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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#481

Post by boris-ning-usds »

Miraste wrote: post #140
robin_reala wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDS aren’t idiots, and if they haven’t realised this yet then maybe this post will focus attention. They want to support every citizen it’s reasonable to support (or at least I did when I was working for GOV.UK) and dropping support from a lack of knowledge shouldn’t be on the agenda.

GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.

Hi!

Can you elaborate on what in particular on the VA site that causes serious harm to the people it's meant to serve? I'm happy to bring it to the team or if you don't feel comfortable with stating it here, please bring it up to the open source website for va.gov. https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-websi...

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#482

Post by rdm_blackhole »

vlabakje90 wrote: post #329
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a no from me. Considering the recent headlines from the EU wanting to scan every private message on the phones of it's citizens in order to "protect the children".

FIY, that has been rejected: https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/26/eu-chat-control-csam-e...

For now, but it's not over.

If not this time then the next. Just the fact that the commission was allowed to propose such a blatant privacy invading law is enough for me to know that privacy is not a something that the EU is serious about.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#483

Post by dcsommer »

ericskiff wrote: post #356

This discounts the number of people who see manifest v3 and the neutering of adblockers as a dealbreaker, forcing them to switch away from Chrome. Now, when they try Firefox it’s as fast and stable as Chrome (which was not the case a few years ago, they’ve made great strides) I’m hopeful that yields a nice bump in user ship. I was a diehard Firefox fan in the beginning, switched to chrome because it was just better o…

Google may pay less for search placement on Firefox if all their users block their ads.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#484

Post by amiga386 »

lucideer wrote: post #257
ink_13 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When an open-source project somehow loses its way, it's often forked by a new team of contributors who have a better idea Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox

> Perhaps ironically, this was also the genesis of Firefox That's not entirely accurate (or at least, while accurate, is missing a lot of significant context) Mozilla was creating within Netscape, not in opposition to it, as a steward org for the open-sourcing of Navigator & Communicator. Even when Netscape was acquired by AOL, AOL continued to fund[0] Mozilla for years after the acquisition. [0] https://web.archive.…

That is the case, but even then Firefox really was a fork, within Mozilla.

Mozilla was created in 1998 to open-source Netscape Communicator suite. Mozilla released its own suite, also called "Mozilla" (e.g. "Mozilla 1.0" [0])

Independently of that effort, Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross made an experimenal, cut-down version of just the browser part of the suite, which they called "Phoenix", as in a Phoenix rising from the ashes. That's a fork. That's a fork by any metric.

They later rebranded Phoenix as Firefox, and eventually the Mozilla suite was abandoned. Mozilla changed tack in 2003 and switched to developing Firefox and Thunderbird as independent products [1]

[0] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0

[1] https://www-archive.mozilla.org/roadmap/roadmap-02-apr-2003

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#485

Post by OkayPhysicist »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #153
Chabsff wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the government HAS to make that determination in a data-driven way. It cannot be based on anything subjective, for what should be obvious reasons. On top of that, said lack of knowledge is a stated goal of all privacy-focused browsers. GA-blindness is an implementation detail of these policies. Any method the government could use to accurately track that information is effectively a bug in need of fixing fr…

Server-side tracking of user agent strings should still be possible.

Except we should be pushing for the elimination of user agent strings, too. They just end up being used as a lazy way for lazy developers to not test for capabilities.

The most recent example I've run into is Snapchat's web client: It reject's Firefox purely by user agent string, but then works perfectly in Firefox if you just have your browser lie.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#486

Post by Animats »

If only Firefox still worked.

Every time I open Firefox on Linux, it does disk I/O for about two minutes before it is usable. No idea why.

On current Ubuntu, about once a day, Firefox stops accepting keyboard input. Sometimes right in the middle of a text box. Other windows still accept input. Restarting Firefox is usually necessary.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#487

Post by worik »

toss1 wrote: post #112
robin_reala wrote: post #28

It’s not on the brink, it’s that Firefox shims GA[1] with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which is on by default.[2] analytics.usa.gov uses GA. So you really can’t rely on usage figures that don’t represent the truth of your situation. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/blob/413b88689f3ca2a30b... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-now-ava...

If this is the case, it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox. Might also be useful to have a plug-in to make a daily 'ping'/check-in from FFox to any govt sites used by their users. E.g., I use USPS and SBA/SBIR sites, but only occasionally or monthly, but if most FFox users who did so got logged more like daily instead of ~fortnightly or ~mont…

> ...it seems that they need to recode the Enhanced Tracking Protection for GA to ensure that they get flagged as FFox.

That would be backwards

The main reason to use FF is the privacy protections

I find it very frustrating they do not get more recognition for the work they do on that front

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#488

Post by nvm0n2 »

robin_reala wrote: post #194
nvm0n2 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2% rule USDS use is taken directly from GDS (gov.uk), so that isn't what your old employer's policy is at all. They have to define reasonable, after all.

That part of the article was just wrong, to be fair (I used to be head of the front-end community at GDS and helped set things like browser support schedules). Our default approach was to add up all browser share (yes, based on GA, but this was a while ago) until we got to 99%, then removed the browsers that were left over. So typically we wouldn’t consider dropping a browser version until it was less than 0.4% usage…

I stand corrected, thank you.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#489

Post by preinheimer »

hs86 wrote: post #117

I switched over after the Manifest v3 debacle, and after a couple of months, I wonder if the implications of using a browser with a lower market share are overblown. I haven't encountered any site that misbehaves, and the only missing feature so far is within the Google Drive web app because it uses a Chrome-only extension [1]. Maybe the ongoing standardization of the web shows its effects here, and using a standard-…

Specific problems I've had as a firefox user:

- I can't pay municipal license fees (Site says "Use Chrome")

- I can't use the Vendor management portal for $largePopularTechCompany type company for my small business ("We support Chrome")

- Xero my small business accounting software just doesn't work properly ("Use Chrome")

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#490

Post by boris-ning-usds »

mardifoufs wrote: post #195
Miraste wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GOV.UK is dramatically more competent than USDS, are they not? I admit I'm not terribly familiar, but I wouldn't want to depend on the agency behind the Department of Education and VA websites for anything. I've seen the VA site, in particular, do serious harm to the people it's meant to serve.

I don't think the USDS makes all or even most of the current federal gov websites.

USDS certainly does not. The guiding principle at the time from what I remembered is to try to set "some standard" for all federal government websites to strive to because there were none.

We also helped with design and infrastructure support for ssa.gov (launched earlier this year) with a contractor team to try to boil down 60,000 pages to ~30 pages that people tend to use.

// opinions of a former USDS, no longer with the team

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