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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#201

Post by feanaro »

walrus01 wrote: post #147
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…

> 3. Invest more in Thunderbird the application and develop Thunderbird the privacy focus email service for independent professionals and small businesses. While I agree that Thunderbird as a standalone Windows/MacOS/Linux desktop email client is a very important project, and needs to be continued, maintained and refined, the paradigm of email has moved on somewhat since 2003. People need to be able to do more than j…

> a Thunderbird Android email client. [...] I want a full featured "power user" IMAP-over-TLS + SMTP email client for Android that is also open source.

Here it is: https://email.faircode.eu/

Unlike K-9, it is very actively developed.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#202

Post by the-dude »

nitrogen wrote: post #177
takluyver wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you hacking our website?!?!?! ?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#203

Post by Yaggo »

recursive wrote: post #182
Yaggo wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat a myth that Safari is less standard-compliant. True, Safari's release cycle is slower and Apple has the motivation to prevent PWAs to become too good, but in many things Safari has always been very innovative browser. Built on top of KHTML foundation, it then became webkit and later the most successfull engine. It was the first to implement full ES6 support, and basically invented CSS transformations/tr…

Internet explorer is also a very innovative browser. It introduced XHR and a bunch of other stuff. But that is a different measure from standards-compliant.

Yes, IE was very innovative in its heyday (up to version 4). But back then there was no strong standard body (sort of status quo) like we have today, and due to Windows monopoly they could come up with stuff which was never even intented to be implemented by other vendors (well, Mozilla). You cannot really compare that era to today's situation.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#205

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

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'll add,

4. Pocket, add daily news to it.

Pocket already knows what I like, has one of the best reader mode, TTS, has millions of mobile users already and is deeply integrated within Firefox.

Mozilla's values could even help it sign some deals with independent news media.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#206

Post by kd913 »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #167
kd913 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea from the old MacOS sure. However, now that iOS apps are looking to be pushed to desktop, do you really think that is gonna continue in the future? As soon as universal binaries/iOS apps becomes fully fledged on ARM Mac I can imagine Apple just removing support completely. It's almost inevitable the way Apple is progressing to basically move to the iOS style platform control to OS X. Even from Mozilla's economics…

Yes. I do really think that is gonna continue in the future. I've said this before and I'll probably say it in increasingly irascible tones, but "next year macOS is gonna become just like iOS" is becoming the new "next year is the year of Linux on the desktop." Yes, Apple will almost certainly keep making security decisions people (including me) don't like, but there's no compelling business decision for trying to lo…

There are plenty of compelling business decisions including from the developer houses themselves.

Development houses now have an opportunity to bring their software to a larger market share (iPad, iOS and MacOS) whilst maintaining just one code base.

Development houses would also have much stronger piracy prevention (same kind of benefit that enables console games to function).

Development houses would have much stronger control over the running environment (preventing adblock, preventing VPN region bypass etc...).

Development houses would have much more control over updates.

Surprisingly just like the now defunct Mac Servers, Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms. They only care for those graphic designers/video editor/MS office crowd and their software is coming in iOS forms.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#207

Post by imbnwa »

IainIreland wrote: post #110
imbnwa wrote: post #94

Can anyone from/formerly of Mozilla explain why XUL had to die? When I was a kid it seemed utterly fascinating, I wonder now if we'd ever needed Electron if there was a modern XULRunner

I believe this is the best account: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...

Thank you

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#208

Post by jonathansampson »

rewddit wrote: post #92
SmokeyHamster wrote: post #54

>The problem? Firefox’s founders are all long, long gone. Brendan and Mitchell are Mozilla’s founders. Well then, you should have thought about that before you forcibly kicked out founder Brendan Eich because you disliked his unrelated politics. You can be a woke company that belittles everyone who doesn't share your narrow ideology or a company that makes a good web browser with a sound business model. You can't be…

Just as an FYI, Brave has done some sketchy stuff in the past, including inserting affiliate links / ads into content.

You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate links within the suggestions-dropdown in the browser itself. We wrote about this back in June of this year: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.

When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.

This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#209

Post by bzb6 »

pushrax wrote: post #35
bzb6 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to devalue the brand. Would be like Google giving away @google.com addresses.

The parallel there would be giving away @mozilla.org addresses. @firefox.com to me feels somewhere closer to @gmail.com, both being products, not companies.

Only that Firefox is a much more valuable brand than Mozilla

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#210

Post by Bakary »

kd913 wrote: post #46
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 don't think any of this fundamentally beats the main problem. That being platform control and advertising. Google advertises chrome with it's services and is the incumbent. It's also preloaded and unremovable on Android. Microsoft advertises edgium on Windows and makes it unremovable. Apple only allows webkit and safari clones on their platform. Firefox even if it's the best browser in the world would have the same…

It's not that we can't be bothered to flash Linux, but that we can't be bothered to deal with the incompatibility issues we will have after we have flashed it.
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