from profiling the whole system. Fixing lots of small hot spots in Firefox frontend and Gecko really added up. It's easy for tiny performance regressions to creep in here and there.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    Many people are badmouthing Mozilla because they disbanded the group working on their pet language, Rust, as if this was synonym for Firefox technology. There are many things that Mozilla does beyond working on Rust.
    - stjohnswarts 6y ago
      No, just no. they were badmouthing Mozilla because they didn't like mozilla firing their rust resources while they continue to pay enormous amounts for a CEO and other higher ups while Firefox's market share is in a death spiral currently. The only thing that can save it is better branding and "gotta have it features" which Rust can bring, along with stability.
      - coliveira 6y ago
        I'm not trying to defend their management, but my opinion here is that they concluded that investing in a new language wouldn't be the best/fastest way to evolve Firefox. Google may have money to invest in a new language, but Mozilla probably needs to be more focused.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
        The executive pay shows that their conclusions about where money should be allocated have severe issues, so it's hard to trust that choice without more justification.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  > Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did. I am sad to say this, but I think it's only a matter of time. At this point, the list of parties driving Web standards basically consists of a whole bunch of organizations that rely on Blink, plus Apple and Mozilla. WebKit can probably hang on for a good long while because ~15% of user-agents are required by fiat to be WebKit. Gecko? At 5% marketshare, I fear it's dropped below the point where web developers are well-incentivized worry too much about making sure their sites run well on it. Which means that it's going to get increasingly costly for individuals to continue using Firefox. And, at the same time, actually making sure your site runs well on it is getting increasingly difficult. The rise of client-side JavaScript frameworks like React means that cross-browser issues have moved beyond easy-to-perceive things like ActiveX controls not being supported, or CSS rendering badly. Now the big problem is differences between JavaScript engines leading to annoying performance problems. And, if a developer is planning on doing the sane thing and relying mostly on libraries for their heavy lifting, there's just not that much that any individual can do about it. My sense, at this point, is that, going forward, the Internet does still have room for free, open, community-driven standards that aren't tightly controlled by a small number of massive corporations. However, the Web (i.e., HTML, CSS and JavaScript) does not.
  - toyg 6y ago
    This is catastrophism. If Mozilla can make a browser that developers enjoy using as daily driver, developers will make stuff for it. If Mozilla can build bridges with framework makers, frameworks will work just fine. They just need to regain some of the focus that was squandered on too many moonshots and hazardous choices (FFOS, Pocket, etc).
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      I think that that may no longer be enough. The elephant in the room is the Web taking over non-Web apps. If Electron is part of your deployment surface, you can't escape Chromium. If Cordova is part of your deployment surface, it's Chromium or WebKit. A nice UI on the dev tools is nice, but I imagine most people would take an acceptable UI over a nice one if the acceptable one is how you get a development environment that is more comparable to what life will be like in production. FFOS was a moonshot that burned a lot of resources, but I also suspect it's one of the few things that, had it been successful, could have guaranteed Firefox's long-term survival.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Initially it was an option to become the engine, then after a time it simply became the place to try and engines and they said it would never be the "new" browser engine. It was a prototyping area.
  - emayljames 6y ago
    Successful parts of Servo where integrated in Gecko, as was intended. So, in a way Gecko is largely Servo.
    - dblohm7 6y ago
      The two major Servo components are the style system and WebRender. But I wouldn't say that it is "largely" Servo by any means.
The_Colonel 6y ago
> years doesn't have long to live the market share is really worrying but OTOH Mozilla just secured another multi year deal with Google so in the short-medium term they are fine financially. I hope that a reason for all those projects cuts is at least partially creation of finacial reserves, in theory they do have enough cash and momentum to stay technologically relevant for at least 10 years.
- josh2600 6y ago
  Google needs Firefox to exist for anti-trust reasons. If they don’t buy fire fox’s traffic, bing will.
  - Nuzzerino 6y ago
    Isn't that the very definition of a "trust"?
    - ivancho 6y ago
      Not according to some very well-paid lawyers, so I guess no.
  - shultays 6y ago
    I always wondered if firefox would actually change default engine if google stops the cash. It would remove some chunk of users at least imo, can firefox really afford it?
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      They switched to Yahoo for a while.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      They’d change the default for fresh profiles but they wouldn’t dare overwrite existing installs. The former is a minor nuisance that would only cause minor grumbling but not affect market share. The latter would be actively hostile and cause significant loss of trust.
mancerayder 6y ago
The media autoplay forced on (with settings that don't turn it off in mobile or desktop) make me miserable and seriously considering using something else that isn't Chrome.
- ihaveajob 6y ago
  What, Chrome has autoplay on? How can anyone stand that? It reminds me of IE7 with auto-installed toolbars that took 1/3 of the screen.
  - mancerayder 6y ago
    Firefox does... and I can't turn it off. The websites, especially news sites, completely and utterly override the "off" settings for autoplay in firefox. And the dev team keeps changing the way those options are named as well as confusingly having a bunch of similarly named options. I'm confident that they're doing it on purpose because autoplay off hurts ad serving and it also probably pisses off traditional media sites trying to turn our browsers into TV's from the 90's blasting at us. I misworded my original. I wanted to say, I'm considering moving off Firefox, but not to Chrome.
    - cpeterso 6y ago
      Firefox currently autoplays video that has no audio. This is a delicate balance. If browsers disable autoplay by default, then advertisers will find other ways to push video ads in users' faces. I read an anecdote that Google tried disabling autoplay on mobile and advertisers started playing video ads using an H.264 video decoder in JavaScript that paints video frames to a canvas. So users still see the video ad, but now using more bandwidth, memory, and CPU.
      - mancerayder 6y ago
        Right. The developers are bad people because of this. Curses to them. Maybe they're <insert some giant ad-oriented corporation here with F or G in the name> employees moonlighting as traitors to the human condition, already suffering from forced information shoved at us, and attention issues? Any other browser recommendations?
olejorgenb 6y ago
Agreed - what I don't get is: (https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...) <quote> However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year. (... snip ...) According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year. As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average. Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in Taiwan, blaming the “economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic.” </quote> Their cost is probably much more than just staffing - but still - doesn't look that bleak? I get the non-ideal situation of being dependent on you competitor like that, but it _has_ proven to be a robust source of income so far..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... Btw.. is there any way to format a pretty quotation on HN?
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Re format, I mostly see people use markdown syntax. > This is not a real pretty quote. > But the good news is that even in uninterpreted form form markdown is pretty readable.
  - wizzwizz4 6y ago
    The syntax was in emails before Markdown. I will loudly declare that it was invented in emails so that somebody will add the immediate predecessor, and so on until we end up at an original source.
    - toxik 6y ago
      News groups?
st3fan 6y ago
Every single day hundreds of people are working on making Firefox better.
gkoberger 6y ago
Mozilla (the Company) has always had problems. They want to be something they're not. But the people on the Mozilla engineering team are top-notch and rarely affected by company drama (and probably feel the same way as you do about it). Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at Google/Apple/etc. (ex-Mozillian here :) )
- beagle3 6y ago
  Why ex?
  - capableweb 6y ago
    Quick look at the profile (unless you recognize the name) reveals Gregory is the founder of ReadMe.com (when you guys moved from io?!), so supposedly ex to start his own company!
    - gkoberger 6y ago
      Last summer! It's the most expensive thing I own haha
      - bigyikes 6y ago
        Wow, did that help business, or was it more of a vanity thing? I was thinking domains didn’t matter all that much.
        gkoberger 6y ago
        I think pg sums it up the best: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html "The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company." I'd say there's a few major reasons: protecting the name and signaling we're a real company to larger corporations. For us, we also host websites that allows JS/CSS/HTML, so being able to put our assets on a separate domain helps with security issues.
Weebs 6y ago
Is there any way we as a community of users can help ensure Firefox remains viable in the event that Mozilla can no longer provide enough support? It seems a shame that such a loved & enjoyed project might fall wayside without significant financial backing. I would say I would love to help, but I have no domain expertise in browsers/rendering, or how I would develop enough to contribute.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Use it, and if you make websites make sure you support it just as well as Chrome.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah all you can really do is use it and suggest it to people. I do this and have made a few converts (along with helping with best extensions to get without getting in their way)
- wussboy 6y ago
  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I would happily pay $10 a month for a brand “deluxe” version of Firefox. We all complain about how Firefox isn’t making money and we continue to exist in a world where I cannot pay for it. It boggles the mind.

ATsch 6y ago

I think it will take more time to say that for certain. Warp is an exception, but most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. I think the thing to be worried about is: what will happen when they run out of stuff that's already in the pipeline? Will they be able to execute the sweeping changes they'll need to do to stay within reach of blink long term? Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did.

IainIreland 6y ago
> most of the recent improvements to Firefox were initially prototyped and developed in the experimental Servo engine which was to my knowledge intended to eventually replace all of gecko. Most of the team for that has been let go. This is not the case. Servo worked on big experimental moonshot projects. They had some major successes (Stylo, WebRender), but the rest of the Firefox team wasn't sitting around twiddling their thumbs. I don't think Servo ever made up more than a small fraction of the overall Firefox workforce. They had to pick and choose their projects. Note, for example, that Servo embeds SpiderMonkey instead of writing its own JS engine from scratch: https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs https://github.com/servo/rust-mozjs Don't worry! SpiderMonkey still has additional cool projects coming down the pipeline, none of which are dependent on Servo.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  This is correct. Servo's Stylo parallelized CSS parser shipped in Firefox's "Quantum" performance release, but a huge part of the overall performance improvement came from profiling the whole system. Fixing lots of small hot spots in Firefox frontend and Gecko really added up. It's easy for tiny performance regressions to creep in here and there.
- coliveira 6y ago
  Many people are badmouthing Mozilla because they disbanded the group working on their pet language, Rust, as if this was synonym for Firefox technology. There are many things that Mozilla does beyond working on Rust.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    No, just no. they were badmouthing Mozilla because they didn't like mozilla firing their rust resources while they continue to pay enormous amounts for a CEO and other higher ups while Firefox's market share is in a death spiral currently. The only thing that can save it is better branding and "gotta have it features" which Rust can bring, along with stability.
    - coliveira 6y ago
      I'm not trying to defend their management, but my opinion here is that they concluded that investing in a new language wouldn't be the best/fastest way to evolve Firefox. Google may have money to invest in a new language, but Mozilla probably needs to be more focused.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        The executive pay shows that their conclusions about where money should be allocated have severe issues, so it's hard to trust that choice without more justification.
mumblemumble 6y ago
> Or will they have to concede like opera and edge did. I am sad to say this, but I think it's only a matter of time. At this point, the list of parties driving Web standards basically consists of a whole bunch of organizations that rely on Blink, plus Apple and Mozilla. WebKit can probably hang on for a good long while because ~15% of user-agents are required by fiat to be WebKit. Gecko? At 5% marketshare, I fear it's dropped below the point where web developers are well-incentivized worry too much about making sure their sites run well on it. Which means that it's going to get increasingly costly for individuals to continue using Firefox. And, at the same time, actually making sure your site runs well on it is getting increasingly difficult. The rise of client-side JavaScript frameworks like React means that cross-browser issues have moved beyond easy-to-perceive things like ActiveX controls not being supported, or CSS rendering badly. Now the big problem is differences between JavaScript engines leading to annoying performance problems. And, if a developer is planning on doing the sane thing and relying mostly on libraries for their heavy lifting, there's just not that much that any individual can do about it. My sense, at this point, is that, going forward, the Internet does still have room for free, open, community-driven standards that aren't tightly controlled by a small number of massive corporations. However, the Web (i.e., HTML, CSS and JavaScript) does not.
- toyg 6y ago
  This is catastrophism. If Mozilla can make a browser that developers enjoy using as daily driver, developers will make stuff for it. If Mozilla can build bridges with framework makers, frameworks will work just fine. They just need to regain some of the focus that was squandered on too many moonshots and hazardous choices (FFOS, Pocket, etc).
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    I think that that may no longer be enough. The elephant in the room is the Web taking over non-Web apps. If Electron is part of your deployment surface, you can't escape Chromium. If Cordova is part of your deployment surface, it's Chromium or WebKit. A nice UI on the dev tools is nice, but I imagine most people would take an acceptable UI over a nice one if the acceptable one is how you get a development environment that is more comparable to what life will be like in production. FFOS was a moonshot that burned a lot of resources, but I also suspect it's one of the few things that, had it been successful, could have guaranteed Firefox's long-term survival.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Initially it was an option to become the engine, then after a time it simply became the place to try and engines and they said it would never be the "new" browser engine. It was a prototyping area.
- emayljames 6y ago
  Successful parts of Servo where integrated in Gecko, as was intended. So, in a way Gecko is largely Servo.
  - dblohm7 6y ago
    The two major Servo components are the style system and WebRender. But I wouldn't say that it is "largely" Servo by any means.

The_Colonel 6y ago

> years doesn't have long to live the market share is really worrying but OTOH Mozilla just secured another multi year deal with Google so in the short-medium term they are fine financially. I hope that a reason for all those projects cuts is at least partially creation of finacial reserves, in theory they do have enough cash and momentum to stay technologically relevant for at least 10 years.

josh2600 6y ago
Google needs Firefox to exist for anti-trust reasons. If they don’t buy fire fox’s traffic, bing will.
- Nuzzerino 6y ago
  Isn't that the very definition of a "trust"?
  - ivancho 6y ago
    Not according to some very well-paid lawyers, so I guess no.
- shultays 6y ago
  I always wondered if firefox would actually change default engine if google stops the cash. It would remove some chunk of users at least imo, can firefox really afford it?
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    They switched to Yahoo for a while.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    They’d change the default for fresh profiles but they wouldn’t dare overwrite existing installs. The former is a minor nuisance that would only cause minor grumbling but not affect market share. The latter would be actively hostile and cause significant loss of trust.

mancerayder 6y ago

The media autoplay forced on (with settings that don't turn it off in mobile or desktop) make me miserable and seriously considering using something else that isn't Chrome.

ihaveajob 6y ago
What, Chrome has autoplay on? How can anyone stand that? It reminds me of IE7 with auto-installed toolbars that took 1/3 of the screen.
- mancerayder 6y ago
  Firefox does... and I can't turn it off. The websites, especially news sites, completely and utterly override the "off" settings for autoplay in firefox. And the dev team keeps changing the way those options are named as well as confusingly having a bunch of similarly named options. I'm confident that they're doing it on purpose because autoplay off hurts ad serving and it also probably pisses off traditional media sites trying to turn our browsers into TV's from the 90's blasting at us. I misworded my original. I wanted to say, I'm considering moving off Firefox, but not to Chrome.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    Firefox currently autoplays video that has no audio. This is a delicate balance. If browsers disable autoplay by default, then advertisers will find other ways to push video ads in users' faces. I read an anecdote that Google tried disabling autoplay on mobile and advertisers started playing video ads using an H.264 video decoder in JavaScript that paints video frames to a canvas. So users still see the video ad, but now using more bandwidth, memory, and CPU.
    - mancerayder 6y ago
      Right. The developers are bad people because of this. Curses to them. Maybe they're <insert some giant ad-oriented corporation here with F or G in the name> employees moonlighting as traitors to the human condition, already suffering from forced information shoved at us, and attention issues? Any other browser recommendations?

olejorgenb 6y ago

Agreed - what I don't get is: (https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...) <quote> However, our source told us Moz will likely pocket $400m to $450m a year between now and 2023 from the arrangement, citing internal discussions held earlier this year. (... snip ...) According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year. As a non-profit open-source operation, Mozilla spends as much as it receives; its 2018 staffing bill was $286m with a headcount of about 1,000, or about $286,000 per person, on average. Despite the renewal with Google, which essentially guaranteed a continuation of its revenue for the next three years, Mozilla axed 250 of its techies on Tuesday, and shut down its office in Taiwan, blaming the “economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic.” </quote> Their cost is probably much more than just staffing - but still - doesn't look that bleak? I get the non-ideal situation of being dependent on you competitor like that, but it _has_ proven to be a robust source of income so far..: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Affiliatio... Btw.. is there any way to format a pretty quotation on HN?

bobthepanda 6y ago
Re format, I mostly see people use markdown syntax. > This is not a real pretty quote. > But the good news is that even in uninterpreted form form markdown is pretty readable.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  The syntax was in emails before Markdown. I will loudly declare that it was invented in emails so that somebody will add the immediate predecessor, and so on until we end up at an original source.
  - toxik 6y ago
    News groups?

st3fan 6y ago

Every single day hundreds of people are working on making Firefox better.

gkoberger 6y ago

Mozilla (the Company) has always had problems. They want to be something they're not. But the people on the Mozilla engineering team are top-notch and rarely affected by company drama (and probably feel the same way as you do about it). Mozilla is one of the few places you can do this specific type of really interesting engineering work, without having to be at Google/Apple/etc. (ex-Mozillian here :) )

beagle3 6y ago
Why ex?
- capableweb 6y ago
  Quick look at the profile (unless you recognize the name) reveals Gregory is the founder of ReadMe.com (when you guys moved from io?!), so supposedly ex to start his own company!
  - gkoberger 6y ago
    Last summer! It's the most expensive thing I own haha
    - bigyikes 6y ago
      Wow, did that help business, or was it more of a vanity thing? I was thinking domains didn’t matter all that much.
      - gkoberger 6y ago
        I think pg sums it up the best: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html "The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company." I'd say there's a few major reasons: protecting the name and signaling we're a real company to larger corporations. For us, we also host websites that allows JS/CSS/HTML, so being able to put our assets on a separate domain helps with security issues.

Weebs 6y ago

Is there any way we as a community of users can help ensure Firefox remains viable in the event that Mozilla can no longer provide enough support? It seems a shame that such a loved & enjoyed project might fall wayside without significant financial backing. I would say I would love to help, but I have no domain expertise in browsers/rendering, or how I would develop enough to contribute.

deadbunny 6y ago
Use it, and if you make websites make sure you support it just as well as Chrome.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yeah all you can really do is use it and suggest it to people. I do this and have made a few converts (along with helping with best extensions to get without getting in their way)
wussboy 6y ago
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. I would happily pay $10 a month for a brand “deluxe” version of Firefox. We all complain about how Firefox isn’t making money and we continue to exist in a world where I cannot pay for it. It boggles the mind.