Mozilla seems to be asleep at the wheel, when it once drove online activity and communications. We have some suggestions where it could go.
In recent years that seems to be eating into every major OS… but six months into the pandemic, Mozilla laid off the entire team, killing its next-gen rendering engine, Servo.
(Much of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn’t be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google’s GoLang? Surely not?)
How does one even make that connection? Why would Google be interested in such a topic? I’m pretty sure GoLang doesn’t make them money directly, but rather as it streamlines their in-house work. I don’t think they profit off this even a tiny bit.
Also GoLang, while probably not a better language in every aspect, has some very neat properties which set it apart from Rust (and vice versa).
Yeah it’s a weird thing to say. Google pays Mozilla a HUGE amount of money to be Firefox’s default search engine. Although the main reason they’re happy to pay so much for that is that they WANT to keep at least one Chrome competitor alive, so they don’t end up in an anti-trust shitfest like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer.
The bigger point here is that Go doesn’t really compete with Rust or C++. Chromium is written in C++, not Go.
You expect too much from “tech journalists”.
You’re right. Tech Won’t Save Us.
Mozilla, please stop aping Chrome. Copying is rarely the way to win big.
Yes! Please. Firefox devs should fork and make an org that focuses on Firefox alone. Make it a true competitor to Chrome/Chromium. Innovate instead of copying. Be something different and get rid of your management with fat salaries. It could be much better used on development and improving the web.
Firefox become popular originally because it differentiated itself from other browsers (well, mainly one particular browser) by offering great useful features that the others didn’t have. Many of them were targeted at power users who went on to evangelise Firefox to others.
These days Mozilla only seems to get publicity and attention for gimmicks, or for removing features. The few useful ideas it has produced, like Containers, languish in obscurity. In the face of Google’s aggressive moves with Chrome, Firefox has withered has a result.
A change of direction is sorely needed.
Also, bundling extensions with the browser is not the way to cater to power users - they will install the extensions they want anyway.
If gecko became embeddable (or better yet, servo was finished), so users could make alternative firefox-based browsers, that would be really good for power users. Right now things like qutebrowser are all based on blink, because that’s the only option.
Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:
Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.
There is a difference between forefox-based browser and chromium-based one. Namely, if you base it on chromium, you take the blink engine and you can build watever UI around it you want. If you base it on firefox, you actually have to take the full firefox code and make changes to it.
All those firefox-based browsers are very similar to firefox with some small changes made. If you actually want to make large changes, keeping up with updates will quickly become a mess.
By contrast, qutebrowser has very little in common with Chromium except for the rendering engine - the user experience is totally different.
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Brave even mention this in the old time how hard for them to fork it… Well… it’s a 25 years old code, even quite older as some even rewritten Firefox from netscape, have same pattern…
“Bundling extensions” sounds to me like a poor description of what I think is the right idea, which is to incorporate things that can currently be done with extensions into the browser in a simpler way. As time goes by it seems like more and more extensions are required just to replace functionality as Mozilla removes it. On upgrading to 115ESR for instance, which has just made it to Debian stable, I find that I need “New Tab Homepage” in order to continue having new tabs be a blank page with a dark background. Other extensions that I think would be worth including as basic browser functions include “Disable Page Visibility”, “Disallow console.clear”, “Redirector”, “RSSPreview”, and “SuperStop”. That’s not counting things I haven’t found extensions to replace such as disabling select events, or various simple UI customizations that can now be done only in userChrome.css, requiring additional steps to maintain them with every upgrade. There are also more complicated things like some features from JShelter which I think would also be deserving of inclusion. And of course as mentioned in the article, the always popular “vertical tabs” although I don’t care for it myself.
They’ve cluttered up the UI in this new ESR release with a bunch of redundant “Can always read and change data on this site” text reminding us all of the security risk of having lots of extensions from a variety of sources any of which could one day sell out and turn malicious. There exist at least some “power users” who do not appreciate having to so frequently add new ones just to maintain existing functionality and to do what seem like very basic and essential things.
What you’re talking about is called “feature creep” and is a surefire road to poor quality.
I, for example, don’t use any of the extensions you mentioned. And I checked two at random and both had less than 10k users, so they’re by no means “must have”. If they had to include all functionality that every “power user who does not appreciate having to frequently add new extensions” ever wanted, they might as well just rename it FireDinosaur or something. It will be both extremely heavy, and quickly extinct.
This browser needs a modest amount of feature creep just to reverse the past decade of feature retreat. I was mostly restricting the suggestions there to features that seem straightforward enough that they’d not lead to any cost to people who don’t use them. It’s by no means meant to be a comprehensive list. If you want one that would instead be very popular, how about this: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979
Personally I think they should revive Positron, their electron competitor, with the launch of Servo. If it has the same benefits of Firefox vs Chrome, I think people would love apps that are on the slimmer side
I don’t see the point, especially when there’s Tauri, which is a slim wrapper around whatever the default web view is on the target platform. That’s about as slim as you can get.
Mozilla making it would merely be a Firefox-based Electron competitor, which would probably end up being similar in terms of size. I think that should happen, but the goal shouldn’t be to make apps slimmer, but to make a real Electron competitor (i.e. something that packages the browser with the executable).
I’ve never heard of Tauri before. It’s almost exactly what I would hope for from mozilla, and perfect for some of the apps I want to make. Ty!
You’re welcome! I’m actually in the process of pitching it to my company to replace our Electron app, which has caused a bunch of problems for us.
Do you have a pros and cons between tauri and electron? Thank you
I’ll just describe how they work, and you can decide the pros and cons for yourself.
Electron:
- bundles browser with the app, so the dev can control exactly the version of the browser they’re shipping
- language is JavaScript
- quite stable from a development perspective
Tauri:
- uses system browser (Edge on Windows, Safari on macOS), so the browser gets updated with the system, not the app
- language is Rust
- younger project, but it’s also a relatively simple project
I want to move our app to Tauri because:
- we need to refactor anyway because recent versions of Electron break our app
- install size is large, and we could refactor the web app to be offline-ready instead of relying on Electron features
- Tauri gets security updates for the browser “for free,” so we could have our app “auto update” by just being a PWA
- if we add desktop-specific features (e.g. move some of our computation to the FE), it won’t be in JS, so Rust offers better options (i.e. threading)
So since we don’t need the features Electron offers, I want to use Tauri to reduce our maintenance overhead.
Much of Mozilla’s revenue comes from Google, of course. This couldn’t be because Rust was, and is, outshining Google’s GoLang? Surely not?
This article is so stupid. I’ve been following blog posts and such back then and even though nobody spelled it out, there was conflict between the Servo and Gecko camps at Mozilla. The C++ Gecko developers were afraid that they were about to be made obsolete by the Servo team. You can easily see this that this camp spread the idea that Servo was never ever meant to be a production engine, only a research playroom but OTOH a Firefox-branded VR browser fully based on Servo was slated to come out not too far after the layoffs happened (IIRC the roadmap stated a year later). The claim of Servo having been only for research and the roadmap of a production-quality Servo-only Firefox release are obviously at odds.
Here’s the roadmap: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap/c8c1a2fbee9fd3ea6e01943db96825516f8478e8 (“Our 2020 goals for Servo - especially the Mozilla staff - are aligned with the Mixed Reality efforts at Mozilla: Release a public Firefox Reality application to the Windows Store that is built on Servo and works with any Windows Mixed Reality headset, focused on delivering high quality immersive web experiences”)
Mozilla (and Netscape before it) have always been the alternative browsers not the industry leaders.
