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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. It sounds like your priorities - UI feat

by 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.
    - unconed 15y ago
      According to Wikipedia, SVG fonts were 3 out of a 100 tests. If you ignore those, Firefox 4 passed ACID3 about 2 years after Opera and WebKit, and that's only counting the actual released versions rather than nighties. But it's not even about the specific tests, it's about the crappy and holier than thou attitude that Mozilla demonstrated in those years, with very little to back it up. For example this post, which has been removed by the author but is still referenced elsewhere: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-worthless/ http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basica... The gist of it was that ACID3 didn't test things that were relevant to 'real' web developers. Which is a dubious criticism at best, seeing as ACID3 was an excellent weathervane for sorting the wheat from the chaff. But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere. As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive engine. I made this site recently: http://acko.net/ http://acko.net/. It's butter smooth in Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D and is on par with WebKit.

by azakai 15y ago

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.
  - unconed 15y ago
    According to Wikipedia, SVG fonts were 3 out of a 100 tests. If you ignore those, Firefox 4 passed ACID3 about 2 years after Opera and WebKit, and that's only counting the actual released versions rather than nighties. But it's not even about the specific tests, it's about the crappy and holier than thou attitude that Mozilla demonstrated in those years, with very little to back it up. For example this post, which has been removed by the author but is still referenced elsewhere: http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basically-worthless/ http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2008/03/26/acid3-is-basica... The gist of it was that ACID3 didn't test things that were relevant to 'real' web developers. Which is a dubious criticism at best, seeing as ACID3 was an excellent weathervane for sorting the wheat from the chaff. But it's hypocrisy in hindsight given that all the great features that web developers flocked to came from the other engines. And now Mozilla is complaining that there are -webkit prefixes everywhere. As for 3D CSS, it's not just about 'disagreements' or 'the spec'. The work Apple has done on iOS and desktop has made WebKit2 a seriously impressive engine. I made this site recently: http://acko.net/ http://acko.net/. It's butter smooth in Safari, choppy and ugly as hell in Firefox 10 (if I enable the 3D effect there). And yet Mozilla goes around proclaiming Firefox now supports CSS 3D and is on par with WebKit.