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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

batsov.com

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#291

Post by Brian_K_White »

_jal wrote: post #234
bool3max wrote: post #124

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…

You shouldn't have had to say it, but thank you.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#292

Post by freediver »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #210
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…

This list of standards also shows how Google attempts to make it even more impossible for anyone but them to maintain a browser. Shape detection API ? Seriously ? Picture-in-picture as a standard when it should be up to the OS/browser ? having the perform resizing and compression ?

We can thank WebKit and Apple's policy around it on iOS for suppressing and holding back these attempts, as sites on average still _need_ to work on an iPhone.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#293

Post by bluefox »

orbital-decay wrote: post #287
bluefox wrote: post #230

The article says that if you care about the web, you should care about Firefox. I disagree, because my "web" is probably not Batsov's "web". What is "the web" for me? Well, I'd say it's IRC, torrents, mailing lists, git repositories, oh and mostly-textual websites. I use Firefox for the latter, but for most of them I wouldn't mind using emacs-w3m instead. Unfortunately GitHub turned into a shitty JavaScript Web App,…

Hold on, Batsov's article is specifically about Web. Web is a hyperlinked document system accessed through the browser (modern WWW has an app layer on top of that, but it's not the point). IRC, torrents, e-mail, and git are not part of the Web.

Yes, I know. I thought about it after I posted. I wanted to emphasize that "web" can be a small part of Internet use, so a browser's importance is placed in a wider perspective. The rest of my comment talks about its importance within that niche, though.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#294

Post by NateEag »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #204
ahartmetz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partisan politics is one hell of a drug

I don't know why so many companies feel compelled to needlessly take political stances. I think they can only lose from that. Although I have heard Nike earned billions with the Kaepernick campaigns, so maybe sometimes it does pay off. But for Mozilla? Do they get government funding?

It's a religious impulse.

It may not be literal religion, in the sense of believing "God says this is the right thing to do," but it is the same underlying instinct - "This is Right, and I must do all in my power to serve it."

Humans pick other people who agree with them for their teams, so after a while corporate cultures are almost guaranteed to become homogeneous.

Once they are, groupthink and lack of dissenting opinions means the company starts to explicitly support whatever causes fit its corporate culture.

That's what it looks like to me, anyway.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#295

Post by dralley »

DeathArrow wrote: post #12

> Clearly, that market share was lost solely to Chrome & co.3 I can attribute this decline to various factors: >Google’s massive development resources and marketing machine. >Most people not thinking about the long-term ramifications of ending up in a market with a single vendor in it. >Firefox losing its status of a shiny new thing over the years. >Mozilla’s inability to capitalize on the popularity of Firefox in th…

Do you truly, honestly believe that being preinstalled on Android and ChromeOS, advertised specifically to Firefox users on the homepage of the #1 most visited website in the world (google.com, and it was literally the only ad that has ever been allowed there), and shoved into all kinds of installers for Antivirus, Adobe, Java and so on with the "make Chrome my default browser" button automatically checked --- all of that had nothing to do with the "true reason" Firefox has been trending down?

The marketing campaign for Chrome alone, if it is even possible to assign a dollar value to it, would have cost billions of dollars for anyone other than Google.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#296

Post by Liquid_Fire »

klyrs wrote: post #201
fsflover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.

I use firefox exclusively. Every few weeks, it installs an update and refuses to open a new tab until a restart. It frequently fails to restart. It occasionally nukes my session so I can't restore my tabs. It seems to occasionally forget/unset my preference to not auto-update. If it just had a status indicator to show that an update is available, I'd happily update at the end of a workday. Instead, it's interrupted a…

Are you using Firefox on Linux, installed via a package manager? What you describe is the behaviour when your package manager updates Firefox in the background from under its feet - not the fault of Firefox. Firefox's own updater will not automatically update without warning.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#297

Post by dralley »

alex_smart wrote: post #40
fsflover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.

Firefox just pushed yet another pointless UI change six months ago. People using their software just to go about with their lives don't like pointless UI changes.

And Chrome pushed another pointless UI change six months before that.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#298

Post by soundnote »

Parts of this are comedy.

> For me Firefox is the only alternative to a complete Chrome hegemony in the sense that:

> it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven)

I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.

> it has a great track record of fighting for its users and for a better Internet.

Last I checked, it's owned by a foundation that's very okay with advocating that others tell me what I should see on the 'net. "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth. That and "fighting for its users" don't exactly go together, unless you believe the Foundation's purpose is to be its users' moral custodian in matters that are not tech-related.

The whole sales pitch of this thing is "you should use a browser that increasingly sucks, that's increasingly lacking in support, whose stewards get their money from EvilCorp and cheerfully advocate for Internet censorship, all because they use a different browser engine". When my option would be to use browsers that do not suck and actually improve release by release, have revenue streams not so beholden to EvilCorp and put their makers' personal politics aside for user control and privacy.

Choices, choices.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#299

Post by jeltz »

gausswho wrote: post #236
sneak wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silently uploading your browsing activity off the device without your consent is absolutely in the same ballpark as what Google does.

I'm unfamiliar with what you're speaking of. Can you elaborate?

He is talking about when Mozilla made Firefox send the browsing history of randomly selected German users to a company they had invested in, Cliqz. That is the by far biggest ethical violation of Mozilla and which, justifiably, still haunts them. That said both Chrome and Edge are worse.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#300

Post by isaiahg »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #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 ove…

I use Firefox as my daily driver and I couldn't disagree more. But it's hard to reply adequately because you don't actually tell us what your problems with it is. In what ways is Firefox not an acceptable alternative?
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