Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps? 300
snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.
Tried to get first post (Score:2, Funny)
But Firefox got embarassed and offered to re-open my tabs.
Zero Research (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about everything in the summary is wrong. I'm going to assume that the article isn't much better.
Re:Zero Research (Score:4, Insightful)
At least they didn't talk about how Mozilla are leaders in the diversity movement and have pride in having a different standard [humanevents.com].
I guess once you put politically correct groupthink over people with a proven track record of innovation, innovation starts to suffer and go away.
This process is also known a "Bad Luck [pjmedia.com]". Sounds like Mozilla is suffering from bad luck...
Re: Zero Research (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, the cause of these problems is the fact they care about underprivileged groups of people.
Sounds like valid and unbiased logic. No evidence needed at all, everyone will just agree with you.
Re: Zero Research (Score:4, Insightful)
No their caring about underprivileged is not the problem but caring more about it than putting out a good product and keeping a proven leader in place because he has an opinion that has nothing to do with there business some people did not like might be.
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At the time he gave the money his position was so far out of the mainstream that the current sitting President of the United States of America agreed with him.
Do you really think it was appropriate to drive him out of his job because of a political opinion that's shared by nearly half the country? That's absurd. Were you one of the people who changed your profile pictures to "Je suis Charlie" after the Paris attacks? Because that would be incredibly fucking ironic.
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You know what I am just going to come out and say it. Its not a human rights violation or a violation of equal protection.
I frankly don't care if two same sex people want to get married or if a "transgender" person wants to use a bathroom with a picture on the door not reflective of their body type or not.
Nobodies rights are being violated though by banning same sex marriage, or this bathroom nonsense.
Homosexuals are just as free to marry someone with the opposite set of genitalia as everyone else, and jus
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Homosexuals are just as free to marry someone with the opposite set of genitalia as everyone else, and just a restricted from marring someone with the same genitals as everyone else.
That's a funny sort of equality. Do also tell people in wheelchairs that they're just as free to use the stairs as everyone else? Would you tell your Jewish friends to stop complaining and eat the pork roast you served all your dinner guests, because "equality"?
Love has nothing to do with it. There is no law that requires you to love the person to whom you are married or the person you intend to marry.
Speak for yourself... if the freedom to marry someone you love is unimportant to you, that's your choice. The rest of us value the freedom to love and marry who we choose, and I'll continue to work damn hard against bigots like you to ensure that
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A dangerous assumption - this is Slashdot after all, there's always a fair chance the summary is grossly misrepresenting the article.
Incidentally - has anyone seen what happened to the sig-editing option? I can't find it anywhere.
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And that's about the only thing they've done for the past ten-ish years.
They've also starting playing catch-up to Chrome (JIT compilation for JavaScript, one-process-per-tab, the UI changes you mentioned, porting to mobile platforms).
One major difference. (Score:3, Insightful)
Mozilla is non profit foundation while Sun was a publicly traded for profit corporation. Apples and Oranges.
Damn for that absence on mobile devices (Score:5, Insightful)
except that I have it installed on my Android right now. By "mobile devices" did you mean crApple by any chance, fanboi?
Still My Favorite (Score:4, Interesting)
Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser. IE still sucks, and Chrome chews up so much memory that it is useless after a few hours. On Mac, I prefer Safari, although I keep Firefox around for those rare sites that don't support Safari.
So I think they're still doing a good job on the desktop/laptop browser market. I just hope that their struggles in the mobile market don't impact the desktop.
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Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser....
A sample size of one is insignificant in the browser marketspace.
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When a larger, more representative, sample size is used, Firefox is losing marketshare. Where is Mozilla in the mobile marketspace?
Mozilla's commands of "wait for us, we're the leader" are falling on deaf ears.
Mozilla is becoming irrelevant.
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I like the tight integration. Handoff of tabs, passwords, form data. Pushbullet is making this possible for other platforms and tools but right now the tight integrations of Safari across iOS and OSX make it a logical choice on those platforms.
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Let's hope you don't find yourself forced to use an ultra-slow Internet connection: they removed the Load images by default checkbox a while ago now.
You have to screw around in about:config to get the same effect.
The thinking behind this: some nonsense about options being confusing.
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Let's hope you don't find yourself forced to use an ultra-slow Internet connection: they removed the Load images by default checkbox a while ago now.
You have to screw around in about:config to get the same effect.
The thinking behind this: some nonsense about options being confusing.
Some would suggest that turning off images is a power user thing anyway... but I understand your point.
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Firefox does what I want about as quickly as anything out there, ( don't notice any difference from other browsers ). And it's the freest major browser out there. Do you seriously want Google knowing anything more about you than it already does?
I still trust that Firefox doesn't have hidden code against my interests. Can you say that about any other major browser?
I did recently switch to Pale Moon, since it's basically Firefox without the Lame. But Firefox isn't really all that lame to begin with. I
Since when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?" The fact that Java, which was created and popularized by Sun is alive and (arguably) well is ample evidence that Sun is not defunct. It has simply been acquired.
Likewise, whatever the future of Mozilla may be, it's far more likely to trudge on and/or take on some other new life than to ever become "no longer in existence; dead; extinct." Just like the old Netscape browser that was its foundation.
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To be fair, if Sun hadn't been acquired, it would be dead now.
Effectively, only Suns' inheritance was bought.
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I agree, but that's the nature of the corporation. Sometimes they reproduce by fission and sometimes by fusion. Rarely do they go "defunct" in the same way that the mom-and-pop store in a small town might when Wal-Mart moves in. Even something like Polaroid, which effectively was just a brand name for several years until they recently began to sell instant film again, doesn't really go defunct.
Another interesting case is Indian Motorcycles, which existed for decades only as a brand that somebody owned, u
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We might be getting tripped up on nomenclature.
Polaroid and Indian Motorcycles are defunct. That some other company picked up the names and started producing products under those names doesn't change that (even if the products are identical to what was originally produced). The original company is long gone regardless, so it's defunct.
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Since when is a corporation like Sun that got acquired by another corporation (Oracle) "defunct", as in "no longer in existence; dead; extinct?"
Since always. When one company acquires another, the acquired company ceases to exist in any way that is meaningful for their customers. It is just becomes a brand used by the company that did the acquiring.
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Your interpretation is interesting, but seems like a matter of opinion. My point was basically that the fact that Java is still a big thing is ample evidence that Sun does indeed "exist in [at least one] way that is meaningful."
I've worked for two different corporations that retained the name of the corporations they acquired as a brand name that they applied to the acquired product lines, which they continued to sell, maintain, and even develop. By analogy, that could be an "Oracle-Sun" line of Sun serve
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Here's an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about [oracle.com] that indicates (to me, at least) that Sun is far from defunct.
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In its glory days, Sun had on staff prominent people like Java founder James Gosling, Unix whiz Bill Joy, and XML co-inventor Tim Bray.
Java good, Unix good, XML DIAF!!!
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In its glory days, Sun had on staff prominent people like Java founder James Gosling, Unix whiz Bill Joy, and XML co-inventor Tim Bray.
Java good, Unix good, XML DIAF!!!
It's my understanding that Java types love them some XML, so this post doesn't make a lot of sense to me...
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I, for one, will always be grateful to Sun for StarOffice and its spiritual successor in LibreOffice. At the time I was in college, and even a student license of MS Office was more than I could afford. I've been using SO, OO.o, and LO exclusively ever since Sun first released it for free. I have had minimal if any trouble with interoperability.
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Even MSFT got the message when their sales tanked and punt kicked the sweaty one and his Metro crap to the curb
To be fair, Metro isn't actually gone. It's still a big part of Windows 10. You can even still enable the AOL start screen if for some reason you want to do that. So it's going to continue to rear its freakish head periodically for the next while.
wrong (Score:2)
Is this such a bad thing? March of progress... (Score:3)
Firefox rose to prominence when the market desperately needed an alternative to the execrable Internet Explorer. Well, it worked. Firefox broke IE's stranglehold on the browser market, and now Chrome and Safari have kept it beat down. (And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Keeping a browser up to date and holding pace with the feature race is difficult and expensive. It's not surprising that Firefox has fallen behind while the commercial efforts keep steaming forward.
(Speaking for myself, I was a die-hard Firefox user for years, but switched to Chrome when Firefox's memory leaks kept getting worse and worse... with Chrome, I can "kill" a resource-hogging tab without killing my whole browser. I know what Google "charges" for Chrome (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay.)
I'm grateful for what Firefox accomplished, but that doesn't mean we need it any more. (And there's no reason to think that should an open browser be needed again, one can't appear.)
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(And IE is now a pretty decent browser that is no longer a festering nest of standards-breaking crapola.)
Excuse me kind sir? Can I have a little bit of whatever it is that you are smoking? Because I don't know what it is, and it sure sounds like some REALLY good shit.
Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be. The most astounding piece of crap EVER. Even Microsoft has pretty much given up on it.
I won't even comment on your assertion that Chrome is better than Firefox in the memory-hogging department.
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Seriously, though, IE is a piece of c-r-a-p. Always has been and always will be.
I don't know if it always will be, but it's certainly a piece of crap, I agree, and getting crappier with each release. The problem with Firefox is that it's not much better than IE and is following the exact same trajectory of constantly getting crappier. Although, admittedly, each browser has its own unique flavor of crappy.
FF is my primary browser (Score:5, Interesting)
If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.
I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.
Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
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Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
What about noscript! That's another great one and you really notice both advertisements and tracking going way down.
The best thing is, it works on mobile FF too.
Oh and speaking of mobile FF, that's also my primary phone browser. And they have an extension which lets you save HTML pages. Silly that I'm pleased, but without that, you nee
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I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers
If that were true IE wouldn't have Tracking Protection built in. It's not even an extension, it's built in.
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Actually, if you look at the usage share graphs, Firefox's usage share increased in the period when the Eich thing happened, as opposed for the slow decline that started late 2010 and continued afterwards. Of course, the period was also when Firefox has its interface revamped.
But at the time the internet was also teeming with people who were very vocal against the new interface, much as you are about Eich. And both groups claim that the cause they're championing accounts for people leaving Firefox in droves
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The important thing about Electrolysis isn't performance, it's that it will allow them to finally sandbox. My respect for Mozilla has lessened over time (and I used to be a minor contributor, back in the early days), partly because they don't seem to care about security as much as the Chrome team do. Chrome prioritised sandboxing over many other things and is a lot more robust as a result. Firefox is still just one JS engine exploit away from total ownage of the running system.
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Whenever I hear people throw out "PC" or "SJW" straw men, I just assume that:
(a) They would really just rather use labels than have thoughtful discussion;
(b) They want a libertarian pass to be assholes.
Not Like Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.
Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.
Simple explanation (Score:2)
.
Those companies that can transition from one to the other survive.
Those companies that cannot transition from one to the other falter.
I Did A Contract At Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
Sun's attitude always was "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Which was largely true, until they weren't cool anymore. But at that point the company was so big and entrenched that they'd lost sight of that. It was no longer "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Instead it was "If we keep making the things we've been making all along, people will buy them." The people in charge no longer understood that the engine of their success was constant innovation, and sat back and rested on their success. Assuming they ever understood that in the first place. It's entirely possible that Sun's success was entirely accidental. The gimmicks they started using to try to attract talent exposed their lack of understanding. It was not "Work for us and you'll get to design some of the coolest, bleeding edge technology in the world." It was "Work for us and we'll have a circus at work while we flail around aimlessly (And make you fill in a 12 page form to unlock version control.)"
Google's now in that position of making cool stuff that people will buy and use because it's cool. Their current leadership also seems to understand that they need to keep innovating to remain in the position they are now. Every so often you see some jackass writing about how Google needs to stop spending so much on "Useless R&D." I would suggest that you avoid taking stock advice from those people. Anywhoo, given that Google seems to understand that innovation is the key to success, the question is, can Mozilla keep up with them? Mozilla should have the advantage that they're able to focus on the one thing they do and do that really well. But to make serious advances in market share, they'd have to significantly stand out from the competition. I'm not entirely sure I can see that happening.
They seem to fire their best talent for politics! (Score:3)
Maybe they are where they are partially because they force people out or actually fire them for the employees' political beliefs.
The CEO that stepped down because of a vocal bunch who didn't like his politics is the first to come to mind. He was one of the founders of Mozilla! Likely a big voice in it's innovation.
I also have a personal friend who helped a client in the British government - and he was let go because his boss got angry - the British government has been known to spy on some of it's inhabitants apparently, and helping the client doomed my friend.
WTF? What has this guy been smoking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.
Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.
As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.
The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.
IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.
What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!
Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies [youtube.com] and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.
I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.
I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.
Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.
My 2 cents.
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IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
Indeed, it's an important platform to support. The most important bit, of course, is a standard app package that can be implemented easily on other platforms. I'd like to see support on BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and better support from Android.
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That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman.
Which hilariously hasn't really panned out for them. I use Chrome and Firefox side by side on Windows and Linux (Pale Moon x64 on Windows, actually) and the only websites which are more reliable in Chrome are gmail and G+, and the latter of those still isn't very good. In spite of running G+ in Google's browser, their interface still takes longer than eternity to load and it still jumps around like crazy. And now that Chrome is approaching Firefox levels of functionality, guess what? It's just as heavy as F
What is Firefox good for? (Score:2)
I use it for the extensions.. the price is right (Score:2)
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Stop talking about revenue. Start talking about marketing.
Google has been promoting Chrome as if it was the coolest shit in the world. Chrome everywhere, Chromebook, Chromecast, Chrome this and Chrome that. Mozilla does not have much of a marketing budget (as far as I can tell).
It's not much of a mystery, if you like free shit, where YOU are the product being sold and bought, stick with Chrome. I'll stay with Firefox, thank you very much.
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s/Sun/Netscape/g (Score:2)
One if it's problems (Score:3, Insightful)
The destruction of it's ecosystem.
Too many choices have been made to simplify Firefox when maybe they should have done a bit more spelunking to see what the users were actually using.
Taking away the status bar. Yeah, there are multiple extensions to get that back, the trouble being that they aren't the original status bar and some of the extensions that I use expect the old status bar, not the extension status bar. Update that extension? Well, the person writing that extension has thrown in the towel. When other issues cropped up, somebody else did come along and fix the issues, but the original programmer can come around and kill it because it's still technically his copyright. Yeah, he didn't GPL or put any other kind of license on it. So, it might exist today, but tomorrow it won't.
Making Firefox look like Chrome is just stupid in my book. There was zero reason to change it. Talk about getting the desktop to look like the mobile is pure crap. They are different environments. What works on a phone or tablet doesn't necessarily mean that it works on the desktop, even Microsoft has figured that part out with Windows 10 coming out now. Extremely obvious to me, so I must be a genius. Or not.
They have changed things such that old themes no longer work. The old personas, which I guess are now considered to be theme extensions, seem to be the only new themes actually getting developed. And they're ugly.
Their mobile push (for Firefox OS) was interesting, but again, desktop seemed to suffer again because of it. They started actually pushing a 64-bit version of Firefox on their Nightly page. Then decided that tracking those bugs specific to it might be too much, so they decided to stop it, then after an outcry, decided to keep doing the 64-bit builds, but if you had a problem, don't bother filling a bug for it unless it also happened on the 32-bit version. And then they decided to back track on that as well. You just can't find the 64-bit version on the Nightly page anymore. But it can be found, at least.
I run the 64 and 32 bit Nightlies, release and beta versions. And they work for me. At least for now.
I don't like IE. Chrome works. I'm just not sure I want Google tracking me that much.
Mozilla and replacement mail clients (Score:2)
Two Products vs. Entire Portfolio (Score:3)
How can you compare a business that has only two real products (Firefox and Thunderbird) to a company that had several iterations of hardware and dozens of software products, as well as service, support, and contracting arms?
Of course Mozilla is on the downslide -- Chrome came along to compete with them, and Internet Explorer was improved, while Safari came into existence. Mozilla still make my browser and email clients of choice, but not all people make the same choice.
And so it should be.
But while Mozilla may be waning in popularity and market share, they are hardly imploding like Sun did. They were never any where near as big nor as important to the industry to begin with!
My theory why Firefox is losing favor (Score:2)
My theory is that every release of Firefox that has come out for a few years now has been worse than the one before it. Their switch to rapid release has just made the situation worse. And the mobile version of Firefox is horrendous and borderline unusable.
Some things have improve, mostly gotten worse (Score:3)
While some things have improved in Firefox, much of the browser has gotten worse over time. Simple illustration... it leaks huge amounts of memory. After only 3 days of sitting around:
UID PID PPID CPU PRI NI VSZ RSS WCHAN STAT TT TIME COMMAND
101 164892 1738 128 230 0 1.45G 1.02G - R2L ?? 3d09:44 firefox -geometry +2820+80
After around 2 weeks the machine starts to swap. I've seen the image grow to over 6GB (with 4GB *active*) before I've had to kill it and start a fresh copy. WTF is firefox using all that memory for? It makes no sense whatsoever.
Other problems include severe instability, particularly with the file requestor (when uploading files), which results in seg-faults. And even with all the threading there seem to be severe interdependencies between tabs running javascript, so if one tab is javascript-heavy, it messes up the performance of other tabs.
The menu system is in a complete shambles, and I was really unhappy when the last upgrade changed my default search preferences to Yahoo without so much as a by-your-leave.
-Matt
Dude! (Score:3)
It's INFOWORLD: The Trabant of the IT journalism world. If you want Clue, look elsewhere.
Re:A serious question (Score:4, Informative)
It made Netscape's open-sourced browser actually work. At a time, when using IE was unpleasant, if not downright dangerous, this is very useful.
It later introduced tabbed browsing via middle-mouse-click -- a major 'productivity booster' (ahem!) for Internet addicts everywhere.
Re:A serious question (Score:4, Informative)
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Known, by people who know about the history of the web-browser.
Can we all get along now?
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Re:A serious question (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard answer is Chrome.
I used to use Chromium (the open-source version) because for a while Firefox was really crashy, but I finally switched because Chrome is such a memory hog and Firefox seems to be working quite well these days.
This article seems to basically be saying "if you aren't continuously growing, you're dying". It's hogwash. That's like saying that the bash shell is "dying" because it isn't adding tons of new functionality, including a built-in text editor and a web browser. Notice that one of the complaints is slow development of Firefox OS. Who cares? I use Firefox because I want a solid web browser; I don't need a new OS. Web browsers are a fairly mature product these days, thanks to HTML5 and modern Javascript engines. Where else is there for them to go? And for Firefox's supposed absence on mobile devices, it seems to work great on my Android phone, so I have no idea what they're talking about there.
In summary, this article is bullshit.
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No. Even if it was discovered that this was the case, they wouldn't care as long as it's shiny. Very few people really care about privacy or have any concern that having too much info out there about them could be a problem. Just look at all the people who use Facebook.
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http://www.w3counter.com/globa... [w3counter.com]
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If one is a professional web developer then the tools for Firefox are astoundingly good compared to about anything else. For daily browsing, Chrome is much faster. Horses for courses.
Re:A serious question (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't so much that they innovated, because when they added new features they were typically already available in other browsers. It's that they provided a free, open source alternative to IE at a time when one was badly needed. In the early days they made big strides forward with things like tabbed browsing and SVG support. I suppose you could say they were in the right place at the right time.
Re:A serious question (Score:4, Insightful)
The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
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I've long since abandoned Firefox, but Thunderbird is still my email client of choice. The closest competitor in the Windows ecosystem is Postbox, and it's based on Thunderbird anyway.
Re:A serious question (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, I have no idea what the article is talking about:
- The "waning market share" doesn't seem to wane all that much, going by international market share numbers (although I'm in Germany where Firefox is still the undisputed top dog so that may color my perception).
- The only thing close to "questions over tooling for their platform" I am aware of is that they're implementing Gecko's successor in Rust, their own programming language.
- While FirefoxOS has pretty much zero presence today it's still easy to run Firefox on Android (and I recommend it because the bundled browser is usually an antique, plus mobile Blink/WebKit ain't all that hot anyway).
- I have no idea what "Gecko-flavored JavaScript" is supposed to be and how it's supposed to deliver "standard tools" that other browser vendors somehow have.
Even if Mozilla sucked at what they're doing (cf. Microsoft, although they're at least trying these days) they'd create competition and thus drive the other players forward.
(No, I don't work for Mozilla. I'm just a web dev.)
Re:A serious question (Score:5, Insightful)
It is better for everyone to have strong competing implementations of web standards. Firefox is still a great browser (better IMO than Chrome) and takes privacy far more seriously. I have no inclination to switch browser at this time.
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The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone? What is the added value of Mozilla and their products right now?
Without Mozilla the Microsoft/Google/Apple triumvirate will control all browser standards. I think Mozilla brings a different perspective that would be missed. It would be nice if Firefox OS gained enough traction to make a similar difference in mobile but the chance of that happening seems slim.
Best browser on FDroid. (Score:2)
It would be very bad if Firefox was gone.
The stock Android Webkit browser has a very bad security flaw - it does not properly enforce the Single Origin Policy (SOP) in Jelly Bean and below. It will not be fixed.
For Android devices that lack Google Play, Firefox is the best option.
Firefox would be an even better option if it was as fast as the stock Webkit browser. Let's hope that happens.
Potential Firefox wins:
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The question then becomes; is it bad if Mozilla were gone?
Yes, absolutely.
Even if we assume there is no technical merit whatsoever to Mozilla's suite, they're still the only non-profit offering a web-browser, and they have an excellent track-record of advancing an open web. Google want to screw you for money through advertising. Microsoft seem to be doing ok with IE these days, but they don't have the open-web attitude Mozilla do: only Mozilla had a real objection to 'standardising' H.264, for instance.
Google release Chromium as FOSS, which is great. Still not sur
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Re:A serious question (Score:5, Informative)
The web 20 years ago was a dark and miserable place. Netscape was the dominant player and their Navigator product was clunky, with a very awkward rendering engine and a lot of proprietary web extensions.
Microsoft, never being one to miss a trick, launched IE4 in 1997 which in many ways was a superior product. It supported dynamic content a lot better than Netscape (still in a largely proprietary way), was faster etc. It was so integrated in to Windows that it could replace your entire shell on Windows 95 or NT4. Windows 98 continued this.
Anyway, whilst IE4 and later 5 were unstable, they were subjectively better and easier to obtain for Windows users. Netscape was such a mess that they gave up entirely on their code base and created the Mozilla project for a next-generation browser. Microsoft launched IE6 in 2001 with just the right mix of Netscape compatibility and proprietary (shiny) extensions that everyone went for it. At one point, IE had almost 90% market share!
With this dominant position, Microsoft basically gave up developing their clunky, insecure web browser as businesses flocked to make applications require it. The Mozilla project spun out of the AOL-owned Netscape and launched a niche browser 'suite' which included email and web page editing all built in. It was slow, buggy and bloated - but very standards based (contrasting to IE).
A group of people took the good bits from the Mozilla project (browser) and tidied up the extension engine. They called it Phoenix and added useful features like tabs, download management etc. This got renamed to Firebird and then to Firefox for trade mark reasons... The world was given a browser that could take on IE. On launch day they had elaborate marketing schemes like full page adverts in the press and heavy promotion via Google.
Mozilla alone created a product that could take on Internet Explorers dominance, forced Microsoft to continue to develop IE towards a more standards-focussed goal and empowered us users to get back the web.
As Chrome (and Blink/WebKit) become more dominant it's critical that we have choice. The web was a dark place with too many sites requiring proprietary Microsoft extensions just to run apps. Lets hope it never happens again!
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There were already holes in mine from 35. It did, however, ask for more after I updated.
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Alright everybody - if you think Firefox is better at everything, step over to this side of the line. If you think that Chrome is better at everything, step over to *this* side of the line. Yes sir? Yes, you. Opera? Listen - you just get the hell out of here, and leave your meal ticket on the table. Everybody else: being shouting!
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And then there are the people using Mobile Safari sitting on the sidelines, enjoying the shitshow.
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Hey, if I wanted a barely functional web browser I'd use Lynx!
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I use Opera on my Android devices because Firefox still has problems rendering some sites. It's part fault of those sites and part fault of bad decisions on the side of Mozilla. Go tr
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Except that Opera is pretty much just a repackaged Chrome at this point.
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I've been a Firefox user pretty much since it was released, but last year I switched to Chrome. It's not much better, but at least Chrome has less propensity to grow to gigantic memory proportions and slow down to a crawl and/or crash for no apparent reason.
That's weird, that's exactly the reason I switched back to Firefox, because that's exactly how Chrome behaved. Firefox isn't nearly as much of a memory hog.
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Ordinarily, I'd agree with you, but a few weeks ago I saw Chrome hit just a little short of 9GB RAM utilization on a machine that had been rebooted perhaps four hours before, with only a dozen open tabs. Was that a poor interaction between Chrome and my ad blocker and whatever the hell javascript and .GIFVs on Imgur does? Probably. But there's no way a browser's processes should be using more RAM than running virtual machines.
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Because juggling RAM isn’t free in CPU time. It’s cool if you can fit it all in, but you still have to read and write data. If you have a lot of it, well your caches get trashed, and you’re still managing memory instead of doing meaningfull stuff.
Re: Just make it less bloated (Score:2)
The machines I regularly use have:
4GB
8GB
16GB
The last two need to run at least 2 and 4 VMs with 3Gb ram each respectively. Running chrome for day-to-day work would make these setups impractical, whereas firefox runs well (firefox needs to be restarted more frequently than the OSs, but not significantly).
Additionally, chrome/chromium have some display issues on one machine (linux, KDE, radeon).
No, I can't (or can't justify just for chrome when firefox is fine) adding more ram, most of the above are work mach
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Chrome is bloated too, so #1 is a non-issue. #2 is the main problem.
I like Chrome and use it both at home and work almost exclusively.
Whenever I take a look at Firefox (mostly for compatibility testing) I just think "why bother?",
Why bother using something that is identical to the thing you already use?
Re:They needed Brendan Eich (Score:4, Informative)
He chose to make his support public
To be fair, while all donations are public, he didn't really publicize it, per se, but rather had it publicized for him by our new puritans.