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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

howtogeek.com

451–460 of 536 posts

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#451

I really hope they eventually support all the web APIs chrome does like web midi. Till then if you want to use those APIs you’re making Chrome apps.

Yes - I've been quite disappointed by this recently. I'm trying to make something that can interact with embedded devices and wanted to use the web serial JS API. Unfortunately it seems that the powers that be at Firefox have no plans to support it on account of privacy and security - which I half get, but, it appears to be an established standard in Chrome. The discussion surrounding it kinda sucked and well.

Fwiw, someone created a webextension that provides the WebSerial API:

https://github.com/kuba2k2/firefox-webserial

I tried it a while back to configure my keyboard but it didn't seem to work at the time, I think it is a nice solution to Mozilla's problems with the API though

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And google is entitled to infer that you're using it and serve you different content, or none at all.

And I'm entitled to publicly shame software engineers who implement this kind of stuff for Google.

You should instead support businesses with a business model that fits your philosophy and try to persuade other users to do the same. If you aren't helping make other business models successful, you aren't really achieving anything.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#454
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or we could just let you and other people like you subsidize it. I've used Pocket Cast for a little over a year and a half. Just manually skipping through ads when I have my phone handy and they come on, the app reports I've apparently saved 14 hours of wasted time. I've been blocking ads in Firefox for nearly 20 years and have been helping friends and family do it for nearly as long. I'm not going back because I sho…

I'm not saying you anyone should feel bad. If you have a principled objection to the status quo you should support companies with business models you prefer, and try to persuade others to do the same. Otherwise your just taking advantage of a loop hole, and shouldn't complain if/when the company tries to block it.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla's brand identity is tethered to specific moral prescriptions[0] that their products are supposed to abide by. People sold on that identity are bound to care. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

This seems unrelated to whether or not Mozilla makes bad decisions more often than not . I'm talking about frequency, you're talking about severity. People don't remember the 1000 times you did something correctly.

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Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#457
post #229
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for those who do actually feel they want to separate their extensions and passwords and such as well, there's a Profiles revamp coming up that's looking really good in Nightly: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re... But yes, people should learn about Multi-Account Containers if they haven't, yet. It's a killer feature that no other browser has. This is the extension to enable the UI for i…

Finally, it only took them 10 years to get around to updating that decades old UI. Wonder which other decade old UI parts are they gonna tackle next? ooh, will they finally do something about Library and the whole bookmarks/history menu/sidebar/window mess? It's a little insane how so much time has passed and so many versions were released, and some interface stuff still remains unpolished and disparate. Firefox simp…

So what browser do you use that solves this properly and allows full adblocking?

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#458
post #53

On my work laptop I use Chrome. There are a couple of things I sorely miss from Firefox * The omnibar: I have a couple IPs I connect to frequently. One ends in 36, the other in 243. In Firefox I can just type 36 (or 243) + Tab + Enter. In Chrome I have to type the whole address. And why can't I search for the title of a page I know is in my history or even just a tab I already have opened directly from the search bar…

Omnibar is unsurpassed in browser usability. Some of my work involves project names in an obscure part of the URL (everything else is the same base/parameters).

FF handles this perfectly, no other browser I've tried comes close.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#459

Earlier 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…

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

What issues specifically? I'm a long time REI customer and a long time (since it was called Firebird) Firefox user, and I've never encountered any issues.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#460

Earlier 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.

I wish this was the case, I doubt it'll be the case. Suppose for example that the foundation agrees that Manifest V3 is a bad idea (and, objectively, it is an awful idea). I can't imagine a world where the contributors from Google (which currently still make up the vast majority of the commits to the Chromium codebase) go back on their steps and re-implement support for V2, which would basically go against the profitability strategy of their own employer.

Same for intentionally crippling Google websites on non-Chromium browsers: given how deliberate such acts of crippling are, I have reasons to believe that it's part of Google's "works with Chrome" strategy, and I'd doubt that Google employees can do much against it.

The only way to fix the governance of Chromium is to effectively chop all the threads that connect it to Google. As long as Chromium developers who are employed at Google won't do anything that goes against the strategy of their employer, you can't have fair governance.

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