Andreas Gal

Five years ago, Firefox was already declared dead: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ Mozilla can't push their browser. They don't have Android, Youtube, various other services with billions of users. Not even Microsoft is successful in pushing Edge (except for the corporate world) as they too have no giant consumer-facing services. Moreover, Firefox is virtually absent on mobile (0.5% market share). On massive websites (some I see at work), Firefox doesn't even show up on dashboards, it's not even in the top 10. Some weird obscure regional browsers outrank it. Technically speaking, Firefox is an irrelevant browser and has been for several years now. You may love it for sentimental or philosophical reasons, but the real world cares little about that. Anyway, the bleeding will continue without a leverage to push the browser. It's not an engineering problem.

Sure, we don't want any single entity--including ourselves--to monopolize the foundations of the Web. To allow that would diminish the Web's power as a democratized public resource. But let's not kid ourselves: Mozilla hasn't been able to unilaterally kill things for years. We finally caved on H.264 in 2014, acceding to a patent-encumbered Web: https://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/ The following year, we reluctantly added DRM to Firefox: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2015/05/12/update-on-digital-rights-mana… Google was the only vendor that supported NaCl or the Filesystem APIs, and WebSQL similarly failed to gain traction outside of WebKit and Presto. If we were wrong in our assessments of those proposals, we weren't alone. And that's what killed them.

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away. ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Firefox uses compartments per domain instead, which is a great alternative to process per tab: "Some readers might wonder how compartments compare to per-tab processes as they are used by Google Chrome and Internet Explorer. Compartments are similar in many ways, but also very different. Both processes and compartments shield JavaScript objects against each other. The most important distinction is that processes offer a stronger separation enforced by the processor hardware, while compartments offer a pure software guarantee. However, on the upside compartments allow much more efficient cross compartment communication that processes code. With compartments cross origin websites can still communicate with each other with a small overhead (governed by certain cross origin access policy), while with processes cross-process JavaScript object access is either impossible or extremely expensive. In a modern browser you will likely see both forms of separation being applied. Two web sites that never have to talk to each other can live in separate processes, while cross origin websites that do want to communicate can use compartments to enhance security and performance." You can read more about how that works at http://andreasgal.com/2010/10/13/compartments/

I appreciate your thoughtful reply! One (of the many i'm sure) problems here you defined are: "...who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader..." The solution however may not necessarily be a private 'reader', 'player', or 'binary'. Though the 'format' may be 'open' this single implementation isn't. You bring up Adobe which isn't a very good business case to follow as the very reasons I brought up are pressing the industry to move toward open implementations[1][2], away from 'free' binary distributions and plugins (for a various list of reasons from security[2], to access on other systems/apps). This really isn't 1999, and CDF isn't yet a popular nor a de-facto standard[1] much like PDF was. Besides you and I are much more capable these days with newer and _open_ technologies are we not (browser, linux, open documents, etc...)? Speaking of documents, other examples of 'perceived' open standard files are Microsoft's ill faded OSP[3] promise which spawned traction for OD/F[4] and other. These reasons are why HTML5/CSS3/JS as a basis to create an open two way street for 'documents' and/or formats are so powerful. It is not enough to only provide an 'open' format, but also an open implementation. This way both use of and implementation of such product be beneficial toward academic progress. Why wouldn't that alone be worth it? Thus a likely more popular solution I am proposing to your…

When you look at the major Addons, usage is consistently going down. Mozilla pulled the plug for the user raw data after this blog post: https://andreasgal.com/2017/07/19/firefox-marketshare-revisited/

If you run a JavaScript error collector or use CSP on a public site you’ll find this all over the world. Mobile ISPs inject horrible 90s JavaScript which recompresses images (see e.g. https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2013/mobile-isp-image-recompression/). Many ISPs - both mobile and wired - inject code to send messages about your account. ISPs like Comcast have tried objecting ads: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2925839/net-neutrality/code-injectio… https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/how-a-banner-ad-for-hs-ok/ After leaving Mozilla, Andreas Gal described ISPs reselling search engine queries and results to Google competitors: https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-search-but-w…

I don't know what you're trying to defend here, high ranked people from mozilla admitted themselves they made bad decision and wasted money and time and developers on the wrong things instead of focusing on their core product[1]. They've also been criticized for years for their business model being too dependent on a single income source contrary to their values. They did nothing about it until it became clear that they were losing the game. IMHO this is bad management for years. [1]: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/

Its a response to earlier article http://andreasgal.com/2016/01/05/oracle-sinks-its-claws-into-android/ by former Mozilla CTO.

It's about the patents. "while OpenH264 is not truly open, at least it is the most open widely used video codec" http://andreasgal.com/2014/10/14/openh264-now-in-firefox/

Andreas is the perfect choice for this role. Top notch technical abilities, and very nice human being if you like the "no bullshit" way of doing things. Edit: his own post is at http://andreasgal.com/2014/04/24/technical-leadership-at-mozilla/

And the original source: http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Here's a blog post by the authors (members of Mozilla's graphics and JavaScript teams) explaining the motivation and direction of the project: http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

It's an unfair zinger from what I've read. TraceMonkey may have been in development at Mozilla for 2 months, but significant portions of it came from Adobe and their Tamarin Tracing team. You can't dismiss the development time of the nanojit contribution just for hyperbole's sake. When I saw John Resig, who I very much respect for his work on javascript, make that statement, I realized there's a PR war going on here. This was a cool article on TraceMonkey development: http://andreasgal.com/2008/08/22/tracing-the-web/

I'm surprised people are still reasoning about Mozilla in their former "glory". Firefox market share has been tanking for 13 years(!) straight. Already 6 years ago the CTO of Mozilla concluded that Chrome had won: https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/ There's nothing Mozilla can do to reverse Firefox's course. It's not an engineering problem, they have no reach to push anything and for ordinary people default-shipped browsers are just fine. The real question indeed is what Mozilla really is with this reality check in mind. A type of do-good activist organization that does a lot of preaching yet fails to convert this into actual meaning or impact? All of this made possible by "easy money". They literally do not have to do a damn thing to receive $0.5B from Google. Just keep things as-is. As they are trying to find alternative income streams, for the first time in their history they're learning what hard money is. Generating $0.5B in the tech market by delivering an actual service/product people will pay you for...is fucking hard. As such, it's odd that in their borrowed time they continue to give away money or do takeovers of products that do not add revenue. I guess they'll never learn.

I dunno about all that :-) MITI is Mozilla trying to keep the internet credible as a source of news and information. This is in keeping with Mozilla's core principles. Give the blog post a careful read, as it might change your mind: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information-trust-ini… Re: Cliqz, working with a search-oriented company might be a way that Mozilla can help avoid monopolies in search. The goal is to find new ways to keep the web open, so that new challengers have a level playing field vs. dominant companies. Andreas wrote a good blog post about the worrying monopolistic trends in search a couple years ago: https://andreasgal.com/2015/03/30/data-is-at-the-heart-of-search-but-w… Edited to add: Cliqz is a very privacy-conscious company, and I think that respect for the user was a major factor in Mozilla partnering with Cliqz. This is just to say that, AIUI, the partnership was evaluated, again, in keeping with Mozilla's principles. Also, here's the Mozilla manifesto, which documents those guiding principles: https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/

It's interesting that these recent posts from the FF top ranks don't address this bundling issue. It seems as though the world is moving to an 'appliance' plus app-store model. In that world the browser is part of the appliance and considered part of the purchase by the consumer. In that world, the only way for FF to have a presence is via hardware partnerships. Yet another FF alumni alludes to the threat in a comment on the 'Chrome won' post [1] (my emphasis)... "...for historical reasons Web sites targeting large-screen non-touch devices tend to configure themselves in a more standards-friendly way. ChromeOS is changing that; it has the form factor of a desktop platform, but not the third-party browser viability. If Android expands into that space, or Windows and MacOS get locked down a lot more, then that also closes up the window for Firefox." [1] https://andreasgal.com/2017/05/25/chrome-won/

Some quotes to quickly understand what is going on. Andreas Gal, Former CTO of Mozilla, wrote yesterday: "... a curious event got my attention: A commit appeared in the Android code base that indicates that Google is abandoning its own re-implementation of Java in favor of Oracle’s original Java implementation. I’ll try to explain why I think this is a huge change and will have far-reaching implications for Android and the Android ecosystem." Source: http://andreasgal.com/2016/01/05/oracle-sinks-its-claws-into-android/ Bradley M. Kuhn, in charge with the task of enforcing the GPL for Linux, wrote today: "Thus, my conclusion about this situation is quite different than the pundits and link-bait news articles. I speculate that Google weighed a technical decision against its own copyleft compliance processes, and determined that Google would succeed in its compliance efforts on Android, and thus won't face compliance problems, and can therefore easily benefit technically from the better code. However, for those many downstream redistributors of Android who fail at license compliance already, the ironic outcome is that you may finally find out how friendly and reasonable Conservancy's Linux GPL enforcement truly is, once you compare it with GPL enforcement from a company like Oracle, who holds avarice, not software freedom, as its primary moral principle." Source: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2016/01/05/jdk-in-android.html