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Hang on to Your Firefox

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Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#401

Post by culi »

kraken_cult wrote: post #290
culi wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that. I think there's plenty of people who shit on Firefox to justify to their own ethical standards their preference for some Chromium-based browser.

I'm failing to parse the "own ethical standards" as it relates to chromium-based browsers and this conversation about firefox..can you maybe explain, does removing the ability for users to block adds seem more ethical than not?

Using Chromium-based browsers means you give Google, the surveillance company that works with ICE and the military, more power over the web to do stuff like push Manifest V2.

Everyone has their own ethical standards around this but I think Firefox is clearly seen as the browser to use if you care about the open web. A lot of people therefore feel the need to defend their preference for a Chromium-based browser.

IMO that obfuscates the fact that even non-Chrome Chromium based browsers still affords Google massive influence over the future of the web.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#402

Post by zamadatix »

sumanep wrote: post #255
happytoexplain wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, sorry, in English your wording appears insulting. What don't I understand?

I think OP didn´t mean the "real" web standars (W3C) but what Google rules that is the actual standars in practice. Edge had to move from his own rendering engine to blink (crhomium) because of that. So "even" Microsoft could not fight that trend. Sorry for my english.

Your English seemed perfectly clear to me, for what it's worth. We just have a tendency to read things in a negative tone for some reason - one of those human bugs :).

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#403

Post by harha »

GuB-42 wrote: post #160
autoexec wrote: post #53

> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition. It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox…

I will go further and say that people hate on Firefox because they care. We don't see many people here hating on Edge for instance, they may hate the fact that it always wants to force itself in, but not the browser itself. And that's simply because they don't use it, they don't even bother trying, they don't know what to hate about it and they don't care. Occasionally, some people say it is actually good, they get i…

No one in their right mind would use Edge, unless the employer's IT forces them to - and in that case they've given up on the tools the employer gives them already and wouldn't care enough to hate.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#404

Post by tliltocatl »

Barrin92 wrote: post #226
autoexec wrote: post #53

> Meanwhile, the over thinkers on Hacker News come up with convoluted reasons to hate on Firefox every time the subject arises...Firefox is our last best hope for browser engine diversity and competition. It's exactly because Firefox is so important that you'll see people here complaining when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company, collecting data on users, and using firefox…

>It isn't bots complaining about Firefox here, it's power users who are frustrated by what Firefox is turning into The problem isn't that they're frustrated it's that they don't have the theory of mind to distinguish between what they care about and what the average user cares about. They don't just complain for themselves, they think this is the causal explanation for Firefox declining market share. Which it isn't b…

Screw average user.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#405

Post by hn_submit »

The frustrating part is that we all know what the problem is (management) but we're powerless to do anything about it since they're holding all the cards. This frustration leads to hate which leads to many people turning away from Firefox.

I'm still sticking with Firefox, at least until Ladybird comes toe-to-toe in terms of features and functionality.

And then there are the web developers who make their site functional only on Chrome. They deserve a special place in Hell.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#406

Post by autoexec »

mplanchard wrote: post #384
autoexec wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain. That's fair. In this case though, the divide is pretty massive and also important. A lot of people couldn't tell you what a browser is. They just know what button to hit to make Face…

I’m sorry, but this is not my experience at all. The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome: both give you immediate access to search, both offer to sign you in for cross-computer sync, and… that’s pretty much it. I have gotten most of my family and friends to switch to Firefox, and I have never gotten a Firefox-specific complaint or question that I can remember.

> The process of installing and using Firefox for a non-technical user is no different from Chrome

Most non-technical users are exclusively using android devices and chrome is pre-installed. Today you can still install firefox for others and it will probably work fine for them, but it will be exploiting them too. It will collect their personal data and use it to push personalized ads. It will use updates to force anti-features onto them.

Firefox has gone from something I could recommend unreservedly to something I can only suggest while cautioning about it's increasingly user-hostile practices and providing a list of setting changes that should be made and monitored for silent changes after every update.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#407

Post by dingaling »

AnonC wrote: post #371
cpburns2009 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla's not exactly short on funds. They take in at least $500,000,000 every year.

AFAIK, from reading the annual reports years ago, this nice sum of money belongs to Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that works on making a better web. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit entity that makes Firefox, doesn’t seem to have as much as it needs. Hence MDN Plus, Mozilla VPN, and other services.

That's their choice, nobody forced them to implement that corporate structure and they can decide to deconstruct it any time.

Google pays Mozilla for default search engine selection in Firefox, no other product. If Mozilla then redirect that money to other non-Firefox ventures then maybe they should explain why.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#408

Post by dingaling »

glenstein wrote: post #352
themaninthedark wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it that we can have a plethora of different Linux distributions, the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the OpenBSD kernel, GIMP, LibreOffice and several other large projects that are run and maintained by donations and volunteers. Yet somehow Firefox is different? It needs to make money! It needs to make money so much that they keep spinning up all sorts of new projects so that they can make more money, or at…

We've got a live one. Most of their expenses are developing the core browser, the side bets (with a few exceptions, notably FirefoxOS, which I think was a GOOD side bet and worth the effort) were not that expensive. They're developing 40 million lines of code, and a lot of the things you're comparing it to actually aren't as comparably large or cutthroat. >At this point in time, if they had taken all the money they s…

> They're developing 40 million lines of code

Isn't half a billion dollars per year enough to maintain that? Over $10 per LoC annually?

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#409

Post by qsera »

usernomdeguerre wrote: post #330
qsera wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Chrome is the only alternative The future looks pretty clear to me. We will have to use two browsers. One government approved, google (or some other thing) vetted browser for all the official and banking stuff. One other for all the other causal stuff. This would be bundled as a single package, with something like firefox containers automatically switching to the "approved" browser based on domain loaded in the tab.

Once a browser is "Government Approved" all the other are 'Unapproved' ipso facto. There's nothing clear about that future, imo.

By government approved, I meant only to access government websites/applications.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#410

Post by olejorgenb »

delecti wrote: post #151
olejorgenb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also better that the other browser in many ways. The "Awesome Bar" among them.

What's different about the Awesome Bar from Chrome? IIRC Chrome had the unified search/URL bar before Firefox did, and I don't remember it being very different from Firefox's implementation. If anything, I remember it being easier to add search engines in Chrome (unless it's gotten worse in the past few years since I switched to Firefox). Am I missing out on cool features of the URL bar in Firefox? Edit: made my ques…

I know Chrome's address bar also does searches, but somehow I find it much worse at actually finding what I want. It's perhaps unfair since I use Firefox much more, but I visit some pages regularly in Chrome and I'm 90% sure suddenly it doesn't find these - or they are just ranked way off.

Firefox also find open tabs (so you can jump to the open tab instead of opening a new tab) and allow you to explicitly search for bookmarks, open-tabs etc. The open tab thing is also nicely integrated with Firefox sync (not sure if Chrome has something similar)

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