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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

#561

Post by smegger001 »

thewebcount wrote: post #461
gizdan wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if battery usage was the reason behind it, it's not good enough. Let the user decide whether or not they're willing to sacrifice battery life if they want to.

A user has no way to know that's the tradeoff. They don't know what tech any given app was built with and they don't understand what the tradeoffs are for different tech.

simply make it easy for users to see what apps are responisble to battery usage. if someone sees that their crappy browser is using all of their battery but safari doesn't they will quit using the crappy browser.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#562

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

bobthepanda wrote: post #545
burlesona wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You never see "Toy Story 2 was ok" spray painted on an overpass.

People do voice very positive opinions, but nobody really voices indifference.

Further, even extremely opinionated people are usually only opinionated about a few things. Most people are indifferent to most things.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#563

Post by soundnote »

tapoxi wrote: post #246
sleepysysadmin wrote: post #228

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?

In my experience woke activists are attention vampires who drain focus away from doing things to doing activism. It is one thing to have activist organizations, but these types invariably try to turn production-focused organizations into activist ones.

For example, the recent move to switch from master branches to main branches provides near zero benefits, mass gnashing of teeth, and hours upon hours of wasted time. It is time spent increasing adherence to a cause and beating down dissent to the cause, and time spent away from things like producing code or, on the activists' part, doing things like teaching people if you're of the opinion that their cause is a good one.

I've seen far more environments turn for the worse after their entry, than become better for it (though a small handful have done so)

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#564

Post by freediver »

nobody9999 wrote: post #525
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.

I'm not aware of any scholarship looking at correlation between level of tech knowledge (specifically, ad blockers) and subscription behavior to avoid ads. That said, apparently ~42% of global users[0] block some ads. Given that there are ~4.6Bn users[1], of which ~1.9Bn sometimes use ad blockers, some 2.7Bn users don't use ad blockers at all. 50 million (although that includes YouTube Music subscribers as well as Yo…

It is a valid analysis and I think that my primary analogy still holds - a good browser should be able to find 10M paying users, when something like YouTube Premium is able to find 50M, just because browser is a much more valuable tool - even though free alternatives exist (because free YouTube also exists).

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#566

Post by the_why_of_y »

72deluxe wrote: post #137
jefftk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but they will use your money for outreach and advocacy, not Firefox.

This seems to be a repeat of the GNOME issues years and years and years ago where people would complain that donations were used to try and encourage women to program instead of spending it on infrastructure etc. I seem to remember people who complained about it were shouted down as mysogenist. It seems the organisations forget why they're here - to write software, not to try and solve all of mankind's issues and inj…

> I seem to remember people who complained about it were shouted down as mysogenist.

Yes, that would be because the whole story was basically lies.

https://fortintam.com/blog/outrageous-outreach/

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#567

Post by freediver »

soundnote wrote: post #484
freediver wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale. Their revenue stream is still ad monetization, just it happens that it does not come from Google (although it is curious that on default settings, Brave's ad blocker does not block Google ads?).

And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them.

Worth noting is that people would run ad-blockers even if all ads in the world are privacy-respecting. Users simply do not want ads on the web pages and eating the bandwidth.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#568

Post by shmerl »

samwillis wrote: post #181
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…

> 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)…

That always sounded like very crude excuse to exert control over Web standards by them. If battery usage with their own browsers is so much better, then everyone would be using their browsers on iOS. Why even ban others?

So I don't buy any of the Apple's excuses when they actively cause anti-competitive harm.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#570

Post by zaptheimpaler »

smoldesu wrote: post #535
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I won't argue against the complaints you have with Mac, i have some of the same and many others do.

I just think there genuinely IS a tension between open source/software freedom and great software. For an example, read about the recent case of Streamlabs. They stole the OBS code and rebranded it a little, copied the webpage down to the layout, but did not disclose any of that. They made tons of money and got acquired by Logitech. The people there successfully used the fact that OBS open sourced everything to steal their work and got rich off it. If Apple open sources their entire OS, why wouldn't the same thing happen? If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac? just recently I found a certain Mac OS app that sells pretty well. On decompiling it I found it was just an old open source command line utility, the dev literally threw in the binary and packaged it into an app. This was not disclosed anywhere of course. I've seen many, many examples of this across SaaS and other products - they take some free code, do nothing but repackage it and brand it, keep the profit and give nothing back to the creators.

I would love if MacOS was open source and I could fix any OS/software when i hit a use case it doesn't solve well for me. If there was in theory a way to open source code without letting cheaters use it that would be great. But if piracy is easy then people default to it. No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the IT industry today wouldn't exist. Like i just see the entire ecosystem and industry with all the amazing technology we have now compared to the 90s was born partly because we found ways to charge for stuff and cut out freeloaders. No one on HN asks for a lower salary and we get these salaries _because_ these models prevent theft. So closed source is a compromise to a tough problem - im okay with that. I think the huge leaps sometimes take a LOT of money to build - say Apple designing and researching and paying to manufacture touchscreens for a decade before ever selling the first iPhone, or Amazon buying a billion servers to build the cloud, and I don't know if they would exist if they never got paid for the stuff they built.

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