Changes To Look Forward To With Firefox 52

[Delgarde]

Mozilla isn't the only one here to blame, Google dropped the ball earlier too. But the message is the same: if you are a hardware manufacturer, you cannot thrust then to base your product features better than Microsoft, and to me this is a very bad message from the opensource guys.

This is not something that's happening without warning - Mozilla, and all the other browser projects, have been talking about dropping support for binary plugins for a long time now... I remember this being discussed more than ten years ago. So while there hasn't necessarily been a good alternative (e.g. WebRTC) for some things until recently, TP-Link and others can't say they didn't see this coming.

[nanonyme]

firefox has to improve hardly providing reliable hardware acceleration as well as to manage effectively both system ram VRam, cpu cache and buffers because it is very slow compared to chrome. It is not able to detect all the system abilities by which to take benefits. On the same hardware chrome is able to feature very well hardware acceleration where firefox fails.

Meh, Chrome blacklists accelerated hardware decode on Linux largely for political reasons. It's not even flag-enablable because Google thinks Linux GPU driver situation is awful. The feature is enabled in ChromeOS

[Vistaus]

I like Elementary OS and I run it. They picked Midori first and then Epiphany later because they could more easily re-theme them to work with the Elementary desktop themes, title bar behavior, etc...

I think the team's focus on beautiful aesthetics is admirable. But everything else about Elementary's desktop environment is fast and stable as well as pretty. Midori and Epiphany aren't. The first thing I do on Elementary is install Firefox and Chrome.

Web (Epiphany) is getting a hell of a lot of better though now with 3.23.x It has seen tremendous amount of progress. There's more customization (though admittedly, some of those things can only be customized through dconf-editor right now, but at least it's there!), there's more privacy focus (AdBlock and web tracker blocking by default), it's way faster, more stable and there's even experimental support for libhttpseverywhere and Firefox Sync. They also have plans to support WebExtensions in the future. So don't write of Web just yet; it's becoming way, way, way better now with 3.23 and will get better after that as well.

[Vistaus]

Firefox os wasn't really a move away from their core, imho. If it did nothing else, it forced someone to look really hard at the idea of browser-as-a-platform and see what it was missing.

That "someone" must've slept under a rock for years then 'cause that person missed the whole webOS era (and ChromeOS, if you will, but webOS was a mobile platform rather than laptop platform so more in line with FFOS). So it had been tried before and they could've easily looked at it rather than looking at FFOS for that. (not hating on FFOS though, the whole UI was pretty neat IMHO, esp. with the never-released 3.0)

[Azrael5]

Meh, Chrome blacklists accelerated hardware decode on Linux largely for political reasons. It's not even flag-enablable because Google thinks Linux GPU driver situation is awful. The feature is enabled in ChromeOS

Graphics Feature Status

• Canvas: Hardware accelerated
• Flash: Hardware accelerated
• Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
• Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
• Compositing: Hardware accelerated
• Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
• Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
• Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
• Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
• Video Encode: Hardware accelerated
• VPx Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
• WebGL: Hardware accelerated
• WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
  
  I'm not so sure.

[AppTeF]

- No support for HTML5 input types datetime, datetime-local, date, time, month, week.

In next release part of date/time will be OK but some blocker remain feel free to work on it

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1286182

https://wiki.mozilla.org/TPE_DOM/Date_time_input_types#Roadmap

[ⲣⲂaggins]

Has Firefox fixed this age-old bug?

On Linux, we don't have a fast compositing path right now for WebGL. This means we do a readback of each frame before sending it to the compositor. This is really slow, and the reason for most reports on Linux regarding framerate differences between Chromium and Firefox.

No. So Firefox's WebGL is basically half as fast on linux as it is on any other platform, and has been like that for the last 4 years. Most notably this affects Google maps/earth/street view. I think I'll be sticking with chromium...

[liam]

That "someone" must've slept under a rock for years then 'cause that person missed the whole webOS era (and ChromeOS, if you will, but webOS was a mobile platform rather than laptop platform so more in line with FFOS). So it had been tried before and they could've easily looked at it rather than looking at FFOS for that. (not hating on FFOS though, the whole UI was pretty neat IMHO, esp. with the never-released 3.0)

I confess that i did forget about webos. Webos was released four years prior to fxos. The web changed a massive amount in that period and, i think, webos had two things working against it: 1) technical debt that they couldn't shake, 2) hardware wasn't quite good enough.
If there's a difference between the two projects if might be Mozilla's desire to push their stuff "upstream" (w3c/whatwg/tc39). So, aside from simply determining the api gap, you also need to actually implement them and, if successful, standardize them. I don't think fxos even attempted to push all their apis upstream, but you can see, from the old web api page, that the intent was there.
ChromeOS has been too wedded to pnacl, and now with the Android compatibility, it would appear that the team is looking at integrating with Android rather than relying on making "native" web apps (they is, ones that rely on the standard functionality provided through the browser, of browser-like interface). I'm saying despite the recent announcement regarding increased web app functionality in Android.

[liam]

Graphics Feature Status

• Canvas: Hardware accelerated
• Flash: Hardware accelerated
• Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
• Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
• Compositing: Hardware accelerated
• Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
• Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
• Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
• Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
• Video Encode: Hardware accelerated
• VPx Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
• WebGL: Hardware accelerated
• WebGL2: Hardware accelerated
  
  I'm not so sure.

Video decode and presentation.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=463440

Apparently there is a patched version of chromium running around on arch/manjaro, but upstream doesn't appear to want the feature exposed.

[Vistaus]

I confess that i did forget about webos. Webos was released four years prior to fxos. The web changed a massive amount in that period and, i think, webos had two things working against it: 1) technical debt that they couldn't shake, 2) hardware wasn't quite good enough.
If there's a difference between the two projects if might be Mozilla's desire to push their stuff "upstream" (w3c/whatwg/tc39). So, aside from simply determining the api gap, you also need to actually implement them and, if successful, standardize them. I don't think fxos even attempted to push all their apis upstream, but you can see, from the old web api page, that the intent was there.
ChromeOS has been too wedded to pnacl, and now with the Android compatibility, it would appear that the team is looking at integrating with Android rather than relying on making "native" web apps (they is, ones that rely on the standard functionality provided through the browser, of browser-like interface). I'm saying despite the recent announcement regarding increased web app functionality in Android.

As a former webOS user, I know all about what went wrong (but it wasn't their hardware per se, the Pebble design of the Pre's is still the most comfortable IMHO even though I don't use my Pre 3 anymore!). But we weren't talking about technical and financial stuff. You simply implied that the idea of a web-centric OS inspired Mozilla and called out FXOS as their inspiration. I simply said that webOS could've been their inspiration since it was released way before FXOS. Doesn't matter what happened to webOS and how the web changed, all that matters is that the idea was already out there for Mozilla to get inspired by, that's all I'm saying.