I wish gecko/servo were separated enough from Firefox that we had other browser options built around it, with features like native sidebar tabs and compact mode. I've tried to stick with Firefox because I don't love Google owning the hugely dominant browser engine, but Mozilla isn't making it easy for me.
Looks increasingly nice across the pond with Edgeium, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.
Is servo even still in development? I know bits and pieces of the project have made their way into Firefox, but I'm not sure where that stands after the layoffs last year.
They fired all the Servo devs. (And) probably increased their CEOs annual salary and bonuses.
At this point, Mozilla is just hell-bent on a path to completely destroying whatever's left of Firefox. It being the only non-Blink browser alternative left is no longer a valid excuse.
I've contributed to Servo, compiled it, used it, etc.
The parts of Servo that were not already merged into Firefox (like Stylo and WebRender) had no clear path to being merged into Firefox within the next few years.
I'm really, really sad that they were laid off, but in terms of the future survival of Firefox, it wasn't a catastrophic decision.
I've seen this kind of thing happen before, where the underdog in some area develops a kind of self-doubt about the ways they are different. Unique advantages get mistaken for liabilities and then the underdog degrades into a weak immitation.
I would say that many of the issues with Firefox for Android (Fenix) come from the fact that there are a lot of modular components that get managed by different teams. My experience is that whenever I've encountered a bug in Fenix that has a dependency on a GeckoView issue, it doesn't get fixed for at least a couple of months. Examples include the inability to copy magnet links and the inability to download images that need cookies attached to the request, like the ones for Cloudflare's DDoS protection. There is literally nothing I can do in those cases except use a Chromium-based browser. I may be biased, but in my experience having more than one repo with their own separate PRs and commit processes slows down bugfixes by an order of magnitude, even more so when they're managed by different teams.
For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.
I think that Mozilla has good intentions, but they pushed out Fenix way, way too early, which broke the experience for users of previous version of Firefox for Android. And it seems that their mobile team is understaffed and overworked. I don't blame them, since they're essentially trying to create an entirely new browser (minus the rendering engine). But should be labeled as a beta, if not an alpha, in the state it's in - not "release-ready" as the version on the Play Store. It's proven that web browsers are too important in this era to get wrong when so much of our lives depend on them. If the experience is even slightly inferior to Chrome, the average user can easily switch and never end up using Firefox again.
> For that matter, some other issues that have nothing to do with GeckoView, like breaking Bitwarden autocomplete and not restoring deleted tabs to their correct position on undo, haven't been fixed for even longer.
Is this related to me typically not even getting the password manager popup? Or that even when I do get it, sometimes it just flat doesn't work?
On this note, anyone have thoughts on Waterfox and Palemoon? My mental picture of them is basically “forks of old Firefox versions” but I don’t know how accurate that is. Web compatibility issues or anything else to know about?
I can only speak for Pale Moon. It gets updated frequently, but it does have trouble with a lot of websites. I use it in conjunction with NoScript, so I'm used to the web breaking regularly, but there are sites that I can't make work correctly even opening NoScript up completely. For instance, it doesn't work with the SSO solution we use here at work. I do use it for some web browsing (I'm using it here) but I wouldn't recommend it to new users who aren't nostalgic about the old firefox.
Looks increasingly nice across the pond with Edgeium, Vivaldi, Brave, etc.
Is servo even still in development? I know bits and pieces of the project have made their way into Firefox, but I'm not sure where that stands after the layoffs last year.