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Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

fakespot.com

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Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#341
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if I don't even have a wifi card?

Then you represent a trivially small fraction of users. My desktop doesn't have wifi either, but most modern motherboards come with a wifi card built in. Not to mention the majority of visitors to mainstream sites are on mobile and a good chunk of the rest are on a laptop. Also Firefox has 3% market share so we're talking about a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.

Most? More likely than not you will not have such a card in a mainboard.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#342
post #340

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If Microsoft had held onto it, their investment in Apple would have been more profitable than anything else Microsoft did in the past 20 years.

On the face of it that sounds like a burn on Microsoft, wisely found by studying the finances, but... by the nature of Apple being the best performing stock in the world for multiple years isn't the same true for most companies, that they could've made more money investing in Apple than in themselves? Heck, maybe investing hundreds of millions in Apple today would, in X years, be worth more money than spending market…

> isn't the same true for most companies

Technically yes, but not really. It’s specifically valid to observe with regards to Microsoft because Microsoft did in actual fact hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Apple stock for a decent stretch of time. Most companies did not.

Microsoft chose to sell their Apple stock in 2003. This was entirely their choice. They didn't have to. They could have sold it in 2005 and made an additional billion dollars. They could have sold it in 2007 and made another ten billion dollars. They could have sold it today and made a hundred billion dollars.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#344
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And “their new alliance” was to keep shipping Office for the Mac like they had done for the past decade…

Yes and/but there was real concern then that they'd stop supporting it which would have killed Mac use in corporate environments where specific version of office compatibility was a huge issue (As anyone who remembers the Office 2.0 vs Office 6 update on Windows will remember).

> As anyone who remembers the Office 2.0 vs Office 6 update on Windows will remember

I think you're misremembering or mistyping the numbers, unless Wikipedia is wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Office

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#345
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, I disable WebRTC, and run uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however. There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome sta…

That's how it felt to me too. Stretched too thin. Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google, I can imagine how hard it is to try to thrive or just survive and maintaining a stable path when you're fighting big pockets. I just wished they could rebalance their allocation and focus on simple daily usability things. Just a bit more. ps: for instance, the screenshot tool is brilliant

> Yet as a small company compared to MS or Google

It's not about the overall company its about browser team. I'd love to see a comparison of the actual sizes of the teams creating browsers, isn't Safari only a handful of (admittedly extremely talented) people?

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#347
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias disclaimer: I've worked on Chrome and Edge, opinions strictly my own >and why is that? Oh because Mozilla hasn't put any energy into getting better or pulling back market share from the moment it started to bleed out to Chrome. Could and should Mozilla have done better? Yes. "Any energy?" is uncalled for, however. There was the entire Quantum rewrite for significant performance boosts (around the time Chrome sta…

People wanted add-ons and customization, not the things you mentioned. Firefox was "the" customizable browser with great ad-block.

And it is still customizable

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me - as a long term FF user and Mozilla critic - it looks like: Spend money on everything except browser development (>$5 billions!). Market share down the drain. Use the market share as an argument for a lost cause and spend money on everything except Browser development. Ladybird - a browser spearheaded by one person - will expose Mozilla of what it is.

I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful and nobody who isn't being paid for a 40 hour weekday actually wants to get involved in it.

> I haven't actually looked at it, but I have the feeling that the Firefox code base is godawful...

Damn, didn't know that one can develop skills to evaluate the quality of a code-base by just "feeling" it and not looking at it at all - quite impressive!

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is fine on all platforms. Smooth even! But in terms of loading time and raw JS performance, Chrome wins hands down every time in my experience. Using https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/ this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I use Firefox on every device, but Chrome is just faster. I can live with the impact on speed for…

In the discussion above I'm referring to folks saying that FF "bogs down" or becomes unresponsive in real world usage, something I've never experienced. But benchmarks are fun too... this is quantified not only by some arbitrary number but also through the visibly slower update speed during the DOM tests. I ran that and Chrome was 50% faster than FF on my 2018 MBP. Safari was even faster than Chrome by a few %. I wou…

I think it really depends on what you do and where you live. I have access to high-speed internet, have (way too) many tabs open at all times and use various web applications. Someone who's just reading the news and social media behind a DSL line will have a completely different experience.

I rarely encounter loading times that are caused by network traffic. Some servers are slow to reach, but most pages load almost instantaneously. Perhaps that's why things that I see Firefox lose to Chrome at are noticeable to me but not to many others.

The benchmark itself is not an indicator of what the average user will do in their browser, but it does show that Firefox is objectively slower in certain areas. Whether those areas bother you is another question, of course.

Firefox becoming completely unresponsive happens to me more than I like. This is due to a difference in architecture; Firefox spawns a process for every CPU thread and divides the work whereas Chrome spawns a new thread for every page. When a badly written page slows down to a crawl (i.e. leaving Reddit open for more than two minutes), the tabs sharing that process become unresponsive. On multiple occasions I've had to kill tabs that were shown as "loading" because other tabs stopped functioning if they lost the render process lottery. It's not as extreme as people claim and it's certainly not as bad as it was five years ago, but Firefox does have weird freezes and bugs that Chrome seemingly just doesn't have.

On the other hand, I'm convinced part of the reason for slowdowns and problems is that Firefox tries to strip away a lot of the privacy invasions that have become the norm on the modern web. I'll gladly keep taking those slowdowns, but even outside those there's still a lot of work that can be done to bring Firefox on par with Chrome.

Re: Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we'll fight the big guys because, if we don't, nobody else will". Smoke and mirrors more like it. They collaborate with Facebook and Google all the time. 80%-90% of their revenue comes from Google. Fighting the 'big guys' for real would mean shutting shop and never to be seen again.

wtf are y'all on about?? Do you really think we'd be better off with Chromium becoming the one and only web engine, with Google singlehandedly deciding what web features are implemented and how? Has Google ever mentioned anything about privacy? (privacy from hackers doesn't count, that's security) Do you think Apple, with the joke of a browser that is Safari and basically zero stake in the web, would be able to keep…

> Do you really think we'd be better off with Chromium becoming the one and only web engine, with Google singlehandedly deciding what web features are implemented and how?

What makes you think they're not doing that now and Mozilla's existence even matters in this case? Funny enough, they're only keeping Mozilla alive to avoid any antitrust cases.

> would be able to keep Google from turning the web into its own closed little sandbox?

Flawed argument. If Google all of a sudden stops funding Mozilla, do you think that they're going to continue development of the browser? Firefox has steadily been losing market share for years, the writing is on the walls.

The fact that Mozilla's existence itself depends on Big-Tech is one huge irony. It's like saying, “I'm against meat eating... Oh hey, my hamburger is here!”.

> Who would say "if Chrome kills adblockers, switch to our browser" and be able to actually sustain it, not just keep their Chromium fork slightly out of date for as long as they can get away with?

Literally Brave.

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