What they are complaining about - that they are treated as second-class citizen - is exacly, how they treat Linux, for example.
No OMTP, OMTC, no hw video acceleration, no smooth scrolling, buggy dark theme, etc, so Firefox on Linux is not as polished and/or performing as on other platforms. The excuse for that was, that Linux has small market share, so it is not worth for putting more resources into solving these problems (some of them have bug reports open for over a decade!).
Well, Firefox itself has also small market share, it is in single digits now. The irony is in the part, that they actively used this as rationalization for what they do, but do not like it, when others use exactly that reason on them.
I'm not talking about validity of the rationale itself; just about the irony of finding them on the bottom of the hole they helped to dig out.
A massive subset of Firefox devs are Linux users. Those features are missing largely because they are hard to implement reliably on Linux and customers (who are largely not Linux users) won't feel the impact. There are often flags you can set to try and use them on Linux, YMMV.
If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever.
Even on Windows some new stuff like WebRender has to be manually opted in on specific driver versions and architectures one at a time, because it turns out video drivers are really bad and if you ship early your app will crash.
> A massive subset of Firefox devs are Linux users.
No, they are not. A massive subset of Firefox devs are Apple users. For Linux, the occasional Redhat or SuSE dev does the most-needed fixing.
> Those features are missing largely because they are hard to implement reliably on Linux and customers (who are largely not Linux users) won't feel the impact.
Neither of these are true. It does make easier rationalizing Linux mistreatment, though.
If there was no impact, the equivalent functionality would not be needed to be implemented under other OS-es either. You have bugzilla full of feedback, that it does have an impact.
It also makes Linux itself look worse, compared to other systems.
> There are often flags you can set to try and use them on Linux, YMMV.
I know, that you can force OMTC, for example. I've been doing that for years, with zero bugs. Why can't Mozilla do that by default? They haven't reviewed the situation for years, that's how much they care.
Also, for example, the EGL situation (needed for Wayland, obviously Wayland apps cannot use GLX without X11) was purely Firefox problem, not the driver stack one. (Worked on by Redhat dev).
> If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever.
> Even on Windows some new stuff like WebRender has to be manually opted in on specific driver versions and architectures one at a time, because it turns out video drivers are really bad and if you ship early your app will crash.
I'm fine with incremental enablement. I'm not fine with the enablement never arriving.
And again; the original post was about the irony of the situation Firefox itself finds themselves in; exactly the same excuses are used against them.
Lot of HTML/js stuff never worked in Firefox either. For example, Youtube uses polymer, which uses web components v0 if available. Firefox never implemented that.
On the other hand, the above mentioned features could work, if Firefox would implement them, as they did for other platforms. Other applications on Linux are able to use the needed APIs available, why Firefox is not?
It's not that complicated to understand: While Google and Mozilla are competitors, Mozilla and Linux are not. Linux just gets less priority because it's quite frankly irrelevant as a Desktop OS.
> It's not that complicated to understand: While Google and Mozilla are competitors,
Web apps and Chrome at Google are being made by entirely different team. Unless there is a mandate from the top to the web teams, it is irrelevant. They could be as well a different companies.
> Linux just gets less priority because it's quite frankly irrelevant as a Desktop OS.
That's exactly the point I was making: Firefox is also getting less and less priority, because it loses it's relevancy as a browser.
Except now Mozilla doesn't like exactly this same argument.
The problem is not the argument, but the conclusion of willful negligence. Firefox neglecting Linux is not an underhanded business decision because Mozilla stands to gain nothing by ignoring Linux; but Chrome does directly compete with Firefox. That's the point people here are making.
Google actually needs Firefox to be around the most; for the same reason, why Microsoft invested into Apple after their antitrust case.
There's no other explanation for Mozilla's attitude towards Linux than negligence; objectively, it is neglected. The degree of willfulness is up to the debate.
