I'm far from an expert, but the switch to multithreading has been perilous to not break everyone's favourite plugins, likewise the switch from XUL
Electrolysis is basically here and working, slowly rolling out
- it's a hard problem
- they don't have the resources of MS or Google
- they have a much bigger extension culture and must support it
- the current work is not sexy and visible and hence get little advertisement
Mozilla created an entire freaking language to level up their game. And in a few years it became one of the most promising technology of the decade, with a vibrant community.
If it was a movie, this period of their life would be the scene with a small outsider named "Moz" training by night in a dirty gym or during the night under the rain.
Next one will be the training paying off and him kicking the other guy's ass in the ring.
But you need the unsexy and hard training first.
Most of your favorite extensions will die, and it is directly forcing me to drop firefox for chromium at work, which I abhor. Sadly the feature I need (decent kiosk mode) will die in its current form (as a XUL addon) only a year after deploying this solution, versus with chromium its built in, and not going away any time soon.
This is just FUD. Especially as Mozilla is working closely with the developers of the most popular add ons to make sure all capabilities they need will be available (see also webextension experiments).
Of course not all capabilities of XUL will make it, but as Chrome has a vibrant extensive add on community around WebExtension the idea that most usecases are affected is implausible.
The one that bother me the most is tab group:
https://github.com/Quicksaver/Tab-Groups/issues/535
It was an feature of Firefox that I loved. They removed it. So I now use the extension. And the author is now announcing he won't be able to port it.
I'll the tab group extension though. I loved it and it won't be possible with webextensions.
isn't/wasn't that the point of firefox though.
>a very good browser doing browser things.
Chrome is the competition. Quite good at 'browser' things
Do I need it to be at least as fast as chrome ? Yes.
I've switched to Firefox a few times over the past years, but usually I'd switch back to Chrome because, whether true or not, it felt more performant/cleaner/better. The main reason I bothered trying to switch back to Firefox was always the versatility or 'freedom'. Stuff like the tree-style tab plugin.
Realistically, for me to break my usual patterns and try Firefox again would have to involve at least one of the following:
- equal (perceived) performance to Chrome - freedom/versatility in regards to plugins - some as-of-yet not seen before advantage
With all else being equal, or even ever so slightly worse than Chrome, I'd go for Firefox simply because I distrust Google.
Thing is, I'd characterize myself as much more security- and privacy-conscious than most people, and yet I'm still on Chrome despite giving Firefox a shot at least once a year for the past few years or so. I catch myself forgetting to test the stuff I make on FF occasionally (I'm a web developer). While I'm by no means a paragon of sticking with my beliefs, I'm still a bit of a privacy-weenie. The fact that I'm not using Firefox worries me a bit.
The fact that I can't quite explain it frustrates me. If I had to give a reason as to why I use Chrome instead of Firefox, I'd say there are two primary reasons and a very vague third one:
1. Chrome is just more familiar at this point, especially its dev tools 2. Firefox feels like one of those Java applets: slow to boot and alien to my OS (moreso than Chrome). 3. Chrome feels snappier
Unless you use extensions, which used to be one of Firefox's biggest advantages.
I gave Firefox on Ubuntu a try for a week last month because I was looking for a replacement for Chrome and if I wasn't tech savvy I wouldn't have been able to figure out that Firefox was running in single-process mode and how to fix that.
E.g. the default "Ubuntu integration" extension that Firefox ships with on Ubuntu (where it is the default browser) is not compatible with electrolysis. Additionally the (now outdated) Lastpass extension from the Firefox addon shop isn't compatible. I think the Trello Scrum extension also isn't compatible. The React developer tools also only just experimentally enabled compatibility.
I'm not nitpicking -- users don't care why Firefox is slow or why electrolysis is disabled. If an extension is available for Firefox, especially if it's available on the official addon shop, users expect it to work and not to make Firefox slow to a crawl.
That said, even with multiprocess mode I found that Firefox would often be considerably slower when having many tabs open (it's normal for me to keep 30-40 tabs open and this isn't rare, even among my non-developer friends). And as a developer the dev tools are still lightyears behind.
I get that Mozilla wants to dump all the cruft added by XUL based extensions, and that they offed all the Firefox OS bits ASAP, but there are still markets for both those things. The latter prolly had more life in it if it were targeted as a Firefox chromebook type deal to give to the parents/kids, as that is eating into laptops marketshare in the double digits, and that on a Pinebook could easily make it the year of the Linux Laptop.
Call me cynical, but Mozilla is made of people. People don't mind making a name for themselves: no one works at Mozilla for life. One might as well prepare for life at tech giants or startups. Firefox is printing money so they can afford the Jonesing (for now).
A less cynical reason is that Mozilla shares the same hiring pool as startups and tech giants and people go back and forth; changing mindsets is hard.
Is that a fact? FWIW, I have little to no interest in working for any other tech company.
Another perspective a friend recently shared with me is that perhaps it is time for Firefox to go the way of Icedove, Mozilla has taken it pretty far, but it is not its main focus even now, and it can be picked up and developed on into the future (not that there haven't been forks already).
Not in any legal sense of the word.
Today, I can build a SIP client for the browser and it will work well on every major platform except iOS, where Apple is still dragging ass years after WebRTC was standardized and implemented by every other browser.
No, Microsoft was a monopoly on the OS market.
You cannot be a monopoly with < 50% share like iOS has (and it's not a monopoly to have 100% share on your OWN platform and dictate terms there, as long as your platform is not a monopoly on the overall market).
In other words, people and devs dissatisfied with how iOS does things, can always go to Android (or Windows Phone).
People couldn't do that when Windows had 95%+ of the desktop and enterprise market, because there was no escaping it.
You're assuming "iOS" and "iOS apps" are the same market, which they aren't in the same way that LibreOffice is in the same market with Microsoft Office but not with Microsoft Windows.
The argument you could be trying to make is that Android apps and iOS apps, or Google Play and the iOS App Store, are the same market. But you can't install Android apps on iOS and you can't get iOS apps from Google Play.
And iOS app developers are the customers of the iOS App Store. They pay Apple for it and have no alternative. "Switch to Android" doesn't work because it is the device customer who would have to switch to Android, not the app developer. The app developer is already in both. It's like facing a retail monopoly in California and what you're saying is to go buy retail space in Texas. That's not the same market.
You are a monopoly when you have pricing power over some good or service (the ability, in some range, to raise prices without losing sales to a competitor). Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
The good or service being "mobile phones" or "mobile apps" -- e.g. the whole market they belong to.
Not "iPhones" or "iOS apps".
Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
>Having less than 50% share in some market using the market boundaries usually drawn by analysts does not prove or imply the absence of pricing power.
No, it just makes it irrelevant as to the law.
No, it doesn't work that way. If you have pricing power on, say, iPhones -- you can raise the price and sales don't move to someone else -- you have a monopoly because price power demonstrates that whatever putative competitors exist are in a functionally separate market, not substitute products in the same market.
> Any company has "pricing power" over their own products and marketplace.
No, companies in competitive markets lose sales to competitors when they raise prices, which is exactly what pricing power means doesn't happen.
Mozilla has basically ignored Firefox for the past few years and let it languish as a single threaded browser in a multi-threaded world, where the other 3 major competitors are highly optimizing their browsers to the respective laptop/tablet/phones. Google with Chromebooks (shipping more than Macbooks[1]) & Android, Microsoft with Surface, Apple with iOS (where they have an illicit monopoly) & on Macbooks.
Mozilla can fight this battle and provide a better user experience, but as it stands a few years have been sunk down the drain on Firefox OS and Mozilla isn't even trying to leverage it into a Chromebook killer!
Sure, trying to win on price (which is what Moz tried with Firefox OS) isn't going to be a battle that can be won. Google and others already have the relationships with manufacturers who know they can drive volume, but what they don't have is the community support & buy in that Mozilla has. Create a compelling user experience! Netscape won the war against the monoculture of a decade ago by creating a user experience that people loved, in spite of the IE6 monoculture of the time.
Today, we have a Webkit monoculture, with Edge nipping at its heels. This is a very similar situation to a decade ago, where Deer Park Alpha lead the way out of the shadowy darkness, with flash free video & audio and performance and protocol support that ran circles around the others.
1 - http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/19/11711714/chromebooks-outso...