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Firefox Was Always Enough

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Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#501

Post by hombre_fatal »

minikites wrote: post #360
jeffbee wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you actually alive in 2005-2010 or are you just guessing? Flash-based unskippable intros on fixed 640x480 centered viewports are the reality of the 2005 web, regardless of whatever nostalgia you suffer from.

We've replaced "waiting for unskippable Flash intros" with: - a web that is thoroughly unusable without an ad-blocker (ad-blocking was pretty optional in 2005) - waiting for 20 megs of minified JS to load over 3G - waiting for Google web fonts to load because apparently shipping more than 4 fonts in common is beyond the ability of plucky upstarts like Microsoft, Apple, and Google - web "apps" with worse performance c…

You have to look at the web's good and not just it's bad. It's kind of tiring to read comments that act like nobody else is capable of enumerating the downsides of something.

Why own a dog? You spend money on it, it shits, it makes noise, you have to find a caretaker when you go on vacation, it bites, it needs walks, it needs to go to the vet, your next girlfriend might be allergic to it, and after all that, it dies.

Do people who own dogs not know these things? Or is it that they own one despite those things and there's a more interesting conversation to be had?

Comments like this make me wonder if you, yourself, are capable of seeing anything that's improved about the web which is a much more illuminating exercise to do than enumerating just bad things, something anyone can do.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#502

Post by couchridr »

the-dude wrote: post #97
xacky wrote: post #44

I have a love hate relationship with Firefox, its only major trick left is that it’s not Chromium. Making it a monopoly of the non-monopoly browsers. I tried for a while to use Waterfox and Pale Moon but they just aren’t accepted by too many websites and now even mainstream websites are locking out Firefox too.

Which sites are 'locking out' Firefox?

Firefox won’t display iCloud.com for me. Of course safari will.

I couldn’t determine why; I have customized perhaps a dozen variables within Firefox so it is hard to know wether iCloud depends on any of them.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#503

Post by pldr1234 »

Uninen wrote: post #498
throw_m239339 wrote: post #271

Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now. FireFox OS could have provided such model, in fact, its successor kaios is doing very well and one can imagine that in the future, it will be the primary OS of half the mobile users on the planet. 'Feature phones' aren't dead. They provide a cheap alternative to touch phones, are usually more robust, and allowing them to run web apps instead of MIDP st…

> Mozilla doesn't have a real sustainable business model right now. I've said this many times and I'm going to repeat it again; I wish Mozilla would offer me a way to purchase a monthly subscription for Firefox. I want to support the open Web and I want to support FireFox development (but not any n+1 random Mozilla products / experiments) and I hate that they don't offer this.

I actually love this concept.

Though would Mozilla grant some type of premium version of Firefox or premium support for your subscription monies?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#504

Post by betwixthewires »

nfriedly wrote: post #356
tomrod wrote: post #59

Except for mobile, where recent updates made it a hot mess.

Can't say that I agree. I've been using Firefox on Android for years now and it just keeps getting better IMO. I'm satisfied with the performance and the UI, but what I really love the extensions. I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me. Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google wi…

Try installing add-ons on that new, pretty Firefox mobile. The browser has been crippled.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#505

Post by usr1106 »

ahartmetz wrote: post #487
chrisseaton wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MeeGo was a bizarre affair. There was I think Maemo, Moblin, LImo, SLP, Bada, Leste, MeeGo, Mer, Tizen, Sailfish, Nemo... all forks, merges, reforks. They seemed to spend all their time and energy continually rebranding, forming and disbanding consortiums, creating new websites and logos. They never just got on with it.

Except one time they did and it was wonderful - the N9. Then Elop came and canceled it, as ordered by the the Nokia board that hired him.

Well, wonderful... It was a huge mess. Maemo was gtk based until Nokia bought Qt. Guess there was some friction in the conversion. Maemo was deb based until Nokia management brought Intel into the boat for no technical reasons, then they switched to rpm. Well, the packaging is a relatively small detail, but many other parts of the distro saw similar switches from choice A to choice B for no real benefit. Friction after friction.

Elop was an incompetent leader, but he had not been involved in creating the mess. He went for a worse option, but that does not say that Meego would have ever succeeded.

Yes, I am stuck in the past myself, typing this on SailfishOS. But one has to see the realities.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#506

Post by betwixthewires »

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad.

They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major update, either software wise or news wise, that amounts to good news. They try to dress it up but the substance is always bad for the user. Recently, they artificially limited the extensions available in Firefox mobile. I uninstalled Firefox immediately on all my machines.

Now they're firing the Rust team? Are these people stupid? Rust is pretty much the only thing Mozilla has going for it. I guess it's time for Thunderbird to go as well.

The idea that Mozilla is somehow the only thing standing between Google and control of web standards is laughable. I used to buy it. But Firefox is funded by Google, and they'll get what they want. And you can see plain as day that they're getting what they want. At this point you're more disconnected from Google's influence using ungoogled-chromium than using Firefox. So that's what I do. I feel more free online using a fork of a Google product than I do using Firefox. Imagine that.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#507

Post by nfriedly »

betwixthewires wrote: post #504
nfriedly wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say that I agree. I've been using Firefox on Android for years now and it just keeps getting better IMO. I'm satisfied with the performance and the UI, but what I really love the extensions. I know they rejiggered the UI a bit recently, but it seems like a moderate improvement to me. Also, I use Firefox to sync across all of my devices. I know you can do that with Chrome, but I trust Mozilla more than Google wi…

Try installing add-ons on that new, pretty Firefox mobile. The browser has been crippled.

I mean, I do. The 2-3 that I mainly use work fine. The only one that ever gave me trouble was some "youtube download" kind of thing, but there are a hundred of those.

I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#508

Post by SkyPuncher »

betwixthewires wrote: post #506

I have recently gone from a Mozilla fanboy to a Mozilla hater in the span of under a year. I'm sure this won't be popular, but I refuse to use Firefox particularly, and would rather use chromium at this point, which, if you'd heard the way I trash google, you'd ask me what on earth was going through my head. It has gotten that bad. They keep progressively crippling the browser. There isn't a single Firefox major upda…

I feel like we're in a very interesting place for main stream computing. The technology has matured enough that it's nearly impossible to add novel, valuable features. It feels like everything is just starting to break for no good reason.

At the same time, companies have hard data about what works and what doesn't work so they're starting to trim excess.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#509

Post by betwixthewires »

nfriedly wrote: post #507
betwixthewires wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try installing add-ons on that new, pretty Firefox mobile. The browser has been crippled.

I mean, I do. The 2-3 that I mainly use work fine. The only one that ever gave me trouble was some "youtube download" kind of thing, but there are a hundred of those. I know there were some breaking changes, but I assume they were for a good reason, and Mozilla obviously left a path forward.

> I assume they were for a good reason

That's where you're wrong. The reason they gave is "we don't want to confuse casual users with comiplcated functionality" or something along those lines, which is absurd because there has always been power user functionality available to those that need it without hurting the casual user experience, and installation of extensions is up to the user, casual users don't need to do it.

So since their explanation doesn't add up, tell me, why do you think Mozilla, who gets most of it's funding from Google, decided to make add-ons such as Privacy Badger and umatrix and cookie autodelete unavailable to us to use?

Never just assume someone does something for a good reason. Never assume malicious intent either, but don't just take it laying down when a tool you use no longer works for you. If a tool keeps getting worse and worse from a user perspective, it is because the changes being made aren't made with the user in mind.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#510

Post by thaumasiotes »

heavyset_go wrote: post #495
thaumasiotes wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Windows Phone, WebOS, Meego and Ubuntu Phone all "failed" around the same time period as Firefox OS. I have a hard time laying blame solely on Mozilla there. I've seen a number of comments on Windows Phone since then (on HN), and one and all they emphasize how much better and nicer Windows Phone was -- from a consumer perspective -- than any other phone. What was the failure? This isn't a retrospective that makes a…

I feel the same way about webOS: it was better and nicer than Android or iOS, and we had to wait half of a decade before Android and iOS adopted some of the features it shipped with in 2009. As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android[1]. Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

> As of 2019, however, 52.4% of the mobile OS market belongs to iOS, and 47% to Android.

This doesn't pass the sniff test, unless you're doing something weird like measuring the mobile OS market in dollars spent on phones.

> Neither of our favorite mobile phone OSes have succeeded in comparison.

To be clear, I have no experience of Windows Phone. I'm just bemused that 100% of comments about what it was like are so glowing. For some other product, you'd expect to see some comments saying "this was the greatest product ever to be commercially available" and some others saying "no, I had one of those, and it sucked". That doesn't seem to happen for Windows Phone.

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