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Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#71

Post by stephenr »

tmikaeld wrote: post #35

If Google really wanted to show that they are for openness and privacy, they would have moved Chrome to a not-for-profit foundation instead of owning it themselves.

that would defeat the purpose of them creating Chrome in the first place - to have access to product (by which I mean people using the browser) activities.

What other advertising company has ever had as many fingers in as many pies?

It’s entirely possible for people in parts of the USA be getting a large percentage of their web content (search, news, video, social etc) from a Google web property, using a device controlled by Google, using an internet connection controlled by Google.

Just to remind you - Google is an Ad company.

People talk about the Apple “reality distorion field” because people willingly buy in to the Apple ecosystem, but Apple have nothing on the religion like status Google has reached with some people.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#72

Post by adamors »

> Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft.

Because they make a good browser? Firefox is still slow, hangs frequently and the developer tools are still not up to par to Chrome's. All IMO of course, but as a developer I don't have the patience to use slower, clunkier tools "just because".

Also, Mozilla gets most of its revenue from their partnership with Google[0]. Is there a difference between using a Google made browser or a Google funded browser?

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation#Google

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#73

Post by stephenr »

k4rthik wrote: post #61

I agree with Paul Graham on this one. "Has any other company grown to Google's size and remained as benevolent? (Not saying they're perfect, just the best that big.)" ( https://twitter.com/paulg/status/495948643149426688 ) I'll stick with Chrome for now as I find it slightly better than firefox.

We obviously have very different ideas about what “benevolent” means.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#74

Post by userbinator »

I use Chrom(ium), Firefox, IE, and Opera, and even Lynx, so I have no particular loyalty to any one browser, but it doesn't feel like there is all that much of a choice anymore among the "mainstream" ones as they all seem to be converging in design. Even Opera, which used to use its own rendering engine, has moved to WebKit, and Blink is not all that different from WebKit either. I certainly hope Mozilla will never choose to turn Firefox into yet another WebKit shell, and neither Microsoft with IE.

Web developers trying to make their pages look exactly the same in "all browsers" may enjoy a browser monopoly since it reduces the effort, but I think that's the wrong way to do it; instead, they should aim for "similar enough" - after all, content is what site visitors are after. The idea of progressive enhancement/graceful degradation, which can make for a better environment for browser diversity, seems to be completely lost on many developers.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#75

Post by slasaus »

specialp wrote: post #54

This is actually very true. Having Chrome/V8 out there has definitely improved the state of browsers as far as performance; especially in regards to JavaScript. But now we face a situation where Google is getting such a market share with Chrome and their other web properties where lock in is a very real possibility, and the only way to keep an open, standardized web is to make sure there are still other browsers with…

Make sure to checkout https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com if you have any suggestions for the firefox devtools dev team.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#76

Post by XzetaU8 »

ishansharma wrote: post #44
recalibrator wrote: post #25

Developers, please stop making add-ons and extensions for Google products. You accelerate Google's domination and vendor lock-in when you do.

This is a very important point. I switched to Firefox mainly due to intertial scrolling and better fonts (Chrome looks crap till this 37 beta and needs a flag). Extensions are more powerful on Firefox but I think they are coplicated as well. There are many popular extensions that just don't have updates on Firefox. One example is Evernote. I used it a lot on Chrome but their Firefox extension is almost 1 year old ver…

You can try the latest Beta build (August 14) of Web Clipper 6 here: https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/60185-web-clipper-6-fo...

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#77

Post by w1ntermute »

codeflo wrote: post #17

As someone who switches browsers about every six months, I feel that Firefox is still quite a bit behind in terms of stability and performance. I mostly blame the single-process model, which makes crashes and hangups way more global than they should be in 2014. On Windows, there's also the 32-bit issue. On machines with 8+ GB of RAM, having all tabs share a 2 GB address space just doesn't cut it. Especially when your…

Firefox is definitely behind (on Linux) when it comes to UI fluidity. It also seems like pages load faster in Chrome, but that might also just be one of its UI optimization techniques.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#78

Post by slasaus »

userbinator wrote: post #74

I use Chrom(ium), Firefox, IE, and Opera, and even Lynx, so I have no particular loyalty to any one browser, but it doesn't feel like there is all that much of a choice anymore among the "mainstream" ones as they all seem to be converging in design. Even Opera, which used to use its own rendering engine, has moved to WebKit, and Blink is not all that different from WebKit either. I certainly hope Mozilla will never c…

"Web developers trying to make their pages look exactly the same in "all browsers" may enjoy a browser monopoly since it reduces the effort, but I think that's the wrong way to do it; ... The idea of progressive enhancement/graceful degradation, which can make for a better environment for browser diversity, seems to be completely lost on many developers."

Sometimes it helps to remind them of IE6 in order to make webdevs realize that a monopoly wasn't that good for them either.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#79

Post by TeMPOraL »

pasiaj wrote: post #66
k4rthik wrote: post #61

I agree with Paul Graham on this one. "Has any other company grown to Google's size and remained as benevolent? (Not saying they're perfect, just the best that big.)" ( https://twitter.com/paulg/status/495948643149426688 ) I'll stick with Chrome for now as I find it slightly better than firefox.

While I do agree, there have been many signs that times they are a changin'

Please enumerate at least some of those signs.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#80

Post by keenerd »

tachion wrote: post #50
wingerlang wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I modified an existing theme [0] and now it looks like this http://imgur.com/kkXpFHX still not pretty but it stays out of the way so I don't really care at the moment. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for...

I dont mean to insult you, but this looks just ugly, and the UI seems to be way too small to be used with comfort. I wonder if there's really no way to stop Firefox from wasting that space above the tabs, just like Chrome does it...

> I wonder if there's really no way to stop Firefox from wasting that space above the tabs

Don't put the tabs on the top of the screen. You are probably concerned about vertical real estate because you have a 16:9 display. Horizontal bars just don't make sense any more.

Install the Tree Style Tab extension. Shove all your tabs into a sidebar. Now your browser has an eye-friendly aspect ratio. Plus you can have more than twenty tabs open at once without reducing the page title to a mere favicon.

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