Firefox 90 • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox 90

#171

Post by fleddr » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #157

laurent92 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that…

1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of the people 2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?

It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not.

Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that.

Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects.

Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape.

If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base.

Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.

Re: Firefox 90

#172

Post by JohnBooty » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #156

bergheim wrote: post #122

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_…

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that…

Feel free to agree or disagree with Mozilla, obviously.

However, I suggest skipping the extra and disingenous step of pretending there's some objective universal standard of "neutrality."

Your "neutral" may be somebody else's idea of "left" or "right."

What you're doing here makes as much sense as inventing some arbitrary personal definition of "rock and roll music" and then criticizing some performer for not hewing closely enough to it.

Re: Firefox 90

#173

Post by ergot_vacation » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

bergheim wrote: post #122

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_…

The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game.

Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.

Re: Firefox 90

#174

Post by joelthelion » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?

Re: Firefox 90

#175

Post by ergot_vacation » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

bennysomething wrote: post #141

bergheim wrote: post #122

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_…

How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fas…

It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm.

What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.

Re: Firefox 90

#176

Post by fleddr » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #147

ninjahattori wrote: post #133

I use and love firefox. I feel sad when I see brave, edge and other new browsers chromium based taking a lead. Firefox by itself is an amazing browser but the company behind it lacks any kind of vision. Brave has its own search, a better startpage, an ad network. From onboarding to incentivising user, they are doing it all very well.

Chromium isn't out of choice it's out of necessity. Unfortunately the newest generation of engineers just see no point in even testing anything but Chrome on a MacBook. This drives me up the wall as someone who's first job required writing CSS that could work in IE6, IE7, Safari, FireFox and Opera and even sometimes IE5.5. To hear devs paid way more than I was back then tell me "can't we just tell them to install Chr…

I'm old school like you are, and morally agree with you.

Yet I did change my mind over time regarding this issue. for the sake of argument, assume we do use web standards.

It makes absolutely no sense for when using such standards, that results differ per browser. In our time, resolving all those differences cost a huge amount of time. Now browsers behave better, but there still may be issues.

We've long seen this as some diversity feature of the web, but it's a bug instead. It means millions of developers are spending time on the same non-value added activity every single time. It's a massive and ongoing waste of resources for everybody.

(browser makers agree with the above, they all have a compatibility program addressing this)

Second, "progressive enhancement" too has been embraced by the careful web developer as the right thing to do. It is. Yet it effectively means building the same thing twice. We've normalized doing that, but it's quite an unnatural approach not seen in any other tech platform I know of.

(the above can be solved by browsers coordinating important standards in time, but generally they won't...often)

Both issues above are time wasters and technical shortcomings. They still are the right thing to do, but an unwanted thing to do when adding pressure.

And pressure we have. We're no longer in the cute web, this is the business web. Developers are very expensive and need to deliver more than ever. Time to market is shorter than ever.

Any activity not directly contributing to time to market, is under severe pressure.

Note that I still agree with your point about some/many engineers being lazy, indifferent. But I hope you appreciate this view still.

Re: Firefox 90

#177

Post by ergot_vacation » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #174

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?

The lead developer has open contempt for the users, for one thing. Also, anyone with a few neurons to rub together can tell the UI is absolutely terrible from a functional perspective. Form over function, on a browser whose target demographic was supposed to be power users (long ago, in the misty past).

Re: Firefox 90

#178

Post by ergot_vacation » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

Oh it's absolutely dead man walking at this point. Just a question of when they finally decide to admit it, turn off the lights and go home.

Re: Firefox 90

#179

Post by wyre » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #174

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?

Because Chrome comes standard on Android and Firefox has little marketing.

Re: Firefox 90

#180

Post by fleddr » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

joelthelion wrote: post #174

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

As a side note, I don't understand why nobody uses Firefox on Android. It's an excellent browser, has ublock which is fairly rare on mobile. Why not use it?

Not an Android user, but I can speculate about reasons.

Most people don't install browsers. They barely know what a browser is. So they use the one pushed to them, or the one familiar with. In the case of Android, I believe Google Chrome is typically shipped as the default browser.

And as it works fine, there's no incentive to install anything else. I doubt young/new internet users would even know about Firefox.

If not set as default browser already, Google pushes it from widely popular services like Youtube.

Bottom line, Google can reach billions of people, Mozilla none.

Please remember this: people do NOT chose browsers, compare them, pick their favorite. They do none of these things. It's a collective illusion by us tech folks.