Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this.
Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should do it all over again.
> Even if thousands of developers from HN switch, that would hardly move the needle. Ordinary users just won't care about any of this.
Thousands of developers from HN make websites. If they switch to Firefox, at the very least, the websites they make will support Firefox. This won't necessarily make Mozilla commercially viable, but if people are really that concerned about it, they can donate to the Mozilla Foundation.
I am horrified by the number of developers who only test in Chrome. At my last gig I found glaring UI bugs (whole menus not responding to mouse clicks, for ex) in FF. Sad.
At my job I work in Firefox, a coworker works in Chrome, and a third person works in Safari (to be honest we don't bother checking the site in any Microsoft browser). That way we are able to do cross browser testing fairly easily.
Not really. Assertions like yours are a moral assertion that we should ignore the moral points at issue and instead favor some unspecified pseudo-business-y ones.
But even taken on business terms, you're sweeping a lot under the rug. As developers and entrepreneurs, we've benefited hugely from the web being an open, competitively specified platform. The more one large company can control the platform, the more it will get tilted toward that company and away from the rest of us.
That may not be bad for any given business next week; these things take time. But for anybody building a serious business, you're going to have to worry about the long-term, large-scale stuff. Google's been going 20+ years; Microsoft and Apple, 40+; IBM, 100+. They didn't get there by only thinking about the next quarter, and you won't either.
if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you.
but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.
One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing.
I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always have implications. That's why, e.g., boycotts are a thing: small decisions add up.
I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here.
Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective.
At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.
By all means, keep on asserting things without demonstrating them and ignoring arguments and examples to the contrary. It doesn't actually convince, but I'm sure it makes you feel better.
Firefox got big in large part because they had good developer tools long before anyone else did. I worked several places where management would say things like, "don't waste time, we only need this to work in IE". The developers would nod and go right back to creating in Mozilla and then fixing it in IE after, because it was faster.
In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.
I can confirm this, everyone I knew at the time was coding on Firefox even if no-one required any compatibility with it just for that reason, it was just much easier to code with.
When I shared my observations with coworkers, they would nod and say they had experienced the same thing. Same with peers I knew outside of work. Either we were in a very large bubble, or that was happening everywhere. And I think the rise of Mozilla aligns with those observations. It 'just worked' because everyone quietly made sure it did, even when people told them not to.
Our business decision is that Firefox needs to be supported as well. The fact that most of the developers use Chrome as their daily driver, however, results in a lot of bugs being seen and caught early (or at all) there.
This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still the optimal decision.
The actual argument against (which others are making and which I'm sympathetic to) is that one shouldn't optimize only for direct bottom-line business interests, that businesses and people have a social responsibility, etc etc.
But that's entirely different from what you're talking about.
That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.
It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.
And even in THAT, it's a business decision.
That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.
This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.
Eh, I'd rather not force my views onto people, against their interests, without their knowledge or consent. That strikes me as pretty dishonest.
I use both Firefox and Chrome pretty regularly, but I'm under no illusions that the quality of Firefox isn't quite a bit lower in multiple very concrete ways for my day-to-day usage (presumably because Mozilla has less resources than Google).
In the past, I have switched family members to a _better_ browser, but I'm talking about IE6 to Firefox, the usability gap between which was 1) in favor of the switched-to browser and 2) waaaayyy bigger than Firefox v Chrome in 2017. Even then, if I had to make that same decision again today, I would probably first convince the person whose computer I was modifying. Especially for non-technical users, having things suddenly change out from under you can be really jarring in an environment that's already pretty confusing.
Given the original posters perspective, Servo is certainly te least concern to change the tides. For an end user it makes absolutely no difference if Mozilla reloaded will be written in C++, OCaml, Rust, wathever. Features, performance, security and speed of evolvement do count.
Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance (GPU accelerated compositing and rendering), and is scheduled to be merged in Firefox as fast as possible.
Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag (not everything is wired at this point), and it also improves perf.
So, yes Servo is of paramount importance for Mozilla's future, because it does make a difference to end users.
Another advantage of Rust is that it allows devs to avoid a whole range of bugs making it easier for them to iterate and ship updates without introducing new tricky bugs (race conditions can be hard to debug).
While dynamic languages may be nice when you want to explore a problem space, the stronger/most static type system is a benefit for upgrading large, mature code bases...
> Stylo (Servo's style subsystem) has already landed in Firefox behind a preference flag
Stylo is still a compile-time option, but will soon be built by default and controlled by an about:config flag. You can watch the progress to build by default in this Firefox bug:
> Servo's WebRender sub-project has amazing performance
Have you gotten amazing results on your machine? I ask because I think Servo, Rust, WebRender are awesome and I'm rooting for them, but the performance has not been great when I try Servo or WebRender in Firefox on multiple machines. Maybe it's just the machines I've tried on though.
And impact wise fast default on content blocking is the feature that gives the biggest bang for your buck. It makes for a nice, fast and more secure browsing experience, plus it is a differentiation Chrome might be reluctant to enable (without crippling it too much).
Browser benchmarks should include how long does it take to watch a 30 sec youtube video from application start to finish or how much 3rd party feature/bloat/mal/adware it downloads connecting to $major_site.
As the lead dev of VLC in a recent interview said, they’ve been offered huge amounts of money to include Google Chrome in their installer, and saying no was the hardest decision he’s ever made.
As long as Google has fraudulent ads for Chrome "your browser is outdated, update now to Google Chrome" on their websites, as long as Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox (see the youtube redesign), as long as Google pays developers to ship Chrome as malware with every single installer, as long as Google forces OEMs to install Chrome with Android, Chrome will rule the market.
MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again. Having a great product and grassroots evangelism certainly help.
(Not that I think Chrome is THE ENEMY. It's constantly evolving, multiplatform and open source. IE was none of that. But I agree Google's practices you described are despicable. Huge kudos to VLC for doing the right thing)
With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with via its control of the client - Windows.
Google is influencing what the web is viewed with by simply being such a key part of the web itself, and using its weight from that direction instead.
(One could argue that they have Android for the client, but as a percentage of web users it's still far from what Windows had in the IE6 days.)
Firefox won back the web by having a great product, grassroots evangelism, and a Microsoft who badly neglected their competing product for many years. They left an opening.
Chrome might be losing its lustre but it's certainly not being treated the same way. I think Firefox's new battle for market share might be harder than it was vs IE, simply because Google is still so active on this front. In response, the only real new thing in our arsenal is hindsight, which I guess is what the VLC example above is a result of.
> With IE, Microsoft was influencing what the web was viewed with
Microsoft was trying (and succeeding) for the web not to be a preferable API to Win32, so as to keep that way a high barrier to entry into the OS business. Which is why IE was squarely against standards.
> MS was a much bigger impenetrable monopoly and the Web was won back. It can be done again.
The Web won because a) its introduction was a one-time technological change whose social impact was on the order of the printing press, and b) Microsoft had gotten fat and lazy on their monopoly revenues from Windows and Office.
We can't get cocky here. It is perfectly plausible that HTML will still render 500 years from now. And I'm dead certain that it will still dominate 20 years from now.
Growing up in a major technical revolution, it's easy for us to assume that the future will have a lot of technical revolutions that will keep knocking monopolists, rentiers, and authoritarians off their perches. And if that happens, great. But we should really be planning for the opposite case.
Internet Explorer wasn't really multi-platform. The Mac version used a different rendering engine (Tasman as opposed to Trident) and it of course didn't have support for ActiveX extensions.
For a long time being a 90s Mac user sucked as different websites required you to use IE on a Windows PC.
Mobile is where the war is being fought. A better browser can ship with hundreds of millions of mobile devices. Firefox-next with ad blocking and better support for parallelism is just what phones need. Users will use what came with the phone.
It's the default browser I'm using right now on Android. Performance is still not on par with Chrome but it did improve since the last time I tried it a few months ago. The ability to install extensions surpasses anything else for me so I'm sticking with FF.
And saves battery and data. The absence of plugins on ios/safari and android/chrome is a severe deficiency. It is also interesting that adblocking firewalls get denied by the app stores...
It doesn't has text reflow after zooming, which Opera has. For all the other features I don't see anything horrible. It used to be slow at drawing pages but it's not anymore. I've been using it since Opera changed hands and it's nice to have uBlock on the phone too.
I've been using Brave[1] on my Android phone for the past two months. It's been brilliant. A much better experience than Firefox, which was a bit slow and some pages loaded as a white screen.
I'd love to use Brave on my desktop too, but their lack of plugin/extension/add on support cripples it a little. There's a couple I just can't live without. Using Iridium[2] on the desktop instead.
How do you get Firefox on devices? If OEMs want to use the Google Play store on any single of their devices, they have to make Chrome the default browser on all of them.
> In practice this means that the position of packages in node_modules is computed internally in Yarn, which causes Yarn to be non-deterministic between people using different versions.
I believe Chrome has to be installed, but it clearly doesn't have to be the default. Just see all the Samsung phones with the default Samsung Internet Browser as evidence.
Do you have a link to the interview? And how is the YouTube experience worse on Firefox? I didn't know of Google's practices except for the banner in other browsers.
> "To be honest we’ve been offered some insane amounts of money to do bad stuff around VLC, like shipping tool bars at the same time of the installer of VLC or or installing other software like Google Chrome and so on. And when you see the numbers they propose to you, you’re just like: How the fuck am I going to say no to that?"
> "The thing is, it’s not only my project so I’m not allowed to do that. [It’s the] legacy of other people. That wouldn’t be moral."
The European Commission has successfully acted against Microsoft in the past and has repeatedly tried to act against Google on various antitrust concerns.
I think, I could be wrong but I think he/she is referring to what the European Union did with Microsoft and asked them to include a way that asks new Windows users to select a default browser and offer them choices besides Internet explorer.
Perhaps he means a similar thing to what they did to Microsoft by forcing them to make it possible to choose a different browser when installing Windows.
It heavily makes heavy use of parallelism and the GPU which increases the responsiveness. It's also uses Rust as a programming language instead of C++ which will prevent a whole category of bugs like buffer overflows and use after free.
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Safari to gain root privileges using an use-after-free vulnerability in Safari and an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Mac OS X.
Demonstrated a successful code execution attack against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an uninitialized stack variable vulnerability in Microsoft Edge
Demonstrated a successful code execution vulnerability against Microsoft Edge in the SYSTEM context using an out-of-bounds vulnerability in Microsoft Edge and a buffer overflow vulnerability in the Kernel.
etc. Highlights mine. All of these are prevented in safe Rust.
Do you have any evidence that's why users are switching away?
My general belief is that general-audience users don't care at all about bugs like those. Which is why we have so very many of them, and have for decades.
Rust's fearless concurrency[0] allows devs to write and refactor performant parallel code without the risk of introducing bugs, enabling them to ship upgrades faster.
It's the same benefit you get from strong, static types in a large project vs one with dynamic/weak types, but for another category of bugs. In large projects, it makes a difference.
I switched away from Firefox because at the time it was bloated, buggy, and slow. I haven't switched back because I am more familiar with Google's developer tools.
I can tell you exactly why I'm not using FF: due to extremely poor support for switching between multiple profiles. Oh, it's possible, but compared to Google's seamless support for the same, its very awkward, even if you install an extension (which is only available from a third party).
I think it's important to scale back expectations for Servo. Given that Servo itself won't be ready to be used as a main engine for quite some time do to insufficient site compatibility.
Project Quantum will use only pieces of Servo coupled along with Gecko. Maybe Mozilla will fully replace all of the old single threaded code at some point in the future but I imagine that's a ways off.
Given the gradual progress of these changes it's likely that any successes in performance it brings will be copied in the other engines before they are too far ahead.
Servo, which I think is the most important software project in the world, is where it will start to change. That's when those of us who may not be directly contributing code into Servo need to come out and do our thing. I still fondly remember the NYT ad and the crop circle. We should do it all over again.