stock firefox is decent but, depending on your goals, there are better flavors. If security is really important there is librewolf and if you care way less about security and just want awesome then floorp is pretty sweet. For me sidebery brings it all together because it lets you do things like set per container socks5, which is a game changer for me (default is all traffic through my favorite vpn provider, but I have containers to make my browser look like my local ip, American, etc.)
"Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody."
Truthfully, it is good for somebody. For example, it is good for Google.
By extension, it is also good for Mozilla because Mozilla sends FF user data, e.g., default search query data, to Google in exchange for money.
If Google's search business declines due to loss of monopoly (aka competition) and as a result Google decides to stop funding Mozilla, then that's bad for somebody.
Perhaps the reader can figure out who that somebody might be.
re: "nowhere near as evil"
Why would I want to use the lesser of two evils when I can generally avoid popular modern browsers altogether. Zero evil.
I used Firefox for roughly 19 years at least or a bit more. I switched to Edge and have been very happy for years now. I didn't know they committed to supporting V2 but it does appear they intend to as long as it serves user choice and privacy needs.
I left because they kept stripping features out that I was used to whether it was my RSS toolbar feeds or something else. I forgot which feature removal was the final straw, or if it was a bug or two that irked me. While I was never a Chrome user, I found Edge was an alternative that I was happy with. I also see a lot of benefit to native browsers. Ironically, that I learned about from Mozilla's own devblogs.
Supporting V2 like this is the exact opposite of what drove me away. I'm cruising so happily on Edge that I'm unsure if I'm willing to do another shift, but I am going to reconsider my life choices.
As an outsider, it seems weird to me that you would go to Edge when you are unsatisfied by Mozilla's spotty long-term support. Edge exists because Microsoft dropped support for IE (and then for their own rendering engine altogether when they switched to Chromium). It seems to me that they have a strictly worse track record in the aspect you care about.
Or maybe I am wrong about the facts? I never used Edge.
He wasn't fired, he resigned, almost certainly because of external pressure more than internal. The board (who had just appointed him 10 days before) tried to get him to stay in a different role after he submitted his resignation.
CEOs always "resign" instead of being fired. Is there reason to believe that this particular instance was truly voluntary, unlike every other time a CEO gets fired and then the company lies about it? I'm genuinely asking - I don't know much about corporate culture at Mozilla so maybe it genuinely was a resignation. Just pointing out that companies always claim that, and in other cases it's a lie.
- External pressure, including a high profile boycott campaign, was widespread and widely reported
- Brendan Eich remained a Mozilla employee for years after his donation was first publicly discussed (in the LA Times and on Twitter), with no apparent pressure to leave. The board appointed him CEO with full knowledge of his views and knowledge that they were publicly known.
- There were relatively few public statements from Mozilla employees asking him to resign, and none from executives or board members.
- I think it's unusual for companies to explicitly lie and say "we tried to get them to stay". It might even expose them to defamation claims or something. If the board forces a resignation, they'll just say "they resigned" (which is technically true) and leave it at that.
Do you think those opinions would have made it more difficult to work with certain employees at Mozilla based on certain protected traits in the law? If so, I think the donation is a red herring, it's the opinion itself that's the problem.
Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.
No, it means that those with unsavory opinions should understand it's in their best interest to keep quiet. It's always been the case that saying something offensive can get you fired. I mean, if I call my boss ugly I'm liable to get fired. And that's not even political.
It means Mozilla is unable to work with people who have other opinions.
I do not have an opinion on abortion, and I’d probably lean towards a yes. But Mozilla being capable of making it a problem out of someone’s history, 10 years earlier, a private donation, shows a major issue of intolerance.
The root cause: Mozilla turned woke, and did look into the past of each employee to fire them. The wokists see no problem with that, but for the rest of us, it’s the darkest time for intolerance.
Well there's multiple problems here, so one by one:
1. Mozilla didn't fire anyone. My understanding is they actually tried to keep him.
2. Public pressure, dollar voting, and boycotts is just the free market at work. The invisible hand is real but it seems to me as soon as the invisible hand starts pushing stuff we all get uncomfortable.
3. Nobody takes anyone seriously who says "woke". That word means absolutely nothing to anyone, it's just a dog whistle. A type of inverse virtue signal that you are not a serious person worth listening to.
If you want a definition, a "woke" person is one who prioritizes waging identity-group conflict over other priorities. The more woke, the more things they sacrifice and trample upon to that end.
#3 is a perfect for the description of Mozilla’s standing. The fact that you decide to use this keyword as a sign that the argument is flawed is proof that the argument is correct with nothing of substance to criticize.
Mozilla decided to #2 appeal to those types of people, with various angles including “renewing the masculinity inside Mozilla”. It’s not public pressure, as the public went on for a backlash against wokism in the 2020 and later. Mozilla is in an ironic situation where it is now driven by those incompetent people, while the public moved on, and its values are not a value proposition anymore.
Especially the “We fire people who do not think like us” part. Let me tell you that the kind of public “We harass people into quitting” answers perfectly to #1 in my books.
Just be good. Just be good people! That’s all we ask!
I believe somebody who is strongly anti-abortion, even for medical reasons and somebody who needs an abortion to save their life probably shouldn't work in the same company.
The principle of the separation of church and state may be cast as a principle that, in conflicts between religious groups, the state must remain neutral. This avoids the situation where, when one group gains control of the state, they get to use it to oppress the other group, and then the other group has a strong motive (and arguably a moral right) to revolt, violently if necessary.
Implementing this meant that people who worked for the state, and other neutral institutions, had to work with others who they honestly believed were heretics that would go to hell. Both they and the institution had to learn to keep their tribal conflicts—nominally religious and doctrinal, but in practice tribal—under control. This was difficult, but very valuable to all sides. The truce enabled mutually beneficial cooperation and the prosperity that entailed.
Centuries later, some tribes find themselves in control of certain institutions. The truce, the principle of neutrality, restricts them, and they see little benefit from it. "Why not violate it, and start a fight over this issue where we have the upper hand? We'll win!" Sometimes this takes the form of arguing tendentiously that the other side violated the truce first, and hence their attacks are in fact justified retaliation. Other times they seem ignorant of the value of having a truce, and are likely ignorant of its history (which is not taught well). So they start trampling on it.
Depending on what we imagine their motives to be, and how narrowly we consider them... On that issue in isolation—gay marriage—it's probably "rational". However, violating the truce makes it easier to do more of that, both for them and their opponents. On this issue they have the upper hand, and they'll win. On abortion, they have the advantage, but less so. On other issues (such as putting biological males in women's sports and women's prisons) they have minority support, and if they keep up their attitude of just fighting because "why not?" (subject to tactical considerations), they will provoke the opposition to fight back more and harder, and eventually they'll lose ground on the issues themselves—to say nothing of the costs of the fighting and the lost value due to the broken truce.
They are short-sighted, ignorant, aggressive little barbarians who start smashing the thing in front of them, unaware that it's a pillar holding up many things we and even they hold dear. They know not what they do. I guess this is where we see the deficiencies of current education.
It's easy to keep abortions secret. They're protected by privacy laws, so even HR can't ask about them. Medical issues are secret from the workplace by default.
It's impossible to keep your sexuality secret if you're married. Your marital status at work is public by default. And no one should have to keep the identity of their spouse secret for fear of being treated worse by the CEO.
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. Privately held political opinions. And Mozilla barred itself from working with a top engineer, inventor of Javascript, for privately-held political reasons, and gave reigns from engineers to business types of people. They kept Mozilla dependent on Google, an economic tie which sidesteps Mozilla from being an alternative to Google.
Some comments say I’m holding a grudge, but Brendan Eich is not the only one harassed, it was a statement from Mozilla, it meant We do not tolerate other opinions
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. You are free to believe differently, but at least you cannot say with a straight face that Mozilla has a moral
standing against Google.
Which part of donating money to ensure a class of people don't get the same rights as the donor is private? That's as public of a move as one can imagine.
so how near exactly is that to Google levels of evil, the claim was it was nowhere near but you seem to think it is near, if not exactly a bullseye? How equivalent are these levels of evil I wonder?
And the people angry about that have popped up in every Mozilla and Firefox discussion for a decade to let us know that Firefox is too woke and now we have a corporate browser monoculture.
Well done folks, your MAGA browser culture war has ruined browsers just like it ruins everything else it touches.
But maybe they'll actually ban gay marriage again and it will all have been worth it for you.
Well, um, yes. Having an opinion is free speech. Calling someone else's opinion stupid is, in it of itself, an opinion. So that's also free speech.
The point being free speech is a two-way street. Speech without consequences is actually un-free in that sense. Because you're free to say whatever, but I'm not free to say whatever in response.
Now, whether corporate actions constitute speech is kind of another question. But the consensus in the US is that yes, they do. Corporations are allowed to have opinions and make donations, and they're allowed to fire you for having opinions or making donations.
The important thing to note is that free speech, as we understand it, is a protection for private entities from public entities. Meaning it protects you, a citizen, from public censorship. And it protects companies, private entities, from public censorship. So it, in a way, enables private companies to censor. Because the public can't censor their censorship.
You’re conflating the US’s constitutional protections against government attacks on free speech with the broader concept of (the virtue of) free speech. No one is saying that what Mozilla did was illegal.
Just curious: would you defend a company for firing someone for speaking out in support of gay marriage?
> Just curious: would you defend a company for firing someone for speaking out in support of gay marriage?
Well companies already do this all the time - this is more so the status-quo. I'm not going to pretend the majority are somehow, in some roundabout way, oppressed. Is this person fired for supporting gay marriage, or being gay? Because obviously that's illegal... you can't fire someone for being part of a protected class. Being a republican or whatever is not a protected class, being gay is. One matters, one doesn't.
No it isn't. I believe it was wrong to fire Brendan Eich (because I believe it's wrong to fire any employee for their activities outside work), but I also don't think corporations count as people and have a right to free speech under the constitution. You're painting with too broad of a brush.
It has been my perception that it's usually not a principled objection in this case, but mostly people mad because they share those specific beliefs he was fired for.
Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.
I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though.
I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.
In my experience speed differences between browsers are indeed negligible on properly engineered sites/apps. Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit. Some of it might come down to poorly pruned or outdated polyfills, which in many cases are filling in for features that those engines gained support for quite some time ago.
I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs, because it’s making the web worse than it needs to be.
I daily drive Firefox serving a Chrome User-Agent, out of frustration with a couple applications that work perfectly on Firefox, but because they didn't test on Firefox, they just assume it won't work and block my connection (If there's any Devs at Snapchat who wants a free ticket completion, you can "Add Firefox support" by deleting your UA check)
I noticed this exact thing. While a lot of sites worked perfectly fine when I was informing them I was using Firefox, when I started lying, they ran faster. Drove me nuts.
Frontend Devs: If your code reads the user-agent string for any reason but logging/spying, you're doing it wrong.
This is the natural consequence of the notion at large that non-Blink web engines are lightyears behind, which was never true in the strictest sense and has only become less true with time as the gap has narrowed. Besides that, even if you’re relying on some feature that Chrome has implemented as an early draft spec thing or something, maybe consider toggling off that one feature instead of blocking off the whole app.
To clarify, I didn't mean don't check if the feature you want to use exists on the user's browser. I meant don't come to that conclusion using User-Agent strings. JavaScript makes if very easy to check if a method you want to use exists or not: just check if the function is undefined.
If you do it the right way, if/when another browser implements the feature you used, suddenly you support that browser, with no code changes. If you check UAs, then you need to keep tabs on browser updates and manually update your website when features get added to browsers, and you need to check what version people are using because maybe it's out of date, it's a whole thing.
What drives me nuts is that the right way is the easy way.
We’re in full agreement here, all I was saying is that the menality that leads to user agent sniffing is likely the idea that engines that aren't Blink are so incapable and will break the site/app so badly that it’s better to just rule out their usage altogether. Checking on a per-function basis (or alternatively, just not insisting on using bleeding edge features in the first place) is absolutely the way to go about avoiding brokeness.
The past few projects I've done, I've made some effort to just not polyfill anything, it's always too easy to wind up with fills for things long supported in every major browser for the past 3-5 years.
On the flip side... if you're running something bespoke relying on an older JS engine, it's becoming harder to find pure polyfills/shims that aren't a tangled mess relying on DOM specific features.
While there are some newer features I don't mind seeing early, I've mostly just avoided touching some of the more recent features for now, only to avoid the mess that are the current state of fills.
> I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs...
I don't think that is possible. It used to be that lazy devs assumed people were on IE, these days lazy devs assume people are on Chrome. In the future if there is a new browser with a majority of the market, lazy devs will assume people use that browser. The problem isn't any one browser, it's that some people are lazy and seek out shortcuts rather than doing things the correct way.
> Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit
This feels generally true but there's some exceptions. For example: I use Firefox as my daily driver, but if I want to watch more than one Twitch stream in parallel I'm forced to use Chromium. Opening multiple Twitch streams on Firefox grinds the browser to a halt.
As a counter example, I remember that I needed to do big reviews in GitHub using Firefox because Chrome would slow to a crawl in the Files tab in GitHub, while Firefox was just as fast as it was with small reviews.
I don't think this is an issue anymore, but it shows that a few things have completely performance in different browsers.
I wonder how experiences can differ so much with the same program. I've never had an issue having 3-5 twitch streams open at the same time, across multiple computers and multiple FireFox versions.
That's largely my own take as well. And while many hate SPAs or client-driven web apps, it reduces the server surface a lot. It should be faster/better... that people make really crappy front ends doesn't mean the tech itself is bad.
There is some really bloated crap out there, and you can create every bit as much bloat on the server as in the client.
OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.
When you build a phone and want that phone to work with salesforce classic- every time a page reloads. You must put the WebRTC in a pop out window. This window will not have focus because they are in salesforce . Even in lightning people want a pop out for the call. Firefox is broken
Salesforce has over 150,000 companies using it's platform, with estimates around 150 million users... The percentage that use OpenCTI powered by five 9, ctm, gensys, twilio, telnyx, etc... that are WebRTC based if even let's say 10%... that is still like 15 million users daily... not exactly niche for Firefox to be breaking a feature for that many users? Oh and consider that salesforce method for embedding a phone is fairly common, then you have other CRM's zoho, hubspot and customer service platform zendesk etc... all broken with firefox's position on WebRTC...
Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.
I've only ever seen this happen with the Linux package-manager-type process where the update might happen "underneath" the browser without its knowledge. Using their built-in upgrade system as far as I know it just happens only on browser restart... but I guess I haven't used it on Windows in a long time.
I've seen something similar in Windows corporate environments where Firefox is updated while you are using it, and the only indication that it has happened is that Firefox insists on restarting before you can load any more pages, although no UAC prompts were involved. It is annoying, especially if you are in the middle of submitting a form. I don't know whether to blame it on how IT has chosen to implement centralized updates, or on Firefox for not being as easy to centrally manage as other software, or some combination.
I just got it on my Windows, but haven been postponing updates for ages before that with zero issue. Hence I was quite surprised. I'm almost certain what triggered it was some application trying to load a website.
Not sure which technique the application used, but after few seconds it loaded the error message, and after that I couldn't open new tabs or windows without getting that error.
This is on a corporate PC, I don’t run into this issue with chrome (which I try to avoid using in general) whose update schedule is also managed by a corp IT policy.
Those settings don’t do anything bec even when I select “Check but don’t install” it still nags me and eventually installs even if corp IT policy is only to update monthly.
I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?
> I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?
That is definitely possible. In my corporate environment, I don't get any nags or prompts to update, and when I go into settings it shows "Updates disabled by your organization".
It sounds like your IT left the update prompts enabled, perhaps specifically to let you update at your own convenience and hence avoid the problem you complain about when it forces an update while you are using it.
I find it's worse with Chromium than Firefox. After an update, new tabs don't load properly and links fail, until I manually restart it. In the past I've joined Google Meet meetings in Chromium and found the audio not working because I'd forgotten to restart the browser since the last update.
Then it sounds like Firefox has the "restart page" to mitigate this exact edge case. Better than having undefined behavior like that imo.
As I get it from other comments, this is not a problem with the built-in updater (as on Windows). On linux, when updating via package manager, you should now this can be an issue with any program. Yes, most programs survive running while being updated, but for a complicated piece of software (like a browser) this behavior is understandable.
On linux I use kill -9 before any update, on the parent of ff's entire process tree. Works for me every single time, reliably getting my tabs back without the need for any extension.
Interesting: On MacOS, with the option "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" chosen in the Firefox preferences, the experience is exactly that, update in the background without further notifications. That is, I get a prompt that an update is available and whether I want to download it now or not. If so, it starts a download in the background and applies the update on the next start of the program. (You can also check for updates and restart in the "About" dialog.)
(Note: I've set new tabs and windows to open with a blank view, which may also make a difference, as there is no default content.)
It's specifically a Linux ecosystem problem they're talking about. The package managers don't coordinate with Firefox and just change files out from under it. That means that you can end up with the processes Firefox spawns when a tab is opened not matching the main process. This caused problems often enough that Firefox implemented a mechanism to detect this case and tell you to restart the browser.
Browsers aren't the only software that could be broken by auto updates on Linux and you can set up exactly the same behavior in at least APT's unattended-upgrades (dunno about RPM).
The issue isn’t time, it’s that I’m in the middle of working, I have unsaved work that I can’t save now bec the browser decided to update in the background.
Sounds like a nothing burger. Firefox allows you to restore tabs. And you can turn off automatic updates. Seriously don’t understand where you are facing this issue. Every commercial grade software allows you to customise your workflow.
I've seen tab restoration fail after those automatic updates, and even when the tabs do restore that doesn't mean that the actual state is preserved. Work is interrupted, and it's a burger full of crap when it happens.
Never faced a tab restoration failure. I have used ff in Linux, Mac OS, windows. Managing updates, or page states, or tabs, never had an issue. And never felt needed special extensions to manage anything.
This definitely look like an issue with your own setup.
But If you did face issues, you can always file a bug.
You can restore the URLs but you don't get page state, that draft you couldn't save because Firefox suddenly stopped loading new pages? Completely gone.
The point is that this is poor default user experience, and it should not be this way.
On old and now obsolete systems this is maybe 20 seconds? I invoke the package manager to update just ff. It downloads, gets extracted, then I'm restarting it. It does it's thing, and restores my tabs. After killing it with -9 right before the update.
Firefox is good these days!
Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody.
Manifest v2 will stay supported on FF - uBlock will keep working properly.
It's time to switch. If you would rather have a UI like Arc, give Zen a shot! (It's what I use!)
Fully agree. With Multi-Account Containers [1] and the recent addition of tab groups [2] / vertical tabs [3], Firefox got even better.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-groups-community/
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/vertical-tabs-and-the-fi...
stock firefox is decent but, depending on your goals, there are better flavors. If security is really important there is librewolf and if you care way less about security and just want awesome then floorp is pretty sweet. For me sidebery brings it all together because it lets you do things like set per container socks5, which is a game changer for me (default is all traffic through my favorite vpn provider, but I have containers to make my browser look like my local ip, American, etc.)
>security is really important there is librewolf
Does librewolf do anything that you can't do via user.js?
you would have to look at their website. I dont know
"Mozilla (despite its issues) is nowhere near as evil as Google and a browser monopoly is good for nobody."
Truthfully, it is good for somebody. For example, it is good for Google.
By extension, it is also good for Mozilla because Mozilla sends FF user data, e.g., default search query data, to Google in exchange for money.
If Google's search business declines due to loss of monopoly (aka competition) and as a result Google decides to stop funding Mozilla, then that's bad for somebody.
Perhaps the reader can figure out who that somebody might be.
re: "nowhere near as evil"
Why would I want to use the lesser of two evils when I can generally avoid popular modern browsers altogether. Zero evil.
> Why would I want to use the lesser of two evils when I can generally avoid popular modern browsers altogether. Zero evil.
What browser are you using?
Most (but not all) folks with posts like this invariably use Chrome
How is that zero evil?
Long live the Red Panda <3
I used Firefox for roughly 19 years at least or a bit more. I switched to Edge and have been very happy for years now. I didn't know they committed to supporting V2 but it does appear they intend to as long as it serves user choice and privacy needs.
I left because they kept stripping features out that I was used to whether it was my RSS toolbar feeds or something else. I forgot which feature removal was the final straw, or if it was a bug or two that irked me. While I was never a Chrome user, I found Edge was an alternative that I was happy with. I also see a lot of benefit to native browsers. Ironically, that I learned about from Mozilla's own devblogs.
Supporting V2 like this is the exact opposite of what drove me away. I'm cruising so happily on Edge that I'm unsure if I'm willing to do another shift, but I am going to reconsider my life choices.
As an outsider, it seems weird to me that you would go to Edge when you are unsatisfied by Mozilla's spotty long-term support. Edge exists because Microsoft dropped support for IE (and then for their own rendering engine altogether when they switched to Chromium). It seems to me that they have a strictly worse track record in the aspect you care about.
Or maybe I am wrong about the facts? I never used Edge.
sounds great, how do I install Edge on Debian?
you have a .deb there https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/download?form=MM145U (i don't use it, just saying)
I don't know what you mean by this. For one, I wasn't trying to sell it to you. I don't care what you use at all. Two, I'm using it on Debian.
> Nowhere near as evil as Google
Mozilla fired its CEO on its private political opinions, expressed as a non-publicized donation.
He wasn't fired, he resigned, almost certainly because of external pressure more than internal. The board (who had just appointed him 10 days before) tried to get him to stay in a different role after he submitted his resignation.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/
CEOs always "resign" instead of being fired. Is there reason to believe that this particular instance was truly voluntary, unlike every other time a CEO gets fired and then the company lies about it? I'm genuinely asking - I don't know much about corporate culture at Mozilla so maybe it genuinely was a resignation. Just pointing out that companies always claim that, and in other cases it's a lie.
Yes, there are a few reasons:
- External pressure, including a high profile boycott campaign, was widespread and widely reported
- Brendan Eich remained a Mozilla employee for years after his donation was first publicly discussed (in the LA Times and on Twitter), with no apparent pressure to leave. The board appointed him CEO with full knowledge of his views and knowledge that they were publicly known.
- There were relatively few public statements from Mozilla employees asking him to resign, and none from executives or board members.
- I think it's unusual for companies to explicitly lie and say "we tried to get them to stay". It might even expose them to defamation claims or something. If the board forces a resignation, they'll just say "they resigned" (which is technically true) and leave it at that.
Do you think those opinions would have made it more difficult to work with certain employees at Mozilla based on certain protected traits in the law? If so, I think the donation is a red herring, it's the opinion itself that's the problem.
Firing people for their opinions is actually fine - if you believe that certain types of people don't deserve rights, for example, and your company has those types of people in it, that's a problem. Freedom of opinion is not guaranteed.
Does this approach ultimately lead to the conclusion that people on different sides of the abortion issue can't work in the same company?
No, it means that those with unsavory opinions should understand it's in their best interest to keep quiet. It's always been the case that saying something offensive can get you fired. I mean, if I call my boss ugly I'm liable to get fired. And that's not even political.
It means Mozilla is unable to work with people who have other opinions.
I do not have an opinion on abortion, and I’d probably lean towards a yes. But Mozilla being capable of making it a problem out of someone’s history, 10 years earlier, a private donation, shows a major issue of intolerance.
The root cause: Mozilla turned woke, and did look into the past of each employee to fire them. The wokists see no problem with that, but for the rest of us, it’s the darkest time for intolerance.
Well there's multiple problems here, so one by one:
1. Mozilla didn't fire anyone. My understanding is they actually tried to keep him.
2. Public pressure, dollar voting, and boycotts is just the free market at work. The invisible hand is real but it seems to me as soon as the invisible hand starts pushing stuff we all get uncomfortable.
3. Nobody takes anyone seriously who says "woke". That word means absolutely nothing to anyone, it's just a dog whistle. A type of inverse virtue signal that you are not a serious person worth listening to.
If you want a definition, a "woke" person is one who prioritizes waging identity-group conflict over other priorities. The more woke, the more things they sacrifice and trample upon to that end.
#3 is a perfect for the description of Mozilla’s standing. The fact that you decide to use this keyword as a sign that the argument is flawed is proof that the argument is correct with nothing of substance to criticize.
Mozilla decided to #2 appeal to those types of people, with various angles including “renewing the masculinity inside Mozilla”. It’s not public pressure, as the public went on for a backlash against wokism in the 2020 and later. Mozilla is in an ironic situation where it is now driven by those incompetent people, while the public moved on, and its values are not a value proposition anymore.
Especially the “We fire people who do not think like us” part. Let me tell you that the kind of public “We harass people into quitting” answers perfectly to #1 in my books.
Just be good. Just be good people! That’s all we ask!
Donating money to interfere in other people's lives and telling them who they can and can't marry is not being good.
Just let people live! Just be good!
I believe somebody who is strongly anti-abortion, even for medical reasons and somebody who needs an abortion to save their life probably shouldn't work in the same company.
why would both things every come up for discussion in a workplace environment. sounds like a place I would not want to work at
What do you think about the answers to your question? Have you reflected on them at all?
The principle of the separation of church and state may be cast as a principle that, in conflicts between religious groups, the state must remain neutral. This avoids the situation where, when one group gains control of the state, they get to use it to oppress the other group, and then the other group has a strong motive (and arguably a moral right) to revolt, violently if necessary.
Implementing this meant that people who worked for the state, and other neutral institutions, had to work with others who they honestly believed were heretics that would go to hell. Both they and the institution had to learn to keep their tribal conflicts—nominally religious and doctrinal, but in practice tribal—under control. This was difficult, but very valuable to all sides. The truce enabled mutually beneficial cooperation and the prosperity that entailed.
Centuries later, some tribes find themselves in control of certain institutions. The truce, the principle of neutrality, restricts them, and they see little benefit from it. "Why not violate it, and start a fight over this issue where we have the upper hand? We'll win!" Sometimes this takes the form of arguing tendentiously that the other side violated the truce first, and hence their attacks are in fact justified retaliation. Other times they seem ignorant of the value of having a truce, and are likely ignorant of its history (which is not taught well). So they start trampling on it.
Depending on what we imagine their motives to be, and how narrowly we consider them... On that issue in isolation—gay marriage—it's probably "rational". However, violating the truce makes it easier to do more of that, both for them and their opponents. On this issue they have the upper hand, and they'll win. On abortion, they have the advantage, but less so. On other issues (such as putting biological males in women's sports and women's prisons) they have minority support, and if they keep up their attitude of just fighting because "why not?" (subject to tactical considerations), they will provoke the opposition to fight back more and harder, and eventually they'll lose ground on the issues themselves—to say nothing of the costs of the fighting and the lost value due to the broken truce.
They are short-sighted, ignorant, aggressive little barbarians who start smashing the thing in front of them, unaware that it's a pillar holding up many things we and even they hold dear. They know not what they do. I guess this is where we see the deficiencies of current education.
No.
It's easy to keep abortions secret. They're protected by privacy laws, so even HR can't ask about them. Medical issues are secret from the workplace by default.
It's impossible to keep your sexuality secret if you're married. Your marital status at work is public by default. And no one should have to keep the identity of their spouse secret for fear of being treated worse by the CEO.
There's a difference between a thing that a person does (usually once) and something that a person _is_.
On a related note, a CEO who believes that some of his employees deserve fewer human rights than others is unlikely to be an effective CEO.
How do you figure that this is "evil" in any way? Who cares about the CEO
Everyone can choose what they consider evil.
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. Privately held political opinions. And Mozilla barred itself from working with a top engineer, inventor of Javascript, for privately-held political reasons, and gave reigns from engineers to business types of people. They kept Mozilla dependent on Google, an economic tie which sidesteps Mozilla from being an alternative to Google.
Some comments say I’m holding a grudge, but Brendan Eich is not the only one harassed, it was a statement from Mozilla, it meant We do not tolerate other opinions
I consider harassment for political opinions, evil. You are free to believe differently, but at least you cannot say with a straight face that Mozilla has a moral standing against Google.
Do you have any evidence at all of Mozilla doing anything? The facts are he resigned as CEO after visible external pressure.
> Privately held
Which part of donating money to ensure a class of people don't get the same rights as the donor is private? That's as public of a move as one can imagine.
so how near exactly is that to Google levels of evil, the claim was it was nowhere near but you seem to think it is near, if not exactly a bullseye? How equivalent are these levels of evil I wonder?
... 11 years ago. Are you really hanging on to a vendetta this long?
Do you see the comments posted in any discussion about Brave? Some people are hanging on to the vendetta.
And the people angry about that have popped up in every Mozilla and Firefox discussion for a decade to let us know that Firefox is too woke and now we have a corporate browser monoculture.
Well done folks, your MAGA browser culture war has ruined browsers just like it ruins everything else it touches.
But maybe they'll actually ban gay marriage again and it will all have been worth it for you.
Funnily enough, it's the same people who argue that corporations are people and should have free speech.
Firing the CEO was an expression of said free speech.
The argument here is that being against punishing someone for their speech is anti-free speech? Because the punishment constitutes speech?
Well, um, yes. Having an opinion is free speech. Calling someone else's opinion stupid is, in it of itself, an opinion. So that's also free speech.
The point being free speech is a two-way street. Speech without consequences is actually un-free in that sense. Because you're free to say whatever, but I'm not free to say whatever in response.
Now, whether corporate actions constitute speech is kind of another question. But the consensus in the US is that yes, they do. Corporations are allowed to have opinions and make donations, and they're allowed to fire you for having opinions or making donations.
The important thing to note is that free speech, as we understand it, is a protection for private entities from public entities. Meaning it protects you, a citizen, from public censorship. And it protects companies, private entities, from public censorship. So it, in a way, enables private companies to censor. Because the public can't censor their censorship.
You’re conflating the US’s constitutional protections against government attacks on free speech with the broader concept of (the virtue of) free speech. No one is saying that what Mozilla did was illegal.
Just curious: would you defend a company for firing someone for speaking out in support of gay marriage?
> Just curious: would you defend a company for firing someone for speaking out in support of gay marriage?
Well companies already do this all the time - this is more so the status-quo. I'm not going to pretend the majority are somehow, in some roundabout way, oppressed. Is this person fired for supporting gay marriage, or being gay? Because obviously that's illegal... you can't fire someone for being part of a protected class. Being a republican or whatever is not a protected class, being gay is. One matters, one doesn't.
No it isn't. I believe it was wrong to fire Brendan Eich (because I believe it's wrong to fire any employee for their activities outside work), but I also don't think corporations count as people and have a right to free speech under the constitution. You're painting with too broad of a brush.
Upvote for proving me wrong.
It has been my perception that it's usually not a principled objection in this case, but mostly people mad because they share those specific beliefs he was fired for.
> Firing the CEO was an expression of said free speech.
They didn't fire him. They even tried to get him to stay after he resigned.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/faq-on-ceo-resignation/
He made a choice, and to the best of my knowledge, he hasn't corrected the record.
Your point being?
Firefox (and Chromium according to their own blog) might be objectively faster (and hardware is certainly much faster), but getting anything done on websites doesn't feel any faster than 20 years ago. In the end we keep bumping into some form of Wirth's law / Jevons Paradox: both browser and hardware speed gains will be eaten by more abstract web frameworks, more authentication walls, more ads, etc.
I find that these days the browsers are all about the same performance-wise and it ends up not mattering much. PCs are so fast that it's very rarely the browser that is the bottleneck. Cool that they're still working to keep it snappy though.
I will say mobile is a bit different. I prefer mobile browser to apps when possible so I can have ad-blocking, but some websites run like complete garbage on mobile browser. They're so slow it's almost unusable. I'm almost 100% certain that's not on the browser itself though.
In my experience speed differences between browsers are indeed negligible on properly engineered sites/apps. Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit. Some of it might come down to poorly pruned or outdated polyfills, which in many cases are filling in for features that those engines gained support for quite some time ago.
I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs, because it’s making the web worse than it needs to be.
I daily drive Firefox serving a Chrome User-Agent, out of frustration with a couple applications that work perfectly on Firefox, but because they didn't test on Firefox, they just assume it won't work and block my connection (If there's any Devs at Snapchat who wants a free ticket completion, you can "Add Firefox support" by deleting your UA check)
I noticed this exact thing. While a lot of sites worked perfectly fine when I was informing them I was using Firefox, when I started lying, they ran faster. Drove me nuts.
Frontend Devs: If your code reads the user-agent string for any reason but logging/spying, you're doing it wrong.
This is the natural consequence of the notion at large that non-Blink web engines are lightyears behind, which was never true in the strictest sense and has only become less true with time as the gap has narrowed. Besides that, even if you’re relying on some feature that Chrome has implemented as an early draft spec thing or something, maybe consider toggling off that one feature instead of blocking off the whole app.
To clarify, I didn't mean don't check if the feature you want to use exists on the user's browser. I meant don't come to that conclusion using User-Agent strings. JavaScript makes if very easy to check if a method you want to use exists or not: just check if the function is undefined.
If you do it the right way, if/when another browser implements the feature you used, suddenly you support that browser, with no code changes. If you check UAs, then you need to keep tabs on browser updates and manually update your website when features get added to browsers, and you need to check what version people are using because maybe it's out of date, it's a whole thing.
What drives me nuts is that the right way is the easy way.
We’re in full agreement here, all I was saying is that the menality that leads to user agent sniffing is likely the idea that engines that aren't Blink are so incapable and will break the site/app so badly that it’s better to just rule out their usage altogether. Checking on a per-function basis (or alternatively, just not insisting on using bleeding edge features in the first place) is absolutely the way to go about avoiding brokeness.
The past few projects I've done, I've made some effort to just not polyfill anything, it's always too easy to wind up with fills for things long supported in every major browser for the past 3-5 years.
On the flip side... if you're running something bespoke relying on an older JS engine, it's becoming harder to find pure polyfills/shims that aren't a tangled mess relying on DOM specific features.
While there are some newer features I don't mind seeing early, I've mostly just avoided touching some of the more recent features for now, only to avoid the mess that are the current state of fills.
> I wish there were something that could thwart the “Chromium by default” assumption at large amongst devs...
I don't think that is possible. It used to be that lazy devs assumed people were on IE, these days lazy devs assume people are on Chrome. In the future if there is a new browser with a majority of the market, lazy devs will assume people use that browser. The problem isn't any one browser, it's that some people are lazy and seek out shortcuts rather than doing things the correct way.
> Every so often I run into one that was only ever developed for and tested against Chromium and has major performance issues under Gecko and/or WebKit
and invariable it's under a google domain
This feels generally true but there's some exceptions. For example: I use Firefox as my daily driver, but if I want to watch more than one Twitch stream in parallel I'm forced to use Chromium. Opening multiple Twitch streams on Firefox grinds the browser to a halt.
As a counter example, I remember that I needed to do big reviews in GitHub using Firefox because Chrome would slow to a crawl in the Files tab in GitHub, while Firefox was just as fast as it was with small reviews.
I don't think this is an issue anymore, but it shows that a few things have completely performance in different browsers.
I wonder how experiences can differ so much with the same program. I've never had an issue having 3-5 twitch streams open at the same time, across multiple computers and multiple FireFox versions.
Addons and configuration can make a big difference. It's why FF likes to push the 'refresh' of the browser if you'd had it installed awhile.
Possibly video drivers and hardware for the Twitch issue.
Memory and battery usage matters on desktop browser for laptops as well.
On modern machines I blame websites (and maybe network connections) for being slow and not the browser anymore.
That's largely my own take as well. And while many hate SPAs or client-driven web apps, it reduces the server surface a lot. It should be faster/better... that people make really crappy front ends doesn't mean the tech itself is bad.
There is some really bloated crap out there, and you can create every bit as much bloat on the server as in the client.
Firefox is excellent. I use it exclusively on my mac and am grateful to all the humans who make such great software.
Pleasantly it also has working adblock and using it helps prevent browser monoculture. So that’s nice too.
Best way to improve performance on the web is to install an ad blocker.
It seems like battery life is no longer a major difference between browsers now either:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413
This finally convinced me to press the update and restart button. Nice to see that not all commercial software projects tend towards bloat.
OMG the phoronix website is appalling. Reader mode made it tolerable but masked the "next page" link, which just, come on. That link led to a full-screen interstitial ad, at which point nope.
TLDR: "On average Firefox 141 Beta was around 12% faster than the Firefox 120 release from November 2023."
[flagged]
Until Firefox acknowledges and takes serious
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1195654
I refuse to accept it. It served it's purpose to help us defeat IE6. That's it. Now it's useless and needs to die IMO.
So that we can have a worse "IE6" situation where blink (and its distant cousin, webkit) is the only engine available?
Why is that bug important to you?
When you build a phone and want that phone to work with salesforce classic- every time a page reloads. You must put the WebRTC in a pop out window. This window will not have focus because they are in salesforce . Even in lightning people want a pop out for the call. Firefox is broken
This seems incredibly niche, to the point I still don't fully understand what exactly your use case is.
Salesforce has over 150,000 companies using it's platform, with estimates around 150 million users... The percentage that use OpenCTI powered by five 9, ctm, gensys, twilio, telnyx, etc... that are WebRTC based if even let's say 10%... that is still like 15 million users daily... not exactly niche for Firefox to be breaking a feature for that many users? Oh and consider that salesforce method for embedding a phone is fairly common, then you have other CRM's zoho, hubspot and customer service platform zendesk etc... all broken with firefox's position on WebRTC...
Firefox has the worst update process. Idk how they haven’t figured this out yet, but the fact that I regularly get “restart to finish update and continue browsing” when opening new tabs or links is totally unacceptable. Also the fact that it can’t just update in the background and still requires me to manually accept a UAC prompt is crazy. Especially bec sometimes if you don’t accept the prompt… you can’t open Firefox until you allow it to finish updating. So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.
I've only ever seen this happen with the Linux package-manager-type process where the update might happen "underneath" the browser without its knowledge. Using their built-in upgrade system as far as I know it just happens only on browser restart... but I guess I haven't used it on Windows in a long time.
I've seen something similar in Windows corporate environments where Firefox is updated while you are using it, and the only indication that it has happened is that Firefox insists on restarting before you can load any more pages, although no UAC prompts were involved. It is annoying, especially if you are in the middle of submitting a form. I don't know whether to blame it on how IT has chosen to implement centralized updates, or on Firefox for not being as easy to centrally manage as other software, or some combination.
I just got it on my Windows, but haven been postponing updates for ages before that with zero issue. Hence I was quite surprised. I'm almost certain what triggered it was some application trying to load a website.
Not sure which technique the application used, but after few seconds it loaded the error message, and after that I couldn't open new tabs or windows without getting that error.
I don't think I have ever run into it on Windows, but I have seen it pretty much every time I update it on Linux through the package manager.
I moved to just using Firefox's binary tarball sitting in my home directory, so it uses its own update process, which doesn't have this problem.
>So you don’t really have a choice but to update to the latest.
Similar to most programs, you can change certain behaviors in the settings of the program. For Firefox update behavior:
Settings -> General -> Firefox Updates -> "Check for updates but let you choose when to install them".
Or, you can choose "Automatically install updates" and subsequently check "When Firefox is not running".
Either way should address your issue.
This is on a corporate PC, I don’t run into this issue with chrome (which I try to avoid using in general) whose update schedule is also managed by a corp IT policy.
Those settings don’t do anything bec even when I select “Check but don’t install” it still nags me and eventually installs even if corp IT policy is only to update monthly.
I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?
> I wish there was a way to turn off the nagging too. Why can’t Firefox trust my corp IT to follow their process?
That is definitely possible. In my corporate environment, I don't get any nags or prompts to update, and when I go into settings it shows "Updates disabled by your organization".
It sounds like your IT left the update prompts enabled, perhaps specifically to let you update at your own convenience and hence avoid the problem you complain about when it forces an update while you are using it.
I find it's worse with Chromium than Firefox. After an update, new tabs don't load properly and links fail, until I manually restart it. In the past I've joined Google Meet meetings in Chromium and found the audio not working because I'd forgotten to restart the browser since the last update.
Then it sounds like Firefox has the "restart page" to mitigate this exact edge case. Better than having undefined behavior like that imo.
As I get it from other comments, this is not a problem with the built-in updater (as on Windows). On linux, when updating via package manager, you should now this can be an issue with any program. Yes, most programs survive running while being updated, but for a complicated piece of software (like a browser) this behavior is understandable.
See the Arch wiki for updating on Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Restart_...
On linux I use kill -9 before any update, on the parent of ff's entire process tree. Works for me every single time, reliably getting my tabs back without the need for any extension.
Interesting: On MacOS, with the option "Check for updates but let you choose to install them" chosen in the Firefox preferences, the experience is exactly that, update in the background without further notifications. That is, I get a prompt that an update is available and whether I want to download it now or not. If so, it starts a download in the background and applies the update on the next start of the program. (You can also check for updates and restart in the "About" dialog.)
(Note: I've set new tabs and windows to open with a blank view, which may also make a difference, as there is no default content.)
It's specifically a Linux ecosystem problem they're talking about. The package managers don't coordinate with Firefox and just change files out from under it. That means that you can end up with the processes Firefox spawns when a tab is opened not matching the main process. This caused problems often enough that Firefox implemented a mechanism to detect this case and tell you to restart the browser.
Browsers aren't the only software that could be broken by auto updates on Linux and you can set up exactly the same behavior in at least APT's unattended-upgrades (dunno about RPM).
I guessed so. (Which is why I brought up the behavior on that other OS.)
It’s just few minutes of update time. If one is so short of time, perhaps they need to re-evaluate other things.
The issue isn’t time, it’s that I’m in the middle of working, I have unsaved work that I can’t save now bec the browser decided to update in the background.
Sounds like a nothing burger. Firefox allows you to restore tabs. And you can turn off automatic updates. Seriously don’t understand where you are facing this issue. Every commercial grade software allows you to customise your workflow.
I've seen tab restoration fail after those automatic updates, and even when the tabs do restore that doesn't mean that the actual state is preserved. Work is interrupted, and it's a burger full of crap when it happens.
That's why I always update my browsers manually.
Never faced a tab restoration failure. I have used ff in Linux, Mac OS, windows. Managing updates, or page states, or tabs, never had an issue. And never felt needed special extensions to manage anything.
This definitely look like an issue with your own setup. But If you did face issues, you can always file a bug.
You can restore the URLs but you don't get page state, that draft you couldn't save because Firefox suddenly stopped loading new pages? Completely gone.
The point is that this is poor default user experience, and it should not be this way.
On old and now obsolete systems this is maybe 20 seconds? I invoke the package manager to update just ff. It downloads, gets extracted, then I'm restarting it. It does it's thing, and restores my tabs. After killing it with -9 right before the update.