What is the best way to prevent big companies (like Google, but not only), that have a de facto monopoly on certain and important parts of the internet, from applying vendor lock strategies to kill their competitors?
Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
31–40 of 266 posts
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more important today with a share of around ~70% instead of ~60% back then ( http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/ )
I'm not surprised with 70% for Chrome. Every Android phone comes with a Chrome browser. Too bad Mozilla mobile strategy didn't work. times and times again I said to whoever was in charge with the project :"Target hipsters, and hackers, not emergent economies and low hand devices, make it the phone for those who can afford a third one with good specs and are trend setters, or engineers, they'll develop cool shit for F…
For what it's worth, agreeing on a strategy with phone vendors and OEMs is much harder than it looks. Decision-makers in this domain have very different processes and goals than in software development. Plus it's very much a shark-eats-shark world.
So I don't actually know who took the decisions, but I wouldn't be so sure that it's Mozilla.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#33Firefox is going to need a large UI overhaul before I even consider laying my eyes on it. It looks terrible compared to Chrome. Maybe if Mozilla would employ me, I could fix that. It's very hard to stop Chrome's brand at this point.
On the bright side, anyone who dislikes Chrome's UI can wait 6 months for them to completely overhaul it again, like clockwork :-)
Agreed that it is much more polished, if only because they aggressively remove everything they can from the UI, including features. Definitely provides a visually relaxing look, even if they crammed it full of unnecessary margins and whitespace. Works pretty well on tablets, too.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#34People choose firefox over IE because firefox was better. People choose chrome over firefox and IE because chrome is better. Want to beat google? create better. Not negativity.
This.
I think we've seen throughout societal history that if you want to affect change you have to do it through the path of least resistance for consumers; this means creating a better browser experience that people use not because they want to revolt, but because they gain utility from doing so.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#35I'm running Chromium instead of Chrome. I like to think of it as Chrome without the bad parts, even though google has influence in the Chromium project.
The main reason I would not switch to Firefox is because, at least when I last tried it, I did not like their dev tools as much.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#36A viable Firefox-based Electron alternative would be very welcome.
The sad thing is Mozilla had a great Electron alternative way before Chrome even existed (apps like Songbird used it, and I shipped a mass-market product using it), but it was dropped due to complexity and lack of resources. Google has the resources to support scenarios like this more easily, and the community is happy to do the rest of the work for them. Market effects are tough :/
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#37Why should I use Firefox, or any other browser, from a standard consumer prospective?
Let me preface this by saying I am open to a new browser, especially one that is always in "incognito" and doesn't share sessions between tabs/windows. My favorite is Lynx but that doesn't always work .
Facebook & Messenger for Android is pretty much spyware and they have over 1B downloads each, so that takes spying out of the discussion.
The last time I checked Chrome performed best (even if it is only marginal) on all benchmarks.
I know there are lots of serious reasons not to trust Google aside from user tracking (changing search results for political reasons[1], Eric Schmidt being a little too friendly w State Dept.[2]) but they make damn fine products.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-think-tank-launch...
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#38Why not just say "Good Riddance?" From a pragmatic perspective, the fewer browsers we as developers need to support, the better. There has never been any meaningful standardization between browsers. Even "modern" browsers are all different enough that you need to test and code specific paths for each of them unless you stick to trivial things. Personally, I want the same thing I wanted back in 1996 when I started thi…
> Why not just say "Good Riddance?"
Because the less competition, the more stagnant the web will be. Then vendors like Microsoft will shove proprietary tech into their browsers and we'll be back to IE6 + Flash. Is it what you want?
Firefox is the only serious open source browser project out there. Chrome isn't, Google could drop Chromium development any day, it wouldn't be the first time they did something like that.
Of course, I believe Mozilla & Firefox shot themselves in the foot by refusing to implement specs like WebSQL,File System API and a few others, no matter what the reason was. I use these API to deliver complex offline applications, I had no choice but to tell my clients to use Chrome. And yes IndexedDB sucks.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#39Maybe these other browsers should stop being complete shit and maybe I will. You want to know why people pick Google products? Because they work and they work well with each other. The only people that don't like Google are tech people that write stupid blogs like this. Sorry, but the general population doesn't give a fuck if Google does any of this. They just want products that work. They don't even give a fuck abou…
And what people don't know can't hurt them, right? More seriously, there is a battlefield on the web. Since the demise of Opera, Firefox is the only mainstream browser left standing that actively attempts to not violate your privacy. This doesn't mean that Firefox developers don't need to work on ways to make Firefox the best browser – incidentally, Firefox in January 2017 is orders of magnitude better than Firefox i…
Opera was and still is the best and most innovative browser.
Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)
#40What about chromium browser? Google's tracking features are disabled there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Differe... The author might argue that this is weak resistance because it's just adding fuel to Google's fire. They have co-opted the open source community by building their tools this way. I prefer this to the nearest alternative, which is a company that pushes closed software on the world…
Chromium is a better choice from a privacy standpoint, certainly. It unfortunately doesn't help prevent the vendor lock-in situation.
The ideal equilibrium for the open web right now would be 33% each for evergreen Chrome (or other Webkit/Blink browsers), Edge, and Firefox.
Bleeding edge prove-of-concepts aside; developing a website or web application that works in all modern browsers has never been so developer-friendly with all the wonderful tools and mature frameworks we have (e.g., Babel), and is trivial with just HTML and CSS. It's a shame to see a class of developers emerge that target Chrome exclusively.