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

robert.ocallahan.org

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

#81

Post by craigsmansion »

Jonnax wrote: post #68
craigsmansion wrote: post #58

Well, maybe if Mozilla hadn't alienated their early Freedom/Open web oriented users with their web hostile actions (or inaction). You know, the kind of users that would stick with "inferior" software because of values. That mountain ahead, Mozilla, is the accumulation of all the "hills not to die on". You got the clout you wanted by selling out, but now those users are flocking to technically better solutions as you'…

Okay. So they sold out and the alternative is a browser from an advert company. How do you think Mozilla should fund the development of Firefox?

An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers.

As much as I dislike that, from the advert company I know they're on the side of the advertisers. They're not presenting a "we're on the side of you, the users" face, whilst behaving more or less the same.

A better alternative would be a fork of Firefox, kept up to date by a handful of overworked but dedicated-to-their-users volunteers. These exist, and maybe they would get some more recognition and funding if Mozilla were to cease to exist.

I don't think Mozilla can change. They're too comfortably corporate. Having lost sight of their mission, I think it would be better if it disappeared and was replaced by something else.

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

#82

Post by diafygi »

saagarjha wrote: post #53
bad_user wrote: post #39

Note this advice is true for email services as well. Pay for and use an alternative now, or later you won't get the choice. Google is hellbent on locking people into their ecosystem. One such move is the promotion of AMP: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-for-email-is-a-terribl... Speaking of email and browsers, the Gmail app on top of iOS presents the user with a choice between two browsers: 1. Safari 2. Chrome,…

> Firefox on iOS doesn't do that either, but at least Firefox has its own tracking protection. Firefox on iOS can't do this, unfortunately :(

I'm curious about this. I get that firefox for ios has to use a webview, but why can't it allow extensions that can manipulate what's in the webview? The main reason I'm currently sticking with Android is that I can install firefox and use ublock origin and https everywhere.

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

#83

Post by AsyncAwait »

aceshades wrote: post #78
nindalf wrote: post #9

Just so we can avoid rehashing the discussion whenever a post encouraging the use of Firefox is posted. - Yes, Mozilla is still the better browser when it comes to privacy. - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. - Yes, it is slow/resource heavy on certain Macs with non-default resolutions. Yes, Mozilla is working on a fix. - Yes, it has become really fast for most users after Quantum improvements…

What was the misstep with Pocket? I've been loving it since I discovered it thru Firefox.

It's just some people don't like it's bundled in by default. Seems really as a non-issue, especially since now Mozilla owns the service.

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

#84

Post by AsyncAwait »

vrazj wrote: post #80
aceshades wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the misstep with Pocket? I've been loving it since I discovered it thru Firefox.

That's cool. And? I use a lot of addons. Should they all be bundled because many people happen to love them too?

To be fair, Mozilla now owns Pocket. It's not just some random extension. Chrome comes preinstalled with YouTube, Gmail etc. too. It's a bit of cross-property promotion and to be fair, Pocket is indeed quite useful.

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

#85

Post by AsyncAwait »

vrazj wrote: post #73
Yoric wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was removed because - pretty much nobody was using it; - it's pretty easy to reimplement as an extension. Championing the Free Web is harder if you also need to champion the dead web. edit "nobody" => "pretty much nobody"

Pocket is also easy to implement as an extension. In fact, it is an extension. But they bundled it with the browser.

It's their own service.

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

#86

Post by OpenBSD-reich2 »

Why would I choose Firefox and all the baggage of Mozilla organizationally, when I've already chosen superior Chromium in the form of Iridium browser? The only thing left for Mozilla to do in converting Firefox into the GNOME 3 of browsers is to start viciously paring features for usability/"user experience!" I don't know if Iridium is pledged in OpenBSD, but Chrome definitely is whereas at this point it's almost impossible to pledge Firefox.

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

#87

Post by trendia »

Yoric wrote: post #74
trendia wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market research indicates that most people actually love RSS.

An implementation of RSS baked into the browser? I'd be surprised. Do you have a source?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626702

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

#88

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

Yoric wrote: post #44
nindalf wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I like Pocket, but I can't see why it shouldn't be an extension that can be removed.

Intellectually, I agree, but - it actually doesn't hurt; - market research indicates that most people actually love it.

These "missteps" are the reason I don't use Firefox. With Chrome, I know Google are watching. But I also know only Google are watching. They're not bundling irremovable third party apps in with the browser, or installing extensions without my consent, or sending my entire browsing history to another third party.

Mozilla have done all these things, and when called out on it, they don't seem to realise they've done anything wrong. That crosses the line from naive to actively malicious.

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

#89

Post by underwater »

craigsmansion wrote: post #81
Jonnax wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. So they sold out and the alternative is a browser from an advert company. How do you think Mozilla should fund the development of Firefox?

An alternative is an open source version of a browser from an advert company, with anti-features hopefully being kept in check by diligent maintainers. As much as I dislike that, from the advert company I know they're on the side of the advertisers. They're not presenting a "we're on the side of you, the users" face, whilst behaving more or less the same. A better alternative would be a fork of Firefox, kept up to da…

Your alternative only makes sense if Chrome continues to win. Google is not going to continue investing in Chromium if a competing open source browser wins out.

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

#90

Post by jillesvangurp »

Easy path to success for Firefox is to continue to beef up security and privacy tooling for their users and have sane defaults. They've been winning a lot of users who feel abandoned by the big companies in this space.

A problem and conflict of interest for them regarding this is that they are funded mainly by Google. Firefox has a conflict of interest here because they are not doing all they can here because that would cut off their main source of revenue.

So, for example, they have sort of a mute option for sound (just like other browsers) but they don't allow you to mute video by default (without blanket turning it off for all websites). I don't know anyone who loves being bombarded with video content when they want to read an article. I find the moving stuff to be distracting; even if the sound is off. Also the bandwidth is kind of not nice, especially on mobile. The BBC has started putting multiple video previews in their articles. This kind of attention whoring is highly annoying. This is not news to anyone of course.

The obvious fix allow people to whitelist sites to allow autoplaying video (youtube, netflix, and other websites where people go specifically to enjoy video content) and switch that off for everything else. All the extenions for that claim to do this are basically a combination of broken or simply setting the config property that blanket bans all autoplay video for every website (just preempting the inevitable comment to try extension X here).

Similarly, the containers extension is great. This should be baked into the browser and improved to the point where the default container is a private container unless you whitelist the domain. Right now private browsing happens in a separate window. It's an obvious thing to do: every site by default is private until you say otherwise.

Both kind of are in direct conflict with how Google, and by extension, how Mozilla monetizes. This is the main reason this is made hard to do. I'm sure if this was easier, there'd be countless extensions doing exactly that. Instead people sort of emulate private browsing with stuff like noscript and other extensions that throw away cookies. Also nice but not user friendly.

Doing all this in fool proof, user friendly way would be a great way for Firefox to differentiate. It would unfortunately cut them off from Google funding probably.

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