171–180 of 253 posts
The browser is, at this point, like a public utility. You can't get by without one. How is it okay to bake in privacy compromises?
Don't ask Mozilla that. Ask the others.
Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
If you ever figure out a bulletproof solution to "just taking the money and building a good product/company without any technical debt and organizational cruft", please do share your results – this would be somewhat valuable for humanity!
Seems like this is in support of "Firefox Suggest", which seems to show sponsored links. I really don't like advertising so I really don't like going down that road. Can't they just take Google's yearly $600,000,000 payment and build the best browser "for the user" while also addressing technical debt and organizational issues so it can continue as an open source project if/when the money ever dries up?
I constantly see this take and I'm afraid I don't agree with it. Firefox is continuing to lose market share, and I think it's less anything they're doing and due simply to the fact that Google is a household name while Mozilla is not. When the user is already using a Google phone, email, search, maps, drive, and document editor, it follows to also use their browser. Simply being a solid browser isn't enough to motiva…
I think it's more that everyone used Google for search (because it at least was legitimately the best by a good margin) and then Google used that position to push Chrome. The other stuff may have helped, but I think search was 90% of it.
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Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.
It’s possible to repackage Chromium with a couple people. It’s not possible to build a browser from the ground up with a couple people.
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Antitrust actions in the US and EU may force Google to cut off those payments (to Mozilla and Apple), and if that happens, Firefox needs to survive somehow.
Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow open source browsers still get made without a $600 million “rich uncle.” Mozilla is pretty bloated. This can buy like 1200 good engineers. People make browsers with a couple people sometimes.
It’s possible to repackage Chromium with a couple people. It’s not possible to build a browser from the ground up with a couple people.
EDIT: I've been getting a lot of down votes for this stance, surprisingly. Why not share your position if you don't agree? There must be a bunch of hardcore people on here who are writing directly on the metal in machine code. Short of that, you are in fact using someone else's code in all your projects.
I’d rather they make Firefox subscription based. I’d rather pay $5 a month and have no ads or tracking of any kind. They can even run a separate fork of Firefox or something for this purpose. If Firefox goes down Google will lock internet behind a DRM and we gonna need another rms or Torvalds to deliver us from this hell. Can you imagine a world without Linux, with Windows and Mac pretty much the only mainstream alte…
Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks. I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.
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The base they alienate just wants a web browser. You don’t need to iterate forever on a good tool that does the job. Software can be feature complete. Anyone wishing for a complete overhaul update for something like cp? Absolutely not, people want tools that work the same for years.
But a browser is never "done", for better or worse, nor are user expectations static. Stopping to iterate on a web browser is like stopping to iterate on an operating system: It'll go well for a while (and users even might love you for it for a year or two, since you can focus your effort on fixing bugs and not introduce new ones with new features), and then you'll slowly but steadily lose users to other browser that…