Mozilla CEO Chris Beard Will Step Down at the End of the Year (techcrunch.com) 27
Chris Beard announced today his plans to step down as Mozilla Corporation CEO at the end of 2019. Beard joined the web software company in 2004, remaining an employee since then, with the exception of 2013, when he left to become Greylock's "executive-in-residence," while remaining on as an advisor. From a report: Beard was appointed interim CEO for Mozilla in April 2014, coming on as full time chief executive in July of that same year. The company has seen a bit of a resurgence in recent years, after having ceded much of its browser marketshare to the likes of Google and Apple. Firefox has undergone something of a renaissance over the past year, as have the company's security tools. "Today our products, technology and policy efforts are stronger and more resonant in the market than ever, and we have built significant new organizational capabilities and financial strength to fuel our work," Beard said in the blog post. "From our new privacy-forward product strategy to initiatives like the State of the Internet we're ready to seize the tremendous opportunity and challenges ahead to ensure we're doing even more to put people in control of their connected lives and shape the future of the internet for the public good."
Good Riddance, SJW Bullshit Slinger (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry if this is not "compassionate communications," but the state of the MF has gone down the shitter in the last several years, mostly because there is no leadership at the top and the inmates have been running the asylum.
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Brendan Eich
He was a target, not a victim. That's why he get's memory holed.
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thunderbird (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm mostly thankful for the thunderbird mail client than anything else, a good mature useful thing.
the feature churning of firefox is annoying though, it's the marketers mentality of justifying existence by pointless renaming, rearranging, and churning of UI... wish they'd stop that crap. Of course, just like google they settle on a less useful menuing system needing more clicks to get to what is needed. Don't guild lilies; don't reinvent the wheel.
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I'm mostly thankful for the thunderbird mail client than anything else, a good mature useful thing.
The reason Thunderbird is good is because it's not developed by Mozilla. It's developed by the Thunderbird Council and Mozilla just let them use their name:
On May 9, 2017, Philipp Kewisch announced that the Mozilla Foundation will continue to serve as the legal and fiscal home for the Thunderbird project, but that Thunderbird will migrate off Mozilla Corporation infrastructure, separating the operational aspects of the project.
I can only imagine the train wreck Thunderbird would have become if Mozilla had continued to develop it. They'd likely have removed half the features, destroyed the UI and alienated its user base. Fortunately, without Mozilla's interference, it remains a great application, unlike Firefox.
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I second this sentiment. I hope that Mozilla simply keeps Thunderbird working as is and does not ruin it by trying to use "modern web technologies", etc.
Its a great tool - keep it private, secure and working and I'll be very happy.
SeaMonkey too! (Score:2)
I am thankful for SeaMonkey [seamonkey-project.org] even though it uses the old Firefox v52's engine and has difficulities to get newer versions out.
Firefox was deliberately damaged (Score:3, Insightful)
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What power did Firefox have to stop Chrome from being developed? With the exception of bending over and take every one of Googles Request good idea or not and put it in Firefox. During Chromes Rise, the real problem was IE, and its stupid legacy Windows Only features. Chrome and Firefox which pushed modern open standards really helped dislodge IE from its sport. Firefox couldn't do it alone or even with full support from Google, Because Firefox has always been second fiddle. It really took Google, with a
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There was a link to use Chrome when visiting Google.
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Firefox couldn't compete with Chrome on performance or security while supporting the old XUL extensions model. Giving extensions unrestricted access to the browser core made changes too hard. That is the main reason it was removed. (Source: I am a former Mozilla distinguished engineer.)
Another reason XUL extensions were removed are so that XUL itself can be removed. Now that most of its features are supported by modern Web standards, it's unnecessary engine bloat.
Users as a whole care far more about perform
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And not firing Brendan Eich over a stupid non-issue would have been a good start.
Re:Firefox was deliberately damaged (Score:4, Interesting)
Bring back xul
Yuck. Unless someone wants to step up and maintain XUL, it's a dead technology. XUL was created when markup languages to express a UI was incredibly limited. You had what XAML, whatever that Java FX markup language was, and a few others. Additionally, those markup languages weren't standard anything, so if the people who created them didn't step up to keep them modern, no one did. XUL hadn't changed since pretty much inception and the technology for it was really creaking at the seams. Including in that XBL was really creaking and the last attempt to fix it was in 2007, when Mozilla attempted to get it as a standard and failed spectacularly. XBL was incredibly reliant on XPCOM to function correctly and XUL was incredibly reliant on XPCOM and XBL to make it anywhere near useful. All the pieces were super tight in integrations which made changes beyond nightmarish to work with. Change a few lines in the XUL render module and XPCOM would break, change something in XPCOM and XUL components would stop talking to each and XBL would start acting erratically.
While we might be able to argue if XUL, XBL, and XPCOM are good ideas, the only person who ever implemented them did so in the most bad way to implement things. The code was too tightly integrated rather than loosely coupled. So every time a security exploit was found in say the JS engine, it meant that the change to fix that security bug in the JS engine would break something related to the UI, or to building the DOM, or XUL rendering, or XPCOM communication. Make one change here, break something way over there and Firefox was notorious for that, way more than some would really like to go on about.
So maybe a complete rewrite of XUL from ground up because the old code base was riddled with way too dependents on each others code. That said, a complete rewrite of a technology that no one accepted as standard was a dumb idea. Instead the web had finally caught up and things like Shadow DOM, the canvas API, and so on were more mature technology and bonus it was a web standard thus, there would be more programmers familiar with it.
Allowing the Chromopoly to form
Firefox was broken the day the 2.x series came out way back. It was just a smaller codebase back them so fixes were easy. By 3.x series the problems were already unmanageable, the codebase was as fragile as a stack of glass cards. Chrome took a way more module approach to building a web browser from the get-go. Google made good choices at the beginning and that got them running. Mozilla inherited a codebase form the 1980s and attempted to keep it fresh and modern. It was doomed from the word go. The rewrite of Firefox as it is, is what should have happened in 2002. That Mozilla was able to seriously challenge IE with such a miserable pile of code that was Firefox at the time speaks volumes about the web back then.
the new leader will have my confidence
And I can assure you that with that mindset, no one wants your confidence. You've got Pale Moon among others who still support the old code base. Go there. Firefox isn't loosing anything by you heading over to Pale Moon or others. The entire point is to maintain an open choice and part of that choice is your selection of Pale Moon or whoever else. If you don't like Firefox as it is, either get to coding or get to moving. If you want XUL back, best to start learning some C++ right now.
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I don't think the GP post really wanted XUL. My guess is that what they really wanted was "XUL extensions", that is to say a way of modifying the UI and behavior of Firefox itself from an extension (as opposed to only being able to do that to webpages, which is more or less what WebExtensions is limited to).
XUL extensions don't have anything to do with XUL. You can blame Mozilla for the ridiculously confusing naming.
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> XUL extensions don't have anything to do with XUL.
That's not true at all. XUL extensions depended on XUL in fundamental ways, e.g. using XUL overlays to patch content into the browser XUL document. If you want to support existing XUL extensions the browser absolutely has to support XUL *and* use XUL to define its UI *and* not change that XUL very much over time or those extensions will break.
Any extension system that allows you to change the browser UI in fundamental ways would make it difficult to for
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I guess overlay-based "XUL extensions" require XUL overlays, but if you want to switch away from XUL then all you need to do is drop the overlay-based loading. "XUL extensions" loaded via a Javascript function call work fine with HTML.
There's no particular need to keep UI mods working between versions. If the underlying UI changes, of course that's going to break anything that mods it. That's expected.
A Fired Fox! (Score:1)
Re:A Fired Fox! (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly his name was a glaring symbol of the oppressive patriarchy.
Firefox was badly managed. Updates not explained. (Score:2)
What Firefox substitutes do you use that allow the old add-ons? Pale Moon? Waterfox?
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I use Pale Moon. I want to like Firefox but I keep trying and failing. The mobile version pisses me off, too. In every version (normal Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Firefox Preview) the UI is terrible, in some of the same ways, and also in different ways. I'm using preview right now even though it sucks, because performance is OK. I was using Brave even though it's Chrome, but they changed the UI such that you can't copy the URL from the address bar, which is just staggeringly stupid. I hate every mobile brows
i got a question for the mozilla community (Score:2)
release (Score:2, Insightful)
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Today's Firefox is faster and more secure than it has ever been. A lot more so than even a couple of years ago.
There's always Brave (Score:2)
It's gotten quite usable, is quite secure, and gets you away from the Firefox/Chrome duopoly. Check it out.
http://brave.com/ [brave.com]