- Increase CEO pay
- Repeat as needed
it should be “We need to focus on the browser” -> lays off employees and pushes feature requests to the open-sorce volunteer community to fill as they see fit.
Firefox should only exist to be a standards-compliant browser (not part of the Google ecosystem). It should not be using Google WebExtensions or a Google manifest. Anything beyond the bare minimum of compliance with the W3C’s published standard should be a community made addon or plugin.
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Absolutely right. It shouldn’t collaborate with any for-profit entity, or non-profit entity captured by for-profit entities. Everything should be about maintaining the base engine at compatibility to open standards, and pushing everything else to either the community or volunteers in the non-profit.
Addons are important though, and they fucked with developers quite a bit in the past. Making the developers start over again is probably going to piss them further.
Oh, I agree. We’re past the point of no return now. Our only hope lies in Ladybird. I’m holding out hope for that engine, though only slightly.
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They did? I still have it enabled and it works. If I get an update that removes this, mozilla can go shit themselves
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I remember using an extension for that in like 2008 or something.
And I remember them disabling the features that extension required to function.
That was the move to Firefox 3.0, wasn’t it? Back when major Firefox releases were actually major and not just minor changes to a few tertiary features.
I’m pretty sure that upgrade killed more addons than every update since then combined. It took years for some of them to return.
When was that? I only ask because Firefox has vertical tabs now.
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Ah TIL! I think it was finally added as of version 136, fairly recently.
This weirdly took me back to a chance conversation I had in the late 90s with the development manager for Internet Explorer. I asked him a technical question about a new feature I thought IE might be getting. He had no idea what I was talking about, and said (almost verbatim), “Now that Netscape is essentially dead, we really have no motivation to innovate in the browser space.” This was about at the end of the transition period when the money people took over MS from the geeks, and I remember thinking yeahhh, this is the end. The feature I was asking about was “back channel requests” - later known as AJAX. I believe it was first implemented natively by Firefox and then Microsoft (who could have done it like 5 years sooner) scrambled to play catch-up - which by then was their standard pattern.
Oh man, I had almost forgotten about when you had to write different ways to read the XHR response depending on which browser you were trying to support.
Right! The thing I asked him about was if XMLHttpRequest would be natively supported instead of having to use an ActiveX object. His reaction was oh, hmm, that sounds kinda cool but nah. At that time dynamic HTML still wasn’t all that old, web pages were still mostly content that just sat there. And now we could eliminate page refreshes and server-side state maintenance, and have little apps run in the browser and interact with APIs. I was super psyched about this changing the whole face of the web, and that MS would lead the way. But sadly by then it had become all about getting people to re-buy Windows every few years.
Capitalism and enshittification
Yep, it’s not that Firefox is bad. It’s that the people currently in charge of it are trying to be greedy assholes and operate like the greedy assholes that run other companies.
Get rid of those people or otherwise stop them from their greedy assholery and The Firefox hate would stop.
Get rid of those people or otherwise stop them from their greedy assholery and The Firefox hate would stop.
What if we tried paying them even more, instead, first…just to be sure we tried everything?
I want to believe it’s possible for a viable browser to be built purely out of altruism. Such an endeavor would require, ironically, a steady stream of income to ensure that the developers are well compensated and are not burdened by, you know, hunger and lack of shelter.
Firefox has had a good run but it’s clear that they are chasing cash at the cost of alienating their most dedicated users. The sad thing is that I suspect they’ve done the math and predict they will gain more users than lose them.
The harsh reality is that browsers are expensive to build. They are the literal portals to our digital lives and it’s becoming harder to isolate and anonymize our online lives.
Hell, I’d love to see a Linux distro take this on. Can you imagine if a heavyweight like CentOS or Linux Mint took on the project to build a browser from the ground up?
Or in short, capienshit.
Just focus on the browsing.
