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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

#251

Post by hellofunk »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #99
hellofunk wrote: post #97

It would seem that the Brave browser and Firefox share similar goals on privacy. It’s hard to navigate the differences in their perspectives on this, why would one choose one of these browsers over the other if concerned about online tracking?

Brave still contributes to a chrome monoculture, and it still shows ads, so it has a different vision of privacy.

From the standpoint of privacy itself, I’m not sure how it’s different. The browser does not transmit any browsing behavior or history to any servers anywhere, which seems consistent with anyone’s vision of privacy.

That they figured out a way to still offer advertising despite this restriction, that’s just an orthogonal feature that doesn’t affect the stance of privacy.

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

#252

Post by alwillis »

greggman2 wrote: post #237
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…

browser extesions are a privacy feature. my browsing is much more private on Firefox with ublock origin then on no extension safari. As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram. As for security, chrome on desktop has a superior…

> As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram.

Firefox is slower, requires more RAM and uses more power on macOS now; it’s highly unlikely that essentially the same engine running on iOS would run significantly differently.

Of the mainstream browsers on macOS, Firefox has always been the slowest.

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

#253

Post by im3w1l »

yborg wrote: post #189
k1m wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. E…

If he took those $10m someone would fork it. It's just that no one bothers now that gorhill is running it so well.

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

#254

Post by soulofmischief »

lcall wrote: post #212
soulofmischief wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what are the remaining biggest reasons I might prefer Firefox? Neither Firefox nor Chromium let you reassign hotkeys without recompiling, and while Firefox's defaults could use some tweaking, Chromium's default keybindings are insane and counter-productive. Of course, Mozilla's organization is in shambles atm so Firefox has been getting worse in many regards, even if its speed has caught up with Chrome. > It is eas…

> Not sure when you last checked, but about:config is its own tab. It was last I checked also, but felt awkward to use, and then you have to know what settings to look for, as opposed to having them in the UI (all can be easily overcome, but it is a little more work i think, maybe not enough to matter for some use cases or if I just forced myself to get used to it). Is it possible to define ongoing exception lists th…

about:preferences is a tab now, too. Cookie options could be maybe a wee bit more complex, however an addon will make up the difference.

> I don't know fully, but for any of those I definitely have to think more, as the user, and there is (probably?) more room for error due to complexity.

On a properly configured distribution, these things should all just work out of the box.

Honestly, barring the update frequency issues pointed out by another user, the OpenBSD Chromium experience is probably on par with the FF experience on major Linux distros.

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

#255

Post by aembleton »

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…

Tree Style Tab [1]. That is the main reason I am on Firefox. My screen is wider than it is tall, so I can make use of this by displaying the tabs on the side. It is 'tree style' which means that it is nested. This allows me to have child tabs of say, hn for reading all of the different articles. This can be easily collapsed, expanded or removed altogether.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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

#256

Post by alwillis »

greggman2 wrote: post #237
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…

browser extesions are a privacy feature. my browsing is much more private on Firefox with ublock origin then on no extension safari. As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram. As for security, chrome on desktop has a superior…

Regarding performance, here’s a detailed article on benchmarks for the various Javascript engines; Firefox is the slowest: https://webkit.org/blog/8685/introducing-the-jetstream-2-ben...

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

#257

Post by barryvan »

auslander wrote: post #238

> Macs remain a fairly open system, although the increasing focus on the Mac app store, which Firefox isn’t on, bodes ill for the browser’s future. Why not put FF in App Store? I'd even pay for clean, no "integrations", version.

I suspect that it's because Firefox makes extensive use of "private" Apple APIs to be able to efficiently render on the platform, and Apple doesn't allow such uses for apps distributed through the app store. Similar issues apply to electron apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21437255

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

#258

Post by freediver »

mthoms wrote: post #231
freediver wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth? I can understand 'unpopular', but 'misleading' without probably even looking at it? 1) This can be easilly reproduced. https://twitter.com/jonathansampson/status/11658588961766604... 2) Over 95% of Mozilla revenue comes from Google for using Google as default search engine https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2017/mozilla-fdn-201... 3) https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#health-report - see first…

Your link implies that Chrome is more respecting of privacy than Firefox. Can you show me a single reputable tech journalist or online privacy expert that agrees with this premise? No, you can't. Your bulleted points are widely known. Could Firefox be even more private? Of course. Would it be better if it didn't rely on Google for the vast majority of it's revenue? Obviously! Heck, even Mozilla itself freely admits t…

I understand how it may imply that, but my intention was to simply point to facts as often times we believe what we are led to believe vs seeing the facts with our own eyes.

To me a business model entirely dependent upon one entity whose policies they are supposed to fight against exposes a fundamental flaw - and that is a fact. Mozilla can make a number of choices to break the spell and they decide not to. For something as important as this, do or do not, there is no try.

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

#259

Post by alwillis »

greggman2 wrote: post #237
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…

browser extesions are a privacy feature. my browsing is much more private on Firefox with ublock origin then on no extension safari. As for Safari using less power and ram on mobile there is no evidence that Firefox would uae more of either since Apple doesn't allow it to run. As far as we know if other browsers were allowed to run some might compete on power and ram. As for security, chrome on desktop has a superior…

>browser extesions are a privacy feature. my browsing is much more private on Firefox with ublock origin then on no extension safari. All things being equal, you shouldn't have to rely on extensions in 2019 to protect your privacy.

The goal is to preserve privacy by default--no extensions required. The vast number of users don't install them or wouldn't know which ones to install.

Brave is secure out of the box and doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: https://brave.com/features/

Safari also doesn't require extensions to protect your privacy: WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy—https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention-policy/

Apple first shipped Intelligent Tracking Prevention in June 2017, long before Firefox or any other browser had anything similar: https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

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

#260

Post by lcall »

thefuzz wrote: post #247
lcall wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I open a new tab, and with Alt-E then S bring up the Settings, scroll to the end and click Advanced. Then click Content Settings, and there are areas in there for images, javascript, and cookies where one can set permanent exceptions as well as on/off settings. I don't see it for iframes. Am I misunderstanding anything?
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