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Firefox Was Always Enough

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241–250 of 611 posts

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The key is `aarch64` ;)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#242
post #217
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again if you are talking about words like 'incompatability' then you are probably closer to the enthusiast techie type 5% than the 95% majority. That majority doesn't even know about Linux or what flashing even is. They just bought a box from bestbuy/amazon so they can access the internet and email. They stick to the manufacturer defaults and would be stuck with Chrome, Edgium or Safari.

I was indeed talking about normie stuff like games or simple applications. Those are the reasons why I will happily be staying on Windows for the next few years.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#243

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 hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers. Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will g…

> demand that W3C, WHATWG clear up their shit and publish formal standards

WHATWG was founded explicitly to avoid that, i.e. "let's get shit done without ceremony, and whatever comes out is the actual standard". Going back to W3C-like processes would remove the very reason for its existence. Google has been very good at leveraging this, but that's mostly because other players seem unwilling to dedicate as many resources to browser-dev as they do (even when, like in Apple's and Microsoft's case, they have more than enough money to spend).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#244

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 think that Mozilla partnership with Google has made these goals difficult to achieve. Mozilla gets its money from Google, so it is implicitly part of the monopolist game played by them. What this means is that they're happy to be second in the browser development game, and are richly rewarded for doing so.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#245

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 hate to bring it to you, but every single one of your priorities have been long rejected: Thunderbird was officially discontinued like ten years ago, Mozilla had just let go a large number of devs in early 2020 and then again a couple weeks ago, among them all Servo developers. Even if you wanted to financially support Firefox or Thunderbird development through donations, there would be no way to. Your money will g…

> Your money will go to the Moz foundation, and end up in all sorts of endeavors except the ones you care about: Moz spends money on discontinued mobile operating systems and new languages and language runtimes (Rust, WASM) nobody needs (sorry Rustees). Above all, your money likely goes to salaries and pension plans for CEOs and upper management.

This is simply incorrect. The Mozilla Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, which have strict laws delineating how they are allowed to spend money. "Education" is one endeavor where charities can spend money, which IIRC is where most of the foundation money goes: to educating people about the web and web development. Notably, "software development" is not an endeavor for which such a charity can spend its funds. Donations don't go to Rust, or even Firefox, because they legally can't.

> As to TFA's point about "sitting on the table to decide about web standards", that also hasn't worked out. It hasn't helped to keep "web standards" in check, nor did Mozilla's own contributions become part of them.

This is also simply incorrect. Enormous swaths of the web spec have been authored by Mozilla representatives, and we can point to plenty of instances where Mozilla has torpedoed proposals from other organizations (e.g. WebSQL, PNaCL).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#246
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't be able to beat Chrome by technology alone. I actually don't know how Mozilla can beat Chrome. Google has an extremely strong incentive to capture the web client market. Whatever Mozilla can do to make Firefox more popular, Google can outspend them by a factor 10 and do more, or better, or both. I want Firefox to win but unfortunately I just don't see a path for it. My mindset at the moment is "I'm going to…

I wonder why Firefox even has to beat Chrome. Wouldn't it be enough to have 30% marketshare again? Or even 10% would be enough to consider Firefox a serious competitor. Somewhere along the line we got this idea that if you're not #1 you've failed. You don't need to crush every single competitor into oblivion to be successful, you just need to succeed at what you set out to do, and in Firefox's case, isn't that just t…

On some level, Firefox has to 'beat' Chrome in order to get/keep a significant level of marketshare. It needs people to see it as better in some way if they're to choose to use it, especially on mobile where Chrome is the default.

For some of us, it still 'beats' Chrome on some kind of principle - I'm not giving Google yet more control. But are there enough people like me to actually keep a modern browser going?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#247

> Mozilla has always made the bulk of its money from selling the preferred placement of a search engine in Firefox It's amazing how valuable eyeballs are -- that you can fund an entire software project just that way.

Ostensibly, they pay Firefox for eyeballs, but.... Google certainly values the eyeballs they get via Firefox, but Firefox could disappear tomorrow and that barely affect Google one bit from a pure "eyeballs" perspective. How much traffic would Google lose? People would just use those same Google services through Chrome, Safari, native apps, whatever. So, I believe Google funds Firefox mainly as a hedge against monopo…

When I was there, we speculated Google was using Mozilla as antitrust lawyer repellant, but it's a weak argument. Google pushed Chrome onto Firefox users repeatedly, by accident or on purpose doesn't matter.

Now that Google is in antitrust court, I think the Mozilla deal is mainly for PR, both positive while it lasts, and negative sense (to avoid being the Firefox killer by not renewing the deal this year -- Google preannounced renewal after Mozilla's August layoffs, and let others repeat the too-high-by-now $400M/year number).

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#248
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.

I would use Thunderbird in a heartbeat at my current job if it could seamlessly connect to Exchange.

Besides this rather serious bug, which does not allow you to accept Exchange meeting invites from within Thunderbird [1], everything else works perfectly with this extension.

[1] https://github.com/jobisoft/TbSync/issues/54

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#249
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stro…

The developers that I hear from have different opinions than what you're expressing here. Many want direct relationships with their customers, for a start, and if you want that, the App Store is right out. And I can't think of a single developer who would say they "would have much more control over updates" if they delivered them through the App Store. (They'd say "oh, honey, no," after they finally caught their breath after the laughing fit.)

As for "Apple doesn't really care about the high end hardware Mac platforms," well. It's possible that they rolled out the Mac Pro just last year as an elaborate ruse to distract us from how much they don't care about the Mac Pro, but it strikes me as relatively unlikely. (And if you think the "graphic designer/video editor" crowd, either users or developers, is on board with moving everything to the App Store, oh, honey, no.)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#250

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.

I don't think you can make a blanket statement like this. My experience has been almost the opposite, Chrome always uses significantly more CPU for me.

I think it really depends on hardware, drivers etc.

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