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Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

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Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#431
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can anyone call firefox privacy focused when they use telemetry so fucking heavily? Per default telemetry is active, disable it and you still got telemetry/pings whatever. You have to opt out of everything. It's not even limited to the user side look at this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1460678#c20

And again, you throw out the baby with the bathwater and go back to Big Google that does worse on every privacy-related issue by a mile. Like, no matter what, telemetry is useful to the product, and defaults matter. Like the infamous “the opt-ot organ donor vs opt-in countries have a staggering difference of 90% difference”. Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no p…

Oh no I still use firefox and like everyone I make bug reports or follow the existing once. But it's hard to recommend it to friends/family if you have to say "you only need to change these settings and install these addons" and I get responses like "I would rather use brave. It just works" or something like that.

I want firefox to be good. I don't even need to have the newest features I just wamt a stable browser I can use. Don't we all? Removing features I actually use and adding things I don't need is counterproductive and I don't know which part of their telemetry helped them make those choices, but many I didn't like.

> Should firefox throw away 90% of its userbase’s useful telemetry, most of who would have no problem with providing it?

Telemetry should always be opt-in. Firefox throws enough messages your way if they would ask (like many other programs) "Help make firefox better" and then offer different level of reporting it would be fine. They ask me to change my theme at the start, but they don't ask me if I want to send them my data?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use high contrast it breaks css

You mention a bug but did not link the bugzilla ID. Want to share the link to the bug for this problem?

This looks like a snide way of trying to say it isn't actually a bug. "A bug" means a malfunction in a program; there is no "the link to" those. What you are looking for is a link to a ticket about the bug.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^^ How to say you're a white male in tech, without specifically saying you're a white male in tech. meritocracy - To whom? Who decides? That's right: the kingmaker. And the kingmaker decides on those who share significant amount of the same traits. And most of these "kingmakers" in tech are 20-30 something white male. master to primary - Again, "master" in US culture has a very very bad connotation that equates with…

>the predominant license (GPL) is a anti-capitalist license GPL and RMS is not anti-capitalist, Linus Torvalds and Red Hat for example made lots of money. So you can have Proprietary license let me explain, I see people selling this idea of you buy this cheap crap from China then do a small change , sell the shit and make tons of money with almost no work(I seen other get rich schems too, with books or other stuff).…

> GPL and RMS is not anti-capitalist, Linus Torvalds and Red Hat for example made lots of money.

RH a bit more than LT, I'd wager.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a US citizen, I really wish I lived in a country with effective (i.e. actually used/enforced) antitrust laws, that would see the dominance in browsers (chrome and android), combined with dominance in search -- which promotes its ads (another industry it dominates), the alteration of how the web is experienced to favor itself (hiding site identity the browser and in search results, combined with showing scraped con…

How do you wish the outcomes of these legal enforcements to be like? An authority with the effective power to cripple the finances and business practices of Google for the purpose of reducing its market share to an arbitrarily lower percentage would be immediately detrimental to furthering the development of Google's products, and consequently detrimental to the utility of its users, while in the longer term it would…

> in the longer term it wouldn't be obvious

Nothing ever is, a priori, so this is a non-argument.

> lesser competitors to scramble for this stolen market slice

Wow, "stolen". That certainly tanked your credibility at least in my eyes.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#435
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, that's a good concrete example.

It's also false. California had Domestic Partnership law that, as amended by 2008, afforded domestic partnerships the same rights and responsibilities as marriages under state law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_partnership_in_Califo... I'm assuming dralley didn't know (is not lying), so my advice is to check incendiary claims and avoid parroting sources you have not checked. HTH!

So if they were pretty much the same thing already, why deny them the term "marriage"?

Comes off as nothing more than jealous spite. Certainly not what one would call a very Christian attitude.

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#436

FTA: “The argument that it was “too hard to maintain” a single setting enacted by 2 lines of code in a 4 Million line codebase is just insulting to the intelligence of users.” I don’t grok that logic. Hard to maintain is about developers, not users. “Code isn’t a lawn. It doesn’t change if you leave it alone for a few weeks.” I disagree with that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot As to the main reason F…

> If you were CEO of the Mozilla Foundation, wouldn’t keeping the royalties flowing in be more important than raising user contributions?

Sure. Because as CEO my multi-million-dollar salary is dependent on money flowing in, more than my "Foundation" actually fulfilling its purpose.

If I were anyone but that multi-million-dollar CEO, though, i.e. if I maybe even gave a shit about what the foundation is supposed to be for in the first place, then perhaps I'd also listen a little to the actual users of the product that is ostensibly the whole raison d'être of the foundation. Idunno, maybe I'm odd that way?

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#437

Firefox has been in decline for 12 years because it only exists for the FAANG companies to throw money at so they can dodge claims of being a monopoly. It is not there to be useful nor to make a profit. Their core business is taking money from large companies and performatively acting like a company to look like 'competition.'

This looks ever more like the most plausible explanation for anything about Mozilla.

It explains, for instance, the conspicuously overpaid CEO: In this context, that's not only "not a big negative", but an actual positive: it's very "corporate".

Re: Why Firefox has been in decline for 12 years

#440
I can offer two salient datapoints:

1. bug [New windows/tabs should inherit current page, back button/go menu history](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18808): `Opened 22 years ago` and `Updated 14 days ago`: they can neither implement nor reject a feature in 22 years?!

2. "We need more than deplatforming" blog post that promotes suppression of Free Speech. Would you trust a _browser_ that wants to _limit_ what you can read?!

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