> Firefox is a legitimate alternative, it works for >99% of the world's websites
Which is useless if your bank shows you an empty page with a message that says they only support Chrome and Edge "for security reasons".
And Mozilla had many, many, many chances to endear themselves to developers. Their actions can best be summarized as they don't give a damn. It took them years to ship basic dev tools with Firefox. Then they wiped out an extension ecosystem that had been growing for more than a decade with the justification that they needed to get rid of technical debt. Meanwhile, Firefox still contains bloatware like Pocket. As for the privacy argument, Mozilla's track record on privacy is mixed at best, considering the many questionable choices they made in this regard in the past.
"The answer to all this" is not Firefox. Not the Firefox made by the Mozilla of 2022, anyway. If the Mozilla of 2004 could somehow be resurrected, perhaps they could turn Firefox into something that would indeed be "the answer to all this". At that point, developers wouldn't need encouragement to switch to Firefox. They'd do so simply because it would obviously be the better browser for them.
Wow that's crazy, I've used quite a few bank websites and never had that happen. Been using Firefox as a daily driver since it first released. I think that would make me question my bank more than my browser.
Not just banks, I believe certain government websites in some countries do it as well. /r/Firefox has hundreds of posts showing websites misbehaving in this way.
> Then they wiped out an extension ecosystem that had been growing for more than a decade with the justification that they needed to get rid of technical debt.
Do you have any proof that wasn't the case? From what I saw, XUL was invented to define UIs in XML but over time HTML became better than it for defining UIs.
And the great freedom XUL allowed made some optimizations impossible.
Basically xpcom and XUL can be treated in same way as gnome-shell.
XPCOM was a object model from the 90s and had several legacy issues. On top of that was XUL and XBL were obselete by improvements to web api and was badly mainatined. Like Gnome-shell, xul extentsion were monkey patching firefox internals. So firefox was limited on certain security and performance improvement. By removing old addons, firefox could start replacing the mess of the old subsystems. XBL was removed for example and xul I think still exist but a fraction of the former self. I don't think the can remove xpcom until they can port a 50% of firefox to rust though
Removing XPCOM is orthogonal to adding rust. In fact, if you search Bugzilla you fill find many references to deCOMtamination, which is about removing unnecessary XPCOM.
Which is useless if your bank shows you an empty page with a message that says they only support Chrome and Edge "for security reasons".
And Mozilla had many, many, many chances to endear themselves to developers. Their actions can best be summarized as they don't give a damn. It took them years to ship basic dev tools with Firefox. Then they wiped out an extension ecosystem that had been growing for more than a decade with the justification that they needed to get rid of technical debt. Meanwhile, Firefox still contains bloatware like Pocket. As for the privacy argument, Mozilla's track record on privacy is mixed at best, considering the many questionable choices they made in this regard in the past.
"The answer to all this" is not Firefox. Not the Firefox made by the Mozilla of 2022, anyway. If the Mozilla of 2004 could somehow be resurrected, perhaps they could turn Firefox into something that would indeed be "the answer to all this". At that point, developers wouldn't need encouragement to switch to Firefox. They'd do so simply because it would obviously be the better browser for them.