361–370 of 675 posts
I recently had to do a video call for a medical appointment. The video client was web based. I opened it up in the latest Firefox and was welcomed with a message informing me only Chrome was supported (or Safari on iOS). Ok, so now in order to receive healthcare in 2021 I must install Google spyware on my devices. This timeline is just swell.
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Microsoft used these same anti competitive practices with Windows and Internet Explorer and they got an antitrust lawsuit.
Always wondered how Google can pull it off then. I assume their legal team figured out the threshold of what they can do, and now they do threshold - 1 so "it's ok"?
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)…
I use Chromium because it has both a safer and more reliable design and implementation. If web browsers were OS's, Firefox would be Mac OS 9. If Mozilla wants to understand why they're losing market share, they should try and understand why no one builds OS's like that anymore.
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> 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."
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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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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 sit…
A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current…
Opera was paid at one point, they lost the competition with free alternatives.
Paid browsers are a concept that has been and gone, and if Mozilla attempted to bring the idea back, it would probably be the stupidest decision Mozilla had ever made. They have made plenty of stupid decisions, but nothing so far has utterly destroyed their market share instantly, this would.
In the end, the funding model alone doesn't define how a company acts. It matters, and is certainly a threat to Mozilla's neutrality, but Mozilla tends to hire developers who care about thier mission, they tend towards openness in their processes. Both these things protect Mozilla from becoming a Google shill despite their funding process.
If Mozilla ever backed Google on the wrong decision, I trust that many Mozilla devs would push back - either internally or by going to the press, even if it cost their jobs. Being a particularly successful open source project tends to select for a certain kind of employee.
Apple devs don't have this advantage - Apple has a culture of secrecy (for prefectly understandable buisness reasons, they don't like leaks), this means Apple's decisions are much harder to monitor, and Apple devs are much less likely to fight internal decisions that hurt the web as a whole.
That said, Apple does have its own incentives to fight Google which are also legitimate - a more independent funding model, and an intense dislike within their internal culture of relying on external vendors for their software and apis. There's a reason Apple develop their own browser, their own compiler, their own dev environment, their own everything. There's a history to that, Apple have been bitten by externally controlled systems, so they are very unlikely to jump to Chrome, probably even moreso than Mozilla.
The point is, both Mozilla and Apple have good and bad elements to their continued position providing alternative browser engines, both are strong in their own ways, and we're vastly better off with the benefits of both than with just 1 of them, either would be a major loss.
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> 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)…
Another reason is actually security. Remember that Apple doesn't allow other web browser engines in any application. Imagine if an Electron application on iOS just decided to ship with it's entire, own browser engine. We would have super-bloated apps like our desktops, and if a security flaw was found, good luck getting all those apps to update. In a way, Apple knows that allowing other browser engines means: 1. Chro…
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 ?
I’m a huge proponent of platforms aiming to be stable and largely not messing with shit but it has to be feature complete first.
Recently reinstalled OS and tried Firefox for some time. Could only last a couple weeks before dumping firefox. I guess Safari is still their own. KDE Konqueror still their own. Sad that opera became chrome. Guess I'll be staying Brave for awhile. Firefox's huge decline also makes sense to me. Firefox stopped building their browser ~5 years ago? It's not that Chromium is inherently just better, it's that Mozilla move…
Why do you think inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive?
I would not agree that is what I said. I'm not opposed to inclusion. I'm not even saying their decision is wrong. Maybe they are exactly what we need on the internet. I fully support their choice to do what they have done.
I have made a judgement against firefox. It has very clearly been neglected. There are a myriad of problems that have been unsolved for years and this is recent experience. I suspect nobody can refute this very real experience. I remember a time in history when firefox was a top contender with tons of market share.
So did I say that they are mutually exclusive? Certainly not, but in Mozilla's case their priorities are clear and the consequence of a bad browser is reality. they lost focus on their browser and it lagged behind.
I'm interested in why you asserted I said more than I did. Do you believe inclusion and good engineering are mutually exclusive? It certainly looks bad for Mozilla.