Were you looking for work when FB approached you either time? If so, why would you take yourself out of the running given you’re (I’m assuming) an experienced developer?
Some value ethics and social implications of their doings more than compensation. I had passed interview at Facebook and didn't join, because it seemed like not a good idea to work on ads and manipulation of masses without clear alternative business plan that would actually also do good in the world.
“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.”
-- Mark Zuckerberg
The interesting thing to me is that Facebook is primarily used by older people (over 40) who are not represented in the coding and ui decisions. Their inability to get a handle on political speech is evidence to me of this. Their employees lack real world experience and wisdom.
I was looking for work, but Facebook is notoriously ageist. I wasn't going to waste my time going to an interview where I would certainly be eliminated because of my age.
To avoid going through the grueling day-long interview/whiteboard session, when it was obvious to everyone in the room that you weren't getting the job from the moment you walked in.
I’ve had FB bugging me off and on and I can’t get rid of them. If I were desperate and they were my only suitor I guess I would do what I had to, but I honestly have no desire to work for them.
On my iPhone SE (mobile Safari), elements are being truncated on the right side of the screen, meaning I can’t view all the data. I’m not near a laptop right now, but I wonder if you’re forgetting:
I’m curious about the pool of Facebook users who seldom use the product, retaining it solely for groups and to keep in touch with family. Will this event loosen that final brick and drive these users to delete their accounts?
in my case, no, because I still need to occasionally keep in touch with those people.
I use Facebook a LOT less nowadays though. Here's what I do:
- removed all of the apps from my mobile devices.
- only check it on VPN, with Firefox, using Facebook Containers.
- log out each time and do not use the "save this browser" feature.
- unlock origin & pihole are active on the VPN too.
I have managed to completely ruin its targeted ads for me. It's been an amusing experiment.
I still use it less because it is a HUGE memory & resource hog and eventually makes my browser window slow to a crawl.
"keep in touch with family" can be subsumed by chat apps. But for discussion groups and special interests, facebook is still the most accessible site to run (small) groups in, or am I mistaken?
If you have some need to know the people, maybe, but if not, hobbyist subreddits are better for discussion groups and special interests. The only thing I can't see leaving Facebook is some group that requires real-world interaction like a buy nothing group, but there are neighborhood specific platforms popping up that would enable applications like that without having to use Facebook.
The big problem here is how to make it more energy efficient (let alone more energy efficient than our existing freshwater purification/distribution systems). We know how to build them, they're just very expensive to run.
> ...we’ve built programs that just dont talk to each other at all.
This really struck me, the idea that perhaps software mirrors the human experience. In the US, we've traded tribalism for individualism, open discussion for echo chambers, and the exchange of beliefs for the walled garden of one's personal vision.
It struck me too... but as completely wrong. A large majority of my work is in APIs, both as a consumer and provider; between local processes, local networks, and the global internet. Every program I build talks to other programs... a lot. If there is any problem at all, it's not that programs don't talk to each other; it's that they talk 1 of 1,000 different standards.
And yet, we have companies building their value based on giant, secret hoards of information hidden away in their lairs, offering mere glimpses of treasures (or horrors) within through their APIs.
Just try to imagine what would happen if the entirety of Facebook's or Google's user were dumped somewhere for everybody to rifle through... The only saving grace here seems to be that the amounts of data are so huge that copying it all takes an unreasonable amount of resources.
I completely agree with your position, but putting that phrase in quotes as you did implies that it is a quote from the article. That phrase appears nowhere in the article, even though the sentiment is certainly there.
It's sad how these valuable optimizations are unknown to the average person. When I hear "the browser" discussed in almost any parlance, the implication is Chrome. It's rare to even hear someone say "Chrome," as it's the defacto choice for the non-mobile web. Convenience breeds ignorance.
Or Mozilla’s leadership was distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions instead of focusing on unsexy things like this and lost out to a competitor.
It wasn’t the users that lost interest in Firefox. It was Mozilla that lost interest in Firefox.
> distracted by a bunch of meaningless distractions
I often find that the specific things that are thought of as 'meaningless distractions' by different people don't entirely overlap.
For example, I think having a mobile OS not controlled by google or apple would be phenomenally important, so I was entirely in favour of FirefoxOS.
Rust has led to improvements in Firefox that were previously said to be nearly intractable. I'd definitely include that as something valuable, not just for firefox but for the world.
Mozilla Persona seemed like a really good way to solve something that we're still struggling with - to have a universal web identity that belongs to me rather than some surveillance monetiser.
I could see value in emscripten, Firefox sync, Rhino, Shumway, thunderbird.
Now that is already a selection of projects that includes a bunch that were widely considered to be failures and were killed. It's also already probably too much for a company of Mozilla's size.
The projects that we see mozilla doing at the moment, I sort of get - they're trying to pitch the brand as a 'privacy' play, but if they really want to do that plausibly, they're going to need to change their income model.
Do you think that focusing on more unsexy things would have helped? It seems to me that it's fundamentally a marketing problem. Many people are not even aware that Firefox exists, despite it being basically as good as Chrome, and in some ways considerably better.
ultimately if there value , word of mouth works pretty well .
Firefox does not have a brand visibility problem , no amount of marketing will convince users if the browser is not significantly better. If the value is marginal convenience trumps.
Firefox did not gain market share orginally because they did better marketing than IE. They became big because they built a better product.
Chrome became because of the same reason too. They did a lot of early innovations with per tab process isolation headless or v8 decoupling and myriad to new features giving performance boost and making it possible for projects like electron to exist.
Firefox got a major usage boost post quantum.
If they could rebuild the full stack on rust there will be a massive usage boost.
Mozilla is in a unique position they don't have revenue targets or shareholders to please. They have users, and a single customer who is also their only competitor.
It is no brainier to say largest chunk of investment should have gone there.
P.S. yes google has a unfair advantage, they implement web standards well before it is accepted then force their version by sheer force the market dominance. This is not new IE did it to netscape . However google also owns a lot of the pages people visit. They will optimize their sites for their browser. This is why youtube will always be faster in chrome than firefox.
Website admins pointed IE users to Firefox because it worked better, supported APIs and features which made their site better.
Chrome was the same too. Yes Google does have unfair advantage because they own lot of properties people interact with every day, they are a significant player for user mind space, but they are not so large that people spend 50-60% time on google products only .
I don't agree. Google is many times bigger than Mozilla. I am not talking about tech people here. Everyone uses search, youtube and android is huge outside usa. Chrome comes preinstalled in major plateforms. Even if it's not going to a google site tells them to install it. These people don't even know they can install firefox.
I'm not sure I see it. Do you perhaps use Chrome yourself and hence the implication? Because it seems everyone just says "browser" regardless of if it's Safari, Edge, Firefox or something else (but it's a fact that Chrome is currently most popular by far). Why would somebody even draw the distinction between what is mostly interchangeable products, unless they have specific technical discussion about that product? It's not like instead of saying "my shoes are wet" people usually would say "my Nike Air Max 93 are wet". It's nonsense.
Not OP but I've made similar experiences. Here in Germany Firefox for a really long time had the plurality of the market share even while in most other countries Chrome had already won. Everyone knew what Firefox was.
Three to four years ago was the first time, particular among young people, teenagers say, that I met kids who didn't know what Firefox was. It has lost an extreme amount of awareness.
A 10-15% speed bump in CPU performance is certainly nice but in most cases it's not going to be something that users are consciously aware of. Web page performance varies a lot due to network performance, new versions of websites being deployed, different ads being served, and so on. This noise obscures things enough that it probably won't be easy to attribute a change in performance to the browser if you're not looking for it.
But even if the users aren't aware of what changed, it will likely affect user behavior.
For the better? Hard to say. Websites that load a little faster are a little more addictive.
If they want to actually improve user experience they can always include uBlock Origin by default - its permissive license should allow this just fine.
Despite it being an absolute dumpster fire in other ways, the new firefox android almost has that. It's nice for telling my friends who I've gotten to switch over to just open firefox, open the hamburger and tap addons then addons manager, then tap ublock origin at the top of the list and that's all it takes to get my friends rolling with it. They're all extremely happy with the new firefox and don't notice how webpages are pretty broken in it now.
They could just show users the recommended plugins to install as part of user onboarding .
It is not just about privacy or blocking ads. It is matter of security . I am trust nytimes , I cannot trust every third party whose code nytimes decided to include. Who in turn has included a bunch that nytimes doesn't even know about. How can I trust a website when they themselves do not know what crapware runs?
There is a move toward 1st party proxys as a result of GDPR and similar ruling. Google has already published a framwork or something in that direction. It is not mandatory yet, but when the web moves in that direction there will be no blocking of domains any more. (Technical) Users won't even know that Analytics tracks them.
I'm dealing with a Firefox issue where painting on canvas with a CSS filter is magnitudes slower than Chrome. It makes my app almost unusable for Firefox users. Improving the performance would certainly make users notice since it's one of the most common complaints.
Stuff like CSS filters is generally going to be down to lack of GPU acceleration or video driver shenanigans, though some obscure filters still run on the CPU. If you run a filter on the entire page for example (some addons do this) it pessimizes rendering in a bad, noticeable way.
> Safari and Chrome both do blur on the GPU Firefox does it in software unless WebRender is turned on. You could try turning on the gfx.webrender.all pref and that should improve things.
In the Firefox Release channel, WebRender is currently only enabled on Windows 10. Windows 7/8 support should be coming soon in Firefox 83 (2020-11-17) and macOS and Linux after that. As you say, GPU drivers are the biggest problem.
I have an Intel video card (UHD 630), and Webrender (which I had to forcibly enable) is working very well. Video acceleration, too. Even with a 4K screen.
Firefox used to be a lot faster, and smoother, at rendering <canvas> than Chrome when I was developing early versions of my canvas library (around the mid 2010s). But then Chrome caught up and for the past couple of years has been considerably faster[1].
One thing that really annoys me about Firefox on MacOS is that they disable keyboard focus of links by default. Which is not good for accessibility - it took me days to work out why my accessibility testing demos were failing[2].
That's technically true, but most average users probably don't care. It's like optimizing your car's fuel efficiency by changing your spark plugs more often. When was the last time you changed your spark plugs?
Well, what actually happens is that there's less pressure on web developers to make their sites faster (in contrast to other business goals) and so we reach a new equilibrium where sites perform just as badly.
Web developers aren't alone here, of course. It's the same story for systems software as well.
In general, thinking in terms of equilibriums is helpful.
Warp is only a bit faster in some cases, and about 10% slower in typical benchmark code.
The speed improvements don't come from optimizations, but from skipping many costly optimizations. The "value" of these skipped optimizations is that some type optimizations are just too costly for them, using also a lot of memory. It's a typical jit trade-off.
The speed of someone's browsing is less of a factor of what browser you use and largely a factor of what websites they browse. The web browser is a commodity for most people.
