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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#171

Post by dvdkon »

andi999 wrote: post #150
Miraste wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses. I know Mozilla's non-Firefox projects aren't popular here, but if Thunderbird really wanted a niche in the business world Mozilla would need to start an email service to go with it. The age of non-integrated email clients for the average user ended a while ago.

It should to treat special characters first (somehow cannot search for ä,ö,ü)

It might be because it's searching using the IMAP server, for some reason those can't often deal with non-ASCII characters. Searching with diacritics seems to work for me in locally-downloaded folders.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#172

Post by takluyver »

jlokier wrote: post #143
the-dude wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure it was FF and not the adblocker?

Of course not. There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time. There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead. If a payment process gets stuck due…

I periodically see sites broken in Firefox until I turn off uBlock and/or Privacy Badger - including issues with paying like you describe. But I've always assumed that the same would happen in Chrome if I had the same extensions installed there. This seems more like 'locking out people with adblockers' than 'locking out Firefox', even if there's substantial overlap.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#173

Post by nitrogen »

jlokier wrote: post #87
wongarsu wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox can trace its history back to Netscape Navigator, released in 1994. It has failed and come back before. Even if the Mozilla Foundation fails, Firefox would likely survive in some form.

That was in the age of desktop browsers. Nowadays most browsing is mobile, and all mobile devices come with a high quality browser component which is effectively part of the operating system already, used pervasively by applications on the device as a component rather than a standalone browser. Installing a browser, any browser, is already a niche thing to do for the majority of internet users today.

Another thing working against Firefox on mobile is that it seems like every software update for Samsung phones resets the default browser/URL handler to Samsung Internet. Anyone not paying close attention will just click through the EULA and suddenly no longer be using Firefox.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#174

Post by troyvit »

dleslie wrote: post #116
yummypaint wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is already the best browser and has been for a long time. The problem is that most laypeople don't even know it exists. Combined with dark patterns used by microsoft and google to steer users toward their own browsers, it's an uphill battle. I'll stick firefox and appropriate extensions on a friends computer so they can watch youtube etc completely ad free, which is a major tangible QOL improvement, but then…

Firefox isn't even the best browser on Linux. On my aarch64 devices, Chromium in a Docker image loads faster, never dominates the CPU, renders video and websites faster, and has working DRM. Firefox is slower in every respect and can't render Netflix.

Really? Firefox works fine with netflix on my pop_os laptop.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#175

Post by liminal »

"Quantitative improvement" is table stakes that I worry have been abandoned with the jettisoning of the Servo team. "Technological pessimism" is a differentiating strategy, but ultimately dooms them to the small subset of users who understand and care about privacy at a deep level. "All encompassing" is a death march. All is infinite and Mozilla can't afford to implement everything hoping something turns out to be valuable (Google OTOH can bankrupt competition with this strategy). "A better browser" is where I think Mozilla should focus their attention. They were doing that with their lab experiments, but abandoned them before they could become valuable. Doing this approach well requires commitment to do enough of them that a vision coalesces and then more commitment to see it through. Mozilla used to be audacious enough to invent a new programming language in order to build a better browser. Now they seem to have turned their backs on that initiative and I'm left wondering if they have any guts left at all.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#176

Post by Yaggo »

rank0 wrote: post #166
Yaggo wrote: post #129

Mozilla should launch a stripped-down version of Firefox, with all the past 20 years' legacy support removed. No quirk mode etc. Just bare minimum implementation of modern core web tech. How fast would it be?

I love the idea of this. But what exactly should be stripped away? I can think of Pocket but thats about it. What do you mean by legacy support?

It's probably true that it's difficult to decide what should be removed without breaking the browsing experience too much. Still, I bet that the engine still contains lot of code for legacy stuff from the era when we wrote HTML such as etc.

The real problem of course is that the web specs itself have become too complex and expensive to implement. But a stripped-down version of browser could point out why we need to reboot the whole technology. It would be a long shot, I admit.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#177

Post by nitrogen »

takluyver wrote: post #172
jlokier wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. There's also no way to be sure it was FF in general and not the particular version(s) of FF Beta I was running at the time. There is no way to know which of numerous factors might contribute without running from a blank profile, which isn't something anyone would do unless really keen on investigating a problem, as it's easier to just run a different browser instead. If a payment process gets stuck due…

I periodically see sites broken in Firefox until I turn off uBlock and/or Privacy Badger - including issues with paying like you describe. But I've always assumed that the same would happen in Chrome if I had the same extensions installed there. This seems more like 'locking out people with adblockers' than 'locking out Firefox', even if there's substantial overlap.

It's distressingly common for JS developers to just throw something like "t.track('payment')" in the onclick handler for the last button (or every button) in a payment flow, where "t" is some analytics package you've blocked. No exception handling, of course, so when the analytics package isn't loaded, nothing happens when you click the button. If you're lucky, there will be a console message logged saying something like "unable to call method track on undefined".

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#178

Post by rubyist5eva »

Recently switched back to Firefox after meandering between Edge and Chrome on multiple platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows) for work and non-work purposes.

Firefox Dev Tools are fucking awesome. Firefox sync works great. All the extensions I want are here. It's fast enough in ways that microbenchmarks don't mean anything to me...and it's free as in Liberty (last but not least).

I've been looking for a VPN, and even though I find the features rather anemic - I've used mullvad before and I trust the infrastructure that Mozilla VPN is built on and it's a way to give money to them. I will probably also switch over from Raindrop to Pocket for the same purpose.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#179

Post by kome »

lucideer wrote: post #146

It's curious that the 4 bullet points in the final section don't make any mention of open source (in fact, the article doesn't at all). I think Opera Software circa 2012 was doing all of the things we would hope for/expect from Mozilla & Firefox, and doing them much better than Mozilla could. Bar one: it was not open source. When I made the switch to Firefox in 2012, it was my belief that I would not have been forced…

I did exactly the same. I switched to Firefox after Opera changed direction, with Opera 13. It's incredible how much Opera 12 was advanced and snappy. It was 2012...

I used Firefox since then. And I never had an issue with it. But, especially at the beginning, I really felt it was an inferior browser. But still better than chrome for sure. Just because I don't want google to know all my chronology.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#180

Post by lumost »

etempleton wrote: post #2

I will make the same comment I made on another post regarding Firefox and Mozilla: a few tips from from no one: 1. Rewrite the Mozilla mission statement. I read that and have no idea what your organization does. Mission statements seem like corporate naval gazing, but if it is honest and well written it keeps everyone focused on what you are working towards. 2. Refocus on Firefox R&D and core technologies - Firefox n…

I really like the idea of businesses focused on their core value proposition. However, in tech, these businesses get crushed by larger platform plays see for example Firefox vs. chrome, slack vs teams, Aws vs digital ocean.

There are a few factors at play here, but I’ll call out a few I’ve observed.

1) If you hire good engineers and give them autonomy, branching into new markets is cheaper than you think. “Focusing” engineers tends to just cut back on autonomy, both lowering productivity as well as limiting the quality of engineering talent one can attract.

2) Unified, integrated solutions, with great default options are preferred by nearly everyone on the market. Sure lastpass let people store passwords easily, but how many consumers bother changing the default password manager in their browser?

3) Investors recognize this pattern and funnel money to the biggest “platform” they can in any given market.

I never understood how bad point solutions were from a business standpoint until I worked in the application performance monitoring space. For any given monitoring feature there are dozens to hundreds of small, high quality point solutions targeting one market niche or another - but most customers will simply purchase their preferred all in one solution and forget about the other options.

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