Unlike the author, who clearly has no agenda or axe to grind.
All that to say, I think a personal blog is a better place to grind axes than the start page of a hugely important software tool.
I understand that people have complaints and want to hang onto others' past mistakes, but I fail to see how either of those (Pocket&Robot) can be classified as either toxic politics or axe grinding.
They're both monetization tactics that many people disliked. Which somehow resulted in people finding Mozilla untouchable, because apparently nobody else has problematic monetization attempts?
The entire Android app was overhauled a while back, dropping functionally and decreasing stability, and has since been pretty much ignored even though it is still missing features and is still painfully clunky and prone to crash. The developer tools on the desktop app were ahead of Chrome but have stagnated, and they're slow to adopt new standards, but they somehow find time to add things no one asked for like Colorways and a VPN.
I want Firefox to get its traction back, but it's hard to cheer for Mozilla or blame Google when I see them twiddling their thumbs like this.
Things like releasing features for firefox users first, because devs like firefox and it had better devtools, would have kept the firefox userbase afloat.
Instead the mozilla devtools have been allowed to fall behind, web apps are no longer developed firefox-first, and mozilla lost it's opportunity.
All of that didn't just happen because of advertising. It happened become Chrome offered very compelling benefits over its competitors.
For many users, Chrome was faster, lighter, more secure, and offered a better all-around user experience than its competitors did. Even now, that's still largely the case.
Advertising alone can't make that happen.
The irony here is that the billion dollar corporation (Google is who OP is referring to) actually funds Firefox's development. We looked into this in one of our recent podcast episodes called "How Does Mozilla Make Money?": https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/bdecab32/how-does-m...
While I wouldn't describe Mozilla leadership as that... I don't think you'll find many people who think Mozilla leadership have made good strategic decisions in the last 5 years.
The explosion of mobile.
You missed the pre-installed browser and applications bundled with your computer becoming good enough that ~nobody is going to www.firefox.com to download a browser on a fresh install. This isn't 2004, you no longer need to spend three hours downloading software to make a fresh install of Windows usable.
That, and a weak mobile app.
Mobile is eating the web. Mobile (Android - it's all Safari on iOs) Firefox is a bad experience.
Google don't make web standards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_standards
This is what actually happens: 1. Google (Who is a member of both W3C and OWF) announces a plan/ships a feature. 2. With 80% of the browser market, people use it or get excited by it. 3. The W3C/OWF ratifies the feature as a standard.
This is literally how 90% of web standards happen today.
https://egbert.net/blog/tags/jit.html
sorry, last time I checked on March 2022, Google Chrome cannot negotiate for my ChaCha-only TLS website; instead try using a Safari, Brave, Firefox, Edge, Aloha, OnionBrowser, Orion, Links, or Lynx web broswer, to name a few).
Meanwhile it is an ongoing crazy ride just mapping the evolution of WASM (in my next planned blog).
I can't really imagine why they wouldn't want to support it... I wonder if it was an oversight rather than a policy decision?
Beside, I am quite partial toward Firefox browser so there is little benefit for me to file a report to help Firefox's competitors.
(The fact that someone can process data and express self in many ways, even with JS - if he can't do it proper by other means - makes that mistake: that the others shall be forced to access data only the limited way some JS allow - but he could mind that the procesing in between may be not needed at all or disturbing and that there are many other ways to access data which dont't block each other or force as expecting JS does.)
Now, Chrome certainly supports ChaCha20 and Poly1305, but it could be that your server is rejecting some other extensions in Chrome's Client Hello.
edit: My main interest is whether or not this blocks Googlebot.
It was never about maximizing my readership, just the ones that know what they are doing.
Only TLSv1.3 is server-supported, am surprised that Edge did a downgrade.
FWIW, I know having Chrome / Chromium as the overwhelming majority browser is not great, if for the sheer fact competition keeps everyone "honest" in a way, but they are by far the most "benevolent" from a developer perspective. IE was truly both stagnant and terrible.
EDIT: that's not to say I approve the Chromium dominance, as a daily Firefox user especially, but I would be lying if I said, from a developer perspective, that Chromium hasn't been pretty good so far on balance. They do innovate. They do push new features. They do usually support the latest specs. Though again, I don't approve of it being so dominate, I'd prefer a plurality. Its a shame that Microsoft didn't use Firefox as its base for new Edge
Oh man, it depends on your definition of interesting. That was the time we had 3-5 engineers at reddit, and let me tell you, making reddit work for all the browsers was awful (and I barely had anything to do with it, it mostly fell on the other guys). It got to the point where every reddit page had "Fuck ie6" as a comment somewhere in the html, because a bunch of people were still using it and it didn't support a lot of the stuff the other browsers did.
While the consolidation of browsers isn't great from a market perspective, it's been great for developers sanity. :)
That said, it saw a lot of innovations broadly, web development was taken alot more seriously as a profession, and saw some interesting frameworks come out (Ember, Angular, and later React) and jQuery sure made life easier by that time.
I even have some fond memories of KnockoutJS. My most favorite, and probably most underrated framework in the history of web development, was SproutCore, which had legs at this time.
From a culture side (user?) it was the heyday of things like Delicious, Foursquare, Good Twitter (IMO) and blog rolls. Mobile web was rolling out in earnest. Alot of innovation was happening in this space.
LOL. I too have been guilty of doing this. HTML, CSS, JS... you name it. "Fuck IE6"
edit: (over Firefox, sorry I wasn't clear)
That however, is not to say that its okay. There's other, broader issues than just developer experience to care about here, like what a Google dominated web means, because via Chrome, they can push a great deal around how the web actually works, which is a net loss to society. It can stifle other innovations. Things of that nature.
Good DX isn't the whole story
Only for anyone who has forgotten just how wretched and stagnant IE6 was, and how long the web ossified around it, and how much work it took to overcome the inertia of a crappy browser[1] shipped by a monopolist that did not want you to use the web.
There are many legitimate reasons to grouse about Chrome, Google, Google owning Chrome, etc, but the problems surrounding it are, I feel, an order of magnitude smaller than what we had in the 00s.
[1] The delta between IE6 and Firefox 1.0 was incredible, and everyone working on the web despised the work required to make websites work on the former.
Can you clarify what you mean by this? I've been using Firefox continuously since version 1 for both personal and development purposes. I've never felt like Firefox was not benevolent.
Chrome has managed, despite its dominance, not to become complacent, from a developer perspective. They add new features, propose new features, listen to developers and their feed back etc.
The chrome teams overwhelming influence on the web as a whole and other factors are very concerning, but from a pure developer experience perspective, Chrome is n't really all that bad. I'm talking about supporting standard APIs etc.
I wonder how much is end user driven, and how much is intermediary driven though. Is it that the customers are only comfortable with one item in each category, or is it the middle men who prefer to sell things that are all connected by the same platform?
You can do this yourself. Watch your mind freakout and give yourself a panic attack if you were to drag an frequented used app; icon from your phone in to an obscure new location or app folder. Frequent bookmark to another folder or off the bookmark bar.
You get used to it but change is scary because its unknown and so unless you can adjust the user quickly and promptly they will reject whats given to them. Or innovate something whole and new thats never been done before.
Add the fact that major brands have user friendly in hand, trying to convince someone to install Linux with its clunky installer as an example; really throws them off edge.
Nowadays trying to get anyone to change really causes them to melt and its only going to get worse as we go on further through the rabbit hole of social media.
So why change when you already have something that just works, that your used to and friends with. Even if it backstabs you with updates, missing icons and leaks your data to the world. It's still feels like your old friend, cosy and comforting.
The vast, vast bulk of computer users are more interested in the destination than the journey. They don't really want to have to care what browser or OS or app they're using... They want to manage their finances, or make art, or surf the web, etc.
When the destination is the point, small amounts of asymmetry tends to accrue more asymmetry because it's easier to solve problems if the help ecosystem is larger to address when the tool doesn't work the way the user wants it to.
It is sad to see Firefox become so irrelevant. As much as people blame Google for this (and it is true Google relentlessly pushed Chrome) but people forget just how innovative Chrome was and how Firefox didn't respond to these issues.
I remember when Chrome launched and it was revolutionary how it was one-process-per-tab (technically, it's site isolation not tab isolation but let's not get lost in the sauce). No longer could an errant website take down your entire browser (mostly). I kept wondering why Firefox didn't copy this. It took them years. What were they doing?
Now I appreciate Mozilla bringing Rust into existence (not without problems and early design mistakes [2]) but the initial goal seemed to be rewriting the browser in a memory-safe language and that never seem to eventuate..
[1]: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
[2]: https://www.pingcap.com/blog/rust-compilation-model-calamity...
I still used Opera 12 in 2016 when I finally searched for an alternative. Not only did websites crash(upside down bird) way more often in Chrome (multiple times a week in Chrome vs. once every two weeks in Opera), but every time a crashed tab took the entire browser with it! It's one of those times where you question reality. Everyone says one thing, your experience says something else!
It literally took years for that feature to materialise. Now™ if a tab crashes, the browser stays. Since I'm a Vivaldi user now I couldn't even tell if that's more Vivaldi's or Chrome's doing.
I also remember, opening a new tab in Opera 12 was without delay. You gave the command and it was just there. On Chrome, with a !EIGHT!YEAR!newer! CPU it took 3 to 4 seconds! I figured it must be the 4MB JPG background image I chose. Sure enough, it was the image. Without it, it was still 1/2 seconds to open a new tab, though. Only now, with an even newer CPU, it feels on par with Opera 12.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker
An entire web browser could be written from scratch independently for that kinda cash.
That's so disappointing that I don't think I can ever look at Mozilla or Firefox the same way again. As a software engineer, I would not work at an organization with such a huge discrepancy in pay. It almost makes me feel better about a lifetime of failure, so I guess I should be grateful.
It's just looking more and more every day like wealth inequality is the great problem of our time, effectively halting progress beyond a certain point.
Only if you think you could re-implement Twitter in a weekend.
It honestly couldn't be. Not one that is on par with Chromium.
I can't imagine how much Chrome "costs" if you add up all the engineering man-hours that have gone into that browser. I wouldn't be surprised if it exceeded (exceeds?) $3 million a month at times.
Everything from V8 to pretty much full standards compliance (and beyond). Web browseres are an immensely complex beast.
https://wiki.c2.com/?OffByOneWebBrowser
I develop a framework for building hyper-compatible Any Browser websites (applications include retro-computing audience) and I include it in my test suite.
Why do people keep framing the story this way? Servo's future is in Gecko.
always_has_been.jpg
The Servo repo was a testbed that allowed people to work on new, Rust-based browser components without anyone having to pass the type of code reviews that are necessary for a production Web browser that is by the way already continually shipping to millions of existing users.
This (far too common) meme of Servo as a somehow failed separate browser engine that was supposed to, I dunno, be swapped out at some indefinite point and retire the lizard or something is very weird.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_(web_browser)
(Edit: I see it now, must have skipped over it before.)
pours one out for Opera 12 (Presto)
