Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 343 posts

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

#291

Post by unethical_ban »

Yoric wrote: post #46
ekianjo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Yes, Mozilla has made missteps with Pocket and Mr. Robot. and the removal of RSS support. So much for the champions of the Free Web!

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"

Was it hard to maintain? Is RSS antithetical to the open Internet?

If the answer to both is no, they should have left it. I wish I could tell my parents to subscribe to some news sites and my website to see updates, so they dont' have to join some kind of mailing list... but I can't, because I'm not going to explain how to configure addons to my 70 year old.

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

#292

Post by feanaro »

EpicEng wrote: post #236
feanaro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

An almost completely non-discoverable feature which most people won't even understand, let alone use. I think it's awesome as well, but stuff like this doesn't move the needle.

Yes, the discoverability is definitely a problem, though I think that might be on purpose and that Mozilla might be planning to do something user-facing with the feature. But I disagree it's that hard for users to eventually understand and accept, if presented right. Tabs were also a niche feature once.

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

#293

Post by feanaro »

basch wrote: post #244
feanaro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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.

You may not have been suggesting otherwise, but in case you're not aware, Firefox also has user profiles and can have multiple open at once.

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

#294

Post by bzbarsky »

hannasanarion wrote: post #263
bzbarsky wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AFAIK themes still don't exist in Windows and OSX. They exist just fine on Windows. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13768/desktop-theme... for example, and there's a number of themes that ship with Windows by default, including several "dark" themes. On Mac I am not aware of themes per se, but there are accessibility options that have similar effects. Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Sto…

> Again, what is your specific proposed solution? Why do you need a proposal from me? What's wrong with this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8 Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12 Or this one? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026... Or this one? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026... Or this one? https://bugzilla.…

> What's wrong with this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c8

Like the comment says: it makes things better with some themes but worse with others. Incidentally, the author of that patch is a senior engineer at Mozilla now; if he actually thought this patch made things better, it would be in the tree.

Note, by the way, that this bug report is about the Firefox UI itself, not about web pages.

> Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c12

That comment comes down to "stop doing native theming", no?

> Or this one? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...

That's the same as your first link.

> Or this one? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/22026...

Amusingly enough, that comment was written by me. There's nothing wrong with it. It's from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=437366 which was a superficially similar, but not at all the same issue, and which I fixed back in 2009. (And yes, I have thought about this problem space quite a bit in the past, though not necessarily the Linux-specific bits.)

> Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c36

That says "stop doing native theming".

> Or this one? https://github.com/lightradius/firefox-dark-theme-fix

That's a set of CSS rules that disables native theming.

> Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c45

This comment is about the Firefox UI, not web pages.

> Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70315#c46

This one is actually useful, thank you. Following the links from there lands me at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086#c13 from one of the RedHat folks who have been active in this stuff. Note that this comment says that Firefox tries to avoid using dark themes for form controls, but some dark themes fail to properly flag themselves as dark themes. Which makes it hard to avoid them.

Also, can you stop pretending like no one has worked on this? Given https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1353147 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1158076 it sure looks like people have been active here.

> Or this one? https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1461538#c9

Karl is an engineer on Firefox, working on GTK integration. If he felt that his comment were the right fix, it would be in the tree.

> In what crazy world is it considered good design practice to force thousands of your users to install 3rd party extensions to be able to read text on the internet?

In a world where all the proposals for fixing that so far make millions of users unhappy?

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

#295

Post by z5h »

kahlonel wrote: post #287

As a non-web-dev, I'm still looking for a reason to not use Safari on my macbook. Perhaps I'm too dumb to see the difference, but I've never found chrome/firefox to be better than safari.

As an exercise in trying to install the minimum amount of software on my Machine, I'm using Safari as my default browser. However, there are cases I have found where a website simply doesn't work with Safari but has been developed and tested against Chrome.

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

#297

Post by TheKarateKid »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #224
jeswin wrote: 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 Andr…

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

The EU is already looking into this, and other antitrust issues with Android and even Google Search in general.

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

#298

Post by TheKarateKid »

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's memory leaks are still pretty bad especially compared to Chrome. Quantum helped a lot though.

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

#299

Post by pseudalopex »

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.

Mozilla was developing a private Reading List feature based on Firefox Sync when they suddenly replaced it with Pocket. At the time, Pocket was a third party with a business model that included data mining. Mozilla owns Pocket now, but it still requires users to give up some of their privacy.

Mozilla employees denied for months that Pocket paid for the integration. Eventually it came out that there was a referral deal.

Mozilla acquired Pocket in early 2017 and said they would release the source code. That still hasn't happened.

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

#300

Post by vram22 »

nunodonato wrote: post #189
vram22 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I guess it may be possible to use it to be logged into and use different email accounts, e.g. foo@emailservice.com and bar@emailservice.com from the same browser instance. That would be helpful.

this is what I am doing now. Plus, opening facebook? BAM instant new container automagically open for me, to keep facebook in its own walled garden :D

Ha. Reminds of a quote, vaguely:

In a world without Windows, something something doors (or Gates, or some other permutations of those).

Though I don't remember the quote, I remember it being a good one.

Post reply on HN