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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

#541
post #324
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The Safari/WebKit team has made a great deal of improvements over the last couple of versions. I think "compatible enough" has turned into a good "basically the same as Firefox" when it comes to web standards with the release of Safari 15 and 15.1. I also support the stance that certain features should remain focused where they belong e.g. natively installed apps. But who can decide what should be a web standard and…

Exactly. Not much of an Apple or Safari supporter but credit where credit's due Safari 13-15 has made more improvement each version than previous Safari. If they keep up the pace Safari 16 should be very close to current Chrome and Firefox.

https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/releas...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery capacity != battery life. I switched to a used iPhone and was bummed my 8+ had a "small" ~2400mah battery compared to my Android phone, which was 3100. Then I actually started using it. Even though the Android phone had an OLED screen, it would absolutely melt the battery. I have so little "battery charge anxiety" now it's not even funny. I don't even bother to charge it above 80-85% most of the time...and th…

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…

This might not always work - low end SoCs might also be built on older process node, making them less efficient. A higher end SoC also can complete tasks faster, meaning the device can sleep more of the time instead of crunching stuff on old slow cores and keeping the device fully up.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why so many companies feel compelled to needlessly take political stances. I think they can only lose from that. Although I have heard Nike earned billions with the Kaepernick campaigns, so maybe sometimes it does pay off. But for Mozilla? Do they get government funding?

It's a religious impulse. It may not be literal religion, in the sense of believing "God says this is the right thing to do," but it is the same underlying instinct - "This is Right, and I must do all in my power to serve it." Humans pick other people who agree with them for their teams, so after a while corporate cultures are almost guaranteed to become homogeneous. Once they are, groupthink and lack of dissenting o…

It's a religious impulse for people, for companies is pure profit-driven marketing. They are into politics because people nowadays love politics. It is everywhere. People want to brand themselves and carry their political flag everywhere. So it sells.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#544

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…

> 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 EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah. Hm? When were keyword searches or compact mode removed? I’m still using them in 94.0

They're removed from mobile and as far as I know slated for removal on desktop.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m reminded of a chestnut I was once told; satisfied people generally do not post comments, because people don’t go out of their way to say that things are okay, and your everyday person doesn’t even really post good reviews unprompted, because good service is usually the expectation.

People only really get active about bad divergence from expectations.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#546

Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away. In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#547

Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away. In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.

After many years, I stopped using Firefox for this same reason. On the other hand, there is a fork named LibreWolf which so far is working well for me and is not related to Mozilla.

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would you mind setting up a 24/7 stream of your bedroom? I don't know you, so technically it's anonymized.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#549

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 enabl…

> Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it.

Source? I don't see any IP address in about:telemetry window.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#550
post #10

I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android. I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike t…

Firefox on Android is absolutely excellent these days, but it still shows how Mozilla is really hesitant to embrace it. It's the only mobile browser with really adequate ad-blocking, thanks to extension support. There are a lot of other extensions which are really useful on mobile that aren't on the recommended list, though. I can understand why they restrict extensions (some don't have a viable UI for mobile or woul…

Both Vivaldi and Brave have adblockers built in by default, and Brave's both won't get fucked over by Manifest v3 (since they're part of the browser) and do CNAME uncloaking, the thing that makes uBO better on Firefox than Chromium.
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