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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#741

Post by djvdq »

beanjuiceII wrote: post #613
Chabsff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the article, this is irrelevant. The case being made is that the figure seen by the government falling under 2%, which it is getting close to, will trigger a chain-reaction of consequences that will dramatically hurt Firefox, and it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that. It doesn't particularly matter whether or not the figure is accurate in that context. Maybe that can be fixed easily by h…

I work in govt tech, we already internally do not care about FF support at all and only really look to chrome based browsers (chrome edge mostly) and safari. Many people don't even know what it is anymore, seems like time killed this browser too. Mozilla spending too much time/money and other crap over the years

US gov't supporting monopoly instead of fighting it? I'm not surprised.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#742

Post by andsoitis »

hedora wrote: post #724
riversflow wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No browser deserves special treatment here. Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.

The supreme court ruled there is no right to privacy in the same ruling that overturned roe v wade.

> The supreme court ruled there is no right to privacy in the same ruling that overturned roe v wade.

My understanding is that the consequence is denial of the right to privacy is limited to women while they are pregnant. Not a categorical denial of the right to privacy.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#743

Post by 8bitsrule »

mtVessel wrote: post #644
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-…

Not sure how so many in the thread are using FF problem-free? In the past few years I've encountered more and more sites that don't work properly with FF. Most of the issues are around modals that won't dismiss or even display at all. Other issues I can't identify, but the site becomes unresponsive or some content won't load. I think the Ticketmaster ticket selection page was the last one I couldn't use at all with F…

Same here. I used to have more FF problems with .gov sites but in the past 2-3 years, rarely. Now & then I have to manipulate NoScript or uBlock to get some feature working on most sites.

But most of the time, I'd rather ignore those sites anyway. After I have a look at them ... which I tend to do after NoScript show me the huge list of crap they expect me to load just for the 'privilege'. Good developers/orgs just don't do that. Most go into a 'Block list' I mostly use to remind myself not to bother trying. I take my business elsewhere.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#744

Post by encom »

sleepybrett wrote: post #713
inversetelecine wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The citation is right there: "In my opinion"

I would like actual facts to back up this opinion.

Fine, here's the one of the last changes that put me over the edge:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128

Mozilla removes "View Image" from the context menu for no reason at all, and a developer (he/him) explains why That's A Good Thing, and eventually shuts it down after almost 100 comments disagrees with it. There was a Reddit thread about it as well at the time, but I'm not digging through that trash heap.

As mentioned, this has been a repeating occurrence. "View Image" was a tiny thing, but I happened to use it many times per day. And many MANY such tiny things just wears you down eventually.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#745

Post by fauigerzigerk »

beiller wrote: post #697
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two PWAs that I use all the time and Firefox doesn't appear to support PWAs. There is a third party extension for it but I'm generally reluctant to install browser extensions because I worry about security.

I believe it supports pwas fully. Click ... Menu and click "add to home screen"

There's no such menu on macOS and nothing that looks similar.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#746

Post by IshKebab »

Silhouette wrote: post #700
IshKebab wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Only completely trivial standards work without testing actually implementations against each other. How do you think WiFi devices work together? Is it because WiFi is a standard? Not really - it's because WiFi vendors all test their chips against other WiFi chips on the market.

I've been the person doing that testing. Checking interoperability with a range of other devices is one way you can look for problems but when it comes to signing things off the standard is the final word. Do you know what happens to the devices that don't comply with statutory radio transmission standards? They don't get sold. Typically the cost of fixing the problem and going through the whole certification process…

> statutory radio transmission standards

Not the kind of standards we are talking about.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#747

Post by shiroiuma »

smegger001 wrote: post #704

The problem Firefox has as far as I can tell is that the people in charge of the Mozilla organization would rather it be a social justice philanthropic foundation than a web browser and mail client maker and thus neglect their main product. And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI.

>And those they do have working on Firefox seem to want to remove features and play with UI.

This seems to be all that most software developers can do these days.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#748

Post by Moldoteck »

bambax wrote: post #278

> I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon. Is it possible that Manifest V3 will help Firefox? Of course most people don't know or care about Manifest V3, but if uBlock Origin or other effective ad blockers cease to work satisfactorily on Chrome, won't that make some users switch? I'd rather go back to fetching web pages from a terminal than suffering the insan…

Most users don't care abt mv3. My parents would continue to use the browser without adblocking if I don't install it, just because they don't have the skills to do this. They don't even think about this. Just extrapolate for the entire world

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#749

Post by creatonez »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #105
tiahura wrote: post #34

I just wish they’d hire the guy that reversed engineered Grand Theft Auto to optimize the loading code to do something about the memory leaks.

I think Firefox no longer has memory leaks. I just which they'd follow Brave's BAT idea, or something along those lines. Brave's BAT, while feeling kludgeful, is the only innovative idea in terms of funding sites nowadays. Micropayments => dead Coil => dead (sorry, on a open stewardship) Flattr => unknown, guessing dead So I want to block ads but I ain't depriving the websites of a way of earning money. If they want…

I want there to be a proper micropayments system (hopefully something supporting fiat money instead of just cryptocurrency) but this functionality doesn't belong in the base browser, browser extensions are a much more appropriate place to put this functionality.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#750

Post by berkes »

matteoraso wrote: post #635
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-…

Agreed. Even if Firefox makes up a small part of the market share, any website that serves millions of people will want to support it. Imagine if you have a website with 1,000,000 monthly visitors, and 2% of them use Firefox. Dropping support will mean 20,000 less monthly visitors. This gives us an idea of how much you should spend on support. If you make an average of $0.10 a month per user, you should be okay with…

> At most, you lose a few small websites that you probably weren't going to visit anyways.

I think this is wrong. It starts with a website to look up train departures that no longer works on Ff. Then the site to buy movie or concert tickets fails on FF. Booking a restaurant, again, requires you to take out chrome.

Which has two concequences. People stop using FF all together because switching all the time is work. And people ensure they always have a copy of chrome around, while fewer and fewer need to keep a copy of FF around.

And so FF spirals exponentially into insignificance.

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