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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

#351

Post by KennyBlanken »

dralley wrote: post #216
fault1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so?

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...

Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d?

By the way, the bugzilla report about that particular incident was locked, then made employee-only, then made public again...then restricted beyond employee-only...by a project manager...who used to work for advertising companies before she came over to Mozilla.

Or how about the fact that flipping on some of the anti-tracking features include munging the timezone, which means times in almost any website are wrong - which seems to be a poison pill to keep people from turning it on?

Edit with details regarding the extension controversy: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#352

Post by jeltz »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #323
jeltz wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because this is overly broad and paints Mozilla in an unfairly bad light compared to how inconsequential this event was, here are the actual facts: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74yo19/cliqz_and_m... 1% of german users had anonymised data sent over.

Browsing history is something which is very easy to deanionymize so I do not buy that defence. What they did was inexcusable, but again both Microsoft and Google are more evil. I run Firefox, but only as the lesser evil.

Edit: 1% is 1% too many if you have a company which claims to care about the privacy of their users. Especially since browsing history is very sensitive and easy to deanonymize.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#353

Post by defaultname »

mtomweb wrote: post #329
defaultname wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 smea…

You wouldn’t be calling Safari awe inspiring if you had to develop for it. It is hands down the worst browser, filled with application breaking bugs and supports the smallest number of features out of any browser. Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS. From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.

"supports the smallest number of features out of any browser."

This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India.

It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser.

"this is reflected in all the developer surveys"

Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.

Developer surveys on this are worthless, and if we listened to developers as a group it would be an entirely Windows world.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#354

Post by freediver »

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…

>but I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry

Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Also we do not know for sure what is done with this data, as Firefox server side code (the one that processes the telemetry) is not open source (and even if it was it would not be a guarantee).

> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

There would be no problem if Firefox shipped as a zero-telemetry browser, and all telemetry was opt-in. This would remove all doubt and if you want to send Firefox data you can choose to do so.

However that is not the case. Significant amount of telemetry is enabled by default. Choosing to go for opt-out vs opt-in is what is hurting Mozilla's credibility here.

What then happens (and I am speculating here) is that this behavior triggers most power users in a negative way (for various reasons, one of them being simply using your bandwidth and resources for telemetry and noone likes having a slower browser) so they do their best to disable it. This in turn leaves Mozilla with data that does not include most of its power user base, the one that actually has most impact on Firefox market share (because as 'techies' they install the browser for their family and friends). The crippled data leads to crippled product decisions, which in turn makes power users even angrier and thus we witness the death spiral of user attrition that Firefox is currently in.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#355

Post by shrimp_emoji »

brianguertin wrote: post #343
_jal wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful. E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."

Do you want to be surveilled?

We promise it's anonymized.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#356

Post by spurgu »

Maybe someone has the answer to the main reason I'm not using Firefox:

Is there a (sane) way to map Cmd+D to highlight the URL bar? I was trying to do this about a year ago but it proved insanely complicated. I managed to update omni.ja in v80 but then couldn't anymore in v80.0.2 (plus this would get annoying quick to do frequently).

In Chromium this is easy since the there's a menu entry for it ("Open Location...") so I can natively create custom mappings for it, but I refused to retrain my muscle memory for Cmd+L so I went back to using Brave. :|

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#357

Post by HeavenSmile »

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…

As someone who for quite awhile almost exclusively used Chromium based browsers and then coming back to only using but actually appreciating using Firefox I approve and very much agree with this message.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#358

Post by dragonwriter »

defaultname wrote: post #353
mtomweb wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn’t be calling Safari awe inspiring if you had to develop for it. It is hands down the worst browser, filled with application breaking bugs and supports the smallest number of features out of any browser. Arguably it’s a result of having no competition on iOS. From idb, webrtc, to scroll to viewheight, to performance issues Safari is the worst to deal with and this is reflected in all the developer surveys.

"supports the smallest number of features out of any browser." This is a bit like saying India has the smallest number of people in countries named China or India. It's still an enormous number of features, and it is simply extraordinary what is capable in the browser. "this is reflected in all the developer surveys" Remember "Made for IE"? IE was dogshit , yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee…

> IE was dogshit, yet there were loads of devs who thought ActiveX was the bee's knees and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was just an annoyance in their lives.

I don't think that's true.

There were loads of devs that thought that ActiveX was the quickest route to the best experiences for the largest market segment and having to deal with other browsers and platforms was something the people signing paychecks cared less about, if at all.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#360

Post by defaultname »

tomxor wrote: post #350
defaultname wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 smea…

This is a misrepresentation, before even getting into lack of modern feature support, webkit introduce a lot of long lived regressions on each release and Apple have changed various behaviours in non-standard ways in Safari over the years then left them broken and unpatched on old devices (looking at you autoheight iframes). This has nothing to do with adopting standards and everything to do with a lack of resources,…

Lack of modern feature support? This is beyond parody.

"What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari."

Android users use the browser on their device -- any browser -- less than iOS users use their browser(s).

Read the Google corporate propaganda repeated on here, and other platforms provide a web bliss of PWAs, freed from app subservience. Only, not at all.

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