Goodbye, EdgeHTML
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161
For example, WebAssembly started out as a Mozilla project. What if Mozilla didn't exist, or Firefox didn't have any market share? It would never have been created. Think of all the accumulated features/innovations that could exist over the next few years that might not if the only browser engine being used is controlled by a single company.
I did experience a glitch the other day in dev tools where a pane blanked out on me. I may have had a crash too, but that's it.
Quantum made it viable to use ff on my old laptop, but a daily driver for a web dev it still is not.
On Firefox, my fans will randomly jump up to 3000rpm when doing only normal web browsing, even on simple sites like HN. I'm using FF right now to post this comment, and as soon as I opened HN, my CPU temp went from 40 to 50c. And this is the only tab I have open. If I open a video, or heaven forbid a Twitch stream or Google Maps, my fans instantly go to 7000rpm and my CPU temp goes to 70-80c. Even just opening Gmail makes FF go haywire. And it isn't just "my fans spin up, big deal". Browsing the internet on FF turns my MBP into a slag of near-molten metal that is too hot to even touch, and I can only imagine what it's doing to my battery life.
I want to like FF, I really do, but this is simply a dealbreaker for me, and even though it's a known issue, Mozilla seems uninterested in fixing it (I have previously seen a response from Mozilla that essentially amounted to "it's hard for us to optimize FF for certain sites, so we aren't going to even try").
It's clearly not an issue for everyone, but I definitely have noticed that I'm not the only one who has these issues, either.
I guess this might be due to the new Rust layout engine I've heard about which is more parallelised?, but even just having a single tab playing youtube or a gif uses more CPU in Firefox, so maybe it's something with hardware acceleration?
My investigations (their bugzilla, the news about their company, I've been following for a long time) point to the opposite: it's the "old code" which nobody wants to improve: it doesn't help if the "new" code is fast to draw Some detail when the "old" decides to draw or update the stuff that doesn't even has to be updated or drawn. And it's not just drawing too, it's all the processing that happens during the life of the page with the "moving" images. Nobody, as "especially managers in Firefox." There was a number of developers in some Asian country, paid by Firefox, who were in charge for fixing in the old code, and they were simply fired. It seems it's not "strategic" for the managers to "fix" things, only to "experiment" with "new" things like ads or "new technologies" or whatever.
The "more CPU and GPU use" of Firefox is absolutely observable on any platform, not only on Macs. There are also the bugs submitted, but it doesn't seem that there's any priority in fixing them. From their perspective "it works, it's just that those who measure such use notice it." It's of course not so. The battery is empty earlier, the notebooks are hotter, the response lags. There are reported bugs demonstrating exactly what you observed: compared to any other browser even a single video on the "modern" site in Firefox needs much more processing power. It’s easy to reproduce in Windows too.
But obviously fixing the performance problems is not priority for the managers, when there's anything "new and shiny." Because they don’t see that as serious bugs: “the same page uses 10% of the max possible power in Chrome but 20% in Firefox.” “Who cares?” It’s too long-term goal.
Then again, I don't do heavy web development or have a tab open with e-mail all day (e-mail is in Thunderbird) so maybe that makes a difference?
Haven't noticed speed issues in Drive either.
I agree this should be implemented natively though.
For anyone unaware, WebRender is a new compositing engine for Firefox written from the ground up in Rust that runs on the GPU.
What do you think if you don't mind me asking?
Which is a shame - I really wanted to like Firefox on Mac.
On those same pages, Chrome and Safari work just fine.
If Apple were making MBPs better each year instead of demonstrating their "courage" ("This time we're taking X away from you because as long as Windows is the only competition, whaddya gonna do about it?") I would have already bought a new one, and that would presumably have more powerful graphics and not get as hot, but I would still want to verify that FF wasn't running the battery down faster than Chrome or Safari.
Yep luckily the bug is being actively worked on and might land in the next version or two.
I can confirm its not fixed yet. Firefox Dev Edition is unusable on my 2014 MBP w/ integrated graphics but is crazy fast on my 2018 and Hackintosh.
Google Chrome can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
I don’t know it would make sense to you, or most, but it felt like a breach of trust and seeing it is still baked into the browser itself (yes, they bought it; yes, you can turn it “off”) and that you can’t “completely remove” it, I don’t “that part” has changed. Besides the separate standalone add-on was a lot more useful and I was a full time user until that debacle when I moved to Safari (and Pinboard).
Would it have been better to have built it internally instead of through acquisition? I admit I'm unfamiliar with the inside baseball on it's integration, but breach of trust sounds pretty drastic. My read (as an uninformed outsider) is that they probably acquired Pocket for a song, it filled a gap in the product offering, and it offers the potential of a future optional revenue stream that aligns well with the web as a document reading medium (subscription).
There's all sorts of internal browser features you can't 'completely remove'. How is bookmarking different?
Users suspected money was involved. Mozilla employees insisted that Pocket hadn't paid for the integration. Months later, it came out that there was a referral deal.
Pocket was and is an extension. It just gets special treatment.
Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.
Pocket is not an extension - it's built in by default and cannot be removed (only disabled).
Did a similar thing for a project, rolled out customer's own Firefox extensions (for office workflow) to employee desktops. Extensions were bundled because the employers sometimes uninstall them and freak out because they can't work anymore.
In the end I decided that it was just easier to switch back to Chrome instead of going down that road, and I'm so happy I can cast videos/tabs to my TV.
Essentially it allows you to put different tabs into different light-weight profiles, with their own session, cookies, and state. That means if you want to log into Facebook but don't want Facebook following you online, just give Facebook its own container.
Mozilla has anti-tracking already baked in, but Multi-Account Containers are a whole other level of isolation, but without sacrificing usability (like traditional multi-profile/multi-user browsing).
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
But from a privacy UX perspective, both Chrome and Firefox accommodate this use case gracefully.
Chrome supports multiple profiles. Mozilla's Multi-Account Container tabs isn't multiple profits. It is multiple isolated containers running under the same profile, in the same browser window.
A closer analogy would be if Chrome allowed each tab to have its own profile, rather than each window, and for each one to be lighter weight than a full profile.
With Chrome, even if you manually sync your profiles and keep the same set of extensions installed in both profiles, it runs 2 processes of the same extension. Even when the second profile window is closed.
But for me the deal breaker was managing a separate set of bookmarks.
daveFNbuck writes [0]:
“They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch between users in a multi-user interaction.”
Both additional profiles and incognito browsing open a different window, with its own settings.
Which may actually be what pushes me to FF. Not out of spite, just that I was counting on Chrome profiles for this purpose, but they've gotten a lot harder for me to use for that (and were never as good as FF's multi-container thing, it sounds like).
I don't, however, like how the UI/UX is implemented. In particular, the management of containers -- why do I have to dig so deeply to add new containers? Also, as a color-blind person, the slightly colored thin bar above the tab is not a sufficient identifier. It just seems all sort of after-thoughty and jumbled to me.
Having said that, I converted to FF being my primary browser from being a long-time Chrome user and am happy about the change.
It is actually easy... once you found the option: Long press the "+" / new tab button, and on the bottom of the container list is "manage containers".
Ce soir je me coucherai moins bête.
Really usefull trick but not very discoverable.
Firefox for Android is a notable improvement over Chrome, but the add-ons available for it, even simple ones like javascript toggle, are significantly worse. On desktop it retains state for each site, wheread on Android it is a global toggle for all websites.
My one wish is if you could set a default container. I use FF to browser Facebook primarily and want that to be default, but instead I have to load Firefox then load a container then load Facebook. Wish it were just open FF -> Facebook is homepage.
Eh, back to my former opinion - Containers are great, Containers UX needs work.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
Also with the standard container addon you can specify that sites always open only in your specified container, so you could just set Facebook to always open in its own container that way.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/containerise/
If you know about them, for example from reading the code, you can create them. So at present about:config is a strange sort of place with lots of knobs but not all of them.
- prefs that a developer was too lazy to add to the list of pref; or - prefs that serve only during automated tests.
You could scan source code for `Services.prefs` and `nsIPreferenceService` if you really want to find them.
Your comment just gave me the idea to: install the container tabs plugin, tell the plugin to always open our Jenkins site in the "Jenkins" container, and then when the bug happens, I can "clear cookies etc" on that container, without destroying my history and login sessions in the rest of my tabs.
After playing around with it for 5 minutes, it seems you can't clear cookies on a container basis. Also apparently only cookies are isolated, but other bits of history aren't. So this might not work. Alas. I almost found a solution. I did find that ctrl-shift-del opens a clear history popup though, instead of going through that wretched menu.
On Chrome, theres an option to list cookies for a site by clicking on that padlock to left of site url, so quicker way of clearing cookies for your Jenkins site. Maybe FF has similar setup.
Then hard refresh browser should clear cache I think (ctr/cmd + shift + r on any system or ctr + f5 on windows).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-boss/
I can't switch to Chrome since I can't live without tree style tabs anymore. I've become dependent.
If you're okay with using chrome: create another profile and only use it for jenkins, in fact, set up a shortcut that opens it in app/kiosk mode and maybe see if there's a commandline flag to clear all history every time you open it, that way all you need to do is click the shortcut and everything else happens in the background and it doesn't affect the rest of your browsing exp.
It doesn't clear cache but it will automatically delete any cookies when you close a tab or when you change the domain. That might do what you need, when you use it in conjunction with Containers.
They're also great for development. I have different containers for each user I use while working on logged-in flows. I can just go from tab to tab to test different user experiences or switch between users in a multi-user interaction.
File | New Session
It didn't work for apps that are sensitive to permanent cookies (and other client-side storage) instead if session level options of course, where multiple profiles does (as presumably does Firefoxes containers? - I don't know as I've not yet used them).
Containers keep the cookies and other data, yes, so you don't need to re-login every time you start the browser.
Yes, but you can have as many active sessions as you need instead of just two.
Incognito/InPrivate/whet-ever-other-browsers-call-the-feature tabs/windows share the same session so that gives you at most two active sessions: normal and incognito.
The "new session" option in IE can have many more. For a lot of workflows two is enough, but sometimes I want something like "a couple of distinct base users, a manager, and an admin" for testing more complex user workflows.
I use them so I can be logged in to multiple AWS accounts at the same time - works like a charm!
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/4...
.. I just went to find the github issue for other people with a similar need[0] and found someone has posted a link to an extension called sticky containers. A new tab opens in the same container of the last one. It's actually pretty close to what I'm after..
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sticky-contai...
[0] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...
about:profiles
Now you can have multiple windows, each window with its own profile and the profile determines everything, from the browser's history to the extensions installed.
Here is an article that talks through the steps (on windows but it's similar for others) https://www.howtogeek.com/209320/how-to-set-up-and-use-multi...
Before the Quantum release we had a pretty cool extension for managing profiles that is no longer available, sadly:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181102210053/https://addons.mo...
I hope it gets implemented again.
I now do the "about:profiles" thing I mentioned. I don't know why they aren't exposing Profiles in the UI in an intuitive manner, makes no sense. For my day to day use, I think Multi-Account Containers are better though.
I have two LastPass accounts. One for work and one for personal use and I cannot use both of them in Firefox
That is the only reason I am not switching
But it's not the particular use-case that's the problem, it's the drastic difference in performance characteristics which is more of a sliding scale than a one-time issue. Firefox is pound-for-pound slower in general browsing activities for me, and chokes on javascript-heavy pages much quicker than Chrome. It's still an order of magnitude better than IE in that regard, but on a sliding scale, Chrome's out in the lead with FF somewhere in the middle.
I'm hanging on to FF for idealogical reasons, but that's it. If the browsing experience was my only measure, it'd be Chrome all the way.
Based on this bug and some of the related ones, the answer seems to be no.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
Until then I'm stuck with Opera/Safari/Chrome, mostly in that order.
It'd be nice if you could throttle processor usage. I'd rather have a choppy experience on the occasionally website than constant fans and having my Mac turn into a heater.
It's valid criticism but seeing this presented in arguments about why Firefox is bad (and you should be using Chrome instead) is absurd.
Firefox is significantly more trustworthy than Chrome (the outrage over Mozilla's occasional screw-ups exists because that behaviour is decidedly not the established norm for Mozilla whereas the same behaviour from Google surprises no-one).
The context in this thread was "Switch to Firefox. It prioritizes privacy, unlike Chrome". In other words, "Firefox is more privacy-focused than Chrome".
Piling on Mozilla for past screw-ups creates the impression that this statement is wrong and that both browsers are equally bad at privacy because neither of them is consistently perfect.
Even if the criticism is technically correct, piling it on like this creates a skewed impression that if you care about privacy you might as well use Chrome because even if you switch to Firefox your privacy will be invaded anyway.
This normalises the level of invasiveness of Chrome and equivocates its consistent and intentional behavior with a series of exceptional missteps.
In case you think "But I never mentioned Chrome", well, Chrome and Firefox were the only options in the original post so anything negative about Firefox implies a positive about Chrome and vice versa. If you wanted to call out specific behavior, either present an alternative (Brave? Ice Weasel?) or clarify that you're addressing the behavior categorically and not just that instance of it specifically.
If someone says "Don't use A. B is better because it doesn't do $thing" and then you respond by "I've seen B do $thing" that implies equivalence between A and B even if B did $thing only a few times out of carelessness whereas A intentionally does $thing all the time because its business model depends on it. It doesn't matter that you didn't mean it that way, it doesn't matter that it's true and it doesn't matter that this is a mistake on part of the audience. Humans are flawed and communication requires you to take those flaws into account -- unless you just want to express yourself.
Not sure relative to Safar or Edge.
Of the problems I've had with Firefox, some of them are actually due to it being _too_ privacy focused, and not having good UX explaining why common operations don't work as expected. For example I couldn't save a file onto my computer and was pulling my hair out until I did a binary search through every version of Firefox, found the first version that didn't work, read deep into the patch notes, and discovered that I needed to set the magical flag of dom.ipc.plugins.sandbox-level.
I'm curious what you're using currently if Firefox's privacy imperfections are of concern? Safari?
(Firefox has a good security team, but Chrome's is unmatched.)
Secondly, that's a single step in the threat model; it's not just about what a Google engineer would do with your data, it's about attack surface area when any Googlers (or Google infra, or Google partner infra) that is compromised automatically exposes you.
The simple act of transmitting and storing your data to anyone, no matter how secure their systems are, is still by definition less secure than simply not transmitting that data.
In terms of technical implementations, Chrome naturally surpasses everything else in a naïve myopic comparison (and always will), but holistically a secure algorithm isn't going to protect you if you've voluntarily handed the keys to the kingdom to umpteen untrusted parties. Chrome gets all the technical details right in a context where doing so seems redundant.
They will also block all third party cookies effectively blocking most ads. Chrome or Chromium would never build in such a feature and make it ON by default. Because tracking and personalized ads are there business model.
Lately it introduced the ability to do "Multi-Account Containers". They behave like light profiles. But you can use containers to box social networks. See:
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
2. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
3. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...
This ability is currently unmatched in other browsers.
It also has built-in tracker blocking. Nothing you can't get with uBlock Origin or Privacy Badger, but it's nice to have it on by default, especially in Private Mode.
Note that people complain about the "strict mode" of that tracker blocking not being enabled by default. However I can tell from my experience that the strict mode breaks websites.
See also the design of Firefox Sync, which was designed to not leak data by default, as compared with Chrome's Sync: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/
Since Chrome, Edge, and IE uses Windows certificate infrastructure and Firefox uses its own, it won't understand directive perhaps pushed through your company's group policy. You can specify address of your intranet site, in style of https://.example.com (where subdomain of example.com is covered in this case) and it should work.
As for certificate, is it using internal certificate of some sort? If that's the case, you will have to load it to Firefox's NSS.
I'd like to use Firefox. I prefer its ideals to everything else. I've tried it out several times the last year. It's okay. Unfortunately, I always end up going back to Safari. Despite the performance improvements, Safari still feels like a faster, sleeker, smoother, and more user-focused browser.
Firefox is still pretty ugly. On macOS, it feels chunkier and less natively integrated. It does not feel like a first-class citizen of macOS, but rather like a gtk+ or Qt app ported to the Mac.
Safari's "omnibar" is superior to Firefox's. Safari actually suggests web sites (see https://imgur.com/a/dY2SWKB), which I use all the time. Wikipedia is a major one. Start typing "Richard Fey", for example, and the first hit will be the Wikipedia page for Richard Feynman, complete with a short summary and photo. Firefox forces me through a Google search. I use DuckDuckGo and its shortcuts, but Safari's suggestions are more helpful.
I also tried out Firefox on iOS some time ago, and it wasn't as nice as Safari. For there to be a point to this, I'd need the same browser in both places, with perfect syncing of bookmarks, cookies, tabs, etc., just like Safari. I'm not tied to iCloud for this, though it'd be nice to use iCloud and not yet another cloud syncing mechanism.
Lastly, migrating is a pain. There's apparently no way to import my current Safari session (I have probably 60-70 tabs) or history (I keep everything I visit, going back years), which means I'd lose stuff by migrating and would have to migrate tabs over incrementally. Hard to try out a browser in any meaningful way this way.
Here's a few things Firefox could do to interest me:
- Make super-sleek platform-specific UIs that feel native. Do you really need a platform-agnostic GUI toolkit for the chrome? The renderer is the portable part. I don't care about theming myself, and wouldn't miss it if my browser didn't have it (Safari doesn't). I prefer an opinionated browser that knows what it should look and feel like.
- Innovate by addressing actual user pain points. Containers are an innovation, but they target techies and fail the grandmother test. I'd like true containers, where every 2nd-level domain is contained. This means having to be innovative about how to address cross-origin things (Google spreads itself over many domains, and then you have things like OAuth).
Another huge innovation you could bring to the table is to fix the user identity and authentication problem. I use a password manager, but why are we still logging in with user names and passwords these days? Why is the password manager using brittle form fills rather than APIs, for God's sake? Here's my solution: When I go to Reddit or whatever, and I'm logged out, what if my browser showed a little bar at the top that said: "This web site would like to use your profile 'Atombender'. [Accept] [Ignore]". On accept, browser and web site would negotiate through some kind of opaque, cryptographically secure token (via some plugin API so that providers like 1Password and Apple can store your state) so that the browser can prove that I am me, and the web site can prove that it is itself. No more phishing, no more remembering passwords. Web sites can only identify users that you've granted access to your identity to, and like ApplePay your true identity should be hidden behind an opaque identifier. Standard protocols could be defined for things such as email addresses and phone numbers, so that I can edit the email for my profile locally, and it would automatically make an API call to the web site to update the email address on that end. Things like deleting an account, setting up 2FA etc. would be part of this API. Of course, to accomplish this you have to design a standard and make web sites use it. Mozilla used to have enough clout to do this, anything is possible.
Another area where innovation is needed: Fix the tab problem. Bookmarks, tabs, windows -- we can do better. Why isn't a tab and a bookmark sort of the same thing? Why is bookmark editing so bad? Why do bookmarks get broken when the web site disappears or changes? A bookmark should save a complete copy of that page!
And why can't I search my history of visited web pages? I remember reading an article a few weeks ago. It mentioned Charlemagne's reign but the title was about something completely different. I don't remember anything else. How do I find it? Browsers only record the title and URL and visit time. Why can't I search for "Charlemagne" in the browser and get a hit?
- Firefox can interest me with great performance, but Quantum has been disappointing on macOS. I remember the standalone WebRender (?) demo app a few years ago, and it was insanely fast. Maybe because it had less legacy baggage. Firefox could charm me by using significantly less RAM and less idle CPU.
- Why don't browsers have adblocking built in? I use 1Blocker, and it has a clunky UI where you can point the cursor at a page element to block that specific element. This could be made so smooth.
- To catch more developers' mindshare, Firefox could develop a super-modern, low-resource-usage Electron competitor with some kind of easy (gRPC?) glue for interfacing with languages. Join forces with Slack to make it happen.
Just some ideas. I don't pretend I know better than the Firefox team, and I'm just one data point, of course.
But like many people I see Firefox as being increasingly less relevant. I don't see this as being caused only by the ascendancy of Chrome, either.
When FF wants to be a Mac app, I’ll be the first one in line to use it.
Firefox has built-in tracker blocking, which has the side effect of blocking a lot of ads and makes your pages load faster:
https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/tracking-protection-always-...
Brave also has built-in tracker blocking:
> I use 1Blocker, and it has a clunky UI where you can point the cursor at a page element to block that specific element.
uBlock Origin has a similar feature. I think it works smoothly in Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...
No it's not. It's frequently hanging certain tabs which I'm forced to close and reopen because I get the grey spinner and my 8 core machine grinds down to a halt.
On Android when opening the embedded webview powered by Firefox, whether the page will load without being forced to open it in the full browser is a coin toss.
It doesn't help that Mozilla has lost most of my goodwill by being such a mixed bag when it comes to politics and decision making the past few years.
I still use it, because I like that a part of the company is trying to move the needle forward in browser tech, I find container tabs better than Chromium profiles and up until recently I could get bypass paywalls without workarounds, but unless things improve by the time Brave moves the Chromium fork out of beta, I'm moving to Brave.
I'd bet Pocket is more useful to more people than Panorama was.
That's a negative to me - again, too much browser engine consolidation. :/
Brave, as yet another Chromium based-browser doesn't feel like it's helping. That, and the name "Brave" absolutely grates on me. It's a web browser: what exactly is brave about it? Too pretentious for my taste.
I always thought "Opera" was pretentious, personally! But I'm friends with long-time CTO, who does go to Bayreuth every year for Wagner, so I mean this is best possible way ;-).
Yes, I include Mozilla in "big companies" (2017 big revenue, which won't recur from what I can tell; big pay to chair too). Nevertheless, Mozilla has mismanaged Servo into an AR/XR only position where it won't go big, and Mozilla (for same reasons as MS) faces pressure to bail on Gecko.
Blaming little browsers for using chromium/Blink is blaming them for surviving.
Successful genes (e.g. for adaptive auto-immunity) tend to sweep. Think of WebKit and now (on desktop) chromium/Blink as such alleles. We may not like it but it happens whatever we may wish. I've chosen to fight for user rights at a higher domain of discourse: private ads, anonymous donations, ad and tracking protection by default. The time for a more radical new engine will come; it isn't now.
It actually prioritizes calling home, stopping ad-blockers from working on Mozilla owned sites, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I am a Firefox user myself, and I do think that Firefox is the most privacy oriented browser when compared to the other popular ones, but nowadays it is a pain in the butt to disable all of their spyware on about:config.
Err, do you mean preventing extensions from modifying critical sites like addons.mozilla.org? Because that's seems like common sense to me.
I have a work and personal profile for Chrome and even tho I could make that work on Firefox, one very simple thing makes it completely unusable to me: clicking a link always opens on one particular window/profile.
On Chrome whatever window you last used will be the one opening the url, which is extremely necessary when using multiple profiles.
Perhaps one day that's going to be implemented and I can go back to the good old FF.
If you use multiple accounts on the same service (eg. Gmail for work/personal use) you're screwed.
The whole point is that it shouldn't need configuration, it should be smart like Chrome is.
If Mozilla forked Chromium this year, Firefox would be a better browser (even with the very interesting developments coming from the Servo camp, E10S, etc. etc. etc.). Firefox has accumulated bugs, particularly around their implementation of SVG, since about 4.x, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better on that front.
I switched to Firefox away from Chrome recently. I am happy with this but I wish they had a friendly UI you could bring up to expose cookies to be shared between tabs on an opt-in basis. Cookies should be isolated per-tab by default. Cookies and other persistent data should be forgotten as soon as the tab is closed. I don't like container tabs, I think it gets confusing to manage tab groups by profile. I want to quickly mouse over and say "expose this tab's cookies to this other tab".
I'm still sad I can't get perfect "tree tabs" going. I have a plugin I use to show parent and child tabs in a tree arrangement but nothing looks sexy about it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/?sr...
I want an actual tree of lines shown to each row/tab to quickly visualize how the tabs were created from parent-to-child. How it currently looks is too busy with borders everywhere. It's functional but not what I envisioned. I can't hide the tab bar at the top as far as I know. I'm just frustrated that I remember trying to make this work in like 2002 and it's soon to be 2019. I feel like browsers aren't made for workstations, but casual consumption. They should enable so much productivity.
I also wish they focused on minimizing and isolating references to various Web APIs, so it would be easier to unreference and orphan them - unreachable from advertisers.
(Unrelated rant?)
See https://blog.servo.org/2018/03/09/servo-and-mixed-reality/
Its a shame they just plugged some parts into Firefox and called it a day. Instead of getting us a new shiny browser that could compete with Chrome, Mozilla focuses efforts on dubious Pocket/Cliqz/VPN integrations and a bunch of progressive outreach programs.
Unless something changes drastically, Firefox will descend into irrelevancy very soon (if not already). And that's bad for all of us.
Working on a production ready project is hard and takes forever, the integration work was a pit stop where we had an opportunity to get our work out to users. We'll take these opportunities as we get them.
Compared to the number of people who browse the web on desktop, the number of VR/AR users is statistically insignificant.
Moving Servo's focus away from desktop and towards niche VR/AR experiments will only accelerate the decline of Firefox. Or rather, fail to slow it down.
If you have auto-updates enabled, Mozilla, like Google, has complete control over the source code that runs on your system. Had they wanted to sneak new source code in, they would have specifically not packaged it as an extension, which made it user-visible and limited to the extension API in its capabilities, and instead just patched the Firefox code to include it. So, they were decidedly doing the opposite of sneaking it in.
Mozilla has made some mistakes, absolutely, but it really is not anywhere close to being "like Google". It's still the far superior choice, personal freedoms-wise, over Chrome.
It could be easier, but still doable in 5 minutes (that's how long it took me) with some CSS, see https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo... on how to do it.
There seem to be some security concern or it's not so easy UX wise, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447 for all the discussions and progress.
I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time.
Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and drains the battery in no time.
Safari, Chrome, Opera, whatever, doesn't have these problems. I actually haven't experienced an application that feels so sluggish and unoptimised in OSX as Firefox. Something is seriously wrong and the dev group must not be prioritising it?
I checked their subreddit and loads of people are fleeing the Mac version, even on the newest nightly builds of quantum - seriously what the hell is going on? Why hasn't "the bug" or whatever been found or defined in clear termes in over 5 years?
The day the app works without serious CPU issues i will uninstall Chrome and go to Firefox, but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence.
When i talked to devs in the subreddit many of them were like "Hey, that sounds weird, should be better in the new nightly, are you sure it's not ..." - an absurd answer in the light of the constant stream of people saying this for years and years - even in this thread i see multiple people saying it's useless on OSX.
To the dev group: Get a Macbook (many devs use them), open Firefox, identify the problem - should have happened 5+ years ago.
If the Mozilla devs aren't paying attention to and haven't remedied the problem you're experiencing, perhaps you're the edge case?
I just wrote that their support subreddit is filled with posts about performance on OSX, this thread in itself already has loads of posts with people complaining about it, and my post just is getting lots of upvotes - how is that an edge case? Also all Firefox threads on Hackernews has these posts, every single one.
As i said before i have been following this for years. You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case - not that there is anything wrong in that, i love keeping tech for as long as possible.
Any Sandy Bridge i7 from 2012 easily outperforms most odern laptops.
There is some progress made in performance per watt, but raw performance strongly decrease after the 39xx series.
How so? It's the same processor (Ivy Bridge) and GPU combo (HD 4000 + GT 650M) as the first few revisions of the retina MBP models. The big difference is the display resolution (1680x1050 vs 2880x1800).
You're saying this problem goes back five years (2013). Whether or not the 2012 model is particularly common now, the guts were common in 2013 back when you claim to have seen the problem.
I've got a newer (still non-retina) iMac and have used a variety of retina machines for work and haven't seen any performance problems with FF either. Sure, if I run a bunch of flash based video players I can get the fans to go nuts but that's not a FF problem (the same thing happens if I use Chrome, flash is just an inefficient means of rendering video).
If the Mozilla devs haven't reproduced your complaint on a first class platform it's a pretty safe bet that you're doing something whacky whether or not you realize it.
We are not discussing if your computer is an edge case tech wise, but if it represents a "commonly used device" on the osx platform, ie, a device with a Retina display. In other words an edge case market wise.
Also another guy just wrote "Definitely not an edge case", about all his companys computers above me.
I don't get your point in trying to say we are "whacky" people because we say there is a problem. Once again read other FF threads on HN an these posts are in every one.
Eleven people out of the thousands of people that use FF on a Mac daily? Perhaps it's not Mozilla that's wronged you.
I don't know why you're trying to deffend the idea that this bug is not a (relevant) thing. I'm not OP btw.
Why? Hand waving and tantrums don't mean that what OP is experiencing is representative of the state of Firefox on OSX. OP is positing that it's this ancient bug that Mozilla developers have just ignored because they're so awful/incompetent/lazy/whatever, but there's no way it would be problematic on hardware that dates back to the original problems.
It just smacks of frustrated user doing something out of the norm and falling prey to this idea that their own experiences are OBVIOUSLY representative of the norm.
Me? I'd guess that OP is doing something like running with a non-scaled display, running something else that's disabling the integrated GPU, running a poorly behaved corporate plugin or anti-virus, loading something so memory intensive the computer is swapping to disk, has a poorly behaved corporate font installed (or too many fonts), or something else along those lines. Basically something that seems normal to OP but is, in reality, not.
I've seen plenty of poor behavior from Firefox and from the Mozilla devs, but this idea that Firefox just performs poorly across the board on OSX (or some increasingly specific subset of OSX) seems very unlikely given how much focus Mozilla has been giving to performance as of late. More likely I expect there's just a very vocal minority.
I'm not making a judgement on Mozilla devs and their competency or work ethics, and I don't think OP is either, but the fact remains that the bug is there and I'd guess it's decently easy to replicate given that I've encountered it in the wild a lot. If it's one tenth as usual as my personal experience suggests it should be at the top of their backlog.
Plenty of things there could be edge cases. In fact the very first thing I thought of was resolution. Running a non-scaled retina display could definitely cause all sorts of problems as all of a sudden the browser is rendering a much bigger canvas.
> I'm not making a judgement on Mozilla devs and their competency or work ethics, and I don't think OP is either
OP is absolutely judging Mozilla employees and if that carried through to the bug reports I'm sure OP filed, well, that could definitely color the response from Mozilla.
Most people here are superusers, and i personally am a dev.
Off course i have tried everything possible, clean install, new profile, HW acc off, boot to safe mode etc. To insinuate that i have installed some weird plugin and even talked directly to the FF devs without trying basic troubleshooting or have some weird anti virus plugin installed is beyond weird.
I also wrote it's the same with all of my colleagues MB's (15 people).
So how is this a tantrum and a vocal insignificant minority of it comes up again and again and the post is sitting at the top with lots of people agreeing? (i know not everyone has the problem).
Your other points i don't get. Scaling should not be an issue as it's not an issue for any other apps - disabling the GPU by accident, what? All other software works fine. You shouldn't need a discrete GPU for browsing.
This issue is all over the place, here just from their own bugtracker only from the last 12 months (detailed from this post https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-batt...):
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1191965
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
And from their subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7d6pc6/firefox_is_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7g6k9n/firefox_qua...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/8if1fs/anyone_else...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/763avh/firefox_qua...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6wv0d9/why_is_fire...
And here the devs asks for help for once (and admit a problem):
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7g6k9n/firefox_qua...
Just searching for random posts from the last 24 hours on reddit r/mac and bingo:
https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/a3gk1k/macbook_air_201...
and you can find many more:
That you suggest all of these hundreds of people are imbeciles with weird plugins is beyond disrespectful when so many of us has tried to help mozilla debugging to no effect and with little info in return. Most of us are devs or superusers - the issue has been detailed through many technical blog posts, and investigated by highly technical people thank you.
I don’t understand how that is a difficult conclusion to reach.
My retina macbook pro never had any issues with FF.
Basically you said the developers of a major browser, browser engine, programming language etc etc etc are all stupid because firefox doesn't work optimally on some subset of mac users machines. If this effects 1 in 1000 mac users this could be biting quite a few people certainly enough to inspire a lot of complaints and still effect a tiny portion of firefox users especially if firefox users are already underrepresented on macs due to historical poor showing.
If Macs are 9% of desktops/laptops and firefox users are around 10% then 0.9% of users are mac firefox users even given an even distribution of users or more realistically 0.5% of users.
If a bug effects in in 100 users its effecting then 0.005% of users. If it effects 1 in 1000 its effecting 0.0005% of users.
The prior posters statement about poor performance with scaling sounds interesting and importantly repeatable. If its the source of the challenge in question it seems like it would be great to submit a bug report.
Bugs that effect everyone are quickly fixed. Bugs that effect a small minority are more apt to slip through. This seems like a more satisfying conclusion than just assuming Mozilla hires morons for 6 figures.
"Yes we are aware that a certain percentage has severe performance problems on osx, we believe this has to do with the Retina displays blah blah" - instead it seems like no one from the dev group has been following this problem when you ask them. Despite weekly threads, just like the posts here on Hackernews in every FF thread.
Check my other post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=18626325
This issue is all over the place.
I will admit it was too harshly written, the issues seems to only be on the osx platform and Firefox is great on all other platforms, but the issue has been detailed in their own tracker and subreddit for many years.
Also slow is relative. If someone hasn't had an experience with a faster browser, then "slow" just feels normal. I had that after using Firefox for ~9 months. It just felt normal, and then got a bit slow and unusable after a while. After switching back to Chrome on Mac, it was like a breath of fresh air. I forgot what a responsive UI felt like.
I have periodically had firefox problems in performance on all platforms including the new Mac air I bought my wife, her old Mac Pro and various Ubuntu and Windows installations. As a general rule it is because I've kept it open for several days with lots of tabs with media in them running. I mean it's irritating but not an ongoing catastrophe that means I can't use. As I said in some other thread recently I have over the past 10 years I think had two occasions where FF performance was so bad I had to leave the platform for a some time until it was fixed.
I see a lot of people in this thread claiming problems, and I see a lot of people claiming no problems, and some like me in between. So I don't know what the statistical breakdown of performance complaints about FF in comparison to all other issues (and if those complaints are actually likely to be related), but maybe it is not as great as you think it is?
Searching Google for "FF performance issues site:reddit.com" time span : last 24H, and off course there is a thread where the highest rated comment is someone saying FF is "laggy" on OSX :https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/a3gk1k/macbook_air_201...
My guess would be most people have issues but most consumers don't know better. Some have no issues, and it seems that's the ones with older "non retina" displays.
Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).
To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs.
The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.
When I did research about it (about a year ago) it seemed the devs were considering retina macbooks with a non-default resolution as origin of the bug for some reason - I'm referring to the display setting that appears as "more space" in the regular OSX settings menu, not some arcane hidden configuration.
I regularly check back because I love the idea of using their open source, somewhat privacy-focused alternative to chrome, but it's been years and still not a fix in sight.
I'm using Tridactyl for navigation, so i just press 'b' (:buffer) and start typing tab title or whatever. In a moment I'm on the tab that I needed.
There are a few handfull addons for tab management available.
>know what’s on those tabs?
I was the one who opened them, of course I know what's on those tabs.
I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it - I find uber-tabbing impressive and baffling in equal measure.
If you know what you're looking for, what does having it open (but probably knocked out of memory?) have over using search/URL autosuggest? Just a workflow thing, or is it faster?
I typically have related tabs around the one I find. E.g. recently I researched some details about the python requests library, but haven't finished implementing it yet. I can go back to that group of tabs that's in a somewhat logical order. Autocomplete wouldn't have that, and also suggest links I've already discarded as not interesting.
I've tried a few times to replace this workflow with bookmark groups etc, but I never got that to work in a way I'm completely happy with, and making my own extension that does it exactly like I want it to would be an interesting project, but too much work for now.
What I find useful is a browser extension that lets me copy-paste a list of all URLs in a window with their titles, so at the end of a research session I can move the entire list quickly to a markdown file and save it with a few notes.
I think of my tabs as my documents (the ones I'm working with today, this hour or even this very moment).
I prefer keeping those documents on my table, because this saves me some time\effort and just more convenient (subjectvly). So active tabs are the documents right in front of me and knocked out of memory ones are the ones I'm going to work with soon or needed for some sort of reference waiting their time in some sort of document organizer.
>I rarely have more than 10 open at a time and sometimes completely forget what's there or why I opened it
Well, I just have good memory :D It's part of the way schooling goes here in Russia I guess and maybe the upbringing. Memory training was just another daily routine. Sometimes it's really hard for me to believe that some people can't remember the plot or the characters from the book they read a year ago, while I still can quote a book I read 15 year ago.
In the end I guess everything goes down to what kind of processes influenced your brain development or something like that.
This doesn't really help with navigation when you have 100+ of them, but this structure maps to your internal memory organizer too. Sort of.
It's like orrganizing things you keep in your room\apartment - you may have LOTS of things and from a 3rd person point of view they may seem unorganized, but not for you - you put things according to your own logic and even if you forget the exact coorditanes of some item you still can find if quick enough because you know where you should look for it.
I'm also using Firefox on an underpowered Ubuntu machine and it works wonderfully there though (no HiDPI screen).
1st step to trying to debug would be removing your old profile completely, maybe try to disable extensions and HW rendering acceleration
Also i am a dev - i have tried all possible options to remedy this issue. I even wrote that i talked to FF devs directly. Wouldn't it be weird if i hadn't tried basic techniques?
It's like there is this weird tribal thing going on where there is this passive aggressive attitude towards the people having problems like "you guys must be idiots" even though there is dozens of comments with anecdata about no one using FF at their companies because of performance issues.
A lot of people have issues, some don't - doesn't make the ones that do have them complete imbeciles.
Sometimes "why someone hasn't tried that" is less about being clueless and more about not assuming how much people know about things.
I can imagine someone at Mozilla going "how do we debug this" and failing to reproduce the problem (I run FF on two different Macs/OSX versions and it runs ok on both)
Maybe FF can add some telemetry or have a special debug version for those with the issue, but I see how it can be frustrating
As a frequent /r/firefox visitor - while I do agree that Fx team should spend more time investigating this, I still have to note that this is not a bug or something ssimilar that can be easily reproduced.
I have late 2013 MPBr and 2014 iMac and never had any issues of a sort ever since quantum release. The only problem (performance wise) were videos on Youtube, but it seems to be fixed already. So it is there for some people and it is not for the others. With dfferent Macbooks\software\setups etc.
Since I switched to 2018 Macbook Pro Retina the issue is gone.
Edge preserves my battery the best, however Edge is not practical to use, so Opera with the battery saving option is currently the best bet.
Firefox is still my main development browser though.
(I don't know the exact details, I have a vague recollection of pcwalton explaining it to me)
Would you be interested in help to profile the issue and file a detailed bug? This would help fix it.
What i don't get is that it's an unknown problem, many people have already filed bug reports on the tracker:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325
(also see several blog posts like: https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-batt...)
I think it has to do with running the Macbook Pro at scaled resolution which is pretty much standard among devs on MB pro no? (otherwise you will have very little screen real estate).
I just created i Profile through the Gecko profiler once again but i don't know if that captures the CPU data? What external profiler do you use?
Profile here from Firefox nightly, 1 minute of scrolling around https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Fir...
----
Very non scientific test below that i need to external profiler to confirm:
Symptoms:
I get a hot computer when browsing / working normally
high CPU usage leading to
fans constantly running and battery drain
Doesn't happen in other browsers
Comparative methodology:
Open 20 tabs and scroll a bit up and down for 1 minute.
Check CPU usage in Activity monitor.
Check fan speed an temp.
Repeat in all major browsers.
Result:
Safari, Chrome and Opera the fans stays silent and i get moderate CPU usage.
Firefox the fans kick in quickly (also ran first to have a fair baseline temperature).
Do I understand correctly that you're checking CPU usage immediately after having scrolled up/down, or while scrolling up/down, right?
Apparently, there are already people working on that bug. If I understand things correctly, Firefox uses transparent windows, but transparent windows use lots of CPU on some macOS configurations, and this somehow wasn't detected during testing (I imagine that the computers used for testing didn't have these configurations).
If this is the same bug, as is likely, the bug is identified and developers are working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 . If you wish, you may leave a message on that bug mentioning that you are available for profiling and testing a fix.
It is my impression (but don't take my word on it) that the fix will ship in Firefox 65, which is currently in Nightly. Now, I'm not sure that the fix has already landed in the current Nightlies, but do you have the possibility of testing on Firefox Nightly if the problem is still present?
(usual caveat: Nightly has Telemetry activated by default – if you don't like Telemetry, don't forget to disable it)
Apparently, the bug is already identified, so this might not be necessary. More details in my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18634165 .
If you wish, you may leave a message on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 mentioning that you are available for profiling and testing a fix.
It's also a fair bit slower than Chrome, which doesn't help.
It's clear that the current round of browser wars isn't just about speed and standards compliance, but also feature lock-in too.
I do agree however that the entire industry standardizing on Chrome is not great for anyone (including Google). I'm surprised that Microsoft isn't continuing Edge development, even only as a hedge and to have a sensible default for Windows - especially if you're building Windows Apps and you need a browser control. Why give that up to Chrome? And it isn't like Microsoft can't afford it - they are almost a trillion dollar company.
My grandmother had glaucoma and could not use Firefox 57 in any capacity because the feature to have large chunky Netscape/Mosaic buttons was removed completely. I had to switch all her stuff over to SeaMonkey, which still had the ability to have large buttons, so she could use a web browser.
Whether you think it's a good or bad move, Electron has made building cross platform desktop applications a lot easier. It's a shame it must use Chromium and V8.
In fairness Mozilla used to have XUL [1] until it was stopped [2], presumably because not enough people were using it?
1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Tech/XUL 2. https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/FAQ#Doesn.E2.80.99t_F...
Perhaps the gold standard of Electron would allow you to choose the engine and then build a native/browser app based on that.
For people who have web development experience, yes.
And that case applies more often than you'd think. For example, the Spotify app, the Slack app†, the various Facebook Messenger "clients", etc.
† the Slack app is built with http://macgapproject.github.io/, but it's pretty much the same thing.
The macOS default is to have no taskbar at all, just a bunch of icons without text or context.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...
otoh Webkit was originally developed as part of iOS, so embedding was required
I bet the ipad prototype from early 2000s actually ran some version of osx&safari
But let's be realistic, people want things to "just work". People in general are not bothered by privacy or security, but if funny cat picture can't load that's huge problem. People in general were moving from IE because it's shitty laggish software, not because it was not secure or was sending telemetry. So adopting Blink/WebKit is right business decision, because it makes customers happy, because a lot of sites are developed with only Chrome in mind. Bootstrap and friends support Firefox, it's true, but many actual sites with custom non-framework HTML/CSS do not. Some bugs are negligible, some are not. But what is 0.5% of all web sites for Microsoft? A huge deal, let's accept this.
Google Chrome has enterprise version which already supports Active Directory Group Policy, so corporate customers will be happy too.
What can Firefox offer today? Frameworks support Firefox and Firefox supports standards well. I genuinely believe that google Chrome in 2020 will be like IE6 in 2010 and rust based codebase will be superior by all means, easier to maintain and faster to execute. But I am very naive and optimistic about Firefox, because I simply love this browser.
Microsoft arguably isn't, they still like to force the customer to do things beneficial to itself, and collect lots of telemetry.
BTW, this is not the first time MS has considered Chromium. Back before the fork of Edge, they considered using Webkit.
But the tech industry is a key contributor for any democratic contender, so I don’t expect much progress here. Might still be the right choice though, but I don’t think this is the issue where you should turn your hopes on the democrats.
Bernie Sanders is occasionally a Democrat; particularly, he was when running for President in 2016 and almost certainly will be if he runs for President in 2020; as a Senator he is “merely” an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, doesn't have the Democratic Party support candidates against him, and is the Democratic caucus’s ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.
No, he didn't get to be the ranking member of the Banking Committee without personal connections with just about every Dem leadership figure that matters, especially in the Senate.
Now, he might have the moral fortitude to stand up for his public values despite such connections, but denying that they exist is ludicrous.
I am always reminded of when fire departments couldn't help other cities because their equipment wasn't compatible. This was so disastrous that we introduced standardization for sizes of hoses, connectors, etc.
I am not aware of anyone protesting such standardization the way we routinely think it's a terrible thing in other industries while taking it for granted that all our stuff is supposed naturally play well with all our other stuff.
My understanding is MS basically brought the world the personal computer. You and I probably couldn't have this argument had they never set out to get filthy rich and yadda. The world would likely be a very different place and I personally think that alternate timeline wouldn't be all upside. I don't think it would be some eutopia that we stupidly missed out on by failing to tell Bill Gates "kill it before it grows."
By using Blink, maybe they can spend more time actually contributing to the spec and having an independent voice elsewhere?
Ajax
For me, I think a reasonable definition of a healthy development platform is one where developers are investing their time and sharing their expertise to develop tools and applications specifically for that platform. Having a windows focused code base for web browsing and all of the components that entails could be an encouraging reef from which open source eco-systems could spring.
Does Microsoft adopt Chromium/Blink for embedding in UWP apps and Electron? That will reduce memory and storage requirements for the latter, but greatly increases the attack surface of the former.
Microsoft is also taking on an _enormous_ maintenance burden in integrating it with their own sandboxing and protection mechanisms. I'm in disbelief that the ongoing cost of maintaining this fork and tying themselves to Chromium will be worth it.
And the incentive for Google to now embed more and more ChromeOS/mobile device management into Chromium. For example: Google intends to ship an alternative credential provider for Windows 10 through Chrome. Microsoft will have to painstakingly isolate every feature like that which Google adds, and adopt an aggressive posture of doing code reviews of Chromium.
I'm not sure how, given that they are such strong competitors/adversaries, this can work out.
Whereas it used to be that big IT departments would nix the installation of any 3rd party browser, nowadays almost all accept the use of Chrome. And if you're selling an app into a big company, you always tell them to use Chrome, and never advertise IE/Edge support except as a last resort.
If Microsoft want to sell their cloud services into these companies, they need to support Chrome-based apps. Edge won't do. As such, they have little choice but to fork it and build their own browser, tied into their services. I'm sure they recognise the potential problems and downsides, but consider it the least worst option at this point.
I also wonder if instead of "ceding" control to Google, Microsoft intends to start being a major contributor to Chromium, so much so that it almost becomes a joint effort vs. Google dominance.
But on the other hand, Google forked Blink away from Webkit specifically so it wouldn't have to share control of the codebase with Apple.
Do you think Google is willing to share control over Blink with Microsoft?
That's not accurate. Google forked Blink for many reasons (WebKit2, dev tools policies, etc.) that collectively added up to a dysfunctional relationship.
(I'm a diehard Firefox user but not gonna lie, side-by-side, I'd prefer surfing through WebKit's repos by a long shot!)
I think the lack of embedding has hurt Gecko showing up in more projects. Their solution was XULRunner which inverts the model by embedding your app in Gecko instead of the other way around, and they don't even support that anymore.
I'm hoping GeckoView takes off on Android and makes its way back to desktop, but I'm afraid that will happen too late for people to care about it anymore.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/03/dutch-court-re...
I can’t wait never to touch VSTO again.
Obviously this is a super niche thing, and you could make the argument that there are more efficient ways to edit text than this. My main point is that I never have this issue with native apps, only Electron-based ones, so it seems likely to me that there is some performance issue with this sort of input to Electron.
Other editors run just fine in my Linux VMs- Sublime Text has no problem at all.
That said, it's clearly possible to build a nice editor purely on the CPU, so it's a shame that VS Code can't run well in the same environment. Sublime Text handles dozens of tabs and windows under emulation.
By atrocious performance, I mean even such things as the application significantly lagging behind my typing speed.
At any rate, I’ve often wondered when the endless pile of layers and abstractions has to topple.
Lol.
Nevertheless, I hope they go all-in because a gimped JS Office would finally let other players to innovate in the word- & spreadsheet processor niche without the MS .
Fingers crossed brother, finger crossed!
Getting WebRTC means Teams can replace Skype for Buisness
i feel the biggest players now have all carved out their public niche - they're afraid to directly challenge the leader with big words and marketing millions. ms doesn't have to "beat" google or mozilla anymore.
they're competing on a secondary, less visible level - at least for the retail consumer - like cloud computing and AI; the public fights are less heated than they were a couple of years ago.
still, i feel like a company like microsoft wouldn't give up the chance to influence that easily. so why choose blink over quantum? mozilla might be "morally superior" to google, and thus less likely to be influenced by anticompetitive behaviour. but google wont tolerate anything from MS that could hurt their own efforts.
* Vendor stability is one issue: While I doubt Mozilla will go out of business, Google clearly is a very safe bet.
* Which vendor will invest more in keeping the technology up to date? Google, due to its vast resources, seems like a safe bet to invest more money and engineer hours. Mozilla, however, will certainly make the web browser the center of its attention and top priority; Google has a lot on its plate (and Microsoft knows how browser tech can drift for years without top management attention).
* Which browser is most likely to maintain compatibility with websites and web apps, including corporate ones? Google is the obvious choice.
* Which vendor's engineering priorities most align with Microsoft's? I'm not sure. Google has their own priorities - a front end for Google's services, which compete directly with many of Microsoft's - but Google seems more focused on the corporate market. On the other hand, Mozilla's focus on privacy and end user control could easily conflict with Microsoft's priorities.
* And of course, which browser fits best in Microsoft's immediate browser plans and has the cleanest upgrade path from Edge/IE? I have no idea.
I'm a dedicated user and supporter of Firefox and Mozilla, but I can see reasons Microsoft might choose Chromium.
If Microsoft wants to make a cross platform product that runs on Windows, Android and iOS, and they know some of that product has a web rendering engine or js, they want to target/accomodate as few embeddable libraries as possible. Electron may be one of those products, but plenty of other things need embeddable html/js. Maybe Outlook will switch to blink someday?
It also means that in theory, Chrome could STOP shipping Blink with Chrome, and ship Chrome more like they do for iOS, where the rendering engine is part of the OS not browser app.
If things don't work or look broken, it causes more people to switch to Chrome over Edge/Firefox, turning this into a vicious cycle. The only way to break the cycle is to act like Chrome, so either chase Chrome's behavior with Edge or Firefox. Both of which entail a lot of effort and money with less than stellar results. Adopting Firefox will get them some development help but the fundamental problem of chasing a speeding train still remains.
Web browsing dominance is a single member district. Firefox and Chrome are the two major parties, and IE/Opera/Safari are third parties.
IE could have gone to Firefox to promote open standards and "back the opposition" so to speak. They chose, instead, the corporate behemoth behind the mobile OS they want a foothold on (presumably).
The market of web browsers has become "who gets to set the default search engine makes the moolah". Bing marketshare and revenue is driven by how well Edge works and how it can stop the bleeding to Chrome. Changing the engine to Quantum does not solve the problem they were having in the first place very well.
There’s no way this can be true.
Apple owns various platforms that ship Safari/WebKit and it’s the only option on iOS and watchOS. They’ve shipped more than 2 billion (and growing) iOS devices.
And hundreds of thousands native iOS apps use WebKit views.
So there’s no way Safari is a fringe 3rd party browser and has a better privacy story regarding fingerprinting and tracking than any of the other major browsers, including Firefox.
Unless you’re on the W3C mailing lists and GitHub repos, you wouldn’t know how active the WebKit team is on the development and implementation of web standards.
Yeah. A bit.
Thing is, Blink is not Chromium, Chromium is not Chrome, neither of them is Google, and BSD-3-clause is a pretty damn solid bulwark against the monopolization of the "control of fundamental online infrastructure", were that to ever become a concern again.
And the other bit is that the building blocks that make up Chromium power a lot of technology that is totally independent of anything under Google's influence, including NodeJS, Cloudflare's Workers, Microsoft's VS Code, and Amazon's Firecracker. They use it because it's solid, well-engineered tech. And even though Google wrote it, Google can't control it or stop you from using it against them. Microsoft isn't ceding anything at all to Google, Google's not in control of anything here.
The uncomfortable truth is that the role of neither Gecko nor Firefox nor Mozilla is particularly critical in terms of protecting the free and open Internet. What prevents Google from going all IE6 with Chrome isn't Mozilla, it's Chromium. If IE had been a BSD-licensed open-source project since 1995, then all the BS we endured in 2002 could never have happened; explorerium would have been trivially forked to create a sensible competitor with no switching cost.
Google tied their own hands from the very beginning, and by ensuring Chromium doesn't lag behind, they're keeping their hands tied. Almost as if they were doing it on purpose. In fact, the fact that Microsoft is switching to Chromium locks both tech giants into an intriguing sort of bargain. Each can benefit from the other's work as long as neither strays too far from the open source codebase, as long as they both push their changes into the open. So you end up with a reasonable guarantee that the future of the Internet stays independent; not because of a nonprofit competitor with a strongly-worded manifesto, but because none of the the main players can afford to make it closed.
For all of you that have a "last 10%" problem with Firefox (i.e. "I'd use Firefox if only it had X or Y feature"), please consider if that's worth contributing to the monoculture of rendering engines, and worth extending Google's monopoly on Internet standards.
You have to understand that there's making a stand on what's right, and then choosing to focus on the rest of your life... which, in this case, means not being annoyed by a browser that isn't keeping up. Firefox is great, many of us have loved it since Firefox 2 (or even before!) but you don't get significant increases in users by being the "more greater good" option. You get them by keeping up in the race. A browser is a tool and I want it to feel like it belongs, let me move, and then get the hell out of my way.
Every single time I use FF on Mac there is something weird or buggy about it, and this holds true even if I install it on a freshly bought unpolluted MacBook Pro. The UI stands out like a sore thumb, and it doesn't feel like it belongs.
I'll continue using Safari.
I get what you're saying, and I don't mean to be sanctimonious. But there are lots of aspects in life where I trade annoyance for doing what I think is right in the larger scheme of things. I recycle aluminum cans even when it would be easier to chuck them in the nearest bin. I used to toss cigarette butts out the window instead of having them stink up the car's ashtray.
Yeah, my examples might seem a bit dramatic compared to one's choice of browser. Look at them as analogies and not comparable badness.
For me, it's worth whatever edge cases annoy me to know that I'm not working for Google for free. Their incentives don't align with mine. For the most part, Mozilla's do.
If Mozilla falls, then we're right back to where we were in 2001. A single company dictating the standards of the web. That horrifies me.
Only thing I wanna nitpick... it's not _quite_ back to 2001. In 2001, we had IE6 that plagued the web and held it back. It was a different situation for two specific reasons, one of which is commonly discussed and one of which isn't.
1) Chromium is open source, Trident (IE6) was not. It's much more difficult to be stagnant for this reason alone. Anyone not liking the direction Google steers the project in can fork it and do their own version (e.g, the de-Googled Chromium builds out there). Trident (IE6) never had this, it was the definition of vendor lock-in.
2) It's easy to forget how different the environment was back then. The desktop still reigned king, and mobile devices weren't even really close to what we think of them as now. Companies were different as a result; Microsoft outright didn't give a shit about the web, and thus you saw IE6 languish. It was good enough for them so they didn't have to care. Google, on the other hand... literally wants to own the web, for better or for worse. It's in their best interests to keep Chromium healthy.
I really should just do this as a blog post...
1) While more sites might be targeting Chrome now, the browsers and standards are generally more inter-operable now than they were in IE6 days. jQuery came from a time where each browser supported drastically different APIs. These days Chrome and Firefox generally support 80-90% of the same APIs, with generally only a few cutting edge features and edge cases differeing.
2) Microsoft adopting Chromium as its core is in direct contrast to IE6 days. There are now two big players building on Chromium instead of one. That could have never happened with proprietary IE6. Now there are two hands on the wheel of Chromium, so to speak. And if Google won't play ball with Microsoft, like you said, Microsoft can fork Chromium, but I imagine both Google and Microsoft want to avoid that if possible.
https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
Not much has changed in the past year, with Safari holding steady at around 19% and Chrome going from 60% to 63%. Firefox is baring holding on to its 5%.
So while it's concerning to see MS embrace the Chromium engine from the standpoint of adding fuel to the Google fire, I don't see this having any real effect in the near term on the browser market nor the development of new web technologies. Firefox is certainly right to promote its excellent Quantum-based browser these days, but honestly I only see Firefox as being relevant on Windows. On the Mac, Safari is an excellent browser and one I use personally as well as for web development, and iOS doesn't allow any engine other than WebKit to be used. And with Android, Google has the upper hand on that platform.
In summary, as much as I want to cheer for Firefox and the Gecko Quantum engine from a philosophical standpoint, the only real competition to Chrome and Chromium right now is Safari and Webkit. Let's just hope Apple continues to put adequate resources into the development of its browser and keeps pace with Chrome.
1) It holds this marketshare mostly because of the forced monopoly on iOS. It's not technologically particularly far ahead or even has a browser implementing it with good marketing.
2) It exists on platforms other than macOS and iOS, but it is being optimized specifically for those platforms and only there can kind of compete with the other browsers. So, if you're not on macOS/iOS, it is hardly a competitor that you could choose from.
3) Chrome's Blink engine was forked from WebKit, so they are actually very similar in a lot of ways. A Blink-WebKit-duopoly would still have many of the disadvantages of a monopoly, like security vulnerabilities being shared and certain innovations being harder, because they have the same architecture.
* Mozilla stands up for privacy, user control, and open standards
* They back it up with high quality technical products like firefox
* They built rust, a language I love
Seriously: if you want to buy happiness then supporting an organization like Mozilla is about the most efficient way possible
* They back it up with high quality technical products like Chromium
* They built Go, a language I love
I could have written the same with Microsoft/VSCode/C# and Apple/Safari/Swift.
Seriously: Mozilla is good, but they're not saints, they're not totally different from other companies. They sometimes erred, even on the privacy of their users, which is their strong point. They are a commercial entity that sells services. It's easier to to keep enforcing a "Don't be evil" policy when you're not powerful enough to be evil.
The Mozilla Foundation's legally-binding mission statement is therefore also effectively enforced for the Corporation. The Foundation could throw out the CEO of the Corporation and in general gets to decide what happens in the Corporation, which they're legally bound to tell to follow the Foundation's mission statement, i.e. making the web a healthier place, improving privacy etc.
As a result, the only profit-motive that exists in the Corporation is that the employees want to keep their job.
A small correction: if I recall correctly, the Corporation is legally allowed to give some money to the Foundation, and it does so. But the allowed amount is quite small -- maybe a couple a million a year? I don't remember exactly -- and only a tiny fraction of the Corporation's profits.
Until now, Chromium has been strongly driven by one huge player: Google. Now, it can become driven by two huge players. It can erase the monopoly of Google over Chromium. Or if they have too many disputes, Microsoft can "fork" Chromium (like Google "forked" WebKit into Blink) and make their own, even better Chromium (Microsoft does have enough money and smart people to do so). The Edge could even beat Chrome, and be a new open-source multi-platform browser, which improves much faster than Chrome.
Many Chromium contributors are enthusiasts, who don't get paid for it. They would not mind working on Microsoft's fork instead of Google's fork.
While I agree with the overall content of this post, it seems dire to the point of hyperbole. Chromium is OSS, and Microsoft has both the incentive and engineering to fork it should Google not ultimately work together with them on it. It is somewhat ironic how Mozilla was basically founded due to Microsoft's monopoly on the browser market and when they (Mozilla) succeeded in breaking that monopoly, they give rise to a new competitor (Chrome / Chromium), which mostly does them in (Do them in being defined as steals most of their userbase).
I only really care that the web stays relatively open and vendor neutral, something Mozilla overall has been a real champion of. Microsoft using an open source standards compliant rendering engine is sort of a step in the right direction from where we were 10 years ago even if that rendering engine is primarily maintained by Google.
OTOH, Microsoft did this to themselves. Back when MS actually tried to create a user friendly OS and listened to their users. IE was supported across the entire line of supported OSes. But then under Balmer, they started to use IE and directX (and a few other things) as hammers to force people to upgrade to more recent versions of windows. Combined with a string of moves which pissed of their users and developers has resulted in far more reticence to upgrade windows versions than happened in the win 2.x->windows ME cycle.
Now their applications are suffering because windows 10 is still less than 50% of the windows userbase. So, basically 50+% of windows users can't actually run edge. Similarly with games, A developer that exclusively targets directX 12 cuts out 50% of the windows market share (and a similar share of the game console market).
OTOH, both firefox and chrome work just fine on windows7/8, and somehow so does vulkan, meaning that a brand new game could just target that and gain the entire supported windows ecosystem, much of the mobile, and game machine markets.
Basically there is a layer of management at MS that needs to be fired, because they still think its the 1990's and MS can force any old crap on their user-base and they will suck it up. After all, what are the alternatives (this is sorta still true, both linux and macos are still subpar experiences too)?
Chrome's UX is much better imo, but based on rendering engine I wouldn't have cared much.
I just hope they don't think it was their engine that made me (and probably others) switch.
I think, it was rather that they thought you were using a touchscreen...
EDIT: typo: Microsoft -> Google. Not sure what happened there :).
[1] Yes, this is a very vague concept these days. Google has, what 80%+ market share? They have a lot of people who can influence standards, and the cognitive biases of those people could mean that we end up in a new MSIE6 situation[2]. Anyway, I can certainly understand their fast growth when the browser came out, but these days I don't see much difference between Chromium and Firefox and it seems likely that Firefox is on my side when it comes to privacy. (I realize that I'm a very atypical user, perhaps not in this venue, but certainly in terms of general browser markets.)
[2] Through no fault of their own! It's just a combination of institutional/organizational pressure, market forces, etc. This is why I think it's also unfair to foist "securing the freedom of the web" upon Firefox. Firefox is an important piece of the puzzle, but ultimately they are in the market and that's not an objective place to evaluate strategy from.
This seems like some late 90’s derived sentiment
The first one is the tab research feature. It available for many years in chrome I don't understand why it's still missing in firefox. I can't type "yo [hit tab] my video" to find a video on youtube.
And the second feature missing is the search highlight in the scrollbar. It's a mandatory feature for my when searching on a long page (like this one for example) to search for "firefox" and find in the scrollbar everywhere it is. It's a feature available in chrome for the beginning I think.
If I understand you correctly: In firefox you set this up by 1) Create a bookmark 2) Edit it, and a) insert %s where you want "my video" to go, and b) give it a keyword, e.g. "yo".
Now you can use it by typing "yo my video" (no tabbing).
It's been in Firefox since circa 2006.
(To continue the example, the url for the youtube bookmark should be: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s )
1. In chrome, you don't need to manually add anything; you don't need to assign a keyword that you have to memorize. All the websites that you frequent that support OpenSearch will be automatically added by Chrome and you use their domain as keyword. I can now type en + tab to search on Wikipedia, as well as hundreds of other websites (no exaggeration) without manually configuring anything.
And on top of that, if you want to manually add anything (maybe it doesn't have OpenSearch), or assign a different keyword like Fx, you can still do that in chrome://settings/searchEngines, like Firefox.
2. Chrome's quick search supports auto completion. Firefox's doesn't.
It was not a big problem for me before the change of the Search Bar in Fx, since you can very easily add OpenSearch engines there and get auto completion too. But the new "One Click" makes it very hard to use (particularly the auto completion part). Now I have straight up given up search bar.
I prefer Firefox’s defaults on both counts.
Also, Firefox has auto completion on by default on its default search engine, which is Google no less. So I'm not sure why this topic is about privacy other than purely technical.
- Google has auto completion on Google through a bit of JavaScript.
- Firefox has auto completion on all text input fields that don't specifically disable it and aren't password fields.
As a portal to the internet, I'm quite happy that Firefox doesn't modify specific individual websites, even if they are Google (the anti tracking features are/should not be hardcoded values, but rather behavioral).
>I'm quite happy that Firefox..
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with that too. The one I replied to seems not happy about the behavior that you can get auto-completion results from search engines in Chrome, because that "end up sending keystrokes to third parties". I was simply pointing out Firefox did that too with default search engine, just not when you're using keyword to call other engines; which IMO implies it's purely a technical limitation, not a privacy choice.
Suggestions for keyword searches will be fixed in the next release.[1]
Unfortunately it doesn't fix the problem that I have to add keywords for all of them manually
Apparently there's an extension for the scrollbar thing (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/highlightall/) although I can't quite imagine why it would be more useful than just visiting the search results sequentially.
This is the main reason I switched back to Chrome after trying Firefox shortly after the release and Quantum and just recently. You can manually create search shortcuts in Firefox, but this is incredibly inconvenient if you make heavy use of this feature as I do. With Chrome, I can visit a new page and it will immediately offer tab-to-search when I type the first letters of the page's URL.
It's a pity because I really wanted to switch, but I couldn't get used to this.
It's present in Firefox and has been for several years now. I use it extensively both with internal and external sites, e.g. I type "people joe blogs" in to my browser and it opens up our internal phone directory and searches for the person.
It's super simple to set up:
Go to the desired site. Right click on the search field, and choose "Add a Keyword for this search". Pick a name for the bookmark, and then pick a keyword to go with it.
That's it, job done :)
I don't see how this is mandatory, you can just use the next/previous-result buttons (F3 / Shift-F3) to go to each result, but I guess it would make it much easier to establish some context as to where you are on the page, especially after you've jumped to the next search result.
Yes, firebug started it all, but chrome is killing it right now. Mozilla, why don't you start copying the chrome console already.
I've switched over to Firefox DevTools for 2 reasons:
1. The box model is on the right instead of on the bottom, so I can mess with it and immediately see results in the Inspector styles window and the browser. https://i.imgur.com/KfxmRQT.png
2. I can click on the Event bubble next to the element to see events that are bound to it and go to it if I choose so. https://i.imgur.com/UWiMttX.png
Also hoovering mouse pointer over, does not always show variable's value.
These problems are not present on Chrome.
Step, Step Into, Resume.. use different function keys than I'm used to on Linux.
Edit + Resend doesn't work for me on Linux. It works on Windows for me.
Copying headers doesn't work well for me on Linux. I have to click 'Raw Headers' to copy a header. Works fine on Windows.
Chrome is still faster than Firefox.
I prefer chrome and Edge's download monitor.
I prefer Firefox's proxy controls.
Safari isn't a competitor with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge
What's incredible is that Chrome uses more CPU on Youtube than Safari. When playing the SAME video side by side.
edit: As an example, Safari is 2nd after Chrome in this ES7 support comparison: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es2016plus/
I still use Chrome for google stuff (e.g. gmail, google docs, GCP, etc), but that's because google has chosen to make their own properties work poorly in other browsers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-pushes-safari-on-windows-via...
Safari has about ~5% percent market share on desktops, but 15-25% on mobile, including tablets.
Depending on Region, it could be up to 15% on Desktop and 60% on Mobile, including tablets. Most people don't realise the devices usage market shares from iOS is actually much larger than they thought.
My view and strong suggestion would be, yes, please. And also evangelize Firefox to the non-technical people you know.
And I absolutely love how the dev tools show which elements are grid and flex box containers with a little pill in the DOM explorer.
I don't see a single good reason to switch back to chrome/chromium
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-edge-to-morph-into-...
I've tried a couple of extensions that "pull" tabs out of the parent window, but it never worked perfectly.
If Firefox had native support for this (apparently simple) feature, I believe it would gain the preference of many users of tiling window managers.
The problem is that even if you have a browser with a single tab, you still get the browser tab bar showing that tab. And then on top of that you get the WM tab bar, wasting space and confusing the user.
In older days, a browser with a single tab wouldn't show the tab bar at all. But that has changed ever singe they shoved the tab bar into the window title bar on most platforms.
With Servo only just in developer preview, it's not going to be fit for Microsoft's enterprise customer needs for another couple of years, and taking a dependency on Rust would have been hard for Microsoft as it has its own languages that serve much the same purpose.
Choosing a mature browser platform written on C and C++ makes a lot of sense when thought of in those terms.
Fears of a monoculture are legitimate, but still overblown at this point.
50% directly spent on Firefox development.
12% spent on marketing (for comparison, rumor has it that Chrome's marketing spend is comparable to Mozilla's total revenue).
13% general and administrative expenses (this includes things like leases on office space, as far as I can tell from the usual definition of this category).
9% (of revenue; it's 36% of profit) income taxes. Which Mozilla apparently pays, unlike some other tech corporations.
16% money going into the rainy-day fund.
Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla; pardon my snark about taxes. It's a sore point.
The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation. It is _not_ a nonprofit and develops a web browser as well as most other software you would associate with "Mozilla". It pays dividends to the Foundation which the Foundation uses, alongside donations, to fund its work. The Corporation pays taxes on its profits, like any other corporation that is not explicitly a nonprofit. Note that I am explicitly not using "for-profit" to describe the Corporation, because profit is not the Corporation's goal. Again, the only shareholder in the Corporation is the Foundation, though they do have separate boards and somewhat separate governance.
Google advertises Chrome on the Google start page, literally on google.com. I wonder how much that web real estate would go for if Google were to auction it off?
RIP!
Chromium is the open source version minus the proprietary services and codecs[0].
What am I missing?
[0] https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what’s-the-difference-betwe...
My understanding is that Microsoft is planning on adopting some components of Chromium (certainly including Blink, unclear how much else) for future versions of Edge.
Personally, though, I've been a Firefox person since the times when it was still called Firebird, so I'll stick with my favorite browser mostly through inertia. Nobody has given me a good reason to use another browser, except when I want to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime Video on GNU/Linux, that seems to work better with Chromium.
And let us not forget the outliers like dillo, which has a terrible rendering engine and no Javascript[1], but it is FAST as lightning, and you can keep 50 tabs open, the browser still just uses about 100MB of RAM. Whereas Firefox, on my work laptop, can easily top 2GB of RAM.
[1] Some may consider this a feature - it certainly means you do not need an ad blocker in dillo. ;-)
Strategically it would have been a super win - lots of good will value to gain, a way to keep themselves and others less reliant on Google, and perhaps even push/use Firefox as a poster child GitHub partner for further value. What gives?
I wonder if this is about Microsoft making a cross platform browser?
I'm curious as to what point we say screw it and create a new web. Is that even an option? Is it even plausible or desirable?
Only reason I came back is their Android browser kinda sucks. Addons constantly crash in the mobile browser, and its not integrated well with the password manager APIs and other stuff. It was a pain in the ass to use.
Their auto-fill sucks compared to Google's and just overall if I take out container tabs, Firefox just doesn't work for me like Chrome does. So I switched back, installed SessionBox, and while not perfect, gets close to container tabs.
I'd rather want safari gone, cause safari on iOS is a shitshow with no competition.
Safari on iOS gives me the IE6 feeling, it's so insanely bad and bug filled. Like, it sometimes fail to render pages properly if hardware acceleration is used, and sometimes one have to restart the browser just to get the keyboard working, or the ability to click any link.
iOS Safari must die, especially if we continue like this with no other allowed engine on iOS. Either other engines must be allowed or iOS might as well die and the web would be better off.
Chromium, while being open source, is a project run by Google, so they have the final word on what is included in the code. They don't just have enough influence, they control it.
At work it's a different story though as our organization is heavily baked into Google's productivity suite (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, etc.) and of course, Google will always recommend using Chrome.
FF is far from perfect, and I see a lot of constructive comments here which, if taken by FF, can really improve a lot of aspect in their product.
Even if Chromium is a bit easier to put a new skin around, that's a few developer years, nothing for MS. But strategically, handing it all over to Google, just like they did in the mobile OS space, what? How does that make any sense? Especially now that Firefox became an _excellent_ browser again?
Bit rich coming from an organization funded by Google.
Microsoft as a big enterprise will likely push their charm to improve things in chromium. And Google as another big enterprise with good control over chromium till now will proably not like all their changes. So how good is the chance for some friction and later an open conflict of interessts to appear?
I thought that Chrome's rendering engine was Blink, a fork of Webkit.
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge/blob/master/README.m...
It is improving.. Yet, pure performance, both EdgeHTML and Chromium outperform on many of my devices.
You'd expect a slightly more usable design.
No, when you give power without backup (FOSS licenses for instance) you'll be hurt, even sooner than later. Microsoft have a sole interest if it want to compete with Google: keep the desktop up instead of putting anything in the cloud (Google is far superior technically and as per reputation in that) and offer technically superior products. Like offer Firefox bundled and contribute to it, since is a FOSS project not held by a single and competing company.
While Microsoft product and reputation are worse Microsoft is still there on most desktop so it have power and interest to react. Try to evolve play the Google game (like in-Windows ads, Office365 etc) is lost at start.
> Google is a fierce competitor with highly talented employees and a monopolistic hold on unique assets.
IMO it has, right now and not from today Google product are crappy as Microsoft one, people (not only geeks and tech savvy users) start to notice more everyday. Especially on mobile crap. Google of course have the excuse to blame OEMs (with good reasons) but many start to notice that they are not the sole guilty. So Google is still a prominent company in technical terms, but it's a dead one whose big body keep moving a bit due to the fact that death was never instantaneous for such size animals.
BTW Mozilla foundation IMO should do different things than complain Microsoft decision, one is looking at Firefox and Firefox users especially when many say "hey, you go in a wrong direction". A thing should be remembered tech savvy users may say things that does not interest vast majority of your users today but quality always win in the long run so if tech savvy user say a thing does not work it may work today and tomorrow but it will crush after. And the more it last the more hard will be the crush.
Be open, community will help and there is nothing big as internet community, no company can compete, that's why after years software became open again and that why companies start to trap FOSS code in proprietary jails knowing well that they have no other options.
An ancient politician motto: you can make a throne on bayonets but it will start hurting you when you sit on it. We are citizens, even if only few are aware more will come the measure the collar tightens and no Google, nor Microsoft, nor Amazon can exists without consumers. They can try to be as indispensable as possible and it may work for some times but not forever.
Chrome Dev tools are way better
Firefox Ui looks like 2008.
Firefox would win more if it continuesd to support unity.
Problem with Firefox is that it sticks to standards too much whereas others experiment and get cool features which then become part of standards and then finally Firefox gets them.. meaning in last.
Bookmark manager sucks
File menu and other menus are clunky
They need to redo their logo it also looks like 2008
If Firefox made their motto "get all chrome features 6 months before chrome" I'll uninstall chrome right now
You'll probably find that you can permanently log both users in at the same time, and then switching between them is just a shortcut and takes a fraction of a second, so it needn't be a burden. You may find it's even faster than changing the user in Firefox.
That's why it's great to do these things at the OS level - it can be done efficiently once for every app and not reimplemented lots of times badly like in Firefox.
Chromium is open source. It's not like Google and Microsoft are conspiring in secret to build a browser and destroy the competition. It's an open source project, and there's the W3C and WHATWG. Even if Chrome had 100% market share, there's nothing stopping people from contributing new suggestions, features and improvements to Chromium, or getting involved with the W3C.
I used to be a huge fan of open-source software and the Free Software Foundation, and thought that this anarchist/communist style of project management was the best way forward. Now I've realized that most open source projects are poorly organized, suffer from lack of leadership, and have bad UX and design. The developers are underpaid (or unpaid), unmotivated, and sometimes end up burning out.
Some of the most successful open source projects are backed by large companies who can pay the salaries of full-time engineers (Rails, Chromium, React, Red Hat, etc.) Anyway, I think it's great that Microsoft has decided to adopt Chromium, and that many Microsoft engineers will be contributing new features and improvements to the open source engine.
Check out Brave [1] if you want a Chromium-based browser with a focus on privacy. Or use Firefox. Anyway, I don't think it's the end of the world.
I've never used it because I kind of thought it was a weird cryptocurrency project. I honestly don't think it provides much value over Chromium + uBlock + uMatrix. But it's just another option.
I personally use Google Chrome, because I actually like signing in with my Google account, and I don't mind the tracking. I already use Google for everything: Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar, Analytics, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, search. And Google Apps for my company. My choice of browser doesn't make a difference.
Think of it this way: do you think it helps or hurts Google to have every version of Windows come pre-installed with what is essentially already Chrome, except, of course, it will probably have Bing as its default search engine. Do you think the odds of people just using Edge to download Chrome and nothing else go up or down with this move? Do you think it helps or hurts Google to have most tech people not bother telling their parents to download Chrome anymore? There is significantly less control from "owning" an engine than owning an actual browser. I don't think I would have had much of an issue with the dominance of IE 20 years ago if I knew I could compile and modify (and release!) IE myself.
This is more akin to most browsers now having a common starting point. The problem with browsers is that if you truly want to make a new one you need to somehow replicate the decades of work put into the existing ones. What that means is that before you can exercise any of your noble privacy/security/UI/whatever goals, you must first make sure you pass Acid 1 and replicate quirks mode float behavior and etc. etc. etc. This is a non-starter. But now, Microsoft can launch from Chromium's current position and have a browser that can actually compete with Chrome. It's as if they've taken "engine correctness" off the table, and can compete on cool features or "we won't track you" or anything else. Websites will work in Edge by default, so if you like that one new feature in Edge, you can feel OK switching to it without compromising devtools/rendering/speed/etc.
Now I know that the initial response to this is "but Google will call the shots!". Not if the way this has gone down every other time has anything to do with it. Google's Chromium started as KHTML. When Apple based WebKit off of KHTML, the KHTML team had very little say in anything and they eventually forked of course. Then Google based Chromium off of Apple's WebKit, and once again, there was very little "control" Apple could exercise here. Sure, they remained one monolithic project for a while (despite having different JS engines which just goes to show that even without forking you can still have differentiation), but inevitably, Chromium was also forked from WebKit into Blink.
And there should be no reason to think the same won't happen here, and it's a good thing! Microsoft in the past couple of years has demonstrated amazing OS culture. I can't wait to see what the same company that gave us VSCode is able to build on top of Blink, and eventually separate from Blink. Ironically enough, the worst thing that could have happened to Google's search dominance is have Blink win the "browser engine wars": we all agree Blink is the way to go now, so we can all start shipping browsers that at minimum are just as good, and won't auto-log you in, or have their engine set to default, or etc. etc. etc.
It eliminates from the equation a browser implementation that never really was that popular and at best sort of did what other browsers did without actually doing much different.
You have to ask what the point for MS would be to continue to fund that. It wasn't buying them much positive differentiation. They had a little, mainly in the form of some performance benefits. But mostly people ended up using Chrome or Firefox, even on Windows 10. Mostly it was differentiating negatively for them in the sense that it had its own sets of unintentional compatibility bugs that most web developers did not prioritize working around.
Several years into the windows 10, it's been largely a success for MS. Edge is the exception however. They made a few strategic mistakes with it (still under Balmer), the primary one being to make it windows 10 only. This made some sense when the plan still was windows 10 on every device but that went out of the window when Satya Nadella unceremoniously killed off windows phone. So while windows did well, Edge did not. Worse, MS now had to support pretty much everything they did on Android, IOS, and Mac OS as well. So, having their own browser engine just made that more complicated for them without offering any benefit. Porting it to other platforms would have been a serious investment, without any clear benefits or a path to success.
Arguably, already at the time you could have questioned the logic of putting vast resources into duplicating the efforts of several open source browser engines with the explicit goal to do exactly the same functionally. IMHO it was largely the not invented here syndrome that drove Balmer/MS to do this. The new found pragmatism under Nadella produces different decisions. So, they keep the UI but they swap out the internals for of the shelf OSS that works perfectly fine. Happy users, happy developers, less cost. Not the hardest decision he's had to take I imagine.
As to Firefox, they have an ongoing project to re-implement their engine in Rust that is producing clear benefits in addressing pain points in their old implementation that are also common to other C++ based implementations. They've been doing a great job staying on top of web standards and are a good contributor to them, often pioneering features such as wasm or webauthn in Firefox first. So, their implementation and focus on privacy adds value and they have lots of users that appreciate what they do and how they do it.
I get their frustration that Google is gaining more power here where MS used to provide some independent voice in e.g. standards committees. But lets be fair here, MS wasn't doing a whole lot on that front and was basically just struggling to keep up without adding much value. Few web developers will mourn the need of having to deal with Edge specific rendering issues. Most users won't be able tell the difference. And having MS scrutinize what Google does with Chromium and kicking their ass in the standards bodies might help in keeping them honest.
Challenge accepted.
A week later, after having set Firefox to default on my systems and working with it, I decided that:
* There's still no good replacement for DownThemAll or Tree Style Tabs (the gimped, non-feature-complete alternatives to those are not acceptable alternatives),
* That the unfixed dupe SSL cert problem that makes Firefox unusable at work is going on a decade old and has no movement on it,
* That Mozilla deciding what I can install in the browser is an infringement on my freedoms as a user in a much more real way than philosophical concerns about licensing (no, running a fork of the browser is not an acceptable alternative)
* That they keep making extremely questionable decisions regarding privacy, telemetry, and overall user control over those things,
And overall:
* That Mozilla's stated commitment to empowering the user cannot be trusted inasmuch as it applies to people with strong computer literacy.
--
So for now, I stay on Chrome. Your choice of web browser comes to to functional concerns, not the kind of political wankery that this blog post represents. With that in mind, why would I choose something that's basically Chrome that offers maybe one or two useful additional features, but is basically worse in every other way?
Speaking of which:
>That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.
This is bald faced fearmongering, edging dangerously close to maliciously lying. The main problem with IE6 of the day is that it is closed source and very difficult to interoperate with, given its rather special take on web standards.
Chromium is open source and can be forked given the will to do so - which will happen should this doomsday scenario they're predicting come about. Hell, Firefox was responsible for ultimately unseating IE as the browser of choice a long while ago, and they did not have this advantage.
Say what you want about Google/Chrome(ium)'s motivations, but I see very little in the way of things they do that go out of their way to make my life miserable. They're hardly perfect or blameless, but at the end of the day, I've spent a lot more time cursing at Firefox than Chrome.
What it boils down to is that firefox is dead to me until they are cured of the dread GNOME disease of deciding they know better than the people who use their software what the people who use their software want and need. You know, priorities. Like making the actual browser better, rather than shoveling in crapware like https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/price-wise and ancillary, niche garbage like WebVR. There are a hell of a lot of questionable resource allocation decisions being made here.
I'm looking at Vivaldi with a great amount of hope:
>Your browser matters. Take control with Vivaldi. We live in our browsers. Choose one that has the features you need, a style that fits and values you can stand by.
This is a philosophy that is a breath of fresh air to me.
What problem is that? I haven't encountered that, but I really don't use FX that much.
>. Like making the actual browser better, rather than shoveling in crapware like https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/price-wise and ancillary, niche garbage like WebVR
Nah, I'm sure their priorities are in the right place /s - they sent me a newsletter message for a concert they're hosting for some reason because I'm on the MDN mailing list: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/concerts/?utm_campaign...
In short, a number of poorly-behaved devices reuse the same self-signed SSL certificate, primarily consumer routers and enterprise out-of-band management apps like iDRAC and iLO (and apparently a number of firewalls, judging by the comments on that tracker). Once you've hit a site that presents a cert, Firefox will flat out disallow you from visiting a different site that presents the same (non-wildcard) cert, with no opportunity for override.
The only way to work around this is to nuke your cert DB outright and restart the browser, or to run a command with the cert's fingerprint as an argument to remove it, and restart the browser. The simple option would be a button to just kill the offending cert, which I personally suggested last year (third comment from the bottom) and didn't even get a reply to.
Meanwhile, Chrome, IE, and Edge don't have this problem.
This has been going on for 12 fucking years. Apparently WebVR and shopping plugins are more important than basic usability.
Yeah, I got that concert email too. What the actual fuck is this company even doing anymore?
I ask because the "goodbye" headline uses a wide font.
I switched to using https://Vivaldi.com last year after going through a whole bunch of web browsers to find a adequate replacement for my once favorite pre quantum Firefox browser with 70+ core xul based addons... The best I could find was Vivaldi, it's chromium engine based however the developers behind it have really taken to providing power user features and a good level of customization for the front end ... adding at least some of the features Firefox addons used to be able to provide. Not to mention it still allows me to use the garbage chrome store extensions, which while they will never compare to the old Firefox addons, it's at least better than scrap like dummIEs browser, flOpera, and defaulty chrome goolag Garbage and of course whatever fail Mozilla work on.
Seriously Mozilla have been making themselves irrelevant, for at least a decade since Firefox 4.0 they have been adding allowing retards to add crap features, mess around the frontend gui while not actually improving anything just causing more work for addon developers and the those who make good theme. The only good thing they did was push the standards for website rendering. Now they have self lobotomized the best product they had by cutting off the addons that kept it being the browser power users and influential users would recommend out to the less techie friends and family who now all just use chrome crap. Firefox(quanturd) has now become what might aswel be a chrome clone that while practically falling to it's knees in supporting and copying all the same crap Goolag does... so basically a whole lot of developer time is wasting just making their version of the same shit, instead of ever getting around to developing useful features for end users. .. at this point MS is smart for just using the chromium backend, ofc MS are even more rubbish these days and will never improve the front end user experience and features even with more time to spend on those areas and they'll probably not update the chromium source thus dragging things behind again.
And starting with the garbage web extensions api, that was the death nail for Firefox the moment they thought throwing technology like XUL out, that had allowed third party addon developer to create vastly more powerful addons for the Firefox web browser (NOT every other mediocre noob garbage browser, which is the goal of web extensions, when the best addon you can mak for your preferred browser could be ported to other crap browsers and is also limited by such a poor and limited api as implemented and agreed on by a consortium of morons with agendas of the company they work for ie Goolag, crApple or MicroSuck..) than are possible for Chrome, not to mention the customization and power user features that came with that addon support. These new employeed dolts that started infesting the Moztard organization threw it all away to level the play ground with all the other rubbish browsers like Chrome and Edge, etc..
So now they find themselves competing with zero advantage, and they have such morons working at this place that they don't even bother to implement the best power user addons in the actual browser that they broke.. Which is funny because if they did that, I wouldn't be using Vivaldi.. To this day many addon developers behind very popular addons like TabMixPlus are still trying to get these retards at Mozilla to actually improve the web extension crap format to not only fix bugs but improve on the api's that would help them re-implement the addon that made Firefox any good in the first place... check this thread https://tabmixplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19942 .. it's a been a whole year, meanwhile Vivaldi practically just implemented most the features that TMP added for Firefox directly into Vivaldi options.. wtf have Mozilla done, nothing like that, they might aswel be the same idiots that work at goolag on chrome with its garbage user interface and feature standards.
Stupidity doesn't even begin to describe Mozilla, I have nothing but contempt for the organization for what they have done and the kind of morons they have working at the place. And it is sad because as a power user and someone who used to recommend Firefox as I really do miss having a web browser that had 70+ core addons that all went to making my browser highly customizable so I could have it looking and working the way I wanted, while providing a great experience and interaction with the web that was vastly superior to anything else on the market. Not anymore though, since Quantum wreck came out last year. And now he legacy browser of Firefox that supported all those vastly better xul based addons has ceased to get the updates required to render sites properly, performance issues have increased more bugs and for years Mozilla have been messing with frontend css changes etc and breaking customization for there own crappy visual design and garbage inferior features.
So yeah http://i.imgur.com/481pHyo.jpg ...farewell Firefox (that was an old screen of Firefox, FF versions onwards Moztard broke more of the interface I gave up maintaining any sense of a good theme and more addons started breaking).. Firefox you were once the best, now you are shit, to all those at Mozilla go fuck yourselves. You cater to mediocrity and noobs, you deserve to disappear, followed by the rest that follow and set your direction into oblivion.
If a family member asks me what to use, I would tell them to use Chrome just because it's likely to be a better experience for them.
I am sick of Firefox now.
I bet if they kept XUL, people would complain about the other things, in Fact they used to.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/11/supercook...
From a security and data privacy standpoint Firefox seems like the only option.
Although, I'm considering moving more to Chrome because of how Apple is breaking old extensions in Safari 12.
Who asked for more native apps? Because I sure didn't. Make no mistake, it's about security, but they still chose the wrong path. If they just made people sign their .safariextz bundles, we wouldn't have to go through this dance.
You can sorta do the same in Chrome by creating a full separate profile and opening an extra window, but then your passwords and bookmarks are separated as well. It's a pain in the ass.
The real question in my mind is: how will Mozilla differentiate in such a way that it even makes sense for users to support a different browser platform?
Are you upset over extensions breaking? There was a long, extremely long deprecation period and afaik Mozilla helped addon authors move over. They had to make the cut at some point, tbh.
I don't feel like any of this time went "down the drain". Why do you? Software doesn't usually last forever.
Now I know how to write Electron apps, but before you know it, all that work is going to go down the drain, too! Get used to it. ;)
Change is good, and each iteration gets better, and if you're not enthusiastic about learning new stuff all the time, you're in the wrong industry. I do NOT want to go back to ActiveX or XP/COM, thank you.
Did you know that Mozilla actually invented words to describe the process of removing XP/COM: "DeCOMification" and "DeCOMtamination"?
Which didn't include 100% replacement APIs. A long period doesn't help if the new thing doesn't actually replace the old thing.
I liked Firefox, but when the drama around Brendan Eich blew up, I was disgusted and walked away. Have they gone back to just working together to build a good browser? Or does it still come with a “must think a certain way” subtext?
(FWIW, I want everyone to be able to code; I don’t care who/what/how you look like or sleep with or swear commitment to).
I'm guessing the people complaining here haven't tried to embed Gecko vs Webkit. Webkit is far superior, it's the leading browser engine world-wide, and it would be really strange for Microsoft to choose Gecko over Webkit, as a result.
Also, Microsoft would be unable to provide a browser for iOS if they went with Gecko. Why would they try to standardize around a browser engine that is supported across less platforms than Webkit?
Webkit's API for engine embedding is far superior to Gecko[0], and that's coming from Mozilla directly.
> The “browser engines” — Chromium from Google and Gecko Quantum from Mozilla
Huh? Sorry Mozilla, but you have to know that "Chromium" is not the engine, it's Blink, Google's fork of Webkit. Chromium is an application that encapsulates Blink, just like Firefox is an application that encapsulates Gecko.
Anyway, the complaining from Mozilla is hilarious anyway... Do they seriously want Microsoft influencing them? C'mon... They are just butthurt because Webkit has way more market share than Gecko, and even more so now that Microsoft is abandoning EdgeHTML.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Will-Firefox-ever-drop-its-Gecko-layou...
There's also various open source projects tackling this problem, which aren't as advanced, but are always improving.
Except it's not 'radically better' if you rely on extensions killed by Quantum and are unlikely to be updated because Firefox has such a small user base now.
I want to go back to Firefox and give it a try, but sending a load of extensions to their deaths has made that significantly harder. I'm not up for spending hours finding little hacks and half-baked work-arounds, either.
I had some useful extensions that worked with old Firefox. Then new Firefox came along and killed off some of them, so I had even fewer useful extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has many more useful extensions and hasn't killed off any of them. Chrome fits my workflow, Firefox doesn't/can't. Yet this is somehow understood as me wanting 'less'. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They plainly admit that Firefox can just hold it’s own and it is still NOT the fastest and best browser experience out there.
When I launch Chrome I just get this feeling that it is a super lightweight desktop app that manages a ton of tabs efficiently.
The reason why is that those are complex judgements rather than easily measured objective facts. Browsers are extremely complex and what “fastest” means depends on what you're measuring and where it's running. Chrome's memory usage is a great example — if you have tons of RAM and nothing else running, it's often faster but if either of those is true, Firefox being so much more memory efficient more than balances it out, especially for people who keep tons of tabs open — and all of the comparison points are changing regularly as browser development teams adjust.
As an extreme example, this is far from true but assume that the next version Chrome was faster on every part of the browser from networking to JavaScript, CSS, etc. Firefox might still be faster for most users on the metric they care about the most because its default tracking protection blocks 90% of the page weight on most sites and so every single one of those people would say it’s faster because that’s what they actually experience.
i7 laptop, 16 GB of RAM, nothing else running
Chrome: ~45 seconds to become usable, blank white window appears at 5 seconds into that wait time and just sits there
Firefox: ~10 seconds to become usable
Your security matters. Google recommends using Chrome, a fast and secure browser. Try it?
MS are going to be using Chromium, the open-source project along with it's Blink and V8 rendering and JS engines as the basis for their next default browser. They are not planning to install Google Chrome as the default browser.
Microsoft choosing to use one open-source project over another to fork their next browser from does not threaten the health or diversity of the internet. It isn't giving Google any additional control or power over the internet, because Chromium is an open-source project and any integrations to Google's own services exists only in Google Chrome.
Basically this article is just Mozilla whinging because their project wasn't chosen and pushing FUD about the health and balance of the internet being threatened as a result.
In reality Google does not gain any "power" from this, unless you count the couple of contributions Microsoft have submitted to the Chromium project (which again, is open-source) as an increase in "power", by which logic Mozilla should already have more "power" because they have been receiving decades of contributions as a result of being the default browser in most Linux distributions (leading hackers to write Firefox contributions and addons instead of for Chromium for example).