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Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
281–290 of 469 posts
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#282We need to be honest about what value Firefox really has left. Commercially, it's completely irrelevant. On big websites it doesn't even show up in the top 10 browsers and it's almost entirely absent on mobile. Site owners can readily ignore Firefox. Firefox is no longer a developer default. I'm sure some of us in our bubble have strong personal preferences but the entire dev ecosystem is chrome-based. Very advanced…
I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
Firefox works pretty well on most sites. Web standards are IMHO in a good enough Shape that anything properly developed will be fine.
Firefox doesn't work well on Google properties (for obvious and non obvious reasons). It's decent, but in my experience it 's significantly slow and resource intensive in most of Google Suite and subpar on YouTube[0]. Useable, but definitely heavier than Chrome. I ended up with a dedicated Chrome instance for meet and Sheets.
Recently I found Notion to be more and more sluggish, it might be because of cache and other relics as I spend my life in Notion, but fresh Chrome instances behave better. All in all, Notion has become worse and worse, so it might be just part of that trend.
Many enterprise extensions currently won't work at all in Firefox. It's in no part Firefox's fault, and enterprise software has always been shitty, but this is becoming a reality to me.
[0] I don't have the link at hand, but it was notably due to Google intentionally screwing up Firefox last time I looked into it...
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations. Or maybe the idea is that employees/developers don't need to eat, which is incredibly ironic given who HN users typically are. There isn't a single line in this petition dedicated to how Mozilla should raise funds instead. Maybe signing the petition should be behind a paywall, I would be very interested to see how many votes that would gather.
I am sure lots more people would donate if the money would go towards Firefox specifically, and not general "mozilla foundation activities"
I at least stopped donations years and years ago to them, because I wanted my money go to browser only.
In the light of ToS changes, I'm sad and feel let down without an option.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Brave doesn't support multi-account containers.
Just make a new profile like all chromium based browser
Can you use accounts just like Firefox containers? E.g. use right click to choose opening a link in a new tab running a different account?
Genuine question from a FF user.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point. I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe. If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under…
> "Firefox is inferior" argument isn't a decade old echo.
IMO this isn't the argument. Firefox users aren't discussing superior or inferior, but sites that accidentally or purposefully break or over-optimize for Chrome, making Firefox users second class citizens.
I commented about YouTube and Google Suite on another thread, but your webassembly example reminds me of the GCP dashboard and in browser virtual machine, which is also horrible in anything but Chrome if you plan to use it day in day out. I was spending my life there for a few months, and sure enough a dedicated Chrome instance made my life a lot better.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I wish my miserable failures brought in $65 million annually. HN users complain about that $65 million constantly. Mozilla is stuck in a spot where the same angry nerds that want them to diversify away from Google won't actually let them spin up diverse sources of revenue.
I wonder how many of this angry crowd donate. Mozilla do accept donations. Or maybe the idea is that employees/developers don't need to eat, which is incredibly ironic given who HN users typically are. There isn't a single line in this petition dedicated to how Mozilla should raise funds instead. Maybe signing the petition should be behind a paywall, I would be very interested to see how many votes that would gather.
I don't agree that you are downvoted without being offered an explanation, that's just a gross misuse of the privilege to downvote that seems to be more and more frequent on here. :shrug:
I also don't agree that donations are the only way to support Mozilla. As others have mentioned they have spent time and effort contributing to Firefox/Mozilla's projects, and many probably have advocated for the use of Firefox — all of that is value to Mozilla and the community.
I don't have any experience starting an organization, let alone one that has that kind of revenue, but as a user, whether you donate or not, if Mozilla is getting that kind of money and their track record and reputation just seems to go downhill, I'd be surprised that people who are invested in it are not upset.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#287IMHO the EU should step in. Having a browser that is not controlled by big tech should be part of an effort to reduce the dependency on the US.
How about not involving governments in how Firefox is run. Especially not those keen on backdoors and "Chat control". It could be a stand alone association ruled by its members or a classic free-for-all whatever goes code talks FOSS project.
The non-gov approach has been the last decades. I don't find the result convincing to be honest.
The path you're proposing has been pushed by the community for about how long the Mozilla foundation existed. I'm not sure asking them one more time will make a big difference.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never once had an issue with a website that was solved by opening it in Chrome instead. and I switched to firefox like three years ago. If firefox is so much less supported, I'm not seeing it at least
I've been bringing this up in every single thread about Chrome and Manifest V3 pops up. I'm been using Firefox, 100% of the time, on three different operating systems, for probably six years at this point. I can remember a single time I had to swap to Chrome for something, and it was three years ago, and involved some flavor of WebAssembly, I believe. If anyone can point out a current website that is acting up under…
There’s one feature on LinkedIn that doesn’t work in Firefox (you can’t reorder skill list in your profile – dragging doesn’t do anything). That was the only time I’ve opened Chromium in the past couple of years, though – apart from testing my own websites, of course.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this landscape I'm curious if any amount of money can overcome the oligopoly advantages of owning the OS (with no anti-trust enforcement) or owning the most popular web properties. Even if every cent for the past ten years went to browser dev alone, would that have made a difference? Do regular users even know the difference between one browser and another? Or is it only the icon they recognize, if even that?
Yeah, this is my takeaway as well. Folks in this discussion are saying “why can’t Mozilla just focus on making Firefox” and my response would be “because that’s the path to eventual death”. Firefox is, what, 3% of the browser market today? It isn’t because it’s a bad browser. It’s because people are using OSes with tightly integrated browsers they never think to change. Making Firefox faster or adding vertical tabs o…
The thing I think will bring in users is search. Full text history search with some modest depth crawling for the domain and external links. The easy Google money makes it unattractive.
It will take some time for enough users to be blown away by how useful this is.
I wrote a simple user script one time that subscribes me to all discoverable rss feeds I run into while browsing. It seemed rather random but I was blown away by how interesting the websites I visit are to me. You can imagine it, now multiply that by 10 000 and you have a good estimate.
Google has to index 130 billion pages and is barely able to deliver half interesting results. If you query it with something like "Firefox" or "Google" it will find zero interesting pages. Stuff so boring you won't even bother.
In your history there might be hundreds of interesting articles, discussions, lectures, publications etc interesting to you specifically!
That obscure website you once visited, that one without any traffic, visited by Googlebot one time per week which then bothers to index 5% of it and puts the results on page 20 of the search results. Why it even bothers to index it no one knows.
Now say you want to read it again or you are searching for that obscure thing again 5 years later it is there in your history.
Mozaïk had full text history search in 1994 when hard drives were 5 mb and the www had 10 000 pages. The www now has a hundred thousand times as many pages but drives are a million times larger. Unlike 1994 you won't be able to visit a single digit percentage of it.
Re: Tell Mozilla: it's time to ditch Google
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
They went form 90%+ market share down to 9%- since taking Google money. The allegation of throwing is too light. They’re complicit in covering for Google’s obvious monopoly.
Your ratios are correct but your numbers are off. Mozilla peaked at around 35% of market share and is now around 3%.
You’re not wrong, but people get this mixed up because Firefox was a continuation of Netscape which did have a 90+% market share in 95. Mozilla however is a completely independent entity that continued to work on an open sourced browser created by a different entity.