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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
121–130 of 675 posts
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#122> but from my perspective Apple is just another company that’s more focused on advancing their own agenda than the well-being of their users or open web standards
Right. Strange that. Who’d have thought that’s how a company would prioritize things.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#123It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
IMO they're in a good position where then can include deep-rooted privacy services on which they could (and already do in some) capitalize.
for example Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay which added a premium version with unlimited aliases and your own @*.mozmail.com subdomain.
If they can find a way to promote themselves as a leader of Internet privacy with well-integrated servoces, and from which they can get a revenue from it then at least they'll gain some independence.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#124It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not).
Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#125It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
I thought firefox was supposed to be a simplified interface (compared to the older mozilla suite).
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
What large companies use GMail like that? Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work. (edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't wo…
I know several security professionals who do incident response and therefore see a lot of IT setup across multiple domains since ransomwares are endemic nowadays, and according to them 99% of the shops they intervene run Office or Outlook(365) in some capacity.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#127It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
> greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs
Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone.
`about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set of settings and undiscoverable CLI flags available in Chrome...
I personally feel removing settings from the standard UI is perfectly fine when almost no-one is using them, and power users can work just fine with settings.js or `about:config`.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#128If Google will be able to have a monopoly on the rendering engines and dictate web standards that will be hugely detrimental to lots of companies.
I don't understand why those companies don't finance the development of alternative rendering engines and browsers. Right now Google is financing the only alternative left, Firefox. So they kind of control that, too.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#129It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…
"we're talking about sharing technical data with a non-profit organisation to help them maintain and improve the browser you rely "
No we are talking about a non-profit and a for-profit at the same time, where the distinction is often not clear. But it is clear, that they included ads and "studies" by default in their browser, that did send data to whoever, without any user consent.
So no, I do not really trust them anymore. Still more than google maybe, but not enough to voluntarily send them my data. And this is a shame, because I would have liked to keep trusting them.
Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony
#130The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution.
Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox?
Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share.
The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a limited storage space is a compelling reason to not install a second browser.
The third advantage Chrome has is the fact that more than 90% of people use Google has search engine and every time you access google.com with a browser other than Chrome you get a "Switch to Chrome" notification telling you that Chrome will help you "hide" annoying ads (without telling you that Google is responsible for the annoying ads) and you will be safe against malware. The regular user fears malwares and viruses more than ads or anything else because they think their bank account info will be stolen, so better security is a compelling reason to install Chrome.
Please, tell me, how do Firefox or any other browser can compete with the fact that Google is abusing their dominance of the search engine market and the mobile phone market to "force" people to use Chrome?