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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

111–120 of 346 posts

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#111
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

Dunno man, it’s miles better than discord which bombards me with ads every single time I log in.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.

There are many ways to mask your "real" ip address, VPN being an easy start.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#113
post #91
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI? Its a protocol.

They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.

Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense.

Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#114
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

UI? Its a protocol.

What? I just want to share cat pics, video clips, and memes with my friends and respond to their stuff with not-inline emojis.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#115

> I'm not kidding when I said that Firefox is a niche browser. Folk have to actively look to use it. There was once a time where IE was only ever used to download Firefox... Mozilla squandered that.

To some degree, yeah they did, by leaving space for a lean and mean competitor like Google Chrome to come around and eat their lunch. And when it was introduced, Google Chrome truly was the lean and mean browser, less bloated than both Firefox and IE.

But I'm not sure how much they could've done. Maybe they could've invested a ton of engineering resources into a project similar to Firefox Quantum earlier, so that Firefox didn't leave as much room for a leaner browser? But half the reason people complain about Firefox today is that they broke XUL extensions, which was an absolutely necessary step in making Firefox a competitive, fast browser. I can only imagine the backlash they would've seen if they did that before Chrome ate their lunch.

And I'm not sure how much it would've really helped, since 1) Chrome would've still been a less bloated browser simply through having been around for a shorter time and having fewer features, and 2) Google would've still had immense marketing opportunities by plastering Chrome ads all over Google Search etc.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#116
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.

Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense. Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.

IRC doesn't have offline messages and standardized user accounts.

Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#117
post #108

I really wish Mozilla would focus relentlessly on a privacy-first, performant browser across major platforms. Nothing else. I don’t want extensions (attack vector), vpns, fancy bookmarking services that are deprecated later on etc. I want to browse the web safely and privately and preserve battery life - nothing more.

How do you expect Mozilla to make enough money from just Firefox to survive if Google ever decides to stop paying them for being the default search engine?

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leaders could, for example, have made AI opt-in. If it's popular, maybe make it the default for new installs later on. Instead we had to go a few versions from "now with AI" to "now with an AI off button" because they got enough negative user feedback. I don't mind experiments, but if you're the "we put you back in control" browser then please build an "off" switch in from the start.

AI is not, and was not the reason why the average user moved away from Firefox. AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.

> AI is however a potential avenue for raising money.

How? By selling the position of preferred model? They can do that without implementing it in a way that means people who don't want it at all have to jump through hoops to opt-out.

Being able to turn AI summaries and such off by default was the final reason I started paying for Kagi. I know they use ML in the background no matter what, but as long as I get links to resources relevant to my search, that I can read/judge/summerise as needed, first and foremost, how they produce that list is not the issue.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#119
post #48
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed

I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore. Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with up…

Of all the forks I think Waterfox is the one with the strongest case that they can continue on even if they have to fully decouple from Mozilla Firefox.
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