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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

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Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#371
post #355
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…

Don't like YouTube's ads, great don't use it. You aren't entitled to get it for free though.

Google isn't entitled to invade my privacy, harvest my data and waste my time with ads. Installing an adblocker isn't an act of entitlement, it's an act of self-defense.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#372
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…

rei.com generally continues to have issues with firefox. Completely absurd.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#374
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux] Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that. The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the prod…

> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time. Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? W…

I think it's a reasonable question to ask, and there's surely some churn that we could do without. But don't underestimate the effort that goes into device drivers.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#375
post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is how we solve it. There’s a technical end to every demand, and at the end of the day regulation only can do so much for both sides. The reality sorts everything else. The solution you mentioned is valid too. But you cannot ignore the fact that internet is for everyone and not for google. Google minus all the shit it does to the internet can definitely exist in some form. Claiming it’s either this or no…

Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine. Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send…

Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink. That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and delete the bookmark, what are you waiting for?

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#376

Today I tried to start Firefox on a file:// type of url. It said the file could not be reached while I was sure it was there, as md5sum could read it. Then it turned out that because Firefox was installed using Snap, and the file was apparently on a mount point that was out of reach of Snap, the file could not be read. I think Mozilla should refuse package managers that are clearly broken.

I think people should also stop using distributions that have been pushing this broken shit for years.

Yes. But I'm using an nVidia Jetson which vendor-forces me to use Ubuntu.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#377
If firefox worked with Chromecast audio I would be all set.

I have 2 of those hockey puck's audio dongles Google used to make to connect to your stereo. They only work with Chrome, SiriusXM, VLC, CalmRadio and Youtube, Chrombooks.

They don't work with Firefox.

Sad.

Maybe Mozilla should start IoT devices for Firefox.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#378
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ask why so much engineering time and money is being wasted on [Linux] Most likely the corporations will say "because that is much cheaper than developing our own; 10 of our devs on Linux an 99% of devs from other corporations are much cheaper than 1000 of our devs on our own OS". And the shareholders will likely accept that. The key thing is that for most corporations that contribute to Linux, Linux is not the prod…

> You can fork but you likely cannot maintain Linux as-is. Where do the 1M hours/year come from? That's hard to do in free time. Maybe a question too radical for Hacker News, but why does Linux need 1M hours/year? How much "worse" would Linux be for the end user if this year, that time spent dropped to 100k or even 10k? And which "type" of Linux user was benefiting most from that time spent (person or corporation)? W…

A. How do you contribute to the kernel in a way that only benefits the contributing organization? That's quite literally impossible in this kind of project. Even the more niche stuff like virtualization support is used by homelab enthusiasts. It's also not like Linux has 100,000 APIs for every customer under the sun.

B. Most of the effort goes into hardware enablement; CPUs, GPUs, power management, etc. Without corporate interests, try running Linux 2.2 from 1999 on a modern PC (which came out just before the $1B IBM investment). See how well it works. Fork modern 2025 Linux, and try running it on a computer that comes out in 2028. See if it even boots. If Intel's only done a minor refresh, it might work; if it's something bigger like the split to P cores and E cores, expect a brick. Even if it does boot, don't be surprised if it crashes, acts unstable, has borked performance, broken sleep/wake, broken audio, broken USB, you name it, it's probably broken.

C. A forked Linux would not have the same level of security research behind it. For example, the Linux 4 era was marked by the introduction of fuzzers and the fixing of countless bugs. A C codebase with handwritten Assembly is rather unlikely to ever become bug-free. How well would your forked non-corporate codebase handle Spectre and Meltdown, just an example, with Google's experts contributing the technique for fixing these problems efficiently (Retpoline)?

D. Added to the above, this isn't a hypothetical: The FSF didn't like the practice of proprietary firmware blobs being in the kernel; so they made their own commercial-interest-free version of Linux called Trisquel. It still uses commercially written code if it's open source; so even it can't be called completely free of commercial influence. The kicker: It runs on almost nothing, and people were complaining about how it works on nothing 13 years ago.

TL;DR: A forked Linux, is a broken Linux, that will never run well on newer hardware, and will quickly become insecure.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#379
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I was ambiguous. I just meant not to use the ad-supported part of the web. Yes, the rest of it is fine. Even a large chunk of the ad supported internet is happy to continue sending you bits if you don’t render their ads. This is fine, the convention has always been I’ll send whatever (non-malicious) bits I want, you send whatever you want, and we’ll render it however we want. YouTube specifically doesn’t send…

Exactly. It’s amazing that ads-ers send bits regardless and expect them to be consumed as is, as if it was some fundamental law of nature to do so. Simply don’t send, wink . That wink makes them feel uneasy because it breaks that wonderful narrative of theirs. “If you don’t want to watch ads, just don’t visit”. Yeah, just paywall us then, come on, we’re all yours, signed in, vendor locked. I’m so ready to leave and d…

People are playing this cat-and-mouse game with YouTube specifically, where they’ll circumvent the desire to block them for not rendering ads. I think this is a bad thing for users to do. But I mostly think it should make the ad providers uncomfortable. Because they know that most people won’t play cat and mouse for their content. In any case other than YouTube, people would just move on.

They know it. We know they know it, because if they really didn’t want to send bits to ad-blockers, they’d copy the first step of the back-and-forth that Google did with YouTube, and those users would no longer be a problem.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#380
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…

freetube is a superior experience for consuming youtube content in every way, including not running google’s javascript so they cannot mess with the users in the same way. it has adblock and sponsorblock built in.

that said, firefox has been my browser of choice as a web dev for most of my career. (im old enough to have used netscape before that).

i remember having super powers compared to other devs with the help of firebug :-)

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