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Firefox 89: Can this redesign stem browser's decline?:
Mozilla has released Firefox 89, proclaiming it a "fresh new Firefox," though it comes amid a relentless decline in market share.
Firefox matters more than most web browsers, because it uses its own browser engine, called Quantum, and its own JavaScript engine, called SpiderMonkey. By contrast, most other browsers, including Chrome and Chromium, Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi use the Google-sponsored Blink engine, while Apple's Safari uses WebKit (from which Blink was forked). The existence of multiple independent implementations is important for web standards, helping to prevent a single vendor from pushing through changes without consensus, and ensuring that the standards are coherent.
A glance at a statistics site like W3Counter is telling. In April 2008, Microsoft enjoyed a 63 per cent market share with Internet Explorer, and with Firefox performing strongly behind it at 29.3 per cent. By April 2010, IE was down to 48.6 per cent, Firefox up to 32.7 per cent, and Google's newer Chrome was starting to make an impact, at 8.3 per cent.
In April 2012, the three were almost on a par, though Chrome (26.8 per cent) had overtaken Firefox (25 per cent). Today, Chrome is at 65.3 per cent, Safari second at 16.7 per cent, IE and Edge has 5.7 per cent, and Firefox has just 4.1 per cent share. Despite numerous updates, Mozilla's browser has declined from 6.1 per cent share a year ago. Statcounter tells a similar story, reporting a 3.59 per cent share for Firefox, down from 4.21 per cent a year ago.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:32AM (7 children)
How do they know which browser is being used - do they count user agent strings?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:15AM (6 children)
Probably, which makes it all bullshit. I use PaleMoon, but it lies to just about every site about what it is. Usually it claims to be the latest Firefox, but sometimes it's chrome or IE. There are several screenfuls of useragent.override strings in my about:config.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:32AM
Old Opera (_not_ chrome-based, but v12 and down Presto based) also had that ability- limited to presenting itself as IE or Firefox, but sure helped (helps) with the too many idiotic sites that detect your browser and refuse to load the desired page, rather telling you to "upgrade to a modern (or compatible) browser".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:38PM (1 child)
It's funny how so many websites break until you set a modern user agent string, then like magic it works
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:43PM
I doubt much of that is malicious and more about a global check to make sure a user's browser supports all of their features.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Monday June 07 2021, @12:05AM (2 children)
How many people do you think that mess with agent string? 50%? I don't think so. Probably a 0,1% is generous
So, no bullshit, but statistically a very good approximation
(Score: 2, Insightful) by deimtee on Monday June 07 2021, @12:26AM (1 child)
I would say just about 100% of the people who don't use Firefox / Chrome. There are far too many sites that go:
If Chrome
Serve This;
Elseif Firefox
Serve that;
Else
Serve "Get a New Browser";
So whatever the proportion of non-Firefox/Chrome is, they will be almost completely hidden.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday June 07 2021, @12:48AM
I agree that the users of other browsers are probably under-represented because they likely set their User Agent string to Chrome/FF, but I'd be surprised if they represented low single-digits in any case. Don't forget that for every Soylent reader on the internet, there are 10,000 Walmart shoppers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:33AM (17 children)
Despite? It's BECAUSE of the numerous updates they keep losing market share. Relentless updates and changes that nobody asked for and everyone hated. They're just trying to kill it. I use Firefox myself and this latest update continues the trend of "simplifying" things way beyond simple. It's not limited to Firefox, but all sorts of programs have taken to hiding things you want deeper and deeper under layers of menus. Now instead of having a button up front that lists the most five or six most useful categories of things, it's "Hamburger> Menu> Category> Action. It adds two or three clicks to every single action.
Of course they justify it with metrics. They collapsed everything to a tiny hamburger window that's a crap interface so things get used less. So they hide even more items and they get used even less and get removed entirely because people start forgetting the features are even there.
Another thing that got changed is yet another annoyance. My title bar is now the same color whether it's the active window or not. It looks permanently inactive. I've seen this trend in other programs like Discord as well and it's garbage. Let the OS handle the window colors. Ugh...rant over. :(
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:11AM (7 children)
My favorite are the switches back and forth with dubious reasons or ones they ignored earlier. For example, "rectangular tabs wastes space so we are switching to angled tabs" followed a few years later with "angled tabs have too much dead space so we are switching to rectangular ones." Another is "icon padding and a large extension area (since we killed the status/addon bar) leaves less space for the address bar" to "an address bar that is too big is dead space, added padding to icons aids is a better use of space and shrinking the address bar allows room for more extensions."
(Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:15AM (1 child)
In this one the pointless padding is on bookmarks menus and, in fact, all menus, in order to make things easier for their massive user base on mobile devices and at the expense of their existing user base on laptops/desktops which they've been busy ignoring for years, if not being actively hostile towards. Which means that everything that has a list of anything has exploded off the edges of the screen, requiring that you scroll endlessy to get to things that were previously two clicks way, one to open the menu, the second to select. And since they've deliberately broken userChrome.css you can't even fix it any more like you used to be able to.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @05:32PM
I've taken to maintaining my own bookmarks file, editing it with emacs, and using omd to convert it from markdown to html.
If you like, and the web page is up (intermittent because of trouble with a new modem) you can have a look [pooq.com].
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:11AM (4 children)
You'll love Firefox 90... the pink-hairs have finally developed the Holy Grail of UX: the tabless browser. Their telemetry found that users only look at one tab at a time, so eliminating tabs not only frees up screen space and reduces memory usage, but it simplifies the user's experience.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:55AM
and to switch between tabs, do you use the phone's camera button?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:36AM (2 children)
I vaguely recall tabless browsing. Did it last as long as IE4, or was that IE3? Somewhere in that time frame, somebody published an overlay sort of addon for IE that gave you tabs.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:30PM (1 child)
Tabs were introduced in IE7 [wikipedia.org] in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface) [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:30AM
Prior to tabs, if you wanted to have multiple websites open at once, you needed to use separate windows.
And we had to move the mouse fifteen miles down to the start bar to switch between 'em. Well it was either that or use alt-tab.
Course back in them times, we didn't have touchy-feely interfaces. We had a keyboard, with real keys, that you had to press down forcefully with your own fingers! Great days.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:11AM (2 children)
From what I see dicking around with interface stuff too often is a sign that the team in charge have no real new good ideas on real improvement or are too incompetent as a team to implement them.
It's a bit similar to bikeshedding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality [wikipedia.org]
https://exceptionnotfound.net/bikeshedding-the-daily-software-anti-pattern/ [exceptionnotfound.net]
tldr; they are unable to make real improvements so they spend time dicking around with themes and "rebranding/name changes".
Don't get me wrong I'm all for UI improvements but in most cases it's a good sign the team as a whole has jumped the shark. Especially when there really aren't other real significant improvements to go along with it. Microsoft with their Metro UI. Desktop Linux with their wobbling windows and Metro UI wannabes. And Mozilla with their endless fuck-ups.
I'm fine with the LGBTWTFBBQ bunch in Mozilla fucking whoever they want (I barely even care whether it's consensual or not). The problem is lots of us don't actually like the way they keep fucking Firefox up and fucking us over.
Maybe they think fucking with things in different ways automagically counts as an improvement. It might work that way in their "fuck spaces" but it clearly ain't working for the rest of the world.
As for privacy: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/browser-startup.html [netmeister.org]
https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ [brave.com]
p.s. that browser market shares have changed so much in ten or so years show that people can and will actually switch browsers. Chrome isn't installed by default on Windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:09AM (1 child)
WTF you talkin' about? It's the brand new Proton interface! The! Brand! New! Proton! Interface!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:34AM
Just wait until Firefox 90: Brand New Electron Interface!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:06PM (4 children)
The only thing they ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS do is kill whatever hacks people use to get tabs on bottom.
This seems to be to the prime directive of every Firefox update. Second priority is to create ACRES of whitespace. "Compact" made is unsupported, requiring hacks, then it's not even fucking compact. It's about where medium should be. So, I have more lovely lovely vertical whitespace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @07:37AM
Because that's the way *Chrome* does it, and they absolutely refuse to allow tabs on bottom, so we have to do it that way too!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:32PM (2 children)
I have tabs on the side. Makes more sense to me than top/bottom for a PC since lots of screens are wider than they are tall. And you can even have tab trees (children = indented tabs).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @05:36PM (1 child)
I suppose in langauges that write vertically, they require the tabs to be on the right side?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14 2021, @08:03AM
I can only think of one script right now that is obligately vertical, and that is Mongolian.
What is support like for that now in any environment and context?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:35PM
Living dangerously, I've chosen to stick with 68.12.0esr for the time being (with the occasional user agent or other about:config update). At some point, things that I need will quit working properly and then I'll go to the next esr version.
For reference, this version has rectangular tabs with reasonable context, and the menus still seem to be sane on my laptop screen.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @08:34AM (8 children)
A lot of "improvements" to Firefox over the last decade are among the biggest reasons for the browser's decline, and glancing at the article's mention of things such as "simplified menus," I somehow doubt this is going to go the way Mozilla is hoping.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:56AM (3 children)
Personally, I think that development focus (or lack thereof) is the crux of the problem Mozilla has with Firefox; they need to stop emulating Chrome and find their own way that clearly differentiates them and provides something that users will relate to. OK, we've got a new UI (again!) in Proton - so *fucking stick with it*; fix any major issues in v90, then leave the damn UI alone for several revisions (at least!) and put the development focus onto something else! Might I suggest more fine-grained control over privacy options and putting control of the web into end user's hands, because Apple, Google, and Microsoft certainly won't do that? That means exposing configuration options again, even if many of them are in "Advanced" tabs, (and no, that doesn't mean "Here be Dragons" about:config - the main options need to be fully supported), and perhaps looking into how to provide users with much more control over what individual sites can and can't do/save on their computer. Allowing users to set a "security/privacy policy" on a per-domain basis, for instance - e.g. I could allow a site I trust somewhat (Soylent News, say) to run scripts, save first-party cookies, and cache data, others might only be allowed to save first-party cookies and cache certain data, while the worst offenders (e.g. Facebook, et al) have any temporary data nuked form orbit as soon as I close the tab or shutdown the browser.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:21PM
Exactly. All they have to do is focus on what people really want/need. People wanted easy local backup of login creds and what did these bolshevik whores do? Copy Chrome and make a cloud only backup. Suited Whores.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:16PM (1 child)
They broke vertical tabs so much it is not possible to do it properly with any of the available extensions anymore. I switched to vivaldi (i know it uses chrome, but at least has old opera devs) the day it implemented sync and haven't looked back.
palemoon needs funding. it has been abandoned by extensions community and so doesn't bring anything new to the table.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Tuesday June 08 2021, @01:26AM
What are you talking about?
I use Tree Style Tabs, and it works perfectly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:18AM
It's basically the same problem as new coke, they started copying chrome for no good reason and upset people. From idiotic things like the version number bumps every few weeks to the interface that regularly changes for no good reason, they've made the experience bad.
When they rewrote the engine for multithreads, that was going to cause issues, but most of the other stuff is just a middle finger to the users.
(Score: 2) by RedIsNotGreen on Monday June 07 2021, @07:12AM (2 children)
If you look at who is funding these "improvements" to Firefox, they will become much less confusing. :)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @05:39PM (1 child)
Who *is* funding the "improvements"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @11:33PM
Probably Google.
Seriously.
So far as I know, Google is the source of most of Mozilla's money. In theory it's to make Google the default search engine. In practice, they're paying Mozilla to continue to breathe and produce Firefox, in whatever form it may be, so that they're less likely to be lynched as the monopolist they are, at least in the browser market. The post you replied to implies that there may be some additional conditions to this funding, such as pressure towards the gradual crapification of the browser.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:08AM (3 children)
I hated this latest update in particular, but it's still my browser. I hate Chrome, IE, IE2 (Edgy), and Apple has never been my thing. Firefox with noscript and adblock has served me well. With phones being the primary target for all browsers, the dumbing down / simplifying of all things configurable is not gonna stop. Most people don't even understand what a walled garden is. I will use it until it folds here in a few years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:42AM
But are you sure you've managed to turn off all Mozilla's telemetry and spying shit? If you haven't maybe it's still not your browser... ;)
See: https://www.netmeister.org/blog/browser-startup.html [netmeister.org]
See also: https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ [brave.com]
https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/ajrub3/firefox_worse_than_chrome_on_telemetry_yes_i_know/ [reddit.com]
With Mozilla doing shit like this I might as well recommend that people use Chrome by default and Tor browser for other scenarios. That way their "public profile" is "Yet Another Chrome User", not "Someone who uses multiple browsers (and thus is more likely to be a Tor user)".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:42PM (1 child)
Have you tried Palemoon? It has a umatrix clone and adblock...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @07:27AM
I remember there was a whole wacky kerfluffle a number of years back about the Pale Moon developer forcing users to jump through hoops to install NoScript because he had some personal ethical objection to...something about the advertising practices on the NoScript website? I want to say it may not have even had anything to do with the extension itself. I don't remember anymore.
If you're going to get petty about your own little fiefdom, at least have the balls to just blacklist the extension, not mess around passive-aggressively making the users do extra fiddly work bypassing "I really think this is a bad idea" prompts.
As if anybody would've been running Pale Moon in the first place unless they had already made up their mind about such issues without your help.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:49AM (15 children)
Set it to false in about:config... apparently there's one sane person at Mozilla who managed to slip this in when the blue-hairs weren't looking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:53PM
thank you.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:57PM (5 children)
That setting is deprecated. They will rip out everything relating to the old interface: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1709425 [mozilla.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:15PM (4 children)
That's how they do it!
Step 1: Pull out all easy access to a feature.
Step 2: Tell people they can "easily" access it by flipping a switch in the browser's basement which is not obviously accessed and comes with warnings about how you're going to burn your browser to the ground if you breathe wrong in the proximity of even the safest of the hundreds of options listed.
Step 3: Most people grudgingly give up and leave for Chrome, or resolve to "do it later" but never work up the courage to do so or time to deal with the problems they fear are inevitable if they try.
Step 4: Mozilla: "Obviously since only a few die-hards are using $CURRENT_CHOPPING_BLOCK_FEATURE, they must overwhelmingly favor this new feature. Obliterate all evidence that the original ever existed and let's start hacking away at $NEXT_FEATURE_MOZILLA_HATES".
Step 5: Loop until out of money or out of features.
Step 6: ...profit?...
(Score: 5, Funny) by kazzie on Sunday June 06 2021, @03:57PM
Not to mention the warning "Beware of installing on OSX Leopard".
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday June 07 2021, @12:58AM
Modded you Insightful, but was sorely tempted to make it Funny. Perhaps it's the mood I'm in this morning.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @07:18AM (1 child)
Does anybody else remember when Microsoft did this with the Start Menu? I want to say it was Windows 8/10?
"Well since we completely ruined the Start Menu, everybody stopped trying to use it for anything, and started just running searches in the Search Bar instead of trying to actually locate anything in the shambles. Ergo this must mean that everybody hates the Start Menu, so let's rip it out." (and that's when the Classic Shell third-party thing got big?)
It's been enough years that I don't trust my memory anymore, but I'm pretty sure it involved the Start Menu.
"You can't tout 'Discoverability' and your users running searches in your interface to find anything at the same time."
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @09:22PM
The worst part is windows 8.1 is actually GOOD once you install classic shell and remove the mero stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:46PM (7 children)
Should stick with "pointy-hairs" unless you prefer people think you're just a bigoted fuck up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:37PM
Sticks and stones and all that.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:26PM
oh no, not a bigot! civilization really needs more fags and niggers!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:33AM (4 children)
Nobody naturally has blue hair. It is a lifestyle choice, not an essential race feature.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:01AM (1 child)
Mental illness isn't a lifestyle choice.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:03AM
It is, though. There's always a choice, and 40% of them opt out.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @06:19AM (1 child)
Nobody is born naturally stupid and racist, but here we are!
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:13PM
They are, we call them Democrats! [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Anti-aristarchus on Sunday June 06 2021, @09:53AM
No.
Just, no.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by engblom on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:08AM (5 children)
There is one improvement I want to see: I want it to be split into a browser library/engine (like webkit) and then the browser itself which is built upon that library/engine. Make it dead easy to build new browsers upon "firekit" or whatever it would be called!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Samantha Wright on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:17PM (4 children)
That used to be a thing [linuxreviews.org]. It is now all but forgotten, mainly because Google and Apple could afford to hire more and better devs for Webkit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:21PM (1 child)
Mozilla could afford that too. However instead it just waste the money on outrageous executive compesation and a wide variety of unproductive, non-coding activities.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:11PM
Bbb...but they shifted the paradigm and reimagined the browser sphere.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @02:28PM (1 child)
There's also the fact that, so far as I recall, Mozilla gets most of its money from Google. Arguably it's so that the Google search engine is prominently displayed and available in Firefox by default. However, in reality it's more along the lines of, "exist so that we don't end up having Chrome ripped away from us because we have a monopoly."
It wouldn't surprise me if there are other quietly implied conditions, as well. Google probably would prefer that the various forked browsers are dependent on their code and not Mozilla's.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @04:40PM
So Mozilla's intentionally burning its fanbase so Chrome is recognized as a defacto monopoly?
I mean, if they are being kept around to avoid Chrome being a monopoly, they'd need to actually preserve a meaningful fraction of the userbase. So you'd think their Google financiers wouldn't be too happy about these continual losses. Maybe that explains the PR spinning more needless changes as a good thing...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:08AM (4 children)
I have stopped caring about UI changes. Very few core extensions have to be present, but else I gnash my teeth and adapt to the changes. However, if a full generation of processors separates browser engines (Quantum vs Blink) to get the same performance, it becomes hard to justify Firefox. I have recently switched away from Firefox. I still prefer Firefox overall but cannot justify new hardware just to keep running Firefox.
I know others having switched for performance reasons which is anecdotal evidence that performance should be the prime focus of Quantum. And Quantum should be the prime focus of Mozilla. The recent cancellation of Servo (https://github.com/servo/servo) by Mozilla, however, indicates that this is not the case. IMO Firefox has no chance of survival looking at its recent development trajectory.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:55PM (3 children)
Me too. The interface on my browser hasn't changed one bit in almost 25 years.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @03:38AM (2 children)
So, Lynx? :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Monday June 07 2021, @05:32AM (1 child)
Oh man! [seamonkey-project.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 07 2021, @06:39AM
I'm using it this instant. Nearest I can get to a practical Netscape 3. :D
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:12AM (1 child)
Can't remember for sure which version I installed - but 4 or 5. All the hype, all the hope, all the excitement over a new browser that might actually work the way a person expects. Firefox has been on my machines ever since. But, today, it does stupid things. Sometimes, it fails miserably. Sometimes it just looks like crap.
I can still install the extensions I think essential, but everything is buried and hard to find.
Hello, Mozilla? If I want a browser that looks like Chrome, I'll install Chrome. Just roll things BACKWARD several versions, and start over. Be Firefox, stop trying to compete with Chrome. Enabling all the 64 bit features was just about the last really good thing you did with the browser.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @07:08AM
Well if that's the case somebody has clearly been failing at their job...
Indeed.
"People are still using our browser; what else can we do to make them leave?!"
But to be serious for a moment, it really is mind-boggling the direction they've been pursuing lately. It's like they're purposely trying to get rid of every feature that people are actually using the browser for...all sacrificed on the altar of security or who-knows-what.
---
You know you're getting old when Pale Moon, the fork you switched to years ago to avoid this exact circumstance, decides to get rid of the main feature you switched to it for (classic extensions). And in classic Firefox fashion, I learned about this decision when I casually clicked the "update" button and it promptly ruined all of my installed extensions, lol.
From the little I've seen of the Pale Moon forums, the guy running it is king of the "#WONTFIX and lock the thread" philosophy of dealing with dissent, too. Guess that's what inevitably happens when you're czar.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:27AM (24 children)
If you want to understand why Mozilla is declining just go look at the Mozilla Developer Network on YouTube.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @10:40AM (3 children)
Wow... there are so many LGBTQUX in one place that I thought I'd accidentally gone to the Gay Pride Month channel.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:39AM
Is that how we should describe Firefox? It sucks and it's fucked in many non-traditional ways.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:13PM (1 child)
I didn't go there but I can imagine the gush of Wellness and Healing and Heathful Diet advice.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:35PM
Oooh troll mod. Somebody needs to practice Mindfulness(tm) and attend a Yoga Webinar(tm).
(Score: 5, Informative) by EEMac on Sunday June 06 2021, @01:20PM (4 children)
The LGBTQUX thing doesn't bother me. But the level of content is worrying.
Mozilla Developer Network [youtube.com]:
* Where do browser styles come from?
* What does "revert" CSS do?
* Why is CSS so weird?
* Inspecting the CSS cascade
* Did you know you can screenshot web pages?
* We just updated underline styling together
Google Chrome Developers [youtube.com]:
* The Web Audio API
* Building a web application with Angular and Firebase
* Building user-adaptive interfaces
* How to monetize your progressive web application
* Structured data for developers
* Connecting hardware devices to the web
* WebAssembly threads
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:13PM
You're both saying the same thing, indirectly.
Almost nobody has a problem with companies hiring or working with folks that go against the stereotypes for a given role. The problem is that when that hiring starts to become a defining position of a company, they're left disproportionately (if not *only* as optics would suggest of the Mozilla Developer Network) hiring people that fall outside the stereotype of a role. The natural consequence of this is that you end up picking from a much smaller population.
That already poses a major problem, and then pair it with the fact that the distribution of the subpopulation may itself already be worse than the stereotyped population. The negative bias is not because of their identity, but because what it's in lieu of. Somebody who goes to great efforts expressing and demonstrating their sexuality, "queerness", or whatever else is, on average, going to have a different set of skills and abilities than somebody who considers a great weekend to be 2 boxes of pizza and 40 hours of code, and they look like it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:30PM (2 children)
It should, irrespective of whatever your views on it are.
It has become the yranac, the more you see a project/organisation making an issue of it , the more toxic that project/organisation has become. As manglement think the need to be seen to pander to the current fetish of (insert this week's alphabet string here) ideology has become a greater organisational concern than the need to hire people cabable of productively filling positions within their organisation, you eventually end up with an increasingly useless organisation top heavy with mediocre (but alphabetically correct ) personnel.
Which is why you end up thinking
When you look at their output.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @06:57AM (1 child)
The what? Is this really an obscure Star Trek TNG reference you expect anyone to get, or something else?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:06PM
Reverse canary,
The yranac is a bird which thrives in increasingly toxic atmospheres, the more toxic the atmosphere, the happier and quieter they become, as opposed to your traditional canary, which screams blue murder with the increasing toxicity.
I'd been using it that sense for years, decades actually, got it from an ex-army colleague down in London who basically initially described it to me as 'it's that usually awkward bastard you keep an eye on, and if they suddenly go all quiet and start looking smug, then it's a sign that shit is about to happen..and happen to everyone but him'.
As far as organisations are concerned, it's when they say or do something obviously idiotic/irrational to everyone outside the organisation, yet there's no apparent internal voice of dissent from people who should know better..a sure sign that something's wrong somewhere internally within that organisation.
I couldn't figure out the ST:TNG reference, didn't watch it, so googled it...I can see your confusion.
Weird, it must have been a very specific army unit slang term, then again, the guy I got it from had a rather interesting 'post' military career, e.g. how many people do you come across in life who, as a 'civilian', had a document which authorised him to have the full co-operation of the police and military of a dictatorship in any matter he cared? (then you find out that a very well-known rock guitarist is his cousin's son in the course of a conversation about a curious contract he was once offered in closing acts of the Vietnam war)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday June 06 2021, @04:26PM (14 children)
I know its kind of a chicken vs egg thing but dying organizations always go far left as part of the death process. Look at legacy media for example, or boomer-era pro sports that are literally dying off.
So Mozilla being far left is more a symptom than a cause, but whatever, its the same end result eventually anyway.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 06 2021, @05:21PM
Actually it makes sense: As things go bad, tensions in the organization rise and therefore the work climate gets worse. Management notices the work climate getting worse, and sees the need to do something about it. Therefore they install some code of conduct that is intended to fix the issue. It of course doesn't fix the issue because the issue is that the core business is not working well, instead the climate gets even worse as people start fighting over the CoC. Which to the management proves that there are “toxic” people who need to be removed. Too bad if they were those doing the actual work or holding essential knowledge, and without them the decline is even worse. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:26PM (10 children)
So explain the GOP then?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @06:59PM (2 children)
Democrats made 'em do it. They can frustrate people into doing anything, even vote for Trump.. again
(Score: 2, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday June 06 2021, @07:59PM (1 child)
You forgot to log in, fistula-crack-itch.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08 2021, @03:10AM
Wow! I can get you to believe anything!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:20AM
History shows that the GOP was a socialist party that ruined itself, as leftists always do. Ho ho ho.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @12:40AM (5 children)
He said dying organizations. As much as you might hate them, the Republican party is not dying. It might get torn in two by Trump, but that is different to a slow death from cancer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:54AM (4 children)
The percentage of individuals that self identify has Republican has fallen steadily (including "leans") over the years. Moreover, the trend seems to be accelerating thanks to demographic shifts. The party (both of them really) seem to be in trouble and have been for decades, Trump just exacerbated a problem that already existed and made it much more visible with what was essentially the Tea Party 2.0.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:24AM (2 children)
Which is why at the last election Republicans got the highest vote count they have ever gotten. Whatever problems they have, a dying party is not one of them.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday June 07 2021, @06:54AM (1 child)
Didn't the last election set records for both sides, for total vote counts?
Going from 100k to 1m voter turnout, two-party system, one side could go from 50% of the vote to 6% and still have the "best turnout ever" (50k vs 60k).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @09:34PM
Plus there is the per capita adjustment and the rising number of apathetic and roll off voters. And you have to factor in the fact that in a two party system, you may not lean towards a party, but you can vote against a party. Or you can vote based on the particular candidate. How many times have you heard, "I don't like {particular party or person} but it's better than the alternative, in your life? Those votes count for that candidate and their party, but it certainly wasn't "for" that candidate or their party. That is part of the reason why the tactics they're increasingly using have adopted that sort of messaging, even beyond generic fear and negative ads.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Friday June 11 2021, @03:07PM
You haven't paid attention to the vote count.
2016 Trump/Clinton received 94.3%
2020 Trump/Biden.. received 98.2%
Over 98% of congress was reelected
The Party is doing better than ever, and overflowing with money. You needn't fret over them.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @02:21AM
Legacy media is right of center. How else do you explain their love of Biden?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GlennC on Monday June 07 2021, @12:38PM
I wouldn't necessarily label it as "far left" as much as "extremist".
It seems to me that as an organization decays, more and more people leave until those who remain are the "true believers" and their philosophy becomes more disconnected with reality.
It's more of an "us versus the world" thing as opposed to "left versus right."
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Sunday June 06 2021, @11:33AM (2 children)
Which is a great aspiration, but when you get to the point where not only is every implementation just an implementation of the same standards but the core of the dominant implication is open-source, where's the incentive for anybody to develop their own, if they can't distinguish it by making non-standard "improvements" to the core functionality?
The main argument against Chrome seems to be that people don't want to deal with Google - which I won't argue with - but there are a number of non-Google browsers built around the open-source Chromium code, offering different privacy features and skins, developed and maintained at the fraction of the effort of producing your own engine. The fact that Microsoft - with all their resources - decided to drop development of their own browser engine and build on Chromium instead - is pretty strong evidence that DIY browser engines are not viable today.
That also partly explains why Firefox has been resorting to UI design changes rather than making fundamental changes to their engine: the only other path that would make business sense would be to switch to Chromium.
I'm not even sure what the big advantages are of having multiple competing engines: "security by diversity" would need more than 2 significantly different implementations in widespread use and wouldn't help the many vulnerabilities that crop up in shared libraries, external services, are implicit in the standards or where the standards lead to common coding mistakes. The "one vendor pushing changes" isn't simply cured by having alternatives available when that vendor has a dominant position in the wider computing market (as Google does now, as Microsoft did when the original browser wars happened). The MSs and Googles of this world are perfectly capable of forcing their opinion on standards bodies.
We're far better off than we were back when it was (proprietary, closed source) MS IE vs. (not entirely open) Netscape & Opera. The standards are far better developed, Google have a substantial commercial competitor in Safari (Macs may not be significant, but iPhones are) and there's an open-source implementation in Chromium that can be forked if Google get too big for their boots. Unfortunately, TwitGoogleZonBook have got so big that they could (already have, to an extent) force proprietary standards on the internet without even needing their own browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @01:11AM
A whole browser is not a one-man or small team project - it requires lots of time and that generally means big money or obsolete on delivery. You don't need to build whole browsers though, but rendering engines, webshit compilers, UX, etc + some glue to hold it together. Each of those projects can be built and maintained and forked by individuals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 07 2021, @03:36PM
The problem is that Mozilla management ate Google handouts and shitted all over firefox. Instead of realizing that Google plans to monopolize www just like Microsoft did to standards with IE, they actively removed whatever made them different. It has gone to the point of no return now. What could have been a winner is now a has been.
Firefox had mindshare of all the geeks all over the world. They needed to double down on their identity, they fucked it up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 06 2021, @12:54PM (2 children)
Whenever I put a video in my design, it says to switch to Firefox as the only browser that supports video in SVG layers https://www.genolve.com/svg/en/index1.php [genolve.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 07 2021, @06:37PM
Last I saw, it also supports mathml.
(Score: 2) by termigator on Tuesday June 08 2021, @03:04AM
Working on a project that needs to display some heavy SVGs, Firefox has a significant performance advantage over Chrome in SVG rendering.