81–90 of 100 posts
The Linux browser escaped out to conquer (konquer?) the world.
Konqueror was a nice browser, my fav back in the day, and it was exciting when Apple picked it to defeat IE with Safari.
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100% How the author arrives at the conclusion that the answer is to create another browser is beyond me. Advocate for Firefox. Invest in Firefox. There you go.
I'm not saying you have to agree but it's pretty clear how the author arrived at that conclusion if you read the article. To summarize: Firefox's shrinking marketshare is an existential threat to Mozilla. The vast majority of its revenue is tied to the search engine deal with Google that the author describes as quasi-charity. Linux is clearly a lower priority than Windows and Mac (and the author even says that it's l…
yeah, so the best thing to do is to try to reverse that. the article just takes it as given that mozilla/firefox will probably fail.
and if it does fail, there's a lot of linux users out there installing chromium on their desktops that will have helped it along.
its so weird how the browser is arguably more important than the operating system at this point, but open source nerds don't even see the problem in shitting on firefox and using google's browser instead. that attitude could be changed.
What problem? I've been using Linux with Firefox for at least 15 years, and I've never thought this to be a problem. Linux is not an operating system for the unwashed masses, it's a specialist operating system for more technical oriented folks. It's less polished in many areas and requires some jumping through hoops at times as we all know. In return, you get a vastly better user experience if you're the right kind o…
The Famous Article points out that Mozilla is kept afloat by Google's search deal. Fans of the browser (starting with the guy in my mirror) need to start subscribing to services like their VPN or something to give Mozilla a better financial footing.
As a firefox and desktop linux user I don’t see any problem
As a Firefox and Linux user, I do see that problem. Hardware video acceleration is fine now, and apparently has been for some time. But e.g. Google Meet plainly refuses to blur the video call background when run on Firefox. It happily does that when running in Chromium.
That seems rather like a Google dark pattern where they take advantage of owning both sides of the communication channel to abuse some internal Chrome API that Firefox knows nothing about.
When is :has() coming to FF? It’s been too long.
What problem? I've been using Linux with Firefox for at least 15 years, and I've never thought this to be a problem. Linux is not an operating system for the unwashed masses, it's a specialist operating system for more technical oriented folks. It's less polished in many areas and requires some jumping through hoops at times as we all know. In return, you get a vastly better user experience if you're the right kind o…
I remember Linus and Luke from Linus tech tips on YouTube making a series about the Linux desktop, in the end they both had a bunch of very constructive criticism, things that the "more technical oriented folk" would just brush off as minimal issues that can be dealt with it at the end of the backlog. But those issues are actually quite important, and if there's a chance that Linux can be open to more people, then let's do what we can to make that chance a reality.
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As a Firefox and Linux user, I do see that problem. Hardware video acceleration is fine now, and apparently has been for some time. But e.g. Google Meet plainly refuses to blur the video call background when run on Firefox. It happily does that when running in Chromium.
As a Firefox on Linux user I also see a problem. It isn't that uncommon to see a feature drop on windows and mac before linux. And for a long time, there has been an issue where if you update Firefox with a linux package manager, you have to restart the whole browser, or the browser stops working. That isn't a problem on windows or mac (usually). And it isn't something you have to deal with with chromium on linux eit…
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It's got to be the hardware. Most people don't have two or three hours fixing their desktop after an update. I use Debian Testing, and I can't remember the last time an update went bad; it's been years. If you use bleeding-edge hardware with an OS that vendors aren't specifically targeting, expect problems. I gave up trying to put Linux on random new laptops, so I've researched compatibility ahead of every purchase I…
Feel like I'm on a different planet to a lot of these desktop Linux users. I've used desktop Linux since the late 90s - Redhat 6 was the first disto I used. I have had uncountable complete system failures since then. As the parent says doing a dist-upgrade has a very non-0 chance of completely bricking the system. I've even had apt brick itself multiple times through normal upgrades. Linux on the desktop for me over…
I remember often having to fix something when dist-upgrading Ubuntu when I used it on personal desktops between ~2005 and ~2014. I can't remember what kinds of issues there were, and apparently none of them entirely bricked the systems beyond repair since the same install survived throughout those years, but I remember it wasn't flawless.
But random breakage from standard updates within release is not something I remember happening on Debian, Ubuntu or modern Fedora with any frequency. (Except when I ran Debian unstable before Ubuntu, but that's a different story.) Double digit percentages, or even integer ones, do indeed sound like they are from a different planet.
I switched away from Ubuntu on the desktop over some dissatisfactions nearly a decade ago (and I never really ran Kubuntu) so I don't have much experience with that from recent years. But I've now had the same install of Fedora since 2014 that's gone through more release upgrades than I care to count, and while release upgrades still have a non-zero chance of breaking something, standard updates have been pretty much flawless.
I suspect there's something rather different about the setups of people who report no issues and that of someone who says standard updates frequently break in mainstream distros. Either there's a hardware difference or a difference in some kinds of 5% needs for the setup -- such as some specific software, specific peripherals, or specific needs. E.g. someone doing sound production might be much more likely to run into sound issues than someone whose sound needs are Netflix on USB headphones.
My last couple of personal devices have been ThinkPads that I picked in part specifically for the compatibility. The previous one with almost everything Intel worked pretty much 100% issue-free for years. I can imagine that if I instead had a random-brand consumer laptop or desktop, a wifi card with some kind of flaky half-support, proprietary NVidia drivers, some slightly niche peripherals, and the need to run some kind of a proprietary application dynamically linking with shared libraries from 2017, the story might be quite different.
Of course it might also be that some of us are just so used to dealing with fixing small issues or skirting around them that they just don't register for us any more. I think that's something that might also happen for some people -- tinkering is so natural that it doesn't feel like tinkering so tinkering doesn't exist -- and I wonder if that's part of the difference in the reported experiences.
But if someone reports a double-digit percentage of stuff breaking on a standard update, there's something else going on as well.
> In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop – KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions – would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Is it really the best solution to crea…
> Is it really the best solution to create a fork?
This is funny considering that WebKit was originally a fork of KHTML.