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Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

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Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#341

Post by andrewnicolalde »

NoGravitas wrote: post #310
tomxor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff Google adds to Blink and tries to push as a standard is often outright bad (e.g. FLoC, WebUSB).

> WebUSB

Wat

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#342

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

ahartmetz wrote: post #311
kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explicitly said the want to do more censorship and promote fake news (like the New York Times), so how can I trust that they won't influence my browsing? What is their differentiating factor to Google now? It is a 180° turn on what they seemed to stand for in the past, an open web.

> fake news like the NY times ...OK? > What is their differentiating factor to Google now? Mozilla doesn't gather your data to show you ads

"Mozilla doesn't gather your data to show you ads"

So they say, but they have teamed up with Google and Pocket before. And how do they plan to fight "hate speech" and promote fake news, without analyzing my data? What if they don't like what I write or look at?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#343

Post by brianguertin »

_jal wrote: post #234
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…

> I also never understood the massive hard-on that the technical user-base has against useful telemetry. > it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer. Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'? And the answer is you c…

> how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'?

Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful.

E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#344

Post by thriftwy »

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?

Nobody is using Google Meet now, and when people did, it didn't work. Maybe a few years back I had this problem - Hangouts would run but not Meet.

That's the thing with second-class citizen browsers - bleeding edge is often broken.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#345

Post by minusSeven »

This blog is probably not meant for hackernews community overall. I for one have been using firefox in both desktop and mobile for quite sometime now.

I guess the problem today is nobody can be bothered to maintain sites for different browsers. Today I see most websites work well only in chrome.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#346

Post by dmitriid »

K0nserv wrote: post #191
samwillis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms. I think it’s worth noting that (at least I believe) the reason apple limit the usage of other browser engines in iOS isn’t (mostly)…

I don't disagree that is their publicly stated reason for the limitation. Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs on iOS and competition for mobile Safari is a common theory. Whether they do have ulterior motives or not, the effect is that innovation is stifled.

>Them having the ulterior motive of stifling PWAs

>the effect is that innovation is stifled.

There's no such thing as PWA. There are several dozen of standards, and any combination of them is called PWAs by various people. And quite a few of those combinations work perfectly fine on Apple devices.

What's worse is that too many of those standards are extremely badly designed (service workers) or are pure Chrome-only "standards" rammed through standards bodies (Bluetooth, HID etc.).

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#347

Post by GuB-42 »

akagusu wrote: post #130

The real problem of Firefox is one that nobody cares about: distribution. Let's say Firefox is the most advanced browser of the universe. How can you get people to install Firefox? Chrome has the advantage here because it is preinstalled in every Android phone and Android has more than 90% market share. The second advantage Chrome has is that it cannot be uninstalled from Android. The fact that Android phones have a…

Firefox had more than 30% market share at their peak, against pre-installed IE and Microsoft aggressive tactics. It was before the ballot screen.

Together with Chrome, they ended up beating IE, at the time neither had a significant advantage in distribution, at least compared to IE.

So in theory, Chrome can be beaten, except that unlike IE, Chrome doesn't suck, in fact, about the only thing going for Firefox is that it is not Chrome.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#348

Post by dmitriid »

andrewnicolalde wrote: post #341
NoGravitas wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff Google adds to Blink and tries to push as a standard is often outright bad (e.g. FLoC, WebUSB).

> WebUSB Wat

WebUSB, Web Bluetooth, Web HID are chrome-only features they rammed through standards bodies.

Both Firefox and Safari consider them harmful in their current state and will not implement them.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#349

Post by nicoburns »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #186
nicoburns wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they've actually implemented pull-to-refresh now.

I read about that but it hasn't made it into the production version :(

Hmm... so it hasn't. I would swear I've used it, but it's not working for me if I test it now. I'm mainly on ios now, so maybe that's what confused me.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#350

Post by tomxor »

defaultname wrote: post #302
tomxor wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple of today has a very conflicted relationship with webkit, the anticompetitive reasons they want to keep their platform "webkit only", simultaneously encourages them to support and neglect webkit development. i.e on the one hand, webkit must be reliable and secure and compatible "enough" to provide a decent basic browsing experience. But should not improve so much as to make developing applications competitiv…

"basic browsing experience" Google pushes out yet another half-baked, poorly considered new feature in Chrome and overnight has mobs chanting about Safari purportedly holding everyone back because of some close to irrelevant fringe thing. Safari might just be the fastest browser, and it supports a ridiculous, awe-inspiring array of features and standards. And the greatest indictment of the ridiculous anti-Safari smea…

This is a misrepresentation, before even getting into lack of modern feature support, webkit introduce a lot of long lived regressions on each release and Apple have changed various behaviours in non-standard ways in Safari over the years then left them broken and unpatched on old devices (looking at you autoheight iframes). This has nothing to do with adopting standards and everything to do with a lack of resources, stagnant release cycle and lack of care and support from Apple.

It's not necessary to talk about chromiums bleeding edge non-standard features, webkit easily has the least support for unopinionated standards released over the last decade and adopted by the other two.

> no platform uses the browser more than iOS users do. iOS users always are over-represented in web usage compared to marketshare.

What point are you trying to make here? iOS users have no choice but to use Safari. If you install firefox or chrome or anything that is a "browser" on an iOS device, it's forced to use Safari webengine underneath, so it's essentially safari with different UI, and this is apparent in the useragent string so any decent stats will show that essentially every iOS user == Safari user.

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