Firefox 70
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
This should give pretty noticeable speed and battery improvements on Retina Macbooks.
[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/70.0/releasenotes/#new
> Passwords can now be imported from Chrome on macOS in addition to existing support for Windows
Yes, each (bookmarks, history, passwords, tabs ) can be turned on or off per device basis.
“How Firefox Sync keeps your data safe even if TLS fails” https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-firefox-sync-keeps-...
Yep. I did this about a year ago. You have to create a Mozilla account (if you haven't already) in order to sync your tabs and history across devices, but that should be a given.
I find the Firefox sync a bit clunky compared to Chromes though. I think Chrome sends udpates to Google on each change whereas Firefox polls and updates on a schedule which means sometimes if you put a device to sleep (or if you're on iOS and the app gets suspended) your history and tab state won't be propagated and it'll be missing on your other devices which can be frustrating when you're away from those devices.
Yes.
> transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Almost. You will have to create a firefox account and export/import your bookmarks. That's it.
Only minor gripe is userChrome.css seems to not be used now.
Set this option to true: toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
That entire industry is a dumpster fire of greed, fraud, and misrepresentation.
Whoever are pushing them - including Telegram that I otherwise like - are damaging their reputation in my eyes.
My gripe there is that it started showing push notifications of ads!!! Once I blocked all its notifications everything went to normality.
Why not use Firefox?
>takes crypto donation hostage and opens funds in other people's names (i.e. scams crypto to artificially create demand for that BAT)
If you use Brave you literally are part of the problem.
The issue with this is that they could start controlling the standards and everyone would have to follow behind instead of everyone working and doing what’s best for consumers.
While chromium is open source, that doesn’t mean they have to accept merges from the community. It only means that they have to provide the source code. Yes it can be forked, but now you have to maintain or develop your engine. If they’re the dominant ones and are setting standards, that won’t help much.
By using another one you are helping keep a neutral ground.
The difference between MySQL and MariaDB is that you have PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MSSQL among a bunch of others, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_datab...
So the issue isn’t forking or not, but the fact that it’s still close enough that gives chromium the competitive edge and could kill the market.
Safari 13.0.2 versus Firefox 70.0 versus Chrome 77.0
Playing the same YouTube video at the same quality (1080p) and watching Energy Impact in Activity Monitor while the video played, I saw averages of: Safari used 20, Firefox used 45, Chrome used 45.
So on that task at least Safari is still king, but Firefox is on par with Chrome.
~6,4W average in Safari 13.0.3
~8,6W average in Firefox 70
More work is planned to reduce the energy usage for scrolling and full screen video. Though I guess for your example you don't watch things fullscreen.
> Safari’s compositor is entirely Core Animation based; Safari basically skips step 2.
(Step 2 is "the Firefox “compositor” assembles Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window")
Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.
Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.
Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).
I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!
This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.
Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.
All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.
I found this extension that forces FF to use H264 instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/
On my old MBP I'd rather consume more bandwidth than more more CPU.
Web Render might allow doing it properly, since the rendering is not on the CPU anymore.
iina is open source and have a lot of codec available.
I don't know if it change something on energy consumption, though.
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:
- A no-script extension or similar.
- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.
I'm running Nightly on OSX and I confirm all those improvements are there, but more are coming.
So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70.
Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background.
Firefox 70: Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82
Safari 13: Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11
If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this release. Save for Apple fiddling with the energy use numbers (VW style) this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari. Can anyone replicate this for the sake of argument?
Edit: uploaded screenshots https://imgur.com/a/4L64ShP
Well it might last 4-5x longer if you run safari in the background, since that is what you tested. But wouldn't the real test be running both browsers as the active window and comparing those results?
One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.
I would hypothesize that Safari still wins your performance test (if you were to re-test using them both as "active" windows), but probably not as dramatically as in the inactive window test.
I measured it with active windows now.
Screenshots:
- Both in background
- Safari Actie
- Firefox Active
Conclusion: it gets even worse for Firefox.
Edit: At the time of test Safari had 7 more windows open with probably 70+ tabs from my previous session that I didn't close.
No matter what you're doing, all but one of your tabs will be in the background at any given moment.
I understand this is rare, but I just have a very very hard time understanding what is so hard about this.
Page not visible? Just stop it. Stop the layout engine, stop the javascript VM. If there was a transfer in progress, let it finish, a page might get the callback when it's active again ...
(I know there are some tricky cases, a lot of them, but there just isn't any reason why a browser with 30 tabs should be consuming over 1 % cpu...)
If they don't render while backgrounded, how do they do that without being noticeable?
I couldn’t find info on how often a keyframe is expected from YouTube, but I’m recalling the bad old divx days where you sometimes had a frame per scene and skipping was very slow.
Presumably there is no easy way to disable page JS but keep your youtube video downloading.
This is so easy and I, a software developer with no actual experience in that area, know the obvious solution that eludes that hundreds of developers with actual experience in the area. Meanwhile, I take umbrage when my product manager tells me that implementing the next feature will be easy and I'm exaggerating how complicated it is."
if (not_visible) { suspend_wait_and_stop_consuming_resources }
I can imagine that it gets massively more complicated. However, as, say, an executive, this probably indicates that you can lean on your sw dev staff to approach the asymptotic ideal that looks so simple if you really care about the goal.
[1] E.g. Firefox added some in version 58: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Page_Visibi...
Well, the difficult part is not writing an if statement...
Contrats, you just broke the web for anyone doing one of the following:
- listening to music in the browser.
- having a webRTC chat with someone while browsing.
- keep reading another tab while waiting for a page to load.
And I'm probably missing a dozen of other totally legit use-cases.
Oh tell me about it. That's just about dead now. I mean, wasn't the point of multi tab browsing that I could do precisely that? Now I load Google Maps on my lethargic internet connection, go do something else for ten minutes, and come back and ... it starts loading when I open. This is on Firefox. Super sad.
Does it mean that page in background isn't updated in Safari?
i posit that ad blocking is actually a net resource saver, probably not at the level of using safari over firefox but certainly over unprotected firefox
(i am on gnu/linux or else i'd do this myself)
Firefox: Threads 71, %CPU 2.5. Energy: 0.4. Opening the tabs all at once took up ~68% CPU. Energy went up to 75.
Safari: threads: 8, %CPU: 0.7-2. When opening the tabs: %CPU: 28%. Energy usage: 2.4.
Firefox grew sluggish when opening that many tabs at once. Safari handled it like a champ.
Pretty bleak for firefox.
Seems like Firefox cares only about Windows.
…which is why all the work was done to support Core Animation on macOS?
(Not to say that it wouldn't be good if Firefox was better at it, but for those using Firefox, it might still be interesting until then.)
I don't know what Safari is doing differently to Firefox, and no doubt Firefox can improve here, but when people say "it's easy, just completely stop running JS in background tabs" they have no idea what tradeoffs that entails. (Just as when people said "browsers should just refuse to autoplay videos" had no idea what they were talking about.)
It's common knowledge among web developers that browsers aggressively throttle background tabs so anybody who is designing a website that depends on it is misguided.
I don't hear anybody complaining about Safari being too aggressive with background tabs, I do hear people complaining that Firefox uses too much battery. So I think Firefox should be more aggressive.
These tradeoffs may also be different for different browsers. E.g. if you're Apple, perhaps breaking Web sites isn't a big deal since on iOS Safari is entrenched by fiat, and if users switch from Web apps to native apps, so much the better for Apple. For Mozilla that calculation works out differently.
Generally speaking "site X breaks in Firefox, works in Chrome" is a good way for Mozilla to lose market share.
I've been using FF since it was in beta, never left but I'm starting to come around to the reality that native browsers are best optimized for the device. While there's no real native browser to leverage on desktop Linux, on macOS/Windows, native may be the best way to go for most people. This is how break down browsers to friends and family.
Google Chrome- optimized for Google's needs and profit margin.
Microsoft Edge- optimized for your device, if running Windows.
Apple Safari- optimized for your device, if running macOS.
Mozilla Firefox- optimized for the user. Certainly a noble goal, but I increasingly have a "mobile" goal and that trend isn't slowing for anyone.
I've also checked this newest version, 70 on Windows and my measurement of the power use give practically identical results to the measurements I've done almost two years ago.
I see that the power drain comes from the browser's own code doing something unnecessary and as far as I see it doesn't even appear to platform dependent.
It's surely possible to optimize that and it's obviously not their priority.
From what I've read, Mozilla can't really optimize rendering to the level of Safari & Edge. I found this article[0] on WebRender to be very interesting on this front. The author noted-
"Note: Painting and compositing is where browser rendering engines are the most different from each other. Single-platform browsers (Edge and Safari) work a bit differently than multi-platform browsers (Firefox and Chrome) do."
I love Firefox quite a bit, every detail, the way it scrolls with smooth scrolling off, the dedicated search bar for switching DuckDuckGo bangs, the container support. The dedicated search bar is a huge one, I can't imagine why no one else at least offers that, as a feature it can't cause that much maintenance headache. I definitely love FF as much as anyone here but I'm not one who argues that Gecko is necessary for a standards-based web, I'm not convinced by the argument. Webkit can be forked again and it has a significant userbase to act as a counterweight to Blink. It's increasingly difficult at this point to convince myself that native browsers don't make the most sense.
[0]https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...
So for me is simply: open some page, hear the fan for as long as the page remains open. Do the same with IE, silence.
BTW I otherwise haven't IE used for daily browsing, but I did a lot of tests with the same pages to see that it's not an accident and that IE does show the same content, but with less power used.
For somebody with a different computer: find any web page with more media playing on the page (you should see the videos playing or pictures "animating"), open the task manager (this is a Windows example) then switch to the graph view and compare the browsers while looking at the graph view. The task manager area "under the curve" reflects the power used -- the more CPU used for a given amount of time -- the more power used. In my observations the area drawn by Firefox is more that twice as big as the one by IE.
That's what drains the battery faster: taking more CPU to keep the "animations" on the page. Moreover Firefox has some consumption created by some of its background tasks even when the pages aren't animated, but the animations are really wasting a lot of power.
From my look at the behavior, having some experience in evaluating the performance of the software, and spending some time trying to figure out what's happening there, my impression is that the source of that power drain is in the Firefox code which is not platform specific which explains why they have problems on every platforms with that.
I've concluded they simply never actively tried to minimize overall CPU and GPU use (both will use more power unless somebody measures and tries to improve the code): even when they did move some pieces of processing to the GPU, their motivation was speeding up what's visible, actively minimizing the power used was simply not the part of their process.
You can also search their Bugzilla to see how they handle the problems with the CPU, GPU use and the power drain. This can be a part of the workflow, measuring that at least for every release and acting to fix the issues, but I just don't see that anywhere.
Agreed though, it's very noticeable and I never did feel it until I started using a laptop more than a desktop. I'm also finding bugs in the iOS version of Firefox which is probably going to be the last straw, not only does it freeze often, my bookmarks are no longer there and they were synced from my Firefox account. I'm likely to migrate to native browsers for whichever platform I'm on at that time. As you said in their own process they're focused on feature development but not efficiency. Overall, I'm losing faith that Mozilla has the resources to effectively manage all of this.
My advice to Mozilla would be to continue on the customizability and privacy route, and get Firefox on iOS in better shape. It's been freezing on me for as long as I can remember using it. Very buggy, and has played a significant role in losing some confidence in Mozilla.
This message and all of my messages in this thread posted from Microsoft Edge 78.0.276.20 (Official build) beta (64-bit).
My problem is that Safari won't work for me as a daily driver so it's not an option. It seems too aggressive in memory management and in reloading.
So I'm very happy to see Firefox improve performance over Firefox-v1.
> I'd actually guess that WebKit runs on more platforms than Blink does…
I'd say they're probably at parity, if not a small edge given to Blink since an entire OS is built around it. Which would be the only exclusive case of the two I can think of.
I'm actually curious which WebKit browser you're using. GNOME Web?
https://austingwalters.com/simple-web-browser-in-cpp-using-q...
Works on any OS I've tried.
Nice bit of obscure knowledge that adds nothing to the conversation. Unless your argument is that KHTML and WebKit are the equivalent to Blink because of a shared ancestry; in which case you're arguing something I never claimed.
Firefox has (for now at least) a huge leg up in terms of content blockers. IDK if that's enough to even out the energy consumption and performance, but it can't hurt.
For my use, I keep many many tabs and windows open. Most of the efficiency gains I see are from handling that better. I don't use desktop Safari heavily. I tend to keep it as the thing I use when I suspect adblockers are messing up content (it's easier than disabling adblock). On my iPhone I do use an adblocker and haven't noticed problems. When I do browse the web without an adblocker I quickly recoil and think, "do people really live like this??"
Maybe, but what kind of performance hit will letting all the ads and nonsense through be? I probably could aim to find a trusty ad blocker for Safari, keeping in mind that Apple has left the disingenuously named uBlock up in their extension store. Or I could just stick with uBlock Origin and a browser that works with it.
I've got ~2000 tabs open in Firefox right now and don't feel like performance or battery life is a problem. I use 1Blocker on iOS, but it's clunkier, less effective, and more expensive than uBlock Origin (and I still get tons of in-app ads). That's not something I'm in any hurry to bring over to the desktop.
> (and I still get tons of in-app ads)
I'm pretty sure that's expected. 1Blocker's FAQ says it won't work with most third party iOS apps like Chrome.
I'm sure usage varies and I'm glad Firefox works well for you. I have Firefox 70 hidden with about 7 windows and 40 tabs (total) and Activity Monitor points to it as the highest energy suck bouncing between 15-20 of whatever units this measures--in line with CPU usage. I only installed uBlock Origin last night for Firefox. I use it mostly for work stuff which generally doesn't have ads. Chrome, where I'm typing this is about 1/3 to 1/2 the usage (and it's not hidden).
I was hoping for more of an improvement from Firefox. Historically, using Chrome or Safari will get me literally hours longer between charging.
It doesn't work quite as transparently (or effectively) as Safari's equivalent functionality, but it does make a noticeable difference. It's worked very well for me.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-decoration.
> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.
> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to cross glyphs, set the value to none.
I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!
11% coverage, and almost all of that is iOS Safari.
> We have plans to start implementation work on this before the end of the year.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=785230...
If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links. To check if this is the case, I have to mouseover both the link before and after the break, and compare the URLs with my eyes.
I find this a much greater annoyance then I do the overlapping underlining.
Ah that's what that is. I've seen a few like that and wondered why there were two identical links next to each other not thinking it was underline style.
I'll save myself the hover now!
data:text/html,<u style="font:99px times">Times</u> <u style="font:99px Arial">Arial
(Safari and Chrome don't do this, they ignore the font's properties and use an arbitrary underline of their own -- which differs between the two, Chrome's being somewhat thicker.)
* "Always" may not be strictly true, but it's certainly been a long time.
I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage and analytics come from within your own teams.
Check the links yourself over at:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/lockwise/
And built in to Firefox by going about:logins, the top right * menu and clicking Lockwise for Android or Lockwise for iPhone
You end up with redirect links like:
"Campaign and Referral Data: This helps Mozilla understand the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns."
"On iOS and Android: Firefox by default sends mobile campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Mobile campaign data includes a Google advertising ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version. Read the documentation."
You just described basically all tracking and analytics. This is what they are blocking by default for everyone except themselves apparently.....
Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/when-it-comes-to-pr...
e: immaigne people down-voting facts https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/-particle-chr...
> That's just a huge gaping security hole
> If that is indeed how Firefox is designed
that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?
here look yourself https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess...
and guess what permission the language extension need?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-spe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21323832
We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.
Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."
you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.
but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?
What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.
Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.
Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.
Edit: I commented on Bugzilla I hope everyone does the same.
This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.
I myself (not a native speaker) am very pedantic about setting all my software to enUS and turn all spell checking off. (I can't even stand the linter underline in VS for example, it ruins my focus, especially when it underlines as I type and then lags before disappearing at the end of the word)
The only place where I use spellcheck is e-mail at work to avoid typos. Over the years I've learned to proofread my messages before sending them and touch typing helps a ton as well.
Heckin finally!
The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.
Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years, especially since Chrome managed to do it - it's not like an open source implementation doesn't exist at this point to crib the math from.
Any time you bring it up, though, you get batted away and beaten over the head with privacy, browser monoculture, or open source arguments. It's really frustrating; if you want open source to succeed, you have to also want it to compete on the same level.
It's like expecting people to eat vegan food when you call it the same as the non-vegan option... and then they don't want to, because it tastes nothing like what they expect.
In fact (I can't believe I'm saying this) I almost wish they were a Qt shell.
Unfortunately, copying the look and feel of the native platform is an endless treadmill as those platforms evolve, and for obvious reasons Safari is always going to be better at keeping up with that on Mac than Firefox is.
Firefox goes out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in. Chrome, for all their faults, tries very hard to emulate the proper look/feel/functionality.
FWIW I use Linux and on Linux, Chrome makes no attempt at all to use the native platform theme, while Firefox does a pretty good job.
I will, however, apologize for saying they "go out of their way". I fired that bit of text off without thinking, but it's needlessly assuming (and likely outright wrong) on my part. Thanks for the correction.
I also saw a comment from the dev team that they're "aware" of the need for such a feature but it's not on a road map yet.
Firefox's Lockwise App (on android) leaves a lot demanding though.
(There's an Android app, too. I'm just not familiar with Android's affordances for that sort of thing so I can't really comment on how it works.)
earlier in this year I switched from bitwarden (which I would still recommend) to keepass because I wanted to fill desktop passwords... but there is the added benefit that you actually don't need a browser extension if you don't want to. instead ive been using the autotype feature that can be run from a hotkey.
Apple has demonstrated that privacy is a very effective value proposition. Maybe Apple should look into investing in Mozilla/Firefox.
I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.
However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).
They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google.
So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem.
Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.
Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue.
Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.
News, social media, browsers, etc.
If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.
If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.
Same thing for browsers.
Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.
I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).
Can you elaborate on this? What kind of bundling and distribution deals?
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath which required ongoing payments to Mozilla that remain the subject of litigation.
> In CY 2017 Mozilla Corporation generated $542 Million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $506 Million in CY 2016.
Financial statement (2016 & 2017): https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201...
Announcement (2017): https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/11/14/firefox-features-go...
And it is not necessarily wrong but if I just want to donate more to good causes then I already have two very good candidates ready that I would be happy to donate more to.
The reason I want to donate to Mozilla would be to make sure it can continue development even of Google should stop paying them.
I have a small hope that their VPN project might be able to funnel money back to developments, and I also think there's some kind of deal with scroll.
If anyone from Mozilla reads this: I'm all for donations (as long as they go towards the product we depend on) or paid products that can work as cash cows.
Just make sure it is optional and don't lie or be sneaky about it and I should be happy
Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?)
What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ...
Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.
It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.
I expected that you wanted to say : It is conceivable that they would have got funding from somewhere else
Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine.
Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game and make use of FF's cutting edge features.
Remember the old Microsoft was quite happy to cripple Windows to kill it's competitors. For example "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run" and the weird "errors" you saw if you tried running Windows on top of DR DOS.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
Remember Microsoft used to be a very competitive outfit with a history of using their dominance of desktop OSs to enter new markets.
It’s easy to forget that Microsoft of old were able to keep bankrolling loss leaders to “cut off the oxygen”[1] of any market that they saw as threatening Windows.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/98/microso...
Source? All I can find is http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done....
If memory serves me correctly Novell believed in their case enough to take it to the US Supreme Court but were not given leave to proceed further. No reason/justification was given for that.
There was a (bug|user error) I experienced during this time which prevented me from changing the default search engine.
It was _terrible_.
I was somehow under the impression that Firefox was developed mostly by volunteers, and so Firefox development would be largely unaffected if Google was out of the picture.
Most of Linux and Firefox development is paid for professional work.
I am not sure it's fair to say that Mozilla "supports ads" by making Google the default search engine in exchange for a bunch of funding. It's a default, you can change it, they need money, I'm glad they took it.
I'm sure that even if it didn't enable Firefox's existence I am sure it made the developer's lives a lot better and increased the number of research projects they could afford to do.
Edit: But the point that Google makes money from ads and so Mozilla would have less funding without Google making money from ads is I guess true. I think Google just wanted to push an alternative to IE. I don't mind ads existing (well, I get that they're a necessary evil) but tracking is something I very much mind.
Basically. Netscape Navigator was a large suite of functionality, including mail and NNTP. FF, originally "Phoenix", started off as a browser only.
It was light enough that I compiled it from source via Ports on my FreeBSD 4 (?) machine, and don't recall it taking too long.
> However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).
These are unrelated issues, though. A connection, financial or otherwise, to Google, does not mean that users aren't getting a browser that prioritizes privacy.
You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ?
Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.
Many SV people are missing the scope and scale of the impact of having OSS charities engaging in the political campaign – it is renouncing all donations from the other side. It is not their role. Every year I have thousands of dollars that I try to affect to OSS charities, but I’m yet to find a single one that is tolerant of everyone, _including the supposedly dominant group_ . But tolerance is too much to ask, even from Mozilla.
All I will say is that I do have quite a bit more to go on than public announcements. I have worked for Mozilla for a long time, including during that event (but not the original uproar over prop 8 donations) and was familiar with the people involved, and am basing my opinions on body language and insider knowledge. But much of that is not mine to share, and there's no reason for people to believe a rando like me anyway, so I'd rather not get into details. It would just lead to accusations of spin or insincerity (justifiably so; you have no reason to trust me.)
No, Eich specifically made a donation to a political campaign for CA's Prop 8 that used blood-libel-level lies to cast homosexuals as pedophiles and sexual predators and use that as a justification to deny them the right to marry.
And this was the state of the Prop 8 campaign at the time he made the donation. He knew what they were about, and he donated to them anyway.
So, yeah, he had it coming to him.
They also lied about what the impact of Prop 8 would be.
Also note that one of the biggest such spenders, the Mormon Church, formally apologized for its role in the Prop 8 campaign after they got to be in the receiving end of the lies during Romney's first presidential campaign.
“He had it coming to him”, they’ll say, justifying the purge, for defending that a child need two parents of different sex because kids are enriched by both viewpoints, which is as perfectly valid as an opinion as saying that speech should be censored aggressively when not agreeing with other viewpoints. Both are opinionated opinions. Only one is not democratic. And that’s a trend across a specific sprout of unicorns and SV companies.
The Silicon Valley TV show even realized it and made an episode about the hero outing a “gay Christian”, until the episode turns into understanding that the problem isn’t that he outed a gay, but a Christian, which is something that apparently the Silicon Valley (and the HQ of Mozilla in Australia for that matters), aren’t tolerant with.
I’m for democracy. Mozilla isn’t supporting equal democracy... for Christians. In my opinion it is more complex than that, Mozilla probably have little opinions about this problem but buckles under specific powerful group pressures and agrees to implement their purge, without due process and fair trial. Instead it’s replaced with “He had it coming”, which reminds me of the darkest ages of the last century. Due process for every accusation is an essential pillar of democracy, and Mozilla hasn’t amended it manners to support this principle.
He wasn't purged by Mozilla, he quit. He did quit because of the pressure put on him because of his donation but the idea that he was purged by Mozilla is at least an exaggeration if not an outright lie.
> “He had it coming to him”, they’ll say, justifying the purge, for defending that a child need two parents of different sex because kids are enriched by both viewpoints, which is as perfectly valid as an opinion as saying that speech should be censored aggressively when not agreeing with other viewpoints.
Bad ideas should be purged. Don't you agree with that?
> I’m for democracy. Mozilla isn’t supporting equal democracy... for Christians.
How so?
> In my opinion it is more complex than that, Mozilla probably have little opinions about this problem but buckles under specific powerful group pressures and agrees to implement their purge, without due process and fair trial.
The man quit... should have Mozilla rejected his resignation and forced him to participate in some kind of "due process"? What do you have in mind for this process?
It doesn't mean that you don't have to live with the consequences to your personal life.
If you think it does, please reread the Constitution, the circumstances behind it's drafting, and the first 10 years of US history.
I’m not convinced this is true. Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative.
There’s plenty of examples of company’s that make a living by charging for a service but for a company like facebook, for example, excluding users runs counter to their whole business model.
“Charging” customers is hassle. If you can find a way to monetise without all that icky hassle, you will.
Citation needed. Individual users' data is, last time I checked, relatively low-value - isn't the Facebook ARPU less than $10?
"1.59 billion daily active users on Facebook on average for June 2019; 2.41 billion monthly active users on Facebook as of June 30, 2019"
They’re not hard sums to do.
Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for?
I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium). I also donated to Mozilla among others.
---
The problem is that browsers should be part of the "commons", just like roads, since browsers are indespensible platforms in this day and age.
Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you suggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser?
---
Also products like Firefox are very unlike other products, because it's open source, both by license and by how it is developed. If Mozilla dies due to Google pulling the plug on their deal, Firefox is still open source and with enough resources somebody else can pick up its development.
To wit Thunderbird may still live under the Mozilla Foundation, but it is community driven, with donations from individuals being its primary source of funding. And it is moving along. Not as fast and it isn't as polished as its users would want, but it lives.
---
I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models that just piggyback on top of Chromium and are thus in no way a threat to Chrome's monopoly.
To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ which I think is $150 per year. HubSpot which will probably get $1k from me... I pay for Gmail... I think it's $4 per user per month? TeamCity, CircleCI ... NYTimes (yeah, I actually pay).
... but I do think you're right here.
I'm actually legitimately curious to understand this issue.
I want to focus my product, Polar, on being a premium document management platform for people VERY serious about research:
... I want to understand more about this mindset though. I think you can make a go at things if you have a VERY premium product focused on a tight niche (at least initially).
> both by license and by how it is developed.
I'd like to argue that this is false. The argument behind Open Source is that it's developed by the community and that by being open there is some sort of community development behind it.
However, that's not what we see from Open Source outside of enterpise. 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers.
> I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models
I mean this is sort of a logical fallacy. Just because something is based on a company doesn't mean they are trying to do something inherently wrong.
While this is by and large true, Mozilla does still have a pretty solid base of volunteer contributors. It's nowhere close to what it used to be back in the day when more than half the development was done by volunteers. But there are still serious contributions coming from volunteers every day, and as a long-time employee, it still has a major impact on the feel of Mozilla development work. You won't be ignored or shut down because you're not being paid, if you have an idea for a different way of doing things that works better, it'll be accepted and supported even if it incurs ongoing maintenance, etc. (Well, assuming people decide it's worth the ongoing overhead, of course; I'm just saying that it's common in other supposedly open development organizations to only accept isolated improvements that make core developers' lives easier.)
I do miss the days when external contributors were a much bigger part. It's tough when people need to eat, and the system complexity has risen, making it harder to get started in many areas.
Contributors welcome!
Then MS released IE for free, no strings attached, and killed their business model overnight.
I think Firefox is awesome and it is really bad if we continue the Chrome/blink hegemony, but I can't stand for their decision to not block all ads instead of just trackers, especially on phones. The modern web without a 'real' adblocker is borderline unusable and Firefox prioritizing publishers over users doesn't sit well with me.
Brave's fine, but if you're worried about Google/Chrome hegemony you'd better not use it, because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony.
Except on iOS, where you have to finagle with VPN-based blockers
> because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony
I'm well aware. I'd rather use (and recommend to less techy people) Firefox, but I can't with their current stance. People want/need adblocking but they also want sync. If Firefox had an ad-blocking toggle that was off by default that'd be fine by me.
I’m curious what ads you want to block that effective tracking protection does not block as an effect of blocking scripts that both track and (via generated scripts) place ads. Thanks.
Brave also depends on Google as their overlord, it's just that the contribution is made in code instead of dollars. There's no evidence Brave could survive if Google changed that deal, whereas Firefox has already spent years independent from them.
It is misleading to equate open source with paid search deals of the kind Mozilla has with Google. Brave has no such deal and is not likely to get one without leverage via market share or other scale advantages.
I'd contest that these are largely the same users.
In any case, I support the overall message: it'd be good if Mozilla found additional ways to finance their work, and I'm happy they're actively looking for them.
There is a very simple way to achieve this. Sell your product for money, and provide no other option. The customer gives you money and you give them use of your product. Win-win.
You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. Windows 10 shows you ads and spies on you, yet you have to pay for it. You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. You pay for a movie ticket, yet have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the movie starts.
I've heard about this, but what exactly does this mean? I have a smart TV, but I never see ads. Supposedly it's spying on me, but how is it spying on me any more than the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions I already pay for?
This is not meant to sound defensive - I do believe it's too good to be true that my TV is as wonderful as I think it is. I'm just trying to understand what is so bad about it?
Pro-Tip: At least for Samsung TVs you can un-accept the privacy-policy to disable this. This will also disable Netflix and all "smart" features but that's..exactly what I want in a TV. Alternatively just don't give the TV network access, but you may want to do a yearly software-update.
[1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...
If you need any proof that they profit off of this, "dumb" equivalents of various models, if they exist at all, tend to be significantly more expensive.
I remember the first time I saw an ad on the in-flight entertainment system on a plane. (I think it might have been United, but they all do it now...) This and the shilling for their special miles-reward credit card, while you're literally captive (in a tube in the air), having paid to be there, is pretty much the epitome of hypercapitalism-gone-wrong today.
Of course in the meantime Firefox and Brave are doing well enough. I still feel as though I'm being towed along and probably the browser makers feel similarly.
Many would argue that Chrome is an alternative to Firefox, given that Firefox predates Chrome as the first real viable browser alternative.
"The discussion about the method for disabling updates has been had over and over already, there is nothing left to say about it, and the change will not be reverted. You've been given workarounds for your problem. Please do not reopen this bug or file any others asking the same thing."
... who needs Microsoft?
Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?
The algorithm we use it not the best (and I think it's not the only cause of bad quality here), and we're investigating what to do.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1427267 is where we track this issue.
I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.
In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.
This is great news. What a huge security hole that has been.
I’m surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the announcement. Doesn’t this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser CSS support?
A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I’m witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the standard after years of such library-based support?
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-decora...
That said, yeah, they're all off the level 4 working draft, so they're standards-track at least.
You can donate money to Mozilla. However, what Mozilla needs more than anything is more users, so spread the word!
On Mac, loading all the appropriate DoD certs and trying to log into OWA causes an unrecoverable hang.
Loading only DOD ID SW CA-37 will allow login to numerous sites. However, after closing those tabs, all other sites time out while "Performing a TLS handshake..."
Lastly, quitting Firefox after a PIV/CAC login causes an unrecoverable hang.
The issue seems to be related to PIV/CAC cards specifically, which obviously increases the difficulty of anyone on the team replicating the bug.
I do like how Firefox you can set to never auto play audio or video but the chrome flag does not seem to prevent that. Haven't really given Firefox a chance in easier and am pretty married to Chrome (especially with switching profiles between work, personal that works very well).
That's great. But what if I now want to log in to the same site from my iPhone?
You can resize them nowadays.
There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..
I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation, but looks like I can switch for good.
Maybe I just saw a spec or maybe I’m just wrong
Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for websocket debugging.
(and yes, that is simply their technical blog)
Really neat how FireFox seems to push the web standards forward here, in a world where Google seems to have total control.
Now, will it work for Server-Sent Events too?
Firefox 70 is developer's delight. Breakpoints on DOM changes is the one of the most difficult parts. FF70 solves this. Great.
I consume hours of video/audio content in my browser daily. Most of it I speed up to 2x, and in Firefox my ears are destroyed if I do that.
> The Baseline Interpreter uses the same frame layout as the Baseline JIT, but we’ve added some interpreter-specific fields to the frame.
> Because the Baseline Interpreter and JIT are so similar, a lot of the code generation code can be shared too. To do this, we added a templated BaselineCodeGen base class with two derived classes: - BaselineCompiler: used by the Baseline JIT to compile a script’s bytecode to machine code. - BaselineInterpreterGenerator: used to generate the Baseline Interpreter code.
[0] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/the-baseline-interpreter-a...
> The Baseline Interpreter sits between the C++ interpreter and the Baseline JIT and has elements from both. It executes all bytecode instructions with a fixed interpreter loop (like the C++ interpreter). In addition, it uses Inline Caches to improve performance and collect type information (like the Baseline JIT).
Including elements [of code] from both would be considerably harder in another language.
If you read closely it appears the interpreter is "generated" - that it, it's not written directly in C++ or anything at all, but is instead an interpreter emitted by the JIT compiler!
Does anyone know if servo is supposed to be related to Firefox in some way, or if it is always meant to be independent?
I imagine it either cost too much to run or didn't bring in enough to justify keeping it going unfortunately.
BTW chrome 78 will be released today too!
The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.
Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek.
https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/
Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3 certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more limited.
https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2012/02/mco2012020...
It links to a video interview with Brendan Eich:
Should there be one implementation, we wouldn't be able to say with confidence that we have succeeded for that goal.
Currently I'm on Firefox for over the month and I did document those things that bugs me. To be fair I should create such list for Chrome too, but I don't get that moment of frustration that often.
Here's the list for Firefox. After some items I thought it would be better to write down dates instead of sequence numbers.
Tldr: The most common issue is with unresponsive tabs which cannot be reloaded/refreshed and leads to re-typing search term / closing, reopening tab / killing firefox.
----------
1. Searching google.. loading.. it is faster to open chrome then, try to copy twice the URL (which doesn't copy/ paster), type in the search term manually and process seach results than wait them appar on firefox. Reopening tab helps on FF tho.
2. Sometimes opening a url where server is cold, I get blank page after waiting. Refresh wont help.
3. CTRL + F sometimes won't work until deleting some chars. Chrome handles this without issues.
4. Opening site in new tab - Firefox hangs. Cannot switch to other tabs, cannot close tab. End task via taskmgr helps.
5. Opening site in some tab - Firefox shows loading, loading, loading. Only closing tab, opening new one helps - site loads instantly.
6. Cannot open link in Dynamcis 365 grid.
2019-09-25: 5. repeats itself. Oh, dumb me, I was in a debugger, hitting a breakpoint.
2019-09-25: Loading, loading, loading.. reopening tab.
2019-09-25: reading text on community.dynamics.com. Suddenly, text gets distorted
2019-09-27: Viewing https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3142345/microsoft-d... and opening article numbers. To go back, must press back button 3 times (history gets filled). Only 1 in chrome.
2019-10-01: Callstack in a huge javascript file? Firefox just can't cope that. It just hangs. Must wait very long
2019-10-01: Scrolling javascript file in debugger. Just empty window, no text rendered. Scrolling here and there or clicking fixes it.
2019-10-01: Javascript debugging frustrating. When I want reload page, I have continue debugger. Now it feels like firefox hangs and I have to close debug tools to refresh my page. Maybe patience could help here.
2019-10-03: Firefox slowing down my browser.. yeah, browsing huge file at https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Sample-Quick-start-for-650db.... But it won't let me go back, won't let me refresh, i'm a victim and can't go back to my google results...
2019-10-07: Opening page.. loading... opening other page from same domain works. Refresh on first page - still loading. Close tab, open new one - works.
2019-10-07: Looks like refresh is just broken. Long running tab is loading. Loading.. loading... luckily it did load after all, well at least I thought so, because page kinda rendered. Only that it wasn't working. And then I was back to the grey "Loading" page. The issue for me here is that I can't force to reload the URL in URL bar.
2019-10-11: Opening webpage from URL. Great, site doesn't open. F5 doesn't help. Cannot switch to different tabs. Thank you for closing many windows and tabs. Closing with X doesn't work. After killing FF with task manager, you restore your session - excellent. And now no problem opening that page. Doh.
2019-10-13: Searching something via url bar... well google never opens and F5 doesn't help. And pressing ENTER doesn't help. Re-searching on new tab works.
2019-10-13: Some tab that leaks memory should be reloaded. Well waiting after CTRL+F5 and waiting and waiting... eh, closing and reopening seems to be faster.
2019-10-14: Cannot copy from from a Dynamics 365 readonly field. Which is <label>. This actually bugs me often. Can copy on chrome.
2019-10-21: Not googling on new tab page, loading, nothing happens. New tab works.
2019-10-21: Writing github issue... scrollbar doesn't work. Well actually tab doesnt respond. Oh i'm probably opening link in new tab that loads, loads, loads... Well, killing firefox is the only way I can "unstuck". How can I love FF? :( Looking forward to write these things down for Chrome in November - maybe it happens to other browsers too? However credit to FF or GitHub - dunno - my text wasn't lost in GitHub issue input field!
2019-10-21: Search. It just doesn't search on some pages (Dynamics CRM). Chrome search works better in these cases.
2019-10-21: Cursor invisible when over Firefox. Probably OS issue, happens to Chrome too.
2019-10-21: Dropdown list doesn't work as intended. Typing chars doesn't search (jump to) matched item.