> I still use Chrome on my laptop (for a multitude of reasons) and if Lockbox doesn't interoperate with it, it's not a useful tool.
Well, you can import Chrome passwords into Firefox pretty easily, and set up Firefox Sync, and then you've got all your (Chrome) desktop logins on mobile. Not ideal, but works.
> I don't want to switch to a product that's only going to be retired in a year
Sure, I definitely understand. I've personally worked on Persona, FxOS, Test Pilot, and Screenshots (and now Lockbox). IMO Mozilla has gotten steadily better at shipping new products, and once we get Lockbox integrated into desktop, it'll have really good chances of long-term survival.
Besides, any new startup might go away; at least with Mozilla products, you can be sure we aren't going to do anything sketchy with your data.
Finally, I'll point out that, if you try Lockbox, it'll give Mozilla's management good signals that they should keep investing in Lockbox :-)
Do you or someone else know if the Lockbox app will feature full password management (like add, delete, edit, generate strong random pw, folders etc) in the future or is it only meant to be a "password access" app?
> I don't understand why the default behavior isn't to isolate every website from every other website? Why is least privacy the default?
Default privacy settings are tough to manage.
Some people want privacy, and will accept broken websites if it keeps their data and online movement private.
Other people just want their usual websites to work, don't understand or care to think about privacy, and if some random content farm looks busted in Firefox, will just switch to another browser.
Aside from picking a sensible default, Firefox also offers to educate users where it makes sense. For example, when you open a new private browsing window in Firefox, the tracking protection section includes a "See how it works" button that takes you to a tour-style walkthrough of how tracking protection works.
I dunno, it seems like the learning process of putting together a series of unsuccessful promo packages might be the exact training you need to become "senior".
If the (good) work you did wasn't reflected in the metrics, then you need to figure out how to change the metrics, or change what you work on.
There's nothing inherently scummy or "political" about influencing the collective direction: identify problems, come up with good ideas for solutions and how to measure (partial) success, and talk it over with your team and manager around the time goals are being set. People are biased, distracted, and fallible, but generally recognize good ideas when they are communicated clearly.
If you're not good at documenting your successes, reflect on what is and isn't getting documented, and find ways to set yourself up for success the next time. Talk to people who've gotten the promotion you want, and figure out what you've missed.
Learning to independently identify problems, devise solutions, measure success, document success, and advocate for your ideas and yourself are essential skills for the human organizational / business part of writing code for a living. This is true whether you work on your own, at a startup, or at a bigco like Google.
It sounds like you were away from coding for a really long time (10 years!), then you got back into it, picking an area you didn't know much about, expected it to be easy, maybe didn't put in the time outside of work...this approach wouldn't work for anyone, no matter their age.
Here's a manager-y question for you: how could you have done things differently when you went back to being an IC, to have had a better transition? Maybe doing more prep work before you left the manager track? Maybe going back to C++ instead, or an area that was closer to what you used to work on? Maybe doing open source work in that new java/python target area, to get experience, build a portfolio, and be sure you liked it, before you bet your livelihood and reputation on it?
Want to get some production experience with react? Tons of webdev projects are using it at Mozilla. Come on over and find yourself a good first bug :-)
"But while I have a full time job and a large-ish family to support, it's hard to fit "3 years of professional React.js experience" into my spare time ..."
I'm sure your got the bugs, but the gp ain't got the time
MITI is Mozilla trying to keep the internet credible as a source of news and information. This is in keeping with Mozilla's core principles. Give the blog post a careful read, as it might change your mind: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information...
Re: Cliqz, working with a search-oriented company might be a way that Mozilla can help avoid monopolies in search. The goal is to find new ways to keep the web open, so that new challengers have a level playing field vs. dominant companies.
Edited to add: Cliqz is a very privacy-conscious company, and I think that respect for the user was a major factor in Mozilla partnering with Cliqz. This is just to say that, AIUI, the partnership was evaluated, again, in keeping with Mozilla's principles.
Screenshots is implemented as a WebExtension. Unfortunately, the WebExtensions framework in Firefox currently appends items to the bottom of the context menu--so you'll notice this with other WebExtensions, too.
There's a bug open to change this behavior: http://bugzil.la/1325758 . If you'd like to hack on some browser JS, I'd be happy to help get you connected with a bug mentor on the addons team :-)
Thanks for your informative response! That's a very interesting discussion, and I'm glad to see support for at least moving Inspect Element back to the bottom in the short term.
Some of the use cases for precise placement capabilities seem pretty compelling, but here's hoping for accessible user customization options as a long term solution, perhaps in conjunction with the ability for WebExtension developers to set appropriate default placement, as long as that placement is not below Inspect Element. Inspect Element at the bottom is sacred!
Test Pilot isn't happening at the cost of stability and performance improvements. It's a complementary program that helps us ship better features through data-driven iteration.
I hear your concerns, though. The platform and desktop teams are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance--you might want to give Firefox another try sometime. If you do, maybe try out some Test Pilot experiments while you're at it, and let us know what you think.
They "are doing tons of great work on improving stability and performance", but I've heard this before and somehow we got to where we are today.
Do you alternate between improving these things and worsening them? Could you possibly not worsen them, or at least warn us to not upgrade when that happens?
Regressions are really not OK. People are trying to use this browser. Well, mostly they were trying to use it. I stuck it out longer than most. Having 512 MB of RAM and dozens of tabs is my use case.
I have 12GB of RAM and probably ~120 tabs open at any given time. This used to be fine, but it seems Firefox is just getting worse over time, the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.
>the main problem is the frequent 5 to 30 second pauses while it is doing....something.
Oh god I thought I was alone on this. I've been talking to various Firefox users and nobody was able to relate with me. I usually keep Firefox open 24/7 with around 20-30 tabs open (~6 or so pinned). Every time I am typing (like in a hangout popup window or in a HN comment) Firefox is micro-stuttering and freezing and it eats away some of the words I am typing and it becomes very frustrating. I ended up typing comments in vim and then copypasting because it was faster. It feels like typing in an SSH connection with high-latency.
Also when scrolling long pages (like reddit threads) the "view" takes a while to update so I end up scrolling down to a totally grey page which then updates with content over and over again. And don't make me talk about twitter taking ages and setting my CPU to 100% (one core) with loud as hell fan every time I click on "show 50 new tweets"...
I have 16GB of RAM and a 2-years old top-of-the-line (back then) i7 CPU on a laptop, I shouldn't be having these issues...
Yes, I have the same problems. Last time I looked into these pauses, those were mostly GC pauses. At first you feel like moving on a bumpy road with micro-freezes and frame drops - that's incremental GC, and then you meet a concrete wall - that's non-incremental GC kicks-in, sometimes in multi-second territory. It got better in the last few releases, to be fair, but still far away from other browsers.
Are you exaggerating ? If not, may I suggest an alternative way to browse the web ?
I use multiple virtual desktops. Each desktop logically caters to one task. Each browser window is logically grouped under one activity.
For example my desktop may look like this :
Virtual Desktop 1 ( Communications ):
* Outlook
* Lync
* Flowdock etc
Virtual Desktop 2 ( Development ):
* ConEmu/ Command prompt
* Intellij
* Browser Window with multiple tabs for referring stuff
Virtual Desktop 3 ( Procrastination ):
Browser Window 1:
* Various pages opened from HN
Browser Window 2:
* Various pages concerning World War 2
* Various pages investigating different investment strategies.
The advantage of this approach is that once you are done you can close browser windows and tabs. Done with researching World War 2 ? Close that window, all associated tabs close automatically. If you accidentally close a tab, you can always bring it back with Ctrl + Shift + T. If you want to refer to a previously opened window, you can always do a simple search in browser history.
Keeps your system responsive and makes it easy to find things.
He is not, it is not rare to have 120 tabs, in fact some extreme even have 400+ Tabs openned. Today is rather lightweight for me and has 70 Tabs.
Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded. They are more like a list of things to read and do.
I currently have 753 tabs open on this computer alone :p
But as you say, it's not a problem at all because there are not loaded until I go back to them.
The only issue I have with massive number of tabs, is the start-up time of the browser, which increase dramatically with the number of tabs (it's at least quadratic).
> Of coz these wont be all loaded, Once you close and reopen those tabs will be unloaded.
That's how it's supposed to work, but for me the tabs seem to consume memory even when they're not loaded (after a restart). I completely can't understand how this is a difficult thing to implement properly.
On a different system, I had pretty much that. I've moved to Chromium, which is also slow but at least doesn't hang as often or as badly. I would do this:
8 or 16 gigabytes of RAM (got an upgrade)
8 virtual desktops, about 5 occupied with browser windows
1 to 20 windows per desktop
1 to 20 tabs per window
That is likely 100 to 300 tabs total. No, I really don't want to close them. I want more open, but performance is a problem. I like to keep going back to tabs that have been open for months. It hurts to close tabs because then I lose track of what I am working on; the scroll bar position matters and the page might even be gone from the web. Sometimes I write a comment on a web site like this one, then let it sit for days if I am unsure I want to post it.
With bookmarks, I lose my state. Scroll position matters. The highlighting of search terms (by Ctrl-F in the browser) matters. The content of an unsubmitted form matters. Web site log-in matters.
Even if I didn't lose my state, reloading a bookmark is slow.
With bookmarks, deletion is a pain.
How would I even know when to bookmark something? I might open 10 links from a news site or search engine, each in a different tab. Do you propose that I bookmark them immediately, even though they are probably tabs that I will soon close and never wish to see again? If I see the page and think I want to consider it for a few hours maybe (or longer; how should I know?) do I bookmark it? Perhaps I should wait the few hours or days...? Why should I even have to make this decision?
Same here, I was using Firefox on Mac for years, but recently I had to move away from it because it was the most CPU/RAM consuming process on my machine, constantly lagging, hanging, crashing... I'd love to get back, but you guys need to improve the performance at least up to Chrome levels, if not Safari. As other people here, I dont care for builtin Pocket and whatever else, because I can get most of things via plugins - I can't do that for browser performance though ;)
I don't know why it is that way for you. I switched to Firefox on mac exactly for this reason. Safari and Chrome were consuming too many resources. Firefox is nice, fast and stable (for me at least).
Translation: Firefox is not Apple nor Google or Microsoft whom has literally unlimited resources. By having engineers on Test Pilot they are having less resources to do what he think is important
Personal Take: Completely agree. I am opening up Firefox with Panarama Mode missing, Pocket, Hello.
And BTW, e10s hasn't shipped yet, and at the current timeline, even if it ship in Firefox 49/50 it will still not be any good for power / heavy tab users, which incidentaly is the only group left using Firefox, most have moved on to Chrome.
I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it. ( Apart from Samsung )
> I see light of hope in Servo. But liscenses ( MPL? Why not Apache 2.0 ) are a concern for a few company to join and devote resources into it.
Copyleft licences are often the best way to go in this kind of situations: thanks to the GPL, Linux remained one until Google forked it for Android. And 15 years after its beginning, there is no fragmentation in the kernel space.
On the other hand, BSD has been forked many times by companies to build their own proprietary OS [1].
The MPL will ensure that Servo is never forked by Google/Apple/Microsoft into a competing proprietary software, but will remain a free software.
Could you possibly comment on FF's seeming inability to unload tabs from memory? There are numerous add-ons that claim to unload tabs and free up that memory, but none of them work as advertised.
And, when FF crashes and reloads, restoring all the tabs, it seems like the tabs aren't loaded (the page is blank and does a reload when selected), yet if you look in task manager (Windows 7), all the memory seems to have already been consumed.
Should tabs be able to be unloaded from memory, in theory? If so, is it implemented this way? If not, is there a reason?
Hi, thank you for taking the time to reply. FYI - I have been using firefox every day as my primary browser for the past 4 or so years and have only switched to chromium in the past month, I still have two versions of FF installed and they're just so unreliable I can't bring myself to rely upon them - especially at work where I'm in the browser a lot. It's most definitely got _worse_ for me in the past year rather than better.
> if there isn't a Chrome plugin, it's not going to be of much use to me
Working on it! We have to get the webextension working in Firefox first, then we'll branch out to other browsers. (Contributors welcome, btw: https://github.com/mozilla-lockbox/lockbox-addon)
> I still use Chrome on my laptop (for a multitude of reasons) and if Lockbox doesn't interoperate with it, it's not a useful tool.
Well, you can import Chrome passwords into Firefox pretty easily, and set up Firefox Sync, and then you've got all your (Chrome) desktop logins on mobile. Not ideal, but works.
> I don't want to switch to a product that's only going to be retired in a year
Sure, I definitely understand. I've personally worked on Persona, FxOS, Test Pilot, and Screenshots (and now Lockbox). IMO Mozilla has gotten steadily better at shipping new products, and once we get Lockbox integrated into desktop, it'll have really good chances of long-term survival.
Besides, any new startup might go away; at least with Mozilla products, you can be sure we aren't going to do anything sketchy with your data.
Finally, I'll point out that, if you try Lockbox, it'll give Mozilla's management good signals that they should keep investing in Lockbox :-)