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Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

fastcompany.com

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Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#41

Post by threeseed »

sdf4j wrote: post #25
alberth wrote: post #19

Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user? Chrome is able to capture the mass consumer market, due to Google’s dark pattern to nag you to install Chrome anytime you’re on a Google property. Edge target enterprise Fortune 500 user, who is required to use Microsoft/Office 365 at work (and its deep security permission ties to SharePoint). Safari has Mac/iOS audience via being the default on those platform. Brave (based o…

I value my privacy and use Firefox. Honestly, I have trust issues with volatile “security focused” forks. I feel the risk of them been tampered are greater than the marginal gains.

Firefox like Chrome still allows long-lived i.e. 400 days first party cookies.

This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web.

If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#42

Post by create-account »

SXX wrote: post #38

I use Firefox on both Mac and Android and it works well. I'd just wish it was proper open source project with BDFL and public team of developers and not some corporate failure.

I’m looking forward for Ladybird browser to be released to the General Public. On the meantime, I’m using LibreWolf instead. I’ve uninstalled Firefox after noticing the surreptitious advertising check

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#43

Post by JimDabell »

alberth wrote: post #26
dtx1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would almost be a good argument but the reality is that they cannibalized their core product to increase their revenue but have done so to the point where it no longer remains viable in the market. Alas, the locusts have had their feast and we are all worse of for it.

So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share? —— I think diehard Firefox fans don’t understand that, no matter how great you make Firefox - it will always lose share to better distribution. Google had the best distribution because it was the vast majority of consumers homepage. And on the homepage, it was nagging users t…

> So in hindsight, if you were CEO of Mozilla - what would you have done differently that you believe would have maintained Firefox market share?

Integrated ad blocker, enabled by default. It’s the one thing Firefox can do that Chrome never will.

Most people aren’t tech-savvy enough to install an ad blocker. Most people really do see all the ads on the Internet. Blocking ads by default would make the browsing experience far more pleasant, and so browsing with Firefox would be far more pleasant than browsing with Chrome for most people.

And obviously, continue to invest in improving the core web experience instead of getting distracted by side quests and firing everybody working on Servo, etc.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#44

Post by create-account »

supertrope wrote: post #14
gotoeleven wrote: post #3

Is there something fundamental to the design of firefox that makes it use tons of memory and be prone to letting web pages peg a core at 100%? Every time I try to use firefox I have to quit because sometimes it runs like a 90s java applet.

Usually it's an ad laden local news website. I usually decide the solution is to stop visiting that website.

Oh no. Just block every connection through uBlock Origin so you get a mostly JavaScript-less website.

There are so many benefits to browsing without JS

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#45

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

threeseed wrote: post #41
sdf4j wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value my privacy and use Firefox. Honestly, I have trust issues with volatile “security focused” forks. I feel the risk of them been tampered are greater than the marginal gains.

Firefox like Chrome still allows long-lived i.e. 400 days first party cookies. This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web. If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

> If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

If I get logged out of every website on a weekly basis I'm going to be annoyed.

> This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web.

How do they use first party cookies to track you?

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#46

Post by create-account »

bitwize wrote: post #31

I liked Firefox a whole lot better back before Mozilla effectively became a UN NGO with a few developers working on a web browser in a God-forsaken basement somewhere, Milton Waddams style. If they want me to love Firefox, they need to love Firefox. And show that love in the form of vision, resources, and better open-source, open-internet style governance. No execs saying "deplatforming is nice and all, but we really…

Goggle still has special privileges to your computer through Ungoogled chromium.

I’ve uninstalled them and will only use them on a VM

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#47

Post by cpeterso »

threeseed wrote: post #41
sdf4j wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value my privacy and use Firefox. Honestly, I have trust issues with volatile “security focused” forks. I feel the risk of them been tampered are greater than the marginal gains.

Firefox like Chrome still allows long-lived i.e. 400 days first party cookies. This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web. If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

Does a 7 day expiration matter if the tracker can just set new cookies with new 7 day expiration dates as it tracks you?

Also, Firefox partitions cookies by site (aka Total Cookie Protection), so first-party facebook.com cookies, cross-site facebook.com cookies on example.com, and cross-site facebook.com cookies on example.net all get separate cookie jars.

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/02/23/total-cookie-pr...

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#48

Post by davidfischer »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #45
threeseed wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox like Chrome still allows long-lived i.e. 400 days first party cookies. This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web. If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days.

> If they do care about privacy it would be good for them to copy Safari and make this 7 days. If I get logged out of every website on a weekly basis I'm going to be annoyed. > This is being abused by advertisers to track you across the web. How do they use first party cookies to track you?

There's a few ways first party cookies can track you. Probably the biggest single way is Google Analytics which by default uses only first party cookies. Even without cookies at all, GA could track you across the web although first party cookies do make this a little easier and "better". However, first party cookies can help trackers in other ways like for CNAME cloaking[1] which basically makes a first-party cookie function similarly to a third-party one.

Disclosure: I work for a small privacy focused ad company.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#49

Post by tmtvl »

create-account wrote: post #44
supertrope wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it's an ad laden local news website. I usually decide the solution is to stop visiting that website.

Oh no. Just block every connection through uBlock Origin so you get a mostly JavaScript-less website. There are so many benefits to browsing without JS

There's 3 extensions which I consider must-haves:

- Noscript Security Suite which has made it very obvious how absolutely fucked today's web is (there's sites which can't display static text without js, as though HTML and CSS are insufficient to display styled text with some markup).

- uBlock Origin because obviously.

- Multi-account Containers, which aren't quite as good as profiles, but get like 70% of the way there.

Re: Mozilla wants you to love Firefox again

#50

Post by hintymad »

danpalmer wrote: post #12

I used to be a die-hard Firefox user, but over the last 15 years software quality has improved, expectations have been raised, and I haven't felt that Firefox has kept up. It still feels like it's a re-skinned 2005 era piece of software. Placing it next to Safari, Chrome, or more recent competitors like Arc, it feels dated. There are technical reasons for this, there are process/political/human reasons why it has sta…

I don't know if it's just my bias, somehow I feel that the response time of Firefox is longer than that of Chrome. Or maybe it's due to my lingering discomfort about a Netscape-era bug: after running Netscape for a while, Netscape may stop responding or crash. If it crashed, I would not be able to relaunch it unless I manually killed a hanging Netscape process. Netscape never fixed the bug and I ran into the same bug a few times after switching to Firefox, albeit a lot less frequently. I then switched to Chrome and never looked back.
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