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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

howtogeek.com

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Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#241

Post by Workaccount2 »

eipi10_hn wrote: post #205
tapoxi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. Why would I, as a developer whose income stream is based on advertising, intentionally cater to users who are costing me money? There is a web based on hobbyist platforms like PeerTube and Mastodon, and you can clearly see why they haven't captured the masses.

Because you cannot even control your ads to users? No one of you devs gets punishment for tracking users' personal information, pushing scam, phishing and malware to users, and now users are not even allowed to protect themselves? Users don't drop trackers and malwares to your servers, why do you drop trackers and malwares to users' machines? Because you are working for a corporation that joins in World Wide Web Cons…

Let me remind you that Ad-Block Plus collapsed when it's users revolted over their plan to whitelist simple vetted advertisements in a truce with advertisers.

ABP was foolish and actually believed it's users were trying to make a statement about invasive ads. Really their users just didn't want to see any ads at all, ever, regardless of the circumstances.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#242

Post by mrweasel »

bartread wrote: post #55
ustad wrote: post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

It’s also laziness in software development practices. Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome. My last job a bunch of us used Firefox as our main browser, which was hugely helpful. As recently as yesterday I ran into an e-commerce site that didn’t work in Firefox (CPC Farnell, I’m looking at you), giving some obscure security error in multiple languages. I thought it might be caused by an extension at fi…

To some extend this is also down to developer having to stop trying to be clever. I can understand having something look a little weird, maybe not align 100% correctly, but how to you actively go about building something like an e-commerce site that doesn't work in Firefox?

My guess is that the developers didn't actively try to do that, but used some framework that's all well an good for a SPA or something that needs to be more like a "real" application and applied that to something that just needs to be a bloody website. People need to stop doing that.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#243

Post by lucumo »

I've done a round-trip through a few browsers in the latter half of last year, and now I'm back to Chrome.

It's usually sync that was too broken for me to use. Chrome's sync works nearly immediately. Firefox on Android would stop syncing open tabs so frequently that I barely remember it working at all. I had to log out and log back in from my Firefox account to get it to sync. But an hour or so later it wouldn't work anymore.

Vivaldi has better sync, but it seems to just randomly break a LOT. It would recover itself after a while, so in that sense it was superior to Firefox. (I liked Vivaldi's amazing configurability, but it's lack of bookmarklet support was breaking some of my workflows too, so in the end I abandoned it.)

I tried Opera too, but I think it had similar issues and I abandoned it quickly.

Syncing extension settings (the settings of an extension, e.g. custom filters in uBlock Origin) seems to only be supported on Chrome. Firefox doesn't have it.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#244

Post by 20after4 »

i_love_retros wrote: post #208
ustad wrote: post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. Can you explain this more? I don't understand what this means.

Youtube intentionally degrades the user experience if you use Firefox, at least if you are using a proper ad blocker. And there really isn't much reason to use Firefox if you aren't also using uBlock. So by targeting the users of uBlock+Firefox, YouTube is aggressively degrading the experience of Firefox users. Things I've noticed include:

  1. Every video defaults to the absolute lowest resolution (240 or 320) until I manually switch it to a higher setting.
  2. Occasional (but fairly frequent) 30-second delay before a page loads (loads enough to show a black page, then just freezes for a while.  During this delay, refreshing the page gives the same result.
  3. Rarely, interstitial notice pages threatening vague consequences if I continue to use an ad blocker.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#245

Post by cobbaut »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #161
ceejayoz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...

Where is the article titled "I don't know how to explain that ads (and the "suckers" who view them) are what keep the internet running"

The Internet worked fine without ads though.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#247

Post by adamc »

LegitShady wrote: post #240
snarfy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some m…

I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics. The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical…

This. If you only shoot the crowds when your overlord demands it, that does not make you innocent.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#249

Post by simlan »

jampekka wrote: post #28

Firefox on Android is a no-brainer because of the extension support. It was a bit rough experience few years ago but has been solid for a long time.

Same experience. For a while I had to do chrome again because it became unusable on my aging phone and then they turned the ship around.

I am always stunned when I have to use anything else at how unusable some pages are without my extensions.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#250

Post by jeffbee »

WorldMaker wrote: post #235
jeffbee wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last serious performance issue I saw with FF+YT was when YT added a glowing border around videos when the tab was in dark mode. FF just wasn't able to efficiently run that effect. I don't think it's very reasonable to say that YT or any other site should be limited by the performance problems of FF. Maybe they should have detected the issue before release but the explosion of browser x platform x dark/light theme…

"Should have detected the issue" implies it was an accident. YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught. Even when they weren't actively sabotaging other browsers they had big Chrome banners and "Works Better in Chrome" signs for several years in the past. If they did it _then_, it's hard to give them the benefit of the doubt that they just "missed it" now, and easier t…

"Intentionally tanked" is just nerd spin. I've never seen an actually convincing recitation of these stories.
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