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

391–400 of 675 posts

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#391

Post by howinteresting »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #81
samwillis wrote: post #65

Firefox is compromised by the fact it’s core active users are also its largest liability. It’s the innovators dilemma. They want it to (more or less) stay the same and not move forward and make changes to compete with Chrome. Whereas for them to achieve a larger market share it needs a radical overhaul. Really what Mozilla need to do is build a “new browser” called something different and put their weight behind that…

I use Firefox for the obvious reasons, but I desperately want it to be as polished as Chrome, which it is a far cry from, especially on Android.

Both ad blocking and password manager support are much better on Firefox/Android than on Chrome.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#392

Post by speeder »

jerieljan wrote: post #159
speeder wrote: post #151

To me that is not good. Firefox just suck. I insisted on Firefox for a while because Google hegemony but in the end I switched to brave. 1. Firefox often loses settings 2. Also it is really, really bad at saving your session. After losing important tabs I ignited that but... 3. After painstakingly preparing a bunch of docked tabs, it lost these too. 4. Frequent interface changes, often for the worse (to be honest my…

Mind if I ask when you've last used Firefox? I've had these problems before (on rare occasions) but ever since Firefox did its Quantum leap, these issues were pretty much resolved.

I switched to Brave 2 weeks ago, that was when Firefox deleted my pinned tabs.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#393

Post by klyrs »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #296
klyrs wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use firefox exclusively. Every few weeks, it installs an update and refuses to open a new tab until a restart. It frequently fails to restart. It occasionally nukes my session so I can't restore my tabs. It seems to occasionally forget/unset my preference to not auto-update. If it just had a status indicator to show that an update is available, I'd happily update at the end of a workday. Instead, it's interrupted a…

Are you using Firefox on Linux, installed via a package manager? What you describe is the behaviour when your package manager updates Firefox in the background from under its feet - not the fault of Firefox. Firefox's own updater will not automatically update without warning.

Only, I don't experience anything like this behavior on any other application. This is a Firefox problem, even if Ubuntu is to blame for overriding my setting.

And, no, I just checked. I don't have any auto-updates in Ubuntu either.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#394

Post by floatboth »

hawski wrote: post #285
floatboth wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you blur your background now on a meeting?

No idea, I never cared about that kind of thing. I've used it for a couple classes recently, that's it.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#395

Post by sneak »

gausswho wrote: post #236
sneak wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silently uploading your browsing activity off the device without your consent is absolutely in the same ballpark as what Google does.

I'm unfamiliar with what you're speaking of. Can you elaborate?

Firefox has a bunch of telemetry enabled by default that phones home usage information to Mozilla without consent.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#396

Post by sneak »

jeltz wrote: post #299
gausswho wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unfamiliar with what you're speaking of. Can you elaborate?

He is talking about when Mozilla made Firefox send the browsing history of randomly selected German users to a company they had invested in, Cliqz. That is the by far biggest ethical violation of Mozilla and which, justifiably, still haunts them. That said both Chrome and Edge are worse.

Nope, I'm talking about the telemetry that still exists in current Firefox that you can download worldwide today.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#397

Post by ahartmetz »

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #342
ahartmetz wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't think they will build censorship into the browser. I guess you can worry about that if and when it happens, not before.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#398

Post by my123 »

nilslindemann wrote: post #339
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 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…

I always wondered why the engine is not separated from the GUI in browsers. In chess world this is totally normal, you have a chess GUI and a chess engine (and a crude communication protocol).

> I always wondered why the engine is not separated from the GUI in browsers

For WebKit that's the case.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#399

Post by lillecarl »

chupasaurus wrote: post #179
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…

KDE now uses Blink to render KHTML IIRC.

KDE relies heavily on the Qt libraries and Qt is using Blink in their QtWebEngine[1]. There's even a web browser called Falkon (The KDE browser, kind of) that uses this library[2].

[1]: https://wiki.qt.io/QtWebEngine

[2]: https://www.falkon.org/about/

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#400

Post by yborg »

samwillis wrote: post #181
K0nserv wrote: post #153

I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it. Two things that I think are worth calling out: 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…

> 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)…

This is a specious argument. Allow competitors to deploy apps causing lousy battery life, and Safari should win easily on that basis. Apple's battery app makes it obvious when apps use a lot of energy.
Post reply on HN