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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

451–460 of 840 posts

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#451
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fai…

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. citation fucking needed.

Citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38532851, where the primary source for encom's opinions (encom himself) says that it's his opinion.

Seriously dude, it's an opinion and he provides some rationale behind it. Feel free to disagree, but then just say you disagree. This isn't a factual claim that can be proven or disproven.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#452
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is fast though.

Yeah. Although I'm not trying to discount what others experience, I'm always confused to hear that Firefox is slow, because it seems just as fast as Chromium on my computer.

It uses a lot more CPU on Youtube than chrome/safari, and seems laggy there.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#453

This is really frustrating to hear! It continues to boggle my mind how Chrome - partly closed source, questionable goals related to advertising - has almost 50% market share; while Firefox is declining.

One feature which is stopping me from switching is Google account sync between devices.

Firefox has account sync!

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really get what you're on about. I switched from Chrome to Firefox a couple months ago and... it's great. I don't notice any differences in performance (if anything, snappier) and the only thing that's "missing" that I had in Chrome is that Chrome had all my credit-card and password data associated with my Google account, which, well, that's not something I want Firefox to have. TLDR: Firefox is a good web br…

The pig doesn't have any problem with the farmer until he shows up with the axe. Thus it is with chrome users.

That axe may just be Chrome's war on ad blockers.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#455
post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. I finally had enough a few years ago, and switched to Vivaldi. Every Firefox upgrade was a gamble on what feature or functionality they'd remove or change this time, or what bone-headed UI design change they'd make. And every time there'd be a Bugzilla bug with a of horde users who just had their favorite feature removed, and every time, without fai…

> In my opinion, Firefox has been at war with its own users for years. citation fucking needed.

The citation is right there: "In my opinion"

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#458
post #380

What should Firefox do for you to select it as your default browser? (It’s my default browser, I’m pretty happy with it, also use the pocket functionality quite bit)

It is my default, but keep a Brave install around just for the ability to "fake" a site into being an app. ie, it gets a separate launcher shortcut, a separate icon, etc. Very useful for sites I use constantly so they're not trapped in the same window as random surfing.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But government don't exist to serve standards. Governments exist to serve their citizens -- their users. It's extremely user/citizen-hostile to say, "well our site works but no commercial browsers do, so I guess you can't register for a health plan this year over the web." And I don't know about you, but I sure don't want the government building its own standards-based browser required for accessing government websit…

The government should set or adopt standards, not serve them. And they can and should provide a reference implementation. We could easily and reliably do forms on mainframes. This is not complicated. And de facto, every browser supports HTML 4 forms anyway, so that's a non-concern. They already set standards for things like needing to support TLS 1.3 with specific cipher suites. There's no reason they can't say HTML…

No -- I don't want the US government (or any other) involved in setting web standards. The W3C is not going to be helped by being run by governments instead.

No -- I don't want the US government providing a reference implementation of web browsers.

No -- I don't want to log into a mainframe computer to fill out my taxes or sign up for Medicaid or a health plan.

The government should simply build services that work, in practical ways that are familiar and friendly to their citizens, according to the tools and habits their citizens are already accustomed to.

That means websites and apps for popular OS'es and browsers. It means phone numbers that work with existing telephones. It means offices in population centers.

Good governments come to where users/citizens already are. The shouldn't make users/citizens jump through hurdles to come to it, any more than necessary.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#460
post #408

I can't be alone in my view that open source won. Just not the original Mozilla open source browser. Instead the re-invented one spear headed by Google - Chrome. Chrome is like the 2.0 of everything the IE6 team and Mozilla team learned the hard way. It was built by many of the original founding members of those teams. It's not a bad thing when Microsoft now uses the open source Blink rendering engine. It's not a bad…

Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers, but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war. Chrome is certainly open source but product development is completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned to displace ad blockers.

It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.

Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.

We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.

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