Well, I liked the comic, but the comments section has depressed the hell out of me. I've been a Firefox user nearly since the beginning. At times I've been disappointed in Mozilla's choices for things, but, by and large, I've thought Firefox to be the best browser around for years. I hate Chrome; it is just awful. And IE/Edge/Chromium Edge are all very annoying in various ways. I'm forced to use Chrome on my work laptop all day, and it just plain sucks. Some of the choices Google made are mind-bogglingly bad from a usability standpoint.
@eng1: Well, most users don't use Firefox anymore. The development tools are a nice reason for techy people to continue using Firefox. While new technologies in the web sector don't emerge on a daily base, the web is changing. It won't take forever for new stuff being embedded into html-code. Surly most of the tools will stay fresh for some years to come and I can't really argue from that side, if it is really necessary to keep developers around for that reason alone. It does cost money. Then again Firefox was in a constant flux over the last few years. Many major changes have been made to its own code and somebody has to tweak the devtools to be in touch with those changes. I see the danger, that one of the future cuts to be made might be cutting them out of Firefox as keeping them in is too much of a hassle and most users don't use them anyways. As I said before: Most users don't use Firefox anymore anyway, but the management doesn't seem to get that. They won't return, even if you sell yourself out to what they "need".
Let's take a look at the beginnings for a moment. In the beginning IE dominated. Netscape has been beaten. Firefox was an oddity on the sidelines. I used IE4 and it was the greatest browser ever. Sleek, nice to look at, responsive and free (as in freeware) (At least in compairison to others at that time). I was introduced to firefox by to tech enthusiastic and honestly, I wasn't impressed. The addon-system looked cumbersome and overall slow. But when I took another look at it a few months later, maybe because I used it on a different PC, I took a liking to it. Especially because it was a competitor to MS and its domination to the market. Some addons (while still slowing things down and hogging memory) have been rather useful. And with each new PC I owned and update it received it became faster. I started to recommend it to people and installed it on their systems. And that was happening everywhere I looked. IE became bloated, Firefox was faster and people with tech-knowledge recommended it. I believe that was the most important part about it. The recommendations. Surly it wouldn't have been possible, if Firefox would have been bloated, but the people had a good feeling about using it. Surly insecure in the beginning after being nudged to it, they gain trust into it fast and hey..."My Techguy also told me it is good. I believe it is good to use."
But after a while it became bloated itself and I'm not talking addons. FF 2.0: The "Awesomebar". I think I remember many people liked it. I didn't. I installed FF2 on an old laptop I had to use and whenever I tried to type stuff into it, it took a while to respond. (I'm a heavy tabs user.) My solution was to go back to FF1.6 I think? Guess what: FF1 was outphased some time later. That piece of code, this unneeded feature was forced onto me. And it was just the beginning.
Years later, one day, when the people asked their tech guys for a faster browser, they had another answer then just Firefox. "I would have recommend Firefox, but if you want a sleek browser, there is also Chrome. I also started to use it (Chromium)." A seal of approval, that stated, "It is also okay to use Chrome".
Now instead of reacting by moving out bloat-code into addons, making it faster, work on the memory management and focus on multithreading (several bg-processes on several cores, like chrome did, instead of one), Mozilla added more "features" nobody asked for. They went into the opposite direction. And instead they let go of their own GUI and mainstreamed it to mirror Chome's (Even though Firefox still has been the mainstream at that time! They had no good reason. Maybe they had some surveys on GUI, but it looked like they went and said, "The people are dumb. Let's make it look identical, as they seem to like it so much.") At that time they could have gone "Quantum" (years earlier) and worked on providing everything needed in the API to make a port of all of the most used Addons possible. I'm not even talking about keeping XUL alive, which would have been the easiest solution, but to provide the functions needed for the ports. The addon-developers would have done the rest, I'm sure!
Every step to Hell was harshly criticized by the community. Most people tried to tell Mozilla they are taking the wrong steps and they didn't act on it. Well...I ranted a lot.
In short: FF became bloated, so people looked actively for alternatives (Even though this was the very reason, why they overthrew IE in the beginning.) and tech related people started to recommend an alternative. -> FF market share died.
The moral of the tale: Don't piss on the techguys. They are the closest to the normal people. If you lose their trust, your open source product won't be used.
...Oh yeah, the DevTools! Nearly forgot about them. Firing their developers instead of reassigning them temporarily, send the wrong message. " DevTools is a few of the things that are better then anywhere else. Let's don't care about it and let it rot."
I don't see, why Trident's continued existence should have hindered the internet to thrive any further. Sure, when Microsoft dominated the market, web designers wrote webpage code to be compatible with it instead of W3C standards, but in the end page codes got forked to be compatible with different browsers. And MS lost out there in the end. IE Trident had to yield. Tridents demise in the end didn't bring any further liberation or anything useful or helped in any way. It was kind of sad, as a big competitor, that also helped to hold the other engines in line, was gone. (Even if I didn't use it anymore.) Its like to have that rival, you want to spit on his grave, and the you get the news, that he just dropped dead and you think to yourself, '... ... ... Humpf. Err..That..That did hit closer home, than I thought it would.' IE and me, we used to be friends.
I don't believe google would ever go closed source with something they open sourced ever again. And they plainly don't need to to get want they want. They do contribute. A lot. A lot more, than anyone else could do. That's their Modus Operandi. That's how they stir things where they should go. Of course you can always fork the software, but your fork will never live up to the updates avalanche BIG-g packs. A new fork of Blink will always have to stay close to google's version to profit from its security updates (which is a good thing), and maybe to keep chrome plugins compatible, but this comes with the downside, that the new versions might contain god knows what they come up with. It is openly written for everyone to see, but the forker first would have to remove/disable undesired code before he can update his version of it.
In the mean time that fork is late on security fixes and gets criticized for it. It's branded as unreliable and less secure. So a fork doesn't cut it, except it is a clean cut of somebody, who is contributing a lot worktime into it. And such a clean cut would grow distant to the original, as the workarounds would grow in numbers, and would end up being a separate engine on itself. Mozilla and the Gecko-engine are are already such a combination. I don't know if the makers of brave would go so far. I heavily doubt it. Such a clean cut will not happen and google would reign subprime, if Gecko would find its end. I'm not saying google would abuse that power, but it has never been a good idea to tolerate someone with that much power.
Regarding AOSP: I don't know too much about ASOP's clean OS, but assuming it is spyware free (without any google services, that always want to call home), I believe there doesn't exist a way for the majority of the people to install it on their phones in a simple way and without voiding warranty. As far as I know unlocking is always involved. Not blaming google for this, as it is the decision of the phone manufacturers to lock the phone owners out, but still.
Yet as far as I know manufacturer's version do contain google services and somebody asked about "How to get rid of them." on googles support forum. That's the most useful answer:
Well, Android is a registered trademark and is Google's implementation of AOSP (the open source version of Android). In order to carry the Android label, the OEM must install certain apps and services as required by Google.
If you want "Android," but don't want Google's Android, you would need to compile your own version of AOSP or use one of the many versions of pre-compiled AOSP packages and install it on a mobile device. Unfortunately, that is not within the scope of this forum, but sites like XDA would be able to help you out.
A clean AOSP doesn't seem to be a valid alternative. If you can't use it, it doesn't really matter.
Wikipedia still calls Servo an experimental browser engine. Hailing from the article some features have already been integrated into Gecko, so its repository also is a development platform for gecko.
"PS wasnt brave the browser that added affiliate links secretly?" Uff...no idea, but that doesn't help me to find them attractive in any way. Please Firefox! Stay alive!
