I'm back with Firefox after a short relationship with Brave. Still use Brave on iOS to block ads when needed though.
I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
321–330 of 536 posts
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
We have web standards, but one area they breakdown is adoption of those standards. Each browser seems to pick and choose which standards they want to adopt and when. Sometimes Chrome will support a new CSS syntax for months or years before another browser finally picks up support (or vice versa). For web standards to truly work, there would need to be better coordination between browsers to adopt new standards in uni…
We vendors disagree about the relative value of different standards. Adopting at different times makes life harder on web devs, but it also seems like the only route forward. Do you want any one vendor to be able to force the others to implement something they disagree with, or (vice versa) to have veto power?
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. I would add to the list the Linux Foundation too. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
Note that the effort there is to shift chromium to a more open governance model. This would mean Google has less influence on the project.
And yet Google is a member of the initiative. Maybe, possibly, this initiative coupled with detaching Chromium from Alphabet might lead to an opening of the Chromium engine, but more likely Alphabet joined so that if it _does_ get split off from the mother-ship due to anti-trust they'll still have sway over Chromium's direction. And that will be an advertiser-centric direction.
I'll add that whatever the purpose of this project, it isn't going to help the overall openness of the web and will only continue to boost the adoption of an engine that already has an outsized influence over web standards.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#324Earlier 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. Pretty sure that was happening back in a days when Opera was using own engine (Presto). They shipped browser with scripts to fix some popular sites. Actually Firefox also has some fixes for particular sites about:compat
Even market-dominant companies do this. Windows ships a bunch of backward compatibility patches. Graphics card drivers (especially Nvidia) wholesale replace shaders in popular games.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe my rant is going to be a bit out of place here but here it goes anyways: sometimes im glad im a technical person that can get away with a somewhat "healthy digital life" im basically immune to all the crap going on. i don't need to work too hard to meet my digital needs because im also a simple person. but i really feel bad for the normies who have to deal with all the shit the tech industry throws at them. the…
AFAICT, current tech industry culture is most like what I understood of the '80s stereotype of Wall Street bro culture: sociopathic unchecked-greed that will do whatever it can get away with. I'm not saying this to complain, but to suggest a risk of what might come next. So far, they've run wild, and taken over computers, the Internet, AI, and information technology in general. What happens when there's a disruptive…
> What happens when there's a disruptive breakthrough in medical care, and the exploiters rush in with the same thinking?
Allow me to simultaneously assuage and stoke your fears. There is little chance of big tech disrupting the medical field; Because every aspect of the medical field has already been seized by the insurance companies. See United Health / Optum.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#326Earlier 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…
> YouTube has intentionally tanked performance in non-Chrome browsers before and been caught.
Can you please share sources regarding this? I'm not familiar with any instance like this.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#327I've got Firefox and Chrome and tend to use Chrome because some things like Google Lens are so handy, and translate works better. Containers are good in Firefox though.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#328It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants. Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it…
More like "we'll complain all the time regardless of what they do by repeating the same talking points over and over again". > How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox! > ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and it…
So weird to paint consistency as a vice.
"Talking points" is from the same land as "gotcha questions." "Talking points" are the points that people are talking about that you'd prefer not to talk about because you don't have good answers for. So you pretend like repeating an unanswered question is an dirty underhanded plot.
> How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox!
This isn't a quote. Don't make up quotes. This is you putting words in people's mouths, and choosing the ones that allow you to reply with something about Brave. At the same time, you're excusing Firefox for doing things because Brave does similar things. The people switching to for-profit Brave from Firefox would have prefer a non-profit, user-focused Firefox, but have been pushed to the point where they don't see any moral difference between the two, so they might as well experiment. When Firefox was innovating, it was the founder of Brave that was running it.
Most Firefox haters use Firefox. They just wish that it wasn't so bad, that it wasn't so much torture to put it into a usable state, and that the developers weren't actively fighting the users to keep them from putting it in that state, rather than centering on the users. They largely blame this on the company, Google, who subsidizes Firefox while competing with it. And on the company, Mozilla, that sucks all of that subsidy up in salaries, while seemingly neglecting the browser.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not too terribly unreasonable. It's largely the Linux Foundation trying to wrest control over chromium from Google before the FTC antitrusts them or before Google does more manipulative market controlling BS. In more polite terms they are framing themselves as an ideal long term steward for the chromium project given that courts have already ruled that Google isn't a suitable steward anymore. Chromium wouldn't b…
Igalia is a valued Chromium contributor, but your notion that they do a near-majority of the dev work is off by an order of magnitude.
Ah yep. I'm mistaken there. I had read somewhere at one point that they were the second largest contributor to Chromium and made assumptions I shouldn't have. My apologies.
Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
For years I have used Firefox as my daily driver, anything I work on works on Firefox. Maybe once a year my tester finds a problem w/ Chrome, if that. Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
>> Developers like myself are the thread that Firefox keeps hanging on by.
Yep. A majority of HN crowd claim to like open source and all that, but then they use Chrome instead of Firefox due to some small perceived convenience. Nobody makes decisions based on principles these days, only their immediate wants. Hoe_math is right, we're on the edge of civilization collapse because to that.