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

181–190 of 229 posts

Re: Thank you, Chris

#181

Post by gregknicholson »

JeremyNT wrote: post #156
swyx wrote: post #111

just want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!

It's worth noting that Firefox Focus is just another chromium-based browser. If things keep moving in the direction they currently are, this may be the sad fate of Firefox proper :(

Happily, this is no longer true! https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/09/focus-with-geckoview/

Re: Thank you, Chris

#182

Post by jsgo »

gregknicholson wrote: post #170
jimmaswell wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I honestly wish chrome never happened.

This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!” And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twi…

I agree with you on most of those, but the problem with a Facebook or Twitter is how do you handle the open ecosystem analog? Is there anything more simple than Facebook/Twitter (Facebook example here mostly) in usage that random friends from way back when that aren't the most computer proficient are going to be able to easily setup on their own? And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#183

Post by gregknicholson »

jsgo wrote: post #182
gregknicholson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of thing always seems to happen. A shiny new thing comes along that's a little bit faster or cleverer, and all the geeks say “Yeah, well it may be controlled by a single company, but they're probably not evil, and anyway it'll never get big enough to be a monopoly, so it's harmless fun, and I'll use it and advocate it to my non-techy friends!” And then we end up with Chrome, and Facebook, and Slack, and Twi…

I agree with you on most of those, but the problem with a Facebook or Twitter is how do you handle the open ecosystem analog? Is there anything more simple than Facebook/Twitter (Facebook example here mostly) in usage that random friends from way back when that aren't the most computer proficient are going to be able to easily setup on their own? And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional w…

I've never used Facebook, so I don't know how well Diaspora can compete, but it seems like a possibility. For Twitter, there's Mastodon (and way-back-when there was identi.ca, its forerunner).

> And with social networks, the interest in them is pretty proportional with the availability of the people you want to interact with being on there.

That's kind of my point. If we geeks stop jumping on the closed thing, and instead support the alternative open federated/decentralised network, then the open network has a chance of gaining the bigger/better pool of users.

As any tool becomes common, it becomes easier to figure out, because mainstream websites run “howto” articles: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=howto+instagram

We understand the network effect. We should apply it for great good!

Re: Thank you, Chris

#184

Post by jonny_eh »

cronix wrote: post #151
_noqo wrote: post #112

I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation. But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now. Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values. Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influen…

I've seen thousands of Chrome ads in my life. On TV, on FB, on other ads on other websites, etc. I really don't think I've ever seen a FF ad. At least, I really can't recall seeing one. From what I've seen, the public has just not really heard of them. It's mostly just us geeks. It's hard to get market share when your audience doesn't even know you exist. And then you have Android, which comes with Chrome and has a m…

Here it is plastered on the San Francisco Bay Area's commuter train (Caltrain): https://twitter.com/gocaltrain/status/697135271280685056

Re: Thank you, Chris

#185

Post by Silhouette »

stebann wrote: post #129
est31 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be precise, it was 289 million on July 1st 2018, and 248 million on July 9th 2019. It was 239 million on August 24. Yes, the numbers are huge. Any product that has this many users would be considered a major success, but the trend is still troubling.

Anybody has some idea why that trend? Firefox is wonderful. I don't understand why more people aren't adopting this amazing browser.

Firefox 57 launched at the end of 2017 and was very much a love-it-or-hate-it change. Some people saw a significant performance improvement and that was important for them. Other people didn't have a problem with its performance anyway but saw the entire ecosystem of extensions that made Firefox different thrown under a bus.

I'm firmly in the latter camp, and if it weren't for the security implications I'd still be running pre-57 Firefox with the full set of extensions I found useful. If I didn't need to use all the major browsers anyway because of my web development work and I wasn't so untrusting of Google in terms of privacy, I might easily have decided at that point that Firefox no longer had any compelling advantage over Chrome and switched. Presumably some people did.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#186

Post by fabrice_d »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #177
lucb1e wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox's dominant past plays against I'm sorry, what? It was either the underdog of MSIE or of Chrome, it never was dominant the way the actual dominant browser at the time was dominant. The peak was 30%, and when Chrome took over from MSIE, it had 21% with MSIE and Chrome at 30% each.

What's it got now?

About 9.5% on desktop, and 4.5% globally.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#187

Post by electronstudio »

lucb1e wrote: post #169
_noqo wrote: post #112

I understand why this spark conversations about the current Firefox market share situation. But I also believe that Firefox's dominant past plays against when it comes to analyzing the product right now. Firefox is amazing, it works wonderfully, it continues to improve, respects privacy, adopts Mozilla's ethical values. Yes, not many people use it, but criticizing this point so aggressively I think it is also influen…

> Firefox's dominant past plays against I'm sorry, what? It was either the underdog of MSIE or of Chrome, it never was dominant the way the actual dominant browser at the time was dominant. The peak was 30%, and when Chrome took over from MSIE, it had 21% with MSIE and Chrome at 30% each.

You have a short memory. Netscape Navigator 3 had a >75% market share. Mozilla, which became Firefox, was a total rewrite, but that rewrite was done by the same people and was released as Netscape 6 - 9.

Re: Thank you, Chris

#188

Post by tauchunfall »

lucb1e wrote: post #171
userSumo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, i have never seen a browser ad in my life... is that in US or something?

Netherlands too, and I saw Google ads in Germany as well but not sure for which product.

There were Google Chrome ads in Germany, e.g. here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tinto/5336283196/

Re: Thank you, Chris

#189

Post by magicalhippo »

smichel17 wrote: post #168
magicalhippo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DDG is just so bad. Yesterday I found a website on my desktop. I wanted to view it on my Raspberry Pi so I could copy/paste the commands. So I typed in some keywords from the title and the name of the site. By default the Raspbian image uses DDG apparently. The page I was after was not to be found. Well at least on the first page, I didn't bother checking beyond. Did the !g thing and got the page I wanted straight up…

The top result is the same (for me) in both searches ( " rel="nofollow">https://www.tensorflow.org/install/> ). What is the page you were trying to find?

Interesting, I guess Google used the fact that both searches came from the same IP to prioritize the one I wanted[1].

In any case, I just connected to my work PC and did a search from a clean VM there, we don't do anything remotely Raspberry Pi or TensorFlow related there. The link you posted was the first hit at work, but the one I wanted[1] was the third hit.

Yet for DDG the results were the same, no hits. I even tried pressing "more" once, still nothing. I even tried "maker.pro install tensorflow" (without the quotes), and similar result. I tried "maker.pro tensorflow raspberry pi", still not finding it.

Maybe I just need to learn what DDG focuses on in a search string, and I've been trained to what Google weights.

But the reason Google got big was because it was the first search engine where, for 99% of the time, I didn't have to spend several minutes optimizing search terms just to find the right thing.

I don't want to go back to that.

[1]: https://maker.pro/raspberry-pi/tutorial/how-to-set-up-the-ma...

Re: Thank you, Chris

#190

Post by tsm »

dhimes wrote: post #152
swyx wrote: post #111

just want to give a shoutout to Firefox Focus and whoever is at Mozilla that made it happen. absolutely fantastic no tracking one tab experience that has made a dent in my browser tab management and privacy defaults like nothing else has. thank you!

I tried, but I can't do it. I need tabs.

Firefox Focus has had tabs for a while
Post reply on HN