[0]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/11/firefox-sync-privacy/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18055161
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...
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.
Google Chrome can die in a fire as far as I'm concerned.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's also a fair bit slower than Chrome, which doesn't help.
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.
(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!)
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?
* 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 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.
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.
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.
BTW, this is not the first time MS has considered Chromium. Back before the fork of Edge, they considered using Webkit.
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 )
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...
otoh Webkit was originally developed as part of iOS, so embedding was required
My view and strong suggestion would be, yes, please. And also evangelize Firefox to the non-technical people you know.
Safari has about ~5% percent market share on desktops, but 15-25% on mobile, including tablets.
Safari isn't a competitor with Chrome, Firefox, or Edge
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.
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.
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
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2018/11/supercook...
From a security and data privacy standpoint Firefox seems like the only option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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'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?
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.
https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/MSEdge/blob/master/README.m...
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.
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...
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)?
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-...
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.
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. ;-)
I wonder if this is about Microsoft making a cross platform browser?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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).
