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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

#581

Post by smoldesu »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #570
smoldesu wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 acquire…

I'm not arguing for Apple to open-source their OS, I just want them to make something that's truly better than Linux/Windows for once. They have an unconscionable amount of money, and they do nearly nothing with it. My original argument was having more money doesn't neccesarily build better software, and MacOS is a prime example of that. A few notes though:

> If that did happen, who pays for all the maintenance and new features on Mac?

This is probably the last thing I'd worry about if MacOS was open source. As it stands today, Apple basically "maintains" the Mach kernel by strapping BSD patches onto the XNU kernel and praying nothing breaks, if the community maintained it we probably wouldn't need to wait months for new iterative versions to come out and fix relatively simple issues.

> 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.

And that's fine. That free software is intended to support other people, and it's why there are distinctions between GPL and BSD licensing. When you write open-source software, imagining such a "worst case" scenario is the first things developers do, and they choose their license accordingly. In the Streamlabs example you brought up, the community rightfully called them out for being a ripoff of OBS, and encouraged people to go use the free version instead. Like I said earlier, "money is the problem, not the solution."

> No one paid for WinRAR back in the day and if we just let that model continue, 80% of the awesome software today wouldn't exist.

People didn't pay for WinRAR because

1. It didn't force you to.

2. There were several free alternatives, like 7ZIP.

As you've mentioned earlier, the majority of "awesome software today" is really just free software strapped together with twine and bubblegum. 80% of SaaSes these days are simply frontends to software that could absolutely run locally. Even SaaSes don't see the end-user as an important asset, since the "new hotness" is moving on to B2B sales and bootstrapping directly onto another successful company like a parasite. Whether or not you consider this to be the utopian world of proprietary software is up to you, but I certainly appreciate things better in the FOSS world.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#582

Post by heftig »

lillecarl wrote: post #405
klyrs wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only, I don't experience anything like this behavior on any other application. This is a Firefox problem, even if Ubuntu is to blame for overriding my setting. And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.

It's really a you problem. The market share of Linux desktops is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter, and you're pulling the rug(binaries) from underneath a web browser (one of the most complex software projects known to man) and expect it to keep running flawlessly. I'm using NixOS where every version of every dependency of every program I install will be saved until I cleanup the garbage (1 command) so I d…

Linux also does not allow you to overwrite a running program; you'll get ETXTBSY.

The difference to Windows is that Linux allows you to delete (unlink) files that are in use. The inode actually owning the data continues to exist until the program is dead.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#583

Post by nobody9999 »

freediver wrote: post #564
nobody9999 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>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).

A reasonable point. And I don't necessarily disagree.

Although "Video of stuff I want to look at" may be more compelling than "some icon I click to view the intarwebz," when they see essentially the same thing unless they take specific steps to block ads/tracking.

And that goes double for Android phone users.

My hypothesis was orthogonal to your thesis, but I agree that the data I outlined certainly supports yours.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#584

Post by starik36 »

malermeister wrote: post #572
starik36 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society What is your feeling towards the summer 2021 rioters? Are they a threat towards society?

Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials, to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule? No? There's your answer then.

Huh. https://abcnews.go.com/US/sen-rand-paul-attacked-angry-mob-l...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#585

Post by soheil »

I wish there was an easy way to map all my chrome ext to firefox exts. For the ones that don't have an exact equivalent maybe the closest match would work fine. The point is I have over 30 extensions and every time I decide to use ff I realize I'm missing one or another ext. Even if I download the ff version of the ext it's still missing all the configuration and customized key bindings.

This is probably the major blocker from people switching.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#586

Post by starik36 »

malermeister wrote: post #572
starik36 wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society What is your feeling towards the summer 2021 rioters? Are they a threat towards society?

Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials, to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule? No? There's your answer then.

At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#587

Post by malermeister »

starik36 wrote: post #586
malermeister wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials, to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule? No? There's your answer then.

At least 25 Americans were killed during protests and political unrest in 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill...

Yes, a few of the protestors were killed by the state. It's sad, but I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#588

Post by irskep »

gonehome wrote: post #576
emiliosic wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser). Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium. The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS. Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.

Ken Kocienda writes about the origin of Safari in Creative Selection [0]. It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base. [0]: The book has som…

Minor correction: Ken Kocienda didn't do the Konqueror port. He was working on getting Gecko to build and a teammate got Konqueror working in X11 before Ken even got Gecko to compile.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#589

Post by gonehome »

irskep wrote: post #588
gonehome wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ken Kocienda writes about the origin of Safari in Creative Selection [0]. It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base. [0]: The book has som…

Minor correction: Ken Kocienda didn't do the Konqueror port. He was working on getting Gecko to build and a teammate got Konqueror working in X11 before Ken even got Gecko to compile.

Ah you're right I was misremembering (read it a while ago) - thanks for the correction.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#590

Post by tomohawk »

kuschku wrote: post #481
brianguertin wrote: post #343

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."

An example, measuring traffic flow in a city. You can do it with cameras and ID plate detection tools, which allows tracking where anyone is at any time. You can also put magnetic loops into the roads, which just tells you how many drive over a certain area of the road, without any individualized tracking. Good telemetry is like the magnetic loops. But nowadays very few implementations are that privacy respecting

Better surveillance: put RFID readers in the road that track the RFID tags in the tires. Then ping that against the database of who bought what tires. People won't known what hit them.
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