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

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

robert.ocallahan.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 316 posts

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

#141

Post by scrollaway »

collyw wrote: post #29
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.

I could say the exact same things about iOS apps. Or Android. Or Windows. But a bit of competition is generally good.

Yeah, no offense to GP but that is possibly the worst way of looking at it.

There are platforms where developers need to stop developing. iOS was the main one; it has extreme lock in, an unfriendly development environment, an extremely unfriendly publishing environment and is actively doing evil things. But no, all aboard the ios apps train!

Windows I could say similar things about but given the competition I really can't. Android... Definitely not. Some of the most free mobile OSes run atop of android.

But when it comes to developing on platforms in general, developers absolutely need to use themselves as a voice to tell other platforms what is good, what is needed, etc. There are excellent general desktop features that people have found on mac os, windows and linux alike. Without developers to make use of them, regardless of the "open" or "closed" state of the platform, users are worse off.

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

#142

Post by thesimon »

scrollaway wrote: post #111
higherpurpose wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lock-in has already begun on Chrome. Now you can't install Chrome extensions from anywhere else but the Chrome store (which means only stuff Google agrees with). Chrome is as closed-down as iOS and WP8 right now (For shame, Google!). It's actually the main reasons I'm waiting to switch from it soon. But not until Firefox gets a security sandbox.

This is not lock in (not for the purpose of lock-in anyway) - it's for security reasons and it is in fact exclusive to Windows. Chrome was getting abused by thousands of extra-crapware installers which would install extra extensions etc. They have taken a gradual response to the issue but it always came down to ">99% of outside extensions installed on windows are crapware. This is exclusive to Windows due to its perm…

The lock is also active on Mac.

But on both OS, you can get around it by enabling the developer mode and installing unpacked extensions.

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

#143

Post by myrryr »

romerro wrote: post #129
myrryr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a Tech company, they make most of their money from ad's for now, but I expect in the future, it will be from AI and robotics, since they are investing incredible amounts in those areas.

Nope, that's just to deceive you. They still just want/need your attention and more of it every year on more surfaces. Online Media is way too profitable to "pivot" away from it :)

They don't need to pivot, they just need the rest of the business to grow bigger then the advertising arm. Which it will, since robotics and AI have the potential to be much much bigger. Of course, then people will worry that Google will create the technological singularity.

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

#144

Post by JoeAltmaier »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #112
srean wrote: post #43

Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…

In fact, the infamous memory leak Firefox was 'famous' for was fixed in version 2.5 which tells me that anyone who still complains of memory leaks in Firefox is one who you do not want to listen to for advice. EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.

The leak points to a slack development/release process (is there one?). Its expected to check for leaks, crashes before releasing a point build. That this dog got out points to a systemic problem. Was that fixed by 2.5? Or was just the leak fixed.

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

#145

Post by mike_hearn »

higherpurpose wrote: post #99
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…

Lock-in has already begun on Chrome. Now you can't install Chrome extensions from anywhere else but the Chrome store (which means only stuff Google agrees with). Chrome is as closed-down as iOS and WP8 right now (For shame, Google!). It's actually the main reasons I'm waiting to switch from it soon. But not until Firefox gets a security sandbox.

It's very hard to be locked in to an open source browser. If Google fucks up badly enough someone will fork it.

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

#146

Post by yati »

srean wrote: post #43

Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…

I have been a long time FF user and can only echo your experience. But sometimes, on (badly written) JavaScript heavy pages, the entire browser locks up instead of just the rogue tab. I've tried enabling electrolysis[1] on my nightly, but it isn't quite there yet. Firefox may not be perfect, but it really is the only option for me, and it's getting better thanks to the amazing community behind it.

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

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

#147

Post by darklajid »

Ff fan here. Running Aurora on desktop, laptop and mobile.

Love the project, have nothing but minor complains. Currently leading the list: For quite a while FF on Android has a 'broken' long press menu on links. Someone thought that it should be

Share Link ->

Open Link in New Tab

Open Link in Private Tab

Copy Link

Bookmark Link

I.. guess I don't understand how others use their browser. The last action doesn't make sense to me (bookmarking a link I haven't visited/open?), but worse: The first item annoys the hell out of me. Same question applies (share a link that isn't open?), but reserving the top spot for that? In my world you use the 'open in *tab' operations or copy a link. I regularly hit 'Share Link' and curse about the UX and shake my head trying to figure out what process lead to this design.

Minor quibbles.. :-) Best browser, hands down.

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

#148

Post by dmethvin »

How can everyone--including O'Callahan--be giving Apple a free pass on this issue? Pointer events are a great example of Apple's obstructionism. The W3C tried for years to standardize touch events and Apple blocked them several times by claiming patent rights. Microsoft proposed pointer events, and everyone seems to agree that they are much better as a future standard and a way to unify pointer models, but Apple seems to have no interest in implementing them.

Whether you agree with Google or not (I don't), be realistic and admit that any web platform standard like pointer events that lacks an Apple implementation won't help developers--how good is a "standard" that doesn't work on the iPhone/iPad? My guess is that Apple sees no reason to move quickly on improving web standards, since they'd rather have people develop for their proprietary walled garden. They just created a new proprietary language to do so!

Microsoft and Mozilla lack the market share in mobile devices to be able to move standards in any direction by themselves. Google is in the driver's seat. Apple is willing to sit quietly in the back and we seem to be okay with that?

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

#149

Post by jfuhrman »

jfuhrman wrote: post #136

For those saying Google is a benevolent company, here are a few signs that the bean counters are taking over: Tracking Google Apps for Education and even paid Google Apps for Business emails to build ad profiles, making misleading statement to the public that they're not doing so, and then when it finally came to statements to federal court, lacking the dare to continue lying and finally confessing the truth and then…

Edit: I can't edit my post, perhaps due to the downvotes(why downvote without replying?), so here's a couple more.

Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-...

Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta access. Bonus points for enforcing this by the duplicitous moniker 'Open Handset Alliance' doublespeak

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/09/report-google-threate...

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

#150

Post by guilloche »

myrryr wrote: post #122
stephenr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this meant to be a joke/sarcasm?

I can see what you are saying, but NACL is a big deal. It isn't ONLY c/c++ but any language that can compile with LLVM, which is almost every language. Think about it, new scripting languages, new compiled languages, anything language you care about. You want to write in Haskell? fine... do so, and have it run instead of javascript. This IS a big big deal. No language is perfect, so the ability to use any of them? It…

I agree.
Post reply on HN