Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind. I'm coming across more than a few sites which are subtly broken in Firefox, something that virtually never happened all these years.
It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year.
There was a window of several years during which you could almost believe free/open source software would really dominate the world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.
> Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind.
If we're talking about the dwindling user base then yes, but if it's about falling behind technologically then it's Safari that is a distant third.
Safari is the new Internet Explorer. Everyone has to support it due to its user base (which is most likely why you don't see many sites breaking under it), but at least from my own experience it's the most feature incomplete, buggy browser out there, and it takes the most amount of work to support.
It's now a regular occurrence for me that I test something in Chromium and Firefox, and it works on both, but it's broken on Safari.
And just like Internet Explorer, you need a specific operating system to even test against Safari. Just that it's even worse, considering the relative market shares of Windows vs Mac (outside of Silicon Valley startups)
- On the most popular consumer operating system in the United States by numbers (iOS), it is the default browser, which is..
- furthest behind in supporting web standards. It is easy to theorize that Apple has no incentive to improve Safari given how lucrative..
- the App Store is. Apple is under antitrust scrutiny (see Epic vs. Apple), similar how Microsoft was under antitrust scrutiny due to IE integration into Windows. iOS goes further than Windows did in that iOS forces all browsers to use the same underlying browser engine.
Do you have a problem with BigInt? fetch? Push notifications for PWAs? Dozens of other useful web technologies used by millions of apps? Is that "web-standard-of-the-week-insanity"?
I agree not all standards are great. But they're *standards*. As in, you really should, because everyone else agreed it was a good idea. The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea.
It's not that Safari doesn't get these features - it gets them years later than the competition. The problem with these big companies (Google is bad as well) is that they're too big to fail. If they don't like something, then the standard isn't their standard.
>The time for vetoing it was when it was being decided (and Apple does shoot down tons of proposals), not when everyone else already agreed is was a good idea.
But this isn't what happens. Safari is pretty good at standards (they do support BigInt and fetch). What actually happens is Google "proposes" a standard, pushes it to Chrome, then goads Mozilla and Apple into adopting it. Half of the time web developers cry about Safari not adopting Standards its because they want to adopt a experimental API that Google pushed
It's the third only if you compare to Chrome experimental APIs, that Firefox devs feel pressured to implement too. When people say it's the new IE they are not saying it's IE6 in 2010, but it's IE6 in early 00's. Google thanks to their monopoly on the web as a platform (except for an iOS anomaly in some parts of the US) is now at the extinguish part of the MS playbook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...).
It's never been clear to me what "web standards" actually cause all these difficulties in the first place. A lot of the foundational stuff hasn't actually changed all that much.
As an experiment, I downloaded Opera 12.16 from 2013 (the last Presto-based version), and it works better than you'd might expect. The biggest issue is that lots of https requests fail because it only supports outdated versions (it does support TLS 1.1 and 1.2 in the settings, disabled by default, but enabling that doesn't seem to have much effect).
There are a few things that don't render correct: cnn.com because of incomplete flexbox support, as well as some stuff their CSS minimizer does that Opera doesn't seem to like. GitHub doesn't really work correct mostly because CSS variables aren't recognized (it does render mostly okay, just without colours and such), and the JS doesn't work as Opera doesn't support const.
I couldn't test stuff like gmail, fastmail, slack, etc. due to the TLS issues, and various other sites I tested all run in to JS problems because of const, arrow functions, and similar small issues. It's certainly not usable, but overall, it's not bad for an 8 year old browser with a long-dead rendering engine.
Maybe I'll run a proxy to fix the TLS issues and filter out some of the basic JS issues and see what happens then.
I will say, it's slow. This is also an issue with fairly simple sites, like HN, old.reddit.com, lobste.rs, etc. Not sure what's up with that, I think it's related to network requests, as it significantly speeds up when stuff's cached.
Clearly it needs significant work to be useful, but from the look of things I expect that actually, it would be an entirely doable project by a not-too-large dev team to bring Presto up to at least Safari-level in a reasonable amount of time.
this reads as wishful thinking , in which universe is safari 3rd technologically speaking? what technology does Chrome or Firefox have that Safari doesn't? Safari performance in MacOS is better than Chrome and Firefox. Can you provide any data?
While I have not done substantive research myself, I have heard a number of personal complaints from (current and former) Mozilla people that very little of their funding actually goes to working on the core projects (like Firefox or Servo). They seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as they got more money, they spent an increasingly large fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their original purpose, hiring non-technical people (who are basically impossible to get rid of later on), etc. It’s much easier to downsize R&D than to downsize HR.
No, rust and Firefox are basically the two on-task things they’re still doing. But giving up on servo kind of defeats the point of them working on rust, so who knows how long they’ll keep supporting it.
You mean pushing HTML5 that after 15 years keeps being half implemented, catching up with native apps, and now literally basically turned into ChromeOS for all practical purposes, alongside SaaS applications?
Mozilla's mission is end-user control and an open Internet. Rust significantly improves security in end-user systems, so I think it supports the mission.
Yes, given a somewhat vague mission any smart person can find an intersection between the mission and a project. I myself have done this all to many times.
The real test is if you START with the mission, will you get to the project? In this case no, there's no way to go from a mission to advance an open internet and web to developing a new systems level programming language. You can only get there with motivated thinking.
Given most Web agencies have moved from having Firefox as a must support browser on the support matrix, and Rust still has a couple of decades before reaching C and C++ market adoption, the mission might be quite endangered.
At least Rust has its own foundation, however just like ISO and other foundation based languages, lets see where the companies at the table take it.
> They seem to have the same problem as Wikimedia where as they got more money, they spent an increasingly large fraction of it on bullshit outside the scope of their original purpose
Maybe it's time to ditch the traditional donations system to a per-feature donation. You could even make a policy that, say, 10% of the money of every donation goes to the foundation to use as they please, but the other 90% goes to the development of the specific product/feature.
We need to fins other governance+funding ways for our IT non-profits, or we will keep having this same problem.
I hear what you are saying, and it makes a certain amount of sense for projects that survive on donations (possibly hard to implement due to the fungible nature of $$, but whatever)
However, Mozilla's revenue is mostly from search engine deals, no? If it is true that the Mozilla foundation is under control of people with goals not aligned with the mission to drive forward open internet, I am not sure what can be done? (Not saying this is true, but there have been a lot of grumbling about it)
Perhaps Mozilla's lasting contribution to the world will be as an apocryphal story, warning others of the dangers of ignoring/neglecting core competencies.
I've been using Linux for 7 years. It has never been better than it is now and every year the alternatives look worse and worse. I honestly get sick every time I try to use Windows. The ads and dark patterns are glaringly apparent once you are used to Linux desktops.
The big green guy is the new Logitech software suite that I need to use to set the sidetone on my new headset, which asks you at install time whether you want to enable telemetry yet doesn't actually let you proceed until "yes" is checked, and which is completely redundant to yet distinct from the old suite (which new versions of the same headset model don't work with) and works less well. The other aliens are update pop-ups.
Whether Linux on the desktop is relevant in general also depends on the relevance of the desktop itself.
If you conclude that desktop is getting less relevant (as I think parent alluded to in the last paragraph), then its improvement within the segment doesn't need to be sufficient.
When I plug my tablet or laptop into a docking station, it is a desktop.
In what concerns Android and ChromeOS, it is as relevant as WSL on Windows for the regular consumer, specially on Android where it isn't part of public APIs.
> I'm coming across more than a few sites which are subtly broken in Firefox, something that virtually never happened all these years.
At a prior organization, I was there when they dropped support for Firefox. Basically got one bug report too many that was Firefox only and at that point the few users were just told to switch to Chrome. The small market share is accelerating its demise.
It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year.
There was a window of several years during which you could almost believe free/open source software would really dominate the world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.