How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?
You can trust both of them to do that well. Other than that it's hard to make a comparison not reliant on anecdotes, I guess.
Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
101–110 of 310 posts
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#102A reminder that, as article points out, a healthy web needs multiple independent client implementations and we're already down to less than a handful major ones. Ideally they should hold equivalent usage share which implies that as currently usage is heavily tilted towards Google Chrome, the best way in which you can help Mozilla is to use their browser and get your friends and family to use it too, unless there's a…
I tried to switch over. Switched from chrome to firefox completely for about two weeks after quantum. I got random high cpu usage from firefox. Some random pages just spiked the cpu and everything slowed down. Same thing on both my workstation and laptop. I also didnt find a way to make opensearch working. In chrome i can just type part of the url of a website, press tab and write a search query and get a search on t…
Google Maps crash Quantum for me on a regular basis. I am trying not to become a conspiracy theorist, but this is making it difficult.
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you claiming now? Are you claiming Mozilla was the tool of Google, switched to being the tool of Microsoft or Yahoo, and then back to being the tool of Google? Or are you claiming that Mozilla is the tool of the "search industry" which is some amorphous group containing all of the above? Google (and other companies in some countries) pay Mozilla to be the default search in Firefox. It's a business transactio…
It is super, super simple. When 80%+ of your revenue depends on a search engine, and you still have payroll to make, you are by definition dependent upon it, regardless of which one it happens to be at the time. The article title is "Maintaining an Independent Browser is Expensive". I'm just calling it out. From the tone of the replies, kicked off by a guy in the analytics industry who went so far as to google me for…
Also you didn't answer my questions.
Please spell out exactly who you think is influencing Mozilla, and to do what (that Mozilla wouldn't normally do for the sake of their mission). And please support your claims with evidence.
("X pays $Y to Mozilla" is already adequately explained by the fact that Firefox-generated search traffic is valuable to X.)
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until they have actually diversified, they are by definition dependent on whichever search engine they are currently contracted to.
Yes, but you implied they couldn't strive for independence while doing so. Furthermore, it's good to note that they have actually diversified: https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2014/11/new-search-strategy-f...
That is from 2014. They are back on the smack[0].
As long as search is the revenue center, there isn't much room[1] for diversification. If they need annual revenue of ~$400M to operate, it's either Google or Google.
edit: On that last point, I could be wrong. Most of the biggies could throw half a billion at them indefinitely if it served the right purpose.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/14/mozilla-terminates-its-dea...
[1] https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as...
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess it's not wrong to call it their original engine, just remember it's a two-decades-old development that started at Netscape.
Well, arguably started at DigitalStyle.
Can you expand? I thought I had a good grasp of Mozilla’s history but this is the first time I’ve heard of them.
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#106Mozilla does not need 1200 people to make Firefox. Mozilla has 1200 people because they blow all of their money irresponsibly, and that's apparently how many people you can hire with the bribes/revenue from Google it pays to maintain its monopoly. The chairwoman takes over $1M year? Why would an open source project need anyone who would be so unethical? This is like a city councilperson paying themselves $1M/year. It…
"Firefox could be done with 400 people" is a "fact" you just made up.
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see how north of 80k$/mo is a reasonable salary. Maybe things are more costly in America, with private insurance and whatnot, but where I live (Italy) few people earn more than €10k/mo after taxes.
It's because there's so much competition for experienced people in Silicon Valley. If Mozilla wouldn't pay her that much, another company would.
Has anyone ever tried to hire someone requiring less than or up to max say 20k for such a job?
I wonder which qualifications that are that you find only in people asking for >50 or even 100k/month.
I am from Europe so i might miss something that’s different in US. But 20k USD would make for a very good living here. Ok you only can afford one house with that an no 1000sqm villa and no Ferrari... but i state you don’t need either.
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way back when, there were versions of IE 4, 5, and 6 for non-Windows OSes such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Mac OS (Classic and X both). It is not unreasonable that they could do it again.
Those were basically just independent pieces of software, and had their own set of features and bugs (IE5.5 on mac was notoriously buggy)
5.0 and 5.1 were pretty bad. 5.2 was surprisingly standards compliant for the time (apart from `clear` inheriting, that was painful). 5.5 was a Windows only version of Trident, never available on the Mac (the Mac’s rendering engine was Tasman).
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#109Supporting FF then is a kind of participating in mass movement to fight against capitalism.
They support antifa, it's cancerous organization.
Re: Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
#110How do Firefox and Chrome compare in respect of security?
With Firefox 57, they're now essentially equivalent in terms of the security architecture.
There's a small architectural difference with how tabs are sandboxed against one another. That is, Chrome starts a new process for every tab, unless it's on the same domain as another tab.
Firefox by default only uses as many processes for tabs as you have processor cores and then round-robins tabs across those. This achieves essentially equivalent parallelism with much lower resource usage, so overall better performance. If you'd rather have the security than the performance, you can set dom.ipc.processCount in about:config to a higher number. This is the maximum number of processes that it will use for tabs, so setting it to something like 1000 will essentially make it start a new process for each tab.
Then there's something to be said about add-ons. Mozilla does manual code reviews of most extensions and extension updates. (They have some criteria for when they don't do a manual code review and instead just an automated check, based on how damaging the extension is able to be with the things that it accesses.)
As a result, AMO has essentially no problems with malware, whereas on the Chrome Store you hear every other month of some trojan or adware spreading.
Mozilla also has a policy that disallows telemetry without user opt-in as a whole, so recognizing adware or a trojan is just a matter of observing network traffic where it shouldn't necessarily be going.
Lastly, Firefox Sync is end-to-end-encrypted by default, only one password needed. Chrome Sync is not, you need to set up a second password for it to be end-to-end-encrypted. And Google will store and work with your Sync data, if you do not opt for E2EE, so that's another possibility for a pretty big data leak. Not a problem, if you are security-conscious and don't mind setting up that secondary password, but recommending it to average users on the merits of it being secure is essentially out with this.