The big question: Will Microsoft fork or take the change also?
Something tells me they'll take the change.
https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1134573349043081217 https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1134909845042335744
Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
121–130 of 231 posts
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope to see Firefox eventually providing an embeddable framework, considering that Chromium isn't just monopolising the web browser space... it's spreading into desktop applications through Electron. Left unchecked, Google will manage to poke its fingers into every pie within reach. It seems like the ideal solution of using the OS's native web toolkit hasn't been successful so far. So the next best offering (aside…
I regret XUL was abandoned - it was a great idea, but much ahead of its time.
XULrunner was a great idea, so the executives of the Mozilla Corporation had to sack it.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#123Glad to see people caring.
99% of people don't even know that adblockers exist. Those same people are generally scared of computers.
Trust me, this isn't gonna matter. I saw these same arguments during the IE/Firefox war. Didn't matter that much.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#124All of this "debate" is pretty absurd. Yes the webrequest v3 proposal seems problematic for scripts /malware / crypto / ad / etc blockers. This is consensual. Chromium is open source and has those two main actors: opera and Microsoft. Almost everybody seems to consider chromium in the debate as a proprietary software owned by Google. And thus argue to switch to Firefox. Let's be clear, when you look at the technical,…
There is a very loud but relatively tiny minority of developers that work for/with and/or support Mozilla in some way, who actively take part in brigading on HN to try and sway your opinion. Any time anybody complains about a better browser, you'll see someone promote Firefox and bring a few hundred of their friends to up-fnord their story to the front page or down-fnord dissenting commenters.
I guess you have proofs of that.
Claiming that there's brigading just because people upvote what you don't find upvote-worthy is not very constructive.
I mean, I've been a Mozilla volunteer for a couple of years, some years ago (on MDN, FWIW), but I think it doesn't mean I'm some sort of fanboy just because of that. Ask Mozilla volunteers who's seen me drunk how harsh I can be towards Mozilla.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#125It needs to be dupe'd every day until Chrome is fixed or goes under 50% market share.
Can we not turn HN into even more of a political soapbox than it already is? It's fm fine that you have a cause to fight for but this is seriously getting tiring.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#126Are there web developers in this thread? The only praise for a browser that I am hearing in this and similar threads is about how a browser is superior for content consumption (browser X is faster, etc.). It’s never about how one browser offers better developer experience than others. And I have not yet found a browser that is nicer to develop in than Chrom(e/ium).
Probably, but both Firefox and Safari are continuously making improvements to their devtools. Specifically, Firefox has pretty good tools for debugging layout (incl. CSS Grid) and accessibility (an entire panel in devtools that shows the accessibility tree).
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#127A chunk of users (Linux desktops mainly) are locked into chrome because of h.264 / mp4 video.
On Linux, I have "OpenH264 Video Codec by Cisco" and "Widevine Content Decryption Module by Google" as Firefox addons. This seems to be the norm [0], as Firefox will download them on-demand so long as the user agrees. [0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm
Says here the Cisco codec allows you to use H.264 in WebRTC with gstreamer and Firefox. It does not enable generic H.264 playback, only WebRTC.
https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/2835 https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OpenH264
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#128Great to see mainstream media picking this up and giving Firefox some exposure. With Microsoft switching to Chromium, Firefox is now the only viable (cross platform) alternative. FF gaining back a solid amount of market share is critical for the browser ecosystem in the future. (Personally I switched back to FF after the first Quantum release, which brought performance back on par with Chrome. On mobile, the ad block…
It’s not mainstream media. It’s a contributor site. You can pay some money and get one of your own. You can post whatever you want on there. They offer to do a little bit of editing and proofreading to make it look professional before it goes online. There is no fact checking. These contributor sites are essentially blogs that carry the credibility of Forbes even though they don’t deserve it.
I see contributor sites being linked all over the place - social media, news aggregators, even Apple news. I wish there was more awareness that these articles are written by some regular person with no qualifications as a journalist and that there is no standard for accuracy.
I’ve been asked to be a contributor before. I don’t know what the criteria is. I got a cold call about it one day. I’ve been a panelist at a couple local events, got a mention in a niche news outlet and was nominated for an award once. My guess is that’s why I was targeted as a lead. The pitch was mostly about having a bigger platform for my personal brand if I remember correctly.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regret XUL was abandoned - it was a great idea, but much ahead of its time.
XUL was just a markup language to create interfaces, it became obsolete as HTML got refined.
Even to this day, XUL is far more capable than HTML. It has built-in widgets for many common desktop GUI elements that still need to be created from scratch in HTML+Javascript, and notably uses the native chrome of whatever OS it is running on to render them.
Re: Google Just Gave 2B Chrome Users a Reason to Switch to Firefox
#130All of this "debate" is pretty absurd. Yes the webrequest v3 proposal seems problematic for scripts /malware / crypto / ad / etc blockers. This is consensual. Chromium is open source and has those two main actors: opera and Microsoft. Almost everybody seems to consider chromium in the debate as a proprietary software owned by Google. And thus argue to switch to Firefox. Let's be clear, when you look at the technical,…
I think it would be a good idea for Mozilla to move to a Chromium base. That way they could have a built in ad-blocker and turn it on by default.
If they did that with Gecko then websites would simply detect and block Gecko even if they changed the user agent. Because it's only in the single digits on desktop and non-existent on mobile.
However I know Mozilla isn't interested in that since that would still likely break websites. Also, they officially believe ads are good for the web.
However, I want them to continue to work on Servo since I think it's important to be able to parallelize reading/parsing and rendering the web.