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0 pointslikeabatterycar1y ago0 comments

> Why does Mozilla always spin their wheels releasing random side projects?

Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals this year.

Firefox is buggy as hell - which is incomprehensible given its age, but older brother Netscape had the same problem 20-ish years ago. The Netscape 4.x days were absolute hell and you could go hardly a day without the browser crashing.

Despite this, it's packed with nonsense no one asked for like Pocket. Which is a coincidence because "AI assistant for Firefox" is the dictionary definition for redundant things no one asked for, with better alternatives preexisting.

At this point Firefox needs to die and something new and manageable - with energetic developers - needs to take its place. Maybe Microsoft could open source the original Edge engine? The one before they bent over for the long dick of Google Chrome.

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brailsafe1y ago

> Because some project manager had "AI" on his performance goals this year.

Same reason Logitech did it, it's a totally arbitrary waste of resources

amlib1y ago

As a counterpoint I'm a heavy firefox user and haven't had crash in many months, and even that was because I was testing some experimental webgpu thing which I had to manually enable. It has its fair share of odd bugs but what kind of big piece of software nowadays hasn't? It's honestly no less cromulent than Chrome.

likeabatterycarOP1y ago

I said Netscape, not FF, was crash prone.

I would, however, agree FF has many "odd bugs".

mdaniel1y ago

> Firefox is buggy as hell

Don't you worry, I'm sure their new AI Assistant will generate a ton of bugfix code!!11 AI gonna take all teh jobs, or so I hear

But, as a more serious contribution: the sentiment "At this point Firefox needs to die and something new and manageable" is the same one which generates the infinite JavaScript treadmill akin to: "I don't like all those bloated JS frameworks, I want one slim and fast and manegable ... well, except this one other feature ... and this other ... oh, shit, this needs to die and have something new and manageable take its place ..."

It's not that I think Gecko is the bees knees, but I do think it has stepped on more than its fair share of real life landmines, and the Great Rewrite Theory means someone needs to spend all that time re-discovering them

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