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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: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday April 14 2016, @06:24AM

    by Magic Oddball (3847) on Thursday April 14 2016, @06:24AM (#331494) Journal

    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?)

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