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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

#531

Post by nobody9999 »

cpeterso wrote: post #507
freediver wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Potentially yes, but hard to believe that a $7bn business exists only because of lack of information. I certainly don't lack the information and few other people from my circle that also pay for it so it is hard for me to scale from there.

Ad blockers don't work for YouTube on a TV or the native YouTube app (unless you are one of the few people with a DNS ad blocker). I wonder how many of YouTube Premium subscribers primarily use the website. I'm a YouTube Premium subscribers solely because I typically watch YouTube on my TV.

> Ad blockers don't work for YouTube on a TV or the native YouTube app (unless you are one of the few people with a DNS ad blocker). I wonder how many of YouTube Premium subscribers primarily use the website. I'm a YouTube Premium subscribers solely because I typically watch YouTube on my TV.

An excellent point. I mostly watch YouTube on a computer with ad blockers, and I also have a DNS-based ad blocker (Pi-hole). And the combination does block many ads, but other add-ons are required to block the video window ads as well.

I don't use YouTube enough on non-general purpose computer devices enough to care about that. As such, I didn't consider that as a reason to pay for Premium.

Thanks for expanding my view on this!

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#532

Post by soundnote »

sfink wrote: post #467
soundnote wrote: post #298

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 EvilCo…

> 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. Ugh, I dislike the title of that post. I still claim that you're misinterpreting it, though. It should have been something like "We need better answers than deplatforming." Deplatforming…

> In my opinion, Mozilla has done a decent job of being apolitical when possible. Yes, it does think you shouldn't see some things on the 'net, but those things are things like scams and malicious disinformation. It does not say that you should not see the latest blatherings of Trump or whoever, except perhaps when they're directly encouraging violence or sedition.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

> Turn on by default the tools to [amplify factual voices](link points to below) over disinformation.

Their idea of "factual voices"?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/16/technology/facebook-rever...

> The change resulted in an increase in Facebook traffic for mainstream news publishers including CNN, NPR and The New York Times, while partisan sites like Breitbart and Occupy Democrats saw their numbers fall.

The entire post reeked of political tribalism in a way I don't like from people who make my tools. While seeing less Breitbart and Occupy Democrats might be welcome, Mozilla were completely fine with third parties boosting the visibility of openly partisan organizations who'll happily lie to my face. No, no thanks.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#533

Post by handrous »

michaelt wrote: post #340
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. Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users. But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.

> Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users.

I'd bet a graph of their privacy-focused:indifferent users over time would be U-shaped. Very high before, oh, I dunno, FF2.0 when the only reason non-nerds had it was because their nerdy friend/relative installed it for them. Lower when they were advertising all over the place and marketshare was growing ('08-'12? My memory's hazy). Higher now, as their userbase continues a years-long contraction and shifts toward being mostly nerds, again.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#534

Post by ksec »

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

I guess that is why some companies are starting to get wary of the term open source.

> Chrome started with a great narrative when it was facing an uphill battle with Internet Explorer,

That is just not true, the uphill battle was hard won by Firefox and their supporters. People knew there were alternative browser. Developers were taking action in supporting Firefox. Chrome came in, with the help of Google Services steal the thunder. Although you could also blame Mozilla for failing to work on e10s, which was originally schedule for Firefox 3.5, pushed to Firefox 4 and later that is what we now call quantum.

>it’s home to the last major rendering engine, that’s not derived from WebKit

I dont think that is bad. Gecko isn't necessarily better than Webkit. You need to win on technical merit.

> Google were still the company that “does no evil”. It’s almost surreal how things have changed

"Surreal". I guess that is just life, when most were too young and naive to believe a new startup company could do evil. And Google was so righteous back then. When a few lonely conspiracy theorist were crying about Google, no one listened. Remember, that was before Steve Jobs declared Thermonuclear war. And before the Great Battle between Apple and Google started. But then even after the thermonuclear war, most people still believed in Google.

It wasn't until 2021 did anyone from ex-Mozilla stepped up and suggest what Google might have done.

And here is what I wrote about Mozilla [1] not long ago.

>And here is another unpopular opinion. I dont care if her salary is 3 million or even 30 million. If she had managed to bring Firefox to 60% marketshare and bring down Chrome on Desktop, would you have still complained if she was paid 30 million?

The problem is Mozilla is in such a bad shape and she is under performing as a CEO.

Unfortunately people dont learn much from history. And history dictate the only way to solve this problem is Mozilla think of it as a problem. Otherwise its current status at ~10% marketshare is enough to sustain its operation. Nothing bad enough is happening, no interest or incentive for changes. Inertia. Let's keep thing this way.

So yes, it is counter intuitive. The only way to save Mozilla ( or change Mozilla's direction, I guess the word "save" is a hyperbole, at least from Mozilla's perspective. ) isn't trying to get more user to use it. It is actually push people to abandon it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28961544

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#535

Post by smoldesu »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #504
smoldesu wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adding money to the equation doesn't fix problems. It's another situation of "the mythical man-month" where you can hire as many people as you want, but it doesn't make the problem go away faster. Take MacOS for example: it's an operating system that has thousands of people working on it, backed with decades of R&D as well as hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn't make it any easier for Apple to support 32-bit…

Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up. Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support teams full of talented people working hard. I see the same pattern in Firefox. Back when Chrome launched, and for years after, it was miles ahead of firefox and IE. Anyways, if money is a problem then just work f…

> Linux desktop is great now because OSes have stagnated and its easier to catch up.

The Linux desktop was fine, arguably since GTK2 was popularized. The software selection was a little sparse, but I genuinely liked it more than the Aqua UI at the time. (as well as... whatever Windows 7 was doing. Aero?)

> Mac was as good in 2010, 10 years ago. I do believe that its at least partly because Apple had the money to hire and support excellent teams full of brilliant people.

Maybe so, but I seldom really saw it pay off. Things definitely looked prettier on MacOS, but I was often frustrated by things that should "just work" like Time Machine and Safari, so I really spent the majority of my time on MacOS looking for alternatives to Apple's own software. Whatever lead they had in 2010 has been greatly diminished though, especially since Big Sur's release. I just can't even fathom using their new UI...

> Anyways, if money is a problem then just work for free lol.

I suppose I do, if you count open source contributions.

>Why do you care about Vulkan on Apple anyways?

It's nice. DXVK is very powerful, and not being able to use it on my Macbook kinda makes it a no-go for regular use. You can argue that it "doesn't matter" and try to trivialize my desires as much as you want, but it's Apple's move. My Windows machines had it, my Linux devices have it, Apple is the only one left who doesn't.

> Seems like you were a Mac user.. if i had to guess you used Mac for many years and switched recently, now that Linux desktop has become viable.

I used to use Windows for gaming and my Mac for programming, but once Proton got good enough I figured it was time to retire them both. Windows and MacOS were starting to get too slow to daily-drive, and my Mac wouldn't even run Mojave without idling above 50c. Plus, Apple's software quality has taken a complete nosedive in recent years. Sierra was the first step in a pretty questionable direction, and everything running Catalina and beyond is completely foreign to me. Plus, the little things like package management and process handling started to get increasingly difficult, to the point that it was actively making it harder for me to do my job. Safari's endless popup notifications drove me up the wall while I was happily using Chrome, and having to blow hundreds of gigs just to use little utilities like Xcode finally pushed me over the edge. I couldn't buy a machine with upgradable memory or even accessible storage. Modern Macs are about as repairable as a cellphone, which I find abhorrent.

> Why did you not use linux 10 years ago too?

I did, I've had an x201 for about a decade that's happily served as a media server and a Nextcloud/Syncthing host for quite a while now. On desktop, it was mostly down to a lack of software: there was a period where you couldn't run everything you wanted unless you had both Windows and Mac, but nowadays the holdouts have mostly given up. I've got Slack, VS Code, Discord, Steam, Spotify, and pretty much anything from Windows that I really cared about like Ableton Live. Plus, I can plug in any GPU that I want and expect it to work fairly well on Linux, which is definitely not the case for MacOS. Really not ideal for the times that I'm playing with AI or CUDA acceleration. Running Linux virtualized was a pretty good solution for a while, but with QEMU I can run Windows and MacOS with baremetal performance.

This isn't intended to dunk on MacOS, as much as it might seem like it (and as much as people insist that I do). I still think Mojave is one of the best OSes you can use these days, especially if you're not an enthusiast. My demands outgrew MacOS though, and Apple's demands offended me. Switching to Linux made perfect sense for my workflow, and it went smoother than I expected on the desktop. My overall point is that money is nice, but it won't buy you software freedom. You could have all the money in the world, and Apple wouldn't let you audit their source code or plug in an Nvidia graphics card. Instead of fighting them at every corner, I've given up, and I'm happier than I've ever been.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#536

Post by burnte »

dijit wrote: post #217
K0nserv wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree that is their publicly stated reason for the limitation. Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs on iOS and competition for mobile Safari is a common theory. Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.

And yet: Steve Jobs wanted PWA's (or something similar) in the beginning and begrudgingly made an App Store. Yes, I know the circumstances are different, but I do think it's ironic.

That was just a cover for the fact that the app store infrastructure wasn't ready and they weren't even certain the iPhone was going to take off. They only had so much engineering talent and money, and it went into the phone itself. They had been working on the beginnings of app franeworks and the store before launch. The huge response to the iphone caused them to both lower the price (to widen the potential market once it would be wildly profitable) and increase the speed/budget of the app infrastructure engineering.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#537

Post by asdff »

veidelis wrote: post #428
GuB-42 wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox had more than 30% market share at their peak, against pre-installed IE and Microsoft aggressive tactics. It was before the ballot screen. Together with Chrome, they ended up beating IE, at the time neither had a significant advantage in distribution, at least compared to IE. So in theory, Chrome can be beaten, except that unlike IE, Chrome doesn't suck, in fact, about the only thing going for Firefox is that…

Addons on mobiles are another thing going for Firefox. What youtube ads?

Only for android though

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#538

Post by soundnote »

didibus wrote: post #529
soundnote wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad-hijacking? The referral code thing was a bug that got fixed - the intended function was Firefox Suggest-esque sponsored links from a local directory when you typed a word but not a complete url, eg. "binance". The bug was that it gave you a suggestion for complete, legit urls too (eg. "binance.us") and put the suggestion at the top. The bug was fixed to make the feature work as intended, and the feature is turned…

Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads. I don't totally understand how people think Brave is against ad-tech, when it is very much an ad-tech company making money primarily from ads, and secondly from its crypto ownership in BAT. Brave does a lot of user tracking, but it says it anonymizes it, which hopefully it does, but it still tracks all your behavior. It is still a cool model, but very much ad-…

Of course they're not against ad tech, they are an ad agency. They just think there's a market for a privacy-respecting setup, is all. And I think they're right in that.

As far as web ads go, a lot of people's objection to them is not seeing ads (though the ads themselves can obviously be very invasive and bothersome), but to things like tracking and fingerprinting, which the company is adamantly against. The attempt is to have ads, but also have privacy, which IMO is the correct move. It's not like we can run everything on subscriptions.

> Brave replaces the ads from the website with its own ads.

This is not exactly true. They have separate functions for an adblocker, an ad delivery system that's entirely separate from the websites you visit, and a tipping system for sending BAT to creators.

I'm not terribly fond of crypto, so I use Brave as essentially a degoogled Chromium with a built-in adblocker that won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since it's not an extension) and is available on mobile, and who run an independent end to end encrypted sync service. It's pretty nice.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#539

Post by asdff »

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…

End users don't care about the management of firefox being messy or not. They install the web browsers that are advertised at them. Every time they go to a youtube link or to their gmail inbox there is a banner ad to install google chrome. Corporate IT now installs google chrome by default on work hardware at a lot of organizations because it works out of the box with their google business products, so you are familiar with google chrome from the workplace or even in schools with chromebooks now too. Google has millions of dollars more to blow than Mozilla at this sort of arms race and its shown in the market share.
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