from the should-I-stay-or-should-I-go-now? dept.
I knew this day would eventually come. We had been warned that Firefox 57 would force some significant changes on us users, including the removal of support for extensions that did not conform to the WebExtensions model, along with the introduction of the new Photon user interface appearance.
Although I have always only wanted to run the stable releases, long ago I had been forced to run the Developer Edition of Firefox just so I could easily use some extensions I had written on my own. Now Firefox was showing me that an update to Firefox 57.0b1 was available. Should I do it? Should I install this update? I debated with myself for several minutes. But in the end I knew I would have no choice. I would at some point have to update to Firefox 57 if I wanted to keep receiving security fixes and other important updates. So I did it. I upgraded to Firefox Developer Edition 57.0b1.
The update itself was uneventful. It installed as past updates have, and I restarted my browser to start using the new version. The first thing I noticed are the user interface changes. My initial reaction was that I had accidentally started my Vivaldi browser installation instead of my Firefox Developer Edition installation. A quick check of the About dialog did confirm that I was in fact using Firefox, and not Vivaldi.
There's not much to say about the Photon user interface. While Australis-era Firefox looked almost identical to Chrome to me, Photon-era Firefox looks like Vivaldi to me. I couldn't see any improvements, however. The menu shown after clicking the three line toolbar button may have had its appearance changed to be more like a traditional menu, but it is still muddled and much too busy to be useful. I didn't notice any increase in the responsiveness of the user interface. It still feels to me like it's slower than that of Chrome's user interface.
This would be a good time to talk about the overall performance of the browser. I can't perceive any improvement. I don't think it's worse than it was, but I also don't think that it's any better. From what I can see, pages aren't loading any faster. Changing between tabs doesn't feel any faster to me. Scrolling through loaded pages isn't any smoother. Chrome still feels snappier. If there were improvements on the performance front, I'm not seeing them.
Now it's time to talk about extensions. Although I was expecting breakage, it's still a painful feeling to see many of your favorite extensions labeled as "legacy" and no longer working. While a small number of my installed extensions already supported Firefox 57, there were others where I had to visit the developers' websites and download special dev or pre-release versions. In other cases I wasn't so lucky. Sometimes the developers had given up on supporting Firefox 57, and openly acknowledged that they wouldn't be making any further updates to the extensions. I had to find alternatives. Sometimes there were alternatives, but in at least one of the cases the alternative was much less capable than the extension I had been using. I spent well over an hour just trying to get the third-party extensions I use back to a state similar to how they had been when I'd been using Firefox 56.
Then there are my own personal extensions. I had written these over a number of years, and had been using them with Firefox for quite some time. But now they were deemed "legacy" and they no longer could be used now that I was running Firefox 57. I started to read up about what it would take to convert them to be WebExtensions compatible, and I soon learned that it would not be a trivial task. I will need to set aside a sizable chunk of time to get these ported over.
I've been using Firefox for a long time. I've experienced its highs, and I've experienced its many lows. Of these lows, I think that Firefox 57 is perhaps the lowest of them yet. Many of the extensions I have used for years no longer work. I will need to put in much time and effort to convert extensions I had written for my own personal use. I will need to learn to use its new user interface. But worst of all, I do not see any improvements or benefits. I don't think it performs any better now than it did in the past.
I feel particularly sorry for the Firefox users who aren't as technical as I'm lucky to be. They might not fully understand the implications of Firefox 57 when it comes time for them to eventually upgrade. They likely won't be able to deal with the many broken extensions. They too will need to learn a new user interface that doesn't really provide anything in the way of improvement. As bad as I found the experience of upgrading to Firefox 57 to be, I fear that these average users without a technical background will find it even more painful.
I'm now in a bind. I don't want to use one of the pre-57 ESR releases of Firefox, because I'll eventually end up in the same position that I am in today. I will have to rewrite my extensions either now or later. But since doing that will likely make them compatible with Chrome, I must ask myself, is it still worth using Firefox? I ponder: if my extensions will work with both Firefox and Chrome, but I find Chrome to perform much better, why not just use Chrome instead? That may very well be what I do. While some say that Firefox offers more privacy, I am doubtful about this. It has a long and complex privacy policy that talks of sending various data here and there.
I never really seriously considered moving away from Firefox in the past, even as my user experience got worse and worse over time. But I think the time to leave Firefox permanently has finally arrived. Firefox 57 takes away the few remaining advantages that Firefox had for me, namely the ability to run the extensions I had already written for myself.
I think that I should be feeling more sorrow and regret about finally leaving Firefox behind. But I don't feel any of that. In fact, I feel a sense of optimism that I haven't felt in a long time. Chrome, or more likely Chromium, will probably bring me a faster browsing experience than I've become accustomed to while using Firefox. I will have to rework my extensions, but at least they will then work with a better browser platform. They may even work with other browsers like Vivaldi and Brave, as well.
So while Firefox 57 has so far been one of the worst web browser user experiences for me yet, in some ways it may also be the best: it finally gives me a reason to move away from Firefox to an ecosystem that offers me so much more than what Firefox did. It may very well be putting me in a better position than I would have been in had I not tried Firefox 57 and been so disappointed with it.
Should you update to Firefox 57 as soon as it become available to you? If I were you, I would be cautious. While it's important to get the latest fixes to try and achieve a safe browsing experience, please be aware of the potential to break extensions, some of which there may be no equivalent WebExtensions compatible replacements for. Firefox 57 does include changes that could cause you a lot of problems. My advice would be to prepare before the upgrade, and be ready for your browsing experience to suffer. If you do choose to upgrade to Firefox 57, I sincerely hope that your upgrade goes better than mine has gone.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Friday September 22 2017, @07:10PM (7 children)
Nice blog post. I was hoping for a review and not an in depth discussion of your feelings and ruminations about your browsing future. Which extensions did you use? which broke? how does it do with webgl? what improvements are claimed and are they delivered?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:38PM (1 child)
You should have read it fully before criticizing it.
It's a good review. It's very clear about what went wrong, and what the risks are. Too many reviews leave out that kind of information.
The specific extensions involved are irrelevant. What matters is that extensions that were working fine before the update stopped working afterward, and this inconvenienced the user. If one user was affected negatively by this upgrade, many others will be, too. That's what matters.
WebGL is irrelevant, too.
What you write off as "feelings and ruminations" are actually some good analyses about the viability of Firefox as a modern browser. Many other users will find themselves thinking the same things.
At least one other user here [soylentnews.org] expresses the same sentiments: "Those addons are necessary. Without them FF is useless to me, I might as well use Chromium (I am on Linux)."
(Score: 3, Touché) by dmbasso on Friday September 22 2017, @11:04PM
Yes, he was obviously talking about the My-Little-Pony-fizer extension, so it didn't need to be explicitly spelled-out and clearly it will affect every one of us.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:58PM (3 children)
How is it not a "review"?
It:
- covers the major technological changes in this version (WebExtensions and Photon)
- critiques the Photon changes
- critiques the WebExtensions changes
- the affected extensions are described ("third-party extensions" and "own personal extensions")
- the performance of the browser is critiqued
- the impact of the various changes on the user experience is critiqued
- the future usability of Firefox is critiqued.
All in all, it's a practical and thorough review of Firefox 57.
It's far better than most reviews, which are often filled with bullshit benchmarks, pointless stock images, and omit any negative details to keep the ad dollars flowing. Is that kind of crappy "review" you were expecting? I, for one, am glad that this review is not like that!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:17PM (2 children)
A "review" usually has some semblance of scientific thought to it: not just "it feels snappy", but actual page load times, for example. Not just "I had to download a number of pre-release extensions", but an actual list of the extension used, their version numbers, and download links if you want to be really helpful.
The GP is right. This is a story, not a review.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:32PM (1 child)
So you want bullshit benchmarks. You can get some of those here [arewefastyet.com], if you really want them. They make it look like Firefox is faster than Chrome, but under real-world usage patterns users report the opposite: Firefox is slow and Chrome is fast.
The list of broken extensions doesn't matter. They'll be different for every Firefox user. I couldn't give a fuck if the review tells me how to fix a bunch of extensions I'm not using! What I'm interested in knowing is if the general risk of extension breakage is high, and clearly it is.
Obviously Firefox 57 isn't a case of just one or two obscure extensions breaking. There may actually be very widespread extension breakage, with important extensions affected. Any useful list of broken extensions could be huge.
Face it, the submission is in fact a review. It's a solid, to-the-point, no-bullshit review, just as reviews should be.
Whatever it is that you want just isn't a review. It sounds to me like you want a marketing pamphlet or similar propaganda that appeals to your preferred notions rather than delivering a realistic assessment.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 25 2017, @05:38PM
> but under real-world usage patterns users report the opposite: Firefox is slow and Chrome is fast.
One does have to be careful with user impressions. It doesn't directly apply here, but the fact that Apple apps (used to?) start by showing a screenshot of the app, before the app itself is loaded, was a stroke of genius that always gave people to impression their iPhone was really fast (arguably, it was faster than the original compile-every-time Android behavior).
Chrome could be similarly choosing which elements to load first to influence the visual speed perception, while potentially be actually slower at loading every last [bleep]ing script on a page.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday September 24 2017, @05:02AM
The legacy extension to disable Ctrl+Q to quit (Keybinder) doesn't work in Firefox 57, and the WebExtension to disable Ctrl+Q to quit doesn't work in Firefox for GNU/Linux because bug 1325692 [mozilla.org] will not be fixed. This means an accidental press of Ctrl+Q when aiming for Ctrl+W or Ctrl+Tab causes loss of data entered into unsubmitted forms in other tabs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:11PM (1 child)
I've arrived at this point a while back and switched to Pale Moon as a primary browser, with Failfox only for particularly broken-without-javascript-or-DRM websites. Gonna wait and see if I'll replace it as my secondary browser after the big update. Maybe with Vivaldi?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:22PM
only the dumbest of fucks would use a closed source browser in this day and age. obviously a windows user.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:17PM (24 children)
Pale Moon [palemoon.org] polled its users in the recent past and took note of (among other things) the tremendous desire for user customization using add-ons. While PM has had longstanding support for add-ons, even to the point of being drop-in compatible with many Firefox add-ons, development efforts are now more keenly focused on providing support for third-party add-on creators, improving the existing PM add-on site, and ultimately adding support for add-on types that PM couldn't previously support (can't recall offhand which, but may include jetpack and/or webextensions).
If you feel like Firefox development has gone off the rails into la-la-land, give Pale Moon a shot. It feels nice and comfy like the Firefox of long-ago days.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:25PM (19 children)
Pale Moon is not an option after the horrid debacle involving the blocking of the AdNauseam extension [palemoon.org]. The way that was handled is, in my opinion, totally inexcusable. It never should have happened in the first place. It should have been rescinded once it was clear that the Pale Moon community did not want it done. And the discussion should never have been stopped like it was.
After that incident, the Pale Moon project lost all credibility with me. I can't bring myself to trust their judgment after what happened.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:56PM (9 children)
[not GP here] Fair point, but I think the AdNauseam incident has been blown out of proportion. It's still possible to use that particular extension, unlike what Mozilla is forcing on its userbase with the coming update.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:06PM (8 children)
The AdNauseam disaster is about way more than just being able to use one particular extension. It gets to the very core of the Pale Moon project and its philosophy. It shows me that Pale Moon's development team has its priorities all fucked up. The suppression of discussion is extremely worrying. It's indicative of the creeping tyranny that ruined Firefox for so many people. Remember, Firefox's decline started with very small changes like hiding the status bar and menu bar. At the time, shithead defenders of these changes would say things like, "It's not a big deal! Just make these minor config changes!" But all that did was set the stage for much bigger screwjobs, like Australis and now Firefox 57. So when we see the same thing happening with Pale Moon we know what the eventual outcome could very well be. It's better for us to cut our losses now and ditch Pale Moon before what happens to Firefox happens to it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday September 22 2017, @08:43PM (6 children)
I think we shouldn't go to overboard yet. Consider this a strike one and continue watching to see what develops. Everybody has the occasional fuckup.
"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 Friday September 22 2017, @08:51PM (1 child)
With such patterns being repeated so many times in the past I think it is fair for people to react strongly. Compromises and equivocations let FF get away with way too much shit. I think there is no greater evidence that a project has been coopted as when tyranny sets in and user's opinions don't matter.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:04PM
Let's take this as an opportunity to remember that this is why free software should use the GPL. This behavior could never be possible with the GPL because the license prohibits restrictions on the user's use of the software. (and once they accept contributed code under the GPL, even the original author becomes bound by the GPL's user-protecting terms).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:02PM (1 child)
Yes, I agree, the original decision was a fuckup. The community made that clear to the Pale Moon developers. That was indeed the first strike. But the Pale Moon developers did have ample opportunities to fix this mistake. The second strike was the developers not immediately reversing the decision and apologizing. The third strike was when the developers closed the forum discussion so quickly. They've had their three strikes, as far as I'm concerned.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:16PM
Have fun with Chrome, then! Maybe it will better respect your rights.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:40AM (1 child)
The Firefox folks have spent a year tearing the core out of their browser (Gecko) and replacing it with Chrome's core (Webkit). This is no occasional fuckup, and there probably is no going back for them.
They will consider it a case of users throwing a temper tantrum. They take requests to make Firefox perform better and interpret it as a desire by the users to take the pieces of Firefox out that make Firefox... well, Firefox. As such we have an also-ran Chrome clone where a highly customizable browser used to be. The concept that people want a better Firefox that is still Firefox in more than branding seems to have been missed by the developers (or more likely they stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed "LA LA LA NOT LISTENING LA LA LA."
If they go back it will probably be on the order of a year or two, maybe longer, and they will have to play catch-up since Gecko will have fallen further behind by then. By that point their old users will have abandoned them and will likely not trust anything they put out. A similar response will be found from those few who have built upon this new structure.
I think the best hope of getting Firefox back is for one of the forks to take over Gecko development, but I don't know that that's going to happen since the lot of them seem to be content to disagree with each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @06:51AM
What are you talking about? FireFox does not have WebKit/Blink code.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:50PM
Ditch Pale Moon in favor of what, though? There's nothing else I'd even want to use. Not Chromium and certainly not anything proprietary. The options at this point are extremely limited.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by http on Friday September 22 2017, @08:17PM (8 children)
From that page you linked:
So sorry that Palemoon deciding to not be 100% dickish about clickish upsets you.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:27PM (5 children)
The extension doesn't come with Pale Moon. If you want to use it, you have to install it yourself.
If the Pale Moon developers don't like what it does, then they don't have to install it into their own personal Pale Moon installations, and they don't have to use it. But they should never be exerting control over which extensions Pale Moon's users can or cannot use.
Personally, I would never use this particular extension. I think it's pointless, and instead I block ads completely.
The extension in question is actually irrelevant. What matters is how the Pale Moon developers acted in what I think is an extremely tyrannical manner. That's what I consider to be unacceptable, and that's why I consider their browser to be unacceptable to use.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:18PM (4 children)
Tyrannical.
Tyrannical.
To you, tyranny is adding a terrible extension to an internal list which prevents it from running, and providing an option (now/soon both in about:config AND in the primary UI) to bypass said internal list.
Wow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:41PM (3 children)
"Tyranny" is a very reasonable word to use when somebody with authority, say the lead developer of a web browser, uses this authority to take away freedom, say the freedom to run whatever browser extensions one wants without unnecessary hassle, from other people, especially while ignoring the protests of these people as they object to their freedom being unjustly taken away.
That's the very definition of the word "tyranny".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:59PM (1 child)
No, tyranny is iron-fist rule with disobedience either severely punished or eliminated as an option. Obviously not the case here, even if the situation was not handled to your liking. Perhaps "heavy handed" is the term you were looking for, even if I still think that's hyperbole.
Calling the actions of PM devs in that regard tyranny torpedoes your own cause, making you look foolish to others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:56PM
Your definition is that which the tyrant would give. Always moving the goalposts so "tyranny" is just slightly beyond the tyranny you're currently practicing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @11:50PM
Oh boy, it's Dennis again!
"Come see the violence inherent in the system! Did you see him oppressing me? This is what I'm always on about!"
"No one expects the violent imposition, in fact, those that do, um, those that do, cannot install extensions, and, um . . .I'll come in again. "
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday September 25 2017, @05:42PM (1 child)
Even microsoft never prevented users from doing dickish/illegal things with Windows.
(Score: 2) by http on Monday September 25 2017, @11:54PM
Hey, did you know that ping doesn't even let non-root users flood the network? Those bastards at the USAGI project, how dare they. </s>
Having something accessible not by default, but via explicit enabling, is not prevention.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by iWantToKeepAnon on Friday September 22 2017, @09:08PM (3 children)
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:36PM
That is one Firefox development practice they should have left behind when creating their fork!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:17AM (1 child)
But nobody wants to touch developing another fork of Firefox.
Many of the complaints center around the horrible morass of C++ libraries and their arbitrary interdependence on other modules.
Personally however, I think what is needed is a fork of 3.6.28 (last old interface), a fork of one of the more recent ESRs, with security patches backported from the latest Mozilla releases where possible, and new patches designed where they are not. Then over time roll features where possible back onto the 3.6 branch, ensuring preferences and about:config options remain for every feature earlier versions of Firefox documented and supported, adding full HTML5 and CSS3 support with changes made where necessary for security. Skip the EME support and include a warning on the homepage splashscreen about why EME is not supported, and do whatever we can to pull addon/extensions developers over to the new fork.
I don't hold out much hope of this working, especially without a soylentnews-level dedicate staff willing to invest the time to get this project rolling and show that support will be available in the long term if the extension developers are willing to come over, but this is the only way to both free us of the disease that is Mozilla's steering committee as well as the diseases that are the W3Cs changes to the web.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @03:02AM
From what I hear, they're starting to bring components written in Rust into Firefox. So not only is there C++ code to deal with, but also Rust code! And Rust code makes C++ code look pretty.
(Score: 5, Informative) by lgsoynews on Friday September 22 2017, @07:21PM (4 children)
I was about to post my own experiences.
Today, after a crash of my FF dev edition, I had a bad surprise: the new (57) version took over. Oh, boy! I had already tested the Nightly version of FF57, but on an empty profile.
I think the last time it was that bad was during the last BIG UI change, that broke everything. Here, it's simple, I lost ALL my addons -including a couple of personal ones- except uBlock Origin. ALL of them!
Those addons are necessary. Without them FF is useless to me, I might as well use Chromium (I am on Linux).
BUT that's not all! I tried to restart with FF55, it worked, not without a few problems. Until I remembered WHY I had been using the Dev Edition! Several addons, mine in particular did not work because they were not verified (Legacy).
Aaaarg!
I had to download the last version of FF56. I started it and, look and behold! Plenty of stuff was still missing! The previous update had messed with my stuff. And to be more aggravating, the stupid thing downloaded -again- the new version and asked me to restart. So I had AGAIN to replace the FF directory and restart! (this time I changed the automatic download setting)
I also noticed that, for some weird reason, my tabs had changed! The last configuration had been forgotten, some tabs I had closed the morning had reappeared. And some addons icons had disappeared. It took a while to put everything back to -more or less- normal.
THIS UPDATE IS A DISASTER!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:31PM
I feel for you folks. I switched away from Firefox a couple of years ago due to memory footprint and general sluggishness. For a while I used Chrome and Chromium under Linux, but now it's Seamonkey for the Windows World at work and Vivaldi for home (where I can also use Claws Mail).
I still miss Vimperator/Pentadactyl.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:48PM
When a software update is this bad for early adopters, it's usually a massive disaster for normal users.
I really don't know if Firefox will survive this release. If Firefox is only about 5% of the market now, I could see it dropping to 3% or maybe even 2% after this release.
If it gets down to 2%, I don't think it could ever be revived.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
Sounds like on a scale of 0 to Windows 10, this "upgrade" is about 8.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:06AM
So I'll wind up with a copy of something at about an 8.1 on the scale but only for playing video games?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @07:24PM (1 child)
While it works with Firefox extensions now, once Firefox breaks everything, it won't work with them then. It will be an isolated product with no coattails to ride. Considering the already small market share of Firefox, will pale moon have enough momentum to continue on its own? Most Firefox users won't switch to pale moon, they'll switch to Chrome or, for whatever reason, stay with just-like-Chrome-except-worse.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Friday September 22 2017, @09:12PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2, Interesting) by higuita on Friday September 22 2017, @07:55PM (8 children)
I also updated and found that even add-on that have webextension versions being developed aren't listed yet, so i would say that 57 update is way too soon. They need to give extension developers more time to finish porting.
Also, the change in the interface was a suprise and again, i do not see any reason for it... at very least, postpone that to after the webextension , so the change is smoother for the user
i do like firefox and will keep using it... but webextension needs to be postpone, give it more time to allow add-on to complete the migration.
I see the this 57beta1 as a version for the developers to test the webextension, not something to be used... not yet.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:04PM (7 children)
Mozilla has grown to behemoth dimensions, especially for a "free software" organization. Maybe they just need some behavioural therapy for all their engineers so they don't start mauling each others over social/politics issues like over at Google or Github. Oh wait... didn't they already?
Ship ahoy I guess, too big to fail, unsinkable Moztanic.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @08:23PM (6 children)
Just goes to show that dumping hundreds of millions of GOOG dollars into an open source project doesn't necessarily improve things, and can in fact bloat things.
IIRC this is not the first time that Firefox has changed their extension system, breaking compatibility with existing extensions. Let's hope it is the last. Browser monoculture is not desirable.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:33PM (3 children)
It's already a monoculture. Only about 5% of web users use Firefox. Almost all of the rest use Chrome, with a small number using Safari or Edge. For all intents and purposes, Chrome is the only browser that matters today.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @08:57PM (2 children)
StatCounter says 13.82% for Firefox (desktop), W3Counter says 6.8%, Net Applications at 11.93% (desktop). So the biggest failure of Firefox is on smartphones. I actually use the Firefox browser on Android and I like it better than Dolphin, Opera, stock browsers, etc.
IE + Edge is doing about as good or better than Firefox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers [wikipedia.org]
If you use the Tor Browser Bundle, you are running a modified version of Firefox that spoofs its user agent by default.
Chrome controls less than 70% according to each group counting the stats. So it is not the only browser that matters.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:09PM (1 child)
With this change, Firefox finally completes its transition into a Chrome fork, so you can add those 13.82% or whatever to the Chrome stats...
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @10:15PM
It ain't Chrome until it switches to the Blink rendering engine. Against all odds, Firefox still uses Gecko (except on iOS due to Apple restrictions).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:26AM
Mozilla needed to trim the fat, especially executive fat first before getting any new influx of cash.
I don't remember how much they had at the time, but they had already managed millions in, as I remember it, individual donations before GOOG decided to start funding them (this was around the time AOL cut off funding I believe.)
Mozilla's problem was the same as Netscape's before them: The management were dotcom bubble children and didn't have a fucking clue how to manage back then. All the executive leadership left when they got their golden parachutes during the AOL buyout, and what remained was the chaff who hadn't made enough to retire, many of which were inept or friends of original netscape members.
Netscape had been imploding for years before the AOL buyout and Mozilla spinoff, and has only survived because of a third party developing phoenix/firefox which allowed some of their long term projects to mature and blunt some of the suck that has always existed in the Mozilla browser ecosystem.
As someone else said above: Seamonkey has now eclipsed firefox as the browser to use, both in resource utilization as well as preferences and plugin compatibility... but how long will that last if Seamonkey can't jump off the Motanic and swim to shore?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @07:04AM
The point of the switch is to ensure that it's the last. The pre-WebExtensions Firefox extensions API is fundamentally broken and also has been because it's based on monkey patching [wikipedia.org]. It was an easy way to add an extension mechanism to an application already developed mostly in JavaScript (the Firefox front-end, that is, the rendering engine that does the heavy computation is in C++ of course), but it is extremely brittle. It's not really an API so much as letting extensions muck with the innards of Firefox and accepting that sometimes extension writers will shoot themselves in the foot. WebExtensions, on the other hand, is an actual extensions API that's intended to be an extensions API. So it can be supported indefinitely.
I'm not necessarily supporting the timing over of the switch-over, but it's certainly something that needs to be done eventually since the current mechanism is broken by design and has been known to be broken for several years.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday September 22 2017, @08:02PM (20 children)
My 'solution' to the Moz corp problem so far is stay on the working ESR release while evaluating a migration strategy. Same as my 'solution' to systemd was stay on Centos 6.x while selecting a replacement, kept the servers on the last known good Debian until Devuan was production, etc. When these corporations give you a "my way or the highway" ultimatum the correct answer is ALWAYS the highway, because once they make one such ultimatum it is a certainty there will be more, each worse.
Going to miss them, been using the product family since long before Netscape 1.0. If you were running Linux you really didn't have a choice in browsers, it was Netscape or buggy half finished crap that didn't actually load many pages. That is no longer the case however. Actually ran across the CD-ROM for Netscape 1.0 for UNIX recently and was reminded again that they were buttholes even then. No Linux version on the official CD, which I had bought because you couldn't download the 128 bit crypto at the time for legal reasons. So one would assume that since the Linux version was in the UNIX directory on the ftp site it would be on the CD with the other UNIX versions. Nope, not available by any method and the ecommerce site didn't warn, just said pick "Windows, Mac or UNIX". And wasn't available until the crypto restrictions was relaxed. Buttholes.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:10PM (19 children)
It sounds to me like you're a Linux user. That means that Safari and Edge aren't really options for you. If Firefox is out of the question, then you're left with a Chromium-derived browser like Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi or Brave. If you want to use a fully open source browser, that eliminates some of those options. So you're probably left with using Chromium. So I ask, what's there to evaluate? Why not move to Chromium right away?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:29PM (12 children)
The parent comment shouldn't be modded -1, Troll. It's a legitimate question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:55PM (11 children)
Seriously, I think some users are abusing the mod system for kicks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:06PM (10 children)
Every account gets mod points. Out of the hundreds of active users, a handful abusing it is not special.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:11PM (9 children)
That's why there should be a zero tolerance policy toward mod abuse here.
If somebody mods down a comment to -1, and one or more users subsequently mod it up, whoever modded it down should never moderate here ever again using any account.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:18PM (4 children)
That's retarded because modding can never be 100% objective. Take your downmod and quit whining.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:39PM (3 children)
If you want shitty modding then you should drag your sorry ass back to Slashdot.
This site should aspire to fix the broken moderation system it inherited from Slashdot, and that means ruthlessly stamping out and and all mod abuse.
Downmods that get overturned are by definition mod abuse, and should be punished severely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:59PM
By definition? Where is this definition? And have you ever considered that some people can disagree with the majority without having any hostile intentions?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:13PM (1 child)
> Downmods that get overturned are by definition mod abuse, and should be punished severely.
Maybe you should visit the Grand Canyon instead of SoylentNews, as what you're looking for is an echo chamber, not a discussion site :/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:46PM
Downmodding can make it harder to view comments here. You have to go out of your way to browse at -1 to see such comments.
Downmodding promotes the "echo chamber" effect you speak of by suppressing certain comments. It limits the free expression of ideas.
That's why downmodding should be highly discouraged. If you disagree with a comment, you should reply to it instead of downmodding it.
Downmodding is toxic to online discussion communities because it's what allows "groupthink"/"echo chambers"/"circle-jerks" to happen.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:27PM (3 children)
Excellent!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:48PM (2 children)
Yes, of course abuse is possible. But it's better for somebody to never moderate again than it is for even just a single comment to be unjustly downmodded.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:12AM (1 child)
I"m getting some good snowflake photography over here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @04:27AM
Winter has come!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday September 22 2017, @08:56PM (4 children)
Pale Moon and Seamonkey are also available for some distributions, including PCLinuxOS and it is the current candidate to replace CentOS 6. It is a bitch, EVERYTHING is going mad at the same time. Replacing the browser is bad enough, replacing OS and browser is worse. Bad part is the fear that the war is still in the early phases. It really feels like there is a hidden method to this madness, that is a war of some sort, lots of conspiracy theories as to what but nothing that sounds right yet. Fairly safe bet the whole Free Software ecosystem's demise is part of the plan but even that probably isn't the whole story here.
Chromium is the red headed stepchild of Chrome, Google totally controls the project's direction. May as well use Chrome and avoid the sites that won't work with Chromium.
Android is going off the rails too, no really good options out there yet for that problem but there probably will be. Still more churn.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @03:41AM (3 children)
It started with the GNU project's obfuscation efforts in gcc/glibc makign it hard to develop on in order to avoid 'legal loophole' plugins/products based off them, then the FSF pushing for the GPLv3 to work around the sleazy actions of companies, combined with their handling of litigation and licensing for companies in violation of it.
Apple was the first major defector. They found LLVM from UIUC, pushed a bunch of funding to make it an MIT licensed backend for code generation in OSX, then slowly pushed development of first a gcc frontend, then a bespoke MIT-licensed frontend (clang). Step two was excising libstdc++, which had been a hassle for years as ever new version resulting in subtle ABI breakage on the majority of platforms, especially linux. The next big push was Android. It seems like the opportunity for linux to take over, but instead it has basically turned out to be an unmanageable mess that nobody has spun off projects from (there still isn't a fork of the AOT compiler from 5.x(?) for compiling native java apps for instance.) Then there is systemd. Nothing more really needs to be said about that. It created a huge schism in the community among the pro and anti-systemd crowd, with the majority of commercial companies siding with the systemd regime. Then there was musl. An MIT licensed C library that is far far better than glibc, at least when your software doesn't contain any gnuisms and is actually standards compliant. As it turned out, Microsoft and the GNU Project aren't that different, both resulting in unmaintainable messes if you don't know what the ACTUAL standards compliant functions are and how they are expected to work (vs how they need to be worked around in practice.) And finally there is Microsoft+Ubuntu. The nail in the coffin. The first and second phases of Microsoft's famous 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.' Much like the Borg's victims, the Linux community will be assimilated. And it will be assimilated thanks to traitors like Miguel de Icaza, Mark Shuttleworth, and so many others.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:06PM (2 children)
The GPL family of licenses are unnecessary because if you support truly free software then you just use the MIT license or the BSD license. If you aren't using one of those licenses, or some other equivalently free license, then you're writing proprietary software. As far as I'm concerned, GPLed software is proprietary, because I can't modify it and redistribute my version without also redistributing the source code.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:59AM
So you can't take software distributed with the express intent to grant freedom to its users without continuing to grant the same freedom to users of your modified version. Could you explain how a reciprocal condition makes software "proprietary"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:49PM
bsd/mit is a whore's license. all you mac using hipster douches just use it so you can whore your asses to corporations that want to leech off of FOSS. all while professing your love for FOSS. You like to use words like "commercial" when you speak of the proprietary software that these leech corps have built with bsd/mit "Free Software". Or your precious proprietary saas apps built on the back of mit/bsd software. You take on the appearance of Free Software like Slack(the saas app not the Gnu/Linux distribution they stole the nickname of), to further obfuscate your leeching. It's disgusting and transparent.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday September 24 2017, @05:06AM
In my tests, Firefox allows more tabs than Chromium before it starts thrashing swap on a laptop that's already maxed out at 2 GB of RAM. This is especially true if the user enables the built-in tracking protection [mozilla.org] for all windows, not just Private Browsing windows.
(tongue-in-cheek) Or if a laptop's RAM can't be upgraded further, should its owner buy a USB RAM drive on which to store a swap file in order to use Chromium?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday September 22 2017, @08:10PM
As long as there is a *monkey for that browser, they will work.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @08:35PM (6 children)
Pale Moon.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @09:07PM (4 children)
Firefox was better off copying Chrome. Pale Moon's interface is shit.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:30PM
Pale Moons interface rocks....chrome/ff is for your 90 year old grandma
Google wants bookmarks gone, they you have to search for everything, they are evil, firefox is drinking the same coolaid
Palemoon is very good, Vivaldi is as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:31PM (2 children)
Because the most important thing about a web browser is the interface.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @10:36PM (1 child)
That is the part that you are staring at and clicking on all the goddamn time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @01:05AM
I think you're using your web browser wrong... The part I stare at and click on is the only part that's explicitly not browser interface :)
(Score: 1) by Goghit on Sunday September 24 2017, @04:19AM
Unless your workflow is now in Linux and structured around Zotero, LibreOffice, and add-ins like Tab Helper and Zotero Connector. Spent a couple of weeks trying to get the bits and pieces to install and talk to each other - no joy. Back to FireFox for now.
For the Windows side of the machine, oh hell yes!
(Score: 4, Interesting) by novak on Saturday September 23 2017, @07:10AM
I still remember Firefox 1.0, when anything besides ie was a godsend. I remember firefox 2 and 3, and the most powerful and customizable set of extensions I've ever seen. I raise a glass to those memories. Even now, when firefox is too far gone to use, I still mainly use derivatives such as seamonkey and palemoon (the only exception that I open on a regular basis is midori). I can't compromise this far on my browser, but before I go, I'll say:
Thanks. It's been real. But I can't even recognize you any more.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @11:29AM (1 child)
Maybe we need some sort of SOPA/PIPA-like 'Firefox blackout day' where web developers agree to include a snippet of code that detects Firefox and redirects to a central page that presents a unified message to Mozilla. The people who care about these issues are greatly outnumbered by non-technical users who don't, which means Mozilla doesn't have to give a damn about our individual cries for sanity. We make the websites and that is where our real voice and power exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 23 2017, @02:08PM
Firefox's market share is already down to 5%. Almost nobody will see these messages. Those that do will just continue to beg Mozilla to fix Firefox's slowness and memory usage, like they've been doing for the last decade. And Mozilla will probably just ignore them, let it's been doing for the last decade.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Monday September 25 2017, @08:17AM (1 child)
In addition to Pale Moon, there are two other alternatives:
The first one is Waterfox [waterfoxproject.org]. Its developer intends to continue support for old style esxtensions, to the extent that he is building his own addons repository. Waterfox also supports all npapi plugins, instead of only flash, if you happen to need them.
The second is Basilisk [basilisk-browser.org], from the Pale Moon developers. This is a fork from a later version of Firefox than the fork used in Pale Moon, that was made specifically to ensure that old style extensions will run, and is completely unrelated to Pale Moon (e.g., it has the Australis interface). I don't think it has been officially released yet.
I'm currently using Waterfox, as it seems to be the best option: full support for old style plugins and extensions, with the latest Firefox engine under the hood. Say what you like about Pale Moon and Basilisk, but I don't think that their developers have the resources to implement the missing parts of the HTML 5 standard on their own. While these parts may not be necessary today, they will be at some point, when all the major engines support them fully.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Monday September 25 2017, @11:05PM
Interesting. Thanks for the link to Basilisk; I'm using Waterfox intermittently and so far it's been fine (although this comment was posted in Firefox because the button is still on the Windows taskbar and I clicked it by mistake).