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Firefox on the brink?

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#771

Post by PawgerZ »

Chabsff wrote: post #69
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...

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…

2% is still 7 million people

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#772

Post by encom »

sleepybrett wrote: post #770
encom wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tras…

Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later.... Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.

And 99% of the time it's not what I want. I'm sure there's an extension that fixes it, but why remove it in the first place? It's a pointless change. There are probably extensions that "fix" all the other myriad things Mozilla broke or removed, but now I have to rely on the good will of a third party to develop it and keep it up to date. There are only so many times I'll tolerate Mozilla breaking my workflow, so I have to spend time on either fixing the problems or adapt to their nonsensical changes.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#773

Post by sleepybrett »

encom wrote: post #772
sleepybrett wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do I care if I can no longer 'view image' but can still 'view image in new tab'? 99% of the time I want the later.... Also this was three years ago, and there is at least one extension that 'fixes' this if you want it.

And 99% of the time it's not what I want. I'm sure there's an extension that fixes it, but why remove it in the first place? It's a pointless change. There are probably extensions that "fix" all the other myriad things Mozilla broke or removed, but now I have to rely on the good will of a third party to develop it and keep it up to date. There are only so many times I'll tolerate Mozilla breaking my workflow, so I ha…

well knock yourself out. Turns out things change that we personally do not like all the time. Some of those things are worth caring about, some of them are not. I salute you for dieing on the hill of 'one more click'. To me this falls well elow the ar of user hostile in a world where google chrome farms you and prevents you from using ad blockers.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#774

Post by parineum »

riversflow wrote: post #670
parineum wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It will always be 2% which will always be, at maximum, 2% more revenue. That's probably negligible if you have to support them and there's an opportunity cost to that money. You'd probably be better off spending that money on advertising than Firefox support, especially…

> they have a backup solution available. Im a decade+ daily driver of Firefox. If a website doesnt support it, I make a mental note that I hate this company now, close the tab, and move on. I don't open it in a V8 browser, i look for an alternative.

I was exactly the same way, even to the point of doing the same thing if adblock or privacy extensions broke the site, but there are sites where you can't just move on where you really just have to use another browser.

I've gone back and forth between chrome and firefox for the what has to be close to 20 years. I want to use Firefox but ever since Chrome came out and blew it out of the water with javascript performance, it's always felt a bit clunky even as they've made their own performance improvements. I suspect my future lies with a chromium based browser eventually.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#775

Post by kemotep »

the_third_wave wrote: post #763
kemotep wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense but nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox. Perhaps the Trillion dollar companies behind the phone duopoly, the Desktop OS with 80+% market share, and the search engine the world uses, leveraged their positions to advertise and promote their browsers to squeeze Firefox out of their 32% market share. Like Linux, so what if Firefox only has a 5% market share?…

> nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect. With the funding Mozilla gets th…

And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources.

I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that would look like with everyone complaining about browser engine monoculture with Brave and Edge using Gecko instead of Blink.

Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly. Firefox is the least bad browser and there is no evidence that promoting diversity and inclusion is harmful to its development. We can make a case that Firefox isn’t spending enough resources on political activism and that’s why it’s falling behind. Otherwise the reason Chrome is popular and Firefox isn’t is that sticking to the principles of privacy and security on the Internet holds back performance. And users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#776

Post by account42 »

Chabsff wrote: post #69
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...

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…

> it's not clear if Mozilla, the organization, could weather that.

It would be best for the future of Firefox if they don't.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#777

Post by the_third_wave »

kemotep wrote: post #775
the_third_wave wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nothing that Mozilla says about politics has had an effect on my experience with Firefox It does, though. It may not be directly (apart from a few annoyances with their 'colours of change' propaganda) but the fact that Mozilla now spends a large fraction of its lavish funds on CEO remuneration and activism while the main product languishes on the back burner certainly has an effect. With the funding Mozilla gets th…

And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience. It’s almost like none of that actually matters because Chrome and Blink based browsers have taken over the world and both Google and Microsoft engage in similar activism and have 1,000 times the resources. I can’t argue against a counterfactual. We might as well play what if games about Firefox having doubled market share instead and what that…

> And despite that Firefox remains far and away the best browser experience

In many ways I agree and this is also why I use FF on both Linux as well as Android as my main browser.

As to the problem related to the low market share I suspect you already know the answer, no what-if games needed. Many developers no longer test their creations with Firefox because they deem its market share to be insignificant. I do not know if you were around in the dark days of yore when Internet Explorer was the main development target but that is where we're going. As it stands Blink is a capable and relatively flexible browser engine but that can change, e.g. with the introduction of Manifest 3 and later incarnations.

> Complaining that diversity and inclusion initiatives and other political activism is holding Firefox back when Apple, Google, and Microsoft all do the same and have significantly higher market share and several orders of magnitude more money is silly

It is exactly for this reason that a non-activist project is needed as I also referred to in my initial posting:

Having all major browsers - Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox - under the control of that same crowd in one way or another is not conducive to the diversity of opinion on the 'net

and

mindshare [...] is probably fairly easy to get given that there are many who are more than tired of all that identity politicking

> users have overwhelmingly voted that slightly better performance in loading websites is more important than any notion of browsing the web privately and securely

This sets a target for this hypothetical Techiya project: make the thing at least as fast as the competition while remaining at least as secure and privacy-respecting as current FF.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#778

Post by sleepybrett »

vkou wrote: post #478
sleepybrett wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

chrome by way of google is making sure it's the only thing that youtube still properly works in. When MS tried this shit they got slapped with anti-trust. What google is doing is worse in every dimension.

When MS tried this shit, there weren't companies that were selling you locked-down hardware running a locked-down OS running a locked-down App Store, while taking a 30% cut of every economic transaction on that store...

Game consoles existed (maybe not 30%) but the cell phone industry was already a nightmare.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#779

Post by hedora »

insanitybit wrote: post #758
hedora wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think that's true. They just ruled that the constitutional right to privacy is not sufficient for the Roe v Wade ruling.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/roe-...

> The final decision was little changed from the leaked draft. Writing for the five-justice majority (with Chief Justice Roberts concurring only in the judgment), Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to privacy is not specifically guaranteed anywhere in the Constitution. When unenumerated liberty rights exist — the right to raise your child as you see fit, for example — those rights must be “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” Reviewing the history of abortion restrictions in the early United States, Alito concluded that the right to abortion is not.

> The opinion ignited a firestorm of controversy. Predictably so: Dobbs is arguably the first case to formally rescind a fundamental constitutional right. The opinion also failed to explain how its logic would not also result in the overturning of Griswold’s right to contraception or a series of other cases that rely on the same logic as Roe. These include Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which invalidated laws criminalizing same-sex intimate sexual conduct, and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which recognized the right to marriage for same-sex couples.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#780

Post by glenstein »

taylodl wrote: post #624
glenstein wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to make sure I'm following along, we were talking about how youtube includes a delay of several seconds if it detects a certain ad blocking browser extension. Firefox has that browser extension, and therefore Mozilla is a "compromised organization."

You violated YouTube's T's & C's and you're complaining about Google putting you in timeout for doing so. You steal from YouTube's content creators yet present Mozilla as the good guys. Have I summed that up accurately?

None of that was my question, so, no.
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