Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#571

Post by r00fus » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

yborg wrote: post #400

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)…

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.

It doesn't matter if Safari "wins" if all other players "required" Chrome browsers.

Apple sets the rules for its own products. Why didn't "open" win? Why for whatever reason is Apple still #1 in the mobile space?

Perhaps users agree with Apple.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#572

Post by malermeister » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:54 PM UTC

starik36 wrote: post #470

mschuster91 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "We need more than deplatforming" are not words I ever want to hear from a privacy organization's mouth. Any entity participating in a democratic society should be allowed to voice their support for keeping said society healthy. Antivaxxers and "the vote was stolen!!!" putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society itself. There are things in a society where standing "impartially" aside is taking a stand in…

> putsch supporters are a direct threat towards society What is your feeling towards the summer 2021 rioters? Are they a threat towards society?

Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials, to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule? No? There's your answer then.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#573

Post by evolve2k » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

About 6 months ago I forced myself off of Chrome and went cold turkey on just using Firefox until it was normalised for me.

In the end I gave up on the feature I’d be hoping Firefox would implement (tab search), and went with I just need to use this for the future of the web.

It’s been a happy process, I love containers for privacy and in the process I’ve discovered many niceties of Firefox.

Don’t miss chrome as my daily driver since I detoxed.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#574

Post by emiliosic » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

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)…

Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser). Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium. The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS. Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#575

Post by gonehome » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 10:58 PM UTC

0xR1CK wrote: post #506

andrepd wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it just has Brave's "bad stuff" instead :)

What would you define as "Brave's 'bad stuff'" ? It would seem that Brave does a lot to leave power of choice while erroring on safety / privacy for the defaults. What issues does it have?

For now it let's you keep the BAT stuff and ads off, but the incentives are not totally aligned there and I'd worry in the future they might force you to use it.

Ultimately they're inserting themselves in as the attention reseller - it's still an engagement/ad play dressed up a bit.

I really like what they've built, but I don't like how they're trying to monetize it. I think the ad/attention model is a corrupting influence on content quality generally, I can see what they're trying to do but I'd rather ad supported models just die. A browser completely focused on the user would just block ads and be done with it (imo).

Just let me pay for software that doesn't suck so our incentives are aligned. If you want a free ad-supported version for people unwilling to pay then fine.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#576

Post by gonehome » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

emiliosic wrote: post #574

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)…

Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser). Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium. The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS. Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.

Ken Kocienda writes about the origin of Safari in Creative Selection [0].

It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base.

[0]: The book has some interesting stories, but I find it hard to recommend because it's weirdly written for an extremely non-technical audience (using grandma like analogies to explain basic concepts, the analogies are so basic they do more to obscure than explain - e.g. the filesystem is like a 'cabinet for files'). It doesn't often get into the weeds of the interesting technical details - which is disappointing since 90% of readers are probably technical. The stories in it are still good though and Ken has a lot of insight into the iPhone development story since he was there.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#577

Post by xiaomai » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

evolve2k wrote: post #573

About 6 months ago I forced myself off of Chrome and went cold turkey on just using Firefox until it was normalised for me. In the end I gave up on the feature I’d be hoping Firefox would implement (tab search), and went with I just need to use this for the future of the web. It’s been a happy process, I love containers for privacy and in the process I’ve discovered many niceties of Firefox. Don’t miss chrome as my d…

it's not discoverable, but ff does have tab search. You prefix a search in your URL bar with '% ' (so like, if you enter '% esbuild', the "suggestions" in the dropdown will all be your tabs that match 'esbuild'

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#578

Post by kkjjkgjjgg » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

ahartmetz wrote: post #397

kkjjkgjjgg wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

What are they talking about, then? What is their plan? If they don't intent to build censorship mechanisms, maybe they shouldn't talk as if they do?

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#579

Post by Arelius » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

gonehome wrote: post #576

emiliosic wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, as a tidbit, Chromium is a fork of WebKit, which is Safari's rendering engine, which for some reason started as a fork from Konqueror (KDE Linux desktop's browser). Google did however replace the javascript engine in Chromium. The Javascript engine in Chromium deserves a different discussion, since it also powers NodeJS. Back in the day, WebKit was quite popular as a rendering engine and is also used by Qt.

Ken Kocienda writes about the origin of Safari in Creative Selection [0]. It started as a Konqueror fork mostly because Jobs wanted a browser on OS X and Ken was initially tasked with it (back then the mac had IE for mac). One person writing a browser from scratch even back then seemed an impossible challenge so he took a look to see if he could use most of Konqueror as an initial starting base. [0]: The book has som…

KHTML was a pretty viable alternative to the mess that was Gecko at the time. And there were already some (underserved) alternative platform ports in-progress at the time.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#580

Post by danielheath » Mon, Nov 29, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

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)…

As far as I’m aware the justification is “no executing pages you can write to at runtime” (because it’s a huge security issue). They give safari an exception to that because you can’t make a JIT without doing that, and that’s the most straightforward way to get fast JavaScript.