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Firefox Was Always Enough

ianbicking.org

601–610 of 611 posts

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercially, it totally did. Without Whatsapp we could not sell enough devices, but without enough volume Whatsapp was not interested to build an official app. Chicken, meet egg!

I wonder what markets WhatsApp is important to. In the UK quite a few people used it while briefly lived there, but in the US, Thailand, Vietnam, et.al. I didn't see anyone using or ever talking about it.

These answers have been insightful. Not sure why asking got me downvotes.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#602
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, wasn’t email designed in a time when the only supported standards were everyone’s form of Extended ASCII? So it would make sense that IMAP only supports ASCII. Heck, attachments are encoded in some base## form before being sent because the entire standard is based on text.

Here I like to quote my favorite penguin:"don't give me excuses, give me results". MS products somehow can do it, and it is a big showstopper dor adaptation in (a lot of) countries with special characters if you cannot search for the product name/customer name/project. (But maybe I remember wronfly and MS also cannot do with IMAP, so exchange it is)

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#603
post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Linux experience I find (running Ubuntu) and is also driving me crazy. On my Windows7 installation Ctrl+Tab switches to the next tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switches to the previous tab. New tabs are open after the current tab. This might be related to the window manager or the Linux build defaults?

It’s just a newer Firefox default that wasn’t applied to old installations, and you can turn it off right at the top of about:preferences (”Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order”). The first thing I turn off with every installation too.

> you can turn it off right at the top of about:preferences

Thanks.

Whoever though it's a good idea to make behaviour non-transparent to users -.-

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#604

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 felt the same way in 2002, and although I like opensource the reason I dropped opera was because it came with built in ads. I switched to phoenix, then firebird, then firefox, and have not looked back. Except for a year or so where i primarily used konqueror, but that was only because I was using kde and it was built in. The one cool feature i considered going back to opera for was built in torrent support, I reall…

The problem with Opera torrent support was ironically that it came at a time when torrent was big, and people who were "into" torrenting at that time didn't want it as a side-feature, they wanted something dedicated: either highly featurful or highly targeted, which are niches a side-feature of a multi-feature app like a browser doesn't really fill.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#605
post #515
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they own pocket, which you can pay for.

I don't think very many people actually like Pocket. I wish it would die. It makes Firefox look like it's no better than any commercial browser -- not even Chrome installs that kind of stuff in my toolbar by default!

I love pocket. What do you use instead of pocket?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#606
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU's focus is more "consumer protection" than security or privacy as such, in my view.

Yes that might be a better general term. However the perspective is the same: no optimism, no enablement, no vision. Instead control and contain the negative aspects. I'm not saying that in itself is bad, its just not sufficient to build a prosperous civilisation.

> optimism, enablement, vision

Like Theranos?

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#607
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave is basically a chrome with preinstalled extensions, which would wither away the second chrome stopped being developed. Firefox is a treasure we should keep alive, because otherwise the web would turn into the same closed source walled garden, as most other things do.

Firefox made a mistake of getting paid by Google and getting too comfortable with it. I think they won't have much happening for them. I mean something could still happen, who knows? Maybe Huawei or Xiaomi or Canonical or IBM will see some value in it and make something out of it, but I fear it might be too late for them. And Brave is not Chrome. It's based on Chromium. Many other companies depend upon Chromium codeb…

Out of these, only Microsoft could reasonably develop a browser enginge - and they stopped doing so, decreasing the available web implementations by one. I’m not worried about google stopping chrome, it is way too big for that - just firefox is unique in what they are doing, and is irreplaceble from a freedom of web perspective.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#608
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also completely baffled by this. i'd have happily paid $100/yr if it went directly to firefox dev, not their other marketing shenanigns. they fired so much talent to focus on junk to drive revenue, that it's not something i can do anymore. very sad.

It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it. Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entir…

You can have a separate version of Firefox that is commercial and complies, and still have open source Firefox. Chromium is open source, but Google Chrome is proprietary.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#609
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that when I tell my kids that when they want to help, but they won't help in the way that someone needs help, that they aren't actually helping, they understand it. Mozilla has buckets of money, between the Corporation and the Foundation. They are separate, for good-ish reasons? But they are separate. If they start allowing customers or businesses to pay for Firefox, then they will have to provide an entir…

> support Mozilla's mission and Firefox development. That's the rub here. Mozilla's mission is a much larger scope than just Firefox. Some people want to support Firefox, but don't want to donate to Mozilla's mission. One such reason is because it's important to have more than one browser implementation. There's no way to support that without Mozilla allocating some portion of your donation to some unrelated part of…

I feel like they would lose a lot of funding if they branch out Firefox's Non-Profit into its own thing because most people care more about Firefox than the kinds of things the EFF is already doing.

Re: Firefox Was Always Enough

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The GP is mostly wrong. What killed FxOS in the market is the lack of official support for one extremely popular messaging application starting by W. Then Mozilla's leadership didn't have the patience to wait for the right opportunity.

This doesn't really answer the question any it just adds more speculation in between again. But to rewrite the question with the new speculation - what made KaiOS able to succeed in starting without WhatsApp support and eventually getting it (last year) instead of failing on both counts like FirefoxOS did? I.e. if you've got something to claim as the reason it can't also apply to KaiOS unless there was something KaiO…

KaiOS got enough users thanks to Jio Reliance in India. That convinced Whatsapp to build an app for it.
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