It may seem an advantage to use the latest cutting edge features of a single platform, instead of using well established standards which are compatible with every browser. Sure, you are going to leave out some small minority of users, but you gain access to many new features.
However, you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place, controlled by just a few entities, with interests which are very different from yours.
You may think that there is no harm in doing so. Most people use Chrome anyway. And what difference can one more web app make?
However, it is exactly this laziness by skilled developers, who are the only that understand the problem, which brought us to the current situation. There is no way to fix this problem, if the people that understand it do not take a stand.
Next time that your manager asks you if you can have that sweet feature, instead of saying "sure, we just need to drop support for Firefox", please consider trying to explain what are the consequences in the long term.
I know this isn't easy for many people, which do not feel comfortable questioning orders or plans. However, this is our responsibility. Nobody else is going to care, if we do not care.
Then in October added "Insertable streams is worth prototyping"
Also: "I will remind people that this isn't the place for advocating for what gets implemented in Firefox. This is something that the media team needs to work out."
then "closed 26 Oct 2020"
But, hey, it's June 2021, you just got a new UI redesign which nobody wanted (I guess, except the managers who invented it), and which uses up more vertical space. (Hint: about:config browser.proton.enabled false helps at the moment).
Even the iOS version of Firefox got an UI redesign. One has to care for the priorities! The color of the shed is always the biggest impact a manager can bring!
firefox has serious performance issues, i had to switch to chromium.
i really want to support firefox in my development but their tooling is just not presented in a rational footprint. when i inspect a vue proxy object, i dont want to see all the setters and getters.
they are losing mind share because neight to user facing components normthe dev facing have a well considered presentation or pefformancd
The most money are paid to the same managers in both cases. The total company expenses in the same period mostly aren't dependent on the nature of the changes implemented. The managers just make their managerial decisions what to set as the goals.
And apparently the board thumbs that up. That's the scope of the problem: "look we make the UI changes" is the "color of the shed" easy to understand illusion of "something" being done.
If there wasn't one manager at Mozilla who said to himself maybe in the pandemic with all the working from home stuff being done. Maybe we should look in our webrtc, video codec stack just is sad. No excuse that's just plain bad management.
Money is fungible, employees are not. Whether others at Mozilla may be tasked with implementing this API or Mozilla (or someone else) contracts Igalia to do it, the employees responsible for and qualified to work on UI are still going to get paid and will still have other work to do.
As far as I know Mozilla is not a foundation for charity towards unemployed developers. So their goal is not finding work for their existing employees, their goal is improving the browser in meaningful ways. They're free to lay off and hire people to do this.
Also honestly any developer worth keeping could figure out the task at hand given sufficient time. So to talk about developers as if there's a developer who can only alter the rendering of tabs and what not is kinda silly.
Actually, Apple has many developers on this team, and Firefox is an open source project.
If we could create an feeling that companies that claim to be developer friendly make sure that FF is also compatible, it would be a huge win for all involved.
Firefox is an open source project, but pushing large changes upstream is difficult (and this is true of pretty much any project). Even if Apple had the patches, Mozilla might not take them.
While at first glance it would be strange to expect Apple to make these changes; I don't feel its unreasonable from any perspective. Apple should hold a long-term interest in keeping the web diverse; Safari will never reasonably hold a majority/plurality marketshare, so their second highest priority from a revenue/ux perspective should be "sticking to the standards" and helping toward ensuring web developers don't take on a "Chrome and nothing else" stance.
Granted, its also understandable that Apple officially working on Firefox would be "article on The Verge" level of news and even an armchair commentator would be able to connect the dots from what they're working on to predicting Facetime was coming to web. Though, isn't that what Jobs originally promised? Open source protocol and such?
At the end of the day, I'm sick and tired of the prevailing hyper-endstage-capitalist excuse of "they won't make a billion dollars from doing this, so not only will they not do it, but they SHOULDN'T". Its everywhere on HN, and its actual brain worms. Corporate decisions shouldn't only be analyzed through this lens; there's a far broader humanistic lens that codifies a higher standard that we absolutely can reasonably hold all companies to; not from a legal sense (HackerNews isn't a court and your votes are not a jury decision, some armchair commentators need to be reminded), not even from a general population public relations sense; but from a viewpoint that Ethics is not a democracy, there are some ethical positions that won't make money, aren't required by law, and aren't even popular, but are nonetheless crucially important to avoiding a Blade Runner-eque corpo-cyberpunk future (or, with some very legitimate issues, species extinction or at least achieving and maintaining a high standard of living for most of our species).
The sibling argument of Firefox's CEO making a ton of money being reprehensible is... I mean, jeeze, they make awesome software, open source, freedom respecting, privacy respecting, and manage to pay their leadership & employees well? Isn't that the dream? That should be the goal; not be derided. There's a middleground between hyper-endstage-brain-worm-capitalism and "all software is developed by starving monks in a monastery". I understand its hard to believe this, because it isn't an extreme; its easy to let gravity drag your ethical viewpoint to an extreme on the left or right in this age of outrageous social media, but neither extreme on any ethical dimension is conductive to a positive future for humanity.
A significant number of websites ignore Safari on mobile; not because its Safari, but because its mobile. Not necessarily with a big banner that says "Please use a desktop", but rather a half-assed layout.
Within the US, Safari and Chrome mobile have roughly equivalent marketshare, recently with an edge to Safari. Globally, Chrome mobile is significantly larger than Safari mobile.
None of that actually matters though; Firefox, Safari, and Edge all deploy advanced analytics blocking features which distort their marketshare. In many instances, these blockers self-report their browser as Chrome, as a "blend in with the crowd" strategy.
When it was reasonable for Apple to do so, Apple distributed Safari for Windows. I don't remember now anymore exactly, it could have been even before Chrome on Windows existed? "Apple's Steve Jobs first announced Windows PC support in Safari 3.0 at Macworld Expo in 2007."
"Google Chrome first release: 2008-09-02." "We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others" (1)
If there's ever a reason for Apple to be more involved in a Windows browser, that's still an option.
But implementing some functionality in a third browser on Windows... why should they? The two which already have the feature are already by the competing companies.
There is an interesting inverse correlation of Mozilla CEO salary and amount of users Firefox has.
I think it's normal to pay competitive salary too, but the salary should reflect one's impact on the company. Looking at the current state of Firefox, I can't imagine why their CEO is compensated as they are.
What is their revenue source? And what is the reason cash flows from that revenue source if not Firefox? If Firefox did not exist, Mozilla would have no reason to be considered by anyone about anything.
Exactly: They could equally well just skin Chromium and keep on setting Google as the default search engine. That's exactly my point-- Firefox isn't the revenue source, auxiliary services around it are.
The salary of their CEO has absolutely no bearing on it being open source. None. Look at Tim Apple's salary, and yet Darwin, Webkit, CUPS, and other projects are open source.
I can count the number of developers I've worked with over the last 5 years that care about it working in any browser other than Chrome on one finger.
This idea that only Chrome matters is absolutely coming from the bottom up and when you point out something broken in Safari the first response from them is "Does it work in Chrome?" before they even look at it because they themselves don't even test in a second browser.
That mirrors my experience. It's not POs or PMs that hear about some new niche browser feature only supported by Chrome. It's devs that want to play with the latest toys and kind of look at you weird if you use Safari.
There's an annoying assumption from other devs that I must be using Safari out of ignorance. They quickly get over it, but it's a problematic first impression thing when working with new teams.
> This idea that only Chrome matters is absolutely coming from the bottom up and when you point out something broken in Safari the first response from them is "Does it work in Chrome?" before they even look at it because they themselves don't even test in a second browser.
I would have thought at least iOS Safari would be a major consideration for anyone due to the ubiquity of iOS devices.
> I would have thought at least iOS Safari would be a major consideration for anyone due to the ubiquity of iOS devices.
If web developers give any consideration to iOS, it usually results in a comparison of Mobile Safari to IE 6.
In reality, Google Chrome’s unilateral provisioning of unratified features drives developers to dismiss competing products as obsolete. In this way, Google Chrome advances the “extend” phase of technological dominance while well-intentioned and overworked web developers implement the “extinguish” phase.
1) Smartphone use, both in general and for web browsing, and
2) Spending on smartphones
These have been true long enough and to a large enough degree that they're usually taken as assumed, baseline facts by anyone involved in mobile software products.
The two of which are why companies not only care about them, but, in fact, iOS' numbers are so good on both of those that it can be tempting to go iOS first for many products, if you have to choose only one platform, even if your demographics don't skew iOS.
iOS devices are used more than Android devices, and their owners spend a lot more on average. There are probably several reasons for this and its unclear which is dominant, but in the end, it doesn't really matter why, if you're just chasing the market.
I test mostly on Firefox and Epiphany; I figure if it works there it's going to work just about everywhere.
Safari is a different beast because I don't have a Mac and it's support for a lot of standards is pretty dismal. It's like the IE6 of browsers these days.
I keep the JS simple though and for CSS I keep around a few handy LESS functions so I can get some basic stuff on crap browsers. Stuff like:
.opacity(@default, @percent) {
-webkit-opacity: @default;
-khtml-opacity: @default;
-moz-opacity: @default;
-ms-opacity: @default;
-o-opacity: @default;
opacity: @default;
// ms-filter *SHOULD* work on IE8 & 9 but ... doesn't always
// for me? WTF... anyway (filter should also work). This
// should be listed before filter to be safe
-ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=@percent)";
filter: alpha(opacity=@percent); /* support: IE8 oh god we're all gonna die*/
}
This way I don't rely on some framework like Bootstrap, and I can write fairly simple stylesheets. I used to transpile compliant and legacy sheets and serve different urls depending on user agent strings but that didn't work well and was generally crap so - one it is.
Don't worry, when I transpile I strip my unprofessional comments.
> Next time that your manager asks you if you can have that sweet feature, instead of saying "sure, we just need to drop support for Firefox", please consider trying to explain what are the consequences in the long term.
If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager, then there's no fight or discussion to be had, because the web has already unequivocally lost. The only thing that's happening is a discussion about whether to parade on the corpse or not.
> If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager,
I see a lot of this 'devs v suits' type language used on HN, with the implication being that the developers are principled stewards of technology suffering under the cosh of KPI-obsessed MBAs.
What causes this? The majority of product managers I've met have technical backgrounds, and they have also had to cut corners to keep their product roadmaps on track.
From what I've seen, it doesn't matter if they have a technical background. Hubris operates the same way in people—it serves to blind them of all but their own ambitions as they lose a more complete picture of reality in favour of expressing their egos.
At least in cases that line up. I doubt it's so universal. I've seen something quite similar happen first hand. To the point that I'm pretty beside myself about it. Hard to understand if you don't just assign it to them steamrolling anything but their ego. It's the only way you could just let core functions in your core product falter and not have a plan for it.
That said, I don't think that applies to excluding Firefox in this particular case. It doesn't sound permanent, and it sounds like it just hinges on FF catching up their available APIs to suit.
Not only that, but developers have at least as much incentive to push to avoid cross platform implementations. More work, more complexity, bugs, maintenance, etc., and many (most?) do all of their dev and testing on Chrome anyway.
Web monoculture simply has a set of labor/$ incentives builtin. It's the default, and it's hard (and probably getting harder) to appreciate the long term system-wide risk that accumulates by allowing one company to control web standards.
I don't see it as a dev vs. suits issue at all. If anything, in my experience it's people who remember Internet Explorer and people who don't.
Apple's choice here was likely to not release the product at all, or use an open standard that Firefox doesn't yet support, and allow them to support it over time.
Using features that not all browsers have implemented _yet_ isn't always bad for the open web. If the feature is important, the other browsers prioritize it.
Why put all this responsibility on developers? I'm pretty sure none of my former managers could have been swayed by talking about the long-time independence of the web. Usually, the most pressing issue was fixing bugs in prod and delivering features on time.
Firefox is doing quite well with the standards. Chrome is implementing things beyond the agreed-upon standards. Which to some extent has to happen in order to advance standards, but that only works if the changes are agreed upon or at least not disagreed upon by other implementations. These days Chrome is forging ahead even in the face of disagreements (usually on grounds of privacy or security).
And to be clear, Firefox is behind on the relevant standard here. Though even then, it's more nuanced than that: Mozilla is ok with prototyping it even though they would prefer for it to use a more secure mechanism -- see https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webrtc-insert...
From what I can tell, Mozilla is in the place of playing catch-up because the other players chose to forge ahead without resolving their objections.
[Ok, "our objections". I work for Mozilla. Not in a relevant area until recently, but it looks like I will be doing some very relevant work starting as soon as I close this damn tab.]
To the vast majority of the people that use this on the web, they will do care about your story.
I don’t mean that as an insult; I’m happy there are folks like you with passion in this space.
If you’re old enough, you still wake up in the middle of the night sweating about IE 6 or 7 bugs that HAD to be solved with
brute force even though the feature worked just fine in Firefox and Chrome. After years of struggle, most of the world uses a very compliant and continuously upgraded browser.
It's not about not taking the win. It's about taking the short term win (by contributing to the monoculture dominance) at the expense of a long term loss -- why expect Google to maintain the Web's current advantages when it no longer serves their purpose to? Especially since the writing is already on the wall.
It was a combo of being a fresh/new dev on my part and IE6/7, but I recall spending (wasting) days and days of my life working around IE issues.
I know we don't want another situation of one browser dominating the web but Chrome (and Firefox) improved building for the web so much. I don't know if people forget or weren't around for the IE days but it was absolutely terrible and a life-waste.
This might come as a surprise but not everyone sees the world from a "freedom" perspective. In terms of practical/day to day experience we won something that works over something that didn't.
I agree with you, but think that there are different definitions of freedom. I love open source software but I don't think it's a right or that all software should be OSS. I like the freedom to keep the source of my apps closed if I wish. If I choose to use a closed source browser, I'm not giving up any freedom in my mind, I'm making a choice and a deal.
It's not a "freedom" perspective. Once you get an overlord, it's just a matter of time until it starts abusing you.
Or, in other words, it's just a matter of time until it's Chrome keeping you up at night eating all of your productivity to avoid some defect. It probably won't be a rendering bug, but there will be something there.
IE "worked" too. The main problems came from having to develop for multiple browsers with incompatible implementations. If you restricted yourself to IE, it was quite painless. Any quirk you'd encounter daily was documented, and at the time there were quirks in all implementations anyway.
It does not come as a surprise but saddening, because freedom is the most important thing in life
With out freedom life is miserable, and it saddens me that people seem to be valuing freedom less and less, one day they will look around and ask "how did we get here", and people like me will just shrug and say "you should have listened"
> you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place
Does it? Open source standardization is a good thing. Still not sure why html/css/js engine should be the exception. No one is calling for competition for QR code, torrent protocol, or the other billion of very dominant open source projects.
It's not really open source standardization though. Google is in charge, make no mistake. Yes people can take it and tweak it, but the main feature changes are dictated by Google.
This is Apple, the inventor of walled garden tech for consumers. I wouldn't have been surprised if they had some proprietary extensions in Safari that made it so Safari was the only browser that could do it.
What the open source world calls "freedom of choice", the rest of the world calls "waste of time". I'd argue it does more people more good to have a de facto standard based on a close duopoly (Google + Apple, webkit/blink) to code websites and devices against, rather than the clusterfuck that is the WHATWG, W3C, etc. process. The existence of Gecko is nice for Mozilla but a time sink for developers and users, who at the end of the day just want to look up restaurant menus or buy tickets or check their email instead of fiddling with browser idiosyncrasies.
If Mozilla moved to some Webkit/Blink/Chromium derivative like everyone else, the world could standardize on that renderer and they are still free to "innovate" on the browser UI/chrome surrounding that engine and differentiate themselves that way.
As it is, Gecko adds nothing to the web ecosystem anymore and wastes everyone's time.
What a deeply ignorant perspective. Too infuriating to ignore. Firefox users constitute <1% of my traffic. If you had any context for how widely browsers diverged on webrtc features (especially video), you'd realize that ff support could easily add months and months to dev time. I'm sure it hasn't escaped your notice that apple makes no mention of safari in their announcement.
my webrtc-based video conference app doesn't currently support ff and never will unless compatibility with chrome's implementation comes around. My manager would have me committed if I tried to pull that shit, and I'm already notorious for refusing to do things on principle. Suggesting that we don't support firefox because I'm lazy? No, vendors force us to choose, and if the alternative is NO video? Here on earth, where we're trying to cultivate a competitive advantage and survive as a business venture, that's an incredibly easy choice.
edit: other commenters have made the point much more elegantly than I but I leave my words here as a testament to how infuriated I am at this condescending suggestion.
I configure FF to use a different user agent, as a security measure. It's a short hop from browsing the Internet with FF to disabiling browser identification.
For a long time I did the same because some websites would refuse to load when they thought you weren't running Chrome even though it would have worked just fine in FF.
If you review Mozilla's business practices, constant spending on NGOs and Politics, ludicrous executive compensation, and recent layoffs of the engineering team, constant buying and starting of new projects (Pocket, Firefox OS) only to abandon them, and so on, it is clear that at least part of the story is that Firefox has been through incredible mismanagement even as they should have been in the fight for their lives.
Some of the activities you described are by the Mozilla Foundation, not the Mozilla Corporation. The two have different sources of funding, so the Foundation's "spending on NGOs and politics" doesn't have any bearing on the funds used on Firefox development. The split between the two exists so that one org doesn't have the constraints of a non-profit: the non-profit Foundation can take tax-deductible donations while the Corporations can do things that a tax-deductible charity can't.
I'm not a fan of some of the Corporation's recent non-FF work (Pocket acquisition, Mullvad-based VPN, etc). But saying that they're expensive and take away from FF funding is inaccurate. These projects are intended to create new revenue streams for the Mozilla corporation.
I think that Mozilla having to chase new revenue streams in questionable ways (like having a proprietary service, Pocket) in an indictment on the Web's complexity and how it takes billions of dollars to build a browser. Making ethical compromises to fund continued development is an extreme but real example of the consequences of software bloat.
Funnily, I find safari to be a worse offender often when looking to implement a slightly newer standard. Especially safari on Mac. Date inputs have been in iOS safari for a while now and are still only in technology preview on Mac.
More often, I find the css property I want to use is in Firefox but not chrome. Eg, some of the sideways text values are still Firefox only, forcing you to use transform rotate instead
> constant buying and starting of new projects (Pocket, Firefox OS)
Constant? Aren't those both ten years old or more? No organization can create successful projects by fiat; there's necessarily a lot of failure to find one success. If they ain't failin' they ain't tryin'.
This feature also won't be available for several months, so it's possible they're planning for Firefox support but hedging their bets in case they can't get it done in time.
E2E is on by default as in all P2P webrtc calls. What you can't do is use a SFU and still get E2E. Perhaps I'm just missing something but why would you want a SFU AND E2E? Why not just use TURN in those cases (if the problem the SFU is meant to fix is routing)?
An SFU lets your video/audio streams scale. If there were only ever two people, sure, you could use a TURN server if P2P failed, but if you invite 4 people on the call, an SFU will allow each person to upload their stream to the SFU which will then distribute it at various bitrates to the other people on the call.
Except that if the call is E2E then the SFU can't do things like reencode to a different bitrate. Also wouldn't the decryption keys need to be distributed to all the participants of the call via the centralized service anyway since the stream is already in progress? Or am I just being thick in not understanding how a SFU and E2E would bring all of the benefits of both?
The originating browser is responsible for encoding all the desired quality levels and sending them to the SFU to decide what to forward to the other participants - that is the difference between a SFU and a MCU, and why SFUs can scale. SVC-capable codecs are coming to WebRTC too, which makes this a lot more efficient for the browser to do.
Encryption keys are distributed out of band of the media, so it's the same as whatever the tradeoffs are for multi-party E2E-encrypted text chat there (I don't know what those are though!)
That can‘t be why – one benefit of their weird way of using WebRTC is that it would actually allow them to provide end to end encryption in all browsers, regardless of support for WebRTC insertable streams.
Zoom does very weird things in the browser. They essentially don‘t use WebRTC, but rather grab raw camera frames, H.264 encode them in software (using WASM!) and shove them down a Websocket (or WebRTC Data Connection. This lets them use their own encryption as well.
I also have some memory of asking all participants in Jitsi meetings to not use firefox, because the call would start to lag for all participants if bandwidth was an issue for the firefox users in the call. Don't know if that is still the case or not though.
If you read to the end, it looks like the expected underlying reason is now fixed, but it hasn't been confirmed yet whether it resolved the problem. If someone knows how to reproduce, they could try it out and comment there.
Because of a long tradition of the system libraries being fucked.
All this stuff started in the days of Windows XP, which shipped with such a meagre selection of codecs you couldn't even play DVDs.
And the codecs you could download? Either they cost money (i.e. most users wouldn't have them), or they were dodging license costs by some questionable means, or they had bigger aspirations than just providing a mere codec (flash/realplayer/quicktime)
VLC arose out of that and became popular because, by ignoring the system codecs, it could actually play the damn file.
Don't get too excited, in France there's a tax on all storage devices (sd cards, usb sticks, hdds, laptops, phones etc) to help subsidise the record and film industry...
Note that internal HDDs aren't taxed under this tax, only external ones. (So if you don't want to pay it, you can just buy a SATA HDd and an adaptor).
Phones are taxed though (yes this doesn't make any sense technically)
Honestly, I'd take that trade. A narrow, stupid tax is definitely the lesser of two evils here. (Especially as it means I'd have a moral license to pirate whatever I wish!)
There was a lot of back and forth [0] over this back when Firefox added support for system libraries. The FOSS purists only wanted to support codecs they could include in Gecko (long before OpenH264) while the pragmatists wanted to make a useful web browser.
Support for system libraries first appeared on mobile platforms because it was essential. At the time (ca 2011/12) the likes of YouTube and Vimeo were only delivering MP4 to mobile clients.
The purists seemed to think that somehow if Firefox held the line on (likely but not guaranteed) unencumbered formats/codecs that every content producer would see the light and go with those objectively worse codecs with no hardware acceleration for video content.
This completely ignored the fact that Flash was common on desktops and supported encumbered codecs just fine. It was in fact the primary delivery vehicle for them. The NPAPI content hole let the purists be intransigent while actually using content on the web. They were also ignoring the design of the HTML5 video tag that encouraged inclusion of multiple source formats and some sort of fallback including object embeds.
As for Microsoft they were still pushing the various Windows Media codecs as the One True Way in the Windows XP and Vista eras. They had to support MP4 with Windows 7 because every smartphone and most stand alone cameras were capturing video in MPEG-4 codecs if not file formats.
Microsoft still doesn't include basic codecs like H.264 in some Windows editions ("N" and "KN" for some regions in the EU and Korea), but those users can download Microsoft's Windows Media Feature Pack to get the codecs:
Firefox used to be able to do this, but they don't anymore for strategic or political reasons. They don't want website authors to depend on certain codecs that some users have on their PC but some others don't. I can understand the rationale, but think it is a bit sad.
I personally believe Raspberry Pi made the wrong decision in using non-free hardware which required non-free firmware to operate key features such as video encoding/decoding.
Why would we encourage Firefox or others to do the same and develop a business model based on patents? Especially so when these patents are owned by huge conglomerates of corporate psychopaths (hello MPEG-LA) and the software editor we're talking about (Mozilla) had to lay-off a lot of staff during the confinement by lack of funds.
To be fair, Firefox is more than capable to encode/decode into free codecs and there's no reason why a third party plugin couldn't support H264 encoding as well. It falls on Apple to support proper standards for their communications platform and not on Firefox to support every piece of proprietary tech they can come up with.
But well, we all know what Apple thinks of standards. With their AirPlay, iMessage, iCloud and other Apple-specific solutions. If only we had free-software, standards-compliant solutions to all these computing problems. /s
How does this happen? AV1 encoding codec was still work in progress, and most chips don't support any hardware acceleration for this. Can we get reasonable frame rates on core CPU for av1 encoding already?
If there are any (as opposed to "just" the added customer support burden), I wonder if they're the same issues that prevent Slack from allowing calls in Firefox...
As a corollary, I wonder if Slack will now implement calling functionality once Mozilla adds the necessary APIs for Apple to do its job here, which is probably very likely since I don't think Apple chose to ignore a non-Google browser on purpose.
Unfortunately, hardware VP9 decoding isn't really well-supported except in high-end phones (in context of multiple decoding, single decoding works fine) due to bugs in Mediatek's implementation. There's software decoding, but that's still taxing to a phone, and transcoding to H.264 server-side but that doesn't bode well to end-to-end encryption.
> A lot of devices are just too weak to encode anything other than H.264
Not that your point is wrong, but a lot of devices are too weak to encode/decode H264 as well. It's very recent for me to have access to second-hand hardware with H264 support and still i'm in western Europe where it's easier to come by.
Though as the other commenter pointed out, if you can afford to use hardware en/decoders then it's always the better option.
Web standards stopped mattering in 2004, these days the only browsers that need to be considered are Chrome and mobile Safari, everything else from other browsers to standards bodies is just an exercise in pretending those two browsers don't have control over the web.
Those two will never be unseated; the constant addition and change of new APIs means that trying to create a new browser is a herculean task beyond the resources of all but the largest corporations, and even if you did somehow manage to do it the standards will always be retroactively set to whatever Chrome does so you'll always be playing catch up.
Its not possible to compete anymore, though to be honest I'm not sure it was ever possible to.
Microsoft dropping EdgeHTML was the biggest blow to the open web in many years. I really hope that Mozilla can pull some magic to keep Google from maintaining basically full control of web standards.
Bullshit. Microsoft adopting Chromium was the single biggest boon for the open web in many years. By reducing the friction for creating powerful web apps, it closes the gap for what is possible in competition with walled-garden app stores.
From my experience EdgeHTML has been "better" than Safari in terms of standard support ever since it was released. Also note that some of the holdbacks were Microsoft and Mozilla telling Google that their APIs had privacy issues. Now with Microsoft effectively blindly pulling from Chromium they basically have no means to object to these standards that Google is pushing.
So while a Chomium-only web would move faster, I didn't see as EdgeHTML a major drag and the cost of Google controlling the web is far too high in my opinion.
Electrons advance into the desktop space means that MS has to put resources into enhancing the performance of Chromium on their platforms anyway, so really even if they wanted to carry on with Trident/EdgeHTML they'd end up competing with themselves.
Looking at where Mozilla spends its money and their layoff of engineering staff, if they don’t prioritize Firefox and engineering, why should we?
Also from Apple’s perspective, there may be x% of people using Firefox, but I bet every one of them has the ability to use Chrome if they wanted to, and the people that are sticking solely to Firefox aren’t the ones likely to use FaceTime anyway.
It's a sad reality of society, but it doesn't have to be. I guess one of my biggest issues with modern day slavery is that the companies that exploit these poorer nations often paint a deceptive picture that everything is above board.
And whats worse is that these companies have the audacity to get behind social movements. Its predatory and just another scheme to improve their bottom line and lull their customers into believing that they are making an ethical choice by purchasing their products.
The raw reality is that everyone is getting exploited so we (the west) can enjoy using an iDevice while sitting on the toilet.
> I agree that it is disgusting that the public unknowing funds human suffering.
The public knows, they simply do not care enough to pay the extra $x. We have known about sweatshops since I was a kid in the 90s, and it is even possible to but clothing made in the US. Yet the vast, vast majority comes from east and South Asia.
> A percentage of phone sales always goes to factory workers in the form of wages...
Preposterous, factory workers are usually paid the same wage whether their production sells 1000 units or 1 million units. Their wage isn't based on how many phones are sold or even if phones are sold since the factory is usually paid upfront in production, not when the phones are actually sold.
Phone factory worker wages are completely unrelated to phone sales.
You comment illustrates a complete misunderstanding of the supply chain business.
Edit: No, workers get wages when they do their job regardless of phone sales. Fairphone gives factory workers a bonus from phone sales in addition to the usual wages.
Unless we're talking about money that is quite literally not from any phone sales (do you count accessories and tied-in services?) e.g. laptops only, then that statement is not strictly true. I've never seen such a differentiation except for on a balance sheet. Apple (as other companies often do) sell many products of which the revenue from those sales pay for the wages of their employees. I don't think financial accounting here plays into the morals of underpaying people.
Using "the money to pay these people doesn't come from this line on a balance sheet it comes from that line" is not a justification for the, while unfortunately legal, unethetical employment conditions of others.
> Apple (as other companies often do) sell many products of which the revenue from those sales pay for the wages of their employees.
I thought it was the responsibilities of company which contracted by apple to assemble iPhone like Foxconn to distribute the wages, so the wages are fixed and not fluctuates based on phone sales? Or does Apple give some bonus from phone sales directly to Foxconn workers?
> Using "the money to pay these people doesn't come from this line on a balance sheet it comes from that line" is not a justification for the, while unfortunately legal, unethetical employment conditions of others.
I do hope that Fairphone is being honest about, in addition to sourcing from ethical supply chain, also improving factory workers, as evidenced from workers testimonies here[0]
Well not always. For example not if you are a Uyghur muslim in china. Then you don't get anything while also getting sodomized with broom sticks. But hey you know, what shall we do, I guess lets just look the other way. Besides it's just cultural differences right?
Sadly not available in my country :( I wanted to buy it, or its German competitor I forgot name, but both are not allowed in Brazil. (I mean, you CAN risk it... but legally the government can ban you from the network if you try)
Yeah right? I'm salivating that even its screen could be detached by a simple pop out and no glue ever used to assemble the phone (maybe the modules are, I don't know).
My previous phone was Xiaomi Mi A1, it died and I couldn't turn it back on, and disassembling the phone is very hard. Then the phone gone somewhere else I don't know. Yet another e-waste. I don't have any smartphone right now.
And that's why we use Jitsi, Conversations, Jami... that is pieces of software that were designed to interoperate, not just work in a very specific set of circumstances on particular hardware, with a certain OS version and when the weather is right.
Firefox is/was really lacking in WebRTC support for non-P2P use cases - bandwidth estimation support was sub-standard until recently, there is no support for simulcast (multiple video quality encodings) when using H.264, and no E2E encryption support (which is very new to the spec). There has been a lot of back and forth on the Firefox / Jitsi situation but it does seem that most of the time the ball has been sitting in Firefox's court.
I wouldn't be surprised if that outcome is intentional. Apple has been pretty transparent (through their actions) that they don't want FaceTime and ichat to be cross platform.
It could be that this exists as a piece of evidence in an anti-trust fight.
That's OK, Firefox would just melt the MBP if you tried to do a streaming call on it anyway. It's my browser of choice, but it uses 40x more power to do streaming (vs. Safari), and has serious heat issues. Wish they'd fix it. Until they do, no reason for Apple to try and support it... likely Firefox can't give a user a good streaming experience on MacOS given how long this issue has been a problem and how little has been done to fix it to date.
Firefox performance has improved a lot on my 2019 MBP over the past year or so. For video streaming, it doesn't seem to be much worse than Chrome.
One of the reasons why Firefox and Chrome use more power than Safari for video streaming is that they support modern/open video codecs that don't have hardware decoding on Macs. For example, YouTube has been using VP9 for years. Until Catalina, Safari would load a h.264 video (that's why Safari used to be limited to 1080p) which has hardware decoding, while Chrome and Firefox would load a VP9 video at higher resolutions and use software decoding, using way more power than Safari. Now YouTube is starting to use AV1 and again, Chrome and Firefox supports it, but Safari doesn't.
It literally says "Users with non-Apple devices can join using the latest version of Chrome or Edge": does it mean users of Apple devices could join using Firefox?
However, you are helping push the web become an increasingly centralized place, controlled by just a few entities, with interests which are very different from yours.
You may think that there is no harm in doing so. Most people use Chrome anyway. And what difference can one more web app make?
However, it is exactly this laziness by skilled developers, who are the only that understand the problem, which brought us to the current situation. There is no way to fix this problem, if the people that understand it do not take a stand.
Next time that your manager asks you if you can have that sweet feature, instead of saying "sure, we just need to drop support for Firefox", please consider trying to explain what are the consequences in the long term.
I know this isn't easy for many people, which do not feel comfortable questioning orders or plans. However, this is our responsibility. Nobody else is going to care, if we do not care.