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Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#211

Post by chimeracoder »

VikingCoder wrote: post #138
DCKing wrote: post #135

"Google is bent on establishing platform domination unlike anything we've ever seen, even from late-1990s Microsoft." [citation needed]. I think this is an assumption, and it needs to have some basis. Can somebody explain to me why it would be in Google's interest to obtain platform dominance? I find their own reasoning for making Android and Chrome in the first place quite compelling. They're making platforms from w…

Also, if it's lock-in, they're handing out the keys. Android and Chrome are open source, and you can easily download all of your data out of most of their services.

> Android and Chrome are open source

Chrome is not open source. Chromium is.

This is not a pedantic point - a lot of things that work in Chrome are not available in Chromium, and that gap has been widening.

AOSP is open source, but less and less of what people think of as Android is part of AOSP - a lot of core functionality has been moved into proprietary Play apps and Google services.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#212

Post by DCKing »

lucb1e wrote: post #152
jfuhrman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I can't edit my post, perhaps due to the downvotes(why downvote without replying?), so here's a couple more. Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-... Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta…

Your profile is green (meaning new), maybe that's why you can't edit. I never noticed downvotes having anything to do with it. I found your post interesting and it contributes to the conversation, not sure why anyone would downvote (care to explain, downvoters?).

I did not downvote. But I disagree his post contributes to the conversation.

Nobody believes the strawman argument that Google is a "benevolent company". Of course they are being assholes to make their services more used. Everyone is aware of that. Moreover, "Google is evil" => "Google wants to create a lock-in for Chrome or Android" is a total non sequitur.

None of what is mentioned means or even implies that Google wants to create a vendor lock-in for Chrome and Android. Nothing in that list has to do with creating a platform lock-in at all. In fact, it shows that Google are being assholes mostly about their services. It is their services that bring in the money, and I think Google really does not care if you use Firefox, Chrome, iOS, Android or whatever. As long as you use their services.

Posting a list like that does not contribute at all to the discussion about Google's alleged vendor lock-in. It only makes this a Google hate thread, and muffles proper discussion.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#213

Post by personZ »

findjashua wrote: post #204
jfuhrman wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I can't edit my post, perhaps due to the downvotes(why downvote without replying?), so here's a couple more. Tying Android App store to having Google search engine as default on Android, ensuring that alternative search engines cannot be shipped as default. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/12/documents-shed-light-... Stopping Acer from shipping Aliyun OS by threatening to pull the Play Store and Android beta…

You stated facts, with sources. I can't see why someone would downvote, and that too without stating the reason. I upvoted to counter at least one downvoter.

They also created a new account to post a mixed list of random complaints. Sorry it's actually a repost given that this identical list was posted by angularfan -- also a fresh new account created purely to post this list -- 20 days ago. Is that really the behavior HN wants?

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#214

Post by r0muald »

nawitus wrote: post #57
specialp wrote: post #54

This is actually very true. Having Chrome/V8 out there has definitely improved the state of browsers as far as performance; especially in regards to JavaScript. But now we face a situation where Google is getting such a market share with Chrome and their other web properties where lock in is a very real possibility, and the only way to keep an open, standardized web is to make sure there are still other browsers with…

I think the developer tools in the latest Firefox are absolutely fantastic. I don't think Chrome offers anything substantially better currently for frontend development.

And the integrated app-manager for FirefoxOS apps and devices is just icing on the cake. I say Mozilla is doing a good job here, improving integration on multiple fronts and giving developers something that works right away. I am impressed at how well it works.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#215

Post by findjashua »

hokkos wrote: post #133

For me Firefox is just superior to Chrome with the Tree Tab Style extension and the absence of multi-process. The multi process in Chrome is implemented in a very bad way that multiply without a reason the RAM usage, it is better implemented in Safari but still heavy, I eventually have crash in Firefox once a month, but the session manager addon can remedy. As for addons they use way less memory in Firefox, you can s…

could you please explain in layman terms what exactly is bad about the way multi-process is implemented?

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#216

Post by findjashua »

personZ wrote: post #213
findjashua wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You stated facts, with sources. I can't see why someone would downvote, and that too without stating the reason. I upvoted to counter at least one downvoter.

They also created a new account to post a mixed list of random complaints. Sorry it's actually a repost given that this identical list was posted by angularfan -- also a fresh new account created purely to post this list -- 20 days ago. Is that really the behavior HN wants?

didn't know that this was a repost of a previous post, in this case OP should've just linked to that. I stand corrected.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#217

Post by billconan »

I don't like google taking control of everything. I tried to force myself to use DuckDuckGo for searching. But soon, I had to switch back to google, because google is so integrated. Not only I need to search, I also need gmail, map, news. All these are not provided by DuckDuckGo. Similar things happen with firefox.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#218

Post by lucb1e »

DCKing wrote: post #212
lucb1e wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your profile is green (meaning new), maybe that's why you can't edit. I never noticed downvotes having anything to do with it. I found your post interesting and it contributes to the conversation, not sure why anyone would downvote (care to explain, downvoters?).

I did not downvote. But I disagree his post contributes to the conversation. Nobody believes the strawman argument that Google is a "benevolent company". Of course they are being assholes to make their services more used. Everyone is aware of that. Moreover, "Google is evil" => "Google wants to create a lock-in for Chrome or Android" is a total non sequitur. None of what is mentioned means or even implies that Google…

> Google really does not care if you use Firefox, Chrome, iOS, Android or whatever

I think they do. Maybe it's not a huge deal, but it's an advantage to control more aspects of what users use (ISP, OS, browser, and finally the service itself).

With Google Chrome they can make anything the way they want and support any feature they like, whereas with Firefox they'd have to wait for the guys at Mozilla to agree with something. Let's just name something silly: a pdf viewer that does OCR so that website authors can put relevant ads there if they want. I can see how Mozilla developers would sleep a night on that feature while for Google it would be a no-brainer that makes them money.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#219

Post by sauere »

Remember the early 2000 days? When Internet Explorer had a 95%+ market share? Well look at where we are now... we have a somewhat diverse market with IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Not counting some other new and upcoming browsers such as Midori. The browser market has a healthy competition and can fix itself if one player is abusing their power. If you belive that Chrome is a threat to your privacy, feel free to use Firefox or something else.

Re: Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice

#220

Post by keeperofdakeys »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #112
srean wrote: post #43

Almost every other comment that have been posted so far are complaining that FF tabs are not independent processes. Let me express my contrarian opinion. For my use case FF is just excellent and has served me well, I have absolutely no complains now. There was a time when FF leaked, and held a lot of memory, that time has since passed, at least seams so. I regularly keep several hundreds of tabs open for months on en…

In fact, the infamous memory leak Firefox was 'famous' for was fixed in version 2.5 which tells me that anyone who still complains of memory leaks in Firefox is one who you do not want to listen to for advice. EDIT: I may have the version number wrong, it's been a long time, and, yes, the "leak" was a combination of things and not just one thing but my point is the same.

There have always been memory leaks in Firefox, and before 4.0, they were always worse on a new release, and improved with bug fixing releases. I don't know whether it's aurora, or the increased pace of the development cycle, but I haven't noticed any serious memory leaks like there were back in the day.

Of course, any program the size of Firefox is bound to have memory leaks. So we can't totally eliminate them while we still use C++.

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