181–190 of 310 posts
Would it be better if the project includes a native ad blocker?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Mozilla is actually helping Google build and maintain a monopoly on search (for money) and is accepting the scraps that Google leaves on the table from the browser market. Mozilla has continuously and repeatedly fucked up when it comes to defaulting to grab telemetry and shady deals with Google, to asking for money while spending way too much salaries for its execs for a supposed non-profit corporation (that is e…
I'm absolutely with you on this. In fact, when I heard about the servo team and the CEO's salary, I stopped using Firefox. Now I mostly use qutebrowser (and Vivaldi for stuff I need more security). I will start using Firefox when it leaves Mozilla and I'd pay a subscription for it. For me, the ideal situation is a lean team (hopefully only the devs, because I'm not paying any useless middle or high level managers a p…
I agree with you on almost everything except Vivaldi. They are closed source and Firefox is 100% much more capable of supporting privacy than Vivaldi.
I have my own problems with Firefox but don't intend to stop using Firefox. They are still great. I will have to see this through I feel. lol.
Also, when you use a browser based on Blink engine (Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, Edge, Chromium) you are giving more leverage to Google at W3C. This makes FLoC kind of stuff more probable from Google.
"You need to change the browser engine as well, NOT JUST THE BROWSER." ;)
Always choose Gecko or Gecko based (like Librewolf) :)
Genuine questions. Aren't such forks harming the actual Firefox developers by decreasing the Firefox user base? Doesn't it help the Google monopoly on the web?
They’re sponsored by Google, and use google services and google as the default search engine. How are they not part of the Google ecosystem, or monopoly as you call it?
Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?
>Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? [...] What's preventing other forks from taking off Some of the replies to your question state "money" but there are also more fundamental reasons of choosing Chromium over Gecko: technical functionality and performance (especially on mobile) . You'd think an ex-Firefox programmer and Mozilla co-founder such as Brendan Eich would have chosen Gecko for Brave but he…
At some point we compared gecko with a blink port on Gonk, maintaining both while we were doing performance comparison on low end mobile devices. We were looking both at memory usage and page loading speed. I was expecting to see blink way ahead of gecko, but that was not the case at all. For some content blink was a bit better, for some it was gecko, but never with a large gap either.
Maintenance of the blink product was not easy, with barely documented internals changing a lot (it's very different to build a new product on top of blink compared to just fork an existing one like chromium). I'm not blaming the blink team, that makes sense in the context of what they do, and we were not as familiar with blink code base as with gecko. Finally we stayed on gecko because this was the best choice for us (eg. including team velocity and the amount of non standard apis to rewrite).
In my opinion if you want to start on a new browser product, the main Chromium benefits for a commercial project are: - web compat, which unfortunately is self sustaining. - licensing. The MPL vs. BSD doesn't matter for open source projects, but many companies (especially VC funded) are adverse to copyleft licenses. Gecko's xpcom architecture was actually not a bad fit with the MPL, since you can ship new xpcom components without publishing their code if you don't want, but that didn't make much of difference (some chipset vendors used the capability for FirefoxOS to replace the implementation of telephony apis with closed source ones).
But you need to be comfortable being subject to the whims of google (and a little bit MS now). For instance, consider the changes to web extension resource blocking capabilities with the "manifest v3": some forks plan to keep the resource blocking api working, but it's very unclear if they will be able to do so in the long term without a growing complexity of their fork that may become too high.
If you are an open source project, please don't cement Google's dominance of the web by using chromium.
Gecko deserves to have a future - it may just not be Mozilla's corp current leadership that is the best for that to happen.
Author of Mozilla telemetry here. You can accomplish this with official firefox by blacklisting incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org domain, per https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.moz...
How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?
Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…
Some discussion about it maybe a year ago and it dwindled off as barely any changes to Firefox except branding....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Mozilla is actually helping Google build and maintain a monopoly on search (for money) and is accepting the scraps that Google leaves on the table from the browser market. Mozilla has continuously and repeatedly fucked up when it comes to defaulting to grab telemetry and shady deals with Google, to asking for money while spending way too much salaries for its execs for a supposed non-profit corporation (that is e…
(Mozilla dev here, not speaking for Moz) "grab telemetery" - that data is really, really useful in making development decisions, and we are hyperparanoid about what we collect. From an armchair, it may seem like you can make the right guess about how to eg adjust garbage collection scheduling priorities, but actual data always surprises you in one way or another. It can make the difference between spending a month on…
No one is arguing that telemetry can be helpful but forcing users into it while acting holier than though is not just shady, but very much scammy.
The whole structuring difference between the foundation and the corporation sounds a lot like a tactic to push for some things under the non profit front and others under the company front, aka scammy.
All this turns on alarms in people’s heads… in a way I don’t find it weird that you guys still don’t see it, this is a sinking ship, and you’re going to think everything is going well until the last breath.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…
> regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions In general, that's true. But Firefox is an exception to this. The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase. There's also the distinction between users vs customers. Most users pay…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…
I don't mind telemetry, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.