| I think you misundertood the justification of the "remove FTP" bug. That bug was filed by the person who wrote most of the FTP implementation in Firefox and was one of the few people who maintained it. The reasons to consider removal were that it was a maintenance burden, extra security attack surface, and not really relevant to users nowadays. The posted link only spoke to that last point: that other widely used browsers were removing it and it wasn't being a problem for their users, apparently. The first two reasons for removal were not clearly explained in the bug report initially, because they were obvious to both the bug filer and his intended audience: the networking module owners and peers. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1174462#c23 for more details. Would the summary being "consider removing FTP support" more accurately reflect intent? Probably. Did the actual engineers involved know what the bug was about? Yes. > Or, better yet, I remember that there was talk of having Chrome switch back to using a native pdf renderer back from the javascript one. I assume you mean Firefox? Speed was part of that discussion, but so were the various features pdf.js lacks but the proposed replacement supports. > It is only a matter of time until Firefox makes it harder to download video, solely because Chrome is doing it. If you assume that Mozilla is just aping Google. But if, on the other hand, you just have that as a preconceived notion and try to make all decisions fit that theory no matter what the actual reasons for them are... then you might just guess wrong on this. I agree with you on the broad point that Firefox needs to do things Chrome can't or won't do. The worry with your "aggressive ad-blocking" suggestion (much as I would like that personally!) is that a likely outcome is a large enough number of sites blocking Firefox altogether that users stop being able to use it at all for normal browsing. If Firefox had a monopoly position in the market it _might_ be able to get away with that sort of move, but it doesn't have that position. |
Actually the point was that mozilla should stop removing features that are not in chrome first, if there are any left. The point is firefox should differentiate from chrome instead of being more and more similar because being similar to chrome just remove the appeal firefox had.
> If Firefox had a monopoly position in the market it _might_ be able to get away with that sort of move, but it doesn't have that position.
But when they had the better share of the market they were adamant not to do any adblocking and this may be related to the fact that 98% of their revenue came from advertising through google. Then again how would a website block firefox ? Using user-agent ?