Why do you still use Firefox?

Okay, let's be honest here. I'm a web dev for around 10 years and I really, really used to love Firefox. But, I'm being honest. Firefox is installed on my machines only for one-time website tests, that's it. And IE9 in a VM is too.

Reasons:

  • JS engine is superslow, not even comparable to Chrome
  • UI is synchronous and blocking (single-threaded), I can't wait 10 seconds to open another tab in a slow internet connection
  • All extensions (even NoScript) have alternatives, just use ScriptSafe, for example
  • Adblock Plus sucks, uBlock Origin rocks. That's for your "performance" argument

Really, the only thing I value in Firefox is that it is using not system-specific proxies. That's why it's basically my hyperboria and TOR Browser. But I'm honest here as well, I simply build my own GNOME shell extension to switch Proxies via one-click, so I can't value that as a real argument.

In my personal opinion, Mozilla realized that above points are a problem. Heck, they created the most awesome paralleled programming language for that.

BUT in order for Mozilla to stay alive, I think they have to push Servo further. The simple "step-by-step" migration plan didn't work for the last 5 years, so it won't work for the upcoming 5 ones. I mean, every single damn update in Firefox makes more confusion about how to create an extension.

It simply got impossible to google. Any extension on github that is older than a year (or was a tutorial) is so out of date that it even won't compile anymore. So that's my argument about jetpack, the most idiotic undocumented and stub API ever created. Really, any tab-injecting API is a stub API and somewhere in the issue tracker as on hold. WTF.

Letting my personal opinions on those matters out of place, I value the spirit and goals of Mozilla. But they really have to change the course, otherwise they will lose people like me forever. The new ad-platform heavily reminds me of sourceforge; and everybody knows how people think about sourceforge now.

TL;DR

Get your shit together, Mozilla. Give us a Browser based on Servo and Rust, make the extension API compatible with the WebApps WG-based API of Chrome, nw.js, Opera, electron (and pretty much the rest of the extension-relevant world) and everybody is happy. Don't reinvent shit from scratch if you don't have to; contribute.

/r/programming Thread Link - agmweb.ca