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Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

robert.ocallahan.org

41–50 of 303 posts

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#41
I can't take anyone serious who rants about google's marketplace dominion but can't seem to migrate from blogger to wordpress self-hosted. Sorry, it's just overly ironic, and it's also hard for me to take bloggers on blogger serious as there's a lot of crap blogs on there. Every dominant player eventually falls, Microsoft owned the browser, search, email, docs, and os back in 2000 -- now they're practically irrelevant.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#42

I'm genuinely curious what the perceived threat is. I'm not happy about having a handful of browsers being dominant, but Chromium is legitimately free software. I'm very slightly worried that most people choose the Chrome branded version (which is not free-as-in-freedom), but there is so little between the two that I'm not sure it matters. V8 is forked into Node now so it would be pretty difficult to do horrible thin…

one thing is that the influence on standards will be pretty strong if you have the "main" implementation. So it requires trusting Google to go the right direction.

You can contrast Google's "the web as apps" with, say, Apple + Safari's more "web as documents + prettiness" approaches.

With at least 2 major implementations, even if Google doesn't want to do something, if Apple + Moz + MSFT does something, it's still possible to get it into the standard.

You can try getting into the standard without a single implementation but that's probably difficult without a vote of confidence from stakeholders

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#43
post #34

I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of…

A thousand times this. Ironically Firefox had this feature in the past ( I don't remember the exact version). My workaround is to start Firefox in anonymous mode always (Settings->Privacy->History->"Never remember history). But it's a workaround and I wish Firefox would be able to open links in an incognito window.

It's so interesting to see how workflows differ between different people. You say "a thousand times this", but I for one never have this issue because I never (have to) click on an external link to be opened in my browser.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#44
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tool…

No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type of thinking is often why. Firefox makes a product and therefore should improve that product so that more people want to use it. Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offerin…

If the open source tools are worse than the other ones, then sure, they should be improved. But I have no reason to believe this is the case here.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#45

I generally agree with the sentiment here, but somewhat similar to using Linux over macOS, my experience has been that it's just a worse user experience in exchange for "doing the right thing." In the end, it's about how much you're willing to sacrifice convenience and user experience for an ethical ideal. For me, the last time I attempted to switch from Chrome to Firefox, it drove me nuts after a few days because of…

If this is your only or main issue with FF, it can't be that bad.

I tried Chrome from time to time and the endless processes eating up an immense sum of RAM (I had to add together first to realize) as well as the missing addons drove me away.

I never considered myself a participant in the ideological browser war and whenever I have to fix a computer somewhere around my friends and family (besides my parents) I left Chrome on their computers. It somehow always is there. Installed through Avast or similar. This annoying and disgusting behavior and the fact that Chrome wasn't anywhere faster or better led me to the conclusion that there is no better browser for me then FF.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#46
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every person who says Chromium's developer tools are better than Firefox's, you can find another person who will say exactly the reverse. It's possible one of the two positions is correct and the other is not, but I find it more likely that people are just used to particular developer tools and that there is no significant difference between the two. People get work done with Firefox and Chromium's developer tool…

No, he shouldn't have to learn to use them. When open source fails this type of thinking is often why. Firefox makes a product and therefore should improve that product so that more people want to use it. Vendors in a market are rarely in a position to tell the customers in that market what they should and shouldn't do. We don't want them to be in that position either, even Mozilla. They have to improve their offerin…

I think you missed the point. I for one can't stand the chrome dev tools. I use Firefox largely because i prefer the dev tools there.

So, the point is, it's possible there is no real difference and it just comes down to personal preference or what you're used to. At least, that was the commenter's point which you didn't address.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#47
post #40

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their…

It's not quality of Firefox.

On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products.

On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit.

Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#48
I never understood why Mozilla has allowed their main product and their only money maker to fall so far behind.

They have a lot of income.

I don't mind them going of on various edgy projects.

But FF has been inferior to Chrome for many years. They should really refocus their efforts to concentrate on delivering the best browser again, as it was before Chrome came along.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#49
post #40

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success. Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their…

I rather have people write such texts to encourage people to switch to Firefox then have Chrome installed accidentally because they again bundled it like some crappy AntiVirus software in the installer of another program (together with the google updater service and god knows what).

Re: Choose Firefox Now, or Later You Won't Get a Choice (2014)

#50
post #5

Unfortunately Chrome/ium has the best security story at the moment. Mainly due to good separation/sandbox. Firefox is only now catching up, slowly. So while I'd like to use FF, it's simply not a reasonable choice for me.

I've flip flopped on this over the years.

I've finally settled on this:

Why are dev tools 1-size-fits-all? What is that? I should be able to say, turn on all the tools, or just give me simple mode.

For a lot of websites I create, I would love to have:

1) Console for errors and debugging output.

2) A way to edit the source of the page I'm looking at, and any connected CSS/JS pages in a regular notepad-like editor to make real-time changes to what I'm looking at (and reload with those changes in place)

That's it. Then I can transfer my changes to my dev files and upload to the FTP server.

Then, when I'm working on some huge bloated website with all kinds of craziness, I can turn on all the tools in an advanced mode.

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