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

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

#241

Post by O1111OOO » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #140

zymhan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stuck with it and preached it and told people why Google is just going to repeat IE's history with Chrome, and my tech friends still mostly use Chrome. There is something about A) what everyone else is doing, and B) inertia, that is just too difficult to overcome without some sudden significant change.

The single biggest advantage of Chrome is that it's bundled as the default, non-removable browser on the largest mobile OS in the world: Android. And nearly all those people then expect to use the same browser on laptops and desktops and even here it is often pre-installed by OEM. If Firefox had somehow had this clinching advantage in an alternate reality, they would be the Chrome now. The actual performance and tech…

> The single biggest advantage of Chrome is that it's bundled as the default, non-removable browser on the largest mobile OS in the world: Android.

I'm still upset that Mozilla balked on Firefox OS[0]. It would have made a good ChromeOS competitor on laptops and tablets. I would have opted for a Firefox OS tablet instead of Android as a secondary device. A privacy-focused tablet would have been amazing.

Honestly don't see any reason why Mozilla couldn't restart the project on larger-screen devices - skipping the phone phase for a period. Especially now that they have their rust-powered Quantum Browser showing the world what it can do.

They could always do phones later on when the platform matures. I think they are failing to see that solutions are about ecosystems. Few can deny they have a rich, browser-based, ecosystem. They are still thinking in legacy terms - a single-use application.

I believe they have the monetary means (and the talent) to enter hardware (or via Kickstarter). Their worst enemy... they may be a little old-school, corporate management-heavy on top.

Their leadership let Firefox stagnate, the performance suffered the entire time Chrome was taking everyone's market share. We're talking years of neglect.

> If Firefox had somehow had this clinching advantage in an alternate reality.

The alternate reality... Google invests $22 million in the ported version of Fire OS, KaiOS[1]. They are helping to keep alive (and integrating themselves) into the very OS Mozilla created (and abandoned).

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

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/27/google-kaios/

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

#242

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

ballooney wrote: post #33

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome has better security unless you want to keep yourself secure from prying by Google.

Would someone who actually _knows_ the answer (I know this will not deter the HN-reckon but worth a try) be able to comment on if/why this security gap exists? Is it something fundamental to the different design choices, is it just which has had more test/resources thrown at it, and is the closing of the gap practical and/or on a roadmap?

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by Improvotter » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

I'd use Firefox if I didn't have to enter my master password on MacOS every time I start the program. It integrates with keyrings on Linux, is it that hard to get it to work on MacOS which has more users? Also, does it work on Windows?

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

#244

Post by basch » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

feanaro wrote: post #49

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…

- Yes, Firefox does support Containers, which are a very innovative privacy feature allowing you to maintain separate browser sessions (cookies, site preferences, ...) towards different websites inside a single browser instance.[1][2] [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers#w_what-are-c... [2] https://www.thechiefmeat.com/guides/containers.html

I use both firefox and chrome. Chrome does have user profiles, and I can have multiple open at once. Separate cookies but ALSO separate extensions.

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

#245

Post by Scarbutt » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #140

zymhan wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've stuck with it and preached it and told people why Google is just going to repeat IE's history with Chrome, and my tech friends still mostly use Chrome. There is something about A) what everyone else is doing, and B) inertia, that is just too difficult to overcome without some sudden significant change.

The single biggest advantage of Chrome is that it's bundled as the default, non-removable browser on the largest mobile OS in the world: Android. And nearly all those people then expect to use the same browser on laptops and desktops and even here it is often pre-installed by OEM. If Firefox had somehow had this clinching advantage in an alternate reality, they would be the Chrome now. The actual performance and tech…

Firefox was losing to chrome long before android became so big, Mozilla dropped the ball here, they were too late on mobile.

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

#246

Post by Paul-ish » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:05 PM UTC

Santosh83 wrote: post #79

Yoric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Chrome multiprocess isolation model is really good. Firefox devs have known this for ages (heck, there were demos of a version of Firefox 3.x with a similar model), but could not actually land this model for two reasons: - it would break all old-style extensions and users were unhappy about that; - it takes looooots of memory and users were unhappy about that, too. Now that Firefox has dropped all old-style exten…

A browser written in Rust (which is probably Firefox's long term goal) should blow Chrome out of the water in terms of security, despite the massive efforts invested in that regard by Google to prop up Chrome's C++ code base.

It seems unlikely that FF will ever be completely written in Rust. More likely that new bits that get added are Rust, and many of the old bits stay C++.

If FF gets rewritten in Rust, it will be a decades long effort.

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

#247

Post by mixmastamyk » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

csdreamer7 wrote: post #203

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…

I have never been able to move over to Chrome. Chrome always synces my bookmarks out of place. My bookmarks are how I get things done and run on muscle memory. Because of this I have been a loyal FF user for decades. I tried Chrome again last year and bookmarks still sync out of order. It boggles my mind that Google never fixed this or just isn't a problem for people (do people care?). As an FF user for decades, esp…

> FF now runs very smooth and uses so much less memory.

The big memory use fix went out a few years before quantum. Extensions like firebug were leaking memory.

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

#248

Post by ohthehugemanate » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #63

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…

> - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. These are forgivable in my opinion. At least this steps are somehow understandable. What I‘m really miffed about is their partnership with Cliqz. If Google is the devil then Cliqz is Beelzebub. I don‘t understand what they were thinking...

Er... You mean Cliqz, the privacy focused fork of Firefox, with a locally hosted search engine and special crowd sourced Anti-Tracking magic, that experiments with zero-knowledge, locally hosted advertising as a revenue model?

There must be another cliqz? Or are there some skeletons in the closet I should know about? Beelzebub to Google's devil is pretty strong for the people that own ghostery...

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

#249

Post by amyjess » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

gambler wrote: post #233

jillesvangurp wrote: post #90

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 wo…

Most people don't care. Firefox became popular by being fast and offering tabbed browsing when IE didn't. I think being fast and offering radical quality of life feature is a good strategy to follow even now.

> tabbed browsing

And popup blocking. I remember how much of the Internet was utterly infested with popups in the early-to-mid-00s. Firefox was the only way to not get inundated, unless you were a really hardcore geek and ran a proxy server like Junkbuster (the ancestor of Privoxy), and most of the population wasn't going to do that.

Popup blocking changed how the Internet works, and you can thank Firefox and Opera for that.

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

#250

Post by amyjess » Fri, Dec 07, 2018, 5:16 PM UTC

Honestly, the only thing the use of FUD like this headline has done is to continue to put me off of the FOSS community.

Back in the '90s, it used to be big companies like MS that used FUD against FOSS. Now the FOSS community uses FUD against everyone else. FUD is bad no matter who spreads it.

Hint: If your argument is "don't use our competitor, or else", you are engaging in abusive monopolistic behavior, and it gives me reason to believe that if you actually manage to destroy your competition, you will not hesitate to abuse your newfound monopoly.