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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#201

Post by klyrs »

fsflover wrote: post #35
traveler01 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I even want to install Firefox on my families computer? The thing is, I want them to have a long term, good working solution that doesn't become a pain in my ass. Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. Mozilla is badly missmanaged, they are killing Mozilla and specially Firefox. Things need to change, badly.

> Firefox isn't very stable for non-tech people, that's the sad truth. What are you talking about? It's been working flawlessly for many years, without any maintenance for me and my non-technical relatives.

I use firefox exclusively. Every few weeks, it installs an update and refuses to open a new tab until a restart. It frequently fails to restart. It occasionally nukes my session so I can't restore my tabs. It seems to occasionally forget/unset my preference to not auto-update. If it just had a status indicator to show that an update is available, I'd happily update at the end of a workday. Instead, it's interrupted a talk I was giving at work because it silently updated and spontaneously wouldn't let me open a new tab. It's not even stable for tech people.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#202

Post by pvinis »

cout wrote: post #158
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox for the obvious reasons, but I desperately want it to be as polished as Chrome, which it is a far cry from, especially on Android.

What makes Firefox seem less polished to you than chrome? When I use chrome, the feeling I get is one of standing in an unfurnished office space with white walls and few windows. To me, that is the opposite of polished. Firefox in comparison feels like being in a grand old house that was built before plumbing and electricity. You can tell that it used to be beautiful and polished, but the luster has faded over time.

best comment I've read today! I wish I could double-vote you.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#203

Post by fault1 »

samwillis wrote: post #88
zesterer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want it to (not or less) stay the same and not move forward I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank. > Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to le…

I believe they laid off the Servo development team? Also they moved way to slowly with Servo, starting it as a research project was correct. But they should have gone all in on it years ago. I know they have taken parts of it and folded them into Firefox, but it should have been the the other way round. Take the bits of Firefox they could and combine them into something new with Servo.

The problem is that Servo required a lot of things, including Rust, to be mature.

That being said, Servo resulted in the creation of all sorts of technologies.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#204

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

ahartmetz wrote: post #139
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #110

Maybe I am a minority, but I and some others I know of have turned their backs on Firefox because Mozilla got woke and spoke out in favor of censorship and promoting fake news. Since they are no longer proponents of freedom on the internet, any reason to still give them the time of the day has been gone away. In fact I now celebrate their shrinking market share.

Partisan politics is one hell of a drug

I don't know why so many companies feel compelled to needlessly take political stances. I think they can only lose from that.

Although I have heard Nike earned billions with the Kaepernick campaigns, so maybe sometimes it does pay off. But for Mozilla? Do they get government funding?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#205

Post by fault1 »

eloisant wrote: post #163
pdenton wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mozilla need to [...] build a new browser See The Book of Mozilla, chapter 11. >and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own XULRunner was essentially this.

XULRunner was mostly like Electron before Electron. And it could have take succeeded before Electron arrived if Mozilla didn't decide to let the project die.

The problem is that XUL just didn't work very well. It was one of the reasons Apple decided to go with forking KHTML for the basis of webkit, and Google decided to with forking webkit for the basis of Chromium.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#206

Post by _dark_matter_ »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #197
bool3max wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…

We live in a time when wrong think can get you cancelled and Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture. The telemetry might be entirely technical in nature but both ability and the motive are there for it to be something much worse. At a minimum Firefox needs 100% transparency into who had access to the data, how it is secured, its exact uses, and ti…

I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data.

Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.

I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#207

Post by sneak »

metalliqaz wrote: post #184
sneak wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FLoC has nothing to do with rendering, though. Mozilla existing (and shipping spyware, just like Chrome) doesn't really do anything to stop any of that.

it's not "just like Chrome". It's not great, but it's not in the same ballpark as what Google does.

Silently uploading your browsing activity off the device without your consent is absolutely in the same ballpark as what Google does.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#208

Post by shultays »

the_duke wrote: post #127
NoboruWataya wrote: post #103

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…

> greater configurability leads to greater code complexity and therefore greater maintenance costs Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone. `about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set…

about:config is removed from (not beta) android version of firefox. Who knows if they will decide to remove it on desktop as well because "only x% of our users were using about:config!"

Also if a setting is hidden behind about:config, it probably means dev will care less and less about it and eventually remove if it is becoming a hindrance

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#209

Post by zepto »

K0nserv wrote: post #191
samwillis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms. I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly)…

I don't disagree that is their publicly stated reason for the limitation. Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs on iOS and competition for mobile Safari is a common theory. Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.

PWA’s aren’t ‘innovation’. Apps can do far more than PWAs.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#210

Post by ohgodplsno »

K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance…

This list of standards also shows how Google attempts to make it even more impossible for anyone but them to maintain a browser. Shape detection API ? Seriously ? Picture-in-picture as a standard when it should be up to the OS/browser ? having the perform resizing and compression ?
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