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Mozilla and the burning need for clients for power users
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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Also, bundling extensions with the browser is not the way to cater to power users - they will install the extensions they want anyway.
If gecko became embeddable (or better yet, servo was finished), so users could make alternative firefox-based browsers, that would be really good for power users. Right now things like qutebrowser are all based on blink, because that's the only option.
Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:
Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.
There is a difference between forefox-based browser and chromium-based one. Namely, if you base it on chromium, you take the blink engine and you can build watever UI around it you want. If you base it on firefox, you actually have to take the full firefox code and make changes to it.
All those firefox-based browsers are very similar to firefox with some small changes made. If you actually want to make large changes, keeping up with updates will quickly become a mess.
By contrast, qutebrowser has very little in common with Chromium except for the rendering engine - the user experience is totally different.
Brave even mention this in the old time how hard for them to fork it... Well.. it's a 25 years old code, even quite older as some even rewritten Firefox from netscape, have same pattern...
"Bundling extensions" sounds to me like a poor description of what I think is the right idea, which is to incorporate things that can currently be done with extensions into the browser in a simpler way. As time goes by it seems like more and more extensions are required just to replace functionality as Mozilla removes it. On upgrading to 115ESR for instance, which has just made it to Debian stable, I find that I need "New Tab Homepage" in order to continue having new tabs be a blank page with a dark background. Other extensions that I think would be worth including as basic browser functions include "Disable Page Visibility", "Disallow console.clear", "Redirector", "RSSPreview", and "SuperStop". That's not counting things I haven't found extensions to replace such as disabling select events, or various simple UI customizations that can now be done only in userChrome.css, requiring additional steps to maintain them with every upgrade. There are also more complicated things like some features from JShelter which I think would also be deserving of inclusion. And of course as mentioned in the article, the always popular "vertical tabs" although I don't care for it myself.
They've cluttered up the UI in this new ESR release with a bunch of redundant "Can always read and change data on this site" text reminding us all of the security risk of having lots of extensions from a variety of sources any of which could one day sell out and turn malicious. There exist at least some "power users" who do not appreciate having to so frequently add new ones just to maintain existing functionality and to do what seem like very basic and essential things.
What you're talking about is called "feature creep" and is a surefire road to poor quality.
I, for example, don't use any of the extensions you mentioned. And I checked two at random and both had less than 10k users, so they're by no means "must have". If they had to include all functionality that every "power user who does not appreciate having to frequently add new extensions" ever wanted, they might as well just rename it FireDinosaur or something. It will be both extremely heavy, and quickly extinct.
This browser needs a modest amount of feature creep just to reverse the past decade of feature retreat. I was mostly restricting the suggestions there to features that seem straightforward enough that they'd not lead to any cost to people who don't use them. It's by no means meant to be a comprehensive list. If you want one that would instead be very popular, how about this: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/customizable-hotkeys/idi-p/4979