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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

batsov.com

251–260 of 675 posts

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Battery capacity != battery life. I switched to a used iPhone and was bummed my 8+ had a "small" ~2400mah battery compared to my Android phone, which was 3100. Then I actually started using it. Even though the Android phone had an OLED screen, it would absolutely melt the battery. I have so little "battery charge anxiety" now it's not even funny. I don't even bother to charge it above 80-85% most of the time...and th…

Idk, I'm a big fan of what companies like Motorola are doing by taking a 4000mah+ battery and pairing it with some of those low end SoC's that sip battery. Androids power usage can be complete trash, but I've managed 4 days of battery out of these cheap Motorola phones while still using discord/twitter/telegram like normal.

If apple actually went up on their battery sizing they could easily achieve Monday to Friday battery life on something like the iPhone SE.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#252
post #220
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to t…

> I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. Go to about:telemetry There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.

I didn't know this existed - thank you for sharing. I've shared telemetry on Firefox, but wasn't sure exactly what was being sent so this helps quite a bit more.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…

We live in a time when wrong think can get you cancelled and Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture. The telemetry might be entirely technical in nature but both ability and the motive are there for it to be something much worse. At a minimum Firefox needs 100% transparency into who had access to the data, how it is secured, its exact uses, and ti…

As another commenter stated you can go to about:telemetry and see what data is being shared.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#254
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you c…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#255

Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away. In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.

After many years, I stopped using Firefox for this same reason. On the other hand, there is a fork named LibreWolf which so far is working well for me and is not related to Mozilla.

Thanks, I hadn't heard of LibreWolf before. Will check it out.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#256
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that is their publicly stated reason for the limitation. Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs on iOS and competition for mobile Safari is a common theory. Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.

PWA’s aren’t ‘innovation’. Apps can do far more than PWAs.

I believe the stifling of innovation the parent comment refers to is that of browser engines, not of PWAs.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#257
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…

> Firefox, while open source, doesn't provide footing for the community to build browser forks Say hello to https://servo.org/ .

Wasn't Servo team disbanded?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#258
There are a couple of misleading things in this post.

The assumption that Chromium (& Webkit) is controlled soley by Google, is outdated.

If you think Microsoft would have made a strategic shift like basing Edge on Chromium without ensuring they had a seat at the table, you would be very mistaken - and they did not.

Microsoft, Google, Brave, and Samsung all contribute to the core, Microsoft very significantly.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#259
post #220
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to t…

> I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. Go to about:telemetry There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.

That gave me a laugh. Had no idea this existed, thanks.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#260
Firefox isn't an acceptable alternative, over the past few years it's completely obvious the priorities of the organization in control of it are not to build a great browser and to de-homogenize the web tech stack.

Best thing that could ever happen for the browser problem is for Mozilla to go under and FF be taken over by the community who actually care about the problem that FF is the solution for, not just some overpaid executives who think selling a VPN is a good use of their time between private jet flights.

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