Can you give a few examples of how Mozilla/Firefox have changed?
We all know about FF Quantum. Yeah it sucks what happened. Maybe there was an alternative, but any one saying Firefox should’ve just stuck to not being compatible with Chromium extensions is kidding themselves on how badly that would’ve continued hurting Firefox’s market share. The XUL powered extension I’m sure were powerful so the outcry in certain places was huge. Vocal minority.
The Pocket integration got lots of outcry which seemed pretty silly to me. It’s one product they own. Mozilla doesn’t have a ton of products. Yes that is Google like. Much like any synergy or integrating is Google like. Which is really just being a modern internet corporation. If this is one of the reasons. Why would Mozilla of 5 years ago not have done that vs the Mozilla of today and whenever they did do it. 1-2 years ago I think?
FWIW, killing XUL extensions wasn't even really about Chromium compatibility. The changes in the Quantum rearchitecting were going to break everything anyway; the decision was made to move everything onto an add-on system which wouldn't just break again and again with every architectural change (which, yes, did have the benefit of Chromium compatibility).
Quantum wasn't even about Chrome compatibility. The XUL extension mechanism was permanent technical debt loaded onto the browser because of how it exposed features, basically welding things directly onto the browser's guts, which on the one hand is super-convenient for making radical changes in an extension and on the other hand is a nightmare to maintain.
The analogy I've used is the Amiga operating system design versus Unix when it comes to multi-core / multi-processor versus multiprocessing. Amiga welds everything to the hardware, the Unix design has a "system call" mechanism cleanly separating your programs from the OS and vice versa.
Because Unix has this relatively thick layer between the OS kernel and the rest of the world, you can just pick up your entire kernel, wrap it in a lock (in Linux this was called the Big Kernel Lock in some BSDs it was Giant Lock and other Unix systems gave it different names) and you've got a multi-processor capable system. Linux did this in about a year IIRC. For purely CPU bound software this minimal work gets you 99.9% of the performance of a custom built OS designed from the outset for multiple processors. Subsequent work to get rid of the BKL further improves performance on more sophisticated workloads, but you're off to a great start.
Amiga couldn't do that, every part of their system could interact with every other part as it liked, so if you tried to just add one lock to protect things the resulting system might randomly deadlock, maybe only on systems with specific hardware or software combinations, and you basically needed to reconsider everything from the ground up.
You need a degree of abstraction like this, the Chromium-style web extensions have it, the XUL extensions didn't, adding it to the latter would have been years of work only to deliberately be incompatible with both existing software on Firefox AND everybody else, madness.
There are definitely things we want in extensions. For example Firefox has a copy of the Public Suffix List baked inside it (all browsers should have this, in its absence you'll get weird security behaviour around how domains and sub-domains work) and I'd like to access their copy from inside an extension to make it behave how users expect. But obviously the extension can just ship its own copy of the PSL, and then keep that up-to-date it's just a waste of resources.
> The XUL extension mechanism was permanent technical debt loaded onto the browser because of how it exposed features, basically welding things directly onto the browser's guts, which is a nightmare to maintain.
There is no evidence for this at all. Extensions can't modify the rendering engine.
"guts" meant the XUL implementing the Firefox UI. tialaramex is absolutely right about that, extensions had total access to that XUL/JS state, which is why changes to the Firefox UI inevitably broke extensions.
DNS-over-HTTPS was the big one for me. Mozilla betrayed us here. They've pushed something browsers shouldn't do into the browser, and in my case, started to roll it out to my browsers despite my network device being set to block it.
They actually managed to implement a policy that respects user choice and freedom less than Chrome, which only implements DoH if your set DNS provider supports it.
> DNS-over-HTTPS was the big one for me. Mozilla betrayed us here.
Betrayal indicates some intent to harm users; the intent of DoH is clearly to safeguard users. However, the rollout was absolutely hamfisted & shortsided.
It's notable that the DoH deployment is about the only example here of Firefox harming users. Compare that with Google rewriting Chrome's code to hobble uBlock Origin & leave users more vulnerable to nefarious ad tech.
The former was Mozilla putting user safety first (in a poorly handled way) while the latter was clearly Google doing the opposite.
Don't get me wrong, I would always choose Firefox over Chrome, but I lament the lack of a major option that seems to not follow Google's plans and generally assume they know better than the user how to use the web.
I don't think the Pocket was owned by Mozilla when they announced their integration. Looking it up, it looks like they bought it 2 years after the initial announcement so I can see it being controversial.
> The Pocket integration got lots of outcry which seemed pretty silly to me. It’s one product they own. Mozilla doesn’t have a ton of products.
I switched to Firefox after the Pocket thing happened, so I didn't follow the "outcry" and can't say if the tenor was justified.
However, as a new Firefox user not familiar with the history, the pocket integration just felt "icky", particularly in combination with the new tab page. Regardless of Mozilla's intentions, it seemed like another instance of Software A trying to push me toward unwanted unrelated Service B, as so many modern tech products are wont to do. Mozilla should be a sanctuary from that crap.
Luckily, I found out about the about:config flag to disable Pocket, and I've been happily ignoring it ever since. I just think it's an unfortunate experience for new users. Hopefully I'm wrong and Mozilla is right about what most new users want.
Being in a country that was the last holdout for Firefox (majority usage) before it was also taken over by Chrome, I know that several others as well as I have issues with Mozilla. Personally, I've always used Firefox, without exception, and stayed with XUL, rather than switch to their new browser, as add-ons are the most important part of a browser for me. I don't care if one is half a second faster or not.
Not to mention that stuff like stupid redesigns of logos as well as the Pocket issue made me basically lose all trust in Mozilla. Privacy is a huge deal here after all. Those who switched regularly complain about design issues (apparently the desktop browser is becoming somewhat "mobile-like") and most recently the address bar problem which upset everyone except for one person who didn't care about that. (Meanwhile, I'm happy with my address bar being my address bar and my search bar (being just right of it) being my search bar.[1]) If you would ask the people still using Firefox here whether they would recommend it...they would most likely say "no" but then would go on that while it isn't good, the alternatives aren't either.
So the question of change in direction (which is obviously there) regarding Firefox begs the question which people they are actually targeting? It's certainly not your average Joe because Firefox will never be able to out-Google Google. They are also annoying the more advanced users who just want privacy as well as useful things (add-ons, proper baked-in features etc) with their shenanigans, so it can't be them either. The only people I see actually celebrating new releases all the time (regardless of negative changes) are the crowd on HN. So, to me, it seems like they are targeting some kind of tech bubble (no offense) while basically ignoring the users out there. This is, of course, also reflected in them continuously losing marketshare while all the back-patting is happening.
Mozilla has to target the mass market or they won't survive. They certainly have to target people who, unlike you, care about performance more than anything else, since that's most of the market. You can argue it's hopeless but you can't expect them just to give up, nor should they.
I'm not the previous commenter, but on Android Mozilla is removing the ability to install extensions from third parties (think GitHub, etc.) and will trim the only left official extension store down to a few extensions. (I think it's below 20 right now.)
An ecosystem where all extensions need to be channelled through one central power broker is pretty much the main requirement to allow them to do what Google is doing in the linked Pushbullet case.
edit: this is all factual, sadly downvotes won't change it.
They've rebuilt their browser from scratch and are re-adding the APIs. It makes total sense to prioritize the most frequently used ones now and expand to the other ones later on.
For me personally, Privacy Badger and uBlock Origin are already there. I don't think I need a third one at all.
This is temporary while the Android team builds out and stabilizes the add-on APIs supported in the new Firefox for Android. Otherwise it'd be a total crapshoot whether an add-on you tried to install worked or broke randomly (potentially in gnarly ways).
If locking down on the extension ecosystem were only temporary they could just defer the nearing downgrade of their main line browser until their replacement is fully functional.
But that's not what they do. Instead we do have a clear announcement on a feature removal and a vague hint that they might add it again in the future.
It's absolutely not sure that disabling non-store extensions is only a temporary defect.
If you have evidence that suggests otherwise, feel free to add it.
It does not help that their marketing language feels designed to consistently avoid any meaning whatsoever.
> If locking down on the extension ecosystem were only temporary they could just defer the nearing downgrade of their main line browser until their replacement is fully functional.
The update is going ahead because the new Firefox for Android is such a dramatic improvement along all other axes, and because, from a development perspective, the incarnation it's replacing is saddled with legacy and technical debt. It never received most of the benefits from Quantum, for example.
> The update is going ahead because Firefox Preview is such a dramatic improvement along all other axes.
...and even the extension axis, from a power-aware Mozilla position. That's what makes it suspicious in the first place.
A few years ago they had a bug that added seconds to every page load that they didn't fix for half a year, but once an update coincidentally consolidates power at Mozilla it needs to be pushed for all its supposed benefits and despite all its known drawbacks asap.
We wouldn't buy that if it were Google or Microsoft and we shouldn't buy it in Mozillas case either. ... If they even announced that they plan to reopen the extension system, which they (to my knowledge) did not.
Personally I don't notice any grave difference between Firefox and preview. Apparently scrolling should be different, but my mid-range phone scrolls just fine in both apps.
> For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.
> Here’s a breakdown of what happened a few days ago. Mozilla and NBC Universal did a “collaboration” (read: promotion) for the TV show Mr. Robot. It involved sideloading a sketchy browser extension which will invert text that matches a list of Mr. Robot-related keywords like “fsociety”, “robot”, “undo”, and “fuck”, and does a number of other things like adding an HTTP header to certain sites you visit.
> Mozilla’s motto is “internet for people, not profit,” however the realities of having to fund all of its ventures are forcing the company into adopting one of the web’s less human-friendly aspects: sponsored content. Having acquired read-it-later service Pocket last year, Mozilla has been populating new tabs in Firefox with Pocket reading suggestions — and those are now going to include links that an advertiser has paid for.
We all know about FF Quantum. Yeah it sucks what happened. Maybe there was an alternative, but any one saying Firefox should’ve just stuck to not being compatible with Chromium extensions is kidding themselves on how badly that would’ve continued hurting Firefox’s market share. The XUL powered extension I’m sure were powerful so the outcry in certain places was huge. Vocal minority.
The Pocket integration got lots of outcry which seemed pretty silly to me. It’s one product they own. Mozilla doesn’t have a ton of products. Yes that is Google like. Much like any synergy or integrating is Google like. Which is really just being a modern internet corporation. If this is one of the reasons. Why would Mozilla of 5 years ago not have done that vs the Mozilla of today and whenever they did do it. 1-2 years ago I think?