Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

batsov.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 675 posts

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#281

Post by freediver »

dralley wrote: post #216
fault1 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe Mozilla will do much considering 90% of their revenue comes from Google. for better or worse, Apple has been the single biggest driver towards privacy enhancement.

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals? There's new headlines about this every few months. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi ... https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest ... There's also this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll ... https://twitter.com/__jakub_g…

Because of such an apparent conflict of interest. At the end of the day we do not know how many good ideas (for the users, for the web and for Firefox market share) were silenced because not to upset the feeding arm. And where would Firefox be today if it relied on its own users for the revenue instead?

Having your main competitor as your main customer is not a good position to be in for any company.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#282

Post by NoGravitas »

_abox wrote: post #26
yutijke wrote: post #10

I feel the article misses how Firefox's inability to get a foothold on the mobile platform contributed to its decline. There are more people today using web browsers via mobile then desktop. In many poorer countries the first and only access to the open internet for the people is through chrome on Android. I don't blame Mozilla for this though since they did not have a monopoly on a platform to capitalize on unlike t…

I use Firefox on Android, it works pretty good. Having dark reader and uBlock Origin on mobile is a big plus. But I do hate the lack of configuration options, pull-to-refresh, and their need to 'approve' extensions and in particular not allowing any kind of sideloading of extensions. For this reason I can't use some of the extensions I like (because they won't allow them in the firefox store either). This is in parti…

Recent Nightly releases have pull-to-refresh, and you can jump through hoops to install all extensions on the mozilla site (not sure about side-loading).

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#283

Post by dralley »

sime2009 wrote: post #76
resonious wrote: post #53

I used to hold the same opinion: Google controls the world because everything is Blink/Chromium based! Must use Firefox to protest! Then I looked closer look at the history of Chromium and Blink. The reality is that a lot of the other "Chromium-based" browsers actually only use the Blink renderer. They don't use many (if any) other Chromium components other than probably V8. In ancient times, Blink itself was a fork…

True. People forgot that Microsoft had been developing its own browser for years before they moved to Chromium. That team and expertise didn't just disappear. They've been doing significant work in that code base. See https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1329200077517295618 from a year ago. Having that technical power does give them quite a lot of control over the code base which can help balance the political power he…

But given the recent developments with Edge, I'm not sure if Microsoft's political power is of much practical benefit to the community.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#284

Post by squiggleblaz »

cout wrote: post #125
NoboruWataya wrote: post #103

It's a depressing situation, particularly knowing that Firefox is pretty much kept alive at Google's whim. It makes one seriously wonder whether it is feasible at all to maintain an independent open-source web browser in 2021. People tend to blame Mozilla's management and I'm sure there have been management failures but I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser. It s…

I thought firefox was supposed to be a simplified interface (compared to the older mozilla suite).

That's how I remember it too, but I think the expectations of simplicity has changed over the years - in those days, it was closer to great defaults and no gratuitous features, whereas now it's a bit more like less flexibility (although really, Firefox has masses of options that aren't included in the UI but are accessible from about:config, so I don't really think Firefox falls victim to this criticism).

Part of the old tradeoff was that extension writers could do almost anything to make the web browser do almost anything. Nowadays, extensions are much less flexible. I think for good reason: being able to click a few buttons and get pwned isn't really a desirable feature. But the tradeoff has moved. I don't think that's really an argument against Firefox, but consider that powerusers are often very conservative, I'm not surprised that it caused some disagreement.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#285

Post by hawski »

floatboth wrote: post #243
thriftwy wrote: post #149

I remember using Konqueror in the middle of 00s. It was much better UI-wise, but a lot of web sites were broken in it so I had to default to Firefox often. Guess what, today using Firefox is the same, even if it's better than Chromium derivatives for you, too often will you need to switch to Chromium when faced with Google Hangouts / Google Meet / Zoom / the fad of the day, or some random websites. And this time it d…

Google Meet works perfectly in Firefox, what are you talking about?

Can you blur your background now on a meeting?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#286

Post by zepto »

LocalH wrote: post #256
zepto wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PWA’s aren’t ‘innovation’. Apps can do far more than PWAs.

I believe the stifling of innovation the parent comment refers to is that of browser engines, not of PWAs.

It’s not innovation if it’s just catching up to what another platform has been able to do all along.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#287

Post by orbital-decay »

bluefox wrote: post #230

The article says that if you care about the web, you should care about Firefox. I disagree, because my "web" is probably not Batsov's "web". What is "the web" for me? Well, I'd say it's IRC, torrents, mailing lists, git repositories, oh and mostly-textual websites. I use Firefox for the latter, but for most of them I wouldn't mind using emacs-w3m instead. Unfortunately GitHub turned into a shitty JavaScript Web App,…

Hold on, Batsov's article is specifically about Web. Web is a hyperlinked document system accessed through the browser (modern WWW has an app layer on top of that, but it's not the point). IRC, torrents, e-mail, and git are not part of the Web.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#288

Post by asoneth »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #146
bool3max wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to strongly agree with your last point - I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. Perhaps it's just the loud minority, but to me it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product (for-profit or not). Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do tha…

Believe me, I understand the appeal. Yesterday we were discussing something dropping support for some platforms from an open source project and the issue is... we have no way of determining how many installs are on such platforms. Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in a…

I'm in a similar predicament for a business application.

We've resorted to the "scream test". When there are features that are expensive to maintain that we suspect aren't being used (based on surveys, interviews, and usability tests) then we insert a notification when the feature is used announcing it's pending removal in some subsequent version. The notification includes contact information so if we get a higher-than-expected number of complaints then we may keep the feature.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#289

Post by samwillis »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #276
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another reason is actually security. Remember that Apple doesn't allow other web browser engines in any application. Imagine if an Electron application on iOS just decided to ship with it's entire, own browser engine. We would have super-bloated apps like our desktops, and if a security flaw was found, good luck getting all those apps to update. In a way, Apple knows that allowing other browser engines means: 1. Chro…

The ironic part of this is that if Apple allowed alternative browser engines, I guarantee you it is only a matter of time before you see Electron apps bringing their own browser engines with them to iOS. And not long after before Hacker News is screaming and moaning about it (like they do for Electron on desktop) and begging for Apple to stop it.

HN already screams and moans about mobile apps built with PhoneGap/Cordova/Capacitor/Ionic ect. for not being "native" at the same time as promoting PWAs and complaining that apple doesn't support them, ignoring that PhoneGap, Cordova and especially Capacitor give you that functionality (mostly). I think that says more about HN than Apple...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#290

Post by Ajedi32 »

jasode wrote: post #134
zesterer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So does Google really control us that much? Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. Google still makes the big decisions about what gets to enter the codebase: which web features to support, which ones to deprecate, how to interpret standards, and how to slowly align the web with their own financial incentives.

>Yes. Contributing code to something doesn't mean that you suddenly control the direction of that thing. I think the idea of gp's point about others forking code means the forkers can also influence the code because they control the fork . Otherwise, if we take your comment at face value, we'd conclude that Google's contributions to Webkit means it can't "suddenly control the direction" of Apple's Webkit. That's true…

There are forks, and there are forks. If you take a codebase like Blink, fork it, and commit to maintaining that fork entirely by yourself independent of the upstream then yeah, what the upstream does at that point is kinda irrelevant. If, however, you're still relying on upstream for important patches and you're just rebasing your small changeset on top of that every so often, then there are limits to how far you can diverge from upstream before pulling in those necessary changes becomes impractical.

If I understand correctly, Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, etc are all running on the later type of Blink "fork".

Does Google still contribute to Webkit? I was under the impression that stopped a long time ago after Blink and Webkit sufficiently diverged.

Post reply on HN