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Firefox on the brink?

brycewray.com

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Re: Firefox on the brink?

#821

Post by int_19h »

sleepybrett wrote: post #773
encom wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Individually, each of those things is not worth caring about. But in aggregate, a thousand small cuts is extremely unpleasant.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#823

Post by collinmanderson »

Nice. I totally noticed that FireFox was nearing 2% rule a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36776603

Glad this is getting more exposure.

In my opinion 2% is probably too high.

"There were 5.40 billion sessions over the past 90 days.".

2% is 108 million sessions in the last 90 days.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#824

Post by Silhouette »

IshKebab wrote: post #746
Silhouette wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

WiFi was your own example.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#825

Post by pabs3 »

insanitybit wrote: post #788
riversflow wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government shouldn’t work based on data, but on virtue. That’s the whole point of a constitution, common law, etc.

Easier said than done. That introduces the chance for bias and nepotism. The data driven approach is intended to avoid that.

Just use progressive enhancement instead, so the site works in all browsers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#826

Post by beanjuiceII »

riversflow wrote: post #787
insanitybit wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I used the word "appears" exactly to emphasize that the appearance is sufficient. The government is working with the data they have.

The government shouldn’t work based on data, but on virtue. That’s the whole point of a constitution, common law, etc.

so govt should spend tax payer money to support a browser by the numbers no one uses? for "virtue" ? going to have a hard time convincing people of that one

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#827

Post by soundnote »

luuurker wrote: post #801
soundnote wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely: You can make pretty good adblockers even with Manifest v3, and there are Chromium-based options with adblockers built in.

Can those extensions adapt to new methods of adblocker avoidance/detection and update their lists as fast as they can do now? I'm not sure if they can.

Possibly not, but multiple Chromium-based browsers have already built their own adblocking solutions as part of the browser itself, so they certainly don't have to care. Brave's especially is about as strong as uBO, Vivaldi has a decent adblocking system and the people making Arc are looking to build their own as well.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#828

Post by eastbound »

ale42 wrote: post #74
eastbound wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always get downvoted for that, so it seems that Firefox supporters are subjective about their beloved browser, … and it doesn’t matter anymore whether I phrase it properly, since it will be shunned anyway, preventing Mozilla from actually recognizing their culture problem… But Firefox has ads. It also has a lot of obnoxious browsing-interrupting interceptions saying that they care about our privacy. Which isn’t pos…

Do you think that Google (part of PRISM, remember?) protects your privacy better by automatically linking your browsing data with your Google profile if you ever have the idea of logging in on a Google website before tweaking the settings? And as far as I know, Mozilla can't access the key that encrypt Firefox profiles (as long as your profile password is not 123456). Didn't check the source code, but I guess that if…

I don’t think Google does it better. But switching from Chrome to Firefox makes much less sense if Mozilla still performs advertising. And, least be said, fires a CEO for having made a private political donation one day, so it is not politically agnostic either.

You are correct that Mozilla has implemented profile encryption and it is believable. However, NSA has backdoors at every level, so having an account online isn’t really a good practice.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#829

Post by insanitybit »

int_19h wrote: post #811
insanitybit wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your proposal? Because taking an approach that isn't data driven means it needs to be a replacement, and you need to convince people that it's worth the risk of nepotism and bias.

For starters, how about not using a proprietary service from one of the biggest tech oligopolies which has strong economic incentives to misuse any data that passes through it? If government needs accurate tracking numbers to base its decisions on, it should roll its own tracking for those numbers.

Not a great proposal, frankly.

Re: Firefox on the brink?

#830

Post by phendrenad2 »

Closi wrote: post #809
phendrenad2 wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just splitting hairs. Chrome is not holding back features from Chromium, so Chromium has everything that Chrome has. The only things it's missing are things that literally don't matter to Chromium users (like google sync, what are you going to do, make your own google corporation?) or things that literally can't be open-sourced (non-free codecs). The point here is that open-source "won" because nobody is tryin…

Well the closed source bit is that you also cannot reproduce the binary yourself (so we don't actually know if there is other code in Chrome), and Chrome presumably adds a load of (non open-source) code around sending your browsing data and history to Google servers. The open source version also doesn't include any way to do automatic updates, sync with your google account, or have access to the extensions store. Non…

> cannot reproduce the binary yourself

Don't need to, I'm not using Chrome

> sync with your google account

Don't need to, I don't have a Google account

> or have access to the extensions store

The store that will soon ban adblockers..? Also, Firefox can't access the Chrome store either

My point is you can't find fault with Chromium without conflating it with Chrome

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