If anyone's wondering how to get Firefox mobile on F-Droid, it's called 'Fennec' and can be found here: https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid
Firefox Browser: best for a free web
161–170 of 240 posts
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#162I'd like to mention (once again), that Firefox on Android is a huge leap in everyday browsing experience over Chrome - and you should try it if you haven't. Due to mainly one reason: ad blocker extensions; which aren't supported on Chrome. Since that's where most users are, I hope Mozilla will be able to communicate these advantages better. Chrome is arguably better on the desktop for most users, unless they're in th…
I prefer Firefox for Android as well, but there is a Chromium fork called Bromite which has adblocking built in, too.
Bromite's adblocking is nowhere near as effective as Firefox + uBlock. That being said, I'm using Bromite as my primary browser on Android too because it's much faster and snappier to use and has tab groups. Perhaps I'll use Firefox Android as my primary browser some day.
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of a more effective way to kill Firefox. You'd give the fence-sitters a reason to switch, you'd get rid of all the volunteer contributors, and you'd get rid of everyone who uses and advocates for Firefox because it's free* software, which would probably be a significant portion of the remaining userbase. (I know it's technically possible to charge money for free* software, but it's impractical.) * as-in…
Fence-sitters already switch in droves, Firefox lost 250M users in the last ten years. So keeping the status quo already clearly leads to demise. And how can you claim you are free* when 90% of your revenue comes from your main competitor? Maybe making a paid browser is what they need to become truly free* and reset to a user-centric product development culture, which could then actually make it an exciting product a…
I think you're underestimating the size of the demographic who care about FOSS, or who believe FOSS to be more trustworthy. It's not big globally, but I think it has a lot of overlap with people who use Firefox and people who care about online privacy.
There's no way that the intersection of people who care about online privacy, don't mind that Firefox is less web-compatible than a Chromium-fork, but also don't care at all about FOSS is big enough to sell a product that everyone else is providing for free, especially since you're not just saying goodbye to the Googlebux, you're also saying goodbye to part of your workforce (the volunteers,) free advertising (FOSS advocates and default installs on desktop Linux,) web devs (no one would pay to test pages on a niche proprietary engine,) extensions (most high-profile extension devs are FOSS advocates,) and most of the community. It wouldn't work.
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately that's not a likely explanation. If you do even the simplest possible measurement, which is just recording user agent strings and IPs, you won't end up undercounting Firefox clients
Either uBlock Origin or Matrix comes with user agent spoofing, it's not like the practice is that rare.
Matrix used to do this but doesn't anymore [1] and uBlock never had that feature. Please don't make stuff up.
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#165FF might be better than Chrome etc now, but Surprisingly, firefox didn't care about the declining usage till a long time. It seemed to me, they let it go to Google. Speed, crashes etc were too often then and it never got fixed in time. that mattered to lots of users
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#166It makes me sad that FF browser share has continued to decline steadily. The past couple years of releases have been some its the best in terms of my own UX, since perhaps the Phoenix era. It's pretty fast these days, the UI is good, has a lot of great extensions and privacy features. I use Brave at work to have a better chrome-based experience with gsuite. It's also a fast, excellent browser with good privacy featur…
I still ask myself: has FF browser share actually dropped that much, or has FF's privacy focus caused browser share estimates to mostly miss FF users in their counts? Most of these stats come from the exact kind of skeevy companies that I (and many other FireFox users) are using FireFox to avoid.
My take on FF "decline" is that FF user share (%) dropped because the pie started expanding (especially on mobile). New internet users are likely to be Safari or Chrome users for whom the browser they have is good enough. And Firefox on mobile is simply not as fast as alternatives (the bar set by Chromium Android is very high), kinda painful to use unless you have a highend device, esp. JS heavy sites like Twitter work much better on Chromium.
This doesn't fully describe situation, but over last 3 years, mobile users went from 50% to 75% users in my prev company's data. And Firefox is nowhere in those mobile stats.
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is not the browser, but a lazy mgmt. Selling user privacy to Google for easy money instead of asking users to either pay for ensuring their privacy. But that will take real work instead of easy “royalty” payments from Google. Between telemetry, safe browsing, sqlite database with all sites you visited & gvfs they siphon off some serious data. So bad for privacy but snappy otherwise, particularly the new v…
I can think of few worse business plans than a paid browser, in 2021. I would bet money that even the majority of HN readers wouldn't pay money for something so heavily commoditized.
Maybe you are right, but if you present yourself like a privacy-first browser, the paladin of the free internet, and then you end up taking money from Google, your position and credibility don't look great.
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#168Too many distractions from Mozilla (Firefox OS, VPN etc and a complete dissonance from the core- browser. It doesn't help when senior management takes fat bonuses and fires away employees during the pandemic. That doesn't make for pleasant optics and also distanced me away from their product.
Firefox seems to be the only hope to avoid a duopoly dominated by forces that are anti-privacy and anti-user. I recently made the move from Safari to Firefox and I am very pleased. This being said, I agree with you about the optics of Firefox management. There is a lot going on that isn't good and the personal enrichment of the executives feels all sorts of wrong. If FF management can not be good stewards of a vital…
Not really, since they never found a proper business model. So far, how do they make money? How do they pay the developers? How do they plan to be sustainable? Is there any place where I can see who donated them? Which share of donations is given by large companies that are constantly breaking the values the Mozilla foundation stands for? Was the news that Google will pay $400M per year to be the default search engine confirmed? If so, which share of their budget does this represent?
A lot of questions are not answered, which makes the whole FF a bit shady. As a user, how much can I trust FF as a browser? Before answering, keep in mind that the browser is the single most important software we use every day since it carries most of our activities. Is it safe to use software made by someone who is not capable of sustaining themselves?
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
5. Very keyboard-friendly 6. Incredibly customizable via CSS, including multiple rows of tabs
5b. Keybinds can’t be changed
5c. the shortcut for opening a private browsing window is different from every other browser and collide with the main shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+P) of the main IDE (VisualStudioCode)
Re: Firefox Browser: best for a free web
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either uBlock Origin or Matrix comes with user agent spoofing, it's not like the practice is that rare.
Matrix used to do this but doesn't anymore [1] and uBlock never had that feature. Please don't make stuff up. [1] https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/927
I don't think it's fair to call not knowing that a feature was removed from a discontinued app "making stuff up."
I was clearly wrong, though it is easy to change your user agent it's unlikely that many Firefox users have done it.