Yes and that's a good thing
> Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5?
It's true that what NPAPI was used for 99% of the time is better served by HTML5. But it's not like NPAPI was limited to Flash and applets. Afair NPAPI plugins can access all native resources (which is the reason why the security sucked so much), HTML5 obviously can't. E. g. runtime code generation isn't particularly usable in WASM, so no JIT other than browser JIT for you. Then there are stuff like WebUSB/WebNFC/WebSerial that Mozilla killed. Not that they didn't have good reasons to do so, but having a native-exposing plugin system (with some friction, don't just install anything with a click) would have covered most of the use cases without being that much of a privacy problem.
Ah, true, Chrome has it, but Firefox not. Coincidental, some weeks ago I had to use this, worked well, and is another reason to always have an alternative browser around. Yes, Mozilla should work to at least fix that stuff.
I feel like we can continue to resist this, although I admit it's getting more and more futile every year. It's like trying to hold back the tide. I personally don't want the web to be an application platform. The web is for browsing web pages. I have an application platform on my computer already.
Because the alternative isn't "yes, we are providing Linux and MacOS-arm64 binaries", the alternative is "here is your Win32 blob that is broken on wine because screw you that's why" or "here is a .jar with a horrible awt fronts that is also broken unless you run it under an ancient JRT" - and that's on user's side, on developer's side it's even worse. I feel that web becoming an application platform was net negative for the web, but positive for every other platform (and users and developers as well). Yes, it makes web crappy, but we need some crappy platform where all the crap goes - and at least the browser contains the crap well.
Or we can accept it, make a good access control system in an app platform for once, and add the few missing parts that the web standards are still missing so it becomes a good platform.
And none of that requires that we give up on an entire facade focused on reading text.
But if Mozilla focus on resisting, they can't do that, and honestly, nobody else out there will.
Unless you can't afford the split focus. If Mozilla can do 1 thing right or 2 things half-assed, and it looks like this is the case, they should stop and focus on strengthening the core before hanging more stuff around it.
I keep trying to use it. vs chrome:
1 - bad at returning memory to the OS; do they expect you to regularly restart the whole browser?
2 - shit at managing cpu usage: I'll regularly find the browser sitting at 20-100% cpu load doing nothing. Chrome handles this like a champ;
3 - it recently lost some bookmarks so hard I had to pull them from backup.
They clearly are not capable of splitting their focus.
If you read down in the thread, there's a good discussion about how this simply isn't true about Mozilla.
Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread, Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them, invested minimal resources in others (accepting donations in crypto), and modest resources in VR (which you'd expect given the browser-VR integration standards forming).
So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
Yeah, I'm not searching 500 posts for this..
> Of the fads Christophe Henry mentioned top of thread
Who is Christophe Henry? Is this some namecalling?
> Mozilla flat out didn't invest any resources in some of them,
That doesn't make it better, being somewhat selective is also normal. Most companies don't have the resources to follow literally every fad.
> So the feeling about Mozilla being tech-ADHD comes more from folks reading their social media posts than the people who work there or watch the codebase.
That's the point. Communication of Mozilla is so awful, their whole public picture is how wasteful they are with money, throwing it at pointless dead on arrival-projects. Here are two lists with them [1], [2], this is not a small number of failed projects. They are not even including the small changes in the browser itself.
[1] https://www.spacebar.news/the-mozilla-graveyard/ [2] https://killedbymozilla.com/
They always did, everyone does. This is not really new, and not really that harmful in itself. The deeper problem is that you need developers who are also understanding what they are doing, what people want and need, developers who are nerdy about some topic and very deep into their understanding of it. But Mozilla seems to lack this, which is also why they have to follow every fad blindly, because they just don't know it better, have no real vision and understanding which enables them to build something really worthful. Mozilla seems to be the embodiment of what happens when you have a task and your solution is to just throw money at it until something works.
And let's be fair, it is easy to be good at something, but really hard to master it and dominate the world. It's not really their fault, they are probably doing their best, they just don't know it better, and so does everyone, including fans if we are honest. Everyone has their own preferences and goals, and often they are conflicting with each other. Mozilla has to find a common ground to server as much people as possible, and IMHO they are still good at this. Firefox used to be so much worse on some aspects, Chrome and other Browser are still worse on other aspects. Getting the perfect Browser is just not realistic.
> Give us more extensibility instead.
True, it's really a joke how many of their promised APIs never were finished after they killed XUL.
> Keep supporting v2 manifest and add more.
Didn't they say they will continue with Manifest v2?
> There were genuine technical reasons for why XUL and NPAPI had to die, but we need an equally powerful alternative.
Wasn't NPAPI mostly replaced with HTML5? Most stuff done with Flash or Java-Applets is now possible out of the box. Or is something missing?