Interview: Firefox's chief on why he hopes a redesign will help win users from Chrome
arstechnica.com
Mozilla's Ajit Varma explains why a redesign suits the fight for the open web.

Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

  • Undaunted@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    22 days ago

    I really can’t wait for Servo to get into a usable state and have alternative browsers being build on top of that.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      How do I start using this, is it something an end user can support through adoption?

      • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
        1·
        22 days ago

        no, it’s very much not up to web standards yet. it has a super fast html renderer and css engine that support something like 70% of properties, a very barebones js runtime that has basically no browser apis, and a frontend that (i think) only takes urls via command-line.

        • Jayjader@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          22 days ago

          Honestly that description kinda makes me want to target servo for all of my hobby browser-backed UIs. Html5 with forms can do a surprising amount (albeit not always as effortlessly as just including a JavaScript library) - though I expect something like IndexedDB isn’t at all available?

          EDIT: well, the servo repo has a bunch of code in a storage/engines/indexeddb folder, but the repo aussi has about 30 open issues relating to “IndexedDB” in one way or another.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          22 days ago

          The less APIs the better, some of the information my phone is giving out currently to evwry site I visit is ridiculous

          • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
            0·
            22 days ago

            some of them are, y’know, needed for the sites to do anything at all.