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from the left-hand-doesn't-know-what-the-right-hand-is-doing dept.
Mozilla has sent mixed signals about the future of the Firefox Web browser:
The head of Mozilla's Firefox browser is looking to the future. And, for the moment at least, it seems to lie in rival Chrome. Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser.
"Let's jump right in and say yes, the rumors are true, we're working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox," Mayo wrote in a blog post. "The premise for these experiments couldn't be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us – both on PCs and mobile devices – has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0, and we're long overdue for some fresh approaches."
The biggest surprise, however, was that the project, named Tofino, will not use Firefox's core technology – Gecko – but will instead plumb for Electron, which is built on the technology behind Google's rival Chrome browser, called Chromium.
However, Mayo updated his post to say that "I should have been clearer that Project Tofino is wholly focused on UX explorations and not the technology platform. We are working with the Platform team on technology platform futures too, and we're excited about the Gecko and Servo-based futures being discussed!" Mozilla's CTO also reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Gecko rendering engine:
Just two days after Mayo broke ranks, Mozilla's CTO jumped up and announced another new project – this one called Positron (geddit?) – which will take the Electron API and "wrap it around Gecko." Or, in other words, make it possible to take Mayo's new, better browser and pull it off Chromium and back into the safe hands of Gecko. And so the status quo seeks to reassert itself.
Also at CNET.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Wednesday April 13 2016, @09:26AM
Teases? More like threatens.
I'm not aware of any Firefox users that actually want Firefox to be more like Google Chrome. I guess Mozilla feels there are enough of them to keep Firefox alive, though.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @12:51PM
The only people who want Firefox to be Chrome are the Firefox developers and whoever else is running the self-destructing show at Mozilla.
Simple fact of the matter is that Chrome beats the pants out of Firefox on everything except for the things that they are doing their best to destroy about Firefox, namely customization and plug-ins. And now, if you want a customizable browser, Vivaldi has a fantastic head start and is already compatible with Chrome plug-ins. And for those who distrust Google sufficiently, there are options involving Chromium that are worth exploring. IIRC there are already a few other niche browsers that are based around the Chrome engine, as well, while Firefox busily kills Gecko, or at least leaves it to die of neglect, while they do fantastic things such as spend the organization's money on pet political projects and strip out features.
Essentially Firefox is trying to pull itself from its market share and cram itself into a niche that's already full and growing. I don't know if they expect to pull a bunch of users back to their side or what, but they're providing no incentives to actually stay with them, providing no incentives to turn to them, and providing every incentive to leave and never look back. If they reverse course, they'll already have heavily burned anyone who cared.
It's very sad to see the end of the Netscape browser from such a situation, but it looks inevitable since the devs won't pull their heads out of the sand. I can't help but wonder just what's going on over there in the organization - I half-expect there to be a ton of super-frustrated developers who hate this but don't want to lose their jobs over it, and the decisions are only made by a few people who are out of touch and have deliberately stayed that way.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 13 2016, @03:15PM
Simple fact of the matter is that Chrome beats the pants out of Firefox on everything except for the things that they are doing their best to destroy about Firefox, namely customization and plug-ins.
I agree, except that I'm loving ASM.js compilation to machine code and caching. The work Mozilla has done on the web audio system, file system API, and local cache access are swank. Native support for gamepads and joysticks, WebGL. I'm experimenting with some next gen distributed game engine code where "persistent online world" doesn't need a centralized server, and thus can't be shut down whenever Blizzard wants (not using their IP, but still, fucking hell Blizzard, people just want to play and make games that don't have needless death sentences).
Anyway, I don't really like "WebAssembly" as it's a bytecode format that is irrelevant. It speeds the initial compile time over ASM.js, but only by a half a second, and Every successive page load the machine code is cached and loads in milliseconds, so WebAssembly is a solution in search of a problem, IMO. Well, except that it lets you have native 32bit floats, while ASM.js really only has 64bit float operations (with 32bit float stores to memory), and you can have 64bit ints with WebAssembly -- but I don't use those because I'd rather SIMD more 16bit and 32bit values instead.
Anyhow, it's pretty cool that Chrome can almost (but not really) match the speed of FF's ASM.js compiled code with just the standard Chrome JS JIT operations. ASM.js is a subset of JS that opts out of JS dynamism and garbage collection, basically leaving you only C-like features, but if the browser doesn't know what to do with it the ASM.js code just gets run as regular JS code. WebAssembly, however is not backwards compatible at all, since it's a new binary format for code. Google and MS are on the WebAssembly band wagon though (It's less of a bytecode and more of an archived abstract syntax tree stored recursively left branch first). So, FF pioneered the cross platform way forward and away from Javascript. If I had to pick one thing as the best thing any browser has done so far, that would be it.
Personally, I wish they'd just fire the FF UX team. Get those hotheads out of there. The shit that requires engineering, those people are pretty cool. The chrome/chromium people are fucking retarded, however. I don't know how the fuck you do this, but when they implemented ArrayBuffers (native int and float arrays) the dumb-asses forgot to implement one of the methods required: Int32Array.set() which I desperately needed to efficiently copy and memset and to pass around large messages, audio data, vertex index lists, buffers, etc. I just scratched my head, because the spec and docs said the function was there, but the method was undefined. That means somebody plain fucking forgot to even stub out all the methods. No, that means they're not doing any sort of unit testing, QA, or peer review, like, at all! The kicker is the ArrayBuffers feature had been in FF and Chrome for quite some time, but Chromium still stat there with an issue in the bug tracker saying, "oops, forgot to implement .set()" It's a fucking single line memcpy and some bounds checks, holy shit.
In truth, I know that deep down all browsers are all shit held together with bubble gum and twine. FF is a bit less so IMO. We really should start over from scratch and completely re-engineer the web to be stateful and secure (fuck you Tim Burners Lee and the stateless horse you rode in on, dumbass: "Herp! Let's build the biggest most powerful web out of the most interactive and stateful machines on the planet, but not give them any state! DERP!" "how will people log in you say? THEY WON'T!" Grrr! It's all that fucking guy's fault!). Seriously, all the revered "web gods" are idiotic emperors wearing no clothes. Chrome is not faster than FF, it just cuts corners -- like not checking TLS certificate revocation lists, so if your site gets compromised and you get a new cert, and void the old one, Chrome[ium] still accepts the bad cert that MITMs are now known to be using... what the actual fuck Google! Every little bit of initial page load time they shave off costs you something. I prefer to wait a few milliseconds than to have no security.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday April 14 2016, @06:24AM
We really should start over from scratch and completely re-engineer the web to be stateful and secure (fuck you Tim Burners Lee and the stateless horse you rode in on, dumbass: "Herp! Let's build the biggest most powerful web out of the most interactive and stateful machines on the planet, but not give them any state! DERP!" "how will people log in you say? THEY WON'T!" Grrr! It's all that fucking guy's fault!).
The World Wide Web was never intended to be used for every fucking kind of random interaction on the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee & co. designed HTML specifically for people that needed a way to share written information without needing to send a copy to each individual and update it whenever changes were made. It was intended as one of the many existing & future communication tools on the Internet — alongside Usenet for discussion groups, email for more personal or 'gated' interaction, FTP for transferring files, etc. — not as a replacement or framework for every random fucking thing people might come up with after the 90s.
Your attitude is like bolting a jet engine and wings into a bicycle, then upon waking up in the hospital after crashing it horribly, going bugfuck ranting about how the bike company supposedly did a shitty job designing the vehicle because even though it works great as a bike, it doesn't make a great airplane.
Personally, I'm fed up with Web browsers bloating more every year as they try to cram ever-more abilities under the hood (thanks to the "flying bike" crowd) that I'll never fucking use. If the Web Browsers are a pain in the ass to work with when it comes to game creation, it's a sign that game creators need to collectively branch into a separate shared protocol and standard for GameWeb browsers. As an awesome side-effect of that, maybe the UX twats around the world would then stop compulsively mangling functional software by "reinventing" it in minimalist forms and dedicate themselves to creating the new GameWeb interfaces! (Not likely, but we can all dream, right?)
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday April 13 2016, @08:20PM
Yep, I just installed Vivaldi as a compromise between not using Firefox and not using Chrome, even if it is Chrome under the hood. That's on Windows; I recently also switched to Chromium on Linux.
I've been using mozilla since Netscape 2 on Solaris, through all the initial open source mozilla milestones on Debian, and then as Firefox and Iceweasel on all platforms. But I've reached the limit of how many regressive UI changes I'm willing to tolerate. If you're going to force the UI to be as Chrome-like as possible, then why would I continue to use it rather than using actual Chrome? I was using firefox because I actually preferred it, both for its stance on freedom and its UI. Now I only have two bad choices, and I might as well choose the one which doesn't continually lock up due to not having per-tab processes/threads, and which doesn't have long-standing serious memory leaks. Seriously, it's been leaking memory since the mozilla milestones and you *never* fixed it. Have you heard of valgrind? C++ smartpointers? Such long-standing serious defects are inexcusable.
The best browsers I've used to date were:
Galeon: Used the Gecko engine, and back in the day integrated very well into a GNOME 1.x/early 2.x desktop, and was faster and more stable than mozilla itself.
Konqueror: Well integrated into the KDE desktop via kparts; though nowadays it's not so usable in the KDE 3 era it was excellent
The thing is, mozilla/firefox has never really integrated well into any environment or platform. It might be skinned to appear like it does, but it's never been as usable or as well integrated as these. When it comes to actually getting work done with these, that integration does provide tangible benefits. Rather than being a monolithic beast, konqueror used the kde wallet system for passwords, the spell checking system, fonts, ui, and more. Firefox and Thunderbird are their own standalone worlds, and have always been this way.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 14 2016, @01:01AM
I switched my mom's Chrome for Firefox, only keeping the Chrome desktop icon. She hasn't noticed the difference. Nice work!