A bad article. Mozilla relies on Yahoo's Search-Engine (Bing) cooperation (instead of Google) and probably with partnerships like Pocket (will be removed).
Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me).
Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.
Mozilla has repeatedly stated that they're not receiving any money from bundling Pocket, and I see no reason why they would lie about this considering that they're actively seeking to diversify revenue sources. And even if you think Mozilla is lying, there's no way that Pocket is putting up the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary to make their hypothethical contribution to Mozilla's coffers anything more than a rounding error.
I haven't read every news. I never mentioned that someone is lying!? Nor do I think that way. I just know it from Firefox, it appeared suddenly. And I had to search on Google how to get rid of this unwanted service and disable it on all family computers. I had to change settings in the hidden "about:config" - not even an UI setting was available. Why would they integrate a closed third party service to an open source browser is beyond me. It seems the responsible person had no idea what he decided and is out of touch with the product and its community.
I know I'm being a cynical ass, but I flat out do not believe that they have no incentive to integrate Pocket. Maybe it's not financial, but it has to be something.
There's a lot of hate around pocket, and it provides a cool, but simple feature. Yet I haven't heard anyone who loves it and actively wants it. The best I've heard is "yeah, it's OK", even online. I don't know why they would push so hard for a product that there's so much hatred for, and nobody rooting for, whey they could just say "Wow, OK. Guess you guys don't want it. We're scrapping it". It's far from a killer feature, so who's it for?
Pocket is making money with their database of what people read and when they read it. This isn't insignificant.
Even if there isn't some sort of payola deal going on to feed that money back to Mozilla, this is clearly being done for profit. Maybe it's some sort of indirect benefit, maybe it's someone doing a favor for a friend.
The alternative isn't any better: if there isn't any benefit for Mozilla, they are letting for-profit businesses insert themselves as a feature dependency.
Firefox wanted a similar "temporary bookmark" feature to augment Reader mode and other things. Instead of coding it themselves, they decided on using an existing addon that gave the same functionality.
Now you're moving around the goalposts. I was replying to "Even if there isn't some sort of payola deal going on to feed that money back to Mozilla, this is clearly being done for profit. Maybe it's some sort of indirect benefit, maybe it's someone doing a favor for a friend."
There's no indirect benefit (aside from having a new feature). There's a very clear and logical reason behind the integration. In retrospect, they should have consulted with the community first perhaps, but it's false that Mozilla did this for some direct or indirect benefit.
Multi-process is happening just fine with Gecko, XPCOM, and XUL. It's the extension ecosystem (the do-whatever-with-the-internals nature of the extensions API, and getting all the extensions to upgrade) that's the obstacle. Nightly is currently multi-process (although not large numbers of processes, but there's a pref to flip); it just hasn't shipped in the release channel yet.
Mozilla did not make any money from the Pocket integration. Would you let it go already?
Also the Developer Edition, which is the alpha channel, is multi-process as you'd expect it to be. But speaking of hundreds of tabs, try doing that in Chrome, do that in Firefox, and compare.
> But speaking of hundreds of tabs, try doing that in Chrome, do that in Firefox, and compare.
At least in my experience, bad example. Chrome works with ~300 Tabs, Firefox freezes or crashes regularly with way less then that. And this machine only has 8 GB RAM. Let's hope the current changes in Firefox stabilize it.
I use dozens to hundreds tabs in IE11 and Chrome, sure it may use 16 GB ram, but I have more than that. Firefox often removes the tabs from the memory, going back to the tab means reloading the page. I will check out the recent Alpha for sure, I have it installed.
I use both daily and wouldn't describe either as being across the board better. For any one feature, you can find something else which the other one does better and each release tends to round out weak points (e.g. for awhile Firefox's responsive design mode was a big win but Chrome has caught up and added things like network speed simulation, too).
The right way to look at this is to go back to what we used to suffer through and recognize that it's awesome that we have two sharp dev teams putting at lot of effort into making life easier for web developers. Using the “worst” one is still far ahead of the best two years ago.
> - display JavaScript data structures in more visual way
Sort of? Is the existence of the 'inspect' function enough?
> - breakpoints on DOM changes, events and Ajax requests
I'm not sure about this. I mean, you can set the breakpoints in code per usual but I expect you mean setting them on the nodes themselves and perhaps global breakpoints in the net panel?
> - debugger API to work together with IDEs like Netbeans
It's possible with the remote debugging protocol but the only implementation I know of is the proof of concept that Paul Rouget put together two years ago, although I don't think he released any code.
Mozilla's work on Firefox, Rust and Servo is great. Thunderbird and a real multi-process browser could get a bit more love. The later probably can only be achieved with a Servo based engine (probably not not with Gecko and its XCOM, XUL legacy code - the current multi process work uses just two processes (sandbox plugins) and doesn't scale - opening hundreds tabs won't spawn dozens of processes as we know from IE and Chrome (with all its downsides but even more upsides (stability, usability, UI latency)). Firefox with Firebug and all its plugins is the best web development browser, Chrome with its ever changing DevTools (UI changes) comes second (for me).
Mozilla's browser is very important for the open Web.