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

robert.ocallahan.org

221–230 of 343 posts

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

#221
post #92

Taking users away from Google is still a big ask. Google has been thoroughly anti-competitive in this space - they deliberately downgrade the experience in non-Chrome browsers across many properties. For example, typing "GOOG stock" in Chrome/Android brings up a whole lot of details not found with Firefox/Android. There's no technical reason to do this, and they should be pulled up for abuse of monopoly power. Google…

An advantage to using Firefox Mobile is google search results suddenly become free of AMP crap

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

#222

I've seen the comment here on HN and a few other sites in the past few days - are there sites out there that don't work in Firefox, but do work in Chrome? Like, I'm aware of a few CSS properties that work in Chrome but not FF, but I don't think I've ever come across a site that doesn't look or work completely fine in FF. The only exception to this that I can think of is Google Earth, which I'm pretty sure you can ope…

Google Hangouts failed in Firefox for me last week. Had to break the Chromium out.

There's a FF extension "App for Hangouts" that puts Hangouts in its own window and has worked for me while I slowly convert my contacts into other IM systems.

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

#223
post #61
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"

> - nobody was using it; You'll need a source for that, since most Wordpress sites which constitute a HUGE part of the web have pretty much by default rss feeds. It's not because you are not using it that nobody is. And even you premise was true (which is debatable), it cost absolutely nothing for Firefox to keep a functional RSS reader without putting much effort into it (or instead, you know, putting efforts in pus…

Did users actually consume those WordPress RSS feeds using Firefox? I imagine most RSS users are going to use an RSS reader like Feedly, NewsBlur, or Google Reader (RIP). Those RSS readers don't require users to copy/paste RSS URLs. Users can search feeds by site or topic names.

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

#224
post #92

Taking users away from Google is still a big ask. Google has been thoroughly anti-competitive in this space - they deliberately downgrade the experience in non-Chrome browsers across many properties. For example, typing "GOOG stock" in Chrome/Android brings up a whole lot of details not found with Firefox/Android. There's no technical reason to do this, and they should be pulled up for abuse of monopoly power. Google…

Just downloaded Firefox on Android following your advice. I'm a heavy firefox user on the destkop, but I rarely think about installing firefox on my cellphones since 1. Firefox in Firefox OS was slow and it gave me a feeling that firefox was not for mobile (but I guess it's not true anymore) 2. The fact that Chrome is the default browser and I generally don't install many apps.

The fact that it is the default on Android makes the game very unfair.

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

#227
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same could be said of the RSS support.

True. The big difference is that users use Pocket but didn't use RSS.

A lot of people have a really strong negative perception of pocket. That should be enough to be able to remove it.

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

#228

Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly misplaced. I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often. It's one of the most common firefox questions on stackoverflow: If you have a dark gtk theme, like Arc-dark or Adwaita-dark, then Firefox randomly colors certain web page elements (usually text boxes) dark to match your desktop theme. Almost always resulting in…

There were lots of requests to have form controls "look native", which is why they were changed to use the desktop theme... One problem with that, as you note, is web pages that are setting a color but not a background color on elements, which is a web development 101 mistake. But there's just no way to win here: either you can use the OS theme for widgets and things fail when sites make this mistake, or the widgets…

But... but... I want to have my cake and eat it too!

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

#230
post #196

Frankly, I don't want to choose firefox. Their priorities are utterly misplaced. I can't believe people don't talk about the dark gtk theming bug more often. It's one of the most common firefox questions on stackoverflow: If you have a dark gtk theme, like Arc-dark or Adwaita-dark, then Firefox randomly colors certain web page elements (usually text boxes) dark to match your desktop theme. Almost always resulting in…

Since it's so critical to you, and if it's so obvious (I haven't checked, I take your word on it), would you consider submitting a patch to fix this issue? I can guide you on patch submission, if you need.

Patches have been submitted, tons and tons of times, and are always rejected. The maintainers say "it's the website's fault for not respecting the user's theming preferences" even as their own website does it.

They've been saying that user theming will sweep over the web and this issue will fix itself since the year 2000.

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