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Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

theguardian.com

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Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#181

Post by erikpukinskis »

hoptank wrote: post #3
ppfrc wrote: post #2

Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web, severely cramped by their complete economic dependency on Google and their inability to allocate their funds intelligently

What do you suggest Mozilla do instead? Mozilla don't just fund the development of their own products they also fund research [1] and other projects [2]. [1] https://research.mozilla.org/research-grants/ [2] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/grants/ In a perfect world Mozilla would be funded by donations. I donate to Mozilla but it's a pittance compared to what they get from Google.

> What do you suggest Mozilla do instead?

Mozilla should sell two products:

1) Storage a la iCloud

2) Payment processing a la Paypal

And for marketing purposes they should get into discovery of free/open web services, a la old school Yahoo.

As a web site builder, I don't want to have to manage credit cards. As a user, I don't want to have to trust random web sites with my credit card info. I also don't want to be redirected to Paypal, I just want a secure wallet that can be used on web sites with a drop in or similar.

As a web user, I want to be able to store my photos, downloads, music, documents, etc conveniently in a little cloud-synced folder. I want to be able to quickly give fine-grained access to different web apps to different parts of that space. Photo app wants to access my photos? Great. Github wants to access my repos? Fine. Photo app wants to access my repos? No.

And the discovery thing... There's a ton of free software out there. Mozilla basically has shut the door behind it. "Thanks for the install. Good luck finding other Free tools to use with it." They should be building a directory of other free software that can be used with Firefox. I should be able to use my Mozilla account to post reviews, to discuss new apps that are voted up, etc. That will allow enthusiasts to start engaging socially with the brand in a way that Mozilla (not Twitter or Apple or Facebook) can control the identities.

From there maybe there is some social identity service, but if it's just a way to engage the community—great. Like Hacker News is to YCombinator, Mozilla should provide a place for us to discuss and share web services.

If they want to get into search, that's great. Write a new shitty open source search engine that any web site can federate with. Use Google for now, but use that money to dig us out of the hole Google put us in.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#182

Post by [deleted] »

jrs95 wrote: post #131
johnsea wrote: post #7

The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

It would be a lot more difficult than it sounds for Apple to allow 3rd party browsers and allow them to be good . Even on macOS now, Chrome depends on internal OS APIs which prevent it (or Electron apps) from being in the Mac App Store -- and for good reason, those things could break at any time. So in order to allow 3rd party browser engines that can compete with Safari in terms of performance etc they would need to…

[deleted]

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#183

Post by kilburn »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #176
ragequitta wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to think of a UI difference in chrome or safari that is meaningful, can't come up with one. Can you elaborate?

i have way too many tabs open at all times, and chrome makes it way way easier to see what I have open and get to the tab I want quickly.(it just shows more tabs than Firefox, this is my main complaint) The top bar uses less vertical real estate and is just much cleaner overall. I can see more if not all of the url. Chromes next tab left, next tab right, and close tab, automatically map to the keyboard shortcut I set…

The vertical space you can easily fix by opening the hamburguer menu > customize > density (bottom left) > compact. It then uses less space than chrome. You can also add/remove items from the top bar there, making your address bar larger if you want to.

The default hotkeys for next/prev tab are cmd+option+left/right arrow. I don't know how to change those...

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#184

Post by throwGuardian »

alwillis wrote: post #178
ken wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a convenient excuse on iOS, but Firefox is doing poorly on macOS, too, where no such restriction exists. According to the first statistics I found, Firefox is only about half as popular on the Mac as it in on Windows -- and it's still under 10% there, too. Privacy-compromising systems aren't winning today because people seek out systems that compromise their privacy. They're winning because these companies foc…

Actually, Apple is giving privacy the product treatment: https://www.apple.com/privacy/

Why allow competition when they can simply claim to productize.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#185

Post by xenocyon »

carapace wrote: post #143
neiman wrote: post #104

I see a problem, though I have no alternative to offer, with the current model of organizations. It seems you are either for-profit, and then you have no ethics and do everything you can to centralize the world around you with no concern for users or their benefits. Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Are there are any "shades" between…

Well, crack open your history books and recall that the entire point of corporations is the relatively-risk-free exploitation of other people's resources (or even they themselves, as slaves.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company - - - - By contrast, most religions are not poor and do a lot of good works. - - - - Some people, like Bill Gates, make a lo…

You're getting downvoted, but it's true: the most conventional path for corporations to make money at large scales is to privatize profit while socializing externalities. This has been true for at least a half millenium and continues to be true today.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#186

Post by alwillis »

johnsea wrote: post #7

The article once more reiterates the fact that Apple doesn't allow other browser engines. You cannot even fight, there is no future ;-) on iOS.

As Apple has reiterated, browser engines require low-level access and for security reasons, other rendering engines aren’t allowed.

You can see from Apple’s updates that keeping up with the vulnerabilities for WebKit and iOS, etc. is already keeping them plenty busy:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT210725 https://support.apple.com/kb/HT210721 https://support.apple.com/kb/HT210624 https://support.apple.com/kb/HT210603

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#187

Post by clairity »

kilburn wrote: post #183
ImprovedSilence wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have way too many tabs open at all times, and chrome makes it way way easier to see what I have open and get to the tab I want quickly.(it just shows more tabs than Firefox, this is my main complaint) The top bar uses less vertical real estate and is just much cleaner overall. I can see more if not all of the url. Chromes next tab left, next tab right, and close tab, automatically map to the keyboard shortcut I set…

The vertical space you can easily fix by opening the hamburguer menu > customize > density (bottom left) > compact. It then uses less space than chrome. You can also add/remove items from the top bar there, making your address bar larger if you want to. The default hotkeys for next/prev tab are cmd+option+left/right arrow. I don't know how to change those...

i use ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab for tabbing. easier 1-handed operation and closer to other "change context" shortcuts like next/prev window (cmd-~, cmd-shift-~) and select desktop/space (ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc).

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#188

Post by j-pb »

detaro wrote: post #179
j-pb wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a specification though, its a "living standard" a.k.a. we document the stuff we build as we go.

A living standard is a form of specification. You can use it to implement a tool consuming HTML the same way the browsers do from scratch, and the browsers use the process to align their independent implementations.

Its not a specification though, because your implementation can never conform to it. You can't say "I have a html 5.x" compliant browser anymore because there is no fixed specification for it. You can only have something that is "currently compatible with the other browsers". Same thing you would have gotten with SQLite.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#189

Post by yborg »

k1m wrote: post #82
nullc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Meta-irony is real... @Ghostery tweet about Guardian "allowing trackers to spy on their readers" while themselves selling their user's data.

That's why I find uBlock Origin so refreshing. The entire ad-blocking universe is so tainted with business interests it's hard to trust any of them. The uBlock Origin developer is genuinely principled from what I've seen.

Who should be getting a MacArthur grant or equivalent. I mean, it's literally gorhill or nothing, it's terrifying. Someone could walk up to him with $10M dollars and say 'Here. Stop making your thing and you can have this money." It would be a fraction of the revenue he's blocking and who could turn it down? Wladimir Palant suddenly became a big fan of whitelisting when he realized how much Google would pay for it. Everyone has a price.

Re: Firefox’s Fight for the Future of the Web

#190

Post by vengefulduck »

labawi wrote: post #89
Longhanks wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. There is for example the Pythonista IDE for iOS, which ships a full Python interpreter. https://omz-software.com/pythonista/

Is there an example of a non development/learning tool?

If I remember correctly there’s an exception for learning and development tools.
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