I never understood what geolocation was supposed to be within the context of of a desktop browser. If a website asks for this information, and I approve, what information is transmitted that couldn't be determined serverside via geoip?
Although I am unfamiliar with what is sent with geolocation, I do use a VPN, and allowing geolocation on a website does pull my correct location even when connected somewhere far away.
WebRTC leaks expose your real identity and location even when you use a VPN. You should disable it in your browsers.
Having an independent rendering engine has a lot of value, in both diversity and control aspects. Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh. I mean not that a good chrome can't improve things - it very well may - but the importance of having it is less. > Battling Google and Apple on rendering technology makes no sense to me. And that's exactly why we need a strong independent org to do this. Bec…
> Having another chrome layer around he same engine is kinda meh Yep. Browsers in general are meh at this point. Mozilla is looking for things like Fakespot because all of the big browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
> There really isn't anything they can do with the core of Firefox make a difference. Users don't care.
That comment placed in a thread filled to the brim with "Firefox is slow" and (at least on macOS) "Firefox eats my battery"
That's not even getting into the horrors of their dev-tools impl, or the missing CSS items cited in this same discussion, both of which I grant not _every_ user cares about but there are for sure users who care about all 4 of those things
This feels like a good long term vision for Mozilla. The browser wars are basically over , and Mozilla as an organization would benefit from a longer term vision to improve veracity on the internet. With the ability to generate content at the cost of basically 0, figuring out what's real and not real is going to be an increasingly hard challenge. Browser stats (as of Feb): 79.7% - Chrome 8.6% - Edge 4.8% - Firefox/Mo…
Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
Adblockers increase the incentives for AI generated "organic" content since in the absence of the ability to push explicitly-marked ads, you're gonna get astroturfing and such instead.
You assume an efficient market.
Advertising is not about the Seller of the product and the Publisher of the content. Oh no.
The money in advertisement is the hundreds of companies that prey on each other all the way connecting seller and publisher. Because nobody trust anybody in advertisement. There's traffic validate. Click validation. Sales attribution. Sales attribution validation. MRC Accreditation for the sales attribution validation. etc. etc. etc.
As much as I love Firefox, let's not lie about the state of affairs: "We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet." no you are not, Firefox is nowhere near one of the most popular browsers. It's essentially a non-player in the browser space, and while the people working for Mozilla are still meaningfully contributing to standards bodies, the browser itself is basically irrelevant in the global market. I wish it wasn't, but the good old days of "we beat IE" are long gone, and FF did not step up to Chrome, nor to the Chromification of the rest of the browser landscape. It just threw ideas at the wall in the hopes that something would end up being a revenue stream while Firefox languished. Quantum was the right move, except they should have kept making moves. You don't win by being "pretty decent", you win by doing things people didn't realize they needed their browser to do, and doing all the things they do know they need to do better than the competition. It's been drastically down hill since Chris Beard left.
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…
Not to mention, improving the browser in the space of adblockers installed by default ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin... ftw! ) would remove most incentives for AI generated content in the first place. /inserts shrugging emoji
I wonder how things would be different if Microsoft never gave them that life-line when they needed it.
Microsoft needed an OS competitor to have any viable antitrust defense.
... one which they also made a nice little profit of. $150M in the non-voting stock they bought in 1997 turned into $550M in 2003 when they sold most of it.
I never understood what geolocation was supposed to be within the context of of a desktop browser. If a website asks for this information, and I approve, what information is transmitted that couldn't be determined serverside via geoip?
GeoIP tells you at best what city someone is in, and even then, for smaller towns, will usually report the nearest large city, which could be quite a ways a way. Not to mention it's often even just flat-out wrong. VPNs and other things distort where you are. Sometimes a website might need (or at least think it needs) correct, fine-grained location information. I do suspect that most websites that ask for location inf…
Okay, but I never told Firefox my location, so what’s it doing that geoip can’t?
You'd think that Mozilla has an excess of funding and has covered absolutely all needs in the browser space leading them to branch out like this... but the browser really needs a lot more hands and funding, I honestly can't make sense of this. And Fakespot: they present themselves as a company that focuses on detecting AI-generated content from human-generated content. It sounds like they've set out to play Whac-A-Mo…
I'm happy for them to branch out, but it is discouraging that once every 3-4 months I run into a bug or feature I need, google it, and am taken to a bug report in their tracker from 5-10 years ago that hasn't been touched.
I've had a cross-platform issue for ELEVEN YEARS with Firefox randomly not copying text into the clipboard, even when I 'cut' it-- i.e. the text disappears on cut but paste pastes whatever was in the clipboard before. I cannot be the only person with this problem. And yet the bug persists, and invariably someone pops in and tells me it's down to the extensions I have installed, despite not having any of the same extensions now that I did in 2012.
As a user, Firefox feels like hobby project, but at least it's not a Google product.