The future of Firefox is … Chrome The head of Mozilla's Firefox browser is looking to the future. And, for the moment at least, it seems to lie in rival Chrome. Senior VP Mark Mayo caused a storm by revealing that the Firefox team is working on a next-generation browser that will run on the same technology as Google's Chrome browser. "Let's jump right in and …
"...I'd prefer Firefox not change...."
And there we have it: the reactionary face of IT. Nobody wants change for the sake of change. But progress requires change, and, if you're stuck in a local minima, that can lead to things getting worse.
For the record, I hate retraining as much as the rest of you.
And there we have it: the reactionary face of IT. Nobody wants change for the sake of change. But progress requires change, and, if you're stuck in a local minima, that can lead to things getting worse.
Maybe I don't want Chrome because it's made by data thief Google? Just as an alternative motive. It doesn't really have to be fear of change, because that would mean I would not have been using Vivaldi from when it still was in beta.
I've been looking at Pale Moon too, but that's still very much in beta for OSX.
Maybe I don't want Chrome because it's made by data thief Google?
Surely one should assume, at least for now, that however much like Chrome the Mozilla user experience becomes, privacy invasion is not part of their plan?
If evidence emerges to the contrary, or even if enough people much prefer the current Firefox UI, it's a sure bet that Firefox will fork.
it's a sure bet that Firefox will fork
I think that's effectively what Palemoon is - it is no longer dependent on Firefox code.
I don't know about privacy invasion, but one thing I liked about Palemoon was when I did an update and the first change highlighted in the release notes was something like "removed the last of the telemetry". That at least established where the Palemoon developers were coming from.
I moved off firefox to palemoon because the firefox UI had already changed to something I didn't like. TBH, I don't really care what is under the hood provided it works (although having too many browsers using the same core tech creates a worryingly vulnerable monoculture for hackers) but I do care about the UI because that is what I have to deal with.
I generally don't use chrome because I very much prefer a separate search bar. Others don't, fine. In firefox/palemoon we all get our preference but in Chrome you are stuck with the mixed search/url nonsense.
Hopefully if mozilla moves firefox off gecko someone else will pick it up.
@Len Goddard
"I moved off firefox to palemoon because the firefox UI had already changed to something I didn't like. TBH, I don't really care what is under the hood provided it works... but I do care about the UI because that is what I have to deal with."
A bullseye with your first shot.
If you, Mr. Designer, would like to have a fancy new interface, that's fine with me. Please give the rest of us the option of using the old interface, if we so choose. You are "fixing" things that aren't broken, replacing things that work well.
Give us a Goddam choice!
Same goes for Google Maps. Just because I choose to stay with XP, I am forced to use the broken husk that is Google Maps Lite, whereas before they "Fixed" GM, it used to run perfectly well on all my systems. If Mr. Designer/Developer is hell bent on "improving" our user experience, please make sure that a backwardly compatible path is left available for those - such as myself and thousands of others who have complained - to migrate back to what we know if we don't like it.
"Give us a Goddam choice!"
Verily, verily. Amen.
Like, give us (back) the choice to "Remove Completed Downloads" (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=845658 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=838681 ) when we close the browser instead of bitching and moaning about how stupid we are for wanting to do things that way, and then saying it won't be fixed because that's not how the Mozilla developers want us to use their browser.
Bastards...
I use Firefox mainly because of its large range of useful extensions, and one of those is the Classic Theme Restorer because I didn't like the last appearance change.
The best way to introduce a new look and feel is with an app or option that's active by default after a new installation, and inactive by default after an update of an old installation. Allow users to easily turn big UI changes off and on.
I added "Classic Theme Restorer" to Firefox and some other sauce to fix GUI stupidity in Thunderbird.
Why can't Mozilla fix bugs and stop buggering the GUI?
Print Selection still non-existent in Thunderbird, still buggy in firefox (may throw blank pages with header & footer for part before selection) and Print Preview only does whole page.
Lots of other bugs ... "forgets" blocked cookies settings is an annoying one.
@ Mage (Firefox and Thunderbird printing)
Firefox has always been bad at printing any page that is anything other than basic HTML that doesn't stray much further than the equivalent of "Hello World!". Anything more complicated than that it can render fine but printed copies tend to only show part of the page, if at all.
I'm sure some will say it's lame to be saving web pages on bits of dead tree ("Duh, it's all in the cloudz") but there's a bit more to Printing than that. I tend to save a copy of web orders placed online as a PDF - very useful if I have a problem with the order for example.
In contrast IE (yes, I know) can print almost any page I throw at it, as it's shown on the screen (albeit plus the ads normally blocked by Firefox). When Internet Explorer can wipe the floor with equivalent functionality in your browser you know something is very badly wrong....
"I moved off firefox to palemoon because the firefox UI had already changed to something I didn't like."
I use Seamonkey, partly for the same reason & partly because I prefer to have browser & mail/news client combined.
And, in response to Mage, it nails both interface issues but a pity about the selection issue.
of how firefox will be better once it embraces chrome? I am one of the ones who is on firefox but has been dragged kicking and screaming the past few years as firefox slowly goes down the tubes. What does copying chrome give them ? At that point really what is the reason a user would pick firefox over chrome if firefox is just trying to be chrome?
Firefox seems to actively try to remove more and more functionality that I (and many others) like that differentiate it from other browsers. It's been quite sad to see.
(Phoenix 0.3 I believe was my first exposure to what eventually became firefox, still my primary browser though I use an older ESR release with the various hacks to make it behave mostly like it used to many years ago - it's also the browser I use 99.99% of the time on mobile too - my mobile usage is more casual and obviously mobile firefox is pretty crippled feature wise compared to desktop)
Firefox saying it was removing the feature that allows me to selectively accept cookies on a per website basis was another recent example, my firefox cookie database has probably 15,000 sites in it and has been built up over the past decade. I don't use any ad blockers on my desktop firefox though I do on mobile since I don't have that feature on mobile - also I can disable cookies globally with a click of a button with the prefbar firefox plugin that I have used for a decade as well, another thing I can't do easily on mobile - disabling cookies entirely is mostly useful for gaming sites that are just overloaded with cookies).
No, no, no, no, NO!!!
WHY do people insist on recommending this waste of time?
That's just locking the door after the burglars have long since made off with everything of value.
Never mind the pathetic SDC features, Cookie Monster stops them getting onto your system in the /first/ place.
You can set a default policy and then selectively modify it on a case by case basis: whitelist, accept from domain or (subdomain only), accept temporarily, accept session cookies, delete upon changing policy, delete upon refreshing page, delete upon leaving domain, delete upon exit, delete upon closing tab, view individual cookies/by site/by domain (or subdomain).
I have no affiliation with Cookie Monster in any way but it's the only cookie manager I would recommend - after NoScript and RequestPolicy. it's the first addon I install.
@Nate Amsden,
"Firefox saying it was removing the feature that allows me to selectively accept cookies on a per website basis was another recent example, ..."
I'd noticed too that about:permissions had vanished. However if you right click on a page, View Page Info, Permissions tab, you seem to be able to tweak what happens for a given page. It's clunkier than the old about:permissions, but I suspect it's The Way Things Are Supposed To Be Now.
Fair enough, I suppose - I wasn't paying for the product anyway, so I can't really grumble if they want to go exploring.
But I'm not the exploring type - at least not when it comes to browsers. Since I discovered Palemoon my Firefox use has reduced to the same level as IE - virually nil.
Mozilla seem to have caught the 'innovation, innovation, innovation' bug, which is a shame. Innovation for its own sake isn't necessarily a successful strategy.
Just give my Netscape Navigator back!
FF has become more of a resource hog than anything else( in a W-7 environment, anyways).
Slowly switching OS's, but PaleMoon seems to me, at least, isn't as hungry.
If I wanted chrome, I would download it, or use a chrome book. I wanted something better than that, but am being pushed towards that with FF. Just (about 2hrs ago) had a pop-up in FF to upgrade to 45.0.2, why should I?
Give me an ole clunky, gear crushing, grease drippin', oil spewing, simplistic browser any day of the week...
This talk about different browsers may be good thing. Let's hope that there continue to be different browsers. If the "world" decided to only have one (a company in Redmond tried this) they will control the standard and it could go down a very bad path. Hopefully if we can keep a few different based browsers around, the herd will improve.
One can only hope that the content makers will come around and stop "adapting" to bad browsers. I don't hold much hope, as some still adapt to IE6.
I like FF a lot and have been using if for many years. If they're going to do this, I hope they get it right. It's impossible to tell what this will mean for it functionally or realistically from a few sentences.
But what it feels like is getting a kite flying nice and high and stable, turning the string over to a kid and saying: "You got it? You got it?", then watching with sick resignation as he immediately plummets it into the top bough of some inaccessible tree.
-- not necessarily a change of interface?
For myself, I could give a flying squirrel about details of the browser GUI -- round tabs, square tabs, search box, combo search-address box, whatever. Hamburger menu icon, gear icon, left-side, right-side, if I can find it I can use it. That puts me in a minority, I guess, which is also OK.
Just gimme uBlock Origin and NoScript and Disconnect and a few other extensions. And make sure whatever FF ends up with renders pages impeccably.
Chromium doesn't, so why would a Mozilla build?
Opera has shown its possible to make a very fine chromium based browser with real product differentiators. Mozilla can too.
It also means the whole world will be using the same, open source rendering engine, good for users, good for developers.
"It also means the whole world will be using the same, open source rendering engine, good for users, good for developers."
The lack of diversity of browser engines would be bad - if a critical bug is found in one browser engine, users would no longer have an alternative.
Are there major changes to browser standards in the pipeline which the Mozilla engine is incapable of supporting? Otherwise why replace a mature and well-supported product?
Please don't confuse matters by taking the branding of a popular existing browser for a new browser - it's not hard to come up with an original name.
> It also means the whole world will be using the same, open source rendering engine, good for users, good for developers.
No. It creates a monoculture. I am not saying that there is anything horrendously wrong with chromium. There are certainly worse baselines that could have been chosen. I am saying that we already have a product with the specs they are proposing, that that product has around 50% market share depending on who's asking, that there is nothing so horrendous about it that will see a significant portion of that 50% jump ship so why bother. If the best defence is that monocultures rule, then mount an argument that there should only be one c compiler / one desktop environment / distro / in fact, one uber OS / and while we are at it, browser.
Firefox: almost usable as long as you don't overdo the addons - unfortunately, without the addons it's almost useless.
Internet Explorer: you won't just /think/ you've been fucked by a train.
Chrome: simply terrible but, even if it weren't, I'd still rather install Windows 10, turn on every slurping feature I can find, disable my firewall/antimalware and use Internet Explorer to visit sites known to deliver driveby nastiness of the kind that would make Satan himself blush.
Opera: the experience is so bad I'd rather use Chrome!
Vivaldi: my therapist says sitting in the dark and cutting myself would be less injurous to my psychoemotional wellbeing.
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