Great to see mainstream media picking this up and giving Firefox some exposure.
With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future.
(Personally I switched back to FF after the first Quantum release, which brought performance back on par with Chrome. On mobile, the ad blocker is even more essential to get somewhat acceptable load times...)
It’s not mainstream media. It’s a contributor site. You can pay some money and get one of your own. You can post whatever you want on there. They offer to do a little bit of editing and proofreading to make it look professional before it goes online. There is no fact checking. These contributor sites are essentially blogs that carry the credibility of Forbes even though they don’t deserve it.
I see contributor sites being linked all over the place - social media, news aggregators, even Apple news. I wish there was more awareness that these articles are written by some regular person with no qualifications as a journalist and that there is no standard for accuracy.
I’ve been asked to be a contributor before. I don’t know what the criteria is. I got a cold call about it one day. I’ve been a panelist at a couple local events, got a mention in a niche news outlet and was nominated for an award once. My guess is that’s why I was targeted as a lead. The pitch was mostly about having a bigger platform for my personal brand if I remember correctly.
What are the "qualifications of a journalist?" They are people with opinions that write stuff. If you think journalism and writing departments are teaching rigor and factual veracity, you are mistaken. I've only come to it recently, but Gell-Mann Amnesia Affect is something to be aware of and avoid.
Quality and opinion of mainstream media aside, I think we can all appreciate the difference between someone paid for their work by a professional news outlet and someone off the street who is paying Forbes to host their blog.
I hope to see Firefox eventually providing an embeddable framework, considering that Chromium isn't just monopolising the web browser space... it's spreading into desktop applications through Electron. Left unchecked, Google will manage to poke its fingers into every pie within reach.
It seems like the ideal solution of using the OS's native web toolkit hasn't been successful so far. So the next best offering (aside from building on Qt), is to have an Electron competitor too.
I don't think that there's a desktop offering at the moment. There used to be quite a few (XULRunner, Prism, etc.) but they all died from lack of love.
Even to this day, XUL is far more capable than HTML. It has built-in widgets for many common desktop GUI elements that still need to be created from scratch in HTML+Javascript, and notably uses the native chrome of whatever OS it is running on to render them.
XUL was the markup language used by the Mozilla Communicator Suite for designing user interfaces. It was what Add-on development used.
Mozilla deprecated it not that long ago in favor of HTML but stalwarts have clung to it and complained.
I use to maintain a couple Add-ons and developed some simple UIs for it. I was never impressed by it and it was easy enough to use so I had no objections either.
I'm not sure what you're asking exactly but XUL existed a long time after Firefox was born and became popular. I remember using a XUL app at work around 2010.
Plus one. This was the beggining of the rot in Mozila. This marked the moment the went from making general purpose web/http based platforms based on OpenSource principals to builing a single a www specific advertising platform. I still use Firefox and support them financially. Its the best we have. But they stopped caring about anything other that being the frontpage to the Internet a long time ago. They gave up on supporting developers.
You mean like Positron? That was abandoned several years ago. So was Spidernode, FirefoxOS/apps, etc. Other dropped projects include Shumway, the JavaScript flash runtime. Basically every interesting thing they do that isn't directly related to improving Firefox seems to get dropped eventually.
Then there's GeckoView, which they explicitly decided not to make available as a WebView drop-in to be available systemwide on Android. In this case, at least they seem to have a reason, though it seems to me that having an alternative to Google's WebView would be valuable enough to continue.
Not sure of your meaning of "Linux void of polished apps." Do you mean commercial apps running natively on linux?
FWIW, I've been running Linux as my primary desktop through 4 companies and 20+ years thus far. I'm not at a loss for applications, native or hosted, that I use in my day to day work.
I'm actually quite happy that I no longer need to worry about installing Microsoft office (current day job uses this suite). Online works great, and when offline, libreoffice 6+ allows me to continue to work with the same docs.
Prior to this, Google docs worked perfectly fine for $dayjob-1, and worked perfectly well across Linux, Mac, Android, so I didn't have any significant issues with it.
Really, Linux is a fine desktop. Seems to be about 2x more common accessing my blog than Mac, and about 1/2 that of windows. I can't imagine all of those are server users. Must be some polished and usable desktop apps in the mix to be able to see that.
Not sure about the website you run but there might be a corelation to Linux users and your site. It could be either due to your network and the way people came to know about the site or it could be the content among other things
There’s a ton of cool apps for productivity, time management, health, note taking, all in iOS due to iPad ecosystem. Apple pulled a smart one and democratized file extension monopolies by making App Store ecosystem relatively cheap for customers. This incentivized a ton of high quality lower cost apps that now all have their own file extensions on top of importing stuff like pdf and psd, and the iOS share menu has basically turned apps into Linux command line tools where you set up your own work flow chain. Apple has now positioned iOS libraries in next OS X to be importable into OS X, thus now all these iOS apps can be posted easily into OS X. Essentially, iOS has now liberated the user from .doc, .ppt, .xls, .psd dependencies and soon it will spread into OS X.
Linux has no such source of ample high quality apps that don’t cost hundreds of dollars in fees like in windows (office 365 and adobe, I’m looking at you)
When I switched from Windows to Mac a while back it struck me that I needed to rely on paid apps a lot more. There seemed to be more quality freeware for Windows.
I'm also running a fair few Electron apps on my Mac at the moment.
> With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable
I'm not sure I understand your point. Is there a public statement from Microsoft that they are following Google on this? I don't know what Microsoft is going to do, but nothing stops them from keeping the API fully working. And if Firefox was based on Chromium too, nothing would stop Mozilla from keeping the API working either. Although I expect some forks to follow Google on this, namely other ad-tech companies with web browsers, like Yandex.
That's a bold accusation and would make the case that there's no real difference between Chrome and Firefox, can you point to the evidence that supports this?
Pocket, the easy to enable/disable way to save websites for reading later, and Gab, the far-right social network, as exposed by Columbia Journalism Review?
Pocket which by default suggests "pocket worthy" articles and ads on the new tab page (which after a while you get a feel for what "pocket worthy" actually means).
The other day I got one that made the case that both private schools and homeschooling should be illegal.
I don't follow. How does a built in extension to save pages to a cloud account equate with the systematic and pervasive abuses of privacy that are Google's business model?
>Gab
I was not aware of this platform. Here are some lovely snippets from Wikipedia:
>Gab stated that conservative, libertarian, nationalist and populist internet users were its target markets.
What a lovely "free speech" platform. Can't imagine why it was "censored", where by censored we actually mean: we will not distribute this on our website, though you are still free to install it on your machine if you want. Come on... Porn is also legal, and also not available on the Firefox website, and also freely available for you to get elsewhere.
Personally, I think that Gab is a dumpster fire that it's best to avoid, yet I am very sensitive to browsers making content/editorial decisions for their users. From a security perspective teaching users to jump around browser protections is never a good idea. It's going to bite us in the butt at some point.
Ignoring the fact that pocket is a company with dozens of employees who curate content and calling it just an extension to save pages is deeply disingenuous. If you're right, why lie? Pocket suggests articles and lets you save them.
Firefox hasn't blocked the extension as far as I know, they're "merely" not offering it on AMO anymore. You can still install it via the author's website.
I just wish they finally fixed the bug that makes it unusable for me and thousands of other users using macbooks with resolution set to "more space"... I can't count how many people in my office I've had to help after their macbook randomly starts heating and turning fans to max power, it's always that they started using firefox.
I've been checking the tickets associated with the issue (mainly [this one](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042) ) and there doesn't seem to be any significant advance, nor it seems the people in charge are aware of how prevalent and deal breaking this bug is :(
yeah, I also noticed this and this is the one reason I wont be switching to Firefox on my macbook. On other PCs I’ve been using firefox for a long time now.
It's not just that. Exporting Passwords from Chrome to FF is impossible in macOS. Not a day goes by that I don't have to enter my password for a website. Thus, switching to FF actually means re-entering tens of passwords manually (given that you do remember the passwords, otherwise you'll have to go to Passwords Manager in Chrome and see the saved passwords).
Sorry to be completely off topic here as HN does not support private messages or replies to old threads.
A long shot but you may be able to save us countless hours of effort. Over at the OpenJ9 project we're trying to get z/OS testing for our JDK and one of the dependencies is the XML::Parse perl library which depends on libexpat. In [1] you mentioned you worked on porting this to work with EBCDIC. Did you ever succeed? If so are your changes available in open source anywhere?
In my experience the bug is usually overlooked because people won't notice that they only have performance issues when the browser is open - for most people, the browser is always running nowadays.
I wonder if this bug also applies to using the "Looks like 1280x800" option on a MBP with a 2560x1600 screen (this is what I use). The default is "Looks like 1440x900".
> FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future.
But firefox has shown no indication of gaining marketshare. I'd reckon that a large amount of firefox's current marketshare are people who had pre-Quantum extentions that were critical to their workflow, and who are now using an outdated browser version. One big vulnerability or generally adopted new feature would probably knock a third off even the 5-10% share they currently have.
Firefox's share is so small that the other two-thirds is probably evenly split between google-haters, a constant turnover of people just trying it out for a month or two before going back to Chrome, and people who use Chrome for most of their browsing and switch to Firefox for porn because they are afraid google is watching them.
When firefox was at 40% of the market and shrinking, they somehow decided that their problem was that they didn't look like a cheap knockoff, drop-in replacement for their competitor. They succeeded in making themselves totally disposable.
IMO, their only hope is and has always been to strip their browser down to a virtually featureless embeddable UI component, implement the rest of the current features as a core curated package of plugins against an API that all developers have equal access to, adopt all community-developed plugins that reach a certain usage level, and add a rating system for plugins that communicates the level of mozilla's involvement, e.g. gold for in-house, green for having employees intimately involved with the code, yellow for periodically reviewed by mozilla, red for never reviewed by mozilla, and flashing red for never reviewed by mozilla, has had complaints, and has not responded or been contacted by mozilla.
Other vendors will end up putting together different core suites, and will offer their own ratings, ultimately spawning 5-10 major concurrent firefox versions and swamping chrome out of existence. Through being able to lay off much of the reviewing work to outside vendors, firefox developers can concentrate all of their efforts on streamlining the core, educational outreach about the internet and the web, and lawsuits against the monopolists for adding anti-features to their sites targeted to ruin the user experience on specific browsers.
Instead, firefox has settled into being the token opposition party in a dictatorship that just exists to make sure that there's another name on the ballot come election time, and the dictator only gets 96% of the vote instead of 100%.
Right on. Forbes.com hosts my blog. They provide minimal editorial oversight, usually limited to making sure you capitalize every word in the title per their style guide.
Wow, I never knew/ expected MS to switch to Chromium. Given how much MS boasts about Edge's battery life over Chrome.
Hopefully Google leaves a workaround to enable ad-blocking. Otherwise, I will switch, it will be a bit of hassle, but I'll drop them none the less. No ads & lower power usage would be nice though.
They have Github developers already deep in Chromium for Electron which is powering VSCode so rather than maintain two separate teams, better to focus everybody on Chromium.
>With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future
Why are multiple rendering and JS engines critical for the browser ecosystem? Everyone would be much better off if we standardized on one.
The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business.
Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.
This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.
>The next Chrome standard manifest says that ad blockers are a deprecated feature since they hurt Googles business.
Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.
>Looking a bit further (into possible future business needs of Alphabet) you might see that chrome will refuse to serve anything not based on Googles AMP standard and globally remove anything that hurts their partnership with the Chinese government.
>This is the single standard JS engine we are looking forward to.
This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong. If worst came to worst and Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it and remove the offending parts. A Google Chromium and a Non-google Chromium fork is still way better than what we have now today with four distinct engines in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE.
> Ad blocking isn't part of the rendering or JS engine.
If we believe Google it is in a very performance sensitive part of the APIs, I would say that makes it a prime target for future optimizations just to hard wire the performant behavior directly into the engine.
> This is just unsubstantiated fear mongering and mostly flat out wrong.
Of course we can always count on a profit driven company to do the right thing and there was never a project Dragonfly at Google, just as there was never a Tiananmen Square massacre. Trust in Alphabets morality absolutely, trust that when they are doing something obviously wrong that they are doing it for the right reasons.
> Google rammed something like that into Chromium everyone else could just fork it
Maintaining a fork is going to be quite difficult when upstream wants you dead, already ships black box modules for some features and represents the de facto standard for 99% of the world.
I don't think so. Google is abusing their power with Chrome to force their standards on others. I hope they lose their grip on the browser market like MS did, and standards become open.
The standards are open. The problem is that browsers don't implement them 100% the same and they add in their own features. Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue. Different browsers can compete based on ancillary features like Linux distros do.
> Settling on a single implementation fixes that issue.
When Microsoft was in a monopoly position, they ignored the standards and pushed ActiveX plugins. Chrome this year wanted to push other browsers to adopt obsolete U2F specifications because they used them in Google products. If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.
>If there's a single implementation, and the gatekeepers are majority from one company, standards and interoperability become irrelevant.
That's a good thing. What's the point of maintaining four separate software projects who's ideal purpose is to literally do the exact same thing. It's much better to settle on one open source project. If we think Google is the boogeyman then settling on a Chromium fork is still light years better than what we have now.
I think this is incredibly shortsighted. From a programming perspective, large codebases are a bit like complex organisms and experience a sort of evolution. Forcing yourself into a single local minimum in the form of a single browser implementation guarantees that it will be much harder to avoid having the same constant set of strengths and flaws.
The common ground is the standard not the browser implementation. The web has been working well and is still working well with multiple implementations.
Forom a technical standpoint it's of course unideal, but from a governance standpoint there's a lot to be gained. The browser is a critical piece of infrastructure and handing a monopoly to one company is essentially sleeping at the wheel. As long as there's significant economic value in providing the platform, competition is in the public interest.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity probably has the most reliable metrics on Firefox users. Not enough to compare to other browsers, but if there's a large switch from Chrome to Firefox, it should eventually show up on the graph.
Safari is a terrible, Apple-like version of WebKit. The last viable windows version of Safari was abandoned 8 years ago, so please nobody use this browser.
No it doesn't. For example to tap a link you have to tap it directly, links don't have a halo around them to make them easier to tap. Tapping things like the [-] buttons here in HN is very hard. It's stupid shit like that that makes it unusable for me. I don't believe for a second the developers of Firefox for Android use it every day and haven't fixed that. And if they don't dogfood what hope is there for that software?
> I don't believe for a second the developers of Firefox for Android use it every day and haven't fixed that.
Why is that so unbelievable? I use Firefox every day and haven't even considered that this might be a problem. I don't have difficulty hitting the [-] on HN, but if I did, I would simply zoom in until it becomes large enough.
Have you tried Brave browser on mobile? It's quite fast and blocks ads.
A couple issues with Safari I've seen since it's slower to adopt web standards:
- buggier websites from devs who don't have iPhones. Since there are some quirky inconsistencies with how webkit handles css vs other browser rendering engines it's easy not to catch those quirks if you don't have an iPhone to check them with. And once users point them out, it's a pain to fix without a physical device.
- a smaller web feature set than chrome/Firefox. For instance, Safari doesn't allow localstorage while in incognito. I think it supports serviceworkers and webrtc now but it took years to get them.
It would be nice if localstorage worked in a new instance in incognito. This way webapps that require it can still function without affecting non-incognito tabs. What other privacy concerns would there be I'm wondering?
If you're on iOS it would make sense since Apple is only allowing it's own webkit as browser engine, forcing chromium and firefox to be disfigured versions of what they are on other systems.
When I was working more frontend (~1,5 years ago) no browser would cause more work and trouble for us than Safari on iOS (we didn't have to support IE9 and lower).
Nah I'm talking about Chrome and Firefox on Android. They are both worse than Safari on iOS.
Also I understand that Safari might've created some pain for you as a frontend developer, but frankly I don't care. I'm an end user and I only care about how fast and secure the browser is. And Safari wins there, it's not terrible by any measure for the end user.
Safari being faster on iOS might be more indicative of your iDevice's performance rather than Safari's (the A-series chips are quite fast). Without being able to run both browsers on the same hardware you can't really make an apples to apples comparison.
> Chrome and Firefox on Android. They are both worse than Safari on iOS
I realize that this is subjective, but Firefox Focus has been my preferred mobile browser, regardless of if I have Safari available, (iPad), or not, (Android). In fact having desktop addons on Android has been great.
That might be your personal impression but I don't share it.
Development wise it's not so much about our pain as about certain known bugs that went unfixed for up to 2+ years, similar goes for a range of CVEs (re:being secure).
Performances issues will be hard to estimate, as you can not compare safari to the others on the same phone, which means that you will not be able to correct for hardware and software stacks influences.
In last version of Safari uBlock shows warning that it is not supported anymore and slow down your browsing experience. Adblockers from App Store are limited by number of allowed rules the same way as in promised Chrome API changes. If we should start to worry about browser shift then Safari should be first in the list.
Ok that's fair. From a developer's PoV, Safari is a terrible browser. It's old and buggy and stifles innovation on iOS in the same way ie did on windows.
As a web developer, I find this to be anything be true. Safari supports loads of cool features that clients ask for, like native css carousels (css snap points), and blur effects (backdrop-filter). Chrome, does not.
As a web developer, I like my browser to implement internet standards correctly so websites actually work. People aren't trashing Safari because it's cool.. generally Apple provides a great software experience. But Safari is a bug ridden mess.
Here's an example that broke many many sites that use OAuth2 Auth Code Flow for login (including the main UI portal my company provides clients): https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=194906
There's also been issues with the handling of 3rd party cookies that create issues for login systems, js stdlib functions being incorrectly implemented, etc.
Safari generally implements standards as they mature.
Chrome generally implements everything new and shiny, no matter how underspecified it is, and with blatant disregard to whether or not it breaks the web.
I don't disagree with regards to new standards, but that doesn't change the fact that existing, well established standards are often broken in Safari (see the bug I linked in the parent comment). These bugs are much more likely to break the web than Chrome's half baked bleeding edge features because there's already a huge body of web software that relies on them.
Software has these everywhere. iOS and Android homescreens are carousels. Netflix 'rails' are carousels. CSS Snap Points is a way to create native snapping scrolling views, which Safari and IE supports, but Chrome does not.
It supports the same crippled ad blocking that this article complains about. It is also years behind the competitors in standards support, and the standards it claims to support are implemented buggily. Finally, it crashes more often than its competitors, but I suppose making a browser unusable is one way to save battery.
Since I have the new Macbook Air I also switched to Safari because it also extends battery lifetime. Still need to get used to the different keyboard shortcuts and plugin system though.
(But yes, if I do Frontend development, I use Chrome)
I'm using Firefox for mobile since Quantum, and works better that Chrome (except for a few pages that don't bother on supporting Firefox on any platform)
With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future.
(Personally I switched back to FF after the first Quantum release, which brought performance back on par with Chrome. On mobile, the ad blocker is even more essential to get somewhat acceptable load times...)