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

What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

neilzone.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–149 of 149 posts

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#141

Post by roenxi »

63stack wrote: post #87
roenxi wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoever. Whatever. OSS is a system for finding the most capable entity in the world at developing a software capability and letting them get on with it. It'll find someone to pick up the slack if Google starts doing a terrible job. In this world of 8 billion humans and however many thousands of companies, there'll be one who knows how to put a web browser together. If I were going to guess today it'd be brave.com, bu…

This is very handwave-y and idealistic. Sure, 8 billion humans, and thousands of companies on a cosmic timeline will lift the "most capable entity" to the top, but the road there is going to be extremely long if you just "nah they'll get it" and not do anything else.

I named a specific company, pointed out a specific example of the dynamic featuring GCC and Debian is just one iceberg in the OSS ocean demonstrating that there are more than 30,000 packages built on the principle that free software is better than closed source.

I'm not sure how much more specific and concrete you want the argument to get, but that seems fine to me. The market is big, people care about this part of it. There will be a sponsor for the work if Google isn't up to the challenge.

The only reason everyone uses Chrome is it is really good at what it does and to date Google has been a high quality steward.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#143

Post by mgrandl »

everdrive wrote: post #72

In the short term, I've switched to Librewolf. In the long term, we're probably hosed unless some heroic individuals can produce a new mainstream browser (or just a successful, long-term fork of Firefox that does not necessarily rely on Mozilla maintaining Firefox) It's important to remember that Firefox itself is a good browser, but is far from perfect; it just remains the better option than Chrome. In an ideal worl…

Donate to Ladybird? They are already quite far: https://ladybird.org

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#144

Post by sumeno »

canadiantim wrote: post #138
sumeno wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the browser that has had multiple huge incidents where they've been caught doing sketchy stuff is definitely who we should turn to...

What sketchy stuff or huge incidents are you referring to? My understanding is they are, by far, the best privacy focused browser, especially now that Mozilla has committed seppuku

The Controversies section on Wikipedia pretty much covers it

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#145

Post by wobfan »

roenxi wrote: post #41
mr_sturd wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

They're not in any position to control the web as a whole; Safari is too strong a competitor. But even if Chromium was at 100% market share they couldn't control the web. If they start throwing their weight around then the other web companies will start organising around a Chromium fork. The important thing here is OSS/not-OSS rather than market share. Market share can change quickly enough in response to problems. I…

Isn’t the push to deprecate and remove Manifest V2 in favor of V3 and therefore removing or at least significantly cutting down possibilities for users to block ads a major push from the Google side? A field in which they, conveniently, make their major cut of their profit? Brave is a big company already, still they’ve already announced that they won’t be able to support V2 for too long as the codebase will break over time.

Only because something is OSS doesn’t mean it’s not controlled by a single entity or consortium. We need competition, especially in something so damn critical like web browsers (which are like OSes for the web).

Mozilla is and has been a savior. They’re doing weird shit, but compared to Google and Apple they’re still as transparent as possible, even with their shit. And their shit is not even THAT bad, while I still dislike it and also thought about replacing FF for a short time. I just hope they come back to the right path, at least in their communications.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#146

Post by wobfan »

tzs wrote: post #123
Valodim wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extens…

> 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.

It’s Google. The whole Manifest is there for marketing reasons. The whole browser even. Google doesn’t want us to have a nice browser because it benefits us. It benefits them. And this will continue. With V3 they already did the biggest cut down of af blocking in their browser. They will continue this path.

Their main income is ads. They don’t care for anything else.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#147

Post by bluGill »

KronisLV wrote: post #125
bluGill wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Good for Ladybird, but I don't think they can support all the complexities of the Web with only 7 develops (but perhaps with enough volunteers they could - 7 is enough to do the hard thankless work while volunteers do the more interesting bits). Between all the weird layout rules, required speed to be useful, and security (last only because with out the other two you automatically have perfect security since with no users holes cannot be exploited).

Still I wish them luck.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#148

Post by Timon3 »

tzs wrote: post #123
Valodim wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 extens…

> 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.

This presupposes that advertising platforms will not react to the changes to adblocking in any way, but I don't think that's realistic.

The declarative rules can only be changed with updates to the extension (AFAIK, please correct me if I'm wrong). This means users can't block ads themselves (at least uBlock Origin Lite can't do it), and it will take between days to weeks until new block lists have propagated.

Now, remember last year when YouTube started blocking adblockers? They changed their implementations sometimes multiple times per day, and after minutes to hours new blocklists were distributed that got around them. This won't be possible anymore with Manifest V3, so Google just has to update their adblock implementation often enough to finally get rid of them.

And the same goes for other platforms. Once the majority of users is using browsers that only allow declarative blocking, more platforms will start updating more frequently.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#149

Post by soulofmischief »

bluGill wrote: post #147
KronisLV wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Good for Ladybird, but I don't think they can support all the complexities of the Web with only 7 develops (but perhaps with enough volunteers they could - 7 is enough to do the hard thankless work while volunteers do the more interesting bits). Between all the weird layout rules, required speed to be useful, and security (last only because with out the other two you automatically have perfect security since with no…

If I had 7 disposable engineers, I'd built an open source modular browser that allows individual components such as rendering engine, JS engine, WASM runtime, etc. to all be swapped out for alternative implementations. The browser itself would basically be a shell and SDK. It's ludicrous that someone has to either completely reinvent the wheel today or fork one of two monolithic browsers that require significant upkeep and cross-domain expertise.

I feel like this approach has a much better shot at being sustainable and giving power back to users and clients, despite having its own challenges. I would like it if political fallouts such as this one didn't mean I have to completely migrate to a brand new system. Compare that to Linux, where I can say, migrate to Rocky if CentOS stops being a viable choice, without losing any of my tooling or configuration.

Post reply on HN