Firefox is fine. The people running it are not Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users. It is very rare for an article on The Register to cause friends of mine to contact me and anxiously ask …
" The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users."
...they just don't care. They think they know best and everyone else can suck it up or move. I switched to Vivaldi because of a run in with Firefox devs some time ago.
Sorry to say, but this isn't news to me.
I don't remember a time that they were good - perhaps there was one, but I seem to recall it took far too long for them to accept that the bulky and awkward Mozilla browser was dead and that the lighter and more elegant Firefox was what people actually wanted. Feels like they've been stepping on rakes ever since and I feel as though they were probably stepping on rakes before too.
it took far too long for them to accept that the bulky and awkward Mozilla browser was dead and that the lighter and more elegant Firefox was what people actually wanted
Firefox was never actually any faster than the Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey). It was strange marketing hype that was never reflected in benchmarks.
Chrome got that same hype, while it was never actually faster than Firefox.
"Long?" There are 5 posts, estimate it takes 6 minutes to read the whole thing, but the information relevant to this discussion is right at the top.
This thread you're commenting on is discussing Mozilla browser vs Firefox performance... You should expect contemporary content.
Unfortunately they don't even seem to reach point #1. From my experience, Mozilla sees to have some random system of deciding what to randomly add or remove, with just one overruling safeguard: When in doubt, ask yourself "What would Chrome do?".
Of course some cynics could say their ultimate goal is to make sure Firefox exists (Google needs it to avoid being a monopoly), but nobody uses it (i.e. everybody uses Chrome). From this perspective one must admit it's a total, unmitigated success: From most used browser to a shunned "also-ran" in just a dozen years, that requires a lot of focus and creativity.
Back in the days when last.fm was still a streaming audio service + social networking + audioscrobbler, Songbird and Nightingale were great - I've not found a music player that met my needs so well since. I liked last.fm so much I paid them money for years. Now Songbird/Nightingale are dead, and post-takeover last.fm is really just audioscrobbler + shoutbox with some YouTube/Spotify integration thrown in.
Nightingale had great iPod support back when not many music players did (from memory). I loved it, loved using it.
Thing is now everything is cyclical, I have a media server with my music on it after years wasting money on Spotify. I'd love there to be something like Nightingale to run on the laptop when I'm working but there just isn't anything like it. Navidrome comes a bit close but that exists on the browser and I'm not a fan of that.
Used Firefox for as long as I can remember, but have become thoroughly fed up with it, so moved to PaleMoon - and not too happy with that either. I'm sure I'm not the only one looking for a simple straightforward browser, that isn't intrusive, and without all the idiot bells and whistles that keep getting added to (then removed from) Firefox.
I gave Waterfox a go for about six months or so at home and at work. Definitely seemed a little more sluggish than Firefox and sadly also a bit more unstable, with any update forcing a few restarts of the browser until it would load on Windows 10. Otherwise I liked the UI and vertical tabs (before FF implemented their own - I find they work rather nicely).
Tempted to give Librewolf a try with the privacy options it offers and hoping it'll be more stable too.
I feel like most of the problem here is Cloudflare. If you hit a site that puts a cloudflare captcha on the page, even as a check that you can't see, your browser session becomes total shit. That, or your may be looking at a page that's created in React.
Anyway, for Javascript generally, Chrome is a bloated, fast, memory-hog of a thing. Firefox may have made their javascript engine better over the years even while the browser's UI has languished, but my impression is that Palemoon doesn't have the support or desire to do significant Javascript engine tuning, and uses a javascript engine roughly from when it forked Firefox. (I'm probably wrong, maybe severely wrong about this.) Maybe if Googoyle paid them a few tens-of-millions per year that would become a viable project.
I have recently returned to Firefox on just one Linux Mint machine, because Chrome on that one only draws older geometrical shapes all over web pages. A quick check suggests that Firefox uses two to three times as much memory as Chrome to display the same pages (of the ones I used, natch).
What does that look like - is there any browser that works that way ?
Because I think a part of the problem is that the Web itself has gotten complex. If you arbitrarily ignore some parts of the WWW spec, then browsing breaks to some degree. Look at how blocking advertising and it's technical mechanisms causes sites to mis-render. And that's with targetted suppressions, not simple non-support
If your OS is up-to-date, the SeaMonkey browser has been a fave.
Integration as well, right-click and Send pages and links with the email client. There's a plugin converter that makes Firefox plugins work on SM if they don't already.
And as LP wrote, the HTML editor works.
I'm sure I'm not the only one looking for a simple straightforward browser, that isn't intrusive, and without all the idiot bells and whistles
https://dillo-browser.github.io/
https://www.netsurf-browser.org/
It's those "bells and whistles" that keep a browser modern. Even if you don't, *somebody* wants those webGL extensions and won't stay on a browser that doesn't have them... and that number will slowly climb. Many other features follow the same path, as well as UI changes. The vast majority come and go, but you never know which ones that will be.
Firefox is slower than ever !
Finding the URL isn't what I am referring to.
I am referring to how long it takes Firefox to load, it takes quite some time longer than previous.
This isn't counting the time to close the app and re open it as it didn't manage to load my Bookmarks, this time ?
Every time !
I'm using Linux MX and the Firefox Error Message says "sometimes an anti virus product can prevent Firefox from loading the Bookmarks"
So, thanks for the help, speeding up the useless Interenet search, but no thanks for the length of time taken to load, AND also for the need for me to do this twice.
Yeah!
ALF
If you're using a snap or flatpak build of Firefox, you might have some sandboxing stuff keeping Firefox from accessing your profile directory. I can't offer advice with these application packaging formats.
AppArmor might also be messing with you, but it's not set up by default in MX Linux.
You might have a malicious addon bogging you down. There aren't any support articles mentioning the error message string that you've posted, which makes me think that it's not a message that's actually coming from Firefox.
I recommend setting up a fresh user profile if you're keen on sticking with Firefox. Using the about:profiles page is probably the easiest way to do that these days, but you could also add the -ProfileManager argument to the firefox command.
Firefox takes about a second and a half to load for me, but I'm sitting on a Gentoo workstation with an SSD and I only use three extensions. The only machine I have where it feels slow is the 2011 laptop with 2GB of memory rigged into the bedroom TV (with all the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations slowing it down), and YouTube really likes eating through that machine's resources these days. Ah well!
Load time is probably the least important thing about a browser. I start my browser after I boot my Linux PC, and I don't stop it until I reboot my Linux PC which is typically at least a month and often several months later.
I wouldn't give a damn if Firefox took 10 minutes to start up. That wouldn't effect me in any measurable way.
Certain adblockers, while they do save time browsing the web, would definitely slow down firefox loading time significantly (several minutes of blank pages, instead of 30 seconds or so). It seems that more recent Firefox versions have either reduced the impact of the extension, or fixed the bug that was causing it.
The delay apparently had very little to do with cache or cookies, but more likely to do with number of open tabs or some other thing.
The perception of Firefox being slow is entirely down to the Chromium dominance IMO. Google and Microsoft both use it and are driving "standards" their way, and given that Mozilla remains pretty much the only holdout (Apple don't use Chromium but also don't give a crap if their browser is shit, and indeed on mobile they actively want it to be to drive people to the App store) and their passive leadership don't do very much Chromium gets its way much of the time. Add to that lack of testing and developing on Firefox and you get websites that don't work properly in the browser, something I'm seeing more and more of.
It is a Firefox fork also but has stripped out all telemetry and added some additional customizations (which I don't use).
All prior Firefox extensions work with floorp altho I had to turn off a compatibility-mode check for one or two.
Hope it keeps being actively supported and stays on top of security updates!
I realise that this may well be an unpopular opinion - I'm a Firefox user since v1 - but I dislike organisations joining social or political causes; whatever the cause may be or of whatever nature.
I wish everybody well, but to be quite frank, I don't want to be patronised or have to read about how wonderful organisations like to think they are - and we know this because they feel the need to tell us. Might this energy be put to better use being sublimated into the product's quality.
I've known enough people over the years who are brutally cycnical about the causes they espouse, but in public, they gush. I find it odd.
But, for all of that, I do like Firefox - uBlock Origin still works and I hope they can recover their mojo.
Neither of these things create purpose. Rather, purpose, which is generated from the conflict between the inner self and external forces. Philosophy describes purpose; politics proscribes your ability to pursue purpose. People often say that something, some political cause, religious experience, or philosophical encounter, has "given" them purpose, but the reality is that they have taken purpose from those things. More accurately, they have created their own purpose from their experience of, or interaction with, those things. Politics and philosophy can no more give you purpose than they can give you sight.
So you give the words in my argument different meanings , so that you can then counter it ?. And say nothing to address the original point re dilllution of purpose.
Yet the point you do make is still wrong. Vision is a hell of a motivator in some situations. Sunrises, oceans, attractive people.
You're making a category error. Not all political causes are the same. Firefox isn't wasting money on FOSS development; that would be the place they *should be* putting the money instead of unrelated political causes.
> Truths are inconvenient like that.
This sort of nonsense is just pointless. The article is obviously not going to say it, due to mindless internal snark like this quote, but Mozilla has wasted a lot of money and energy on unrelated political causes. That's just true; they should just stop.
Those are the apps that make browsing the web possible for me. No other browser does that. So I don't care if anyone perceives Firefox as 'slow' compared to another browser - I can't use that other browser, so for me there's no contest.
When I can't avoid JS, and its very brief, I use Chromium. Otherwise it'll just hurt my eyes. When JS isn't needed but Firefox fails anyway, I use links2.
My eyes can't cope with black text on a white background, but Firefox and links2 let me override that. (Chromium doesn't let me, so I minimise my time using it.) I read most sites using Firefox so I can have amber text on a black background.
However, writing posts like this, the editor will show white on grey. I can't fix that. So that's my only complaint about Firefox. It's really a complaint about a false assumption made by web designers, but perhaps browser developers do this too. I call it the paper fallacy.
>>My eyes can't cope with black text on a white background...Chromium doesn't let me....
The Chrome-ish extension DarkReader may help - you can map a key to switch on dark mode, which can either just invert everything, or take white down to a manageable grey.
I use it to have a mostly red & grey El Reg experience. It doesn't work with every website, or every element on a webpage, and certain page models seem to protect themselves from such meddling (one I came across reloads content every few seconds, undoing the changes DR made, so I noped out of there) but on average it does work and I find it helpful. YMMV.
I also have impaired vision. I use Zen, a Firefox fork I read about on El Reg.
I like it especially because I can hide all the toolbars and menus, which will pop out when the cursor hits the edge of the browser window. I use Linux and XFCE, and have a dark system theme. Everything is dark grey or black, with light grey or cream white text.
FYI, re bad vision, I use multiple viewports in XFCE, so every app gets a full screen, and I have cursor-based viewport switching, so I just push the cursor to the screen edge to flip to the adjacent viewport. Using two rows of viewports allows flipping to e.g. an editor in one view, and the browser in the other for web development.
I heartily recommend the combination of uBlock origin on the browser, along with OpenWRT on my router, which uses dnsmasq to help block all the YouTube adverts, and most other ads on all sites viewed on my LAN. Zen uses a vertical stack of tabs, so is more compact than the top tab bar, and retracts unless I use it anyway.
I didn't find any dirt on Zen, so if there are any issues with them, I don't know them, but would be glad to hear about any. I hope this is useful to you and others who have visual problems.
Add NoScript and Ghostery and you are pretty much bullet-proof. I too have used firefox since 1.x, and I've had to bite my tongue a time of two as the "rabbit-pellet" version race zoomed from 3 to infinity and version numbering lost any meaning. I've also run the gamut trying alternatives, but in the end, with all its warts and the things I have to disable in about:config, I always end up back with firefox.
Is there room for improvement, sure. The loss of focus on the browser engine and making it the best has been apparent. Handing development over to the group of "kids with crayons" that tried to add every unnecessary bell and whistle they could dream up was a classic "Do the opposite" move. But, until some other FOSS browser emerges that will have a continue existence longer than a year and has less warts than firefox, I'll stick with the familiar warts I know, and know how to turn off. But, here's to hope....
This article places blame exactly where it should be, and provides a colorful (and correct) explanation of how it ended up that way. A point well made. If all the Mozilla "execs" had their salaries divided by 20, there would be a good chance those that remained, remained because they were dedicated to developing the best browser possible rather than being dedicated to the trappings of seven-figure salaries. The ad company sell-out and user-agreement modification to profit off user-data are symptoms of the cancer that has grown within the company's management.
"All the functionality attached to Firefox's "Browser tools" sub-menu should be unceremoniously ripped out, banished to the developer's edition."
That's the silliest fucking idea I've heard in a long time; if you want to ensure no site works in Firefox, definitely make devs install a special version. The reason most things still work in Firefox is because many web devs still use it as their day-to-day browser. If it wasn't for that, nobody would care. And the presence of the development tools mean if you spot something going wrong, you can only up the tools and inspect it there and then. Chrome-derivatives allow it. Safari allows it. But were Firefox throws up another barrier, who knows who would bother? (Or be allowed to install it.)
We're keeping your backwards browser alive through love; don't make our lives harder.
Ditto. I don't use that stuff often, but when something goes wrong or I need to find out something (like what URL that streaming radio station is actually playing) it's useful to call up the tools and find out. I'm not a hardcore web developer, I don't want to have two different versions of the same thing installed just because the owners make yet another dumb decision...
Sometimes, when the pale/tiny design has even beaten the High Contrast plugin, I might use the dev tools to switch off the font size and color properties. That gets me my browser default back.
Usually I'm staggered at how many times the incompetent fool of an alleged designer has redefined those.
Or sometimes I just decide that what the site has to say isn't that important to me after all.
"sometimes I just decide that what the site has to say isn't that important to me after all."
THIS ^^^^^
More people should simply stop using sites that 'infect' their sites with neverending ads, JS crap, trackers etc etc
If you have to fight the site to get what you want 'they' still win as they get the hits etc.
Stopping using the rubbish infected sites shows that 'you' will not waste your time & effort to circumvent 'their' garbage.
Very few sites are the ONLY source of the information you need ... look a little harder or use a Library [cough spit :)] , they still exist !!!
:)
Good article, but did you have to bring the wholly made-up TESCREAL "let me put a label on everyone I personally don't like and pretend it's an organized group" bullshit into it?
No, the Mozilla management are not TESCREAL. Even if we grant that's a thing (it's not) they wouldn't be in it. If anything, TESCREAL (which broadly rounds off to "nerds") are part of Firefox's natural and longstanding userbase. As a T, S, C, R and L, I assure you that absolutely none of my interests are represented by Firefox management taking the last competing browser engine not under Google's control and slowly driving it into a ditch.
Like, what the hell is the argument there? "The human condition shall be overcome, thus we must sell ads"? Malaria nets for Africa, thus axe the Rust team"?? "Humanity should colonize the Cosmos, which demands integrated VPN"???
> Good article
Thanks.
> but did you have to bring the wholly made-up TESCREAL
I think I did, or I would not have done it.
There are few other explanations that hang together for the determination of Silicon Valley execs to ram "AI" into absolutely every product they can.
Sad to say it fits in very well with much American thought. It fits with "evangelicals" (who are not Christians at all), will millennialist thought ("the end is nigh", "Jesus is coming -- look busy"), with the prevailing groupthink of "everyone is a future billionaire who just hasn't made it yet" and coupled to that "every man for himself" and its corollaries of unrestricted firearms use (even though it is against the holy sacred Constitution) and lack of healthcare and lack of paid holiday time and lack of workers' rights and lack of even employment contracts and so much else.
It is _not_ right, it is _not_ rational, it is _not_ based on fact or reason or evidence or rationality.
I think somewhere I have a long-dormant LessWrong account. I explored it. I am a long-term skeptic, with a k, and it sounded promising. It's not. It's a cult. Its belief system is religious in nature.
"AI" is a cult but it is also part of a larger cult.
And it is getting promoted like a cult, and I want to call that out.
Sure, but it's just a random interjection. I'm a doomer, and from where I'm standing the weird current AI hype *isn't* TESCREAL. At most it's people vibing off TESCREAL, trying to ride hype to sell products. Remember that R at least are *against* further AI capability development - I mean, part of the problem with TESCREAL is that it contains groups that are literally politically opposed, because it has no coherent concept. The EAs aren't even mainly interested in AI! It's really just a label of "people I don't like", and it still doesn't fit here.
I mean, personally I think programmers are sleeping on AI, and my recommendation to fix this is for them to get an OpenRouter account and maybe Aider, and experiment with the APIs at cost. The people selling "agents" and "integrated solutions" rn are not on my side, do not represent my interest, and are afaict not in my ingroup.
Basically, I'm saying "inasmuch as TESCREAL is a thing, which I disagree with, I know TESCREAL, I'm in TESCREAL, and I'm telling you it's not us doing this."
I think the individual members of TESCREAL exist - that's why I said I am some of them - but "TESCREAL", as a single unified phenomenon does not exist. The acronym is in fact an attempt to create a natural outgroup out of everybody the people who use the term dislike. Maybe it could be argued there's a "milieu", and I agree that some of those groups are "adjacent". It's the attempt to draw a line around them and say "everything in here is its own, common thing" that I object to.
Saying "TESCREAL did this" is like saying "the left did this".
> Saying "TESCREAL did this"
I didn't say that. I said that TESCREAL is a genuine faction of people now, and due to its prevalence in Silicon Valley, it's a contributing factor in the way "AI" is being pushed everywhere. Even though, as I have said before, it's not artificial, it's not intelligent, and it doesn't work.
Well, I don't think it's a faction, and I don't think it's pushing AI. It may be "a contributing factor in AI being pushed everywhere", but that's a very generic claim. In particular, you're blaming people who are saying "pause AI" for AI accelerating - which is especially funny because e/acc, the *actual* "accelerate ai, maximum hype" faction, isn't even in the acronym.
(Also, AI is of course artificial, and intelligent, and clearly does work, I use it daily. I used it half an hour ago to add a feature to a website. I was like "Claude, add this feature" and it did. Maybe concretify this? Like, what in particular that you think should work doesn't?)
edit: This is all anyways a distraction from the simple fact that the people pushing AI aren't TESCREAL in the first place!
Have you perchance missed many of the articles here about AI's multitude of failings, including using ludicrous amounts of power for the simplest queries, giving answers that are nonsense, or make up things that don't exist? Tthere are any number of things AI isn't good at, and it certainly didn't teach you how to code.
Did that feature you just added meet your current security requirements? How do you know? Does it miss an edge case? It's helpful, maybe, but only if you don't care that much about the results, and already know quite a lot about what you're trying to do.
I tried using it with Yahoo! Email, and found that it doubled the time it took to deal with my email, because it can't even summarize fairly simple email accurately.
It gets case citations wrong for lawyers. It's bad at math in general, tell it that it got an answer wrong, and it'll come up with a different answer, even if the first answer was correct..
It's wonderful at sounding confidently incorrect, whether or not it actually got the answer right, the tone is always something like, "Here's the answer: ...".
The more you know about a subject, the easier it is to find a case where the AI gets something wrong while still sounding as if it's correct.
AI makes things up, sure, granted. It's getting less over time, and in domains like programming you can just try its code and see if it works. I think this is mostly an inability of the trained persona to correctly cope with uncertainty rather than a technological limitation.
And... "It's helpful, maybe, but only if you don't care that much about the results, and already know quite a lot about what you're trying to do."
Yeah but that's a *ton* of things! Like, I'm trying Navidrome as a web-based music app rn. It's ... nice, except no cue/tta support, which is essential for my music lib. I know how to do it better, I even have a detailed plan in mind, but I'd have to write my own frontend and it'd be a whole thing and normally I couldn't be arsed. But now, soon as I get off work, I'll grab Sonnet 4, explain it the nitty gritty of what I'm thinking of, and see what it comes up with, and I firmly expect to have something usable - even with a pretty web frontend - by the *same evening.* And this works for everything! I can turn an idle thought into working code in half an hour, or a day for something genuinely practical.
Is it as good as the hype says? No. Is it as good as *it* thinks? No. But it's useful. Real and practically valuable. All it takes is trying to figure out how to make it work rather than how to make it fail. And, like every skill, experience.
(Also, the power thing is straight up invented from whole cloth. It's nonsense. Yes datacenters use a lot of power, welcome to operating at scale.)
Personally, I blame board games - you can be on my board if I can be on yours. It all gets a bit incestuous.
Whereas there is clearly a messianic subplot, I suspect that may more likely be the result of being entirely detached from the world in which the majority of us live - I'd put figures like Putin and Assad in the same basket and I don't think either ever had ambitions beyond their own transcendence.
It's a fairly small clique in the Valley. They know where the money's going and they all have a vested interest in making it back so they're tied together in a sort of financial rat king.
"Sad to say it fits in very well with much American thought"
...proceeds to utterly skewer such things. Take my megaphone, this needs to be shouted louder before the orange man deports you (if you're over there) or slaps extra random taxes onto your entire country (if you're not).
> .proceeds to utterly skewer such things
Thanks! I tried. :-)
I'm in the Isle of Man, a tiny country which I think the UK Gov barely even knows exists. I mean, UKG forgot Northern Ireland existed when the cretins performed the ritual of Brexit.
The IoM wasn't involved in Brexit because it wasn't in the EU anyway. Never was. Even so, it's been badly hurt by it.
"I'm in the Isle of Man, a tiny country which I think the UK Gov barely even knows exists. I mean, UKG forgot Northern Ireland existed when the cretins performed the ritual of Brexit."
Isn't the Isle of Man a Crown Dependency rather than a Country?
In the same way that Northern Ireland isn't a country either, it's a "Province" (though it is also part of the Irish Province of Ulster along with 3 other counties in Ireland).
> Isn't the Isle of Man a Crown Dependency rather than a Country?
It's both.
It's not part of the UK.
The monarch is the UK monarch, but that is also true of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, among other places. No, it is not comparable to Northern Ireland, which is formally and legally part of the UK.
Mann has its own government, the oldest continuous single government in the world: it celebrated 1000 years in 1979.
It raises its own taxes, mints its own currency, issues its own stamps and vehicle registrations and so on.
I am not a UK resident or taxpayer, and haven't been since I sold my house in London back in 2015.
I was only questioning whether the Isle of Man was actually a country - I was not questioning any of the other points you listed.
The IoM government's website makes no mention of it being a country: https://www.gov.im/about-the-government/departments/cabinet-office/media-centre/isle-of-man-an-overview/
I do realise that the word "country" can be somewhat vague and used interchangeably with other words such as "nation", "state" etc that have subtly different meanings.
"No, it is not comparable to Northern Ireland, which is formally and legally part of the UK."
You missed my point, I pointed out that NI is not a country, it is a Province - which is confusing as then it is a "constitutional" Province within a geographical Province (Ulster). I made no mention of NI's "relationship" with/within the UK.
>There are few other explanations that hang together for the determination of Silicon Valley execs to ram "AI" into absolutely every product they can.
I don't think you need a cult to explain that. Oh, it'll be a cult for some of them, but for most of them it's just money: the hype-investment cycle. Investors won't give you money unless you can either show RoI, or convince them there will be RoI in the future - i.e., hype. But once you have the money, and the RoI still doesn't show up, all you can do is up the hype, get more investment money, keep the lights on, and hope you can do this long enough for the RoI to appear.
Even if you don't actually need outside money, because you're Google/Meta/Apple and you have all the money already, the trap still has you, because even with all that liquidity, you're still in thrall of your stock valuation. Stock valuation is basically expectations of future earnings - and for tech companies, which can't just keep doing the same thing decade after decade and don't really have any kind of visible horizon, what does that mean? Hype again.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the upper echelons actually knew full well that AI is bullshit, but also knew full well that they can never even hit that they think that.
The AI obsession isn't rational from a broader perspective, but that doesn't mean it's part of some grand transhumanist cult. There are some people who believe in that stuff, and then there are a whole bunch of other people who see that every company that does AI stuff seems to be getting a gazillion dollars from investors and want in.
100000000000 time this ^^^^^^^
Don't get/understand the TESCREAL thing, but it is not a major stall point in the argument.
As a whole I can only agree that the 'AI' nonsense is being treated as a quasi-religious thing.
It is EVERYWHERE, yet has not delivered ANYTHING like the pitch that was made to 'hoover' up the $Billions being acquired then spent with reckless abandon !!!
:)
Before the dawn of Digital Enlightenment, I used Firefox, as soon as it was available, on MS Windows; it was far preferable to the bundled browser. Upon Seeing the Light, and my Conversion to Linux, I stuck with Firefox and was happy with it until recently. Firefox's structure, together with an increasing store of reliable 'add-on' software, helped civilise the WWW.
On the face of it, Firefox, via 'about:config' offers an immense range of customisation. However, many of the options are arcane and lack immediate explanation; this necessitates hunting around elsewhere, that's if one can be bothered. Some options either don't work as implied, else unspecified interactions with other options cause unintended consequences.
For example, I set my home page to display four rows of pinned links to frequently used sites. 'Four' is the maximum number specified in the 'Settings' section. I sought to increase the number of rows to five or six. After some searching among 'about:config' settings, I discovered one which appeared able to override the limit of four rows. Accordingly, I entered 'six' and this was accepted and appeared to be retained, but to no effect.
Much more troublesome is the synchronisation of Firefox instances across devices. In my opinion, this is best ignored or, at most, limited to bookmarks and 'add-on' software. The latter can cause trouble; for instance, the introduction of a fresh device may wipe recorded 'NoScript' site preferences across devices: not a disaster, but irritating. Although sharing bookmarks works as intended, the organisation, and management, of bookmarks is confusing.
Over the years, the 'Settings' menu has accumulated some complexities, fair enough for those needing them, and also assumes by default one desires 'Sponsored shortcuts' and 'Recommended stories'. Additionally, there is obeisance to advertisers by assuming "Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement".
The 'Permissions' section of the 'Settings' menu is problematic because by default it assumes permission to divulge location, and to access the camera and microphone.
Overall, at heart, Firefox retains admirable features, but has accumulated bloat (evinced from RAM usage) and makes questionable assumptions. 'Out of the box', Firefox works immediately for undiscriminating users, but enlightened Linux aficionados may regard some initially permitted features objectionable.
Reported RAM usage has been a meaningless indicator for at least fifteen years.
What is the point of "unused RAM"?
If the browser can usefully cache something in RAM, it should do so. The important thing is to give up that cache should something else need the RAM - and that's the job of the operating system.
Linux and Windows both fill "unused RAM" with a guess as to what the running applications might need. An active application is more likely to actually know what it needs.
"No web designer is building on Firefox first any more."
There is at least one - me :)
I use Firefox first BECAUSE it seems to have a 'standards-compliant browser engine' based on what I think should occur based on the (not so well defined) 'Standards' (which Google now has too much control over - another story)...
After that I check with the 'other' web-browsers and fix any 'anomalies' (which are minor).
When I first started web design (15+ years ago) I built against Google Chrome but the 'non-chrome' web-browsers at that time had too many (minor, but annoying) issues that took way too much time to fix...
"Mozilla should be a nonprofit, working to fund the one independent, non-vendor-driven, standards-compliant browser engine"
Agreed - Mozilla should be a 'REAL' non-profit (is that a thing in the US of A?)
The C-Suites have taken (and are taking) too much money out of the 'Mozilla Foundation'
The C-Suites have taken (and are taking) too much control of the 'Mozilla Foundation'
Sack ALL of the C-Suites
Everybody knows the solution to the problem, but we can't make it happen because Mozilla's management holds all the cards. They collude with the board, which are merely friends and relatives installed to allow management to do whatever it wants. There's no realistic way of anyone changing Mozilla's course.
Management will continue to pilfer, raid and rape Mozilla's assets until they've extracted every last bit of value from it and lined their pockets with it. All this is just a systematic failure of how capitalism and non-profit foundations work in the U.S.
I feel deeply saddened by this. This isn't an isolated incident. It's similar to the slow-motion train-wreck that's Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Everyone knows it's going to implode, it's just a matter of when.
It's pretty easy, what Mozilla needs is a management team that use a web browser on a daily basis. All day, every day. And they need to be focused on making it easy to use, fast, accurate, cross platform, secure and stable. Not necessarily in that order. Oh, and I guess they need to know how to make money too.
You start off with the 'Pretty Easy' comment then end with 'and I guess they need to know how to make money too.' !!!
Please do expand on the 'Easy way to make money' ... I am sure you could sell this information for something ... say like 'Money' !!!
(Don't tell me THAT is the 'Easy way to make money' that you are refering to !!!???)
Been done ... many times ... works in the short-term BUT can end in jail-time or worse.
:)
I mostly agree that higher management is one of the bigger problems but Rust as the savior. No way. Lets discuss this topic again 10 years from now when most of the first rust coders are gone and doing other things. Will be fun to see how well existing source is understood and updated then. Rust ist too abstract. I consider myself a second rate programmer and struggle with the syntax. And most people at work are worse. It is non intuitive and you would need a 6 months crash course first. And removing support for older OS versions still in service like Server 2012 R2 with a minor version is something I don't call Enterprise ready. Even MS still supports Windows 7 targets with latest msvc. But maybe KI is the saviour for old Rust projects then :)
Firefox now depends on at least 574 external rust crates and needs 32GB of ram to compile under Windows. Source is becoming a bloated pig becauee if it. And if someone tells me having that many external dependencies on mostly home made code is good I would counter this statement any day.
So call my names and a backwards yokel and see me not care. If someone at work would tell me to do rust I would quit. Life is too short for this :)
Another problem with Mozilla development I sometimes encountered is that you better not disagree with made decisions on a arbitrary level. Feature removals based on telemetry for example.
Overall there are still great people working there and not so great ones. Its life as we know it.
And the Composer in SeaMonkey will stay but not enough devs around so still 10 years behind the times.
FRG
I somewhat agree on the syntax; it's different to be different IMHO because 4 generations of developers have grown up with the C syntax and its derivatives. Why then, come up with yet another syntax?
Rust's crate system is both a blessing and a curse. It makes developing easier but leads to pull-in of many dependencies. But hey, this is how software development works these days. Gone are the days when operating systems had system calls in ROM with which you could do almost everything you needed.
Because of the myriad of protocols and binary and text formats it has become necessary to work in this manner.
As they mature, the people with passion go and off-the-shelf suits get brought in.
There is a difference between mature GAFA and mature FOSS. The former is a horror show, the latter is a mess.
What we may miss is the diversity we used to get when we were getting new start ups in any particular field. If they did what we wanted, better, they would take over. Once a sector matures, you don't see start ups so often and the players ossify. Working there is a job, not a passion. The management structure reverts to defaults. Lawyers become more important than innovators. Everything just slowly tails off.
The encroachment of government into tech will limit creativity and options in the future. More stuff will be forbidden, and there will have to be built-in restrictions and filters in everything.
It may be that tech has already passed the plateau stage, were there wasn't much innovation, and is now declining.
Unless someone rich who knows their stuff steps up and takes over or kicks off a new project, the future is bleak.
We should be exploring distributed systems and a distributed internet, but governments may have wised up to the need to strangle that at birth to stay in control.
As Orwell (who appears to have accidentally designed our society) put it, 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.'.
Sure, a non-profit developing Firefox would be perfect. Still, non-profit doesn't mean no-money. And where the money would come from?
Google again? If so, Google will ensure Firefox doesn't get in the way of Chrome and web standards Google wants. Or?
The Linux kernel is funded by the many companies that uses it in tehir products, otherwise they would need to spend more to buy licenses or invest in developing their own.
Who needs a web browser and javascript engine - which is not Chrome they already have, for "free"? There are probably bigger chances Chrome becomes a non.profit because of an antitrust ruling, than Mozilla becoming it.
PS: Servo means "slave".... often USain activists show all their ignorance.
>PS: Servo means "slave".... often USain activists show all their ignorance.
Servo does not mean "slave". It may be etymologically derived from the Latin "servus" which had that connotation among others (languages are more complicated and subtle than narrow-minded political ideologies manage to understand), but that is not at all the same thing. There is, for sure, a lot of ignorance around.
No, "servo" means slave. A servo-mechanism is a master/slave relationship. You can't escape that. The problem is USAins shoudl stop to think as if . Yes, the ethimolofy is clear. "Serf" itslef was a slave.
Cambridge Dictionary "servitude: the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom"
Merriam-Webster "servitude: a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life"
Oxfort Language: "servitude: the state of being a slave or completely subject to someone more powerful."
And in Italian "servo" means "schiavo" - and if you don't want to offend anybody, you have to do it in any language worldwide. So if "master" can't be used, nor "slave", nor "servo".
> Who needs a web browser and javascript engine - which is not Chrome they already have, for "free"?
GNOME and Cinnamon for a start. All GNOME extensions.
I suspect but don't know that there are quite a few others. Enough to justify this presentation:
https://av.tib.eu/media/41998
I love Seamonkey too, and I've used it for the past 30 years.
However, some time in the past 5 years Seamonkey can no longer access Wordpress. I can't get to the login page, just stops with a blank page.
This happened to Firefox at the same time, but it was soon fixed. Whatever is causing this problem was never fixed in Seamonkey. I'd go back to Seamonkey in a heart beat if they fixed it.
Michael
> I'd go back to Seamonkey in a heart beat if they fixed it.
You know what, one reason I adopted Firefox before version 1.0 was that I used the Mozilla Internet Suite and it was a nuisance that fetching email paused browsing sessions. I get a lot of email. My main email address is 34 years old.
Having email in a whole separate app, so it perforce multitasked well, was a win.
But now, with Quantum's multithreading, it'd be less of a problem.
I like having separate apps for separate functions, but a modernized Seamonkey with a current Gecko engine could be useful anyway.
The biggest problem with Firefox is the lack of steady funding outside of deals with Alphabet. And yet, whenever they try to break free from that (or at least supplement income) by hawking things like VPNs or services like pocket they are criticized for deviating from their primary role as a web browser. The article claims that the problem is "too much" money but contradicts itself by citing the mass firings of the Rust and Servo teams because of the lack of resources and one is left wondering how these statements can be reconciled. There is no realistic solution offered here for Mozilla—focusing on standards matters only to a vanishingly small number of nerds (myself included) but won't do anything to stop the ever-smaller usage base and income due to the Chrom* monopoly that's backed by very wealthy interests. There are things that could be done to minimize expenditure such as moving away from SF, limiting CEO salaries, and the like but those do not address the big-picture issues with FLOSS projects not having enough resources (El Reg has manifold stories about projects just barely scraping by to prove this point). Long term, if Alphabet is broken up there might be interesting movement in the browser space but I just don't see anything but idealistic hopes being offered in the interim. And hopes do not keep the lights on.
I can't claim to have a workable solution myself but I do sympathize with the plight of Mozilla and any FLOSS competitor that is trying to offer something other than Chrom* to its users. Until such a time when a better option exists—something that respects privacy, allows full adblocking, and keeps up with standards—I'll continue to use Firefox.
I suspect it wasn't actually a lack of resources, but an overwhelming desire for a CxO payrise.
"I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."
So they doubled CEO pay and made about 250 people redundant, presumably to pay for that one person.
That's the problem.
As awful as C-level greed is, you're not going to pay for 250 employees, living in San Fransisco, with that money (I've seen it mentinoed that she raised her salary by 2 million, disgusting but it wasn't doubling it). I'm firmly on the side of capping executive salaries and always trying to retain your employees (taking a pay cut if you're the CEO, if necessary). Still, the issues run deeper than the executives with Mozilla which is part of the point I was making. They do not have a way to maintain themselves if and when Alphabet pulls the plug.
So they doubled CEO pay and made about 250 people redundant, presumably to pay for that one person.
$6m divided 250 ways is $24k each, which is not a software engineer's salary. Especially not in San Fran.
If they had doubled her salary from $3m to $6m, then that $3m uplift would be $12k per person. Definitely not a salary.
So no, it's not quite that. But Baker's salary was undoubtedly excessive, and it was a textbook example of how to burn goodwill through executive largesse whilst laying off the teams building your next-gen product.
McKinsey would be proud.
If there is anything predictable in business, it is that management will hamstring engineering to the point of mission failure, then cut it back one or two notches, to try to recover. Sometimes, they are lucky, and this saves their bacon. More frequently however, they have poisoned the pond, and only the most well adapted mutants can survive. In this case, I am pretty sure they can and should listen to the masses, and backtrace a bit. It will be interesting to see if they are capable of a mea culpa. I figure the odds be fifty-fifty.
I wonder if a new organisation (a new foundation) could not just fork Firefox code but hire select Firefox developers as well? Essentially, move the heart of Firefox - and Thunderbird, I suppose - away from the d*ckheads at Mozilla and put the lot under new management. Perhaps this might be achieved by building around (spooning?) one of the existing forks?
Ah, but there's the small problem of funding. Still, if enough organisations could chip in funding to get the foundation up and running, it might be worth a go. Surely there are enough people and organisations around the world in need of a trustworthy browser, i.e. one that isn't Chrome or Edge? I'd even chip in with a donation here or there - something I'm reluctant to do with the current Mozilla hierarchy in place.
(Posted anonymously in case I later think it's stupid).
Doesn't matter, those were made illegal in the US a few years back, and have always been illegal almost everywhere else.
Aside from that, the licence explicitly says that anyone can.
The challenges aren't legal, they're commercial. A browser needs quite a large full time development team, and they need to be paid.
They could, and many of the forks have tried. There's a reason why Mozilla is still the one making most of the advancements. They're the ones with money. The forks of Firefox often either continually merge in Mozilla's code or stagnate because you need that stuff and it's expensive to write. Sadly, we don't have a good method of getting the money to only those parts we care about or avoiding overpaid management. You can try a new foundation, and there's nothing intrinsic that means it can't work, but you're likely to have the same problems that Mozilla itself and all previous forks have had.
> 30+ tabs is not a realistic scenario,
BS. I typically start the day with 2-3 times that. One of my bookmarks folder contains about 77 links. (Middle-click a bookmark folder to launch all the contents in tabs. Note: Firefox only does the top level; Chrome recurses down the tree, sometimes with disastrous results.)
Occasionally, in the middle of big projects, have reached nearly 10x that. 400-600 tabs is not unheard of.
In other words: just because _you're_ a lightweight, don't assume everyone else is. :-P
> I don't believe anyone can keep track of 400+tabs,
You miss the point wildly.
I don't normally have that many. I have about 30 or 40 now, in 2 Firefox windows, 1 Chrome window with 4, a copy of Ferdium with 7, and a copy of Thunderbird with 1/2 dozen email accounts, Usenet, and Matrix. Oh, and Signal, another wretched web app but one that doesn't even work in Ferdium.
But the point is _sometimes_ I do and when I do I want it to work stably. And it does.
I don't want them open all the time. But sometimes I need them and I want them to work then. And keep working for a few days on end, and daily machine restarts when I update.
It's not _about_ all the time. It's about scaling gracefully to peak load _and then back down again._
I normally run about 200-600 tabs open at a time. This is made wieldy by some userChrome.css that gives me 6 rows of tab bars, and a plugin that discards memory from idle tabs (when you click on them they reload). This is in 16GB RAM on an underpowered lightweight laptop, not a desktop monster.
Why? Tabs are my short term cache. If I'm working on a project I open tabs for all the various options. For example if I'm shopping for something then I might have dozens of ebay/AliExpress/manufacturer/... listings open. I keep them open until the project is completed. I usually have a dozen or so projects on the go at once, so if I don't find what I'm looking for I leave the tabs open until I've completed it (eg made the purchase) and then close a slew of tabs at once.
I admit that Firefox's tab closing isn't great (you can at least select a run of sequential tabs with shift clicks) which can make the tabs get out of hand, particularly if the sites icons aren't easy to identify. But you can also search for open tabs which is very handy.
I could do this with bookmarks, but bookmarks persist and I don't want the overhead of managing a bookmark database. Tabs are much more conspicuous so can see at a glance current open projects.
@Always Right Mostly
Fired up browser earlier this morning, already got (pause to count..) 23 tabs open, will be a lot, lot more over the next few hours (no point closing a tab if I know I will be going back to it in a while, just keep them open until I definitely have finished with them).
So, 30+ is realistic for some people.
30+ tabs is not a realistic scenario,
Another hand raise for "yes, I generally have 40+ tabs open".
Two windows with 10-20 each that are direct work. On my laptop screen there's a couple more with webmail/WhatsApp and the kanban.
Then a couple more with general news (el reg), bits of documentation that are supporting work. This isn't niche. Not even close.
I also have 249 tabs open on my phone. But I'm not proud of that.
The unload facility in the latest FF is appreciated. As others have said, the main issue is it's not always good at freeing memory when you do close tabs. A restart of the entire browser always reclaims a lot of headroom.
I have 57 tabs open in four windows right now. Firefox runs quite well.
There are times when I have a lot more than 57 tabs open. Firefox starts to slow down.
The main problem is not the slowdown with lots of tabs, it’s that when you close tabs memory is not necessarily released, and that not only slows FF down, it slows everything else on the computer down. I have found that the only way to release all the RAM from closing tabs is to quit FF completely and restart it. This means that I usually quit FF after I have 120+ tabs open, so as to recover the RAM.
There are so many groundbreaking products that the Mozilla Foundation has "misplaced", that in any reasonable industry the executives would be accused of pilferage.
HTML editor: at least that lives on as Kompozer, and has actually been enhanced over the years to support CSS.
Visual Javascript: vanished without trace, possibly inside Sun.
Various server-side stuff: ditto.
At the very least, they could have been a viable competitor to WordPress. As it is they're a one-trick pony that gets a bit of new bling every time it's pased on to a new management team.
> Duckduckgo does instantly.
Non sequitur. Duckduckgo is a search engine. (A wrapper around Bing and other sources, I believe.)
The company does not make a browser. It _offers_ a browser but it's a wrapper around your OS's built-in browser.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo_Private_Browser
Compare like with like, or don't compare at all.
That is in part why there's no Linux browser: Linux doesn't have a "native" or built-in browser at all.
I am not surprised if a built-in tool is quicker than an add-on one. The reason I'm writing about Firefox is I don't want built-in tools and don't entirely trust them.
The point here is about there being an independent impartial alternative, not "proprietary tool X is faster than proprietary tool Y."
Mozilla are basically in the same place Nominet were. A non-profit with enough spare cash that the executives got grandiose ideas and used it as their personal playground. Happens a lot, and you see the executive disconnect of "I run an organisation with hundreds of millions of dollars coming in, so I personally must be worth a $$$ salary". Lol no.
There is a significant difference though - Nominet is built around a viable business. They have a monopoly on the .uk TLD and a steady income stream from operating the registry. That they pissed away a chunk of cash arsing around with self-driving cars doesn't change that.
Mozilla have been almost entirely dependent on a firehose of money from Google. This has long been considered dangerous, and it may come to pass that this shuts off when various anti-trust bodies stop Google paying for default search status.
I agree with Liam's assessment that Mozilla should focus on shepherding FF as the reference browser (and associated projects/ecosystem - Rust/Servo, supporting KaiOS, Thunderbird, etc), along with being a standards attack hound. But it does seem that they need to develop stable, independent and diversified income stream. They could of course be sitting on a tidy pile generating passive income had their previous firehose been better stewarded. Alas, that's by the by now.
The need for income could be mitigated if they had worked to offload some development effort to third parties - for instance, if Servo had been in a better place, MS might have rebased Edge onto Gecko instead of Chromium. It's reasonable to presume that MS would then have contributed some engineering effort back upstream, because they would be competing with Chrome for browser installs on Windows and want Edge to be as good as possible, which means making Gecko as good as possible.
Same goes for GNOME, and Kai who are leaning on Mozilla outputs as a dependency.
Perhaps what is needed is a movement for those who have benefitted from Netscape and then Mozilla's development of web standards and browser tehcnology to contribute back a long-term endowment.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Page, Brin, Ballmer and Gates are all worth >$100Bn.
If each of them dropped $200m into a trust, that'd be a $1.2Bn endowment to provide long-term stability and security. A quick look on the Forbes real-time billionaires list shows all of them have seen their wealth increase by $500m-$4Bn in the past 24hours based simply on market fluctuations. I doubt they'd miss such a miserly sum.
I expect Dorsey could pitch some in as well, but as he's only worth $4Bn, we'll let him off with a smaller $50m contribution.
This would basically double the $1Bn the Foundation currently has in investments (2024 report).
They report spending ~$250m/yr on software development and another $125m on Management/General. The payroll is ~$200m/yr. Total spend is $600m/yr.
So a $2Bn trust would not cover all that.
It would however take the heat off annual receivables from search and largely underwrite core Firefox work. Throw off anything AI related (I note the IT budget went up $10m from 2022-2023. Maybe that was a renewal cycle, but I wonder if it was AI-related hardware or cloud spend?).
Seriously. If you can't turn out a bloody good product on $200m/yr, then sack the leadership.
but does any of this article actually matter to the average user? I started out on Navigator, then switched to Firefox at home and, later, on the phone. I use Chrome at home for Gmail and Maps but try to avoid it otherwise, due to the tracking and lack of ad-blocking. It works absolutely fine for me. I don't need to run 40 tabs at once, nor use a million extensions. I don't time new-page-openings in micro-seconds. How many normal users actually do?
Or is it saying that it's the techies that really keep FF in existence, and if you lose them then the whole thing goes down?
I switched to Firefox soon as it was released - mainly for tabbed browsing to start with. I even had my name (amongst many others) in an ad for funding it. When Google's Chromium browser was released I switched to that as many people seemed to at that time. But, since around 2020, I switched back to Firefox and other browsers based on it. I am currently using the Firefox-based Zen browser which works great for me - no one seems to have mentioned it here. And I will try out of LibreWolf and Floorp which I found out about from reading these comments.
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
There is no 3.
I agree wholeheartedly. How do we make this happen, please?
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