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

Thank you, Chris

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: Thank you, Chris

#91

Post by jsty »

stonogo wrote: post #80
jsty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is an open source project. I'm sure if you pitched in with time and / or money to maintain said features, they'd be much less likely to disappear.

Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead... Firefox is an open source project, but here is no openness in the product management. The decisions regarding features to keep or discard are determined by politics internal to Mozilla.

> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead

I sincerely hope it's neither. I'm well aware that a third party can't direct Mozilla as to how to channel its resources. They can however ensure there are sufficient contributors external to Mozilla to maintain the features they wish to keep.

Even if the end decision is still made by Mozilla internals, the decision to keep functionality is much easier if they don't have to battle for resources to maintain it thanks to external contributors being willing to do so.

At the end of the day, being an open project does not require the maintainers to do work simply because a subset of users wishes it.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#93

Post by littlestymaar »

saidajigumi wrote: post #45
huhtenberg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is now openly peeing in Google's punch all the while being dependent on piles of money they take from it. At some point Google will get tired of this and will withdraw from the agreement. They won't be the default search provider, but that will play to their advantage - Firefox out-of-the-box user experience will take a sharp nose dive. Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a…

Say all you want about DDG and alternatives, but they still can't hold a candle to Google's search quality. I'm rather torn on this point. On one hand, yes, DDG for example feels some years behind Google in its relevance ranking. On the other, Google itself has been degrading the quality of its own results with ads, etc. so badly that they've seriously degraded their own "above the fold" relevant results.

I feel exactly the same: I've been using DDG for 7 years now for privacy reasons, but I have been using !g (ddg's shortcut to search on google) a lot because ddg was often lacking useful results. But I've now noticed that Google itself has become a poor search engine too!

Nowadays, I still use !g when out of luck with DDG, but 90% of the times, Google don't give me the answer I'm looking for either. And I don't feel it's because DDG improved that much but because Google declined.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#94

Post by floatingatoll »

sciurus wrote: post #90
modzu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its so obvious that native ad blocking could be that feature. when a non-tech user opens up a browser with ad blocking it blows their mind. they go to youtube and put on a song, and wait! they don't have to reach for the mute first to silence some loud ad? they don't have to wait to click "skip" on the ad? it just works?? the user just wants the content and we can give it to them. imo this would be the step from chro…

Firefox has tracking protection enabled by default. Given the current state of the ad ecosystem, this has the side effect of blocking most ads. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-availab...

Enabled for new users by default. Existing users currently need to go to Preferences and set the cookie setting to “Block tracking” rather than one of the other options to get these benefits.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#95

Post by Kevin_S »

eitland wrote: post #81
entropicdrifter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount... There's a monthly option right there

> Contributions go to the Mozilla Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization based in Mountain View, California, to be used in its discretion for its charitable purposes. I've read about this before I think, for some reason donations cannot be used for development and has to be used for outreach etc?

All it means is that they can use the funds as they see fit. There should be a breakdown somewhere on their site of what % of funds go toward development verse admin/fundraising as they are a 501c3.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#96

Post by dang »

stonogo wrote: post #80
jsty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is an open source project. I'm sure if you pitched in with time and / or money to maintain said features, they'd be much less likely to disappear.

Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead... Firefox is an open source project, but here is no openness in the product management. The decisions regarding features to keep or discard are determined by politics internal to Mozilla.

> Assuming this is naivete and not a deliberate attempt to mislead

Can you please edit out gratuitous swipes like that from your HN posts? It breaks a number of the site guidelines and your comment would be fine (with higher signal/noise) without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Thank you, Chris

#97

Post by littlestymaar »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #73
angrygoat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox decimated Internet Explorer in the 2000s, it was just... better. And I think Chrome had some fairly obvious gains over Firefox and IE which led it to gain market share. I was an early adopter of Chrome, but that was in the days before Google seemed so sinister... I use Firefox now because I care about privacy, and I'd rather use a browser developed by a non-profit that cares about that as well. But I sus…

Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results. Which they do, if you access them using a non-Chrome browser, or at least used to... I confess I'm not sure because I still use Chrome. I agree with you about the advantage of "if you're already using it, something has to be a LOT better to get you to switch".

> Chrome also has a persistent advantage in being able to advertise Chrome on google search results.

And also on gmail, googlemaps and YouTube… They even paid for ads in the subway here in Paris! They also bundled it with software like Adobe Flash, which made it available on virtually every computer circa 2010…

And they ship it as their default browser on Android…

Re: Thank you, Chris

#98

Post by [deleted] »

coldpie wrote: post #76
entropicdrifter wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/?presets=50,30,20,10&amount... There's a monthly option right there

Yeah but I have to go remember to do it and stuff. Meanwhile at ArsTechnica.com, it shows a big banner telling me to subscribe, and I do. More reminders that I can give money to Mozilla would remind me to do it. Eventually they'd hit me at the right time/place to put in the effort to set up a sub, and I would.

[deleted]

Re: Thank you, Chris

#99

Post by mav3rick »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #43
RandomBacon wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a killer feature. Firefox used to be the only better alternative to IE. Then Chrome came along and it used to be the best at tabs and resources. Then Brave came along with automatic ad-blocking. Firefox needs to match the competition and surpass it. What would the next killer feature be?

Privacy! Rethink the whole thing from the ground up with privacy in mind. This includes transparency to whats going on under the hood, an integration of important plugins (your average video downloading plugin is likely siphoning all kinds of information), sandboxing, privacy-aware defaults, and banning and blacklisting a whole lot of known crap!

The mainstream user doesn't care about privacy. Speed has always been paramount.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#100

Post by mirimir »

I mostly use DDG and Startpage. But sometimes Google, when I'm not having much luck. But not via Tor, obviously. And even VPNs can trigger Google's "you look like a bot".

I used to love Metacrawler. And I see that it's back, but just drawing on Google and Yahoo!. Also by InfoSpace, Dogpile, which draws from more sources. But I haven't used either enough to say much.

Post reply on HN