Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hang on to Your Firefox

newsonaut.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 551 posts

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#491

Post by bluGill »

glenstein wrote: post #335
bluGill wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like Firefox is so complex that I could not fork it and make my own. I mean, I could, but the amount of changes I could put in would be trivial unless I'm getting paid full time. Even if I was paid full time, realistically, one person paid full time, no matter how good, just can't make an impact in the browser today. I'm not paid full time to work on a web browser. As a volunteer, I can't find the time to d…

Finally someone talking sense. I understand forking if it's, say, a simple android app to view images, because the owner sold out and ads got put into a bunch of things that used to be a foss code base (coughSimpleMobileToolscough), but the actual task of forking and maintaining 30-40 million lines of code and weekly security updates is unrealistic. That intensive process effectively became Google's moat. I actually…

Even given an unlimited token budget for AI and some form of paycheck to do this I don't think I could maintain a fork of firefox along. There is far too many things that need to be done for one person to pull it off.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#492

Post by nickthegreek »

palata wrote: post #438
nickthegreek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. You really got to go out of your way to not use chromium. The userbase grows when people help others understand these issues, or ideally just install firefox for their non techie friends and set them up with ubo. be the change you want to see.

> The userbase of Firefox existing is obvious signs of caring. And that's pretty much a rounding error, getting smaller every year, right? Or would you say that "most people don't care" does not apply when it's only 99% of people that don't care?

Well I would say that the firefox userbase is 3%+ across all platforms (over 7% on desktop) and that is larger than a rounding error.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#493

Post by nicoburns »

culi wrote: post #277
nicoburns wrote: post #138

For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default: https://blitz.is/wpt The headline results are: - Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582) - Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582) - Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582) - Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582) - S…

I love WPT (I even have a bookmark comparing all of these browsers as well as Flow[0] that I check regularly). But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic. Secondly, these tests aren't all even officially agreed upon standards. Some are specific to Chrome features that are still in the draft stages for W3C…

> But this is absolutely NOT how this site is meant to be used. For example, Ladybird jumped from about 30% to over 70% when it added a bunch of unicode logic.

That's true, but you can dive into specific categories to get a more accurate picture and also see which sets of tests are only implemented by Chrome.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#494

Post by nicoburns »

exsol wrote: post #327
nicoburns wrote: post #138

For those interested in how the alternative browsers are doing, I just put up an alternative to https://wpt.fyi (displays the WPT test results of each browser) which is IMO easier to navigate, and shows Servo / Ladybird by default: https://blitz.is/wpt The headline results are: - Chrome 94.7% (1053647/1112582) - Firefox 90.6% (1008073/1112582) - Safari TP 88.7% ( 987377/1112582) - Ladybird 84.2% ( 937019/1112582) - S…

nice to see someone else fighting with the same suite. i run css part of WPT on pdf engine (paged output, no js) and hit most of the same problems. https://reflowpdf.com/conformance

FYI I was able to vibe code "enough JavaScript to run the css part of WPT" in about a week. Might not work so well if you don't have a DOM or incremental rendering though, but could be worth looking into.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#495

Post by Vinnl »

binkHN wrote: post #489
Vinnl wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried it out with this page, and it gets the HN icon for me. I am on Nightly and on Linux, so possibly this is an actual bug you're running into, but no fix in sight might be too pessimistic. But definitely worth reporting otherewise.

Wonderful to hear this is fixed in Nightly on Linux; thanks for the heads up. I reported this several months ago.

Keep in mind that just because it works for me, that doesn't mean that you're not running into a bug that I'm not, so I can't make any promises about it actually being fixed for you :)

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#497

Post by yencabulator »

themaninthedark wrote: post #320
linuxhansl wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when Firefox does things to push away users like Mozilla buying up an ad-tech company What would you have them do? Somehow they have to make some money somehow. Alternatively they have to live purely from donations, which means that people like you and I have to part with of our money. Or they could be purely open source, in which case people like and I donate our time.

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…

> if they had taken all the money they spent on their various projects and put it in a trust they would probably be able to fund development without taking in any more money.

Mozilla Corporation already has funds totaling about $1 billion today. They're simply choosing not to develop Firefox actively.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#499

Post by yencabulator »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #51
mingus88 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know you, but most people I work with for some reason keep so many tabs open, the tab bar is squeezed so you can barely see a favicon Probably due to my age, I religiously close every tab after I read it. If that gets more than a dozen, I literally quit the browser and declare bankruptcy because it’s not worth it to sort through the mess of tabs I clearly am not using. Firefox is old too. I’m sure it could ma…

I'm around middle age and keep tons of tabs open simply because I have a number of projects/tasks or soon-to-be projects/tasks going at any given point and managing associated websites is easier with tabs than it is with bookmarks. In other words, bookmark management UI/UX is inadequate and tab hoarding is the band-aid. There's also a higher chance that things will slip through the cracks and be forgotten if I bookma…

My hot take: there are two kinds of bookmarks. 1. shortcuts to get to common sites and 2. stuff i need to get back to. And it's a UX mistake to keep #2 separate from open tabs; they are the same thing.

Re: Hang on to Your Firefox

#500

Post by kxrm »

PennRobotics wrote: post #427
kxrm wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> polish on Android Would you care to expand? I've been using Firefox on Android for years and haven't noticed a lack of polish. However, I am genuinely curious what I am missing out on.

I'll reinstall now for a fresh opinion vs Kiwi (my current least hated mobile browser; Chrome with Extensions minus tab groups or AI junk) Prefaced: I respect Mozilla's mission. All of these criticisms ARE overly harsh. At the same time, app UI should be as invisible as possible to the user, and Mozilla's apps are... "loud" My last installs of Firefox Klar and Developer a year or two ago had the APKs at over 200 MB,…

Thank you for taking the time to write all this out. I've never noticed these issues. I also agree, that these are fair criticisms that Mozilla should address.

Also, to be fair to you, I rarely use my phone as a dedicated browsing device so I am probably least representative of someone who relies on their phone as a primary browsing tool.

Not implying that you do btw, I just thought I would color my experience with Firefox. I live largely on Desktop and see my phone as a secondary experience so I excuse a lot of this because I get a Native Add-on experience that isn't addressed by Android's Chrome.

Post reply on HN