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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

#301

Post by burlesona »

samwillis wrote: post #289
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ironic part of this is that if Apple allowed alternative browser engines, I guarantee you it is only a matter of time before you see Electron apps bringing their own browser engines with them to iOS. And not long after before Hacker News is screaming and moaning about it (like they do for Electron on desktop) and begging for Apple to stop it.

HN already screams and moans about mobile apps built with PhoneGap/Cordova/Capacitor/Ionic ect. for not being "native" at the same time as promoting PWAs and complaining that apple doesn't support them, ignoring that PhoneGap, Cordova and especially Capacitor give you that functionality (mostly). I think that says more about HN than Apple...

What it says is that people mostly just post when they want to complain about stuff. Some minority of people are outraged over lack of PWA on iPhone, so they post to complain loudly about it. Some other minority of people are outraged over electron apps on Mac, so they post to complain loudly about it. It's not the same people, it's just the same pattern of the loud minority and silent majority.

I'll admit, though, I'm in the "I really want native Mac apps" minority :)

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#302

Post by defaultname »

tomxor wrote: post #265
NoGravitas wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's guaranteed Safari market also helps keep WebKit viable for other browsers like GNOME Web and Nyxt, so that's something I really appreciate.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

"basic browsing experience"

Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing.

Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards.

And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smear is that no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#303

Post by jeltz »

smolder wrote: post #231
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.

At what point does firefox silently upload history?

They did so in secret for their German users until they were caught red handed and had to stop doing so due to the public backlash. They lost millions of users in Germany due to that.

That said Google and Microft both keep collecting your data despite backlash while Mozilla stopped once caught.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#304

Post by dralley »

freediver wrote: post #281
dralley wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals? There's new headlines about this every few months. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi ... https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest ... There's also this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll ... https://twitter.com/__jakub_g…

Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead? Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately.

It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue.

I don't envy the market dynamics of their situation. Selling FOSS is hard to begin with, and it's even harder in a market that is utterly commoditized by players 1000x larger than yourself, and it's even harder if your niche (privacy) rules out nearly every funding option apart from the search deals with Google.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#305

Post by jeltz »

xvector wrote: post #227
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.

This is interesting, source?

He is most likely talking about the Cliqz scandal which in my opinion was really unethical. but it pales in comparison to what Google does every day.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#306

Post by Brian_K_White »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #146
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…

Believe me, I understand the appeal. Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in a…

[ ] shitty option A [ ] shitty option B

Telemetry showed that users overwhelmingly approve of shitty option B!

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#307

Post by traveler01 »

alex_smart wrote: post #75
traveler01 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I don't want to have my family asking to teach them how to use the browser everytime Mozilla decides to do a pointless UI change. Chrome pretty much barely changes where things are and how things behave and it's a pretty fast browser. If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management.

>If you want to fix Firefox go complain with their management. Despite being an open source project, Firefox management seems to be much less in touch with and responsive to their user's feedback compared to other browsers. As an example, both Safari and Firefox had the same bad idea at about the same time - converting tabs into floating buttons (although in the case of Safari the bad at least served a useful purpose…

Yeah there's need to be changes around Mozilla, something like it happened to AMD I guess, otherwise the latest of us still using Firefox will get tired of it and change to any Chromium-based browser (or Safari...).

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#308

Post by isaiahg »

vvoyer wrote: post #24
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…

> The true reasons Firefox lost market share I would say: The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it. Performance is a feature.

Those reasons might have applied half a decade ago. I was one of the early adopters of chrome and I've since switched back to Firefox for a better experience

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#309

Post by proyb2 »

One annoyed UX I dislike about Firefox is swipe back on iOS. Firefox team should fix their swipe back which go to previous page, it also lead to page refresh, and caused the scroll lose its position.

This deliver a poor experience when implementing History API compare to Safari and Google on iOS that work as expected.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#310

Post by NoGravitas »

tomxor wrote: post #265
NoGravitas wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's guaranteed Safari market also helps keep WebKit viable for other browsers like GNOME Web and Nyxt, so that's something I really appreciate.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff Google adds to Blink and tries to push as a standard is often outright bad (e.g. FLoC, WebUSB).
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