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It’s time to give Firefox another chance

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Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#531

Post by sitkack »

agumonkey wrote: post #150
rightos wrote: post #2

I was extremely skeptical of all the changes they were doing - I said it myself 100 times, "they're just building a Chrome clone, they're killing all the features I like in favor of speed". But here I am, running Nightly because holy shit this thing flies. Their work has paid off and they're not even done yet. Webrender is coming, it's not quite stable enough for daily use yet (mostly just graphics glitching and inte…

The amount of work, the extent for how long they've been doing so, all relative to the funding they got.. it's even painful to think about. Chrome shadowed them overnight, had Google infinite wallet and started from scratch. Mozilla became the old slug.. Since then they got Rust off ground, servo yielding good fruits, firefox cool n quiet. Once again kudos.

Chrome didn't start from scratch. It was based off of WebKit which was based off of KHTML [0], the code has a lineage that dates back to at least 1998.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#532

Post by kuschku »

dannyw wrote: post #514
kuschku wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you are on Windows, there Chrome makes them impossible.

No, you just load an unpacked extension in developer mode. Hard but not impossible

That’s removed on every restart of the browser on Windows nowadays.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#533

Post by syshum »

ubernostrum wrote: post #417
syshum wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the Open Web died as soon as they Caved to MS/Google on DRM, and choose to oppose the EFF in their battle to prevent DRM in becoming a standard. Mozilla is now an enemy of the Open Web, the EFF is one of the last organizations left actually standing up for the Open Web. Mozilla is just another Commercial Browser with anti-user features To be clear I am not laying all the blame at the feet of Mozilla, clearl…

So, what would you do to oppose, say, EME? What cost would you be willing to pay? Would you be OK with, for example, some number of people being badly injured or possibly dying if it would guarantee a permanent end to DRM? How many people? This is not hyperbole, by the way: when you adopt the sort of you-agree-with-me-completely-or-you're-my-enemy rhetoric you're using here, well, people's lives are what you're sayin…

>>This is not hyperbole

yes, yes it is

The idea the opposing EME and keeping EME out of the HTML5 Standard would have some how "cost lives" is moronic and hyperbolic to such a degree I will not even waste my time responding to it.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#534

Post by syshum »

ubernostrum wrote: post #451
AndrewCHM wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And strengthening the stranglehold of copyright holders, doesn't help them ruin lives in a similar way through court systems?

DRM will exist with or without EME, and web-based distribution of major popular media will use that DRM in whatever form it takes. So EME versus no EME is a wash there, and I've argued at length that killing DRM cannot be done via "principled stands" -- it has to be done via market forces, as it was with online distribution of music. Meanwhile, the rhetoric I was responding to was very much of the "people who only 99…

>>DRM will exist with or without EME

Exactly so there was not need to include it in the Standard

>and web-based distribution of major popular media will use that DRM in whatever form it takes.

Lost of popular media does not use DRM at all

>and I've argued at length that killing DRM cannot be done via "principled stands"

No it can only be done by principled stands

>it has to be done via market forces, as it was with online distribution of music.

That was killed by a principled stand not by market forces, the record labels wanted DRM, consumer did not give a shit, a few companies made a principled stand to say no...

That said, even if you want to claim it should be market forces that dictate DRM, then let the market decide by not ham fisting it into a Standard for HTML5.

That distorts the market and is the exact reason MS, Google and Netflix wanted to ensure it was in the Standard so they would not have to explain to the market why the DRM was there, why X device did not work with their products or have to compete in the market place on DRM or no DRM. DRM is "standard" now so there is no market competition for it.

I love all the DRM supporters (which you clearly are despite your claims to not be) that say "DRM was inevitable and putting in the standard would not change anything" Well then why put it in the standard? If it does not change anything, if it does not change the market, if having it in the standard is pointless why did MS/Google/Netflix/MPAA fight so hard to get it in?

because it does in fact matter. It does in fact change the market, and the conversation. Something being a "Standard" normalizes it in the market, allowing it to deployed faster, easier and with less consumer backlash. That was the entire point of the EME Spec, to normalize DRM to the consumer to make it less controversial, and more palatable

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#535

Post by 482794793792894 »

dade_ wrote: post #127

Firefox has been great for a few years, except I can't figure out how to get a good Windows touch experience. Is there an add on or theme anyone recommends? The touch points are too small and close.

The new Photon UI in Firefox 57 comes with a Touch UI. It's under Customize -> at the bottom "Density" -> Touch.

No idea, though, how well it works, I don't have a touchscreen...

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#536

Post by hawski »

nevster wrote: post #235

So torn by this. I've always been a Firefox user and one of my favourite addons is Tab Groups. Unfortunately it will stop working with 57. I'm really keen to update to 57 but until Tab Groups gets updated I'm going to be sticking to 56. Please someone take over the dev!

It seem that there will be alternatives as people answered me in different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15342731

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#537

Post by syshum »

bad_user wrote: post #483
syshum wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are one of those that "Open Web" == performance only and you look the other way on things like EME, Pocket, and various other things that lower Privacy and betray the very foundation of the "Open Web"

I personally love Pocket, it's my bookmarking service and I'm a paying customer. And staying true to their mission, Mozilla bought Pocket and is now releasing it as open source [1]. You're speaking of "betraying the foundation of the Open Web", but Mozilla is the only one out of the big players that isn't guilty of betrayal, the only big player that tried opposing patent encumbered video codecs or DRM, that have been…

>>and is now releasing it as open source

I will believe that when I see the code. 7 months now still no code, and outside of the single blog post no other comments from Pocket, Read It later, or Mozilla has given any indication they will Open Source it. In fact Read It Later is still a for profit corporations operating as a subsidiary of the For Profit Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation the non-profit organizations

>Mozilla is the only one out of the big players that isn't guilty of betrayal, the only big player that tried opposing patent encumbered video codecs or DRM

They did... When???

>If you're upset of W3C EME, your anger should be directed at the parties responsible for it, which are Google, Microsoft and Netflix

I can be upset with W3c, Netflix, Google, Microsoft and at the same time be upset with Mozilla.

I am more upset with Mozilla because they are a Non-Profit organization that had (and I stress Had) a mission to promoting Open Standards, Open Web, and User Privacy. They have turned their back on that when those issues became less popular than performance. They turned their back on those principles because market share.

They have stopped attempting to education the public on why they should care about EME, about privacy, about anything really.

I find it sad that Mozilla is no longer a leader creating conversations about why the Open Web is needed for Society, about way Standing up for Privacy and User Freedom is important. Instead they have choosen to play follow the Leader to MS and Google.

Where is the 1990's Mozilla when Microsoft wanted to maket Active X a Standard and they stood up and said NO

Where is the 2000's Mozilla when w3c wanted to drop HTML in favor of XHTML and they formed WHATWG to force the W3C in to adopting HTML5 we have today.

Where did the Leader in the open Web go? Where did Mozilla go and what is this abomination that replace it?

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#538

Post by 482794793792894 »

superkuh wrote: post #101
chank wrote: post #77

Still comes bundled with Pocket. No thanks.

Even worse, it's a walled garden. You can't edit or make your own extensions without getting each change approved by Mozilla first. They say to use the alpha(dev) or unbranded versions but the former is unstable and the later has no packaging or language support.

Don't know what you mean with packaging support, but you can install language packs into the Unbranded Builds to get the different languages.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#539

Post by wtetzner »

jrnichols wrote: post #382
Sylos wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share, that they now have the leading mobile OS under their control. You can invest a lot of money trying to remedy that, before it's actually a waste of money. And a lot of technologies and standards that were developed as part of Firefox OS still are very much around today. In terms of standards, they did a lot of work for camera and…

"It's also still considered one of the main-reasons for Chrome eating up all market share," I remember one reason Chrome gobbled up a lot of marketshare - it was the browser to install because it had Flash built in. Google definitely leveraged that, and then slowly roped people into the Googlesphere from there once they had the browser as your new default.

Not to mention how they constantly bug you on the Google homepage to switch to Chrome.

Re: It’s time to give Firefox another chance

#540

Post by Kimm0n0 »

glogla wrote: post #456
int_19h wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?

FirefoxOS was a way out of Apple's proprietary walled garden and of being Google's product and information slave. Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.

Maybe some of the hardware makers should have thrown some resources at the project.
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