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Firefox: The Jewel^WEmbarassment of Open Source

101 points by caution 6y ago

chappi42 6y ago
Frustrating that after all those nice world web saving words "only" egoistical overpaid upper management people remain. On the other side, these are likely the people who bring in all the money from Google. Hmm?
- wmf 6y ago
  The users are the ones who bring in the money from Google. Negotiating "give us the same deal as Safari but smaller" can't require genius leadership. OTOH even cutting execute pay to zero wouldn't come close to helping Firefox's financials so I think this argument is overblown.
superkuh 6y ago
Everything there is correct except the response. Don't give up on the web. Just stop using websites that implement user hostile things like web components. It sucks but not nearly as much as switching to a new protocol. The corporate web (like github/youtube/etc) will become inaccessible but there's plenty of real websites out there. At least until the search engines start filtering them out for not leashing themselves to some TLS cert feudal lord. On this subject, see also: https://linuxreviews.org/Modern_Web_Standards_Are_Leaving_Niche_Web_Browsers_Behind https://linuxreviews.org/Modern_Web_Standards_Are_Leaving_Ni... "Modern Web Standards Are Leaving Niche Web Browsers Behind"
- ddevault 6y ago
  Speaking specifically as a Gemini enthusiast: We don't want "the web, but less of it". Do you not realize that "less of it" is still a whole hell of a lot of web? Take a look at Netsurf: 13 years of development and half a million lines of C and it's probably the most advanced rendering engine after the big three. And yet, one of my websites, sourcehut.org, renders like this: https://l.sr.ht/_2pv.png https://l.sr.ht/_2pv.png On WebEngine, it should look like this: https://l.sr.ht/bSdI.png https://l.sr.ht/bSdI.png And this is one of the most conservative websites on the modern internet. The problem with using the web, but less of it, is that the web is still incredibly complicated and even conservative websites require a massive engineering undertaking to render properly, and it just takes one link to a more liberal page to ruin the experience entirely. Gemini is a separate, self-contained network, based on a much simpler philosophy. I wrote my Gemini client in two afternoons, and it's already pleasant to use with all Gemini pages. We don't want the web, but less. We want something else entirely.
  - est31 6y ago
    > The problem with using the web, but less of it, is that the web is still incredibly complicated and even conservative websites require a massive engineering undertaking to render properly The main problem is that "less of it" isn't well defined, so any website, while still appearing to require little of the web, requires its own subset. If there is a clear demarcation about which features are supported and which aren't, then websites can be built targeting this smaller subset, and everyone would be happy. There is no need to reinvent the wheel and start totally from scratch. Reading the Gemini specification, it seems like a NIH of HTTP. What's wrong about a HTTP 1.0 server?
    - ddevault 6y ago
      If you start with the web but less, you're never going to shake the web. You're still fundamentally buying into the same ecosystem. I don't want to be a subset of a broader ecosystem which I hate. I want a new ecosystem.
  - oscargrouch 6y ago
    Is there anything on Gemini that prevents centralization? Because lets suppose this will happen, everyone now goes for the sweet land of Gemini. At the beginning it will be just like the web in the nineties, full of indies web sites, a dozen open source clients, that implements the protocol, yay! Profit right? Here now enter the 2000's of Gemini.. startups begin to grow stronger most of them mediating and selling the content of others that they get for free. The individual gemini sites begin to fade, the startups create Gemini clients with a lot of new features starting to turn impossible for new implementations. (Now its the time we start to ask ourselves, where did we see that movie?) So whats the point of a new protocol or standard, if it doesnt solve the real issues we are facing nowadays, and the only solution it provides its to manipulate people emotions that we should get back to that romantic era of the internet, the 'belle epoque'. "Its hard to solve the modern issues? get your time machine pal, lets get to the nineties and start everything again without solving the core issues, and if by chance we happen to thrive, just let those big problems to be solved by your grandson" There is only one thing we should be doing right now: Decentralize the internet, making "blue seas" for new things to thrive making the moves of FAANGS to centralize and control data, information and computation futile by getting people out of a game they control. A solution like Gemini would reset the game, yes, but only to have the same problems later, giving the creators were not trying to solve them in the first place. Gemini is trying to solve a problem by using denial, and as we know, it doesnt actually solve the problems. It just make them disappear temporarily to hit us again in a near future. You can make a Gemini client in two weeks? thats great, this is probably what you would take to make browsers in the nineties..
- mhd 6y ago
  Even the people moving away from the regular web will most likely be switch-hitting. Using MegaGloboChromeWeb for all that stuff where you have to do it, but also trying separate approaches. Gemini might be one of them, for applications where hyperlinked text offerings make sense. But betting too much on a single protocol is what got us in this place. For example, this site makes no sense to me at all, technically speaking. There's nothing HN offers that couldn't be done with Usenet or a mailing list. Alas...
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  At what point is it okay to depend on a feature? > not leashing themselves to some TLS cert feudal lord Really? You can get one free and change at any time.
  - eznzt 6y ago
    You can change what? How many companies are giving away SSL certificates?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      You can change if and who you get a cert from. If you're really that worried about Let's Encrypt turning evil, you could stop having one when that actually happens. Or get a free one from many DNS providers. Or pay $5 for one. There is zero lock-in, and keeping traffic encrypted is a good thing.
      - davvolun 6y ago
        And just for encryption, you can self-sign. Obviously that doesn't work for the web, but "TLS cert feudal lord" doesn't track for me at all.
        superkuh 6y ago
        Self-signing is exactly what I've done for all my sites. But browsers are getting more and more restrictive about what they will allow their users to see. Right now technically ignorant people will be so confused and frightened by warnings they click away. That's okay, I don't care about those people. But for many it's a deal breaker. I give it about 3 years before the big corporate browsers stop allowing HTTP at all. Search engines already deprioritize HTTP and eventually they'll just delist. And it won't hurt their income one bit. The number of sites that don't HTTP and just 304 to HTTPS is already frightening.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
- neurobashing 6y ago
  I think giving up on the web is doubly wrong, because these days, the web is constantly changing. Just this week we've seen how QUIC/HTTP3 is a big thing, and it's a leap from HTTP2, and a huge leap from 1.1. We've seen small revolutions all over the place. Yeah, it's not clear which ones will "stick" but I think there's still time for meaningful change that doesn't require boiling the ocean.
  - eznzt 6y ago
    Isn't QUIC/HTTP3 a protocol that improves the performance of pipelining which is something that very bloated webpages benefit from? Isn't that something we should move away from?
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Sometimes you want to load a bunch of thumbnails. Pipelining is pretty good. Though you can pipeline just fine on HTTP/1.1 if people would actually enable it.
    - rektide 6y ago
      Pipelining is something that helps everyone other than the gigantic new breed of "single page web apps" that are actually just single gigantic JS files. We should definitely definitely definitely be trying to help pipelining. Unless you send only one resource, pipelining is probably a huge win. And it definitely, from the server side, makes things way easier. As you can get a bunch of requests & start satisfying them in whatever order works for you. This isn't like HTTP 1.1 Pipelining, which was in order: now connected systems can out of order send whatever data they have, without having to buffer it & wait for the first asked for data to clear the pipe. This is massively massively helpful tech we are creating. Attaching it to "very bloated webpages", & implying this is something "we should move away from" is a high level of shade that is not at all in any way deserved nor fair nor accurate.
    - neurobashing 6y ago
      I was arguing less for a specific tool, technology, or whatever, and more that the web as platform is constantly in flux and so "throwing it away" makes no sense. You don't stop using the Interstate system bc a stretch of road is bad.
imglorp 6y ago
> Forget about the web, it’s a lost cause. Let’s move on. Drew drops that bomb and walks off stage. Okay, so what comes after the web?
- ddevault 6y ago
  As a matter of fact, I explained exactly what comes after the web immediately prior to the quoted statement in TFA.
  - sho_hn 6y ago
    We totally have a kio plugin already so you can gemini in Konqueror. I mean, we fucked the thing up once already by sparking WebKit and Blink through KHTML, but ...
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    I don't see gemini becoming popular in the mainstream without image support. Maybe it could survive as a niche thing, but it will not "come after" the web.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      Gemini clients could easily add support for images: if a URL ends in .png et al, fetch it and if the mimetype is image/* then just stick it in the page. Tada! Some clients already do this.
  - cytzol 6y ago
    I read an overview of Gemini that described it like this: gemini is a new internet protocol which: - is heavier than gopher - is lighter than the web - will not replace either It looks like you disagree — how come?
    - ddevault 6y ago
      It won't completely replace the web, but I hope that it's a viable replacement for a subset of the web worth preserving. The rest of the web is either (1) best served some other way or (2) not worth keeping.
influx 6y ago
You forgot firing the technical CEO who had been with the company since 1995 (who btw also invented Javascript) for his personal politics. Looks like it worked out well for the company.
- btrask 6y ago
  Yeah but just look at Brave. Is that really what you would've wanted Firefox to become? This is just a sad story without any winners.
- kjakm 6y ago
  We need to stop this trend of calling anti-equal rights views "politics" as a way of playing down their severity. If your personal opinions are that others don't deserve the same basic rights that you have you should face the consequences of holding those beliefs. Gay marriage is no different than any other civil rights issue and we wouldn't excuse someone who was against equal rights for women or people of another race because it's their "personal politics" and they're entitled to their view.
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    Except when more important things are on the line. Werner Von Braun begs to differ.
    - heavenlyblue 6y ago
      Are you trying to say rockets would not be invented without him?
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    Amusing to see people at the top of the most fashionable industry while holding the moral views of a 19th century.
  - CitrusFruits 6y ago
    While you may be right in that allowing for gay marriage is a good thing, I think talking about it in this manner is really divisive. I mean, in one comment your bundling together a group of people, assuming that one belief begets another, then comparing that belief with other popular less divisive beliefs. It feels like an attempt at shaming, which I personally don't think is productive.
InTheArena 6y ago
I blame a lot of this on firing the CEO for donating to a politician that the mob didn’t like. That tells you what the corporate priorities are.
- gilrain 6y ago
  He donated to the campaign of a proposition aimed at removing rights from a group of people, many of whom were his employees. You can agree or disagree with the consequences for that, but at least get the facts straight.
trefil 6y ago
Ironic that the author calls people fools and then proceeds to advertise Gemini as if it has any chance of succeeding outside the small group of people interested who will probably forget about the project in a few years anyway.
gorgoiler 6y ago
It’s amazing that it’s 2020 and we still haven’t managed to completely fuck up either (1) the web or (2) email. Can’t blame Google for trying though. Ditch Chrome. Ditch Gmail. Your vote will be a drop in the ocean, but as an internet leader, you need to at least empathize with life outside the Google Gardens.
- est31 6y ago
  email is slowly being fucked up by the abomination that's called html e-mail. An increasing number of services sends only crap in their non html versions of stuff. Recently I had to enable thunderbird's feature to use stripped down html so that I could interact with some of those services.
  - yread 6y ago
    I had to recently switch all my transactional email templates to HTML as plain text only wasn't enough to satisfy the finicky anti-spam gods.
  - gen220 6y ago
    My hope is that, depending on the service they're tendering, plaintext (or at least static) emails will become a legal requirement. What if you need to read a "dynamic" email a few years after it was sent, and the company rendering the dynamic components goes away? And those dynamic components are somehow essential to the content of the email? A receipt, for example. There's some precedent for this kind of regulation. For example, the government requires medicare advantage insurance carriers to send physical mail to insured members under many circumstances, regardless of the member's digital-accessibility constraints or lack thereof.
klelatti 6y ago
So Mozilla has been / is badly run and implementing a web browser is incredibly complex and Google is too dominant..... So we should abandon the web in favour of something much more limited which will never be more than a niche standard. Sorry this is a complete non-sequitur. Maybe it makes a small minority of people happy but it does nothing for the vast majority of users who will have to deal (whether they know it or not) with the web issues described. I don't have answers to these issues but giving up isn't the answer.
unethical_ban 6y ago
What's wrong with putting a strong brand on VPN? What's wrong with giving some credibility with a chainlink fence around addons? I get the complexity argument, but the rest... meh
- wmf 6y ago
  Consumer VPNs are mostly snake oil. I'd prefer to see Mozilla educating people about why VPNs mostly aren't needed.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    So they don't obfuscate your IP address from endpoints? I don't know your metric for success. I need one because I acquire linux ISOs and my new ISP suddenly sends me notices.
- gilrain 6y ago
  I think Mozilla should be innovating, very preferably by focusing on Firefox. They should not get used to trading on their name via rebrands. Mozilla VPN is rebranded Mullvad. Firefox Private Network is rebranded Cloudflare Warp.
dx87 6y ago
Couldn't agree more, and Gemini sounds very interesting. Even if it probably won't be a huge thing, it's nice to know that there are people who haven't just decided to roll over and accept the current state and direction of the web. I'm a pretty novice programmer, so I think I'll try and implement a client to try and evaluate for myself how simple it is.
liminal 6y ago
Imagine investing years of effort to invent a new programming language to build a better browser in... and then when it's wildly successful, not using it. smh
- jamienicol 6y ago
  Rust is still being used throughout Mozilla.
  - liminal 6y ago
    It is, but it was invented so that Mozilla could build a radically more performant browser. That was going to be Servo until they decided that replacing their rendering engine was too high risk. So now they have a radically more performant CSS styling library and all the problems they set out to solve are still there.
X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago
The fact that this post doesn't appear to even be hosted on gemini or even available as a flat text file goes to show that they aren't taking their "Lets abandon the web" seriously.
- ddevault 6y ago
  It is hosted on Gemini: gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.gmi It's posted on the web as well because users of the web is its intended audience.
jeroenhd 6y ago
Yes, let's all switch to a new protocol that's barely implemented and doesn't allow for the things we've come to rely on because Mozilla made a few side projects. Sorry, but that's not how the world works. The web is here to stay and practically nobody cares about your silly little gopher clone. Mozilla is the best failed project open source has to offer. Nothing comes close in terms of popularity and brand awareness. Perhaps people know of GIMP because of its funny name, but that's about all the open source tools any layman is able to name, if any.
cytzol 6y ago
While I was reading this post, I felt the same way as I read the HN comments on the Mozilla layoffs two months ago: misplaced blame. I admit I have a soft spot for Mozilla, having used Firefox since Firebird. I really want them to succeed, which colours my thoughts on this topic, and it makes me sad to hear them engaging in shady behaviour. But the impression I got from this post is this: the author believes if Mozilla focuses solely on Firefox (no VPN, more engineers, Servo development full steam ahead) they would be doing better, with Firefox having more users and more money than ever before to go around. I do not believe this to be the case. The post frames "Laid off 25% of its employees, mostly engineers, many of whom work on Firefox" and "Used their brand to enter the saturated VPN grift market" and "Started, and killed, a dozen projects which were not Firefox" as Mozilla's self-inflicted failures, rather than wounds sustained while engaging in battle with corporate giants. I disapprove of the increased executive pay, as well as the advertisements and add-on changes. But I cannot quite find them to be totally at fault for all seven listed items. There's been a lot of engineering effort recently from big companies to make the Web more featureful, and its associated infrastructure faster, than ever before. I completely agree with the author (see the linked post) when he points out that the massive side-effect of this is that only a big company can make a Web browser. It's something that seems to have crept up on us, and will almost certainly take control away from individual users. It sucks. So as far as I'm concened, Google has been the company complicating Web standards without talking to anyone else, developing infrastructure that's only appropriate for massive organisations, and (more recently) exempting themselves from opting out of tracking, all while pushing their browser through previously-unheard-of advertising channels to give them the advantage. All this means Firefox has to catch up, and the money has to come from somewhere — hence the layoffs and other projects. I don't see any other way for them to reach the future I want. To repeat: it sucks. While I wasn't old enough to donate, I liked seeing the 2004 Firefox page in the New York Times. A few years ago I walked through London and saw three electronic Chrome adverts in half an hour. I think Mozilla has the deck stacked against them, severely. And I think nothing would make Google executives happier than to find _Firefox_ is the one getting called names.
- ddevault 6y ago
  For the record, I also have expressed plenty of choice words for both Google and Chrome, too. I think the whole web is garbage and I'm prepared to throw it out. That's the point I'm getting at here. I don't see Mozilla as the last holdouts of a system which is true and good before the flood of Google overtakes everything and ruins the good thing. I see Mozilla as already drowning in that flood and the "good thing" as being not good, but abhorrent. Maybe they could have held the tide, but instead they stuck their fingers in every fad they could reach, and got burned, and now they're neck deep in problems of their own making. And I don't think it'd be better if they were ankle deep anyway.
blato 6y ago
I agree Mozilla screwed up. Especially in comparison to others such as Blender which managed to build something better than the proprietary alternatives by gathering fund through sponsors & donations without ever sacrificing their values such as the GPL openness and while keeping all the focus on Blender. They even obtained a place at Khronos and have a voice on the future of compute & graphic standards. I donate to Blender because I know that not a single cent is wasted. Mozilla is the opposite, everything is wasted & there is no focus. I would gladly donate to a new foundation for a browser that takes the same model as Blender, Godot, etc. : start small, stay focused & don't sacrifice your core values
svnpenn 6y ago
I can say without hesitation, that Firefox is the worst piece of open source software that I use. Hands down. And has been for many years. In fact it's so bad, that I've been using Waterfox for a few months. If any better option becomes available, I will immediately switch. I hate that they shove updates down your throat, and you have to literally set a policy to disable them. Then if you ask about it, they look at you like you are crazy. I don't like auto updates. That's my right. I find a version that works, I don't want it changing every week. I want to update when I want to. Then you have other stuff like the megabar, which Firefox implemented to be more like Chrome (I guess). Looking through about 10 issues on bugzilla about it that were all closed as WON'T FIX, then they hide any negative comments and threaten bugzilla ban from anyone that express dislike. And cherry on top, they make it impossible to disable via settings, you have to do CSS hacks.

101 points by caution 6y ago

Frustrating that after all those nice world web saving words "only" egoistical overpaid upper management people remain. On the other side, these are likely the people who bring in all the money from Google. Hmm?

wmf 6y ago
The users are the ones who bring in the money from Google. Negotiating "give us the same deal as Safari but smaller" can't require genius leadership. OTOH even cutting execute pay to zero wouldn't come close to helping Firefox's financials so I think this argument is overblown.

superkuh 6y ago

Everything there is correct except the response. Don't give up on the web. Just stop using websites that implement user hostile things like web components. It sucks but not nearly as much as switching to a new protocol. The corporate web (like github/youtube/etc) will become inaccessible but there's plenty of real websites out there. At least until the search engines start filtering them out for not leashing themselves to some TLS cert feudal lord. On this subject, see also: https://linuxreviews.org/Modern_Web_Standards_Are_Leaving_Niche_Web_Browsers_Behind https://linuxreviews.org/Modern_Web_Standards_Are_Leaving_Ni... "Modern Web Standards Are Leaving Niche Web Browsers Behind"

ddevault 6y ago
Speaking specifically as a Gemini enthusiast: We don't want "the web, but less of it". Do you not realize that "less of it" is still a whole hell of a lot of web? Take a look at Netsurf: 13 years of development and half a million lines of C and it's probably the most advanced rendering engine after the big three. And yet, one of my websites, sourcehut.org, renders like this: https://l.sr.ht/_2pv.png https://l.sr.ht/_2pv.png On WebEngine, it should look like this: https://l.sr.ht/bSdI.png https://l.sr.ht/bSdI.png And this is one of the most conservative websites on the modern internet. The problem with using the web, but less of it, is that the web is still incredibly complicated and even conservative websites require a massive engineering undertaking to render properly, and it just takes one link to a more liberal page to ruin the experience entirely. Gemini is a separate, self-contained network, based on a much simpler philosophy. I wrote my Gemini client in two afternoons, and it's already pleasant to use with all Gemini pages. We don't want the web, but less. We want something else entirely.
- est31 6y ago
  > The problem with using the web, but less of it, is that the web is still incredibly complicated and even conservative websites require a massive engineering undertaking to render properly The main problem is that "less of it" isn't well defined, so any website, while still appearing to require little of the web, requires its own subset. If there is a clear demarcation about which features are supported and which aren't, then websites can be built targeting this smaller subset, and everyone would be happy. There is no need to reinvent the wheel and start totally from scratch. Reading the Gemini specification, it seems like a NIH of HTTP. What's wrong about a HTTP 1.0 server?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    If you start with the web but less, you're never going to shake the web. You're still fundamentally buying into the same ecosystem. I don't want to be a subset of a broader ecosystem which I hate. I want a new ecosystem.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  Is there anything on Gemini that prevents centralization? Because lets suppose this will happen, everyone now goes for the sweet land of Gemini. At the beginning it will be just like the web in the nineties, full of indies web sites, a dozen open source clients, that implements the protocol, yay! Profit right? Here now enter the 2000's of Gemini.. startups begin to grow stronger most of them mediating and selling the content of others that they get for free. The individual gemini sites begin to fade, the startups create Gemini clients with a lot of new features starting to turn impossible for new implementations. (Now its the time we start to ask ourselves, where did we see that movie?) So whats the point of a new protocol or standard, if it doesnt solve the real issues we are facing nowadays, and the only solution it provides its to manipulate people emotions that we should get back to that romantic era of the internet, the 'belle epoque'. "Its hard to solve the modern issues? get your time machine pal, lets get to the nineties and start everything again without solving the core issues, and if by chance we happen to thrive, just let those big problems to be solved by your grandson" There is only one thing we should be doing right now: Decentralize the internet, making "blue seas" for new things to thrive making the moves of FAANGS to centralize and control data, information and computation futile by getting people out of a game they control. A solution like Gemini would reset the game, yes, but only to have the same problems later, giving the creators were not trying to solve them in the first place. Gemini is trying to solve a problem by using denial, and as we know, it doesnt actually solve the problems. It just make them disappear temporarily to hit us again in a near future. You can make a Gemini client in two weeks? thats great, this is probably what you would take to make browsers in the nineties..
mhd 6y ago
Even the people moving away from the regular web will most likely be switch-hitting. Using MegaGloboChromeWeb for all that stuff where you have to do it, but also trying separate approaches. Gemini might be one of them, for applications where hyperlinked text offerings make sense. But betting too much on a single protocol is what got us in this place. For example, this site makes no sense to me at all, technically speaking. There's nothing HN offers that couldn't be done with Usenet or a mailing list. Alas...
Dylan16807 6y ago
At what point is it okay to depend on a feature? > not leashing themselves to some TLS cert feudal lord Really? You can get one free and change at any time.
- eznzt 6y ago
  You can change what? How many companies are giving away SSL certificates?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    You can change if and who you get a cert from. If you're really that worried about Let's Encrypt turning evil, you could stop having one when that actually happens. Or get a free one from many DNS providers. Or pay $5 for one. There is zero lock-in, and keeping traffic encrypted is a good thing.
    - davvolun 6y ago
      And just for encryption, you can self-sign. Obviously that doesn't work for the web, but "TLS cert feudal lord" doesn't track for me at all.
      - superkuh 6y ago
        Self-signing is exactly what I've done for all my sites. But browsers are getting more and more restrictive about what they will allow their users to see. Right now technically ignorant people will be so confused and frightened by warnings they click away. That's okay, I don't care about those people. But for many it's a deal breaker. I give it about 3 years before the big corporate browsers stop allowing HTTP at all. Search engines already deprioritize HTTP and eventually they'll just delist. And it won't hurt their income one bit. The number of sites that don't HTTP and just 304 to HTTPS is already frightening.
        Dylan16807 6y ago
neurobashing 6y ago
I think giving up on the web is doubly wrong, because these days, the web is constantly changing. Just this week we've seen how QUIC/HTTP3 is a big thing, and it's a leap from HTTP2, and a huge leap from 1.1. We've seen small revolutions all over the place. Yeah, it's not clear which ones will "stick" but I think there's still time for meaningful change that doesn't require boiling the ocean.
- eznzt 6y ago
  Isn't QUIC/HTTP3 a protocol that improves the performance of pipelining which is something that very bloated webpages benefit from? Isn't that something we should move away from?
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    Sometimes you want to load a bunch of thumbnails. Pipelining is pretty good. Though you can pipeline just fine on HTTP/1.1 if people would actually enable it.
  - rektide 6y ago
    Pipelining is something that helps everyone other than the gigantic new breed of "single page web apps" that are actually just single gigantic JS files. We should definitely definitely definitely be trying to help pipelining. Unless you send only one resource, pipelining is probably a huge win. And it definitely, from the server side, makes things way easier. As you can get a bunch of requests & start satisfying them in whatever order works for you. This isn't like HTTP 1.1 Pipelining, which was in order: now connected systems can out of order send whatever data they have, without having to buffer it & wait for the first asked for data to clear the pipe. This is massively massively helpful tech we are creating. Attaching it to "very bloated webpages", & implying this is something "we should move away from" is a high level of shade that is not at all in any way deserved nor fair nor accurate.
  - neurobashing 6y ago
    I was arguing less for a specific tool, technology, or whatever, and more that the web as platform is constantly in flux and so "throwing it away" makes no sense. You don't stop using the Interstate system bc a stretch of road is bad.

imglorp 6y ago

> Forget about the web, it’s a lost cause. Let’s move on. Drew drops that bomb and walks off stage. Okay, so what comes after the web?

ddevault 6y ago
As a matter of fact, I explained exactly what comes after the web immediately prior to the quoted statement in TFA.
- sho_hn 6y ago
  We totally have a kio plugin already so you can gemini in Konqueror. I mean, we fucked the thing up once already by sparking WebKit and Blink through KHTML, but ...
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I don't see gemini becoming popular in the mainstream without image support. Maybe it could survive as a niche thing, but it will not "come after" the web.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Gemini clients could easily add support for images: if a URL ends in .png et al, fetch it and if the mimetype is image/* then just stick it in the page. Tada! Some clients already do this.
- cytzol 6y ago
  I read an overview of Gemini that described it like this: gemini is a new internet protocol which: - is heavier than gopher - is lighter than the web - will not replace either It looks like you disagree — how come?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    It won't completely replace the web, but I hope that it's a viable replacement for a subset of the web worth preserving. The rest of the web is either (1) best served some other way or (2) not worth keeping.

influx 6y ago

You forgot firing the technical CEO who had been with the company since 1995 (who btw also invented Javascript) for his personal politics. Looks like it worked out well for the company.

btrask 6y ago
Yeah but just look at Brave. Is that really what you would've wanted Firefox to become? This is just a sad story without any winners.
kjakm 6y ago
We need to stop this trend of calling anti-equal rights views "politics" as a way of playing down their severity. If your personal opinions are that others don't deserve the same basic rights that you have you should face the consequences of holding those beliefs. Gay marriage is no different than any other civil rights issue and we wouldn't excuse someone who was against equal rights for women or people of another race because it's their "personal politics" and they're entitled to their view.
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  Except when more important things are on the line. Werner Von Braun begs to differ.
  - heavenlyblue 6y ago
    Are you trying to say rockets would not be invented without him?
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  Amusing to see people at the top of the most fashionable industry while holding the moral views of a 19th century.
- CitrusFruits 6y ago
  While you may be right in that allowing for gay marriage is a good thing, I think talking about it in this manner is really divisive. I mean, in one comment your bundling together a group of people, assuming that one belief begets another, then comparing that belief with other popular less divisive beliefs. It feels like an attempt at shaming, which I personally don't think is productive.

InTheArena 6y ago

I blame a lot of this on firing the CEO for donating to a politician that the mob didn’t like. That tells you what the corporate priorities are.

gilrain 6y ago
He donated to the campaign of a proposition aimed at removing rights from a group of people, many of whom were his employees. You can agree or disagree with the consequences for that, but at least get the facts straight.

trefil 6y ago

Ironic that the author calls people fools and then proceeds to advertise Gemini as if it has any chance of succeeding outside the small group of people interested who will probably forget about the project in a few years anyway.

gorgoiler 6y ago

It’s amazing that it’s 2020 and we still haven’t managed to completely fuck up either (1) the web or (2) email. Can’t blame Google for trying though. Ditch Chrome. Ditch Gmail. Your vote will be a drop in the ocean, but as an internet leader, you need to at least empathize with life outside the Google Gardens.

est31 6y ago
email is slowly being fucked up by the abomination that's called html e-mail. An increasing number of services sends only crap in their non html versions of stuff. Recently I had to enable thunderbird's feature to use stripped down html so that I could interact with some of those services.
- yread 6y ago
  I had to recently switch all my transactional email templates to HTML as plain text only wasn't enough to satisfy the finicky anti-spam gods.
- gen220 6y ago
  My hope is that, depending on the service they're tendering, plaintext (or at least static) emails will become a legal requirement. What if you need to read a "dynamic" email a few years after it was sent, and the company rendering the dynamic components goes away? And those dynamic components are somehow essential to the content of the email? A receipt, for example. There's some precedent for this kind of regulation. For example, the government requires medicare advantage insurance carriers to send physical mail to insured members under many circumstances, regardless of the member's digital-accessibility constraints or lack thereof.

klelatti 6y ago

So Mozilla has been / is badly run and implementing a web browser is incredibly complex and Google is too dominant..... So we should abandon the web in favour of something much more limited which will never be more than a niche standard. Sorry this is a complete non-sequitur. Maybe it makes a small minority of people happy but it does nothing for the vast majority of users who will have to deal (whether they know it or not) with the web issues described. I don't have answers to these issues but giving up isn't the answer.

unethical_ban 6y ago

What's wrong with putting a strong brand on VPN? What's wrong with giving some credibility with a chainlink fence around addons? I get the complexity argument, but the rest... meh

wmf 6y ago
Consumer VPNs are mostly snake oil. I'd prefer to see Mozilla educating people about why VPNs mostly aren't needed.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  So they don't obfuscate your IP address from endpoints? I don't know your metric for success. I need one because I acquire linux ISOs and my new ISP suddenly sends me notices.
gilrain 6y ago
I think Mozilla should be innovating, very preferably by focusing on Firefox. They should not get used to trading on their name via rebrands. Mozilla VPN is rebranded Mullvad. Firefox Private Network is rebranded Cloudflare Warp.

dx87 6y ago

Couldn't agree more, and Gemini sounds very interesting. Even if it probably won't be a huge thing, it's nice to know that there are people who haven't just decided to roll over and accept the current state and direction of the web. I'm a pretty novice programmer, so I think I'll try and implement a client to try and evaluate for myself how simple it is.

liminal 6y ago

Imagine investing years of effort to invent a new programming language to build a better browser in... and then when it's wildly successful, not using it. smh

jamienicol 6y ago
Rust is still being used throughout Mozilla.
- liminal 6y ago
  It is, but it was invented so that Mozilla could build a radically more performant browser. That was going to be Servo until they decided that replacing their rendering engine was too high risk. So now they have a radically more performant CSS styling library and all the problems they set out to solve are still there.

X6S1x6Okd1st 6y ago

The fact that this post doesn't appear to even be hosted on gemini or even available as a flat text file goes to show that they aren't taking their "Lets abandon the web" seriously.

ddevault 6y ago
It is hosted on Gemini: gemini://drewdevault.com/2020/10/22/Firefox-the-embarassment-of-FOSS.gmi It's posted on the web as well because users of the web is its intended audience.

jeroenhd 6y ago

Yes, let's all switch to a new protocol that's barely implemented and doesn't allow for the things we've come to rely on because Mozilla made a few side projects. Sorry, but that's not how the world works. The web is here to stay and practically nobody cares about your silly little gopher clone. Mozilla is the best failed project open source has to offer. Nothing comes close in terms of popularity and brand awareness. Perhaps people know of GIMP because of its funny name, but that's about all the open source tools any layman is able to name, if any.

cytzol 6y ago

While I was reading this post, I felt the same way as I read the HN comments on the Mozilla layoffs two months ago: misplaced blame. I admit I have a soft spot for Mozilla, having used Firefox since Firebird. I really want them to succeed, which colours my thoughts on this topic, and it makes me sad to hear them engaging in shady behaviour. But the impression I got from this post is this: the author believes if Mozilla focuses solely on Firefox (no VPN, more engineers, Servo development full steam ahead) they would be doing better, with Firefox having more users and more money than ever before to go around. I do not believe this to be the case. The post frames "Laid off 25% of its employees, mostly engineers, many of whom work on Firefox" and "Used their brand to enter the saturated VPN grift market" and "Started, and killed, a dozen projects which were not Firefox" as Mozilla's self-inflicted failures, rather than wounds sustained while engaging in battle with corporate giants. I disapprove of the increased executive pay, as well as the advertisements and add-on changes. But I cannot quite find them to be totally at fault for all seven listed items. There's been a lot of engineering effort recently from big companies to make the Web more featureful, and its associated infrastructure faster, than ever before. I completely agree with the author (see the linked post) when he points out that the massive side-effect of this is that only a big company can make a Web browser. It's something that seems to have crept up on us, and will almost certainly take control away from individual users. It sucks. So as far as I'm concened, Google has been the company complicating Web standards without talking to anyone else, developing infrastructure that's only appropriate for massive organisations, and (more recently) exempting themselves from opting out of tracking, all while pushing their browser through previously-unheard-of advertising channels to give them the advantage. All this means Firefox has to catch up, and the money has to come from somewhere — hence the layoffs and other projects. I don't see any other way for them to reach the future I want. To repeat: it sucks. While I wasn't old enough to donate, I liked seeing the 2004 Firefox page in the New York Times. A few years ago I walked through London and saw three electronic Chrome adverts in half an hour. I think Mozilla has the deck stacked against them, severely. And I think nothing would make Google executives happier than to find _Firefox_ is the one getting called names.

ddevault 6y ago
For the record, I also have expressed plenty of choice words for both Google and Chrome, too. I think the whole web is garbage and I'm prepared to throw it out. That's the point I'm getting at here. I don't see Mozilla as the last holdouts of a system which is true and good before the flood of Google overtakes everything and ruins the good thing. I see Mozilla as already drowning in that flood and the "good thing" as being not good, but abhorrent. Maybe they could have held the tide, but instead they stuck their fingers in every fad they could reach, and got burned, and now they're neck deep in problems of their own making. And I don't think it'd be better if they were ankle deep anyway.

blato 6y ago

I agree Mozilla screwed up. Especially in comparison to others such as Blender which managed to build something better than the proprietary alternatives by gathering fund through sponsors & donations without ever sacrificing their values such as the GPL openness and while keeping all the focus on Blender. They even obtained a place at Khronos and have a voice on the future of compute & graphic standards. I donate to Blender because I know that not a single cent is wasted. Mozilla is the opposite, everything is wasted & there is no focus. I would gladly donate to a new foundation for a browser that takes the same model as Blender, Godot, etc. : start small, stay focused & don't sacrifice your core values

svnpenn 6y ago

I can say without hesitation, that Firefox is the worst piece of open source software that I use. Hands down. And has been for many years. In fact it's so bad, that I've been using Waterfox for a few months. If any better option becomes available, I will immediately switch. I hate that they shove updates down your throat, and you have to literally set a policy to disable them. Then if you ask about it, they look at you like you are crazy. I don't like auto updates. That's my right. I find a version that works, I don't want it changing every week. I want to update when I want to. Then you have other stuff like the megabar, which Firefox implemented to be more like Chrome (I guess). Looking through about 10 issues on bugzilla about it that were all closed as WON'T FIX, then they hide any negative comments and threaten bugzilla ban from anyone that express dislike. And cherry on top, they make it impossible to disable via settings, you have to do CSS hacks.