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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

#601

Post by klyrs »

lillecarl wrote: post #430
klyrs wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The market share of Firefox is low enough that in reality it doesn't matter. So very insightful. Thank you for showing me the light. Also, I like that you think that Firefox's default settings is "holding it wrong." That's rather the point, isn't it?

It's not Firefox's default settings, It's a technical challenge that they haven't solved. But that I would argue shouldn't really be solved. _YOU_ chose to update your browser while it was running, you're on a non-mainstream platform (Linux Desktop) and you're unable to grasp that pulling binaries and replacing them with others could cause issues. Reddit will have you back now.

No, Firefox's default setting is to upgrade even more aggressively than I'm experiencing. And, it's worth pointing out, the browser works fine, except that I'm prevented from opening a new tab. Sometimes I really don't want the interruption, and I just copy URLs and recycle tabs. That goes fine, it's just an annoyance considered by the developers to be a feature.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#602

Post by starik36 »

malermeister wrote: post #591
starik36 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. https://abcnews.go.com/US/sen-rand-paul-attacked-angry-mob-l...

Chanting "Say her name" is freedom of speech. Breaking and entering into the seat of government [1], building gallows in preparation for hangings [2] and calling for the murder of the Vice President [3] is not. Please don't try to disingenuously draw a false equivalency here. Your whataboutism is supporting attempted murder and contributing to the destabilization of the country. [1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/1…

You are just dead set to not see what you don't want to see. The link I posted was about the mob attacking Ron Paul. A sitting senator. He likely would have been injured or dead had it not been for the police. The article isn't about chanting.

You asked "Did they attack the seat of government with the explicit goal of abducting, raping and killing elected officials". This is an "explicit" example of the mob attacking an elected US senator. Or it only counts when "right" people are attacked?

You also stated: "to interfere with a democratic process and establish autocratic rule". That's exactly what Seattle's “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” was - an attempt to interfere with a democratic process. Last I checked, no one has elected those people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest

So if you are condemn capital riots, don't forget the summer riots as well.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#603

Post by panny »

>sign in was broken on Firefox, but worked on Chrome-like browsers

I've seen that, but it was related to hardware keys. If Firefox cannot be bothered to support keys, why should anyone be bothered by using it?

More importantly though, it seems like the whole world is in this mess, because browser developers develop monoliths. If the browsers were split into small reusable parts, any developer could assemble one, and there could be lots of competing parts. The number of available browsers would explode to infinity. Why is everything lumped under a single massive code base known as "Browser engine" like gecko or blink or whatever? Why do they keep making monoliths? There could be parser engine, css layout engine, svg render engine, etc etc etc. But there isn't, there's one giant lump, browser engine.

If anyone made a focused attempt at a new browser ecosystem, it seems like it should attack the glue layer between these disparate parts.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#604

Post by jefftk »

danielheath wrote: post #580
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)…

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.

Even if you give up the JIT, Apple will still not allow your custom browser on iOS.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#605

Post by kbrosnan »

klyrs wrote: post #601
lillecarl wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not Firefox's default settings, It's a technical challenge that they haven't solved. But that I would argue shouldn't really be solved. _YOU_ chose to update your browser while it was running, you're on a non-mainstream platform (Linux Desktop) and you're unable to grasp that pulling binaries and replacing them with others could cause issues. Reddit will have you back now.

No, Firefox's default setting is to upgrade even more aggressively than I'm experiencing. And, it's worth pointing out, the browser works fine, except that I'm prevented from opening a new tab. Sometimes I really don't want the interruption, and I just copy URLs and recycle tabs. That goes fine, it's just an annoyance considered by the developers to be a feature .

When the distro updates Firefox out from underneath it Firefox's options are; crash because API call does not match, detect the API incompatibility and prompt the user to do a clean restart, or spend a monumental amount of engineering work to maintain API compatibility while running mixed Gecko versions.

Using the Mozilla build in /opt, the Snap [1] or Flatpack [2] versions will avoid the distro updating Firefox out from underneath it.

[1] https://snapcraft.io/firefox [2] https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.mozilla.firefox

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#606

Post by muxator »

kuschku wrote: post #488
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

That's true. They have been gone from Firefox for Android for some time now.

Keyword removal totally dumbed down my browsing experience on mobile. I fear the moment the same will happen on the Desktop version.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#607

Post by boogies »

freediver wrote: post #567
soundnote wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale. Their revenue stream is still ad monetization, just it happens that it does not come from Google (although it is curious that on default settings, Brave's ad blocker does not block Google ads?). And what does the world look like if Brave "wins" (meaning becoming Google size)? Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them. Worth noting is…

> Business model wise, Brave is same thing as Google just at a smaller scale

> if Brave "wins" […] Still ads everywhere, just Brave gets to pick them

No, Google’s business model is gathering humanity’s largest hoard of data and monetizing that through targeted advertizing. Brave doesn’t show any of their most traditional ads unless the user explicitly opts in, and then it doesn’t come with comparable tracking.

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#608

Post by muxator »

Jnr wrote: post #44
vvoyer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The true reasons Firefox lost market share I would say: The true reasons Firefox lost market share is because we, developer & tech people started to install Chrome on family computers instead of Firefox because it was safer & faster (way way faster). And we never came back from it. Performance is a feature.

I agree with this opinion. When Chrome came out, it was way better. Now I don't really see big difference in performance, they have similar extensions, frequent updates, sync, etc. I prefer Firefox but I don't really need to install it on family computers because whatever browser they use is probably good enough.

Firefox sync and Chrome sync came out about the same time if I remember correctly. The first release was in Firefox 4.0, but Mozilla Weave (the addon that eventually developed into the first version of Firefox Sync) existed since 2007, before Chrome's first release.

An old Ars Technica article comparing the two protocols (much has changed since then): https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/10/ars-e...

Re: Firefox is the alternative to a Chrome hegemony

#609

Post by ntr-- »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #351
dralley wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep saying this when Mozilla is and has already been vocally fighting against Google's overreaching proposals? There's new headlines about this every few months. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/privacy-analysi ... https://www.howtogeek.com/756338/mozilla-says-chromes-latest ... There's also this: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/04/latest-firefox-roll ... https://twitter.com/__jakub_g…

Maybe because Mozilla collects a massive amount of "telemetry" on users, in a way that is personally identifiable, despite zero need for it to be so? https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t... Or maybe it's because you can toss some money at Mozilla and they'll silently install a browser extension on behalf of an advertising company for a shitty TV show about a l33t haxx0r d00d? By the way, the b…

nonsense.

about:telemetry shows you all that is collected and none of it is PII, a unique fingerprint maybe...

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