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What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

neilzone.co.uk

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Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#71

Post by replete »

I moved my profile folder into Librewolf, done. The only thing that's bugging me is the 'LibreWolf: Always store cookies/data for this site' option on the navbar padlock dropdown, it only appears for me in private windows, regardless of my 'Delete cookies site/data...' option.

It's annoying because I contributed UX to this librewolf feature a few years ago (because I really wanted it), its finally landed but I can't use it - it was the blocker to adopting the more strict privsec model that librewolf offers by default (it solves the 'cookie exceptions are a pain to manage' problem. Obviously something to do with my kitchen-sink Firefox profile folder copy, but for now I guess I'll just carry on with cookies persisting and at some point rebuild a fresh librewolf profile if I want to adopt their defaults.

So there's at least that, if this ambigious license stuff (and recent ad company purchases) bothers you, you can probably just copy your profile into Librewolf's profile folder, rename, and have done something about this perceived issue without a major disruption

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#72

Post by everdrive »

In the short term, I've switched to Librewolf. In the long term, we're probably hosed unless some heroic individuals can produce a new mainstream browser (or just a successful, long-term fork of Firefox that does not necessarily rely on Mozilla maintaining Firefox)

It's important to remember that Firefox itself is a good browser, but is far from perfect; it just remains the better option than Chrome. In an ideal world, an ideal browser would look itself would look quite different, as would the web itself.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#73

Post by pessimizer »

This blog entry makes me feel heard. I've chosen Firefox through Debian, but the browser is one of those problems that may kick me off the web entirely. People complain that Firefox is dependent on Google, but the forks are also dependent on Google, through Firefox. Chromium is dependent on Chrome. Moving to Apple explicitly attaches you to a company that wants to monopolize your purchases.

This is pushing me to deal with the internet only through single-purpose things that are not browsers, which can be even worse. Losing the browser seems similar to losing general-purpose computing (losing general-purpose social computing, maybe?)

edit: will Apple eventually buy Ladybird? Seems like that's what's going to happen.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#74

Post by everdrive »

roenxi wrote: post #18

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors b…

This is something I'm confused about. When people "build browsers" it's largely just Chromium with a couple of features tacked on top. I'm not sure why no one is trying to keep only the rendering engine and building their own, much better browser on top of it.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#75

Post by rafram »

randunel wrote: post #49
jonatron wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Radisson and Marriott work for me. I guess my IP address has a better reputation?

Radisson doesn't load on Firefox for me, only on chrome. Marriott doesn't load on chromium. I'm talking about the rooms pages, they show errors when loading prices. Static resources still load. The situation is similar with other websites behind akamai, such as US ESTA, the static resources load but all API calls fail. The IP address probably also matters, indeed.

There’s something up with your internet connection.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#76

Post by everdrive »

hypeatei wrote: post #63
roenxi wrote: post #18

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors b…

> As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. You should look into Ladybird[0] then. Their JavaScript engine ("LibJS") scores very well in conformance test suite test262[1]. [0]: https://ladybird.org/ [1]: https://test262.fyi/

>modern JavaScript

This is really one of the major problems. Much of the web is now fairly terrible, and so for a browser to get any meaningful traction it must work on nearly all websites; which means that any browser is going to be compromised unless it aims to remain incredibly niche. Some days I can't decide who I dislike more; MBAs or web developers.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#78

Post by everdrive »

mr_sturd wrote: post #36
roenxi wrote: post #18

I'm not sold that avoiding Chromium is any sort of win. It seems to be BSD licensed. The code comes from a long and storied OSS tradition. It is unclear why that having multiple different browser engines is strategically important. As far as I know we've long left behind the world where a hobbyist project could reasonably expect to implement modern JavaScript. Brave's existence and success suggests that competitors b…

The problem with Chromium is that it's controlled by Google. Given they control the engine in the majority of browsers, they get to call the shots on the direction of the web as a whole.

Does Google effectively own Webkit, though? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really asking. Whether or not Webkit can be thought of as disjoint from Chromium is really the question here.

Re: What, if anything, should I do about using Mozilla's Firefox

#80

Post by everdrive »

amelius wrote: post #54
yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote: post #16

I moved to LibreWolf - https://librewolf.net/

How are they funded? Or, in other words, how do we know they won't end up in the same situation?

There's probably no ideal out there, just different better (or if you prefer, 'less bad') options. With the modern web, nothing is permanent. If a company or software is amazing, it could always become awful in the future. In principle software always potentially suffered from this problem, but the modern web really accelerates this process. There's effectively no web browser which can remain static as the web around it changes so rapidly. And, in order to be meaningfully useful for a broad audience it would also need to keep up with Chromium, which is incredibly well-funded. I think we're in a losing game.
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