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…
> Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Brave also deserves a mention. As long as Brave exists in its current form, there will be a version of Chromium without Google’s “bad” stuff.
Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
491–500 of 675 posts
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 b…
There's also the Oppo/Oneplus way of doing things and pairing high quality cells to a better charge standard (SuperVOOC/WARP) that can throw 65W (or more) at the phone and minimize time spent charging. I can't overstate how much this changes my use pattern when I know I can throw phone on charger, take a shower, and by the time I'm out it's full.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also the Oppo/Oneplus way of doing things and pairing high quality cells to a better charge standard (SuperVOOC/WARP) that can throw 65W (or more) at the phone and minimize time spent charging. I can't overstate how much this changes my use pattern when I know I can throw phone on charger, take a shower, and by the time I'm out it's full.
Sure, but enjoy the battery being degraded to ~70% of its capacity after barely a year of doing that.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
For those who may be curious, Firefox still lists all their metapages [0], which makes exploring under the hood pretty easy. [0] about:about
I don't think it lists 100% of them. For example, I think there might be one that forces a crash for debugging purposes? There are definitely some that are used for displaying errors and things (eg about:httpsonlyerror). You could probably find more with searchfox, using a better query than https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=about%3A&path...
> This is a list of “about” pages for your convenience.
> Some of them might be confusing. Some are for diagnostic purposes only.
> And some are omitted because they require query strings.
Some are omitted. Like about:blank.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#495Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You are arguing that people "should" pay based on value. I believe I am arguing that we underestimate the willingness of people to part with their money when there is a right product. > Cost to switch is low. Economics 101 (literally that class!) says that the price in that situation is going to be based on competition (for the companies/producers that survive), and the price of the competition is $0. Not sure whet…
>Not sure whether we live in different times, but isn't the same with YouTube? The cost to watch is $0, and you can even watch it ad-free for $0 with a free ad-blocker, yet 50 million people still choose to pay $12/mo for YouTube Premium. Isn't that more about information asymmetry than value proposition? Blocking YouTube ads with the appropriate add-ons for free isn't necessarily that well known, except among the te…
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#497I 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…
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Plus, security is somewhat less of a concern when the application only accesses a limited site and isn’t for general purpose browsing for untrusted sites.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
We seem to agree entirely. Many developers would prefer a single, universal browser. A single platform. A single input mechanism (a single development language, compiler, RDBMS, filesystem, cloud provider, backup system, etc). All for obvious, practical reasons, at least in the short term. That would be devastating for the future, but if it makes projects easier today, many developers are entirely onboard. That was v…
I don't usually resort to personalised dissection of post, but to be frank, you've taken a giant shit all over this subthread so I think it deserves it... this notion of yours seems to be the underlying theme of most all of your comments - that everyone here criticising webkit or Apple must be against browser diversity, be Google proponents, or not value stability, performance and privacy... We are not this caricature... It might be worth your while to take a second to reflect on that assumption and binary view of reality.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork . Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true…
Who is "gp"?