I haven’t perceived Firefox abandonment. I get regular updates and there was a very noticeable major update in performance pretty recently. I don’t think I’ve heard of anything Chrome has done besides trying to push an anti-Adblock.

Yes, they're pretty active, especially in removing features. They removed RSS, removed compact mode, removed bookmark descriptions, removed old extensions, etc.

And at the same time they don't offer any options to donate directly to Firefox, you have to donate to Mozilla and hope they'll spend the resources on the right project (which they clearly don't). It feels like Firefox has been a walking corpse for a while, so of course they'll try anything.

Exactly. In the past, I looked for a way to donate to of give businesses to Firefox, but I have no intention of supporting Mozilla given their lack of focus.

I think we should hard fork firefox. Set up a board of respected people, and a non-profit. Fork firefox. Set up a 5 year dev timeline, with specific larger goals and intent.

Fundraise, and then hire away some core, mozilla key devs who will leave. Build on that.

I wonder, this would be a "feel good" place for some IPO enriched persons to put money. And it has real value, in that keeping a second browser engine is a laudable and important goal.

Real good to be done.

Hmm.

And you know, Firefox was paid for by donations, and OSS devs donating time. If anything is reasonable to non-profit, this is it.

>removed old extensions

Lots of new features were impossible with the old extension model, which was barely an extension model so much as complete access to the browser internals.

> Lots of new features were impossible with the old extension model

Can you name some?

Overall I see extensions as part of the problem, not part of the solution. (the one extension I install is uBlock)

Back in 1999 my relatives were mostly running Internet Explorer on computers with 640x480 screens over dialup. It was fashionable then for companies like Yahoo! and Hotmail and Amazon to add toolbars to your web browser and I'd go visit my uncle and find that more than half of the vertical space was taken up by various toolbars they'd downloaded so they really had about 300 pixels to view the web through.

None of them seemed to thing there was a problem there.

Similarly today if you install too many plugins into a GUI application and it gets "pluginitis" and gets slow and unreliable. I am all for extensions that really speed things up by eliminating junk but if you're not part of the solution in this way you are part of the problem.

I'm not sure I understand your point. Yes, extensions can do bad things. Thats why you don't install those. There are also tons of extensions that do very useful things, but are not applicable to a wider audience. It would be silly to include that functionality in the base browser. Extensions are an absolute necessity in a modern web browser.

The problem is that people who like extensions don't stop at just one.

Unfortunately with IDEs for instance, many people have never had the experience of using an IDE that "just works", they expect it to be f-ed up all the time so when they load another 15 plugins into Eclipse and it is crashing and hanging up all the time they figure "that's life" and don't even realize that somebody else has a stable IDE because they use a stable set of plugins and don't have pluginitis.

Reliability and speed are features too and they are global properties of the system. I'd say non-GUI programs accept extensions well but GUI programs have a rendering thread that can be blocked, an internal change notification system that can be corrupted or used incorrectly, etc.

Generally speaking, their entire multiprocess work (you know, the thing that allows your browser to not fully crash when some website decides to load 250MB of JS) would have been impossible with the old model. You're peeking and prodding at the entire core of the browser in ways the browser... Knows nothing about. E10s could not have worked with old extensions.

IIRC that's not true. Multiprocessing was switched half a year before WebExtensions, and most popular XUL-Extensions were refactored to work with multiprocessing at the time and worked fine with it. Back then it was even a big shitstorm that they had invest so much work, just to be killed some months later.

> And at the same time they don't offer any options to donate directly to Firefox, you have to donate to Mozilla and hope they'll spend the resources on the right project

Such hope is fruitless. You can donate to Mozilla Foundation but not Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation does Firefox development and actually pays Mozilla Foundation for the privilege. Mozilla Foundation owns the trademarks/etc and Mozilla Corporation pays Foundation for the rights to those and for administrative services.

I respect Andreas Kling, but Ladybird is not a real alternative.

To the sibling who commented. Sorry you got downvoted to oblivion.

> Of course it's not, yet. But those people are doing good work and it's not unthinkable it could gain contributors at an accelerated rate.

Agreed. It's an impressive feat of tech as it is, and I wish it best. That said it's still far from being usable.

> Well, when you're a leftie HN peasant I guess anything more complicated than your CRUD codebase

That's not fair. Web (browsers) is (are) hideously complex. What Andreas did is impressive, like launching a rocket with terrestrial satellite. What browsers are launch a manned mission to Mars.

Sibling was downvoted because of the gratuitous and off-target insults and strawman-ing (in multiple comments), not their point about feasibility of Ladybird, etc.

Shouldn't then their individual posts be downvoted?

Pretty sure they all were :-)

Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff.

Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser.

(I love this)

>meanwhile people are building a browser & engine from scratch on a shoestring budget (Ladybird).

Ladybird will properly support the websites you use around the year 2060, assuming no more web specs. I sure hope you're ready to deal with Chrome in the mean time because you threw a tantrum at Firefox not being the only project Mozilla has.

Also, uBO literally has "Works best on Firefox" at the forefront of the repo. Firefox fanatics like you will be the death of Mozilla. Learn to let go.

> Ladybird will properly support the websites you use around the year 2060, assuming no more web specs.

That's a bit ungenerous. In less than two years of part-time work, the small team (2-3 main contributors) got it to run discord which is about the most complex interactive website I personally frequent.