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Firefox 90

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Re: Firefox 90

#281

Post by moate »

bergheim wrote: post #221
peakaboo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use chrome.

I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things). I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over. Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.

Everything old is new again.

Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in).

Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.

Re: Firefox 90

#282

Post by int_19h »

fleddr wrote: post #213
yborg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FF market share isn't a technical or ideological issue - it's marketing and platform capture. Chrome is the new IE and has the entire Google ecosystem tied in with it to make it a compelling platform. They were also smart to push the Chromebook into schools so a couple of generations of kids grew up with The Web = Google Chrome. Microsoft installs Edge by default on Windows. These two companies alone have hundreds of…

Agree with most of what you said, but want to add some nuance to some statements. The IE comparison in dominance would be accurate, but it's worthwhile to point out that Google aggressively pushes web tech forward, whilst IE largely stagnated it. I think that's a meaningful difference, at least to developers. And it's not just a passing note either. Firefox' once strong position was made possible by the gap left behi…

What people forget is that IE was also very actively pushing the web tech forward (albeit not via standards), before the stagnation that was IE6.

Re: Firefox 90

#283

Post by alessivs »

benrbray wrote: post #273
atatatat wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge

I was really rooting for Edge back before they switched to Chromium. Now it's just worse Chrome. I do use it as my default PDF viewer though as I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs. (there's Master PDF but it's a bit overkill when I just want some multicolored highlighters.)

> I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs ...snip... some multicolored highlighters

xournalpp, okular.

Re: Firefox 90

#284

Post by astrange »

ergot_vacation wrote: post #175
bennysomething wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fas…

It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm. What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit i…

It hasn't gotten any more difficult to host your own website - the reason nobody does it is they don't want to. It's hard to keep up with spambots and things like that, but it's not like Facebook is running the spambots.

Re: Firefox 90

#285

Post by floatingatoll »

dannyw wrote: post #270
floatingatoll wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel that this dissonance should change how we readers interpret this argument in some way, or is this meant solely as a typo-fix kind of comment? It’s unusual to see a new HN user offering proofreading comments, so I’m hesitant to accept that interpretation without checking first.

Not sure what the meaning behind your comment, but I found /u/downWidOutaFite's reply to be thought provoking. Specifically, the original poster's paragraphs seem to contradict each other: the first suggests 'not fighting the good fight' because you have to appeal to consumerism, and the second blames Mozilla for not fighting the good fight and appealing to consumerism. I also don't know why the account age has anyth…

I see. Thank you for taking the time to speak in more depth about it.

Re: Firefox 90

#286

Post by simondotau »

int_19h wrote: post #275
twelvechairs wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So whats the better, more ethical alternative? Certainly not Chrome

Vivaldi.

That's still Chromium. I care more about avoiding a browser monoculture than I care about dick-measuring the corporate ethics of the three remaining companies which actually maintain actual browser engines.

People might hate Safari but with Firefox slowly retreating into obscurity, Safari looks to be the final vanguard against a total Chromium monoculture. Yet many on HN absolutely abhor Safari because it doesn't currently support some bleeding edge feature which end users probably don't care about.

Re: Firefox 90

#287

Post by kbenson »

bergheim wrote: post #221
peakaboo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use chrome.

I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things). I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over. Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.

> I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed.

I saw a physical poster or sign the other day which didn't even go that far. It had ("f" logo)/name. I had the same reaction.

Re: Firefox 90

#288

Post by tgv »

metalliqaz wrote: post #7

Honestly I'm still not used to the new tab style that was introduced last time. 90 seems fine, but not much to get excited about from the user perspective.

I also didn't like the change. I prefer a clearer separation between tabs, but I don't notice it anymore. I'm not a great tab user, though: just a handful at a time, but perhaps an extra window or two for different tasks (e.g. general browsing, keeping an eye on our websites, and some standard library/stack overflow/AWS/etc. pages).

Re: Firefox 90

#289

Post by simondotau »

astrange wrote: post #163
laurent92 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that…

There's no reason to dig up every opinion on Earth just so you can maintain neutrality between all of them. Brendan Eich is surprisingly un-cancelled for a guy who thinks his employees shouldn't be able to visit their spouses dying in hospitals[1]. He's literally still around. [1] Which happened a lot during the AIDS pandemic and was essentially the purpose of the gay marriage campaign. It was actually relatively cul…

I think Eich's view on gay marriage was stupid, irrational and selfish. But I support his right to have that view. Why? Because not supporting his right to hold that view isn't going to change it. If I want any hope of changing his mind, history has shown that silencing and cancelling the views you don't like is ultimately unproductive.

Sadly, people like Eich have been forced to become so defensive on this topic that there's no real hope of reaching them intellectually. This is how humans work: when we feel forced to defend something, most of us will defend it far beyond the point that it's rational.

The broader gay marriage movement is, in my view, a canonical demonstration about how effective positivity can be. Truly inspiring. Some more contemporaneous social movements could learn a thing or two from the cultural normalisation of homosexuality. Rather than learning from success, what I see it a whole lot of hateful negativity on Twitter... and little else.

Re: Firefox 90

#290

Post by simondotau »

fleddr wrote: post #160

I noticed in the comments below how somebody mentioning Firefox's limited market share was heavily downvoted. I'm a Firefox user since forever, and will keep using it. I also want Mozilla to win, and strongly empathize with their engineers whom are trying to make the best of it. That said, I think the reality check should not be avoided. There is no good in do-good software without reach. Based on statcounter, Firefo…

> Effectively Apple, an enemy of the open web, is our only savior against a full Chromium monopoly. Apple actively sabotaging and blocking the progress of the web, is our "hope".

Caution: the following is a controversial opinion.

You could see it another way—which is that Google, through Chrome, is trying to define what "progress" is by unilaterally pushing new web features into Chromium as quickly as they can. If "progress" is whatever Google wants it to be, then I commend Apple from doing all of the blocking and sabotage they can. In my opinion, the web doesn't need such a rapid pace of change. It's great already. There's no need to agonise over the rate of progress—especially when progress is being dictated by so few.

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