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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

#241

Post by input_sh »

cthor wrote: post #141
oefrha wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or you're a not-for-profit foundation or the Internet Archive, where you do good things but are destined to be "poor". Not necessarily. Wikipedia is actually pretty damn rich with a large war chest.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

Wikipedia is the single greatest website on the Internet. That's what it takes for donations to keep you afloat . $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day . That aside, it's not entirely clear that Wikipedia can live off donations forever.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

> $100MM revenue? Google makes that in a day.

Almost as if one of them wants to squeeze out every penny they can, while the other one is... I don't know, a non-profit that wants to make something good for the world?

What amount of money do you expect a non-profit to make in a year in order for you to consider it as a successful non-profit?

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

#242

Post by the8472 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #122
phatfish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they get shouted down whenever they try to monetise independently, can't have it both ways. Either more users start donating $5-10 a month (seems worth it to me given the time I spend with their product) or they take the Google money and deal with the conflict of interest best they can. A Shuttelworth style billionaire benefactor would work as well, but I doubt one will come from the tech community as Firefox is…

Someone else said it already some time ago, but if Mozilla had just put the money they get from Google into a fund, they'd be able to develop browsers till the end of time. But they try to "innovate" and "re-invent the web" with WASM and also other completely unrelated ventures such as Rust, as nice as it may be (Rust not WASM that is). Another aspect of the Mozilla Foundation is that they're basically acting as a fi…

> Eg. if you're indiscriminately block all ads whether targetted or not

If the ad industry got together to design the most benign ad technology they can come up with (isolate from host site, no cookies, no js, no video, enforced by iframe security directives) then perhaps adblocking extensions could add an exception for this kind of ad, based on technological criteria, not a manually managed whitelist.

But such a thing does not exist and ads are so intransparent and deeply integrated into pages that one cannot tell, thus blunt hammers need to be applied until no ad is left standing.

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

#243

Post by Zealotux »

madenine wrote: post #233

Is there even a fight left? Chrome was the newer, faster, better working option when the average user was acclimating to the web as a constant part of their lives. To a degree, Chrome became a status symbol - knowing to ditch IE and download chrome was a mark that you were minimally web and computer savvy. For the average person to switch away from Chrome, FF would need to have an overwhelming advantage - and I'm not…

For a long time, it was installing Firefox over IE that was regarded as the proof of being "computer savvy". I'll even admit that back in the days, I took great pride in introducing it to my whole family when most of them didn't even know there could be an alternative to IE. And back then, it was Firefox that was the fastest, safest, coolest kid in town.

Up until recently, I was sharing your pessimism over the crushing success of Chrome and how Firefox would never get back in the heart of people. This is why it amazed me when people – non-techies – around me not only did notice but were more than eager to know why I had stopped using Chrome. Small talk was enough, in many cases, to convert them back into Firefox, which isn't is what I wanted to as I never specifically advocate for personal software solutions.

It appears regular people are more aware of these issues than we, in the tech field, might think. Maybe it's because I live in Europe and we're being constantly bombarded with cookie compliance notices – which are obvious dark patterns 90% of the time – that acts as a systematic reminder that almost no website we ever visit "respect your privacy". I'll admit it's nothing more than empirical, biased observation, but maybe something's happening here, I believe we should at least try.

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

#244

Post by lcall »

mormegil wrote: post #217
lcall wrote: post #192

I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea); 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can q…

> 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those sites where I need them (by exception list or temporary exception, and easy to manage it without a mouse once the tab is open; separately, I do change the search engine also, and create search keywords), and I wouldn't want to switch everything on/off manually.…

Thanks. I have been avoiding extensions & plugins in browsers because of how they increase the attack surface (including some that get new maintainers) with perhaps less code review. That may or may not have a significant risk level in a given case, hard for me to say. But do you know if there is a way to make exeption lists for this things in FF w/o any extensions? (built-in in chrome, so that one aspect is convenient)

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

#245

Post by alwillis »

Not only does Firefox have to worry about Chrome and Safari, now there’s Brave on Mac/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android.

Brave is co-founded by Brendan Eich, who co-founded Mozilla. Brave is doing all the things Firefox should have done: create a new ecosystem for a secure and private web, while Mozilla is still taking millions from Google in exchange for making Google the default search engine.

Although the invasive ads are blocked by default, users can opt-in to privacy preserving ads and get paid in Basic Attention Token, which can be used to support the over 300,000 and growing registered content creators.

On the desktop, Brave has Tor, IPFS and WebTorrent built-in—no additional plugins needed.

Yes, it’s based on Chromium, which feeds into the monoculture narrative. But there’s the irony of the guy who started Firefox using Chrome’s engine to attempt to kill Google’s surveillance capitalism system.

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

#246

Post by Roboprog »

throwGuardian wrote: post #226
alwillis wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are literally zero browser engines allowed on iOS, other than Safari/webkit, with a purposefully depleted feature set, to force developers and users to the app store. Apple is clearly moving towards a more secure set of operating systems and that starts by reducing the attack surface. On macOS, Apple is deprecating kernel extensions; the boot partition on macOS Catalina is read-only so that it can’t be modifie…

This response literally proves fanboys and employees will offer circuitous logic to substantiate Apple. iOS Safari W3C non-compliance is well known, a little googling will lay out the (intentionally) missing features. You go to lengths to defend Apple, but do not have the guts to let the consumer pick a Google/Mozilla alternative engine. What is Apple so scared of, if not a level playing field. This is the same compa…

I was a bit surprised to learn a year or two ago that the browser makers have pretty much divorced W3C:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG

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

#247

Post by thefuzz »

lcall wrote: post #244
mormegil wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can quickly turn on/off javascript, images, and/or cookies for those sites where I need them (by exception list or temporary exception, and easy to manage it without a mouse once the tab is open; separately, I do change the search engine also, and create search keywords), and I wouldn't want to switch everything on/off manually.…

Thanks. I have been avoiding extensions & plugins in browsers because of how they increase the attack surface (including some that get new maintainers) with perhaps less code review. That may or may not have a significant risk level in a given case, hard for me to say. But do you know if there is a way to make exeption lists for this things in FF w/o any extensions? (built-in in chrome, so that one aspect is convenie…

It's built in on chrome? Could you please share how?

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

#248

Post by alwillis »

detaro wrote: post #235
alwillis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>iOS Safari W3C non-compliance is well known, a little googling will lay out the (intentionally) missing features. The illogic here is a little scary: Firefox and Safari on iOS basically have the same level of web standards compliance according to html5test.com, yet one is intentionally not implementing features? No fanboyism; just the facts.

It's not that surprisingly that the one making the decisions about the browser engine is blamed, not the one forced to use the browser engine instead of their own, is it?

To be clear, the html5test.com numbers for Firefox are for Firefox on Android.

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

#249

Post by santicalcagno »

lcall wrote: post #192

I hope Firefox succeeds, as I like the idea of not concentrating yet more power in few hands, but, on OpenBSD, I use Iridium (Chromium derivative), so I see these benefits, and am wondering what Firefox would add for me, privacy- and security-wise: 1) Iridium doesn't send info to Google like Chrome does (or that is the idea); 2) It is easier (last I checked) than with Firefox to leave some config tabs open so I can q…

> 3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),

Just FTR, Firefox is adding pledge/unveil support for OpenBSD in version 72, see https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=157325338020502&w=2

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

#250

Post by GeekyBear »

catalogia wrote: post #216
ripa wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox for Mac has been more or less unusable up until the most recent release where they actually started using the Core Animation libraries in macOS. Now it won’t drain all the battery in no time, and it’s actually quite snappy. I’ve tried to run Firefox so many times in the past, but eventually always go back to Safari because it’s more native, fast and unobtrusive.

> Firefox for Mac has been more or less unusable up until the most recent release This is a gross exaggeration. I've been using firefox on MacOS for 3 years and it's worked fine the entire time.

The issue has been the power draw and heat on newer MacBooks with a Retina display.

Older Firefox versions are redrawing the entire window even if only a tiny portion of the window was changing.

With advent of high resolution windows, the amount of work needed to redraw the whole window for every frame became significant.

The last version of Firefox moved to breaking the window into large tiles and only redrawing the tiles that have changed.

This is still less optimized than Safari (which uses Core Animation to only redraw the items on the page that are changing) but it is still a large improvement over prior versions of Firefox if you have a high resolution display.

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