In what significant ways could Firefox be improved, such that it would help most users, over Chrome?
A complete new fast browser in rust - ah wait they also fired these engineers.
Not being multiples years late on some browsers features: you can't import es modules in a webworker yet.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?product=Firefox&que...
Chrome is the product of a company whose mandate is extracting as much data as possible from its users to feed their ad business. Firefox can and should be better, as they could be 100% user focused.
A Chrome monopoly in the browser space has the potential to be more damaging to the web than the Microsoft monopoly in days gone by. They want to make the world a better place? Well, they could have made the web a better place, if they could meaningfully take some share away from Chrome.
Also, experience tells us that being fast and light is incompatible with excellent plugin support, as the more hooks you provide for plugins, the less you can change without breaking those plugins -- that was Firefox's previous problem.
I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)
Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:
The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!
From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.
See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.
Finish making gecko reusable so people can use it instead of blink whenever someone wants to make a custom skin, or instead of electron for "desktop" apps. I grant that it's not immediately user-facing, but it would help give them the actual market share so that web devs have a reason to care about gecko.
I want a way to instal things on my system without a third party graciously allowing me to, that's what I'd consider freedom and why I try to avoid the playstore like the plague. Seeing Mozilla to not be better either is just sad :(
It should be a noble goal that acts as a beacon for others to follow. It'll lose money at first, but they'll keep their core privacy and power user base, until people come around.
Oh and stop following google and privacy advocates supposed efforts to make the web "safer". Those are all mostly propaganda and feel good initiatives whilst the tracking still happens. But that's a long side rant from a pet peeve of mine.
Google's main focus is in extracting rent from their dominance, not in making the browser faster, lighter or whatever.
As for plugin support, that's the challenge no? Make it so the contract for third party plugins can be maintained without breaking them every 6 months as the browser improves.
Firefox has excellent developers. The fact that it still has some relevance despite many years of mismanagement is testament to that. I bet if the company behind the browser was laser focused in making it as good as possible, with no compromise, they could challenge Chrome dominant position.
Well it worked on firefox before, but only on macOS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDq1AN1kSn4
https://web.archive.org/web/20210331133857/https://developer...
> But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.
It could has been a feature that make firefox the browsers for developers, instead it's a new paid subscription dev product.