The one thing that prevents me from switching to Firefox is the spell checker. Like many non-native English people, I'm constantly switching between languages when typing. Chrome is smart with that, and detects the right language sentence per sentence. Is there a way to have FF do this? Did I miss something?
Similarly, the auto-translate (which Firefox is finally getting) is insanely useful if you ever browse a website that isn’t in a language you can read. I’d be interested in how both features can be implemented in a privacy-preserving way.
as an english only speaker I have no need for a feature like this to be built in. I get much more out of monitor. So perhaps neither should be built in by default?
Having features function by default matters a lot in regards to user adoption. A very large portion of users will never change their default settings, let alone discover and install an add on for something Chrome has by default.
Here’s an article by Mozilla stating the power of default settings:
One aspect is having to maintain double dictionaries. Back in the early Mac OS X days the system-wide dictionary was one of the little features that made me happy.
Yes, that's true, but it would be correspondingly more difficult to find an alternative. If a plugin is compromised you're much more likely to be able to easily find an alternative. So it's a trade-off either way.
the cost of a compromised plugin is not just the inconvenience, but also all the passwords you might enter on forms if the plugin has full permissions granted
That's a stretch. We're talking about a translation plugin here. If FF doesn't have a mechanism to keep passwords safe from that, then that is the problem, not the lack of native translation.
I am not wise in the ways of Firefox plugins, but if the ability of a plugin to read a password field is not a separate permission, then that is a much more serious problem than the lack of native translation. That's just a huge gaping security hole, full stop. If that is indeed how Firefox is designed, then the lack of native translation should be the least of your concerns.
that's the whole point I'm trying to make! goddamit stop working on assumption and hypothetical thinking I'm a lunatic, this is a real issue and the actual way firefox works, how do you think all password manager work?
We're not talking about password managers here, we're talking about spelling checkers. If a spelling checker can read passwords, then Firefox has a problem that that has nothing to do with spelling checkers or password managers. You cannot safely use any plugin.
Now, it's possible that Firefox does indeed have this very serious problem, I don't know. But I think it's much more likely that the FF engineers did the obvious thing and excluded password fields from being accessed by plugins by default if they can access text fields. If this were not the case, the complaint would not have been, "FF doesn't have native spell checking", the complaint would have been, "FF has this gaping security hole through which you can drive an M1 Abrams tank."
you're not listening and you're having a very strong opinion on a topic you don't know about, which makes having a discussion frustrating, tedious and very unhackernews-like, the data is before your eyes, believe what you will.
but if you are unwilling to listen, then why ask and answer?
What permission is that? The only permission I see is "Access your data for all websites." If that includes passwords, then FF has much bigger problems than not having native spell checking.
There's slight difference in that in Firefox's case tech journals will be writing about it, everyone else will be talking about it and it will be on front page of HN. In the case of random extension going rogue it will likely get unnoticed for years and when it is finally noticed there's a small chance it will be picked by HN if planets align.
Maybe. Take a look at my exchange with u/LoSboccacc a parallel branch of this thread. If what he claims is correct (I don't know, but he seems pretty confident) then there is already a huge gaping security hole in FF that no one is talking about (AFAICT).
Don't believe everything you read on the internet.
Yes, the text on that page can be interpreted as supporting your position. Still, "Offer a password manager..." is not quite the same thing as "silently read all of your passwords and do whatever the extension wants with them..." I have a very hard time believing that the latter is the case and that no one has sounded the alarm on this yet.
Also, add-ons have been deprecated in favor of extensions.
Well, I mean, "do" is an English word, "de" is an Esperanto word and "di" is an Indonesian word. I'd rather they get marked as wrong in the wrong language. (If I'm mixing languages, which I do on my phone often enough in text messages, whatever; but then I don't care about spelling anyway.)
Weird, Chrome (specifically Electron) always gets confused when I speak English and Spanish all at once and Slack just starts to say everything I spell in English is wrong, it kinda annoys me. I don't think I have experienced this on Firefox.
Whether it is on Chrome, Firefox, Android or in my text editor, I'll always disable spell checking. I am also not a native english speaker and seeing those red underlines everywhere is just way too annoying for me.
All text-based input fields. Like this text-area element I am typing in now. But also for elements with the contentEditable attribute set to true.
This is one of the features I appreciate a lot. I am not a native speaker of the English language, and I sometimes mix British English and USA English, and the spell-checker helps me to write consistently better messages.
I myself (not a native speaker) am very pedantic about setting all my software to enUS and turn all spell checking off. (I can't even stand the linter underline in VS for example, it ruins my focus, especially when it underlines as I type and then lags before disappearing at the end of the word)
The only place where I use spellcheck is e-mail at work to avoid typos.
Over the years I've learned to proofread my messages before sending them and touch typing helps a ton as well.
Is there a good transition path for someone who uses a lot of Google products? In particular, I use Chrome across all my devices, and I depend on the ability to search my history/recent tabs/etc from anywhere. Will Firefox give me the same ability? Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Firefox Sync let's you syncronize Bookmarks, Open tabs, Logins, History, Add-ons and Preferences across devices by logging in once with username password
If you click on the 'x hours ago' part of the comment next to the username you will get a parent link and can then reply to and save individual comments.
As long as you use it everywhere in the same way you presently use Chrome everywhere, yes. You can also import a certain amount (history & bookmarks, not, I think, current & recent tabs) to get started.
> Is the transition literally just: Install Firefox everywhere and start using it instead?
Yep. I did this about a year ago. You have to create a Mozilla account (if you haven't already) in order to sync your tabs and history across devices, but that should be a given.
I find the Firefox sync a bit clunky compared to Chromes though. I think Chrome sends udpates to Google on each change whereas Firefox polls and updates on a schedule which means sometimes if you put a device to sleep (or if you're on iOS and the app gets suspended) your history and tab state won't be propagated and it'll be missing on your other devices which can be frustrating when you're away from those devices.
Agreed to what everyone else said, but to me the killer feature of Firefox Sync is that you can send tabs from one browser to another, so I can find links on my work computer and ship them directly to my home computer or phone to read later, and they'll just show up when it syncs next.
I'm actually not sure if this is a native Chrome feature, but I can instantly send tabs to my other devices with right click > "send to your devices" > list of devices with a Google account signed in (Which is my phone and laptop for me on my desktop).
I just tried this. Interestingly I'd left it on v68 and it cooked my MBP, fans all on max immediately. When I updated to 70 it seems to work perfectly. CPU temp in the 40s. Gonna leave it on in the background and see if it suddenly spikes.
That's a slightly worrying precedent, they're calling the way to diaable certain bits of obnoxiousness (the header bar in Tree Style Tabs comes to mind) "legacy", which is usually a precursor to removal.
Is there a new method available/forthcoming, or is this more control planned to be wrenched out of user's hands?
It is an opt-in system. They're not making you use it and you don't lose anything by choosing not to opt-in. What exactly are they doing that you would consider "shilling"?
Guess we are dealing with purists here. Mind you that Chromium is free and open-source just like MySQL. A strategical move by the community to fork MySQL to MariaDB to ensure it remained free and open from the tech giant after it was acquired by Oracle. How Brave is any different? It made a similar move. Some people hate crypto. Fine. Personally I've never used the Brave crypto. Perhaps FF 70 has completely fixed its performance problem, sure, happy to switch. But before that really happens Brave is still a viable interim solution.
The issue is the engine. There are few big engines out there and chromium is taking a lot of the market.
The issue with this is that they could start controlling the standards and everyone would have to follow behind instead of everyone working and doing what’s best for consumers.
While chromium is open source, that doesn’t mean they have to accept merges from the community. It only means that they have to provide the source code. Yes it can be forked, but now you have to maintain or develop your engine. If they’re the dominant ones and are setting standards, that won’t help much.
By using another one you are helping keep a neutral ground.
I don't know about other usages, but energy consumption while using YouTube is important to me (usually have something playing while I work) so I just did a quick measurement.
Safari 13.0.2 versus Firefox 70.0 versus Chrome 77.0
Playing the same YouTube video at the same quality (1080p) and watching Energy Impact in Activity Monitor while the video played, I saw averages of: Safari used 20, Firefox used 45, Chrome used 45.
So on that task at least Safari is still king, but Firefox is on par with Chrome.
You could try a plugin which forces h264 Youtube. Just about anything made in the last decade has mature hardware support for decoding h264, but not necessarily for VP8/9. This may be what's going on here.
More work is planned to reduce the energy usage for scrolling and full screen video. Though I guess for your example you don't watch things fullscreen.
Anyway, I imagine that's the price to pay for being crossplatform. You can't implement everything for every platform. Safari only has to work on macOS/iOS.
Speaking for Chrome's implementation, efficiently rendering video on macOS does require CALayer compositing, but it's not sufficient.
Only certain types of decoded frames can be efficiently scanned out (different from the types that can be used efficiently in OpenGL compositing). Actually entering the most efficient fullscreen video mode requires some magic. Matching macOS behavior exactly when a fallback to OpenGL compositing is required can be difficult (eg. colorspace bugs can result in flickering).
I have not looked at the new code in Firefox, but I would expect that not all of the benefit would be realized in a first release. In any case it's a huge undertaking to support a single platform; congrats to the team for making it happen!
Safari does not support vp8 or vp9 when playing youtube, and youtube serves h264 instead. h264 is less efficient in terms of compression ratio (more to download for the same quality), but h264 is decoded in hardware on OSX, and VP8 or VP9 isn't, which explains what you see.
This is why, for example, Safari does not have 4k video on Youtube, while being perfectly capable of playing 4k videos in general.
Depending on the machine, VP9 can be decoded in hardware on Firefox on Windows, but chip support is limited.
All that said, we're working on our video playback performance as we speak, especially on OSX (because it was so bad a few release back), but also in general.
I don't know what iina is, but youtube-dl + mpv mentioned by Angeo34 does exactly that (stream videos without pre-downloading them). Youtube-dl just gets the stream URL and mpv plays it. And it's easy to use, just:
Last I checked it was looking like they would now be as "good" as Chrome, which is much worse than Safari. Hopefully that improved or will soon improve.
Recently switched from Safari to Firefox because of the awful extensions environment in Safari but definitely missing the battery life. Really wish one browser could just get everything right
There are other options (paid ones) that are equal —or even better since they are quite automatic— than ublock.
The only two things I'm missing in safari to be hones are:
- A no-script extension or similar.
- Sync part of my work is on a no macOS machines I don't have safari there, so no sync. I partially overcome this with bookmaster for bookmarks, but I still missing tabs and read it later list. However, firefox doesn't have this later feature on desktop —and I don't why.
Firefox Sync syncs your tabs, bookmarks, passwords, etc. Your read it later list is synced through Pocket (which is owned by Mozilla). They exist on desktop and mobile.
Yes, Nightly is (I'm simplifying a bit but it's generally true) release + a few weeks of patches + different default settings, sometimes experimental things enabled, etc.
I'm running Nightly on OSX and I confirm all those improvements are there, but more are coming.
This is what I am most excited about. I have been using the improvements through nightly since they were released, I think little more than a month, and I couldn't be happier. I'd hate to have to use Chrome and I welcome the competition to webkit.
i am very very eager to test and use this. FF is my main driver but it's a heat machine on my mac 10.11.6. I wonder if i gain something to upgrade my macOS (4g ram :()
Love Firefox. The philosophy, its snappiness, its many add-ons, the UI. - Glad to have an alternative to Chrome! Keep up the good work, Mozilla & Firefox team.
Day to day tasks like browsing the DOM, debug, networking, are top notch in both Chrome and FF, haven't found anything infuriating in FF devtools, they are very serious in having snappy and useful experience.
Recently switched my work (full stack web) Macbook to Firefox and I'm pleasantly surprised by how capable FF's dev-tools are compared to Chrome. I was expecting it to be a much more difficult transition. Still running Chrome on an iMac at home (we use a lot of Chromecast there, so I imagine switching will be a bit more painful) but would like to divest from Google where reasonable.
Does anyone know of what useful/killer features chrome dev tools have that ff doesn't? I switched to ff full time a few years ago and only open chrome for testing sites. The only thing I notice is that they have slightly different habits as to where they jump in the html when you are using the inspect feature. The only killer Firefox "feature" I can think of is an extension which is much more recent -- eval villain (https://www.hurricanelabs.com/blog/making-easy-dom-xss-actua...).
My experience is that Chromium DevTools are much more polished than Firefox's. For instance, the network tab is a pain to use with FF on a small screen because the columns have a large default width, so the Method column ("GET") is as large as the URL path column. And you can't resize them. Chromium has a better default, and I can resize them. If I view the detail of a request, pressing Esc will close the details view in Chromium, while it will toggle the console in FF. Even with the mouse, at first I struggled to find how to close the details with FF (the toggling icon is not part of the toggled window, it's next to the filter field!).
Some of those updates are to catch up to Chrome's developer tools. If I were in charge of Firefox, I would honestly have them hire a developer or two to focus solely on the Developer Tools. I'm sure there's many things that browser developer tools could do that we have not even scratched the surface of. I prefer Firefox overall, only use Chrome due to manager only looking at my work on Chrome (it will be deployed in a WebKit container). The DOM Breakpoint feature is one I found out this week about in Chrome, glad it's now in Firefox.
Firefox has an entire team dedicated to developer tools, fwiw. I'm not sure whether your suggestion was "one or two more, in addition to the 7 or 8 already working on it", or "one or two more, instead of the 0 working on it now"...
I'd happily add more people to the mix yeah, had no concept of how many were working on it currently though, I assumed some people worked on it but not dedicated. As I wrote my comment I realized that kind of tooling is not necessarily easy to work on potentially.
They spent the past few years rewriting them to allow them to build on it more quickly and encourage outside contributions. They finished that a while ago and have been ramping up new features quickly, and some exciting things are coming. For example: https://gist.github.com/jasonLaster/1e220992c294a571dd9b59ab...
Wow, blown away by how much better the new password manager is! If they add support for custom fields on each login, this could almost completely replace my need for a 3rd party solution.
Can't speak for Android, but for iOS Firefox has an app which does all the proper hooking into system autofill to be able to fill your passwords browsers/apps.
(There's an Android app, too. I'm just not familiar with Android's affordances for that sort of thing so I can't really comment on how it works.)
With a previous update 1-2 years ago, the password manager seemed to lose the ability to force-create and edit new items, which is necessary if you are using it as a general purpose password manager, or for sites that stubbornly refused to play nice. I switched to LastPass, which worked out fairly well, with the family option, so that my spouse and I can share subsets of passwords with each other. But this FF update does look like they've fixed that issue.
Does it only support passwords? I actually use 1Password for quite a bit of information. (Credit cards, bank accounts, email accounts, servers, and random memberships)
personally im trying to move away from keeping everything in one basket but maybe there is some benefit to having a password manager built in vs a 3rd party extension? less attack area?
earlier in this year I switched from bitwarden (which I would still recommend) to keepass because I wanted to fill desktop passwords... but there is the added benefit that you actually don't need a browser extension if you don't want to. instead ive been using the autotype feature that can be run from a hotkey.
I would have wished a world where both the chromium project and Mozilla would collaborate to a unified JS compiler instead of having two separate implementations. How faster would have JS been? How more featureful and less buggy?
But without their own js compiler, chrome couldn't randomly add/deprecate features! It's not like Mozilla existed first and was open source back when Chrome launched. Oh wait, it was open sourced 10 years before Chrome launched! So yeah, I blame greed.
On the contrary, I'd say that competition has been good for all involved. For such a maligned language that was born in a little over a week, JavaScript is better and faster than it has any right to be.
The amount of resources that have gone into improving JavaScript is amazing. I just wonder what some other languages would look like now with that kind of attention.
Only a week? And I would slap python 3 right on top of that. Despite the language being inherently messy and fully dynamic (similar to js), there are tons of static analysis tools, compilers, alternate run times, IDEs, etc.
Edit: the "only a week?" question was genuine, it wasn't meant to be tongue in cheek.
"There was a lot of internal pressure to pick one language as soon as possible. Python, Tcl, Scheme itself were all possible candidates. So Eich had to work fast. He had two advantages over the alternatives: freedom to pick the right set of features, and a direct line to those who made the calls. Unfortunately, he also had a big disadvantage: no time. Lots of important decisions had to be made and very little time was available to make them. JavaScript, a.k.a. Mocha, was born in this context. In a matter of weeks a working prototype was functional, and so it was integrated into Netscape Communicator."
Looks like it was pretty quick but maybe not just one week. Looks like Python was actually considered, but bear in mind that this was 25 years ago. Python 3 certainly wasn't out yet and the available tool ecosystem was much more limited.
Do some elementary, Wikipedia-level research — Python was at 1.3 then if I recall correctly. As I’ve written many times, the management order was “make it look like Java”, so none of the languages you mentioned was practical. None was practical anyway in terms of portability and safety from Windows 3.1 to Mac CodeWarrior to a number of Unixes that still mattered to Netscape sales. See/hear also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905155. See also https://devchat.tv/js-jabber/124-jsj-the-origin-of-javascrip... — transcript below the fold.
Speaking as a member of one of the many W3C working groups, I would say that it isn't desirable. When designing a standard, we want to have multiple competing implementations of the standard to ensure it is well defined and understood by users.
Should there be one implementation, we wouldn't be able to say with confidence that we have succeeded for that goal.
Your argument is moot, nothing prevent V8 to make two competitive implementations of a feature. With mozilla ressources focused on not duplicating effort, they would even have resources for making 3 or 4 compretitive implementations per JS proposals.
Because the interpreter pipeline shares code and data structures [0]: a couple of examples from the link below:
> The Baseline Interpreter uses the same frame layout as the Baseline JIT, but we’ve added some interpreter-specific fields to the frame.
> Because the Baseline Interpreter and JIT are so similar, a lot of the code generation code can be shared too. To do this, we added a templated BaselineCodeGen base class with two derived classes:
- BaselineCompiler: used by the Baseline JIT to compile a script’s bytecode to machine code.
- BaselineInterpreterGenerator: used to generate the Baseline Interpreter code.
> The Baseline Interpreter sits between the C++ interpreter and the Baseline JIT and has elements from both. It executes all bytecode instructions with a fixed interpreter loop (like the C++ interpreter). In addition, it uses Inline Caches to improve performance and collect type information (like the Baseline JIT).
Including elements [of code] from both would be considerably harder in another language.
If you read closely it appears the interpreter is "generated" - that it, it's not written directly in C++ or anything at all, but is instead an interpreter emitted by the JIT compiler!
I noticed that firefox (dev edition) got rid of possibility to disable update notifications. I prefer my browser to be updated from repository rather than by itself. Did anyone has the same issue or found some workaround?
"The discussion about the method for disabling updates has been had over and over already, there is nothing left to say about it, and the change will not be reverted. You've been given workarounds for your problem. Please do not reopen this bug or file any others asking the same thing."
> Firefox 70 introduces three new properties related to text decoration/underline:
> text-decoration-thickness: sets the thickness of lines added via text-decoration.
> text-underline-offset: sets the distance between a text decoration and the text it is set on. Bear in mind that this only works on underlines.
> text-decoration-skip-ink: sets whether underlines and overlines are drawn if they cross descenders and ascenders. The default value, auto, causes them to only be drawn where they do not cross over a glyph. To allow underlines to cross glyphs, set the value to none.
I'm so excited for these. Implementing sane underlines for headers has been a pain in the ass for far too long. Writers rejoice!
That's true, but if I used all CSS properties with this amount of coverage it would cause a lot of extra work for very little gain. If this is something that really gets your goat, and you use Firefox, perhaps it's worth it to scratch the itch, but otherwise pretty useless currently.
But if you'd otherwise use border-bottom hacks, this is a good reason to stop doing those and just have Chrome users live with the not-terrible default underline until Chrome supports those properties as well.
It'll be nice to simplify underline links tremendously once that becomes implemented in IE/Edge & Safari. The existing methods for avoiding underlines overlapping text descenders like Tufte-CSS's method (https://github.com/edwardtufte/tufte-css) are kinda crazy looking, and also cause the occasional bug with text highlighting.
Do people actually want it? Technological limitation or not, this is how things have been both in print and digital for as long as I can remember. Not to mention handwriting. I still find the non-overlapping underline weird (even if kind of neat).
I think people do; it's popular enough that many people implement it, not just Tufte-CSS, it was one of the first things I added to gwern.net once I saw it demoed, I believe Medium also does it, and no one's complained to me that they really like the overlapping obscuration.
I really like the overlapping underline. Well, really I like the non-broken underline, which happens to overlap with descenders.
If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links. To check if this is the case, I have to mouseover both the link before and after the break, and compare the URLs with my eyes.
I find this a much greater annoyance then I do the overlapping underlining.
>If the underline indicating a link breaks, it looks like there are two adjacent links
Ah that's what that is. I've seen a few like that and wondered why there were two identical links next to each other not thinking it was underline style.
I wonder if the default values for offset and thickness will respect those declared in the font. And also whether sub-pixel values are allowed? I don’t know how many fonts declare these values, but it would be a shame not to use information that provides values tailored to the font in use.
the Times and Arial elements get different underlines.
(Safari and Chrome don't do this, they ignore the font's properties and use an arbitrary underline of their own -- which differs between the two, Chrome's being somewhat thicker.)
* "Always" may not be strictly true, but it's certainly been a long time.
I use it to sync passwords with my phone. I like that I can use a fingerprint to unlock the file on my phone (instead of passphrase). I used to put silly passwords on sites I didn't care about (variants on a common password), but now I systematically generate a random password for all sites because there is no loss of convenience.
The dev tool improvements all seem good. Still no support for inline code edits, which means JS debugging will still be something of a pain, but strengthening Firefox's position as one of the better tools for debugging and prototyping CSS.
> Web socket inspector - In Firefox DevEdition, the Network monitor now has a new “Messages” panel, which appears when you are monitoring a web socket connection (i.e. a 101 response)
Yay, this is great news. Thanks guys! Nice to not have to revert to Chrome for websocket debugging.
I’m surprised though to see new CSS features so prominently in the announcement. Doesn’t this add unwanted additional fragmentation to browser CSS support?
A cosmetic feature like that naively seems better implemented with a library rather than folding it straight into one particular browser, but maybe I’m witnessing the process of text-underline-thickness being cemented in the standard after years of such library-based support?
Does FF use a different cert-store than os? I've frequently had to fiddle with os/app cert-stores to get them to trust. Not just import the cert but the signer too, some times on both sides. I'll likely hit this issue when I upgrade.
It does have it's own cert store. You can test your sites with testssl.sh [1] to see if they validate correctly. It only depends on openssl and bash. If you have your own self signed CA/certs, then you would have to import them into FF.
Turns out this was an issue with Firefox's automatic certificate selection logic. I changed it to ask me every time instead of automatically selecting certs, and once it saves my selection it's back to normal.
I'm not sure how that changed in this release, but it's at least resolvable.
I recently switched to firefox to give it a try. Does anyone else 2x-3x their video playback and notice the audio distortion in FF on mac? I've tried to find some discussion or workarounds for it, but no dice. Hoping that maybe the renderer in this release might help a little.
> Lastly, Core Animation allows us to move rendered content around in the window cheaply. This is great for efficient scrolling. (Our current compositor does not yet make use of this capability, but future work in WebRender will take advantage of it.)
Oh I am so excited about this! Where can I follow along with this development?
This is great news! I tried to switch to firefox to do my (frontend) development in, but I noticed serious slowdowns compared to Chrome with multiple tabs open. Going to give this another try!
My message to the team would be: Please bring back the shader editor in devtools.
In a previous release, we had access to live reloading shader editor, which was really useful in my case, developing real time WebGL apps. It was a truly nice developer feature.
Pinch-to-zooooooooom!!!!!!!!!! Finally. I will definitely try Firefox again for a week or so, and see how it manages, battery-wise, compared to Safari.
I don't see any mention of this. I made some about:config changes before and got pinch zoom working on Firefox 68, but it only zooms 10% for each discrete pinch gesture I make. Did they update it to be better than this?
What's the state of saving & autofilling credit card info? That's the one thing that keeps me going back to chrome (rather than typing in my card by hand).
There are some bugs on this that look quite stale, and they don't seem interested in finishing support, and its disabled by default..
It's not on Chrome's level, but it does have autofill. I hope that is next on their agenda. I love how Chrome prompts for security code and generates based on that.
I switched over to FF recently and just use Chrome for password generation, but looks like I can switch for good.
I am not a Firefox user but know that matching Webkit performance on macOS is going to be very hard.
So just fired a test on my Macbook Air - Safari 13 vs Firefox 70.
Opened top 10 links from techmeme. Both windows in background.
Firefox 70:
Energy use 30-200; CPU 20-25%; Threads 82
Safari 13:
Energy use 0.1-5; CPU 2-5%; Threads 11
If this is to celebrate I can only imagine what the things looked like before this release. Save for Apple fiddling with the energy use numbers (VW style) this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari. Can anyone replicate this for the sake of argument?
> this means that my battery is going to last 4-5x longer with Safari
Well it might last 4-5x longer if you run safari in the background, since that is what you tested. But wouldn't the real test be running both browsers as the active window and comparing those results?
One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.
I would hypothesize that Safari still wins your performance test (if you were to re-test using them both as "active" windows), but probably not as dramatically as in the inactive window test.
> One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero.
I understand this is rare, but I just have a very very hard time understanding what is so hard about this.
Page not visible? Just stop it. Stop the layout engine, stop the javascript VM. If there was a transfer in progress, let it finish, a page might get the callback when it's active again ...
(I know there are some tricky cases, a lot of them, but there just isn't any reason why a browser with 30 tabs should be consuming over 1 % cpu...)
YouTube music video running in another tab. Should it stop render the video and keep playing the audio? Maybe feasible but it should keep receiving both the video and audio data. Stop all of it? Not what I wish to happen.
The javascript engine and rendering engines are what are generally affected by being backgrounded. So yes, generally the media library will continue receiving the combined video/audio stream and not bother rendering the video frames
Chrome does this for a long time now and I don't consider it an issue. You see a frozen version of the last decoded keyframe until the next one is decoded. Elegant solution IMO.
That makes sense, it seems I haven’t looked closely enough to notice.
I couldn’t find info on how often a keyframe is expected from YouTube, but I’m recalling the bad old divx days where you sometimes had a frame per scene and skipping was very slow.
Youtube uses the Media Source Extensions API, which means that JS is responsible for fetching compressed video data and feeding it into the decoder, so it can implement adaptive streaming. Pause JS for more than a few seconds and the video will stop playing.
My understanding is that most video websites like Youtube use Media Source Extensions, a standard which allows javascript to download and assemble video streams in non-standard ways. This work is done by page JS and passed to the browser to decode and render. AFAIK youtube uses this to implement DASH streaming.
Presumably there is no easy way to disable page JS but keep your youtube video downloading.
This is so easy and I, a software developer with no actual experience in that area, know the obvious solution that eludes that hundreds of developers with actual experience in the area. Meanwhile, I take umbrage when my product manager tells me that implementing the next feature will be easy and I'm exaggerating how complicated it is."
if (not_visible) {
suspend_wait_and_stop_consuming_resources
}
I can imagine that it gets massively more complicated. However, as, say, an executive, this probably indicates that you can lean on your sw dev staff to approach the asymptotic ideal that looks so simple if you really care about the goal.
Reminds me an old boss I had who, when I reported a complicated problem, always came up with: "why don't you just write
if (problem) { solution(); }
? Should'nt take long, should it?
Well, the difficult part is not writing an if statement...
> Page not visible? Just stop it. Stop the layout engine, stop the javascript VM. If there was a transfer in progress, let it finish, a page might get the callback when it's active again
Contrats, you just broke the web for anyone doing one of the following:
- listening to music in the browser.
- having a webRTC chat with someone while browsing.
- keep reading another tab while waiting for a page to load.
And I'm probably missing a dozen of other totally legit use-cases.
"- keep reading another tab while waiting for a page to load."
Oh tell me about it. That's just about dead now. I mean, wasn't the point of multi tab browsing that I could do precisely that? Now I load Google Maps on my lethargic internet connection, go do something else for ten minutes, and come back and ... it starts loading when I open. This is on Firefox. Super sad.
> One thing that Safari is incredibly good at (and its' engineers are proud of) is the ability to reduce resource consumption for non-active tabs and windows to nearly zero. This is really good when running on battery because it is a shame to dedicate resources to things that aren't even visible on screen. But this could make the results far more dramatic through your test.
Does it mean that page in background isn't updated in Safari?
what would be interesting is running with state of the art ad blocking in safari (which IIRC they recently changed) and firefox with ublock origin on multiple domains so as to better approximate advertisement load across the web
i posit that ad blocking is actually a net resource saver, probably not at the level of using safari over firefox but certainly over unprotected firefox
Mozilla's priorities are (and have mostly always been) for FF on Windows. It's a gripe that me (and the great majority of FF devs who use Macs and Linux boxes) have been suffering under for years) that those OSs will just never be the highest priority--and the reasons why have much to do with Apple and their Apple-first mentality for their platform. It is only partly a joke that the last users of Firefox will be software developers and their grandmothers. But there are a lot more grannies than devs.
As other people have mentioned, Safari doesn't load/run tabs in the background. What happens when you switch to each of those tabs so you can use the site?
For many years CA wasn't hosted in the window server; it was rendered locally within the app via GL 1.x, which is worse than what Firefox was doing. And window server rendering didn't result in large energy consumption gains until Retina Displays came around.
IIRC Safari achieves this by suspending the processes in background tabs, which could be running inefficient JavaScript (polling for new ads etc). There's no cross-platform way to do this, but I think Mozilla absolutely need to try and find a way to address this. Web sites cannot be trusted to write efficient well-behaved JavaScript and so the burden of taming it falls upon the browser. There is probably some throttling going on, but clearly not enough. Running background JavaScript should be an opt-in permission, not the default.
Firefox can and does aggressively throttle JS in background tabs. However, it's not easy to do this in a way that doesn't break sites. Sometimes background tabs have JS doing actually useful work --- playing audio, running a simulation, receiving notifications, stuff like that.
I don't know what Safari is doing differently to Firefox, and no doubt Firefox can improve here, but when people say "it's easy, just completely stop running JS in background tabs" they have no idea what tradeoffs that entails. (Just as when people said "browsers should just refuse to autoplay videos" had no idea what they were talking about.)
The answer is simply that yes Safari breaks websites, but users are happy to make that tradeoff.
It's common knowledge among web developers that browsers aggressively throttle background tabs so anybody who is designing a website that depends on it is misguided.
I don't hear anybody complaining about Safari being too aggressive with background tabs, I do hear people complaining that Firefox uses too much battery. So I think Firefox should be more aggressive.
Haven't people been complaining that youtube will randomly stop playing in the background on safari? I'm not so sure users are happy about that as you say.
A poll of your friends may not constitute adequate data for making such decisions. We know for sure that techie-people and friends-of-techie-people are qualitatively different to the mass market.
These tradeoffs may also be different for different browsers. E.g. if you're Apple, perhaps breaking Web sites isn't a big deal since on iOS Safari is entrenched by fiat, and if users switch from Web apps to native apps, so much the better for Apple. For Mozilla that calculation works out differently.
Generally speaking "site X breaks in Firefox, works in Chrome" is a good way for Mozilla to lose market share.
On Windows I've been testing the new MS Edge because I've noticed my laptop has significantly higher CPU usage running FF. The reduced battery life is one thing, a hot laptop is another. Currently the new Edge is not as well optimized as the original, but there's more to come on that front.
I've been using FF since it was in beta, never left but I'm starting to come around to the reality that native browsers are best optimized for the device. While there's no real native browser to leverage on desktop Linux, on macOS/Windows, native may be the best way to go for most people. This is how break down browsers to friends and family.
Google Chrome- optimized for Google's needs and profit margin.
Microsoft Edge- optimized for your device, if running Windows.
Apple Safari- optimized for your device, if running macOS.
Mozilla Firefox- optimized for the user. Certainly a noble goal, but I increasingly have a "mobile" goal and that trend isn't slowing for anyone.
Yes, I also observe much more power drawn even on a single page (especially if it contains animations) opened in Firefox vs any other browser, and on Windows, IE is significantly less power hungry.
I've also checked this newest version, 70 on Windows and my measurement of the power use give practically identical results to the measurements I've done almost two years ago.
I see that the power drain comes from the browser's own code doing something unnecessary and as far as I see it doesn't even appear to platform dependent.
It's surely possible to optimize that and it's obviously not their priority.
If you would share any of your findings, I'd be interested to see that.
From what I've read, Mozilla can't really optimize rendering to the level of Safari & Edge. I found this article[0] on WebRender to be very interesting on this front. The author noted-
"Note: Painting and compositing is where browser rendering engines are the most different from each other. Single-platform browsers (Edge and Safari) work a bit differently than multi-platform browsers (Firefox and Chrome) do."
I love Firefox quite a bit, every detail, the way it scrolls with smooth scrolling off, the dedicated search bar for switching DuckDuckGo bangs, the container support. The dedicated search bar is a huge one, I can't imagine why no one else at least offers that, as a feature it can't cause that much maintenance headache. I definitely love FF as much as anyone here but I'm not one who argues that Gecko is necessary for a standards-based web, I'm not convinced by the argument. Webkit can be forked again and it has a significant userbase to act as a counterweight to Blink. It's increasingly difficult at this point to convince myself that native browsers don't make the most sense.
My notebook happens to have a fan calibrated to turn on when the CPU gets "too hot" where the point is above of what is consumed by IE to show the pages with more videos, so I actually hear the power consumption of Firefox and I simply don't hear it for the same page when opened in IE.
So for me is simply: open some page, hear the fan for as long as the page remains open. Do the same with IE, silence.
BTW I otherwise haven't IE used for daily browsing, but I did a lot of tests with the same pages to see that it's not an accident and that IE does show the same content, but with less power used.
For somebody with a different computer: find any web page with more media playing on the page (you should see the videos playing or pictures "animating"), open the task manager (this is a Windows example) then switch to the graph view and compare the browsers while looking at the graph view. The task manager area "under the curve" reflects the power used -- the more CPU used for a given amount of time -- the more power used. In my observations the area drawn by Firefox is more that twice as big as the one by IE.
That's what drains the battery faster: taking more CPU to keep the "animations" on the page. Moreover Firefox has some consumption created by some of its background tasks even when the pages aren't animated, but the animations are really wasting a lot of power.
From my look at the behavior, having some experience in evaluating the performance of the software, and spending some time trying to figure out what's happening there, my impression is that the source of that power drain is in the Firefox code which is not platform specific which explains why they have problems on every platforms with that.
I've concluded they simply never actively tried to minimize overall CPU and GPU use (both will use more power unless somebody measures and tries to improve the code): even when they did move some pieces of processing to the GPU, their motivation was speeding up what's visible, actively minimizing the power used was simply not the part of their process.
You can also search their Bugzilla to see how they handle the problems with the CPU, GPU use and the power drain. This can be a part of the workflow, measuring that at least for every release and acting to fix the issues, but I just don't see that anywhere.
That's essentially how I've been A:B testing as well. I was hoping you had some software that measured power draw and tracked it. Much like the Windows 10 power usage info. A laptop fan is a pretty good arbiter.
Agreed though, it's very noticeable and I never did feel it until I started using a laptop more than a desktop. I'm also finding bugs in the iOS version of Firefox which is probably going to be the last straw, not only does it freeze often, my bookmarks are no longer there and they were synced from my Firefox account. I'm likely to migrate to native browsers for whichever platform I'm on at that time. As you said in their own process they're focused on feature development but not efficiency. Overall, I'm losing faith that Mozilla has the resources to effectively manage all of this.
I hate to followup with a 2nd response but I wanted to add, it really would be a poor priority anyway because they'll never be able to beat Apple or MS at optimizing a browser for their OS.
My advice to Mozilla would be to continue on the customizability and privacy route, and get Firefox on iOS in better shape. It's been freezing on me for as long as I can remember using it. Very buggy, and has played a significant role in losing some confidence in Mozilla.
This message and all of my messages in this thread posted from Microsoft Edge 78.0.276.20 (Official build) beta (64-bit).
I just can't imagine Firefox will ever be performant as Safari. One is written for a single platform developed at the same company that develops the hardware and OS (I'm not trying to belittle the Safari team--it's kind of amazing what they do). The other is developed separately, must equally support at least 2 other OSes and has an expectation for supporting older setups.
My problem is that Safari won't work for me as a daily driver so it's not an option. It seems too aggressive in memory management and in reloading.
So I'm very happy to see Firefox improve performance over Firefox-v1.
I didn't say it didn't run on other OSes. But the big ones are mostly iOS and it shows in the targeting of the development. Blink is what's on most (non-gecko/servo) browsers people use now (chrome, chromium, Opera, the new Edge browser, etc).
> I'd actually guess that WebKit runs on more platforms than Blink does…
I'd say they're probably at parity, if not a small edge given to Blink since an entire OS is built around it. Which would be the only exclusive case of the two I can think of.
I'm actually curious which WebKit browser you're using. GNOME Web?
Interesting. You're one of the few people I know on Linux not using Chrome/Chromium or Firefox (or one of it's derivatives). And the others I know mostly use Konqueror.
I never said it was Mac only. I said it's development now was mostly focused on iOS browsers. You can obviously use GNOME Web and the like, but most big browsers (especially cross-platform) that aren't Gecko-based are Blink-based (Chrome/Chromium, Opera, Edge beta)
I never said it wasn't cross platform. I said it's development and use was pretty exclusive to iOS these days; outside of less common browsers like GNOME Web.
WebKit was based off KHTML. It hasn't been the same engine for 17 years (though they do occasionally share code) and never used the same jS VM.
Nice bit of obscure knowledge that adds nothing to the conversation. Unless your argument is that KHTML and WebKit are the equivalent to Blink because of a shared ancestry; in which case you're arguing something I never claimed.
I just can't imagine Firefox will ever be performant as Safari.
Firefox has (for now at least) a huge leg up in terms of content blockers. IDK if that's enough to even out the energy consumption and performance, but it can't hurt.
I know Firefox is the one browser who isn't switching to the newer, more restrictive method of content blocking, but wasn't the (purported) motivation for Safari's change performance?
For my use, I keep many many tabs and windows open. Most of the efficiency gains I see are from handling that better. I don't use desktop Safari heavily. I tend to keep it as the thing I use when I suspect adblockers are messing up content (it's easier than disabling adblock). On my iPhone I do use an adblocker and haven't noticed problems. When I do browse the web without an adblocker I quickly recoil and think, "do people really live like this??"
wasn't the (purported) motivation for Safari's change performance?
Maybe, but what kind of performance hit will letting all the ads and nonsense through be? I probably could aim to find a trusty ad blocker for Safari, keeping in mind that Apple has left the disingenuously named uBlock up in their extension store. Or I could just stick with uBlock Origin and a browser that works with it.
I've got ~2000 tabs open in Firefox right now and don't feel like performance or battery life is a problem. I use 1Blocker on iOS, but it's clunkier, less effective, and more expensive than uBlock Origin (and I still get tons of in-app ads). That's not something I'm in any hurry to bring over to the desktop.
I can't speak to actual performance impact. I saw people flame Safari, then Chrome about the change. I was waiting to see how everything settled out for my own use case and switch browsers as needed.
> (and I still get tons of in-app ads)
I'm pretty sure that's expected. 1Blocker's FAQ says it won't work with most third party iOS apps like Chrome.
I'm sure usage varies and I'm glad Firefox works well for you. I have Firefox 70 hidden with about 7 windows and 40 tabs (total) and Activity Monitor points to it as the highest energy suck bouncing between 15-20 of whatever units this measures--in line with CPU usage. I only installed uBlock Origin last night for Firefox. I use it mostly for work stuff which generally doesn't have ads. Chrome, where I'm typing this is about 1/3 to 1/2 the usage (and it's not hidden).
I was hoping for more of an improvement from Firefox. Historically, using Chrome or Safari will get me literally hours longer between charging.
Firefox users should take a look at the "Auto Tab Discard"[0] extension. It offloads inactive tabs, saving CPU and RAM, (similar to how Safari works).
It doesn't work quite as transparently (or effectively) as Safari's equivalent functionality, but it does make a noticeable difference.
It's worked very well for me.
I had to stop using Firefox 70 Dev Edition because it made my 2015 Mac run out of memory. Switching back to regular 69 fixed the issue, but I hope they have corrected it by now...
Firefox + Mozilla are awesome. I still have a Mozilla 1.0 t-shirt from the first release party!
I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.
However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).
They make 94% of their revenue via bundling and distribution deals with companies like Google.
So to say that Firefox doesn't really have ads I think it is a bit disingenuous. They don't have ads directly but they benefit directly from the ecosystem.
Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist.
Not saying this to be rude or call you guys out. I think we need an honest discussion on this issue.
Across the industry, we see users just outright refusing to pay for products because they're accustomed to 'free' being the norm.
News, social media, browsers, etc.
If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else.
If Facebook tried to charge users they would revolt.
Same thing for browsers.
Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.
I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).
> Today, the majority of Mozilla Corporation revenue is generated from global browser search partnerships, including the deal negotiated with Google in 2017 following Mozilla’s termination of its search agreement with Yahoo/Oath which required ongoing payments to Mozilla that remain the subject of litigation.
> In CY 2017 Mozilla Corporation generated $542 Million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $506 Million in CY 2016.
My understanding of the donations is that they don't go towards supporting firefox development because of how the company/non-profit is structured... is this wrong?
Last time it was brought up, this was the conclusion.
And it is not necessarily wrong but if I just want to donate more to good causes then I already have two very good candidates ready that I would be happy to donate more to.
The reason I want to donate to Mozilla would be to make sure it can continue development even of Google should stop paying them.
I have a small hope that their VPN project might be able to funnel money back to developments, and I also think there's some kind of deal with scroll.
If anyone from Mozilla reads this: I'm all for donations (as long as they go towards the product we depend on) or paid products that can work as cash cows.
Just make sure it is optional and don't lie or be sneaky about it and I should be happy
> Without Google's ad business Firefox wouldn't exist
Really? My recollection of events 15 years ago is a little hazy, but wasnt FF a browser-only release of Mozilla, itself Netscape which has been around as long as time itself (~25 years?)
What are we talking about here? There was very definitely a push around 2003 to get FF adopted en masse, and I guess Google probably were a big factor in this ...
Bit of a stretch to say FF wouldn’t have existed otherwise though. There was very definitely some dissatisfaction across the board with IE dominance and its not hard to imagine something like FF being inevitable.
It really isn’t inconceivable that they wouldn’t have got funding from somewhere else. It was a marketing opportunity for Google, them being the David to Microsoft’s Goliath. Remember that whole ”don’t be evil” thing? Turns out it was jusy a ruse to be abandoned once the market had consolidated.
it's not inconceivable is a common enough phrase. You could say this might be more parsimoniously expressed as "it is conceivable", but the colloquial phrasing intones that the premise proceeds specifically from the supposition that it may be inconceivable.
There is also an argument that back in the day Firefox saved Google rather than the other way around.
Why? Because when Microsoft had 90% browser share, gained through tying IE directly into Windows, there was a very real chance that they could have adapted IE so that it was harder to use Google than a default MS Bing search engine.
Having a better, cross-platform alternative to IE allowed Google to stay in the game and make use of FF's cutting edge features.
Remember the old Microsoft was quite happy to cripple Windows to kill it's competitors. For example "Windows ain't done until WordPerfect won't run" and the weird "errors" you saw if you tried running Windows on top of DR DOS.
I'm not sure that adds up. When Bing was introduced in mid-2009, IE had about 60% of the market, and it was dropping fast as Chrome's popularity exploded [1].
I believe that Microsoft’s interest in Google’s business predates the launch of Bing. You can replace the brand name “Bing” with “some kind of search/advertising/internet gateway” business.
Remember Microsoft used to be a very competitive outfit with a history of using their dominance of desktop OSs to enter new markets.
It’s easy to forget that Microsoft of old were able to keep bankrolling loss leaders to “cut off the oxygen”[1] of any market that they saw as threatening Windows.
I think you’d find most of the court proceedings under Novell vs Microsoft.
If memory serves me correctly Novell believed in their case enough to take it to the US Supreme Court but were not given leave to proceed further. No reason/justification was given for that.
I wasn't necessarily talking about the origin but the current state. But to answer your question I believe AOL gave FF about $5M USD to get started off...
Yeah, I have to ask what percentage of Firefox developers are paid for by Google's money?
I was somehow under the impression that Firefox was developed mostly by volunteers, and so Firefox development would be largely unaffected if Google was out of the picture.
My memory is also that FF was originally a decoupled version of Netscape and I think they also simplified the code base a lot back then to remove bloat. I remember a motivation being that Netscape was just too slow and big and couldn't compete with Internet Explorer very well.
I am not sure it's fair to say that Mozilla "supports ads" by making Google the default search engine in exchange for a bunch of funding. It's a default, you can change it, they need money, I'm glad they took it.
I'm sure that even if it didn't enable Firefox's existence I am sure it made the developer's lives a lot better and increased the number of research projects they could afford to do.
Edit: But the point that Google makes money from ads and so Mozilla would have less funding without Google making money from ads is I guess true. I think Google just wanted to push an alternative to IE. I don't mind ads existing (well, I get that they're a necessary evil) but tracking is something I very much mind.
Google's payments are not charity. FF has users and could have routed traffic generated by them to the highest bidder. It just happened that the highest bidder is Google. And they do it for profit: ad revenue generated by those users likely significantly surpasses traffic acquisition cost.
OP overstated his case, but the fact is that the Mozilla Foundation does derive the majority of its revenue from deals with advertising based companies. Whether or not it would exist (or if it existed, in what form?) without these deals is a critical but unanswered question. Critical in the sense that it goes to the heart of whether we can be both ad-free and have free stuff like Firefox.
> I've recently seen a ton of FF fans state that the reason they love Firefox is that it doesn't have ads or track you and preserves your privacy.
> However, Firefox wouldn't exist without Google and (to a lesser extent, Google Chrome).
These are unrelated issues, though. A connection, financial or otherwise, to Google, does not mean that users aren't getting a browser that prioritizes privacy.
Oh, please. You make it sound like Mozilla is equivalent to Facebook. Is that a smear campaign ?
You can donate to the Mozilla foundation. Have you ? Have you convinced your company or your friends to do so ?
Because that's a better alternative than outright singling Mozilla out for their ties to Google. Which last time I checked didn't make the user the product of Google like Chrome or Android does.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation (a subsidiary of the Foundation). Money donated towards the Foundation doesn't go towards Firefox development. The Corporation has it's own income sources (including money from Google), and actually a lot of money from the Corporation ends up going to the Foundation, to further the mission of "Making web free".
Mozilla fired their CEO, the founder of JS, Brendan Eich, because he made a donation 10 years before to a Christian charity.
Many SV people are missing the scope and scale of the impact of having OSS charities engaging in the political campaign – it is renouncing all donations from the other side. It is not their role. Every year I have thousands of dollars that I try to affect to OSS charities, but I’m yet to find a single one that is tolerant of everyone, _including the supposedly dominant group_ . But tolerance is too much to ask, even from Mozilla.
I don't think you are ever going to find such a charity. The Red Cross maybe ? (then again, when donating blood, and depending on the country, you have laws in place that prevent some people to donate if they are transgender for instance).
He gave money to a political campaign attempting to limit the right to marry to heterosexual couples. A little different from any old "Christian charity".
True Christian charities probably engage in humanitarian work, like the Red Cross. Political advocacy isn't charity work. Even if you think its effectually charitable, to claim there is no difference between charity work and political advocacy would be laughable coming from a 9th grade student
Mozilla faced tremendous pressure from the media, Mitchell had no choice but to let him go. The public went on a witch hunt. It's your peers who did this, not Mozilla's chairman.
That seems about right, except for Mitchell's involvement. As I remember it, it was more Brendan's call than Mitchell's. She did not ask for his resignation. At least from what I heard, he decided that the backlash was doing too much damage to Mozilla and stepped down.
And it's natural to assume that things match your preexisting biases, as well.
All I will say is that I do have quite a bit more to go on than public announcements. I have worked for Mozilla for a long time, including during that event (but not the original uproar over prop 8 donations) and was familiar with the people involved, and am basing my opinions on body language and insider knowledge. But much of that is not mine to share, and there's no reason for people to believe a rando like me anyway, so I'd rather not get into details. It would just lead to accusations of spin or insincerity (justifiably so; you have no reason to trust me.)
A donation to a Christian charity would have been fine. There are thousands of them in the US and around the world.
No, Eich specifically made a donation to a political campaign for CA's Prop 8 that used blood-libel-level lies to cast homosexuals as pedophiles and sexual predators and use that as a justification to deny them the right to marry.
And this was the state of the Prop 8 campaign at the time he made the donation. He knew what they were about, and he donated to them anyway.
Please note that Prop 8 was actually supported by voters. So if supporting Prop 8 is reason for firing, more than half of voters of California should lose their jobs.
I think that's unfair, and suspect that witch hunt campaign was probably initiated because of some kind of power games inside Mozilla.
Also, please make note that there is zero evidence of any LBGT Mozilla employee was discriminated by Brendan Eich or even evidences of him discussing his stance on homosexual marriages at work.
He was literally bullied and fired for his private life facts: fact that he privately supported same political stance than majority of California's voters.
Please note that Prop 8 supporters spent many tens of millions of dollars lying about gays to get people to vote for Prop 8.
They also lied about what the impact of Prop 8 would be.
Also note that one of the biggest such spenders, the Mormon Church, formally apologized for its role in the Prop 8 campaign after they got to be in the receiving end of the lies during Romney's first presidential campaign.
Also, I'm living in Russia, and there is common knowledge that we have a lot of problems with democratic procedures here. I don't say that someone could not be fired for his voting or donating for opposition here, it definitely can happen. But it will probably cause media scandal, not media support
So Mozilla thinks that laws proposed to voters are so immoral that we should purge people over them.
“He had it coming to him”, they’ll say, justifying the purge, for defending that a child need two parents of different sex because kids are enriched by both viewpoints, which is as perfectly valid as an opinion as saying that speech should be censored aggressively when not agreeing with other viewpoints. Both are opinionated opinions. Only one is not democratic. And that’s a trend across a specific sprout of unicorns and SV companies.
The Silicon Valley TV show even realized it and made an episode about the hero outing a “gay Christian”, until the episode turns into understanding that the problem isn’t that he outed a gay, but a Christian, which is something that apparently the Silicon Valley (and the HQ of Mozilla in Australia for that matters), aren’t tolerant with.
I’m for democracy. Mozilla isn’t supporting equal democracy... for Christians. In my opinion it is more complex than that, Mozilla probably have little opinions about this problem but buckles under specific powerful group pressures and agrees to implement their purge, without due process and fair trial. Instead it’s replaced with “He had it coming”, which reminds me of the darkest ages of the last century. Due process for every accusation is an essential pillar of democracy, and Mozilla hasn’t amended it manners to support this principle.
> So Mozilla thinks that laws proposed to voters are so immoral that we should purge people over them.
He wasn't purged by Mozilla, he quit. He did quit because of the pressure put on him because of his donation but the idea that he was purged by Mozilla is at least an exaggeration if not an outright lie.
> “He had it coming to him”, they’ll say, justifying the purge, for defending that a child need two parents of different sex because kids are enriched by both viewpoints, which is as perfectly valid as an opinion as saying that speech should be censored aggressively when not agreeing with other viewpoints.
Bad ideas should be purged. Don't you agree with that?
> I’m for democracy. Mozilla isn’t supporting equal democracy... for Christians.
How so?
> In my opinion it is more complex than that, Mozilla probably have little opinions about this problem but buckles under specific powerful group pressures and agrees to implement their purge, without due process and fair trial.
The man quit... should have Mozilla rejected his resignation and forced him to participate in some kind of "due process"? What do you have in mind for this process?
I’m not convinced this is true. Surveillance/Market insight/whatever is just too lucrative.
There’s plenty of examples of company’s that make a living by charging for a service but for a company like facebook, for example, excluding users runs counter to their whole business model.
“Charging” customers is hassle. If you can find a way to monetise without all that icky hassle, you will.
> I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).
Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for?
I'm willing to bet that a vast majority of HN users are still using a @gmail.com email address. And I'm actually in that super small minority that pays for services such as FastMail, Dropbox, Newsblur, 1Password, or YouTube (premium). I also donated to Mozilla among others.
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The problem is that browsers should be part of the "commons", just like roads, since browsers are indespensible platforms in this day and age.
Are your taxes funding browsers? If no, then are you suggesting that only the privileged should have access to a good, modern browser?
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Also products like Firefox are very unlike other products, because it's open source, both by license and by how it is developed. If Mozilla dies due to Google pulling the plug on their deal, Firefox is still open source and with enough resources somebody else can pick up its development.
To wit Thunderbird may still live under the Mozilla Foundation, but it is community driven, with donations from individuals being its primary source of funding. And it is moving along. Not as fast and it isn't as polished as its users would want, but it lives.
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I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models that just piggyback on top of Chromium and are thus in no way a threat to Chrome's monopoly.
> Out of curiosity, what services and products are you paying for?
To be fair you're asking the wrong person. I pay for a ton of products. I pay for IntelliJ which I think is $150 per year. HubSpot which will probably get $1k from me... I pay for Gmail... I think it's $4 per user per month? TeamCity, CircleCI ... NYTimes (yeah, I actually pay).
... but I do think you're right here.
I'm actually legitimately curious to understand this issue.
I want to focus my product, Polar, on being a premium document management platform for people VERY serious about research:
... I want to understand more about this mindset though. I think you can make a go at things if you have a VERY premium product focused on a tight niche (at least initially).
> both by license and by how it is developed.
I'd like to argue that this is false. The argument behind Open Source is that it's developed by the community and that by being open there is some sort of community development behind it.
However, that's not what we see from Open Source outside of enterpise. 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers.
> I'd rather use Mozilla's Firefox, instead of products with obscure VC-backed business models
I mean this is sort of a logical fallacy. Just because something is based on a company doesn't mean they are trying to do something inherently wrong.
> 99% of Mozilla's development comes from paid Mozilla engineers.
While this is by and large true, Mozilla does still have a pretty solid base of volunteer contributors. It's nowhere close to what it used to be back in the day when more than half the development was done by volunteers. But there are still serious contributions coming from volunteers every day, and as a long-time employee, it still has a major impact on the feel of Mozilla development work. You won't be ignored or shut down because you're not being paid, if you have an idea for a different way of doing things that works better, it'll be accepted and supported even if it incurs ongoing maintenance, etc. (Well, assuming people decide it's worth the ongoing overhead, of course; I'm just saying that it's common in other supposedly open development organizations to only accept isolated improvements that make core developers' lives easier.)
I do miss the days when external contributors were a much bigger part. It's tough when people need to eat, and the system complexity has risen, making it harder to get started in many areas.
Interesting, back in the day, I believe you were supposed to pay for Netscape. That changed once the Mozilla Foundation was started and Netscape's codebase was open sourced.
Netscape was "free for educational use" and anyone could download it free of charge. According to one old hand at Netscape (JWZ? Eich?) they checked their server logs for which corporate IPs downloaded it most often and had their sales team contact the freeloading companies. I think they were also planning to sell licenses to ISPs and modem vendors for use as pack-in software.
Then MS released IE for free, no strings attached, and killed their business model overnight.
Yes, you are correct. IE was "built" into Windows, and Microsoft strong armed OEM's to not pre-installing it for fear of losing a Windows License. Downloading Netscape was a lot different when most people had only 56k Modems as their connection. Most people didn't bother and just stuck with the pre-installed IE.
Hence why I like Brave. Their model is very solid and seems a lot more sustainable than depending on Google as their overlord. Ads are voluntary, displayed as a system notification and vetted by Brave. Watch ads, you get tokens which pay publishers. If you don't want ads, you can buy tokens. If you don't want to buy tokens, you still won't see ads. And except for the first offer there is no nag screen either.
I think Firefox is awesome and it is really bad if we continue the Chrome/blink hegemony, but I can't stand for their decision to not block all ads instead of just trackers, especially on phones. The modern web without a 'real' adblocker is borderline unusable and Firefox prioritizing publishers over users doesn't sit well with me.
Blocking ads by default would require a judgement that ads and ad-supported Web sites are bad by default. That is a much more extreme and less supportable position than Mozilla's position that tracking is bad by default. People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension (including on Android, unlike Chrome).
Brave's fine, but if you're worried about Google/Chrome hegemony you'd better not use it, because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony.
> People who want to block all ads can opt into that with a Firefox ad-blocking extension
Except on iOS, where you have to finagle with VPN-based blockers
> because as a Chromium browser it's a part of that hegemony
I'm well aware. I'd rather use (and recommend to less techy people) Firefox, but I can't with their current stance. People want/need adblocking but they also want sync. If Firefox had an ad-blocking toggle that was off by default that'd be fine by me.
Just to clarify, Brave blocks tracking not ads, and so does what @roca advocates — but we have always done it by default, and we block more tracking than Firefox belatedly does. What’s more, we include an optional way to support your favorite sites and channels. See https://batgrowth.com/ for results so far.
I’m curious what ads you want to block that effective tracking protection does not block as an effect of blocking scripts that both track and (via generated scripts) place ads. Thanks.
> Their model is very solid and seems a lot more sustainable than depending on Google as their overlord
Brave also depends on Google as their overlord, it's just that the contribution is made in code instead of dollars. There's no evidence Brave could survive if Google changed that deal, whereas Firefox has already spent years independent from them.
Lots of browsers use chromium, now including Microsoft. It’s all open source apart from Widevine, so the “deal” you must mean is Google paying for most of the engineers. With the new Microsoft Edge out, this deal is less of a risk for Brave or any small chromium-based Browser, but the risk was always low.
It is misleading to equate open source with paid search deals of the kind Mozilla has with Google. Brave has no such deal and is not likely to get one without leverage via market share or other scale advantages.
> If you charge for a news site the users will revolt and go somewhere else. (...) Yet a large percentage of these same users will get angry and yell that they're privacy is being sold.
I'd contest that these are largely the same users.
In any case, I support the overall message: it'd be good if Mozilla found additional ways to finance their work, and I'm happy they're actively looking for them.
> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).
There is a very simple way to achieve this. Sell your product for money, and provide no other option. The customer gives you money and you give them use of your product. Win-win.
> I'd rather things be direct. I'd rather we live in a world where customers paid directly for the product and I was the customer (not the product).
You don't have that choice - what happens is you pay and become the product. Cable TV used to be ad-free, since you paid for it, then they figured out they can make more money selling ads. There are ads on the buses and subways, even though you have to pay for tickets. Windows 10 shows you ads and spies on you, yet you have to pay for it. You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads. You pay for a movie ticket, yet have to sit through 20 minutes of ads before the movie starts.
> You pay for a TV, yet 'smart' features get included, that spy on you and show you ads.
I've heard about this, but what exactly does this mean? I have a smart TV, but I never see ads. Supposedly it's spying on me, but how is it spying on me any more than the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions I already pay for?
This is not meant to sound defensive - I do believe it's too good to be true that my TV is as wonderful as I think it is. I'm just trying to understand what is so bad about it?
Many new "smart" TVs have "ACR" that sends info about what you're watching (regardless of whether on netflix or hulu or a set-top-box) to the TV manufacturer. [1]
Pro-Tip: At least for Samsung TVs you can un-accept the privacy-policy to disable this. This will also disable Netflix and all "smart" features but that's..exactly what I want in a TV. Alternatively just don't give the TV network access, but you may want to do a yearly software-update.
Some smart TVs show ads outright, most of them phone home on the regular with fingerprints of whatever's on screen.
If you need any proof that they profit off of this, "dumb" equivalents of various models, if they exist at all, tend to be significantly more expensive.
In addition to the "ACR" issue mentioned, smart TVs have been caught throwing up pop-up ads anytime a person changes volume (including over movies/games) and scanning attached media (laptops, hard drives, USB sticks) and sending lists of all accessible files and folders back to the manufacture. Samsung in particular has been pretty shitty with ads and spying.
Don't forget product placement or native advertising , so that you're being shown advertising directly in the movies or content that you're already consuming. It's turtles all the way down.
I remember the first time I saw an ad on the in-flight entertainment system on a plane. (I think it might have been United, but they all do it now...) This and the shilling for their special miles-reward credit card, while you're literally captive (in a tube in the air), having paid to be there, is pretty much the epitome of hypercapitalism-gone-wrong today.
I wonder how my younger self from twenty years ago would have responded to me now: I'd prefer to PAY money for software once rather than being suckled by subscriptions, annoyed by ads, frazzled by fingerprinting, or prickled by privacy problems. Give me a nice over-sized box to stick on my desk for fifty bucks and some clean, well-developed software.
Of course in the meantime Firefox and Brave are doing well enough. I still feel as though I'm being towed along and probably the browser makers feel similarly.
I actually prefer to rent software, since I don't have to pay a huge amount for software that I will only use occasionally (hello Photoshop), and I know the developers will have the resources to improve their products.
I recently tried Firefox again and I liked a lot. Only drawback for me at the moment is the lack of hardware video decoding on Linux. I hope it arrives soon.
How can I, as a mere user, support Mozilla (except spreading the word)? Is it still true that their main source of income is a search agreement with Google?
Switching to CoreAnimation is very, very nice - however, this still doesn't feel quite at home on macOS because of a bug that's pretty old at this point.
Overflow/rubberband scrolling needs to be added here, because that is how scrolling is supposed to work on macOS. If you don't have it, you feel very alien. I'm not entirely sure why this isn't fixed after all these years, especially since Chrome managed to do it - it's not like an open source implementation doesn't exist at this point to crib the math from.
Yeah... Firefox is probably the biggest example of why you shouldn't reinvent the wheel in terms of cross-platform GUI. It just looks and feels so out of place, whether it's macOS or some niche setup like running it under KDE. If you're in Gnome or Windows it can look fine, but I still question much of the iconography and general layout.
Any time you bring it up, though, you get batted away and beaten over the head with privacy, browser monoculture, or open source arguments. It's really frustrating; if you want open source to succeed, you have to also want it to compete on the same level.
It's like expecting people to eat vegan food when you call it the same as the non-vegan option... and then they don't want to, because it tastes nothing like what they expect.
In fact (I can't believe I'm saying this) I almost wish they were a Qt shell.
Every browser reimplements the native platform widgets. Even Safari! You have to, because the native platform widgets never support all the features a browser needs (CSS styling, JS event interception, etc etc).
Unfortunately, copying the look and feel of the native platform is an endless treadmill as those platforms evolve, and for obvious reasons Safari is always going to be better at keeping up with that on Mac than Firefox is.
Dude, I know - read my original comment, I'm clearly aware that Chrome had to implement their side of things.
Firefox goes out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in. Chrome, for all their faults, tries very hard to emulate the proper look/feel/functionality.
AFAIK Firefox does not "go out of their way to draw controls that don't fit in". On Mac and other platforms, the policy is that the controls look and feel like their native counterparts (unless overidden by Web authors) ... unless it's changed since I left Mozilla, and I don't think it has. In some cases, however, that has not been achieved. I haven't had a Mac for long time so I can't speak to the details of what works and what doesn't.
FWIW I use Linux and on Linux, Chrome makes no attempt at all to use the native platform theme, while Firefox does a pretty good job.
I will, however, apologize for saying they "go out of their way". I fired that bit of text off without thinking, but it's needlessly assuming (and likely outright wrong) on my part. Thanks for the correction.
On Windows and Linux, Firefox draws native-like (win32 or gtk) controls. On Windows (possibly Linux), Chrome draws custom controls (for <button>, sliders, and right-click menus).
Firefox on iOS is Webkit wrapped in a Firefox UI shell. It does not use Gecko, and so is very different from desktop and Android Firefox, much more like Safari actually.
And the fullscreen mode of Firefox doesn't seem to be very well integrated to me. It's the only feature that is still superior with Chrome. I wish there was a way to maximise screen space used by the page displayed itself.
Mozilla won't quit - I love it. We need a third browser engine in the game and that should be sufficient as I've determined arbitrarily. There should be an open source browser that's a little more amateur and "democratically developed" than the big ones. Although browsers are approaching OSs in terms of complexity (or already there). Tried switching back to FF a while back but was still not as smooth as Chrome. I'll give it another shot. Good job, Mozilla!
How does Firefox Lockwise compare to 1Password and how does the ad/tracking protection compare to using Chrome with uBlock Origin?
I do like how Firefox you can set to never auto play audio or video but the chrome flag does not seem to prevent that. Haven't really given Firefox a chance in easier and am pretty married to Chrome (especially with switching profiles between work, personal that works very well).
Settings -> Click "Settings" under network settings (bottom of "General" section) -> Check "Enable DNS over HTTPS" -> Change provider (if you want a different one).
I’m a little surprised about the two word display specifiers (e.g. display: inline flex). Specifically they say they are the only browser to support it but I feel like I saw this somewhere (maybe in a nightly release of some browser) at least two years ago.
Still has serious bugs with certificates that I don't think will ever be fixed.
On Mac, loading all the appropriate DoD certs and trying to log into OWA causes an unrecoverable hang.
Loading only DOD ID SW CA-37 will allow login to numerous sites. However, after closing those tabs, all other sites time out while "Performing a TLS handshake..."
Lastly, quitting Firefox after a PIV/CAC login causes an unrecoverable hang.
Have you filed a bug report on their bugzilla? Is there a way they can test test certs? Are there public facing websites or are these all going to be internal/government?
I just had f.lux turn on night mode after upgrading. Firefox 70 does not handle this well. Some elements on most sites (including HN) randomly flash in and out of nigh mode colors.
Excuse my ignorance. What does Firefox have to do with f.lux? I thought f.lux was a separate package that tinted colors on a level lower than the applications themselves?
I thought so too, but the only time I've had this issue is after upgrading Firefox today. It's not happening anymore, so I'll just chalk it up to a weird one-off for now.
Please excuse my ignorance, but why is this being published from "hacks.mozilla.org"? Is that just the name of their technical blog? It sounds like a platform that's more clandestine / unofficial to be used to announce a public release.
I'v been constantly trying to switch to FF from Chrome to help Firefox market share a little bit. However there are always some issues which makes me switch back to Chrome.
Currently I'm on Firefox for over the month and I did document those things that bugs me. To be fair I should create such list for Chrome too, but I don't get that moment of frustration that often.
Here's the list for Firefox. After some items I thought it would be better to write down dates instead of sequence numbers.
Tldr: The most common issue is with unresponsive tabs which cannot be reloaded/refreshed and leads to re-typing search term / closing, reopening tab / killing firefox.
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1. Searching google.. loading.. it is faster to open chrome then, try to copy twice the URL (which doesn't copy/ paster), type in the search term manually and process seach results than wait them appar on firefox. Reopening tab helps on FF tho.
2. Sometimes opening a url where server is cold, I get blank page after waiting. Refresh wont help.
3. CTRL + F sometimes won't work until deleting some chars. Chrome handles this without issues.
4. Opening site in new tab - Firefox hangs. Cannot switch to other tabs, cannot close tab. End task via taskmgr helps.
5. Opening site in some tab - Firefox shows loading, loading, loading. Only closing tab, opening new one helps - site loads instantly.
6. Cannot open link in Dynamcis 365 grid.
2019-09-25: 5. repeats itself. Oh, dumb me, I was in a debugger, hitting a breakpoint.
2019-10-01: Callstack in a huge javascript file? Firefox just can't cope that. It just hangs. Must wait very long
2019-10-01: Scrolling javascript file in debugger. Just empty window, no text rendered. Scrolling here and there or clicking fixes it.
2019-10-01: Javascript debugging frustrating. When I want reload page, I have continue debugger. Now it feels like firefox hangs and I have to close debug tools to refresh my page. Maybe patience could help here.
2019-10-07: Opening page.. loading... opening other page from same domain works. Refresh on first page - still loading. Close tab, open new one - works.
2019-10-07: Looks like refresh is just broken. Long running tab is loading. Loading.. loading... luckily it did load after all, well at least I thought so, because page kinda rendered. Only that it wasn't working. And then I was back to the grey "Loading" page. The issue for me here is that I can't force to reload the URL in URL bar.
2019-10-11: Opening webpage from URL. Great, site doesn't open. F5 doesn't help. Cannot switch to different tabs. Thank you for closing many windows and tabs. Closing with X doesn't work. After killing FF with task manager, you restore your session - excellent. And now no problem opening that page. Doh.
2019-10-13: Searching something via url bar... well google never opens and F5 doesn't help. And pressing ENTER doesn't help. Re-searching on new tab works.
2019-10-13: Some tab that leaks memory should be reloaded. Well waiting after CTRL+F5 and waiting and waiting... eh, closing and reopening seems to be faster.
2019-10-14: Cannot copy from from a Dynamics 365 readonly field. Which is <label>. This actually bugs me often. Can copy on chrome.
2019-10-21: Not googling on new tab page, loading, nothing happens. New tab works.
2019-10-21: Writing github issue... scrollbar doesn't work. Well actually tab doesnt respond. Oh i'm probably opening link in new tab that loads, loads, loads... Well, killing firefox is the only way I can "unstuck". How can I love FF? :( Looking forward to write these things down for Chrome in November - maybe it happens to other browsers too? However credit to FF or GitHub - dunno - my text wasn't lost in GitHub issue input field!
2019-10-21: Search. It just doesn't search on some pages (Dynamics CRM). Chrome search works better in these cases.
2019-10-21: Cursor invisible when over Firefox. Probably OS issue, happens to Chrome too.
2019-10-21: Dropdown list doesn't work as intended. Typing chars doesn't search (jump to) matched item.
Links for the password manager, "Firefox Lockwise" go through adjust, which appears to be a tracking/analytics/marketing platform. This is both through their website and by clicking through the Firefox UI menu.
I guess it's harder to walk the walk yourself when the desires to track usage and analytics come from within your own teams.
To be fair, it's common practice to measure marketing campaign effectiveness. Mozilla doesn't hide that they share data to "Measure and support our marketing"
"Campaign and Referral Data: This helps Mozilla understand the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns."
"On iOS and Android: Firefox by default sends mobile campaign data to Adjust, our analytics vendor, which has its own privacy policy. Mobile campaign data includes a Google advertising ID, IP address, timestamp, country, language/locale, operating system, and app version. Read the documentation."
I fail to see how the latter prevents the former. This is digital information that can be copied endlessly, not a physical object that can only be owned by one entity at a time.
Google doesn't share data between Analytics and Ads behind the scenes, only if you set it up through the the site owner and it doesn't go through to other sites.
Not sure what your point is? Of course it's common practice. Of course it's useful information for the business. Of course it will be documented in their privacy policy.
You just described basically all tracking and analytics. This is what they are blocking by default for everyone except themselves apparently.....
Since they censored Dissenter, they are dead to me. They can be the best web browser ever made, but it will never touch the sillicon of my hard drives ever again. With Goolag, at least I know where they stand and I know what to expect from them. Mozilla betrayed my trust and I am not fan of second chances.
It's been more than a year I've installed Firefox again and use it full time, both in my phone and macbook. I feel like it's the perfect browser now. I want even more privacy features and speed, more speed!
Does the mobile Firefox have something like the Developer Tools of the desktop version? Because those are generally missing on mobile, I made my own site that serves some JS to do (part of) what built-in developer tools would do.
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