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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

#481

Post by kuschku »

brianguertin wrote: post #343
_jal wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

An example, measuring traffic flow in a city.

You can do it with cameras and ID plate detection tools, which allows tracking where anyone is at any time.

You can also put magnetic loops into the roads, which just tells you how many drive over a certain area of the road, without any individualized tracking.

Good telemetry is like the magnetic loops. But nowadays very few implementations are that privacy respecting

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#482

Post by pydry »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #423
K0nserv wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

US antitrust law is based on tests of harm to the consumer (though most people do not know this nor about its application due to lack of enforcement). Apple frames everything they do as positive for the consumer to throw up chaff that makes consumer harm harder to quantify for people who don't know better.

Same as https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21161271/apple-settlement-...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#483

Post by julienb_sea »

I've recently converted my personal usage to Safari as Chrome was proving buggy on the new MacBook Pro. I've enjoyed it, performance is essentially identical and Apple pay in the browser is the smoothest payment experience I've ever had on mobile web.

Although, autofill on Safari is objectively worse.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#484

Post by soundnote »

freediver wrote: post #321
dralley wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but nobody on HN has ever - ever - come up with a better funding model for them. It's all complaints all the time and people don't even seem to bother researching what they have been doing lately. It's also fun to watch people complain about the Google situation and then, 10 seconds later, complain about "side projects" which are actual independent sources of revenue. I don't envy the market dynamics of their sit…

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current…

I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#485

Post by smoldesu »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #468

Anyone who has ever actually worked on OSS or just hangs out in ANY support channel/forum for open source will see that users are endlessly demanding, need lots of support, but will never, ever pay for anything if a free alternative exists. Linus and the “gamers” will compare and try distros, point out tiny flaws, judge developer team strength but the one thing they will almost never, ever do is _pay money_. Even the…

Adding money to the equation doesn't fix problems. It's another situation of "the mythical man-month" where you can hire as many people as you want, but it doesn't make the problem go away faster. Take MacOS for example: it's an operating system that has thousands of people working on it, backed with decades of R&D as well as hundreds of billions of dollars. That doesn't make it any easier for Apple to support 32-bit software, add Vulkan drivers to their system or make a decent first-party software distribution system that doesn't scalp the developers selling their software. Every organization has their own goals and ulterior motives, if Firefox got 100 million dollars tomorrow they'd probably use it to add a second "Pocket" advertisement on your taskbar and lock the rest away in a vault somewhere.

Open source software walks a hard line on freedom. Nothing is stopping you from charging a dollar for your Linux software, but nobody will pay for it unless you're offering some kind of actual utility. Similarly, if Google started charging a dollar for their browser, I imagine there would be a lot of disgruntled people looking for new browsers.

Money is not the solution here, it's the problem. Hiding away code and restricting access is the opposite of freedom, and while you're welcome to disagree with the principle it doesn't change the fact that there's thousands of open source projects floating around, many of them best-in-class. Do you think Hacker News would exist if every CSS component charged a dollar so you could support the developers, or every coreutil you used had a 50-cent tax after every invocation?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#486

Post by dralley »

soundnote wrote: post #484
freediver wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better funding model is right in front of our eyes and is used by almost every other company - sell the product to the users. There is no rule saying that a browser needs to be directly or indirectly monetized by ads. On the contrary, in this day and age, not helping sell more ads would surely be seen as a good thing? So if the browser is that good as a product, it surely will be paid by a percentage of its current…

I think Brave is a good model for developing alternative, independent revenue streams. They're helped in large part by having a community that understands the need for it, a lot of the vocal Firefox fanbase seems to want an independent browser engine and service backend run and distributed as donationware.

Brave does ad-hijacking and has been caught hijacking referral links in the past. I'm not sure I would call their model "good".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#487

Post by soundnote »

sfink wrote: post #450
KennyBlanken wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth. Mozilla has had five fold increases in CEO compensation over the last fifteen years, as Firefox market share has gone down six fold . Firefox had ~30% market share in the mid 2000's, and now it has less than five percent market share. Safari has twice the market share Firefox does, by some metrics. Mozilla has literally paid its CEOs fa…

> How about this for a funding model: tie executive compensation to revenue growth. I'm not sure this would go quite the way you think. The quick numbers I could find are $104 million in revenue for 2009 [1], $828 million in revenue for 2019 [2]. Your market share percentages sound about right, though (and is more relevant to the success of the mission.) > Being a browser company and seeing declining revenue during a…

I think "post pandemic" there means "after the pandemic drove everyone to WFH anyway", not "especially after the pandemic is over" (which would be an argument for more local offices, not less).

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#488

Post by kuschku »

soundnote wrote: post #298

Parts of this are comedy. > For me Firefox is the only alternative to a complete Chrome hegemony in the sense that: > it’s open-source in the real sense (a project that’s truly community-driven) I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCo…

> I missed when the community wanted to do away with tab groups, compact mode, or keyword searches synced via bookmarks. The project is handled by a corporation with a multimillion dollar advertising deal with one of the EvilCorps. Uhh, yeah.

Hm? When were keyword searches or compact mode removed? I’m still using them in 94.0

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#489

Post by andrepd »

joecool1029 wrote: post #429
officeplant wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, I'm a big fan of what companies like Motorola are doing by taking a 4000mah+ battery and pairing it with some of those low end SoC's that sip battery. Androids power usage can be complete trash, but I've managed 4 days of battery out of these cheap Motorola phones while still using discord/twitter/telegram like normal. If apple actually went up on their battery sizing they could easily achieve Monday to Friday b…

There's also the Oppo/Oneplus way of doing things and pairing high quality cells to a better charge standard (SuperVOOC/WARP) that can throw 65W (or more) at the phone and minimize time spent charging. I can't overstate how much this changes my use pattern when I know I can throw phone on charger, take a shower, and by the time I'm out it's full.

Sure, but enjoy the battery being degraded to ~70% of its capacity after barely a year of doing that.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#490

Post by awill »

I get it. We all wish more people would use Firefox.

I tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox, and 98% of my websites work fine, but you still need Chrome as a backup for those sites that don't. Without 100% compatibility it's a hard sell when most users have no reason to leave Chrome.

I can't recommend Firefox to friends with the caveat "Keep a copy of Chrome around for when stuff doesn't work" Hopefully Mozilla can keep making things better. I'm glad someone is competing in this space

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