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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday April 13 2016, @07:56AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by rleigh on Wednesday April 13 2016, @07:55PM

    by rleigh (4887) on Wednesday April 13 2016, @07:55PM (#331273) Homepage

    Strangely enough, for those old enough to have read and used the older user interface guidelines, be it IBM CUA, Sun OpenLook, CDE, GNOME 2 HIG, Apple's old ones, etc. the major point rammed home is simply: be consistent. Consistency makes things usable by making newly encountered things sufficiently similar to things the user already knows about, making them intuitive, discoverable and obvious. It doesn't matter if it's common keybindings, common menu structures or visual appearance. They all become familiar and second nature. And the people who wrote these things based them upon actual thought, study and empirical testing. Hell, even the simplest Xt or Motif application had more consistency than the crap we have to deal with today.

    The modern "UX" experts make me very angry. It's all style over substance, and it's entirely regressive. We had better qualified and skilled people doing this stuff over 30 years ago, who literally wrote the books on this, but to your average hipster that's old and outdated. But do any hipster UX "experts" actually seriously use their bastard creations, or just inflict them upon others? Forget "experience", whatever happened to efficiency and usability for people who actually use this stuff day in, day out. There's a reason I'm using Emacs and not gedit or Visual Studio. Common menu structure? You'll take your hamburger and like it! Keybindings? What are they now? Visual consistency, it'll be flat and bland with no way to differentiate between a label and a button. Gah.

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  • (Score: 2) by bitstream on Thursday April 14 2016, @01:34AM

    by bitstream (6144) on Thursday April 14 2016, @01:34AM (#331405) Journal

    They can't make a living by using what already exist .. ;)