Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

infosec.press

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

781–790 of 851 posts

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#781

Post by tjpnz »

jamespo wrote: post #333
tjpnz wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fork Firefox, bundle uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block et el and sell it is a consumer web security product (that's not complete shit) with a monthly subscription. Use some of the proceeds to support the devs working on the underlying tech, similar to what Valve are doing for Wine, Proton and Fex. Bonus points: 1. Multi layered approach to dealing with ads and other malware. 2. A committment to no AI or other bloat - that…

Charging for a browser died with Netscape in 1998

But I'm not pitching a browser. This is a web security product which people do pay for - it's a billion dollar product category in fact. The only functional difference is that the malware and fraud protection it provides is demonstrably superior to all of its competitors.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#782

Post by littlestymaar »

danaris wrote: post #679
array_key_first wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, maybe not. It's getting dangerously close to the modern day IE, where some websites just don't work right and everyone has to do arcane shit to make their websites cross platform. It's also a closed source browser developed by Apple. It's not competing with Firefox. Everyone contemplating switching to safari over Firefox are not being honest - they're not even on the same playing field.

The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome. You should probably think about that for a bit, in light of why IE was IE back in the day.

> The only way you can possibly view Safari as "the modern day IE" is if you consider the authoritative source for What Features Should Be Supported to be Chrome.

No. Safari is the modern IE in the sense that it's the default browser on a widely used OS, and it's update cycle is tied to the update of the OS itself by the user, and it drags the web behind by many years because you cannot not support its captive user-base.

It's even worse than IE in a sense, because Apple prevents the existence of an alternative browser on that particular OS (every non-safari OSes on iOS are just a UI on top of Safari).

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#783

Post by kunley »

roenxi wrote: post #683
kunley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that expressing loud doubts about something ethically dubious is often a sign that an opposite action will be taken. So many business people want this moral excuse "but I had doubts" while being totally cynical

Logically that is setting up an argument where no matter what the CEO says you're going to assume they're going to take an action. If they say yea, obviously it is a yes. If they say nay, it means they're thinking about it which is basically a yes! That is a completely reasonable position, often it makes sense to ignore what someone says and focus only on their capabilities. But if that is the situation then it doesn…

My point is to have an evaluation of the cynicism behind that guy's words; so it's not about ignoring what he says - in fact, the opposite

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#784

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

SirMaster wrote: post #659
throwaway613745 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used Firefox as my default browser through thick and thin for damn near two decades. If Mozilla killed andblocking extensions I’d switch to Helium Browser in a heartbeat since they’re maintaining manifest v2 support for uBO and even ship it OOTB. The web is unusable without a proper Adblock.

>The web is unusable without a proper Adblock. And yet somehow most people in the world use it every day without an adblocker...

Trillions of flies eat shit...

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#786

Post by prmph »

saghm wrote: post #777
tadfisher wrote: post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, because I desperately want pinned tabs to stay on their URL, but that's not what happens, and I end up with random URLs in these tabs because I click links. Is there a config flag I flipped without thinking?

Yeah, I don't get why I'd want to pin a tab and then change the url (which I do accidentally for a pinned tab every couple of weeks or so). When it's not the site I pinned, it's just...a tab?

Do you actually use the feature much?

From my experience I want to pin tabs because I simply want a set of tab available for use that remain visible when I scroll through a lot of tab headers to the right.

It's very annoying to be on a pinned tab, navigate to even just another server on the same root domain, and suddenly be pushed to another (un-pinned) tab. Even if navigate to a totally different url, I do no want to be pushed to another tab.

The enforcement of the url remaining the same should be done by myself, not the browser trying to second-guess me.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#787

Post by anothernewdude »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #291
simiones wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not impossible that people would pay Firefox that much yearly to keep their current user-base from using ad blockers. However, what is impossible is to imagine Firefox would have anything close to their current user base if people were prevented from using ad blockers. Most likely they would shrink to almost 0 users overnight if they did this. There are very few reasons to use Firefox over Chrome or Safari (or e…

That doesn't explain the apparent market share of 2--3%, which is still quite large if you think about. I believe most non-techie users are just lingering, using Firefox just because they used to. Since Firefox doesn't have a built-in ad blocking and the knowledge about adblocking is not universal (see my other comment), it is possible that there are a large portion of Firefox users who don't use adblockers and conve…

Ad-blockers are the most used extensions on firefox. Origin itself has 10m installs, there are others with 3m and few with 1m installs.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#788

Post by jjav »

Dwedit wrote: post #705
pmontra wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uMatrix, from the same author of uBO. It's been officially unsupported for years but it still works and it's UI is better then the UI of NoScript and of course much better than the incomprehensible subsystem of uBO that should have replaced uMatrix.

It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests) There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.

> It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox.

Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great.

I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#789

Post by 1718627440 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #576
broof wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?

I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.

State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.

Re: Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

#790

Post by pmontra »

jjav wrote: post #788
Dwedit wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. uMatrix has bugs that cause it to randomly delete your cookies, or occasionally fail to block a request (race condition? Looking at logger shows an incorrect domain on some requests) There are community-made forks which fix the cookies problem, like nuTensor.

> It doesn't "still work" if you're on Firefox. Not my experience at all. I run uMatrix on every computer I have and it is awesome. Still annoyed it was replaced by uBo which is quite good, but nowhere as nice as uMatrix. Luckily uMatrix still works great. I wish they'd just scrap the uBo interface and replace it with the uMatrix interface which is far superior.

They do different things. I'm using both: uBO for ads and hiding UI elements, uMatrix for JS. I wish that the author could support both but time is limited and I'm OK with that.

By the way, I realized that most of the tabs where I'm logged into something run inside their own tab container, so that limits the damage that any bug on handling cookies can do.

Post reply on HN