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A look at Firefox forks

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Re: A look at Firefox forks

#291

Post by voytec »

immibis wrote: post #206
klauserc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone responsible for login/registration at a large online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks. Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-login with credentials from password dumps, try to register accounts controlled by bots. Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite eff…

What is wrong with a bot creating an account? Is their money not as green?

I'd guess that their problem is data pollution (marketing unhappy, ads impressions unaligned, data needs to be cleaned anyway before PowerPoint presentations for shareholders are made). And technically: unnecessary database growth which impacts migration efficiency, backup size and duration and stuff like that.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#292

Post by culi »

I recently did this exercise as well. There are a lot of browsers not mentioned that you can find here,[0] but there's one big missing one imo.

The Tor browser is forked from Firefox to support the Tor Network. On top of the actual tor network it's filled to the brim with novel and unique privacy enhancing features. Mullvad (the VPN company) recently did a partnership with Tor to create the Mullvad Browser.[1] It's exactly the Tor browser but without the onion protocol part. Instead it just has all the anti-fingerprinting and privacy enhancing features.

I ended up going with that browser as it's the strongest privacy-focused Firefox fork option

[0] https://alternativeto.net/software/firefox/

[1] https://support.torproject.org/mullvad-browser/

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#293

Post by culi »

lolinder wrote: post #246
ta8645 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that the Mozilla CEO makes over $6,000,000.00 per year is a complete betrayal of what Firefox was. How could anyone justify donating to Firefox knowing that so much of their money would be going to this one person?

You can't donate to Firefox anyway—you can only donate to the Mozilla Foundation, which isn't alowed to work on Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation owns Firefox, and money can only flow from the Corporation to the Foundation. So every donation that has ever been made to "Firefox" has actually gone to whatever random stuff the Foundation is working on this week and, yes, to the Foundation's CEO.

To be fair, Mozilla has come out with a lot of new services that have dramatically decreased their dependency on Google. They went from over 95% of their revenue being google royalties to less than 70% just in the past half decade

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#294

Post by MrAlex94 »

broadsidepicnic wrote: post #179
MrAlex94 wrote: post #126

> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website? IMO…

well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with. And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.

Well, System1 was/is a search aggregator. That falls under ad-tech but at the time no-one cared about the former and only the latter.

Lots of browsers make search engines and lots of search engines make browsers, so it made (and still does) make a lot of sense.

I understand seeing ad-tech and immediately expecting the worst, but a quick Look into what it actually meant and I never understood why people were so in arms about it?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#295

Post by mmooss »

immibis wrote: post #263
mmooss wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you take enough users from Firefox, who will do the expensive, hard work of updating and maintaining a browser engine?

That bridge will be crossed when we get to it. Thunderbird improved substantially after Mozilla stopped maintaining it. Thunderbird was held back by Mozilla.

Thunderbird began improving, as far as I know, after multiple post-Mozilla iterations, including returning to the Mozilla fold in a different relationship, which is where it is now. Its improvement was not correlated with the Mozilla breakup.

Mozilla and the Thunderbird teams knew, however, that a breakup was needed for both Thunderbird and for Firefox (Thunderbird compatibility requirements were holding back Firefox).

The reason was that Thunderbird was a low priority for an organization that has a much more successful application in Firefox. Low priority projects don't do well; the organization naturally structures, invests in equipment, hires, manages, etc. for the high priority. You want to be a high priority wherever you are - better to be the big app in a small org than a small app in a big org (as a very general statement).

If you don't know these things, why make up sh-t about Mozilla? What do you get out of it?

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#296

Post by maccard »

glenstein wrote: post #279
maccard wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, if that's the case, then out of that 500 million a year, we already have 50 to 60% of that going to software development, so something on the order of 250 million. Lots of peoples "supposed" problem is giving money to Mozilla, not Firefox. If the goal is to give people a way to support FF development, then this does achieve that. But FF doesn't need _that_ (which I think you and I both agree on). > but I just…

I wholeheartedly agree with most or all of this and it's refreshing to see thoughtful commentary amidst a tidal wave of crazy speculation. I actually think it would be much more fair, in the event that FF raised $100MM from donations, to have to be accountable to user perceptions of where those resources are going. Although my experience from hn commentary is that people are extremely confused about this and vocal mi…

I actually agree with you fully.

> with the perception of "baggage" which has, in my opinion, largely been manufactured in hn comment sections

To bring this back full circle, the same group are the ones who want to fund Firefox-not-Mozilla. And if every comment in this thread cost $200 to post and went straight to Firefox development, it wouldn’t fund a single developer for a year.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#297

Post by andix »

bad_user wrote: post #287
andix wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Microsoft just doesn't care about ad-blockers. They probably don't have a strong position on it. If they work it's fine for them, if they don't its also fine. They need to ship a good browser with Windows, because a lot of their enterprise customers rely heavily on web applications. A lot of Microsoft enterprise applications are browser apps. The purpose of Edge is not primarily web browsing.

I don't think we should guess. In 2024, Microsoft generated 12.58 billion dollars in revenue from advertising, which is nothing to scoff at. And we also have to look at future opportunities — the share of the advertising market may be small, but they represent THE alternative to Google's ads, including on all alternative search engines. If they aren't concerned about ads or ad-blockers, then why are they so aggressiv…

Thanks for those insights. So they might have good reasons to support Google‘s position.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#298

Post by culi »

jszymborski wrote: post #162
aucisson_masque wrote: post #132

> The Floorp project is a much newer entrant.... According to its donations page, donors who contribute at the $100 level may submit ads to feature in the new tab page So if I get it right, people can 'donate' money to floorp project in exchange for service (advertisement). Like when I go to the grocery shop and I make a donation, in exchange I get back home with a pack of beer. I didn't know I was donating so much,…

I take your point, but it is worth noting that gifts, services, and goods are often exchanged for money and termed "donations" when the dollar amount greatly exceeds what one would normally pay, with the understanding that the proceeds go to a certain cause/group/organization.

$100 for an ad generally seems like a steal of a deal. If anything it's underpaying

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#299

Post by MrAlex94 »

lolinder wrote: post #251
broadsidepicnic wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, a browser owned (and de-owned) by an internet advertising company is enough for me not to ever touch that. We already have a chrome, which is one of the reasons we're in this mess to start with. And yea, I did use waterfox like a decade ago.

Yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable with Waterfox because of that episode. In the HN thread the creator responded to complaints about this privacy-unfriendly turn by saying that they "tried to stay away from branding Waterfox as" being about privacy or user control. That's fine, but an immediate turnoff for me even now that the advertising company is apparently out of the picture. If Waterfox isn't about privacy or user c…

Well the issue I’ve always found is that privacy is a sliding scale. At the time especially, everyone was after “absolute” privacy - i.e. everything Tor offers. But people were coming in to use Waterfox with that expectation and it wasn’t meeting it - but communicating how “much” privacy you’re being offered is difficult. I did settle on the current terminology and when people ask in user forums I try and make it clear that it’s a balance of usability and privacy - as much as possible without breaking websites.

Not sure I agree with your understanding wrt Waterfox not being about user control? Always has been and the feature set matches that and that hasn’t changed.

Re: A look at Firefox forks

#300

Post by culi »

MrAlex94 wrote: post #126

> Waterfox is a browser that began in 2011 as an independent project by Alex Kontos while he was a student. It was acquired and then un-acquired by Internet-advertising company System1. Its site does not, at least at the moment, have enough specifics about the browser's differences and features to compel me to take it for a test drive. Are the others that much more descriptive in their features on their website? IMO…

Wait, aren't you a developer of Waterfox? Why don't you just tell us...
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