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Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

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Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#161

Post by caf »

dagenix wrote: post #114
hirundo wrote: post #103

I disagree with Brendan Eich on same-sex marriage. And I'm not neutral or ambivalent on the subject; I wholeheartedly approve of the practice. But I disapprove of the way Eich was treated for his heresy. I think that he is a fine man and a great technologist and Firefox is a poorer product due to his excommunication. So for me it isn't time to give Firefox another try. It's time to keep using Eich's far more innovati…

He was the CEO. How are Mozilla employees supposed to believe he is going to look out for them when he literally spent money to advance a cause that was harmful to some of his employees and in no way beneficial to anyone. It wasn't like he was just some dude that didn't have people management responsibilities and kept his mouth shut. The decisions he made would impact lots of peoples lives. Mozilla employees were abs…

It's also the fact that CEOs embody and represent the entire organisation in a way that individual contributors and even mid-level managers do not. This is a part of the job, alongside the big salaries and the yacht parties.

Consider how people's opinions on Mark Zuckerberg colour their opinions on Facebook, or how often Satya Nadella is referenced in conversations on Microsoft's corporate culture and how it may or may not have changed (and how the previous culture is often literally referred to as the "Ballmer era").

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#162

Post by damnyou »

alf-pogz wrote: post #137
rpearl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted. This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open sou…

The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument. I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are st…

Doxing is publishing PII. Political donations are NOT PII and are in fact supposed to be public. It is completely legitimate for a CEO's political donations to be scrutinized.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#163

Post by pseudalopex »

alf-pogz wrote: post #137
rpearl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted. This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open sou…

The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument. I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are st…

Eich's donation became widely known in 2012, when he was still CTO. Nothing came of it until he was promoted to CEO in 2014.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#164

Post by joshuamorton »

alf-pogz wrote: post #137
rpearl wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? His donation (of public record) specifically against same sex marriage--indicated that he was not a good culture fit. People (inside and outside the organization) chose to point that out when he was promoted. This really doesn't have anything to do with user privacy in any way whatsoever--nothing about user privacy was surfaced or breached in any way. Nor is there any indication, in mozilla's extremely open sou…

The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it. Folks at Mozilla actively chose to find a touchy topic, and expose it to cause the "bad culture fit" argument. I'm not here to start conspiracies, I'm simply stating that the entire event left me feeling that there are some big players at Mozilla that will use ethically gray areas to achieve their goals, and the people who indulged in that gray area won and are st…

>The act was definitely "doxing" any way you slice it.

How exactly is taking publicly available information about a (comparatively) high profile individual and sharing it doxing?

Political donations are public information[1]. As far as I can tell, (and according to Mozilla), the group that made public the information about Eich was The LA Times, in 2012. Two years before he was made CEO[2][3].

In what way is retweeting a two year old newspaper headline about the recently promoted CEO of your company remotely doxxing?

[1]: http://projects.latimes.com/prop8/results/

[2]: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

[3]: http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/04/business/la-fi-tn-br...

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#165

Post by Rebelgecko »

nayuki wrote: post #136
Rebelgecko wrote: post #75

I switched from Chrome to Firefox a few months ago and am mostly happy, with just a few annoyances: There's a setting to prompt "are you sure" before closing Firefox, but it doesn't actually work. I really miss this feature (which works as expected in Chrome) since unless I'm turning my machine off a pretty much never close my browser intentionally Shortcuts in text input also work differently than every other progra…

> "are you sure" before closing Firefox I believe this feature gets disabled if you enable the feature that automatically restores your previous session when Firefox is opened.

Yeah, there's some arguments about that on their bug tracker page and it looks like someone tried to change that code but it never went anywhere. If you horde tabs like I do it can still waste a lot of time to restart the browser and wait for the session to be restored.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#166

Post by justsee »

theseatoms wrote: post #126
hirundo wrote: post #103

I disagree with Brendan Eich on same-sex marriage. And I'm not neutral or ambivalent on the subject; I wholeheartedly approve of the practice. But I disapprove of the way Eich was treated for his heresy. I think that he is a fine man and a great technologist and Firefox is a poorer product due to his excommunication. So for me it isn't time to give Firefox another try. It's time to keep using Eich's far more innovati…

Last time I tried Brave, I was dissuaded from adopting it due to poor support for extensions. Hopefully that part's improving.

Yes they're switching to a full Chromium base so all Chrome extensions will be compatible.

ETA for releasable build is Sept 7 according to: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/milestone/3

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#167

Post by aquova »

grundymonday wrote: post #153

I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago after using Firefox as my main browser for the longest time. I've considered switching back, but every time I run up against several features in Vivaldi that I am just not ready to part with yet: 1) tab stacks, 2) the ability to save and reopen an entire session, 3) a page load progress indicator in the URL bar, 4) using Ctrl-F highlights the position of all matching locations…

I am in the same boat as you are. After the Firefox Quantum release, I decided to switch from Vivaldi and try Firefox out for a little bit. While I did like it, and it did seem to have a slightly faster performance, there are just many QoL feature s that Vivaldi offers that Firefox doesn't (or at least isn't immediately apparent). Simple things such as rebinding keys or reorganizing the top sites were such a headache that I very quickly switched back.

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#168

Post by miqkt »

mxvzr wrote: post #152
fencepost wrote: post #85

I haven't seen anyone mention this, but Firefox is my "daily driver" for almost all browsing, and is also locked down with uMatrix, uBlock Origin, DecentralEyes and Ghostery (though I could probably drop Ghostery without missing it). Chrome has uBlock Origin and a few other things but interferes with pages less. I keep a set of pages for some specific web apps (e.g. GMail, Google Calendar, task management, etc.) open…

I'd remove Ghostery. Not only is it useless once you are running uMatrix & uBlock Origin, they also used to sells your data (page visit, blocking, and advertising statistics) if you activated a feature called "GhostRank". Not sure whether it's still true or not.

Ghostery also had an incident [1] last month where they exposed e-mail addresses of some users, which I guess adds further doubt to their reliability.

[1]: https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/ghostery-email-i...

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#169

Post by callahad »

nimbius wrote: post #53

1. does it still require me to use pulseaudio to compile it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661 2. does it still send DNS data to third parties for analytics. https://www.ghacks.net/2018/03/20/firefox-dns-over-https-and... 3. Am i still required to build Pocket when I build Firefox? are we still forbidden from removing pocket? 4. Is telemetry still shipped on by default? https://www.theregister.co.u…

1. Yes. The bug you linked to is prominently marked "RESOLVED WONTFIX."

2. We are not sending DNS data to third parties "for analytics." We are openly and transparently conducting a DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) experiment with a very small portion of users running Nightly test builds of Firefox. The experiment places a massive notification banner in the browser window with prominent buttons to disable or accept the experiment.

The details on DoH and how it improves both security and privacy are explained by Lin Clark in https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/05/a-cartoon-intro-to-dns-ove... (HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196415).

3. Firefox is Free Software, under an OSI-approved license. You're not "required" to build pocket, nor can or would we "forbid" you from removing it when you build Firefox.

...but you could also save yourself a lot of time and just toggle the "disablePocket" group policy: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

Still seems like a really bizarre thing to get hung up on when the extent of "Pocket in Firefox" is a toolbar icon and a section of the new tab page, both of which can be hidden with 1-2 clicks, after which they're completely inert. But hey, whatever floats your goat.

4. Yes, we gather a limited amount of telemetry by default. Unlike other modern platforms, this is always available for your own inspection (see about:telemetry and https://telemetry.mozilla.org/), and you can opt-out with a single checkbox. We actually reduced the telemetry we gather last year: https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-i...

Re: Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try

#170

Post by citilife »

jploh wrote: post #108
furgooswft13 wrote: post #78

I find it kind of ironic that Mozilla rewrote Netscape Navigator from scratch with the lofty idea of creating an entire cross-platform application development platform, not just a browser. XUL, XULRunner etc. But it never caught on and they abandoned all that to focus on just the browser. Yet now Electron is everywhere... Before its time and abandoned in the nick of it. And no one cares about native GUI's anymore app…

I remember XUL. Not a fan but it's sad it didn't take off. We need an Electron alternative.

I use Qt for some pretty large applications - works well and highly recommend.
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