Why I use Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I use Firefox

#221

Post by cl3misch » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:24 PM UTC

berkes wrote: post #172

cl3misch wrote: post #155

> The user’s data is stored on the browser vendor’s servers, and this data is of course encrypted. But can the browser vendor decrypt this data? Google can. Can it? You can set an additional password for synchronization. I was under the impression this implies end-to-end encryption. Of course, Chrome might send this data back to Google once synced and decrypted by the user. But Mozilla might do that just the same.

As per the article: this is a trust issue. Given the approximately same setup and use-case: Who do you trust more to keep encryption strong and unbroken? OFC trustless verification and such would be my ideal for a very impractical version of "ideal". Where I'd run my own server software, read all it's source code, read all the source code of the client, monitor all my network traffic, and do so for all updates. Given…

Yeah, sure. Just writing "Google can" is misleading though.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#222

Post by mariusor » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:25 PM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #218

mariusor wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take your comment at face value, but implying that alternate rendering engines is just "duplicate work" instead of providing one of the few ways to fight against the full monopoly on the web by Google is plainly absurd.

>instead of providing one of the few ways to fight against the full monopoly on the web by Google is plainly absurd. Firefox becoming a better browser and gaining market share is what will fight against a monopoly. Whether Firefox does that while using Gecko or some fork of Blink it doesn't really matter.

I fail to see how monopoly is avoided by using a Google driven rendering engine.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#223

Post by willi59549879 » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:25 PM UTC

NemoNobody wrote: post #122

Nobody uses Brave?? I've nearly completely switched to Brave - I still use Firefox occasionally but Edge is my second most used Browser. I haven't used Chrome for over 5 years.

I use the doge at work. But it is even worse than chrome with spying and adware.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#224

Post by aembleton » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:25 PM UTC

ed_blackburn wrote: post #72

How does Firefox work with Google Meet? I'm finding Google Meet gets less and less reliable on Safari on my Mac. What's the point of a web app if it only works on one browser?

I've not experienced any problems using Google Meet on Firefox. A few months ago, you couldn't do some of the features such as a blurred background whilst you could on Chrome. That's fixed now though.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#225

Post by SilasX » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

aembleton wrote: post #168

SilasX wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can customize pretty much everything about the browser UI using CSS. Not the controls, though. For that you’d need Firefox 2016.

Which controls do you want to remove? Can't you do that through the customize toolbar? I'm removing the toolbar and the sidebar header with the following userChrome: /* to hide the native tabs */ #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; } /* to hide the sidebar header */ #sidebar-header { visibility: collapse; }

I didn't ask to remove controls. I referred to customizing controls to the level you could as of Firefox 2016. Or like you could do in Super Metroid (1992). For example, if I want shift-J to move to the left tab, and shift+K to move to the right.

As of now, extensions can kind of customize this like before, they just don't do it in a fully general way (like you'd get from a supported settings feature). The extensions will only apply after a given tab's page has loaded. So if I want to go left three tabs, I will get stuck on any tab which needs to reload, or doesn't have a page loaded, or any number of exception.

So, bottom line, I can't customize controls in a general sense anymore.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#226

Post by extraduder_ire » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:27 PM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #101

jjordan wrote: post #78

Sometimes I wonder where Firefox might be today if, in the last 10 years, it had competent leadership singularly focused on delivering the absolute best browser in existence.

I'm not sure it hadn't had competent leadership tbh. HN loved to hate on it's decision but a lot of them (like XUL removal) where strictly necessary for firefox to still have any chance for relevancy. And while they did try out a lot of things but FF fundamentally has a hard time gaining new users as they have very little killer features. So stuff like pocket, VR or FirefoxOS where needed tries of FF to gain some fea…

I'm incredibly glad they created firefox VR and that its development is being continued as wolvic. Only VR web browser I've come across that supports ublock origin. I might switch if the regular android firefox could use the quest's VR features though.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#227

Post by VancouverMan » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:27 PM UTC

robertoandred wrote: post #149

jhoechtl wrote: post #2

For me it's > Mozilla develops their own browser engine This is key. Without Mozilla we are aproaching monopoly as Safari aproaches gradually Internet Explorer.

A ludicrous and non-serious statement. Safari leads in several areas, and both it and Firefox push back against Google’s self-serving and privacy-threatening “features” it wants people to think are web standards.

If you use Firefox for privacy reasons, and especially if you're concerned about your data potentially ending up with Google (or other entities), please be sure to read the Firefox Privacy Notice:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

It currently mentions "Google" a number of times, along with "Microsoft", "eBay", "AdMarketplace", "Cloudflare", "Comcast", "Adjust", "Fastly", "our partners", and other entities.

I think a lot of people believe that Firefox respects its users' privacy more than it actually does.

They may be surprised to learn how many, and which, third-parties might be involved when using Firefox.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#228

Post by rprospero » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:28 PM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #203

ajorgensen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tried to switch quite a few times over the years to Firefox and I still to this day consistently run into websites that are unusably broken on Firefox, do you have the same experience? I realize this probably speaks volumes to the need for more people to use browsers other than Chrome but its unfortunately frequent enough that I always end up switching back to Chrome after a few months.

People always say this but almost never are they able to give examples.

Concrete examples:

The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.

imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.

These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#229

Post by jwells89 » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

lenerdenator wrote: post #146

walrus01 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even recall the names and purpose any of their other side projects other than some janky mobile phone OS and hardware attempt. But clearly they've put a lot of staffing resources and money into some of them.

Firefox OS was actually a not terrible idea. Instead of having applications written in a platform-specific stack, do it with web technologies and make the apps PWAs. Seeing how many people are now criticizing Apple for hobbling PWAs with Safari on iOS, I'd say they were just ahead of their time.

The thing that killed FirefoxOS, in my opinion, was trying to break into the industry with low-end devices. The mission of providing privacy-respecting, user-empowering phones at low prices is a noble one, but starting at the low end with a physical product makes success much less likely.

By doing that you have to contend with low-to-nonexistent margins, green unoptimized software struggling to run on weak hardware, and the fact that nobody (users and devs alike) really gets excited or talks about entry level devices.

Mozilla might’ve caught some transitory flack for focusing on flagships initially, but it would’ve made for a much more usable product out of the gate and helped to fund R&D to make more affordable models a reality.

Re: Why I use Firefox

#230

Post by extraduder_ire » Wed, Feb 28, 2024, 4:32 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #3

> browser.chrome.guess_favicon = false No more 404s in dev tools for local websites, thanks!

The one thing stopping me from toggling this is the faint concern that it's a vector for fingerprinting. I'm sure it's rare enough that nobody's checking for it though.