Firefox 0days are cheap. Don't use Firefox if you care about security.
Why I use Firefox
231–240 of 319 posts
Re: Why I use Firefox
#232I love the reader view of Firefox; it's the best implementation and makes all the "web crap" go away to focus on content. Chrome had a good implementation of this hidden behind flags, but they recently neutered this "because ads" and, while Edge does a good job of this as well, Edge is too focused on helping me buy stuff or shoving Bing and related on me.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
Because that rendering engine is open source. This means whoever is shipping the browser has control over it.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#234> xn--ime-zza.eu > šime.eu Looks like HN needs Punycode support [1] when it displays the domain name after the article title. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
> when it displays the domain name That is the domain name. I'm glad that Hacker News, the site for hackers, displays the domain name, and not the rendered display version of the domain name. Other places can and should do it differently, it's the right choice here.
But I can't read the ASCII encoding. It's gibberish. It tells me nothing about which site the article is from. It's unintelligible. You might as well not show anything at all.
I can't understand why you think the underlying ASCII encoding should be used, instead of the Unicode domain that actually gets rendered in the browser's address bar.
That makes as much sense as saying non-ASCII characters in the comments section should be displayed as raw ASCII bytes instead of correctly interpreted as UTF-8 characters. Or that domains shouldn't even be displayed as letters but just as sequences of numbers that are the code points.
The whole point of a domain name is to be semantically meaningful. Otherwise we'd just use IP addresses.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#235Sometimes 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.
Oh look, it's my least favorite HN trope. Comment A) "Screw Mozilla, all their funding comes from their Google Search deal, they're just Google in a mask" Comment B) "Screw Mozilla, they waste all this money on side projects (that would provide non-Google revenue streams) when they should be spending all of their effort on Firefox (which is effectively un-monetizable apart from the search deal - and you can bet hard…
> Oh look, it's my least favorite HN trope...
You don't need to copy/paste this to all your comments. Some people may disagree with you and dismissing them like that will only lead to resentment.
> Can we at least acknowledge that most of the side projects did lead to improvements in the browser and web ecosystem?
Indeed, a lot of the stuff you mentioned _indirectly_ improved some things in Firefox-the-web-browser. Now image how much better it could have been be if all that resources had been invested in the browser quality directly.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#236If only Firefox on Android had keyboard shortcuts so that tablet + hardware keyboard would be a comfortable way to use Firefox. Argh.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#237Sometimes 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…
> So stuff like pocket, VR or FirefoxOS where needed tries of FF to gain some feature with which you can gain users. Tries they lost but I would say failing to try would have been worse leadership.
You know what else could have gained them new users? Best in class mobile browser supporting full range of FF extensions! Instead they dragged their feet on extension support for years and its performance on Android is still inconsistent for me.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#238Earlier 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.
Often claimed, never backed up with links.
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Re: Why I use Firefox
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
That post's points about Mozilla's source of revenue and expenditure on their CEO are good, but the rest is a politically motivated hit job. They spend the first few sections establishing that Mozilla has a ton of revenue, and then the best examples of misspent money they can bring up are utter peanuts in comparison to the revenue they literally just established Mozilla has. $300,000 is nothing compared to $600,000,0…
> That post's points about Mozilla's source of revenue and expenditure on their CEO are good, but the rest is a politically motivated hit job.
I don't dabble in US politics too much because I'm European, but it felt a bit odd to read the article and encounter the way it frames things.
As if donating money to a bunch of organizations that care about trans issues, pro-choice, vaccine acceptance and a bunch of other social justice stuff is somehow a horrible thing to do, especially when the amount of money being donated is equivalent to the salaries of a few qualified engineers.
>> Why does Mozilla give so much money to political speakers that have no relationship to their core business?
What exactly is wrong with a company choosing to support a left political leaning? From what I've read of USA, those might in general be more grounded and regard privacy higher, than the right leaning stuff like needing an ID to watch pornography, banning books and all that other weird stuff, which might lead to some surveillance state.
>> Why does Mozilla seem unconcerned with alienating a large portion of their user base (which is already shrinking)?
I don't get it, who cares about this so much that it'd alienate them? It's akin to me seeing that my KitKat chocolate bar supports planting more trees, going on some charade about climate change and then boycotting their products. Surely nobody gets so worked up over some money going towards initiatives that'd arguably make lives better?
>> Why do some of the recipients of Mozilla money appear to be nothing more than empty shells of companies — not even having a simple website?
This is a better point, as are the other questions in my opinion. But at the same time, if there are corporations that support the far right, I don't mind Mozilla throwing some money in a direction to balance things out, even if it might be a bit performative due to the comparatively small sums.
Re: Why I use Firefox
#240Earlier 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.
I unfortunately do not have a running list. The one that made me drop Firefox last time was the mermaid.js docs site. None of the sidebar navigation was clickable but only on Firefox, the same issue did not appear on Safari or Chrome. It appears they have since fixed that issue as I retested and it appears fine.
The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.