Live data from Hacker News

Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

fakespot.com

171–180 of 384 posts

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#171
post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

>This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. >The browser wars are basically over and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Let's not just sit back and go "Oh well, they lost nothing they could do" shrug . They built their tech in such an obtuse and opinionated way it's impossible to integrate…

> Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome.

This demonstrates that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#172
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser wars are over because Firefox lost them by spending all the time patting themselves on the back about how much better they were than the competition, wasting their money on stupid stuff like this instead of improving their browser. Getting themselves into a deeper hole is unlikely to help, imo.

Remember "Firefox OS"?

FirefoxOS was the sort of sheer audacity that I'm glad Mozilla invested in. Same with Servo, which eventually gave us Rust.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#173
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many Firefox extensions including the "recommended" ones which are claimed to be actively monitored are breaking Mozilla's extension policies by secretly sending telemetry, injecting advertisements, load and execute external resources, etc. None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still presen…

> None of the ones I reported have had their recommended status revoked, several ones have since even been allowed to publish new versions where the same violations are still present Could you publish these publicly anywhere, so that we can do for ourselves the job that Mozilla apparently is failing to do (while claiming to)?

Here are a few that contained violations at the time when I checked them out last February:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/giphy-for-fir...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabliss/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...

The official policies can be found here:

https://extensionworkshop.com/documentation/publish/add-on-p...

Some highlights of commonly "forgotten" rules:

> No Surprises

> Add-ons must be self-contained and not load remote code for execution.

> Add-ons must limit data collection to what is necessary for functionality [...] Data includes all information the add-on collects, regardless of the manner.

> Collecting, or facilitating the collection of ancillary information (e.g. any data not required for the add-on’s functionality as stated in the description) is prohibited.

> Modifying web content or facilitating redirects to include affiliate promotion tags is not permitted

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Firefox is slower than all the other browsers" Wow, absolutely not my experience. I use both Chrome and FF regularly on Mac and PC desktops and laptops with vintages ranging from 2011-2023. There is no perceptible difference to me. Admittedly all of my machines are relatively comfortably specced. Desktop-class CPUs, 16GB+ of RAM, SSDs. Perhaps the difference is more pronounced when the computing environment is more…

Don't you have an experience that Chrome works better on old-end hardware? I have in an active use some 2005-2013 hardware and I describe Firefox as significant worse (freezes and consumes more memory per tab), I do not like Chrome but I use it because I use that hardware sometimes. Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB. Than Firefox unleashes its ability to work just fine even with a lot of extension…

   Another story is if computer has at least Haswell/8GB
My oldest in-use machine is an i7-3770 (3.4hgz, 4 core) with 16GB of RAM and an SSD running Windows 10. That's an Ivy Bridge from ~2011 which is a generation older than your Haswell but, honestly, it's still pretty modern... performs at about 50% of a 2023 i5 in CPU benchmarks.

FF absolutely smooth on there.

Typical usage on that machine is usual recreational web crap. It's my game/relaxing machine. Running 1-2 windows with some mix of Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, Amazon, whatever.

Zooming out, I have been running a mix of FF and Chrome for dev work ever since their respective debuts. We're talking easily 2000+ hours a year of browser usage for 20+ years. I have never seen the FF performance issues others get into a fuss about.

I honestly have no explanation for this. I'm sure that other people are telling the truth but I find it mystifying. I've never had monster high-end CPUs but I've always run AdBlock/uBlock, I generally have as much RAM as feasible, and was an early SSD adopter. Maybe I dodged some FF issues that way. I also never have massive numbers of tabs/windows... usually a max of 10-15 tabs over 1-3 windows. I'm also not running "big" browser-native apps like Figma or whatever in FF.

It's not that I'm insensitive to performance. I run 144hz monitors for gaming and that's a big difference to my eyes. There are also some UI things that are noticeably faster in Chrome like dragging a tab to a new window but that's not a big part of my browsing experience.

(FWIW, Safari has always felt significantly faster to me during my infrequent usage. IIRC they do some latency reduction tricks on MacOS. So even though typical web benchmarks show it as slower, it "feels" faster to me)

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#175

You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…

I'm starting to wonder why the EU isn't Mozilla's biggest funder.

Because Mozilla the foundation has shown itself to be a very poor steward of Firefox the application. If there was a way to directly fund Firefox I’m sure many people would do that, but atm it appears you can only send money to be wasted by Mozilla.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#176
post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Surely that is desktop browser stats. Safari must be doing better when accounting for iPads and iPhones.

[deleted]

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember "Firefox OS"?

An open source phone OS would have literally changed society. If it had succeeded. Alas it did not. I don't know why not. But it was not a wrong goal.

AOSP is open source, and open source user facing systems are available (Lineage, Graphene)

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#178
post #170

Mozilla is a company in search of relevance. Right now, if Mozilla doesn't think Firefox is central to its mission and if they're giving up the fight in browser wars (as many in this thread suggest) .. ... I don't see that it has any relevance left. It has income, it has a CEO paid a few $m, aaand ... that's it? I'd like to see Firefox spun out (together with Firefox-related revenue streams), and then let Mozilla (th…

100% agree. Mozilla uses Firefox to raise funds and then spends it on pet projects and executive bonuses instead of putting it into Firefox.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#180
post #15

This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…

Stats vary a lot by source, for example[1] puts FF and Safari neck and neck (which seems optimistic to me, as much as I like FF). 1: https://kinsta.com/browser-market-share/

I think a lot of University computer labs still use Firefox. At least at some point, that was because it was easier to lock down — no directory "an administrator" (i.e. malware) could just dump an extension into to treat it as force-installed.
Post reply on HN