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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#181

Post by samwillis »

K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

  > 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.
I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly) about maintaining control and dominance. It’s about battery usage, WebKit is heavily optimised on iOS to ensure optimal power efficiency. The number one priority is that the lowest denominator of iPhone user is happy with their device, and battery usage is the number one KPI people care about.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#182

Post by onion2k »

lvncelot wrote: post #141
NoboruWataya wrote: post #103

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…

What's worse, I think it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for another project to start from either a fork or from nothing and provide an alternative, as developing a browser (with its own rendering engine) is extremely complicated, comparable to an operating system.

The rendering engine part is kind of the least problematic bit, because there are three primary options (Gecko, WebKit, and Blink) and they're all pretty up-to-date and open source. You could also pick up Goanna, KHTML or Servo if you didn't want to use any of the big three as they're open too, but there'd be work to do on them.

There's no particularly good reason to start your own renderer from scratch.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#183

Post by berkes »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #86
parhamn wrote: post #37

I think part of this discussion needs to be that Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks the way Chromium does. This sort of open usage, ironically, feels very fitting to the spirit of Firefox, but they're not even close to Chrom(e|ium). I've been building a browser full time the past year+ (synth.app) and FF core wasn't really even an option. They've done very lit…

That's a real missed opportunity. Firefox would have made a fantastic embedded webview, and could have plausibly become the core of Electron. Back when webviews were IE, with atrocious Javascript support and all the usual IE quirks, Firefox was a superior product and interconnecting with other software is very in line with the open source ethos.

That opportunity is still there.

Enough features to distinguish on, enough political/managerial reasons for choosing an independent FLOSS engine over one controlled by Google.

Sure, Edge/MS won't move to this engine anywhere soon. Nor will Brave switch over tomorrow, or electron rebuild around their tooling. But the world is full or "HTML-2-PDF renderers, headless testing toolkits, (embedded) webview-libraries or electron-alike toolkits, which are now almost all exclusively Chromium based.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#184

Post by metalliqaz »

sneak wrote: post #172
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

FLoC has nothing to do with rendering, though. Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.

it's not "just like Chrome". It's not great, but it's not in the same ballpark as what Google does.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#185

Post by fault1 »

K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google.

for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#186

Post by GekkePrutser »

nicoburns wrote: post #77
_abox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in parti…

I believe they've actually implemented pull-to-refresh now.

I read about that but it hasn't made it into the production version :(

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#187

Post by GekkePrutser »

TobTobXX wrote: post #68
_abox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in parti…

On FF nightly you can install any addon. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/find-and-install-add-on...

Oh ok, I didn't know. I don't like using the nightly version but I'll give it a try.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#188

Post by dotancohen »

DeathArrow wrote: post #138
resonious wrote: post #53

I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest! Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink. The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8. In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork…

>I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest! The end users don't care about who controls what. They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.

  > They care about having a simple, fast browser who just works.
And the "just works" part won't happen without the other browsers' competition. It will become "just works with other Google products, for those who hold the same values as Google holds".

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#189

Post by metalliqaz »

samwillis wrote: post #181
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms. I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly)…

> battery usage is the number one KPI people care about.

I wish all phone manufacturers actually understood that

/me glances at my Pixel 3XL with 3430 mAh batt

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#190

Post by GekkePrutser »

Y_Y wrote: post #31
GekkePrutser wrote: post #21

I really love Firefox still.. Though they are starting to annoy me. Especially with GUI changes and the lack of customisation thereof. Like Compact mode disappearing. For the most used app on most desktops, customisation is super important. I think they're jumping on the 'opinionated software' bandwagon too much. It still has some powerful features though, like E2E encrypted sync, multi-account containers etc. I'll k…

You can still re-enable compact mode through about:config (at time of writing). It will nag you not to, but that's all.

I know and I've done this, but the writing is on the wall.. It may disappear at some point and that just annoys me because it's really valuable IMO. It makes me unsure if I want to keep using it when that happens. If they aren't planning to remove it, why remove the UI button for it?

And it just looks so bulky with compact mode off. I tried to get used to it but no. I actually used it without compact mode before, but with the latest version the compact mode is using about the same vertical space as the old normal mode :)

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