It certainly does to me....Firefox and ublock origin makes using the modern web easier. Anytime I use some other combination (at work, or someone else's device) I can't stand most websites.
I know there are problems around Mozilla the org, or the how firefox is funded, but I hope it's not going anywhere.
Having the software is not enough. A web browser is not one and done. Without a development team behind it, Firefox would fall even further into obscurity. Also, a failure at Mozilla would send a pretty clear message that the whole idea is untenable.
This idea that Google is pushing too many features is just silly.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been losing to native mobile apps and closed ecosystems. For many people, Facebook's mobile app is the Internet, and they're installing it from a closed app store. The web is an open application platform, whether you like it or not, and it either evolves to compete with mobile apps, or it's going to die.
For this reason, Google does more to preserve the open web than its competition in the browser space. And yes, I find these stats worrying when opened in Firefox:
And look, if you want to use a text-based browser like it's the 90s, go for it, but I'm pretty sure that most people are glad to see apps running in their full-fledged browser; because the browser is cross-platform, it's the perfect sandbox, and opening a web page isn't gated. YMMV.
Firefox and uBlock Origin definitely make the web more usable and I’m shocked when I occasionally see what a non-techie friend’s browser screen looks like. However, adblock is only a band-aid over the dying of the web overall. Blogs are dead, forums are dead, ostensible replacements like Reddit or microblogging sites suffer from the decline in longform text and nuance (as their userbase is overwhelmingly contributing from mobile devices now). So much information that would have once been presented in efficient text is now in time-wasting video, etc.
Thanks to LibGen and Anna’s Archive, I find myself reading actual books more these days, many published long before I was even born, to scratch my itch for learning. Wikipedia aside, a bunch of pirated grayscale scans from university libraries is suddenly more fulfilling than the information superhighway that the web was hyped to be.
It is untrustworthy as it will keep turning on features. Example - sync. If you aren't using sync, it will eventually turn it on. If you aren't syncing history it will turn that on at some point.
I use Firefox on both iOS and desktop. A few days ago, I was surprised to find two new shortcuts on my new tab page in Firefox on my phone (to Expedia and adidas).
My first thought was that I must have accidentally visited a website or downloaded something that exploited the browser to insert advertising shortcuts. However, I discovered that this is actually a built-in Firefox feature called 'Sponsored Shortcuts.'
Mozilla could have been an exemplary company, but they continue to squander the trust people place in them. It's shameful.
I remember years ago when I first tried clearing browser cookies - they would quickly reappear. I tracked it down to all the pre-populated favorites that would visit a website when the browser launched.
They do stupid things like this once in a while. They dont even need the money, which is a rounding error compared to what Google pays them every year.
This is just a greedy clueless MBAs trying to show themselves they are not useless. Can't wait for Ladybird to hit stable.
While sponsored shortcuts are not exactly good it's still insanely better than the alternatives that will stop supporting good ad-blocking, or the other one that will ignore the user choice of not making it the default and keep starting anyway when you use some other software/OS from the same company.
The defaults of Firefox may not be optimal but they're easy to change and don't pester you to change them back.
(with that being said I sure would like it if Firefox remembered my choice to disable sponsored shortcuts in my synchronization account)
It's sad that it took less than 20 years for Mozilla to pivot to being an ad-tech company that collects the browsing history of Firefox users and puts it into the hands of third parties and ultimately advertisers.
Firefox still matters because we don't have a good independent replacement yet which actually rejects surveillance capitalism, just privacy protecting forks that remove the data collection, but it's not really clear how well they'd be maintained and developed if work stopped on Firefox.
I have to say that besides the gradual decline in respecting user privacy Firefox has been a great browser. I've been using it since switching from Netscape. Before they got involved with Anonym I would recommend it to anyone. With a bit of work and a lot of about:config edits you can lock firefox down harder than anything else. That's a niche no other browser has much interest in.
Have you heard the tragedy of Internet Explorer 6?
It is said that this browser was so good, so ahead of the others from his time, that he achieved the power to... monopolize the entire web stack. Ultimately achieving 95% market share, websites for a while didn't bother to support other browsers.
However, time passed. IE6 got old and other browsers got progressively better. Suddenly, IE6 that was so good (compared to the 5.1 and 5.5 era and its competitors) was not so hot anymore.
So, we transitioned to the better browsers, right? Wrong! Companies that homologated IE6 took almost a decade to transition. Devs took almost a decade to cultivate a workable cross-browser culture. There was a particular dark era that required you to support 3 or 4 different IE versions (6 through 10), each one with its own quirks.
So, yeah. Anyone who lived through that era will never, ever, support a single browser implementation. It is a deep trauma. We want browsers to get their shit together, so huge gaps like that will not happen again.
2.65% global marketshare on statcounter would suggest Firefox doesn't matter.
Its a shame really. But unless something drastic happens, to bring Firefox back into relevancy, I don't see its trend towards obscurity changing.
Things matter for their niche. Populations respect Paretian distribution - the worth typically leans on one side -, hence niches matter, hence do their practices.
But why would that interpretation of 'matter' matter?
There is not much real choice when it comes to WWW browsers. For people that refuse Chrome, Safari and Samsung (distrust is sufficient), the 1-digit-percent remainder is the actual solutions space.
So: either things "matter" in practical terms, e.g. choice, which as said can be pretty scarce, so all plausible options are important, or why should the idea of "matter" be important at all.
The question is why they focused on DEI, weird social activism so much and not on engineering itself.
Look at SQLite. SQLite is notable example where they don’t even have CoC(!) and focus only on getting engineering done. No marketing, events, sponsorships.
> Look at SQLite. SQLite is notable example where they don’t even have CoC(!) and focus only on getting engineering done. No marketing, events, sponsorships.
They kind of do have a CoC, called Code of Ethics.
But it's probably not what "tolerant" people are looking for. And it's
fine.
Also, SQLite is open-source, but not open to contribution, so they can
"get away with it". Although I completely support their model of doing
development.
So you want absolute religious zeal in open source? As opposed to "tolerance" quotes from your link ..
"First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. "
"Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." "
"Fulfill not the desires of the flesh; hate your own will. '
I hate sjw corrupting coc's invading the foss meritocracy as much as the next guy but this is so radicaly on the other side of the spectrum I think I hate it just as much .. being reactionary to sjws like this is still letting them win.
All I've said is that I support their development model, meaning that I
support their choice not to allow thirdparty commits in their code.
As for your highlighted excerpts, the first one says about having
respect for the rules. Second one is about respecting the chain of
command. Third rule is about having self control over oneself, and
discipline.
Of course you've also failed to mention that in that COE there is also a
comment that you're free to not obey those rules. They've just written
those down, but you're not expected to follow it.
Ladybird is indeed very interesting. But it's too soon to tell whether it will be successful, and how, if it is, it will get the money to maintain its development in the long term.
To me? Yes but very little. So little that for weeks I don’t even look at it. It’s the representative second browser which I install on a new machine or fresh (desktop; which sadly has been just mac of late) OS install mostly out of habit since college. Then I use it when I have to open a website that, once in a while refuses to open in Safari (which incidentally has been happening more often lately).
The thing is Firefox (and Mozilla) became very off putting. They did things which weren’t exemplary or ideal - yes, when you are Firefox your very existence in my books is based off the premise of you trying to be ideal (because if you are not there really are good and better alternatives) - and they kept doing it, still do.
Had I not been on the Internet long enough I would have assumed Firefox still generally matters just seeing comments online just like a lot of folks assumed this US election result was to be a landslide (in opposite direction) from Reddit alone :)
The real value of Firefox is to have a serious browser vendor that is not wholly owned by a FAANG company, and it still to some extent focused on the user's needs rather than its parent company's agenda. Having a third browser engine which is neither WebKit or Blink is a win too.
Implementation diversity is absolutely essential to an open-standards based Web, and right now the Web is pretty much the only open channel for pretty much all of human discourse.
Having said which, Mozilla is in real trouble, and desparately need to sort out their business model.
46 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadI know there are problems around Mozilla the org, or the how firefox is funded, but I hope it's not going anywhere.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been losing to native mobile apps and closed ecosystems. For many people, Facebook's mobile app is the Internet, and they're installing it from a closed app store. The web is an open application platform, whether you like it or not, and it either evolves to compete with mobile apps, or it's going to die.
For this reason, Google does more to preserve the open web than its competition in the browser space. And yes, I find these stats worrying when opened in Firefox:
https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/
And look, if you want to use a text-based browser like it's the 90s, go for it, but I'm pretty sure that most people are glad to see apps running in their full-fledged browser; because the browser is cross-platform, it's the perfect sandbox, and opening a web page isn't gated. YMMV.
Thanks to LibGen and Anna’s Archive, I find myself reading actual books more these days, many published long before I was even born, to scratch my itch for learning. Wikipedia aside, a bunch of pirated grayscale scans from university libraries is suddenly more fulfilling than the information superhighway that the web was hyped to be.
It is untrustworthy as it will keep turning on features. Example - sync. If you aren't using sync, it will eventually turn it on. If you aren't syncing history it will turn that on at some point.
At least Brave and Chrome don't do that.
My first thought was that I must have accidentally visited a website or downloaded something that exploited the browser to insert advertising shortcuts. However, I discovered that this is actually a built-in Firefox feature called 'Sponsored Shortcuts.'
Mozilla could have been an exemplary company, but they continue to squander the trust people place in them. It's shameful.
PS: You can turn off sponsored shortcuts here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
I got a feeling Mozilla will push more and more of stuff like this as Google's money dry out.
I need to check what defaults the Debian FF package comes with.
It might be other stuff like ocsp or domain stuff.
This is just a greedy clueless MBAs trying to show themselves they are not useless. Can't wait for Ladybird to hit stable.
Now I want ladybird to succeed even more.
The defaults of Firefox may not be optimal but they're easy to change and don't pester you to change them back.
(with that being said I sure would like it if Firefox remembered my choice to disable sponsored shortcuts in my synchronization account)
browser.shopping.experience2023.enabled
dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled
Firefox still matters because we don't have a good independent replacement yet which actually rejects surveillance capitalism, just privacy protecting forks that remove the data collection, but it's not really clear how well they'd be maintained and developed if work stopped on Firefox.
I have to say that besides the gradual decline in respecting user privacy Firefox has been a great browser. I've been using it since switching from Netscape. Before they got involved with Anonym I would recommend it to anyone. With a bit of work and a lot of about:config edits you can lock firefox down harder than anything else. That's a niche no other browser has much interest in.
It is said that this browser was so good, so ahead of the others from his time, that he achieved the power to... monopolize the entire web stack. Ultimately achieving 95% market share, websites for a while didn't bother to support other browsers.
However, time passed. IE6 got old and other browsers got progressively better. Suddenly, IE6 that was so good (compared to the 5.1 and 5.5 era and its competitors) was not so hot anymore.
So, we transitioned to the better browsers, right? Wrong! Companies that homologated IE6 took almost a decade to transition. Devs took almost a decade to cultivate a workable cross-browser culture. There was a particular dark era that required you to support 3 or 4 different IE versions (6 through 10), each one with its own quirks.
So, yeah. Anyone who lived through that era will never, ever, support a single browser implementation. It is a deep trauma. We want browsers to get their shit together, so huge gaps like that will not happen again.
There is not much real choice when it comes to WWW browsers. For people that refuse Chrome, Safari and Samsung (distrust is sufficient), the 1-digit-percent remainder is the actual solutions space.
So: either things "matter" in practical terms, e.g. choice, which as said can be pretty scarce, so all plausible options are important, or why should the idea of "matter" be important at all.
Edge, a browser that comes bundled with Windows, has 13.55%.
All this says is the majority of people use a mobile phone's default browser.
The question is why they focused on DEI, weird social activism so much and not on engineering itself.
Look at SQLite. SQLite is notable example where they don’t even have CoC(!) and focus only on getting engineering done. No marketing, events, sponsorships.
Pure wonderful code that works.
Edit: read more here about their „progressive” transformation https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/diversity/2022/
They kind of do have a CoC, called Code of Ethics.
https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
But it's probably not what "tolerant" people are looking for. And it's fine.
Also, SQLite is open-source, but not open to contribution, so they can "get away with it". Although I completely support their model of doing development.
"First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. "
"Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." "
"Fulfill not the desires of the flesh; hate your own will. '
I hate sjw corrupting coc's invading the foss meritocracy as much as the next guy but this is so radicaly on the other side of the spectrum I think I hate it just as much .. being reactionary to sjws like this is still letting them win.
As for your highlighted excerpts, the first one says about having respect for the rules. Second one is about respecting the chain of command. Third rule is about having self control over oneself, and discipline.
Of course you've also failed to mention that in that COE there is also a comment that you're free to not obey those rules. They've just written those down, but you're not expected to follow it.
How is that radical?
Last time I used Chrome, you can only mute all at once.
The thing is Firefox (and Mozilla) became very off putting. They did things which weren’t exemplary or ideal - yes, when you are Firefox your very existence in my books is based off the premise of you trying to be ideal (because if you are not there really are good and better alternatives) - and they kept doing it, still do.
Had I not been on the Internet long enough I would have assumed Firefox still generally matters just seeing comments online just like a lot of folks assumed this US election result was to be a landslide (in opposite direction) from Reddit alone :)
Implementation diversity is absolutely essential to an open-standards based Web, and right now the Web is pretty much the only open channel for pretty much all of human discourse.
Having said which, Mozilla is in real trouble, and desparately need to sort out their business model.