We need competition; we also need diversity. We need the possibility that young, game-changing market entrants might come along. We need that idea to be kept alive, to make sure that all the browsers don’t shift from keeping users happy to just keeping a few giant corporations that dominate the Web happy. Because there’s always pressure to do that, and if all the browsers end up playing that same old game, the users will always lose.
We need more browsers that treat their users, rather than publishers, as their customers. It’s the natural cycle of concentration-disruption-renewal that has kept the Web vibrant for nearly 20 years (eons, in web-years).
We may never get another one, though.
Sometimes, I feel a little dirty for using Chrome just about anywhere, instead of Firefox. The problem is that switching browsers is not something I just do willy-nilly; you build up certain ways of using a browser, and with it being by far the most-used and most important application on my PC, even the tiniest of things become ingrained, and the tiniest of differences between browsers will annoy the crap out of me. I do give other browsers a chance every now and then, just to keep up with the times – but I always end up back at Chrome.
That being said, Doctorow’s article paints a very bleak picture of the future of browsers, because according to him, the W3C has basically become a tool for the few big tech companies to dictate the direction of browsers and therefore the web with it, with disastrous consequences.
I moved away from Firefox due to memory leaks.
Just keeping browser 24/7 with GMail and another tab for regular browsing was enough to rise Firefox usage to 3GB in two days.
I switched to Chrome. Not perfect, but I can keep it under control.
Would I go back? After latest news regarding their relation with their users, I don’t think so.
I leave Firefox open for days, even weeks on end with no such issue.
Memory leaks have been solved for quite a while (at least a year). Memory behaving much better than Chrome which has become a real hog.
The problem is that memory don’t mean squat when a single misbehaving tab locks up the whole browser and pegs the system to 100%.
Look I like Firefox (specifically Pale Moon and Comodo Icedragon because I think the new FF UI is deep fried ass) but lets be honest folks….the engine kinda blows. I also have a couple of Chromium based (Comodo Chromodo and Opera) and I have NEVER had a tab crash take down the browser or slow the system to a crawl because the browser is pegging the cores…I just can’t say that with any of those using the Gecko engine.
As for TFA? We HAVE competition, more competition than ever before, Dragon and Icedragon, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi,Pale Moon, Waterfox,Kmeleon, Off-By_One, QTWeb, hell I could go on all day so if FF dies, which frankly IMHO it deserves to for repeatedly giving the users the finger and forcing through UI changes nobody wanted or asked for? Then its not like the old days where we’ll have IE (or whatever they’re calling it now) and one other choice (Opera then and Chrome now) we’ll still have choices up the wazoo.
Heck maybe if gecko dies someone will come up with a new engine that will allow plug ins like gecko but without all the problems.
We are talking about competition that actually have resources to influence a standards body here, not a bunch of more or less maintained hobby projects.
Second, your rant about the Firefox UI, I simply cannot understand. For me, all browsers look exactly the same. They all have a url-bar with a few buttons, and tabs where Firefox is the most customisable of them all. What is there really to complain about?
I’m trying to use Safari only now for a while (for the much better native h264 support on Mac), but I miss Firefox for some behaviours and extensions that I can not replicate in this browser. I have tried Chrome as well, but that browser is a buggy piece of shit, and I seriously don’t understand why people use it. Yes, crashes takes down the whole browser, at least once a week.
My feeling is that the Firefox brand simply is not cool and alternative anymore.
Edited 2016-05-13 06:07 UTC
ROFL what “influence” do you think they actually possess friend?
Did they have enough influence to get a free codec as the default instead of the copyright landfill H.26x in HTML V5? Nope. Did they stop DRM support being baked into the standard of HTML V5? Nope.
So please list what they have actually done, and I don’t mean things they suggested that were instantly shot down by MSFT,Google, and Apple, but actual standards that were changed because of Mozilla.
And no all browsers do NOT look the same with that dogshit “Metro” minimal UI ripped from Windows Mist8ke, and if you believe that then you simply haven’t used any browsers but clones…like Moz who is trying to ape Chrome so hard it comes off like a Chinese knock off.
Try Pale Moon, Off-By-One, QTWeb, or Kmeleon…then get back to me about how “they are all the same”. Oh and just FYI Chrome isn’t the issue, its the fact you are running it on a niche OS which OSX is, sorry. In Windows any of the Chromium based run great, and from what I’ve been told they work great on Linux too, its only OSX that has the issues. Perhaps you should bootcamp into Windows?
Wow, lots of anger there!
Mozilla does not change standards, they work with creating standards, and they have contributed quite a lot in that aspect.
Here are a few to get you started: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/02/24/mobile-web-api-evolution/
And here is the current list of what they are working on: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Standards
TL;DR: The web would be less open and free without Mozilla, even though they cannot win every battle, and you should be thankful for it.
I can’t see any trace of “Metro” in Firefox for OS X. Chrome/Safari/Firefox looks pretty much the same here. Sleek and unobtrusive. I’m pretty sure none of the browsers you name dropped would bring me back to Windows again though.
BTW, Pale Moon and Kmeleon are based on Mozillas Gecko and QTWeb is based on Apples Webkit. If those are not clones, then I don’t know what is.
Yup, the gmail on Firefox was a terrible thing. The solution I found was to take gmail (and Keep, the other google thingie I use) to another browser (IE at first; then when I could bring myself to install another browser, Opera).
Then I made Firefox never remember any credentials for google, and I feel like having a more secure browsing experience in Firefox; less tracking and all. Opera does a good job with gmail. And I still can use the gazillions of Firefox add-ons I accumulated over the years.
At the time of writing this comment franzrogar’s comment is on -2.
Was his comment inaccurate, trolling, or off-topic? Obviously not the latter two. So was it inaccurate? No; he was saying why he moved away, which is personal and presumably accurate information, not making a sweeping statement about Firefox.
People can be too trigger happy with marking down. You shouldn’t mark down because you don’t like the post. It inconveniences the rest of us and his hardly conducive to meaningful debate.
Mozilla are so full of themselves that they can use a good humbling occassionally.
Look how declining market- and mindshare has made them finally take the necessary steps to make Firefox become suitable for inclusion in Debian again.
More alternative browsers? Sorry, but that ship has sailed. Browsers are now one of the most complex pieces of software running on a system. Websites are approaching JavaScript payloads of 1 MB. To get that executing in any satisfactory fashion, one needs to invest many man-years, which isn’t going to happen. What remains is some fringe browsers like NetSurf or Dillo, and ageing unmaintained codebases like KHTML that almost nobody cares about anymore.
Edited 2016-05-12 00:02 UTC
Your claim about the complexity of things is pretty ’90s; even then there were notions of running simply in a VM. Today you just pick your tests or your SCRUM maturity, adjoin to the public bug mashability, get your things to compile and curate dependencies to do what you want. You get people and/or services to test in their environs and VMs and containers; or don’t and rely on other instrumentation, even sending your browser out 8MiB of Android code at a time (it’s a Match-3 game starring Ozy journalists, but ace at Reactive SunSpider…) If you can’t use Machine Learning or a solver (with incremental state) to help out, you were never architect in the first place. You could run a situationist license.
Even so there are bunches of browsers even within the Citrix, Virtual Desktop and signage industry. If you’d mentioned rejiggering the M&A of that to match, I’d believe more ardently in your notes of complexity.
They certainly could match the servers better. One person, one clot of 40 ad javascript (and n browser environments and their mobile intents) is hardly expidient. Lots of stuff should be hosted on the DSLAM.
I really enjoyed unrekonq. That was an awesome browser, even if it did send you to make kde or at least qt functional.
Vivaldi’s awesome, unless I missed something.
Opera might be great; yes the Opera house is well into season 16 of its own as an Opera (more if they do 4 seasons instead of 2) and the lead team in different digs drawing from Chinese management for top ideas. (Now of course I wish I made more version snapshots.)
your comment looks like something a spam bot would spit out.
developing a new browser from scratch is nearly unfeasible nowadays, due to complexity of web pages and necessity of dealing with javascript in a timely manner.
vivaldi does not use its own engine, it’s yet another browser on top of blink, which is yet another variant of webkit. browsers like that a dime-a-dozen.
I fly -literally- JS disabled, Chithanh.
Only turn on eventually on those bastardized pages I have found no replacement for, yet[The Old Opera allowed granular control on this issue].
But essentially you are right. A browser have -unnecessarily- become a huge effort to create and maintain.
Being this complex is AGAINST the very philosophy of Internet NEUTRALITY [Excludes small Actors], persistence and resilience.
Should We come back to the XHTML Path? Really serious about this.
XHTML failed for two reasons:
1. It fails HARD if you make even the slightest syntactic mistake. (Sites that don’t are actually being treated as HTML by the browser)
2. The XHTML 2.0 effort wanted to throw out things like
in favour of things like <l>line</l> tags with no migration path.
It was rolled into HTML5 by ensuring that the HTML5 standard would consider things like
to be valid HTML so you can generate HTML5 markup that is also valid XML. (The term to google is “polyglot markup”)
Producing well-formed HTML is actually not that hard. If you have legacy code that outputs tag soup, then use an HTML sanitizer.
If you write new code, then use production rules that can only generate valid HTML (e.g. manipulate DOM nodes instead of directly writing HTML code).
It doesn’t matter. People are too used to browsers “be[ing] liberal in what they accept” and to the performance of a non-XML-aware serializer and don’t consider it acceptable that a single-character typo or an interrupted transfer should replace the the entire page with a red-on-yellow “Parse error on line X” message.
Compare the performance of a template engine like Genshi, which enforces well-formed HTML/XML output, to the performance of something like Jinja2 or Mako. To mitigate that performance hit, you’d have to enforce well-formedness during some kind of compilation phase and you’d still take a hit to process any “don’t autoescape” sections at runtime.
The web has already settled on “It’s much easier to have each client give a little CPU-time to recover from errors than for the server to foot the entire CPU-time bill for preventing them. Standardize on a parsing algorithm (which also happens to provide legacy compatibility) and let the clients handle the error recovery.”
…though I’m still very hopeful for what will gain traction in the Rust community. They love pushing as much into Rust’s type system as possible and being able to have the well-formedness of my SQL, HTML, and HTTP processing verified at compile time will be awesome.
(eg. Rust’s hyper library uses their “strong but inferred” typing along with the interaction between the borrow checker, method-implementation, and generics to compile-time verify that you’re not doing things like trying to set a header on an HTTP request you’ve already sent, preventing that infamous-in-PHP error at compile time. The method to send a request consumes its own object and returns a new one without methods to modify it.)
Edited 2016-05-13 03:47 UTC
Yes. Dealing with the tag soup (invalid HTML) and reproducing bugs from long forgotten Netscape versions is one of the things that makes browsers complex.
I don’t recall how far it went, but they were talking about adding JS quite a while back on the Netsurf mailing list, IIRC.
It must not have helped that the world noticed that Firefox was hijacked by the angry left. Basically if you’re using FireFox it seems you agree with a certain worldview that’s happy to unemploy people like Brendan Eich. A lot of people see that behaviour coming to them.
Edited 2016-05-12 03:21 UTC
So you are against the free market then?
Because I hate to break the news to ya but his firing was the most perfect example of the market in action we have seen in years. People said 1.- “I do not support this, I will not use this product and tell others not to as well”. 2.- this gains traction, other post links on their webpages saying don’t use Firefox and why, 3.- CEO refuses to do his job**, numbers plummet,4.- he gets fired…tada! Classic voting with your wallet and feet. And yes voting with your wallet works even on a non-profit like FF because…where do they get their money? From selling access to user’s eyeballs, no eyes? No check.
**.- If nothing else he should have been fired for refusing to do his job…what is the job of a CEO? To be the public face of the company and interact with reporters on behalf of the company…what did he refuse to do? Why be the public face of the company and interact with reporters on behalf of the company.
Sorry but if you don’t do your job you SHOULD be fired.
The idea that Mozilla isn’t a puppet of a large corporation is silly. For many years, they were primarily financed by Google. They’ve also had recent deals with Yahoo and other companies.
On one hand, I understand why they want funding. It allows them to do a lot more, pay for bandwidth and so on but at the same time I don’t have much sympathy for their problems.
They have an advertising budget. They have money to hire some developers and qa people. Most open source projects never get that.
Firefox has great improved in performance and memory consumption. Most people who complain now are using a lot of extensions that leak memory and the browser itself is fine. If they ran it stock, it would work fine on a supported platform.
Where firefox has issues is their branding guidelines, and the portability of their code base. The ifdefs and security code is swiss cheese and it’s a nightmare to keep a system ported that isn’t main stream enough for them. They’re not a very open source friendly project in terms of inclusion even within Linux distros let alone *BSDs and other operating systems.
They need to clean up the code, trim the fat and make it more portable. They also need to stick with a normal build process unlike Google. Building chromium is a hassle and that code is even less portable than firefox despite starting as khtml/webkit code.
I very much disagree with your conclusion that Mozilla would be a puppet because of their lucrative deals with search providers. The very fact that they have switched default provider in the past shows that they are not a puppet but playing the field.
Also, about 10 years ago they were very profitable with large cash reserves, giving them the freedom to ditch any deal and continue without any cutbacks for years without any income at all. That financial free freedom made them the puppet of nobody.
Their situation today may be different though, after having invested heavily in FirefoxOS (which they would never have done if they were the puppet of Google) and loosing a lot of browser market share they may be much more dependent on their business partners than they were.
The idea that Mozilla isn’t a large corporation is silly!
What was Mozilla^aEURTMs total revenue for 2014?
Mozilla^aEURTMs consolidated reported revenue (Mozilla Foundation and all subsidiaries) for 2014 was $329.5M (US), as compared to $314M in 2013. (src=https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2014/faq/)
Firefox grew when they positioned themselves (correctly) as the non-IE. They kept developing when IE became dormant for 5 year between IE6 and IE7, they had great extensions that IE didn’t have, tabs, etc. IE was great for companies, Firefox was great for consumers.
Then Chrome came out and started to equal (and sometimes beat) Firefox at everything Firefox was good at….and Chrome had browser sync. Then the world became mobile and Chrome became mobile while Firefox just didn’t really
Now Chrome is the defacto browser for many people and the browser sync provides a nice little lock-in.
Browsers are relatively easy pieces of software. HTML- and JavaScript engines are impossibly hard. I think the current “big 4” (Chrome, Edge/IE, Firefox, Safari) are a great balance between focus and choice. Losing 1 would be a great loss but there doesn’t seem to be anything like that in the future.
The problem with the “big 4” is that they are all tied to companies that make OS-es, hardware and a whole bunch of other software and services except for Firefox. That means Firefox will never be the default for anyone and it isn’t convincing enough anymore to replace the other 3 defaults on a global scale. In that regard the EFF is right to call for a saving of Firefox.
But the article isn’t actually about saving Firefox, it is about keeping the web open from things like the video-tag that apparently would block openness because of the Encrypted Media Extensions that would block future browsers (but not firefox???) with protection from the DMCA. Honestly, I am writing it just as messily and incoherent as the article did. While all the individual words make sense to me, the reason why the article gets a “Save Firefox!” title is beyond me
Regarding Firefox OS, that was a good move at a very bad time. At this point, I don’t think it’s possible for a third OS to get significant marketshare in the smartphone or tablet space. Even Microsoft and Amazon has failed miserably there.
With PCs there was always a chance because you could get people to switch platforms fairly easily on their computers. It’s not easy to flash an iPhone to Android or run Windows phone on a Nexus. The nature of ARM SoC having random differences between devices isn’t helping either.
In fact, I actually applied to work on Firefox OS with Mozilla and was rejected in an unpleasant way. That’s not why I’m grumpy with them now, but it was one of many interactions that went badly over the years.
I think there are some great people involved with Mozilla but there are some bad eggs that give everyone a bad name. This can happen with companies and open source projects and most people defending them have only used their browser or email client and never actually dealt with the people.
When you run an open source project and you need to get things upstreamed and vendors dick with you or have ridiculous rules to deal with, over time you just get a list of good and bad projects. Mozilla is on the slightly bad side whereas the maintainer of GNU config.sub and config.guess is on the permanent asshole list. He went so far as to delete my bug report to hide any evidence of what he did.
Back to my original point, when you’re taking large amounts of money from someone, you’re not going to do anything to piss them off too much. I doubt google was threatened by FirefoxOS. Firefox’s losing marketshare caused the Yahoo deal. Google has so much marketshare now with Chrome they don’t need Firefox anymore. IE is dead. Edge hasn’t taken off yet. Google is now #1.
FireFoxOS could bring back a little Decency to the field. If some Investors had the will… [of Decency].
on both FreeBSD and NetBSD I had Firefox as default with xfce(by default I mean the first browser suggested to install) so I am not sure if portability is really that big of an issue. I should check if there is any version difference between the *BSD Firefox and other platforms.
I disagree, Firefox probably has better support of BSDs than any other browsers. Security features like W^X were in fact contributed by OpenBSD people:
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20151021191401
http://www.ghacks.net/2016/01/04/mozilla-enables-wx-in-firefox-46-t…
Getting such a significant contribution into a fully corporate-controlled codebase such as Chromium is going to be a lot harder.
The biggest issue up until now with Firefox has been that of branding, but fortunately Mozilla’s stance on it has become a lot more reasonable than a few years ago.
(disclaimer: I work for Mozilla)
On defense of Mozilla I have to say that: If well true that most of their developers have to pay their monthly bills, Also true that their projects are AMONG the more USER sensitive.
Disclosure: Old Mozilla Family products’ user.
Unfortunately, many features that are stock in Chrome (eg. basic but comfortable GUIs for whitelist-based javascript and cookie handling) require said potentially leaky extensions in Firefox because the Firefox devs insist said features are what extensions are for, but then refuse to take responsibility for ensuring said extensions are leak-free.
Nope sorry, all the spirit of alternative, open, choice-included solution of firefox lost the last few years.
It turns more and more to a chrome clone so don’t see why i shouldn’t just use the original thing.
Sorry but the EFF are scare mongering on the WHATWG.
There are two standards bodies.
* One is the W3C which is glacially slow.
* The other is the WHATWG which is a consortium of tech companies.
The reason that the WHATWG exists is because the HTML5 standard was at one point (I haven’t checked recently) going to take to 2020 to complete. The reason why we had the codec mess a few years ago is because the W3C couldn’t make a decision.
Generally a browser vendors proposes a spec for a new feature, it get discussed , implemented as an experimental feature and then added to the living standard.
Even the WHATWG say that developers should follow W3c rather than them.
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2014/on-html5-vs-living-standard-w3c-v…
Edited 2016-05-12 06:34 UTC
The real reason that html5 is slow to decide on is since there is sooo much crap in there that is not SGML compliant. And the purists and the coders of complex applications REALLY do not want uncompliant code.
I don’t see what all the fuss is about. Firefox is healthy, secure, extremely usable. If I understand the article correctly it’s just stating that we need more browsers such as Firefox.
If Google doesn’t know how to make good Gmail it is not Mozilla’s problem. And there are a lot of problems with Gmail as we all know.
One more example: tried to use some streaming service back home that recommends using Chrome. Of course it did not work as well with Firefox. Did not end up using Chrome but rather ditching the service for Netflix which works perfectly on Firefox.
I really don’t see how Firefox could be in danger. Whether it has 100, 70, 50 or 30% percent market share is irrelevant. It will always have enough users to be successful.
I hope there are still people out there that have not forgotten how it used to be and how Firefox became what it is today. Let’s not forget that there would be no place for Chrome if Microsoft won the browser wars.
in a heartbeat.
If…
1.: It wasn’t much slower. (There are exceptions, but
for my usecases it’s true)
2.: It didn’t waste vertical space.
3.: It started up quicker.
4.: The GUI wouldn’t lock so much.
I could find more reasons not to switch back, but those are the showstoppers for me.
I never regretted switching to Chrome, it never tends to get in my way. I still like Firefox for sentimental reasons, but that’s not enough for me to use a piece of software.
Probably the browser is the most active/used program in my computer.
I cannot afford to have a slower product just it has a fancier moto.
* e10s is taking forever to release
* not so fast as chrome
* no sandbox (i like the way i feel more protected with chrome)
* less supported html5 standards
* worse development tools
* i still can’t have an “private window” in firefox with addons disabled like chrome does (i feel more secure)
* i have x264 video decode gpu acceleration in linux
But yep, i feel a little dirty, still the advantages are enormous
Edited 2016-05-12 12:57 UTC
1. e10s is “taking forever” to release because they recognize that their extension ecosystem is their greatest strength and they’re making sure that e10s will only be released once they’ve added enough shims and given enough assistance to ensure that the extension ecosystem comes along for the ride.
2. “not so fast as chrome” is what e10s is for.
3. The sandbox is coming with e10s because doing it without splitting the content renderer from the main application is more or less impossible.
4. “less supported html5 standards”: How are you judging that? Chrome implements some things Firefox doesn’t yet (eg. native support for certain HTML5 form field types) and Firefox implements some things Chrome doesn’t (eg. support for websites appending to the context menu rather than replacing it). Also, If you’re judging by html5test.com, their comparison charts are almost 10 releases out of date for both browsers and they give Firefox no points for implementing things like microdata while giving Chrome points for things like implementing WebP support (It’s Google’s attempt to replace JPEG) and implementing speech recognition by punting everything you say to the Google Now server farm for processing.
5. Worse development tools: Assuming you’re talking about performance under the influence of a typical extension/tab spread for a developer, I’ll have to give you that. e10s should fix it. (Firefox actually has some functionality Chrome lacks if you can get it to perform acceptably.)
6. Firefox’s alternative to disabled addons in private windows is to audit what they sign and then have Firefox itself restrict the APIs the extensions can access. (eg. Automatic Save Folder can’t create new folders when running under a private window because of that)
Also, with their WebExtensions effort, they may implement what you want. In their announcement for Firefox Developer Edition 48, they point out that they’re already starting to fix what’s broken in Chrome’s implementation of their API, starting with one of the APIs NoScript and uBlock Origin need. (reliable origin information for requests)
If they recognize that their extension ecosystem is great, why are they switching away from all their APIs to be Chrome compatible?
1. Their APIs are more “Application Programming Non-Interfaces” (look at any long-lived Firefox extension. You’ll see massive trees of “If this version, do that thing” and tons of code which basically arbitrarily fingerpaints over Firefox’s guts because that was the official way to do things.)
2. Their old APIs are seriously crippling their ability to implement e10s and, even when they do shim things into working, it’s slower than it should be due to all of the blocking/synchronous IPC that’s needed to ensure the extensions get the semantics they were written for.
3. Addon SDK, their attempt to design something analogous to Chrome’s API, has its down significant design flaws.
4. If they’re going to have to put together a new extension API to encourage authors to eventually move to, they might as well make porting extensions from Blink-based browsers easier too.
A lack of API consistency doesn’t mean the answer is to copy Chrome. It just means to stop changing the API so much.
I called it a “non-API” because it literally was “Extensions operate by overriding arbitrary Firefox-internal code”. That’s what made it so powerful back in the days when Firefox was pioneering the concept that the browser could be extended with things beyond 3rd-party toolbars.
As I said, they copied Chrome because:
a) They already tried to make a stable API once and botched it, so they wanted to use something proven.
b) Copying Chrome’s API makes porting extensions easier.
I seriously don’t see what the problem is, given that they’re not letting it limit them:
1. They’ve already added an API Chrome lacks (reliable request origin information for extensions like NoScript and uBlock Origin) and have plans to continue that “superset of Chrome’s API” pattern.
2. They have plans to allow extensions which need more access to specify a “native.js” component which will be carefully audited by the AMO approvers and can expose a new WebExtensions API for the rest of the extension to use. (The idea being that each “native.js” will be treated as a proposal for an addition to the official WebExtensions API.)
Essentially, they’re trying to make the Blink extension API (already used by Chrome and Opera) into a common API that gets iterated on similarly to standards like HTML, CSS, ECMAScript, and DOM.
Edited 2016-05-13 03:29 UTC
The problem is that this will break every single addons that Firefox has, and given that Firefox’s popularity is in large part built on extensions (and the new attitude Mozilla has that customization only belongs in addons ), this sounds like a recipe for disaster.
I have two addons that are still available for Firefox. Neither have needed a code change since I made them (2013 and 2014, respectively). The API seems stable enough for me, at least.
Beyond that, it’s not that I like Firefox because it is like Chrome, I like Firefox because it isn’t Chrome. The more it copies Chrome, the less I care.
And to be clear about that, if Mozilla ever dropped Gecko (or Servo) in favor of Webkit, I would abandon Firefox. I understand the mantra of freedom, but the more Mozilla becomes complicit in removing competition from the browser space, even if that is just in aiding the WebKit hegemony, the less I trust they can accomplish their goals.
I’d like to say I’d join you, but Firefox would probably still be the best of a bunch of bad options for me even then.
Edited 2016-05-13 18:14 UTC
I went back to safari for a few years and now it’s getting crashy again so i’m looking at alternatives. I use chrome as my backup and firefox as my 3rd. I might switch those and use firefox, chrome, then safari in order of preference. It’s just all the bookmarking and storing stuff, all the cookies, etc. that make switching browsers a bit of a pain. i agree with Thom, I hate needing to use another.
I am sorry, but the only save I see for Firefox is a new management and new design team, for years it looks like every single decision they make goes the wrong way. I still use Firefox as my browser, but I stopped caring about them. Remove Pocket, remove the binary closed trojan (EME), go back to the classic interface, put back the many removed or hidden features, embrace Thunderbird again… and I may care again
I believe that watching movies in browser is a bad idea, altogether. There should be a standard way to redirect streaming content to external application of users choice. Based on content type, for example.
If one wants to watch mp4 movies from ‘Openload’ or ‘Videomega’, Google Chrome is the only one which displays them correctly and without stutter. My guess is that those providers deliberately optimized their servers for Chrome. I suppose we could expect more of them to do so in the future. I have tried Opera and Firefox, with limited success. I don’t believe the Chromium would do either.
My problem is that I hate Chrome, and don’t like Google too much, either. When I want to watch something I feel like I have drink from the toilet.
Occasionally I need to run a virtual machine wit Windows XP and SQL Server Express in it. Once I open it while Google Chrome was active and Google Chrome processes wasted more memory than whole virtual machine.
So, we have another potential problem here. A vendor lock-in for HD movies from the web.
Firefox is my favorite because of smaller memory footprint and extensibility. Whatever annoyance they throw at us, someone would write an extension deal with it.
I don’t know which OS you use so I don’t know for sure it will help, but both Pale Moon and Comodo Dragon had no problems playing videos on the sites you mentioned.
BTW if you are gonna go to those kind of sites you might want to either view them in a VM or use a Comodo browser on a PC that has Comodo Internet Security Free installed so the browser is in a low rights mode double sandbox, as a lot of those streaming sites end up having issues with malvertising.
Bears very little authority over Infrastructure Policy. Not expecting -to a great degree- that HTML5 become Infrastructure [Too much tinted].
The article really isn’t about Firefox though ^aEUR“ it’s about Encrypted Media Extensions, i.e. DRM for HTML5. There are several related articles that bring up different applications or services that might not have seen the light of day had copyright laws been more restrictive. The original iTunes was launched with the slogan “rip, mix & burn”. Netflix started out mailing physical DVDs which meant they didn’t have to negotiate for licenses. Firefox was able to put a stop to Internet Explorer’s dominance by building a better browser thanks to the open nature of web standards. What the EFF is saying is that EME would allow media companies to put even more limits on how their contents is consumed and new players (i.e. “the next Firefox”) would need to seek permission to be able to play it.
My old rips disappeared, somehow, TasnuArakun. Looking for my old vinyls at those piled boxes, again. Will try to BURN, this time.
Maybe going to undust the Old “BIOS” Rig.
No, not going to plug it to the ‘Net’. Not anymore…
What’s really soured me against Mozilla is the entire extension signing bit. Not that extensions they distribute have to be signed (that makes perfect sense), but that there is no way to shut it off without using a build other than the stable channel. I should be permitted to bypass this requirement when necessary (and it has proven necessary a time or two), especially for third party extensions that have nothing to do with Mozilla. It smacks of attempted control, and all too Apple like. To then go and have the nerve to talk about an open web is pure hypocrisy.
The bigger concern for me (though well related) is that there are basically only two open source libraries capable of powering a browser: Gecko and WebKit (blink is still very similar to WebKit). It’s also hard to call Blink properly open, since although the code is available for download, Google controls the project with an iron fist, and rejects any code whatsoever that isn’t directly and tangibly beneficial to Google. Gecko doesn’t have official bindings, although the official bindings for WebKit are pretty horrific, and it takes tons of extra work to actually make a browser with it (such as the WebKitGTK and WebKit Qt work).
People berate Gecko for…some reason. They say it’s slow, although it seems pretty darn fast to me, basically identical to WebKit and Blink. People say it takes a lot of memory, but much of the memory used by a browser is used by JS, and the usage of Firefox is really similar to Chrome nowadays.
Would you want to live in a world with only one really open implementation of the core of the web browser?
This. While I still worry about things like EME, the pure complexity of web technologies are an even bigger barrier to entry. Long gone are the days when a single developer could write their own browser.
I remember around 2000 ^aEUR“ about the time that Mac OS X was released ^aEUR“ being able to pick from a decent number of different Mac browsers, all using their own rendering engines: Netscape/Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Opera, iCab, OmniWeb.
The later three eventually abandoned their own engines and went with WebKit or Blink. There still are some oddities out there though, such as Dillo and NetSurf (and they do come in handy sometimes).
Myself I fell for iCab and used it as my main browser for about ten years. It started out strong, with a standards compliant renderer and low memory footprint, but was struggling to keep up by the time sites were starting to make serious use of CSS2 features.
I eventually switched to Chrome. I never saw Firefox as a serious contender. It used to feel like a second-class citizen on OS X. It was slow, memory hungry and didn’t use native widgets. I’m sure it has improved a lot, but for me it made a bad first impression.
A very simple conceptual construct?
And BROWSERS to WWW what Emacs to Text?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Stallman_-_Preliminares_2…
“The Church of Emacs has its own newsgroup, alt.religion.emacs, that has posts purporting to support this belief system.”
The unforgettable SIN of EMPOWERING the eternally procrastinated USER.
A P2P Beast?
My main browser is Safari, but since I’m running 10.8, it’s getting old, creeky, and deprecated.
Firefox is used almost exclusively for my Gmail. I try to not do any extra surfing out of that browser, and try to avoid logging in to, well, most anything save a few tiny forums, on Safari. If I do log in, I make it a point to log out.
Finally, I have Chrome as my main work browser since I have no qualms about closing it, nuking cookies, etc. It can be a wasteland of state and junk since I keep it on a short leash.
I bounce back among them all the time.
I also run my mail in Apple Mail, but I have Firefox for Google docs and stuff like that, so it just stays logged in there.
Recently I finally managed to send Firefox over the top. It didn’t seem to want to recover with over 1000 tabs open. I forgave it, salvaged the tabs from the crashed state, and moved on.
I was a Netscape user until Safari was released around 2003 or so and I loved it… in fact, Safari is still my favourite browser ever created in terms of usability, design and speed… but today I value freedom, diversity and versatility more than anything else.
A couple of years ago, when Firefox started to lose momentum and Chrome was the new king, I was pretty shocked cause I really fear Google… so I migrated all my computers, bookmarks, history and stuff to Firefox… I didn’t like an scenario dominated by Google, Apple or Ms and I didn’t want to contribute to that bleak reality.
I realized how important Firefox was so I started to use it even knowing It sucked hard on the Mac. It was not an easy task, Firefox was (and still is) really really horrible on the Mac… It took me 1 or 2 months of customization and tinkering to got Firefox the way I wanted, but It worthed the effort cause I reused all those configurations in every machine that I had (Mac, Linux even Amiga!).
Firefox versatility is incredible. It’s not the best in any particular aspect, but It’s good enough in all of them… and you can round some hard edges with customization.
Today I’m a Firefox fan, there’s no look back for me. I’m a Firefox soldier.
Safari is just a 2nd option, It’s beautiful yeah, but I don’t care too much about it. Fuck Apple xD
There are many alternative web browsers but it’s really difficult to compete against big corporations.
Maxthon, Avant, SlimBrowser, BriskBard, just to name a few.
But most of them are just interfaces to WebKit, Chrome or Trident rendering engines… so, they aren’t really “browsers”.
I have started using Vivaldi. It is pretty great. You even get to use most Chrome extensions.
But I disagree with their conclusion. Digital media companies need to protect their copyrighted material, and without content protection, too many people WILL pirate content.
Let’s assume the media companies don’t do anything about it.
1. They make less money.
2. They get less investors.
3. Less content gets made in the future.
4. Consumers lose because they didn’t play fair.
If anyone disagree with this MOST BASIC of observations, you’re simply a F’n web moron.
The problem is that DRM is a fundamentally broken idea.
Mathematically, it’s crypto where the legitimate recipient and attacker are the same person.
Practically, something’s effectively “DRM-free from a niche vendor” the moment one challenge-loving person takes up the challenge of cracking or bypassing the protection.
(I’m a backer of The Banner Saga and the devs royally pissed off backers who care about DRM-free games by blaming their DRM-free release of episode 1 for increased piracy, then changing their mind and releasing a DRM-free version of episode 2 after the Steam version was cracked on release day and claiming that the lesson learned was “we need better DRM” when it really was “The DRM-free release gave more publicity on sites like GOG.com and, when you grow a pie, the the piracy slice will grow even if it remains a fixed percentage of a whole.”)
YouTube isn’t DRMed but, because they use the Media Source Extensions to implement dynamic resolution switching (ie. their own mapping between input data streams and the video element), you can’t just right-click and choose “Save Video As…”. DRM via EME would be exactly the same thing to an end user… it would just reduce the selection of people who can write the requisite “youtube-dl” or equivalent. (And, given the size of the world, that’d still be a massive slice of the population.)
Gabe Newell understands this and, rather than pouring a ton of money into an arms race against release-day cracks, Steam’s advice to developers has been “do your research on an optimal price point, focus on supplementary features which can be tied to a legitimate network account, and compete on convenience”. (The exact solution the RIAA and MPAA have been fighting tooth and nail for over a decade now.)
Edited 2016-05-16 04:53 UTC