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The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner. Take OS X Lion's new scrollbars, for instac

The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner. Take OS X Lion's new scrollbars, for instace. Lion has been around since July last year, and Mozilla has yet to offer support for the new auto-hiding scrollbars and for rubberband scrolling. It only took Chrome around one month to fix that. Same for native full screen support. Then there are bugs that have been around for years now, like pressing Cmd+Left or Cmd+Right on a textarea does nothing. (Windows users: These are the OS X equivalents of Home and End) They say that there's a conflict with another set of key bindings, and that this is an issue with XUL, but I strongly believe that the Firefox UX should dictate how XUL works, and not the contrary. The last time I looked, they were still struggling to make each tab an independent process. Chrome first shipped more than three years ago with such a feature. Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have adopted a similar model. Their new, rapid release cycle is a great improvement. But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped. I wonder if Mozilla is suffering from finantial/funding issues right now, already, since their main source of revenue, ads on Google results in Firefox, is constantly decreasing. How long can they keep mantaining Firefox? Should they switch to a crowdfunding model? It's really a shame this is hapenning, since they have great intentions: To keep the Web open and innovative. In terms of philosophy, they are also on a much higher ground than Apple, Microsoft and Google.

fpgeek 15y ago
You haven't heard about Mozilla's recent deal renewal. They more than tripled their income (to over 300 million a year, nearly a billion over three). They aren't hurting financially.
azakai 15y ago
> The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner. It sounds like your priorities - UI features like scrollbars - are not identical to the FF developers. That's fine - it's why it's good we have several good browsers to choose from. Generally though, Firefox has definitely been inventing and adopting plenty of new and exciting technologies, some random examples: TypeInference in the JS engine (still unique to Firefox), Layers graphics system with support for hardware acceleration/Direct2D/etc., WebGL (together with Chrome, lots before Safari or Opera), Audio Data API, new JS features like Proxies and WeakMaps (which Chrome yesterday blogged about finally implementing), etc. > But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped. FF 10 defaults addons to compatible, and FF 11 and 12 will add things like update in the background (no progress bar, no prompt). It would have been good to have had this with 4.0 of course, but it does take time to do - waiting to release 4.0 until now would have meant not shipping all the other great features mentioned before.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  This. Firefox is the only browser shipping a fully standards-compliant implementation of IndexedDB. IndexedDB is one of the most important features of HTML5. Clearly Mozilla is moving fast enough, their priorities are simply different than the grandparents.
  - unconed 15y ago
    Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3 test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later anyhow. Mozilla has had their priorities wrong for ages. They still coast on the glory days of the 2000s when they were the good guys, even though they're now just another browser maker with millions in the bank and a giant legacy platform to take care of. Bugzilla is full of code-centric developers who seem more interested in theoretical feature sets than actually making features that are useful to end-users. Take for example the differing approach to sub pixel rounding. WebKit's approach recognizes that rounding errors cannot be viewed in isolation, but can result in visually disruptive artifacts in group. Mozilla still prefers mathematical purity over reducing disruptive artifacts, with e.g. text drifting perceptibly against a container when it is being moved slowly. But the best example was border-radius: Moz implemented it for years, but didn't anti-alias rounded corners. There wasn't even a guarantee that identical corners on the same box would be rendered the same, due to rounding errors. When WebKit implemented it, they had anti-aliasing from day one, and suddenly everyone was using it. Big surprise. The web has always been a visual medium, and the stick of platform APIs needs to be sold with the carrot of attractive design and seamless rendering. In their marketing materials, Moz gets it, but in their development strategies, they are still way behind.
    - azakai 15y ago
      > Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3 test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later anyhow. About ACID3, the main issue was SVG fonts. They are an unneeded standard, because Web Fonts exist, and Firefox has therefore not implemented them (so saying they eventually did is incorrect). The right thing to do was to fix the ACID3 test, which has been done, see more details here: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 About 3D CSS, sure, there were disagreements and eventually Apple got it's way, that's a normal part of the standards process, you can't predict how things will work out. You can't expect every browser maker to be right from the beginning on every topic.
kibwen 15y ago
> The last time I looked, they were still struggling to > make each tab an independent process. Chrome first > shipped more than three years ago with such a feature. > Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have > adopted a similar model. The reason for Firefox's apparent inflexibility is that addons are allowed to hook deep into Firefox's internals, which means that any large changes to the engine lead inevitably to addon incompatibility. Such a thing happened last year, when a version of Aurora introduced fancy new tab-dragging animations; the underlying code changes broke so many addons that the feature never made its way to Beta. Gecko is old, and I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers who are responsible for balancing the advantage of modern enhancements with the risk of breaking addons that have been working for the past decade or more. From this perspective, it's no wonder they're looking towards writing a brand-new browser engine.
- azakai 15y ago
  > Gecko is old All browser engines are old. WebKit's code begin in 1998, for example, and IE and Opera also have plenty of code from the 90's. They are all huge C++ codebases too - there are big burdens for all current browsers that stem from the code's age and size. Gecko does have the additional task of keeping addons working (which WebKit doesn't), but on the other hand WebKit has the additional task of maintaining a stable embedding API (which Gecko doesn't). Perhaps IE and Opera don't have those burdens, they are closed source so we can't tell. > I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers For the reasons mentioned above, you can say the same of all the other browser developers. Or, also for all OS developers, even a relatively recent OS like Linux is quite old and has all manner of baggage in terms of maintaining compatibility with legacy kernel modules and such. Big, long-term projects like Gecko, WebKit, Linux, Windows, etc. are hard!
  - kibwen 15y ago
    You're right about WebKit's age (and even Trident is just as old as Gecko), although I wasn't aware of the complications of WebKit's embedding API. I wasn't trying to compare browser engines, but rather to drive home to the parent poster the very sentiment that you express in your final sentence (and set myself up for my own final sentence). As long as we are comparing browser engines, though, I'd like to stress the relative scarcity of resources available to the Firefox developers. Mozilla's recent windfall with respect to their arrangement with Google is great, but Mozilla's attention is focused on much more than Firefox nowadays--Boot2Gecko, BrowserID, and Rust/Servo being their most prominent diversions at the moment.
bwarp 15y ago
It's not like everyone can benefit from new features thrown out by browser vendors every two minutes so what is the problem? Stuff stays around for a while. If you want to reach your userbase, you use the common subset of functionality. Everyone pushes features galore these days to the point no-one knows what "HTML" is objectively defined as. People do know what subset works consistently across all browsers though, which Firefox supports reliably. As for Firefox's UI - they maintain consistency between platforms. Apple like to throw absolutely horrid curve balls every OS release and change just about everything for the sake of some misfeature they decided to make their users suffer (scrollbars in Lion being one of them). Also TBH compared to the ABI stability of Windows and Linux, OSX is a pile of shit to develop for so things are going to take time if you have to sync a lot of code across a lot of platforms. If they didn't bother - so what? At least your browser world didn't cave in due an OS release. Regarding the whinge about scroll bars. I'm sitting on a Windows 7 machine at the moment and the scrollbars work the same as they did 16 years ago i.e. how I expect them to work and consistently with everything else on the machine. New scrollbars is not a feature - it's an annoyance.
- Zirro 15y ago
  "New scrollbars is not a feature - it's an annoyance." It's called innovation, and I'm glad it's still happening.
  - bwarp 15y ago
    Innovation? Bullshit. Innovation is improvement, not change for the sake of change. It's not an improvement.
    - Zirro 15y ago
      But it isn't "change for the sake of change". Not having to see the scrollbars all the time makes the web a better experience to me, and it's very useful in small spaces. Finally, it can be changed back in the settings and become an always visible scrollbar, if that's what a user prefers. It's a win for most people, and the few like you who have a hard time adapting to changes can switch back.

fpgeek 15y ago

You haven't heard about Mozilla's recent deal renewal. They more than tripled their income (to over 300 million a year, nearly a billion over three). They aren't hurting financially.

azakai 15y ago

> The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner. It sounds like your priorities - UI features like scrollbars - are not identical to the FF developers. That's fine - it's why it's good we have several good browsers to choose from. Generally though, Firefox has definitely been inventing and adopting plenty of new and exciting technologies, some random examples: TypeInference in the JS engine (still unique to Firefox), Layers graphics system with support for hardware acceleration/Direct2D/etc., WebGL (together with Chrome, lots before Safari or Opera), Audio Data API, new JS features like Proxies and WeakMaps (which Chrome yesterday blogged about finally implementing), etc. > But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped. FF 10 defaults addons to compatible, and FF 11 and 12 will add things like update in the background (no progress bar, no prompt). It would have been good to have had this with 4.0 of course, but it does take time to do - waiting to release 4.0 until now would have meant not shipping all the other great features mentioned before.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
This. Firefox is the only browser shipping a fully standards-compliant implementation of IndexedDB. IndexedDB is one of the most important features of HTML5. Clearly Mozilla is moving fast enough, their priorities are simply different than the grandparents.
- unconed 15y ago
  Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3 test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later anyhow. Mozilla has had their priorities wrong for ages. They still coast on the glory days of the 2000s when they were the good guys, even though they're now just another browser maker with millions in the bank and a giant legacy platform to take care of. Bugzilla is full of code-centric developers who seem more interested in theoretical feature sets than actually making features that are useful to end-users. Take for example the differing approach to sub pixel rounding. WebKit's approach recognizes that rounding errors cannot be viewed in isolation, but can result in visually disruptive artifacts in group. Mozilla still prefers mathematical purity over reducing disruptive artifacts, with e.g. text drifting perceptibly against a container when it is being moved slowly. But the best example was border-radius: Moz implemented it for years, but didn't anti-alias rounded corners. There wasn't even a guarantee that identical corners on the same box would be rendered the same, due to rounding errors. When WebKit implemented it, they had anti-aliasing from day one, and suddenly everyone was using it. Big surprise. The web has always been a visual medium, and the stick of platform APIs needs to be sold with the carrot of attractive design and seamless rendering. In their marketing materials, Moz gets it, but in their development strategies, they are still way behind.
  - azakai 15y ago
    > Remember when Opera and WebKit were racing for 100% compliance on the ACID3 test, while Mozilla was whining that the test wasn't valid? Remember when Apple published a gallery of beautiful 3D CSS effects, and Mozilla was whining that "it wasn't real CSS 3"? They ended up implementing both specs years later anyhow. About ACID3, the main issue was SVG fonts. They are an unneeded standard, because Web Fonts exist, and Firefox has therefore not implemented them (so saying they eventually did is incorrect). The right thing to do was to fix the ACID3 test, which has been done, see more details here: http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 http://limi.net/articles/firefox-acid3 About 3D CSS, sure, there were disagreements and eventually Apple got it's way, that's a normal part of the standards process, you can't predict how things will work out. You can't expect every browser maker to be right from the beginning on every topic.

kibwen 15y ago

> The last time I looked, they were still struggling to > make each tab an independent process. Chrome first > shipped more than three years ago with such a feature. > Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have > adopted a similar model. The reason for Firefox's apparent inflexibility is that addons are allowed to hook deep into Firefox's internals, which means that any large changes to the engine lead inevitably to addon incompatibility. Such a thing happened last year, when a version of Aurora introduced fancy new tab-dragging animations; the underlying code changes broke so many addons that the feature never made its way to Beta. Gecko is old, and I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers who are responsible for balancing the advantage of modern enhancements with the risk of breaking addons that have been working for the past decade or more. From this perspective, it's no wonder they're looking towards writing a brand-new browser engine.

azakai 15y ago
> Gecko is old All browser engines are old. WebKit's code begin in 1998, for example, and IE and Opera also have plenty of code from the 90's. They are all huge C++ codebases too - there are big burdens for all current browsers that stem from the code's age and size. Gecko does have the additional task of keeping addons working (which WebKit doesn't), but on the other hand WebKit has the additional task of maintaining a stable embedding API (which Gecko doesn't). Perhaps IE and Opera don't have those burdens, they are closed source so we can't tell. > I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers For the reasons mentioned above, you can say the same of all the other browser developers. Or, also for all OS developers, even a relatively recent OS like Linux is quite old and has all manner of baggage in terms of maintaining compatibility with legacy kernel modules and such. Big, long-term projects like Gecko, WebKit, Linux, Windows, etc. are hard!
- kibwen 15y ago
  You're right about WebKit's age (and even Trident is just as old as Gecko), although I wasn't aware of the complications of WebKit's embedding API. I wasn't trying to compare browser engines, but rather to drive home to the parent poster the very sentiment that you express in your final sentence (and set myself up for my own final sentence). As long as we are comparing browser engines, though, I'd like to stress the relative scarcity of resources available to the Firefox developers. Mozilla's recent windfall with respect to their arrangement with Google is great, but Mozilla's attention is focused on much more than Firefox nowadays--Boot2Gecko, BrowserID, and Rust/Servo being their most prominent diversions at the moment.

bwarp 15y ago

It's not like everyone can benefit from new features thrown out by browser vendors every two minutes so what is the problem? Stuff stays around for a while. If you want to reach your userbase, you use the common subset of functionality. Everyone pushes features galore these days to the point no-one knows what "HTML" is objectively defined as. People do know what subset works consistently across all browsers though, which Firefox supports reliably. As for Firefox's UI - they maintain consistency between platforms. Apple like to throw absolutely horrid curve balls every OS release and change just about everything for the sake of some misfeature they decided to make their users suffer (scrollbars in Lion being one of them). Also TBH compared to the ABI stability of Windows and Linux, OSX is a pile of shit to develop for so things are going to take time if you have to sync a lot of code across a lot of platforms. If they didn't bother - so what? At least your browser world didn't cave in due an OS release. Regarding the whinge about scroll bars. I'm sitting on a Windows 7 machine at the moment and the scrollbars work the same as they did 16 years ago i.e. how I expect them to work and consistently with everything else on the machine. New scrollbars is not a feature - it's an annoyance.

Zirro 15y ago
"New scrollbars is not a feature - it's an annoyance." It's called innovation, and I'm glad it's still happening.
- bwarp 15y ago
  Innovation? Bullshit. Innovation is improvement, not change for the sake of change. It's not an improvement.
  - Zirro 15y ago
    But it isn't "change for the sake of change". Not having to see the scrollbars all the time makes the web a better experience to me, and it's very useful in small spaces. Finally, it can be changed back in the settings and become an always visible scrollbar, if that's what a user prefers. It's a win for most people, and the few like you who have a hard time adapting to changes can switch back.