Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is untrue, did US ESTA fully on Firefox. Not sure what settings you use but the problem ain't FF nor the website.
Firefox on Linux?
Tried on FF for Windows, OSX and Android.
What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
121–130 of 149 posts
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> GOOG dropped the slogan "Don't Be Evil" -- I cordially invite all relaxing frogs to speculate about future increases to the water temperature. the problem is that mozilla also seems to be boiling the frog right now.
I worry less about 2.63 % of the marketshare using some aggregate browsing data than I do about GOOG dominance (60-90%) in the commercial surveillance industry.
but aren't you are just describing another convection cell in the same frog-boiling saucepan?
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO the critical factor will be whether any Chromium forks keep support for Manifest V2 alive. If yes, it will be a viable alternative to Firefox (or FF forks), but I haven't seen indication that a project will pick up the slack. A browser without proper support for uBlock Origin or similar extensions isn't a browser I'm willing to use, even if ad-blocking is integrated into the browser itself. The freedom to actuall…
It'll be gone the moment upstream drops it. Maintaining this in a fork will be a lot of work. Fortunately it's still available even in Chrome for a while, but that's just an ultimatum
Even if maintaining Manifest V2 is too much work after upstream drops it that doesn't necessarily mean that they just have to accept Manifest V3 as shipped in upstream.
From what I've read there are two main problems with Manifest V3 when it comes to ad blocking.
Problem #1. The webRequestBlocking permission is gone:
> Note: As of Manifest V3, the "webRequestBlocking" permission is no longer available for most extensions. Consider "declarativeNetRequest", which enables use the declarativeNetRequest API. Aside from "webRequestBlocking", the webRequest API is unchanged and available for normal use. Policy installed extensions can continue to use "webRequestBlocking".
That does not necessarily mean good ad blocking must break. Most people find the ad blockers on Safari to be fine, and Safari does not have that kind of blocking. It has long required the declarative rule kind of blocking.
Some brief searching suggests that the rules for Chrome's declarative blocking are actually more powerful than Safari's.
That brings us to the second Manifest V3 problem.
Problem #2. The declarative rules only allows something like 30k rules. Apple found that such a low limit is not sufficient and raised it to 150k.
I'd guess that maintaining a fork that just raises the limit in Chrome would not be a problem for the Chromium-based third party browsers.
The big question would be whether the current 30k limit is there for technical reasons or for marketing reasons like not wanting ad blocking to be too effective. If it is a technical limit the forkers might also have to rewrite the rule processing engine which would likely be more than they would want to deal with.
[1] https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/reference/api/w...
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#124I've switched to Waterfox (yet another Firefox fork) and so far I'm happy with that choice https://www.waterfox.net/
I was just checking their site. Not even mention of Firefox other than an external quote? Looked a bit shady tbh.
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what's stopping anyone from forming a group or foundation based on donations from like-minded people? And maintain a secure, free fork? I see this topic often enough on HN, this might a big enough group.
You need several million dollars per year to be useful. Anyone can form a foundation but if you don't have that much or more it was a waste of time. it need not be money a dozen developers donating code full time would work but that is harder to get.
Currently Ladybird has 200k USD from FUTO, 100k USD from Shopify and then a bunch more from ProtonVPN, Ahrefs, etc., they also have 7 full time employees and a bunch of volunteers: https://ladybird.org/#faq
They fall short of the numbers you suggest, but it's kind of encouraging that some people can do that for an entirely new project. Time will tell how it works out for them, but I could feasibly imagine a Firefox fork gaining similar ground, should people get tired of Mozilla's stewardship for whatever reason.
After all, even something like 3% of the market share is way more of a proof of feasibility than 0% and if you get a bunch of money when that figure is 0% like Ladybird, things can only get better for a project built on established technology.
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s something up with your internet connection.
API calls which go through Akamai all return their default "access denied" or "something went wrong" html, my 1Gbps internet is fine.
I mean if Marriott’s site isn’t loading on Chromium, the problem is very unlikely to be with Marriott or Chromium.
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#127This blog entry makes me feel heard. I've chosen Firefox through Debian, but the browser is one of those problems that may kick me off the web entirely. People complain that Firefox is dependent on Google, but the forks are also dependent on Google, through Firefox. Chromium is dependent on Chrome. Moving to Apple explicitly attaches you to a company that wants to monopolize your purchases. This is pushing me to deal…
> Will Apple eventually buy Ladybird?
This is the first time I've heard of the idea. Considering how the project has decided to replace C++ with Swift, a language with strong ties to Apple, it seems like a possible scenario.
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.
Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.
> Does Google effectively own Webkit, though?
No, Google owns Blink: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine)
which outright forked in 2013, though at that point it sounds like they were already carrying enough patches to constitute a soft fork (which then became a hard fork).
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#129** To clarify - looking for any Firefox alternative, not restricted to the Gecko engine Is Brave at all a viable alternative? Or do their own ads and all the crypto-shmypto make the switch moot? Tangentially - has anyone tried building Firefox from the source? [1] I wonder how feasible this would be as an alternative if coupled with disabling all unwanted parts of the browser. [1] https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.…
Brave is just bag of privacy lies. They have to make money somehow. If the browser is free, who's the product? Ask your AI or just Google it.
> They have to make money somehow. If the browser is free, who's the product?
The problem is that this covers Firefox and all the Chromium browsers. We've left behind the ability to pick a good option and are instead looking for the least bad option now.
Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox
#130Any thoughts on Mullvad Browser? https://mullvad.net/en/browser
It appears to be a closed-source variant of the Tor Browser, itself based on Firefox.
If I were going to use a Firefox variant, I'd probably go with LibreWolf.