In most of my jobs, as soon as Firefox presented any kind of issue or inconsistency, support for it was dropped. In my first job, we had an inconsistency in how Firefox handled datalist vs how Chrome did. Firefox support officially ended at standup the next day.
That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do.
> That being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do.
You mean... if anyone has specific checks they want to have you do?
Not my practice area, but letting someone circumvent anti-terrorism banking laws seems like something you'd definitely want to seek legal advice about before acting.
I web develop first using Firefox and I can't ever remember a time that it failed to run on chrome.
Not sure if you remember the "good old days" when people coded only for IE (because what's the point... the rest be damned). We had EXACTLY this same attitude. MSFT then let IE6 stagnate.
Most likely we won't have the same fallout with chrome (as there are quite a few derivatives), but do we really want to just have one code base? (chromium).
Having competition is good. We should do whatever we can to stop Firefox dying, IMHO.
Webkit/Safari is the closest thing to competition that Chrome has. Firefox is so rarely used it that it doesn't really factor into any decision making anymore.
If Safari (especially iPhone) doesn't support something, that's a big deal. If Firefox doesn't support something, people shrug and move on.
"Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested.
If you want me to use a competitor, build one that doesn't fuck me over. Begging me to use something because "the other guy is too big!" is just not going to fly when I have to actually use it for practical purposes.
> "Competition" requires competitors to actually compete. Firefox is clearly not interested.
I exclusively use Firefox because of ublock on mobile. Other browsers cant compete. I have no issues using FF, and major annoyances when I use chrome on someone else's computer (wrong shortcut to open a new private tab, can't press backspace to navigate back 1 page in history, etc)
You can use what you want, but that doesn't really make Firefox relevant...
I think a lot of Firefox users also tend to be power users who have unusual settings and blockers, like you. To companies who own websites, that's even less incentive to support them.
Firefox users used to be the power user crowd, but "hardly anybody uses that feature so we removed it" changed all that. Nowadays Firefox users are little more than ideological contrarians.
I use mostly Firefox to support tech diversity on the web. (Also because it works for my use. So would Chrome/Chromium. I wouldn't use either if it didn't.)
I don't think that makes me an "ideological contrarian". That would mean opposing something just to oppose, and that's not why I'm doing it.
I exclusively used Firefox on mobile and desktop for years, and I complained to myself every time I updated, then told myself "but the only other option is google", then one day I updated the mobile browser and I was only allowed to install 5 "curated" add-ons.
I was done. I rage quit Firefox on all devices within an hour and I have not regretted the decision. I'm done making excuses for them.
Now I use kiwi browser on mobile (chromium fork with extensions support) and qutebrowser on desktop (uses chromium's engine, keyboard focused and fun to use) and ungoogled chromium for dev related stuff when I need to.
I don't like web browsers and I don't like the web. But I don't find myself constantly making excuses for a piece of software I have to use anymore.
If you're using web apps, you are already using a gazillion apps, you're just using tabs as a taskbar and one full screen window at a time. The browser becomes the OS. You're just changing where the abstraction happens, and creating a more hostile UX.
Consuming content is not the only focus of the web. In my opinion, it would be better to have an application to read documents, a different application to stream media, and if there's any complex interaction it warrants its own application, so things like chat, git GUIs like github, social interactions all warrant an application. It used to be like this, you had IM, IRC, a web browser that just delivered HTML documents, things were less user hostile and easier to implement. If we had continued along with this paradigm instead of cramming everything into http and web browsers I think we would have a better web today. For one, it wouldn't be impossible to implement a do it all browser from scratch, and you'd have a more open web than we have today.
> The browser becomes the OS. You're just changing where the abstraction happens.
That's probably correct.
For me, I think (for me) it's about control of content.
I detest using an app for newssite-A and another for newsite-B (I don't do this), especially if they bombard me with ads, popups and dark patterns to generate their objectives.
e.g. Twitter constantly messing with their stream, instagram going more towards videos.
It's a cesspool and I don't know how the average (not techie) finds it acceptable. Cable TV went this way and for me unwatchable.
With a browser, I can remove obnoxious ads, disable popups and fix css to my liking.
Not sure if we need to have protocol per content-type. The browser kinda does this already and gives me the control.
FTA:
"Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.
The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an “in-app browser”, controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user’s web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox."
Glad you found a solution that's working for you! I found it annoying when Firefox did that, but in a purely academic way - the only add-on I use is uBlock.
If a better browser comes along, great. But Firefox ain't it. Shrug. Nobody uses it because it's just not memorable or useful in any significant way, but it has more and more compatibility issues every year.
At work, we just deprecated Firefox last week too, after encountering some HTML Canvas performance bugs that have been around for years.
Firefox was less than 3% of our user base, even less than Edge, and we just didn't have the resources to keep debugging for one browser. Everything else is Blink and Webkit.
Same here. We just kept running into bugs with Firefox, especially with a lot of "newer" technologies like WebRTC.
It hurt to deprecate because I used to be such a Firefox fanboy. The last few years there's been a compounding effect of Chromium/Blink adding features that aren't supported elsewhere and Firefox just having a slew of very outdated bugs that haven't been fixed for years that have made it difficult to use. The percentage of our users who use Firefox has also steadily declined... most likely because we have to throw up "Unsupported browser, things may not work" warnings all over the place because the number of random bugs users keep running into.
I'm curious as to what these specific issues you guys are mentioning are. I browse the web largely with a Chrome UA string on Firefox and I don't think I've ever seen an actual problem. If I don't use a Chrome user agent though, I get a lot of "This site will only work in Chrome/Edge" or "This site doesn't work in Firefox" popup nonsense, which is especially funny when the sites function otherwise completely fine.
The same Canvas code runs fine on Webkit and Blink, but really really slow on certain Firefox builds (dependent on OS and CPU architecture). I'm not at work and don't have the bookmarks handy, but you can search their issue tracker and see dozens of open issues along those lines, stretching back more than 5 years and still unresolved.
I'm sure Firefox works fine for most sites, but if you're one of those that it has an issue with, well... just like IE, below a certain % of usage share, we just have to make the decision to not support it.
Actually, this was a learning experience that caused one of our devs to switch from Firefox to Chrome too. We didn't realize how far behind Firefox had gotten until we had to debug the issue and read through their tracker. Mozilla just ignored the threads after a while and they kept building and building.
We haven't put up a warning banner yet but probably should. It's like IE all over again lol.
I have another similar story. Firefox didn't behave nicely and after multiple days of investigation (I am not well versed in front end, neither are most people in my org) we decided to just let it be broken and advises customers to use Chrome.
I still personally use Firefox, at home and at work and will continue to do so. But the writing is appearing on the wall and it doesn't look pretty.
It's one thing to not officially support a browser. It's another to say "we're going to try to figure out if you're using this browser, and if so, intentionally lock you out".
Generally speaking it's due to not wanting to test multiple browsers (laziness).
However, at $BIG_CORP, we had a massive internal website that did exactly this. Naturally, people bypassed this by changing their user-agent. When the product owner realized this, he flew into a rage on Slack and threatened that people bypassing the block could be help criminally responsible for damaging infrastructure. I never figured out what his reasoning was.
Could be the site was configured to use IE6 NTLM authentication, which other browsers don’t support. Could be to maintain an audit trail of who accessed what, eg for SOX compliance reasons. It was / is not uncommon for big corporations with an SOE / golden image with Windows vXX and IE vXX to do this. Not saying this to defend his / her dickhead behaviour, though.
It’s very different (and extremely lazy) for a public web site.
Why support niche browser nobody use? This is on Mozilla management spending money on everything but browser and their devs introducing nonsense features nobody asked for instead basic ones, heck their Android version still didn't have pull down to refresh and pretty much no extension support.
Weird. This is not at all my experience. I haven't been using Firefox for 30 years, since it hasn't existed that long, but I've been using it since it was first working.
Weird. I was using Mosaic on DECs at the beginning of the 90s (when WWW came to university around 1993), then Netscape (commercial "fork" of Mosaic) on SGIs (at my first startup) and then Firefox on Linux.
[Edit] I still remember Coherence also [1], yes I'm that old ;-)
> Mozilla was hijacked by political activists who wanted to change the internet and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on non-browser things.
Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists who wanted to change the space the org was focussed on, and it started out spending lots of resources on non-browser things, too.
No, Mozilla was founded by developers and tech people to create a browser from the Netscape sources.
Mozilla says so itself
"The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code. It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. "
Yes, that's the goal they wanted to harness the power of “thousands of programmers on the internet” for. The quote doesn't say anything about who the founders were beyond their activist goals.
Mosaic was released 1993 [1]. Mosaic was from NCSA and commercialized as Mosaic Netscape [2] by Mosaic managers and developers. Mozilla was the open sourcing of the Netscape code to provide a basis for Netscape browser to compete with Microsoft. Firefox was a branch off from Mozilla and after several name changes (Phoenix, Firebird) [3] became Firefox.
Agreed and same here. Now they're spending their money on lobbying the government for rules in their favor, rather than on improving the product.
I loved the idea of a mobile browser that supported extensions! But they just haven't invested enough to keep it performant. I still use Firefox on mobile now and then, but largely had to switch to the DuckDuckGo mobile browser.
I don't think people really value online privacy all that much. They choose to use Facebook and Google despite everything. And there's always Chromium spinoffs like Brave and Edge with much better compatibility and similar protections. Firefox offers nothing special anymore.
And while Google isn't exactly benevolent, Chrome doesn't spam you with ads the way Firefox constantly does with its suggestions and whatever the hell Pocket is.
Those people probably don’t fully understand how pervasive the tracking is. If they did, they would care. When Apple launched the tracking prompt in iOS, Facebook took out ads warning people how bad it was going to be for them, and the results proved their fears right. When asked, almost everyone chooses “no”, and I suspect many of the “yes”es are misclicks.
My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy.
But if it inconveniences them, whether it's having to click through five menus to disallow cookies or having to use Firefox, most just won't bother.
People always say they care if you ask them, but if you look at their behaviors, almost nobody actually does. It's just a nice to have, not a necessity.
> My takeaway from that is that people will choose privacy if it doesn't cost them anything and is easy.
Agreeing with the above, an alternative take on the rest is that people will not choose privacy if it is expensive and difficult. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a necessity, just that they can’t afford it and/or can’t work out how to get it.
The organisations involved in invading end user privacy employ large numbers of psychologists to deliberately design things that make being privacy-conscious difficult (mentally taxing / expensive / path of most resistance). When the population at large is (unknowingly) fighting against an highly armed adversary, it feels uncharitable to claim that they don’t care.
We’re losing a war the vast majority don’t even realise is happening.
I don't know, I think there's also room for people (like me) who understand the tracking going on and are frankly just fine with it. These privacy fears have been around since the 90s, when people were terrified of using their real names online. But they're just not a big deal to many people.
Watching Apple and Facebook duke it out was mildly entertaining, but at the end of the day, life went on without much difference.
I've had my Google account privacy turned way down for years because I found that recommendations were better when Google knew everything about me. I didn't mind giving Google all that data. What finally stopped me wasn't privacy concerns, but that all my trivial web searches started to leak into a redesigned Google News, leading to it becoming useless. I was sad, because I would rather they have implemented more controls over the feed algorithm rather than force me to turn off history-based recommendations. Guess they're taking a play out of tiktok's book?
For a decade, Google has known my precise location at all times, my browsing history, my weight, my heart rate, my emails and texts, my pictures... and you know what? Nothing much has happened. It wasn't a huge positive or negative.
Privacy just isn't a big deal day in and day out. Nobody has any today and somehow we're OK...
"If they knew what I know, they'd care like I do." This is an extremely easy main-character mindset to fall into. The truth of the matter is that for a lot of people, perhaps even most, they wouldn't care even if they knew as much as you.
For most people, they see how convenient services are, how good they are at recommending products you may want to buy, friends you may want to connect with, videos you may want to watch, etc. They perceive ads as payment for using these services. They see privacy popups and prompts as frustrating interferences.
They understand at some level that the companies are doing it deliberately, that they're making handing over your data as easy and convenient as possible and opting out as hard as possible; that those cookie prompts are incredibly obnoxious to coerce you into just clicking "Accept All". But human nature is human nature and people generally prefer the convenience.
Sure, but that's not the same thing: people overwhelmingly choosing to opt out when presented with a binary yes/no prompt is not the same thing as caring as much as you about privacy. Those people aren't going to start campaigning for privacy regulation because they opted out of Facebook's additional tracking. I generally refer to this as the "Don't Send" principle, if you remember those old Windows errors.
> They perceive ads as payment for using these services.
The problem is that they've been tricked into thinking 'ads' are the cost that they pay. The reality is that they'll be paying for the rest of their lives in ways they never thought were possible and with no way to back out.
The more people start to learn about how the data they've surrendered for a tiny bit of convenience is, and has been, being used against them they'll slowly come to realize that they've been ripped off and had no idea what they were giving up. They'll discover that they were lied to when they were told the services they enjoy couldn't exist without that sacrifice. By the time most of them catch on it'll be to late, but they'll certainly care then.
The average person _does not_ care in the slightest. I have family and friends I have explained the tracking to, with proof, sources, up to date recent news, etc. I've explained how and why those companies and applications work, including apps like TikTok. Invariably the answer has been "So what?" and even "I don't have a problem with targeted ads, they're more relevant and good!". Or "I don't care if it's spying on me, everything is. It's fun".
PEOPLE in general do not care, even if they claim to know about the tracking.
People in general are animals that do not reason abstractly, but rather react emotionally. I've had conversations with family members that were already coming into the conversation caring about being "tracked by GPS satellites", and I've tried to explain that it's mostly software on your phone doing the tracking, and that there are ways to mitigate much of it. Rather than seeing that I share their concern, work with technology, and perhaps they could pick up some tips for me, I just got othered for not mirroring their party line of being helplessly attacked.
So no, abstractly trying to tell people they're being continually surveilled and trying to get them to care is not a useful indicator. Even if you could obtain and present the contents of their permanent records in a shocking way, there's a good chance they'd just react to the overwhelmingness with cognitive dissonance.
I have had nearly the opposite experience, for what it's worth. Long conversations with non-technical family members about the pervasiveness of tracking and surveillance. A lot of them share my hatred for social media platforms and identify the 'correct' (in my opinion) issues with these platforms (pseudo-quantification of opinion via like buttons instead of nuanced interactions, mercurial algorithms tailored to individuals destroying any sense of shared reality, etc.).
Of course, none of them will actually take the leap and leave these platforms as I have, but I think people are willing to actually recognize these issues. Just depends on who they are. Maybe if you're talking with people you could talk about how this surveillance isn't just used for ads, that the data collected by advertisers is purchased by law enforcement agencies to circumvent legal requirements for warrants, that the police (in the US) with zero oversight can track your every movement via these databases, in open contravention of the spirit of the laws that "regulate" them.
Also, I think that the corpo line that surveillance results in "better" ads is simply untrue. I've heard so many people complain about irrelevant ads being served to them. I think there is a growing group of people who feel insulted by the shallow way they are typecast by these ads. A family member who is a carpenter who gets advertised consumerist "manly" products comes to mind. Because ultimately they are not serving you what you want, they are serving you what you are statistically most likely to click on. And at least most people I have asked, have never even clicked on an Instagram or Facebook ad. So the ads presented to "you" are really being presented to a consumerist ad-clicker alternate reality version of you, it is a fundamental disconnect. I think the value advertisers gain from increased "engagement" on ads is increasingly being paid for in the form of alienation of the kinds of people who will simply never respond to this kind of advertising.
> "I don't have a problem with targeted ads, they're more relevant and good!"
They don't care because they don't understand. It's not about 'ads'. the data they give up will increasingly be used against them in ways that matter greatly (like how much they pay for something vs their neighbor, or if they do or don't get offered a job) and in even the most mundane aspects of their life (like how long they wait on hold). If an occasional ad were the true cost they were paying for the fun they're having it wouldn't matter, but that's not the case. They'll be paying over and over for the rest of their lives as the data that's been collected is used against them by everyone who can leverage it for their own advantage.
> “I don't think people really value online privacy all that much.”
I’m not far from this position, because on the face of it, privacy is only a claim proven false with the loss of privacy. Meanwhile, I still use Facebook to check on my family, etc.
What are you talking about? Google spams you to use Chrome every time you visit their website. Literally the most used website in the world, tells you to use Chrome any time you're not using Chrome.
Firefox shot themselves in the foot by having such a painfully slow mobile version. For years, almost every review on Google Play complained about its sluggishness. Yet Mozilla seemed content to keep describing it as "fast" as if that alone fixed the problem.
They also, for some unaccountable reason --and, again, in the face of countless complaints dating back years--- removed the 'text reflow' function, which basically made half the web unreadable on mobile [for me, anyway].
And, as mentioned above, their stupid 'curated extensions' policy was the icing on the cake.
Firefox come across like Apple these days "We know what you want, better than you do"
Haven't followed the mobile browser scene so correct me if things have changed, but the main draw for FF on mobile (at least on Android) has been:
- Autoplay in the background without YouTube Premium
- Extensions - specifically uBlock Origin, making it an option (the only?) for ad blocking on mobile.
- Sync your FF data between desktops and mobile - great if I need to access something on the go without a password manager.
I hate its sluggishness as well but the pros are pretty hefty IMO.
For those using F-Droid, there's also Bromite, an ungoogled Chromium with ad blocking built in. Haven't used it too much.
I use Yandex browser [Chromium-based] on Android. Like all mobile browsers, it's a piece of crap. But it's the least piece of crap one I've found so far. The only mobile browser that offers text-reflow[0] AND the ability to install any extension [1][2]
[0] Kiwi browser also has text-reflow. But the implementation is terrible. Yandex's works really well.
[1]Kiwi Browser also offers full extension support
[2] Yandex makes you jump through hoops to install some extensions by refusing to install them as 'incompatible'. However by enabling Developer Mode and using 'Load Unpacked' you can usually get around this. I run Yandex browser on Android with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ViolentMonkey, Windscribe VPN and I Don't Care ABout Cookies.
BTW --to pre-empt the tediously predictable:
* I use <Russian product>
* Ha! All your data belong to Vladimir Putin!
or
* I use <Chinese product>
* Ha! All your data belong to CCP!
responses
If I didn't use Yandex browser on Android, Kiwi browser would be my second choice. On paper, it offers the same must-have features as Yandex; text-reflow and full extension support. But, in practice, I find it pretty clunky and glitchy.
And, the reason I brought up the subject of Firefox mobile, in the discussion of Firefox's demise is that:
1. For quite a while now, more people have been browsing the web on mobile than on desktop. So having a decent mobile version of your browser is paramount
2: Many people [myself included] enjoy the convenience of being able to 'pick up where we left off' when switching between using browsers on our laptops / desktops /mobile devices. So finding one browser that we can use [and sync] across all devices is preferred.
I still have Firefox on my laptops & desktops. But, these days, I rarely ever fire it up, as I know anything I do on there will be lost to me when I switch to one of my mobile devices.
They screwed up a lot, but the real reason they lost is because they were sabotaged at every step by Google. Remember the “oopsies” where Google sites were breaking on Firefox and the advertising and bundling onslought for Chrome.
Google was being obviously anti-competitive and the US authorities were giving zero fucks as usual.
With a heavy heart, I recently switched from FF to Chrome. My primary credit card payments were not going through in FF. It wasn't redirecting back to merchant site from payment processors website after entering card details. It is still my primary browser on phone but I am not sure how long it will last.
I tried and it worked. Then I disabled extensions one by one and found the culprit. Firefox is back as my default browser. Feels like I am back home. :D
But why? There are other better options than Chrome, I use for instance Vivaldi on desktop and Kiwi on Android since it supports extensions, Edge is also decent on desktop and mobile (but no extensions there).
I'd recommend Vivaldi on desktop, much more user friendly than Edge, I guess their mobile offering won't be much worse as well, though never tried, since I'm happy with Kiwi browsers with extensions.
I understand if Firefox has some issues for this bank but this is a public-facing site of a multi-BILLION dollar bank.
TD Bank owns MBNA and their unwillingness to test and support Firefox seems to echo the comments in here that it's just laziness. It isn't like users are trying to run some cutting edge game experience.
1. Create a firefox addon called "workaround for MBNA"
2. The addon simply opens an email with the subject "Dear MBNA I will be closing my account because you don't support firefox". Plus twitter, etc.
My guess is that they have few users using Firefox plus either (a) some Firefox-specific vuln was blown way out of proportion, enough to get Legal to block this browser, or (b) their front-end devs haven't discovered Playwright yet and don't know how to run e2es against it, which MBNA considers a non-starter
Either way, horrible decision on their part, especially now that firefox usage might be ramping up due to Manifest v3 concerns
117 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThat being said, I do have a (largely dormant) MBNA account if anyone has specific checks they want to do.
You mean... if anyone has specific checks they want to have you do?
Not my practice area, but letting someone circumvent anti-terrorism banking laws seems like something you'd definitely want to seek legal advice about before acting.
Not sure if you remember the "good old days" when people coded only for IE (because what's the point... the rest be damned). We had EXACTLY this same attitude. MSFT then let IE6 stagnate.
Most likely we won't have the same fallout with chrome (as there are quite a few derivatives), but do we really want to just have one code base? (chromium).
Having competition is good. We should do whatever we can to stop Firefox dying, IMHO.
[1] https://www.quippd.com/writing/2022/07/19/MBNA-stops-support...
However, this has long had American precedents.
Both Airbnb and Groupon built for Chrome as of 2017.
https://thenextweb.com/news/please-build-websites-web-not-ju...
Canada excels in diplomacy and things-like-that though.
And you won’t find governments doing much better on this front.
I get your point, but if big tech isn't willing/able to handle multiple browsers, MBNA is not going to be able to do it.
If Safari (especially iPhone) doesn't support something, that's a big deal. If Firefox doesn't support something, people shrug and move on.
If you want me to use a competitor, build one that doesn't fuck me over. Begging me to use something because "the other guy is too big!" is just not going to fly when I have to actually use it for practical purposes.
I exclusively use Firefox because of ublock on mobile. Other browsers cant compete. I have no issues using FF, and major annoyances when I use chrome on someone else's computer (wrong shortcut to open a new private tab, can't press backspace to navigate back 1 page in history, etc)
I think a lot of Firefox users also tend to be power users who have unusual settings and blockers, like you. To companies who own websites, that's even less incentive to support them.
Ideological contrarian? Seriously? Grow up.
I don't think that makes me an "ideological contrarian". That would mean opposing something just to oppose, and that's not why I'm doing it.
I was done. I rage quit Firefox on all devices within an hour and I have not regretted the decision. I'm done making excuses for them.
Now I use kiwi browser on mobile (chromium fork with extensions support) and qutebrowser on desktop (uses chromium's engine, keyboard focused and fun to use) and ungoogled chromium for dev related stuff when I need to.
I don't like web browsers and I don't like the web. But I don't find myself constantly making excuses for a piece of software I have to use anymore.
Errh.. the web gives you the ability to switch browsers (to kiwi or qutebrowser).
I strongly believe in the open-web (although I agree it was a pita with android firefox and their limited set of addons).
I shudder at the prospect of using a gazillion apps to consume content, like I see others doing.
If you're using web apps, you are already using a gazillion apps, you're just using tabs as a taskbar and one full screen window at a time. The browser becomes the OS. You're just changing where the abstraction happens, and creating a more hostile UX.
Consuming content is not the only focus of the web. In my opinion, it would be better to have an application to read documents, a different application to stream media, and if there's any complex interaction it warrants its own application, so things like chat, git GUIs like github, social interactions all warrant an application. It used to be like this, you had IM, IRC, a web browser that just delivered HTML documents, things were less user hostile and easier to implement. If we had continued along with this paradigm instead of cramming everything into http and web browsers I think we would have a better web today. For one, it wouldn't be impossible to implement a do it all browser from scratch, and you'd have a more open web than we have today.
That's probably correct.
For me, I think (for me) it's about control of content.
I detest using an app for newssite-A and another for newsite-B (I don't do this), especially if they bombard me with ads, popups and dark patterns to generate their objectives.
e.g. Twitter constantly messing with their stream, instagram going more towards videos.
It's a cesspool and I don't know how the average (not techie) finds it acceptable. Cable TV went this way and for me unwatchable.
With a browser, I can remove obnoxious ads, disable popups and fix css to my liking.
Not sure if we need to have protocol per content-type. The browser kinda does this already and gives me the control.
FTA: "Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been rewriting websites its users visit, letting the company follow them across the web after they click links in its apps, according to new research from an ex-Google engineer.
The two apps have been taking advantage of the fact that users who click on links are taken to webpages in an “in-app browser”, controlled by Facebook or Instagram, rather than sent to the user’s web browser of choice, such as Safari or Firefox."
Sigh
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/11/meta-inje...
Firefox was less than 3% of our user base, even less than Edge, and we just didn't have the resources to keep debugging for one browser. Everything else is Blink and Webkit.
RIP...
It hurt to deprecate because I used to be such a Firefox fanboy. The last few years there's been a compounding effect of Chromium/Blink adding features that aren't supported elsewhere and Firefox just having a slew of very outdated bugs that haven't been fixed for years that have made it difficult to use. The percentage of our users who use Firefox has also steadily declined... most likely because we have to throw up "Unsupported browser, things may not work" warnings all over the place because the number of random bugs users keep running into.
I'm sure Firefox works fine for most sites, but if you're one of those that it has an issue with, well... just like IE, below a certain % of usage share, we just have to make the decision to not support it.
Actually, this was a learning experience that caused one of our devs to switch from Firefox to Chrome too. We didn't realize how far behind Firefox had gotten until we had to debug the issue and read through their tracker. Mozilla just ignored the threads after a while and they kept building and building.
We haven't put up a warning banner yet but probably should. It's like IE all over again lol.
I still personally use Firefox, at home and at work and will continue to do so. But the writing is appearing on the wall and it doesn't look pretty.
However, at $BIG_CORP, we had a massive internal website that did exactly this. Naturally, people bypassed this by changing their user-agent. When the product owner realized this, he flew into a rage on Slack and threatened that people bypassing the block could be help criminally responsible for damaging infrastructure. I never figured out what his reasoning was.
It’s very different (and extremely lazy) for a public web site.
Mozilla isn't fully blameless but Web is turning into OS 2.0
Probably being a control freak, then making shit up to try and force ppl to follow his dictates.
[Edit] I still remember Coherence also [1], yes I'm that old ;-)
[1] "Cameron made a joke every 30 secs - noone laughed in the audience though I found them all funny." https://svese.dev/i-want-to-meet-cameron-purdy/
Mozilla, like most nonprofits, has always been run by activists who wanted to change the space the org was focussed on, and it started out spending lots of resources on non-browser things, too.
Mozilla says so itself
"The Mozilla project was created in 1998 with the release of the Netscape browser suite source code. It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet and fuel unprecedented levels of innovation in the browser market. "
> No, Mozilla was founded by developers and tech people
“Developers and tech people” can also be activists, so that's not a contradiction, but...
> Mozilla says so itself
Except it doesn't in the material you quote, it says (emphasis added):
> It was intended to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the internet
It doesn't say it was founded by tech people, it says it was founded with the (activist!) intent to harness the power of tech people.
It explicitly says (emphasis added) "levels of innovation in the browser market."
And they have the nerve to beg for money in a very obtrusive way.
Good riddance.
Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004, see https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/11/mozilla-foundation-re...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape#Early_years [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#History
I loved the idea of a mobile browser that supported extensions! But they just haven't invested enough to keep it performant. I still use Firefox on mobile now and then, but largely had to switch to the DuckDuckGo mobile browser.
There are a few sites that don't work in it, but it tends to hew closer to the standards than the proprietary lock-in browsers.
And while Google isn't exactly benevolent, Chrome doesn't spam you with ads the way Firefox constantly does with its suggestions and whatever the hell Pocket is.
But if it inconveniences them, whether it's having to click through five menus to disallow cookies or having to use Firefox, most just won't bother.
People always say they care if you ask them, but if you look at their behaviors, almost nobody actually does. It's just a nice to have, not a necessity.
Agreeing with the above, an alternative take on the rest is that people will not choose privacy if it is expensive and difficult. This doesn’t mean that it’s not a necessity, just that they can’t afford it and/or can’t work out how to get it.
The organisations involved in invading end user privacy employ large numbers of psychologists to deliberately design things that make being privacy-conscious difficult (mentally taxing / expensive / path of most resistance). When the population at large is (unknowingly) fighting against an highly armed adversary, it feels uncharitable to claim that they don’t care.
We’re losing a war the vast majority don’t even realise is happening.
Watching Apple and Facebook duke it out was mildly entertaining, but at the end of the day, life went on without much difference.
I've had my Google account privacy turned way down for years because I found that recommendations were better when Google knew everything about me. I didn't mind giving Google all that data. What finally stopped me wasn't privacy concerns, but that all my trivial web searches started to leak into a redesigned Google News, leading to it becoming useless. I was sad, because I would rather they have implemented more controls over the feed algorithm rather than force me to turn off history-based recommendations. Guess they're taking a play out of tiktok's book?
For a decade, Google has known my precise location at all times, my browsing history, my weight, my heart rate, my emails and texts, my pictures... and you know what? Nothing much has happened. It wasn't a huge positive or negative.
Privacy just isn't a big deal day in and day out. Nobody has any today and somehow we're OK...
For most people, they see how convenient services are, how good they are at recommending products you may want to buy, friends you may want to connect with, videos you may want to watch, etc. They perceive ads as payment for using these services. They see privacy popups and prompts as frustrating interferences.
They understand at some level that the companies are doing it deliberately, that they're making handing over your data as easy and convenient as possible and opting out as hard as possible; that those cookie prompts are incredibly obnoxious to coerce you into just clicking "Accept All". But human nature is human nature and people generally prefer the convenience.
That was the whole thrust of what Facebook was objecting too; they didn't want people to have a choice.
The problem is that they've been tricked into thinking 'ads' are the cost that they pay. The reality is that they'll be paying for the rest of their lives in ways they never thought were possible and with no way to back out.
The more people start to learn about how the data they've surrendered for a tiny bit of convenience is, and has been, being used against them they'll slowly come to realize that they've been ripped off and had no idea what they were giving up. They'll discover that they were lied to when they were told the services they enjoy couldn't exist without that sacrifice. By the time most of them catch on it'll be to late, but they'll certainly care then.
PEOPLE in general do not care, even if they claim to know about the tracking.
So no, abstractly trying to tell people they're being continually surveilled and trying to get them to care is not a useful indicator. Even if you could obtain and present the contents of their permanent records in a shocking way, there's a good chance they'd just react to the overwhelmingness with cognitive dissonance.
Of course, none of them will actually take the leap and leave these platforms as I have, but I think people are willing to actually recognize these issues. Just depends on who they are. Maybe if you're talking with people you could talk about how this surveillance isn't just used for ads, that the data collected by advertisers is purchased by law enforcement agencies to circumvent legal requirements for warrants, that the police (in the US) with zero oversight can track your every movement via these databases, in open contravention of the spirit of the laws that "regulate" them.
Also, I think that the corpo line that surveillance results in "better" ads is simply untrue. I've heard so many people complain about irrelevant ads being served to them. I think there is a growing group of people who feel insulted by the shallow way they are typecast by these ads. A family member who is a carpenter who gets advertised consumerist "manly" products comes to mind. Because ultimately they are not serving you what you want, they are serving you what you are statistically most likely to click on. And at least most people I have asked, have never even clicked on an Instagram or Facebook ad. So the ads presented to "you" are really being presented to a consumerist ad-clicker alternate reality version of you, it is a fundamental disconnect. I think the value advertisers gain from increased "engagement" on ads is increasingly being paid for in the form of alienation of the kinds of people who will simply never respond to this kind of advertising.
They don't care because they don't understand. It's not about 'ads'. the data they give up will increasingly be used against them in ways that matter greatly (like how much they pay for something vs their neighbor, or if they do or don't get offered a job) and in even the most mundane aspects of their life (like how long they wait on hold). If an occasional ad were the true cost they were paying for the fun they're having it wouldn't matter, but that's not the case. They'll be paying over and over for the rest of their lives as the data that's been collected is used against them by everyone who can leverage it for their own advantage.
I’m not far from this position, because on the face of it, privacy is only a claim proven false with the loss of privacy. Meanwhile, I still use Facebook to check on my family, etc.
They also, for some unaccountable reason --and, again, in the face of countless complaints dating back years--- removed the 'text reflow' function, which basically made half the web unreadable on mobile [for me, anyway].
And, as mentioned above, their stupid 'curated extensions' policy was the icing on the cake.
Firefox come across like Apple these days "We know what you want, better than you do"
- Autoplay in the background without YouTube Premium - Extensions - specifically uBlock Origin, making it an option (the only?) for ad blocking on mobile. - Sync your FF data between desktops and mobile - great if I need to access something on the go without a password manager.
I hate its sluggishness as well but the pros are pretty hefty IMO.
For those using F-Droid, there's also Bromite, an ungoogled Chromium with ad blocking built in. Haven't used it too much.
I use Yandex browser [Chromium-based] on Android. Like all mobile browsers, it's a piece of crap. But it's the least piece of crap one I've found so far. The only mobile browser that offers text-reflow[0] AND the ability to install any extension [1][2]
[0] Kiwi browser also has text-reflow. But the implementation is terrible. Yandex's works really well.
[1]Kiwi Browser also offers full extension support
[2] Yandex makes you jump through hoops to install some extensions by refusing to install them as 'incompatible'. However by enabling Developer Mode and using 'Load Unpacked' you can usually get around this. I run Yandex browser on Android with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, ViolentMonkey, Windscribe VPN and I Don't Care ABout Cookies.
BTW --to pre-empt the tediously predictable:
* I use <Russian product>
* Ha! All your data belong to Vladimir Putin!
or
* I use <Chinese product>
* Ha! All your data belong to CCP!
responses
If I didn't use Yandex browser on Android, Kiwi browser would be my second choice. On paper, it offers the same must-have features as Yandex; text-reflow and full extension support. But, in practice, I find it pretty clunky and glitchy.
And, the reason I brought up the subject of Firefox mobile, in the discussion of Firefox's demise is that:
1. For quite a while now, more people have been browsing the web on mobile than on desktop. So having a decent mobile version of your browser is paramount
2: Many people [myself included] enjoy the convenience of being able to 'pick up where we left off' when switching between using browsers on our laptops / desktops /mobile devices. So finding one browser that we can use [and sync] across all devices is preferred.
I still have Firefox on my laptops & desktops. But, these days, I rarely ever fire it up, as I know anything I do on there will be lost to me when I switch to one of my mobile devices.
Google was being obviously anti-competitive and the US authorities were giving zero fucks as usual.
TD Bank owns MBNA and their unwillingness to test and support Firefox seems to echo the comments in here that it's just laziness. It isn't like users are trying to run some cutting edge game experience.
1. Create a firefox addon called "workaround for MBNA" 2. The addon simply opens an email with the subject "Dear MBNA I will be closing my account because you don't support firefox". Plus twitter, etc.
Either way, horrible decision on their part, especially now that firefox usage might be ramping up due to Manifest v3 concerns
> The following desktop browsers are supported on this site: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Safari (macOS only).