12 ms·

It is your moral obligation to use Firefox

87 points by boreq 7y ago

chupa-chups 7y ago
No it is not. Why? - Browser fingerprinting protection? Nope - No ads on start page? Nope - Https everywhere? Nope - Ad block? Nope If you want to support firefox, download TOR browser. Else, use brave. But please don't support further degradation of privacy in the web.
- chupa-chups 7y ago
  I'd like to correct myself: the new nightly build from Firefox supports browser fingerprinting protection: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protectio... And thanks for downvoting the original comment despite valid concerns and a link to the TOR browser.
  - sdinsn 7y ago
    > No ads on start page? Nope You can set your own startpage > Ad block? Nope You can easily add an extension for ad block.
- secstate 7y ago
  The point isn't that Chrome doesn't do things to help privacy. But having a monoculture web built around Blink is terrible. We know this from experience with IE. Brave uses Blink. Chromium uses Blink. IE now uses Blink.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  There are extensions/options for all of that, and they work well. And why would I use Brave? It's just another chrome browser, so it isn't helping solve the monoculture in browser rendering. We had that problem when IE ran things, and now we're having it with chrome. Why do we put up with it?
ohiovr 7y ago
Actual paying users would be better than millions of users that just want to complain. At this point with so much immorality online, what browser you use is just a matter of taste.
- flukus 7y ago
  I was a paying user (at least a donated to them) before they started breaking extensions, putting tracking in, putting DRM in, rewriting things in rust and working on crap like webasm that will make the web even more user hostile. At this point paying them to literally do nothing all do would give me a better return on investment than the direction they're heading.
  - ohiovr 7y ago
    I would not at all balk at paying for software that works and doesn't churn everything every 2 years. That was the main appeal to me of MacOS. There is a threshold of crappy changes to abandonment and Microsoft crossed it and Apple just mismanaged it. Firefox doesn't bother me so much that I hate it yet. But I got to wonder if the only voices that matter were the users that actually paid for it, I would imagine the paying users would be mostly happy. That seems to be the case for commercial software that offers free beer wares on the side like Unity3D.
lawrenceyan 7y ago
Is there any reason why you should use Firefox over Safari in this case then? How are we defining the "moral superiority" of web browsers here because it all seems to bit iffy to me. Why not use NetSurf if we're really talking, something that's actually open source and not only in name like Mozilla does with Firefox.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  Arguably that Firefox is open source, and Safari is not.
  - lawrenceyan 7y ago
    I really think the whole open source designation Mozilla tries to play off of is sort of slimy. Hundreds of millions of dollars regularly funnel through it. I understand the legality of it all and the technical truth to it, but it seems like the spirit of open source really isn't being portrayed that well as compared to a browser like say NetSurf, which I look at and can actually see a group of likeminded hobbyists supporting something they enjoy without money clouding everything over.
    - seba_dos1 7y ago
      That's completely orthogonal to "open source".
- chupa-chups 7y ago
  Safari doesn't support disabling click tracking anymore: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/Safari-link-tracking.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/Safari-link-tracking.htm... Firefox does this (as well TOR and brave)
  - twiceaday 7y ago
    But Safari ITP is wrecking havoc on the ad-tech industry right now.
- 7y ago
fxbl0i 7y ago
It is Mozilla Corporation's leadership moral obligation to resign for their privacy scandals and mismanagement of Firefox.
- sdinsn 7y ago
  > their privacy scandals and mismanagement of Firefox Explain further? Haven't heard of these
  - panda888888 7y ago
    Here's a good start (the Pocket integration debacle): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876016
    - ctnb 7y ago
      Personally, I wouldn't consider it Mozilla Corporation's moral obligation to resign over including an add-on by default, that can be disabled.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - panda888888 7y ago
        I agree that there isn't/wasn't a need for them to resign. Just wanted to provide some historical context.
- newscracker 7y ago
  If resignation is warranted for some mismanagement, then I guess the people still at Facebook, Google, Amazon and many other companies ought to have resigned a long time ago and should’ve vowed never to work in this field ever again. Outrage is good, but it also needs to be directed well and fairly.
pat2man 7y ago
No mention of Safari here (or Epiphany on Linux). The latest version of Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1 is pretty good at fingerprint protection.
nanaboo 7y ago
lol at firefox in 2019. It's a joke of a browser. Gimped to the biggest extreme. It's basically a chrome clone. edit: I mean I use it (not the latest version anyway) but with distaste.
- Thetawaves 7y ago
  Care to elaborate why you believe it is a chrome clone?
  - Lowkeyloki 7y ago
    Yeah, Firefox predates Chrome by quite a few years. Even more if you count its Netscape lineage. I don't know how you could honestly claim it's a clone of Chrome.
webwanderings 7y ago
FF was also behind in using auto update the software without user interaction. That was a big change from user’s perspective (who didn’t much care that a certain service was also always running behind the scenes).
- marssaxman 7y ago
  That was a plus from my point of view. I don't want my machine getting independent opinions about how to manage itself; it's my machine, after all.
WalterGR 7y ago
If it’s a moral obligation, can I mention a problem on a forum without being asked for my bug report or my patch? Or am I both morally obligated to use the software and either open tickets for any issue I mention or fix those problems myself?
- beatgammit 7y ago
  You're not morally obligated to open bug reports, just encouraged. That's the way things get fixed with Firefox, and if you want that, then learning how to do it is a big help. If you don't want to, feel free to ignore that recommendation.
PHGamer 7y ago
lol firefox. i wouldnt hate the guys if they had stuck to their guns on DRM and didnt kick the guy because he made a religious donation.
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  Calling it a "religious" donation is pretty reductive IMHO.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    It was still none of their business what he uses his personal funds for. From what I could tell, he kept his personal views very separate from his professional work. However, it's water under the bridge and Mozilla is fine. I don't think that fiasco contributed in any meaningful way to Firefox's loss of market share.
ncmncm 7y ago
I agree. I have tried Chromium at times, but the weight of Google hegemony always sends me back. HOWEVER! I run it in a VM on a Qubes host, with UMatrix add-on and a Google Analytics blocker. It has no access to a GPU. It crashes, sometimes, hundreds of times a day. (Most usually this is a tab crashing, but frequently enough the whole thing goes.) Nothing else on the machine is even slightly unstable. At the moment, 66 is entirely unable to bring up a Google Maps tab for more than a half-second; it draws the map, then BOOM. Frequently it can bring up a page, but then crashes at the first hint of scrolling. Looking back, this seems to have started sometime around 60 or 61, and got really bad around 63 or 64. I really would like to see an end to its crashing.
RickJWagner 7y ago
No, thanks. I don't like being told what my moral obligation is. I'll figure that out for myself, thank you.
Avamander 7y ago
Make GPU acceleration work, 1080p YouTube videos play under Linux and I'll consider it.
- stunt 7y ago
  Try the latest version. I don’t have any issue with Youtube 1080p videos.
- dusted 7y ago
  had 4k video work just fine under linux in firefox for as long as youtube has had 4k videos
  - Avamander 7y ago
    I can't call stuttering video in firefox for as long as youtube has had 1080p videos, "works just fine".
- yoasif_ 7y ago
  Have you set `layers.acceleration.force-enabled` to `true` in about:config? It may help.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    Last I tried enabling that FF just started freezing randomly after, WebGL was still much slower than Chrome's and had artifacts, YouTube still didn't play 1080p smoothly. It just didn't work and reading the issue tracker they have no proper plans to fix all the acceleration issues under Linux either.
    - yoasif_ 7y ago
      That is too bad. What distro are you on? What version of mesa are you using?
      - Avamander 7y ago
skybrian 7y ago
"With every year it is more likely that one day you will not be able to create a website using the technologies of your choosing and you will not be able to make it behave as you see fit. Others will make those decisions for you." This is already how it is for almost everyone and it's... fine? I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't even be bothered to keep up with emerging web standards, let alone make any decisions about them.
- c22 7y ago
  Fortunately you still have the option of not keeping up with modern web standards and just writing some html 3.2 into a text file.
msla 7y ago
I'll use it when they bring back RSS functionality, make it possible for me to configure its UI like I could before, and stop tracking me by default. I'm sick of updates stealing functionality from me, and I'll use qutebrowser or something similar until Firefox is no longer run by people intent on destroying the software.
garciagomezluis 7y ago
Great browser. It has really been improved over the last months. I think that extension portability is needed in order to compete with the chromium family. Why firefox? It is the next major browser (after chrome) in desktop. Promoving the use of another may lead to the parity in the very long term.
- stunt 7y ago
  Mozilla is doing a great job on mobile as well. I use “Firefox Focus” on mobile.
- orev 7y ago
  What is needed in extension portability? You can use Firefox Sync to sync extensions between devices.
Lowkeyloki 7y ago
Although I also despair the lack of choice in web browsers nowadays (not to mention certain coworkers of mine who try to spin "standardization" on Chrome/Chromium as a good thing), I wouldn't go so far as to claim there's some moral component to one's choice of browser. While I have strong feelings about this, I can't judge people who choose the path of least resistance when picking the software they use. Sometimes you want stuff to just work. People's priorities are their own and not everyone has the luxury of being able to be different because of their views. Some people just need to get things done.
austhrow743 7y ago
Poor title. The content doesn't try to defend it unless you accept "the web as it is now/has been is morally right" as a truism.
jrs95 7y ago
It's too late. Firefox already has compatibility issues with sites I use heavily. There's a much better chance I'd use the new Chromium based Edge than Firefox at this point. And with it's usage share dropping...if moral superiority is the only thing Firefox has going for it, it's a sinking ship. Having more contributors/users of Chromium/Blink seems to be a better path towards a less Google-dominated browser landscape at this point.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  Do you have a list of those sites? I use Firefox as my only browser and I honestly haven't had to use chrome for anything beyond debugging web stuff on chrome. I'm sure Mozilla would be very interested in fixing any issues there are. However, most of the issues seem to be hard-coding to Chrome's nonstandard quirks, which is really a sad state of affairs. Do we really want a more cross platform IE? Because that's what we're getting if everyone jumps to chrome-based browsers.
  - jrs95 7y ago
    Biggest issue for me is Twitch, HBO Now, and to a lesser extent YouTube although I've noticed issues with any site streaming video. Even on a gigabit connection and a new $2k desktop, Firefox buffers or the video just goes black and I have to refresh the page to watch for another 10-15 minutes before it happens again. Chrome never does this. I can't be the only person that's had this experience. I know I also had issues with JavaScript on some sites causing tabs to freeze that wasn't an issue in Chrome as well, but it's been long enough (6+ months) I have no idea what those sites even are now.
    - stunt 7y ago
      I remember having some similar issues with old versions. But a couple of versions after their major redesign they are all gone. There was an issue with Youtube last year and they blamed Youtube for it, but that is fixed now too. You can give the latest version a try.
dusted 7y ago
I'm just using firefox because it's the better browser. it's got better plugins, better settings and better performance (except in cases of google frameworks like angular, but come on, a webframework that "just so happens" to perform better on the vendors browser.."
mariushn 7y ago
The most important advantage of Firefox for me is being able to run extensions on mobile
forumer 7y ago
Morals aside, I agree with the points made regarding key Firefox fumbles at times when Chrome was making significant inroads. Of course there are many other mistakes Firefox/Mozilla made that people have also commented on here. Over the years I saw these mistakes take place and lamented about them often. I'm just not sure that even if all these mistakes were avoided Chrome wouldn't still dominate the market, especially in the mobile space - Platform bundling is a powerful thing! As we know, even a poorly performing browser (like IE) can get a large market share when it's the default for the masses. I see a lot of non-technical Windows 10 users browsing away in Edge these days because it's there and seemingly as a bonus it works well enough for them. I personally would like to use Firefox exclusively, but I often deal with equipment that demands Chrome whether it really needs to or not. This is especially common when it comes to IP video applications.
bediger4000 7y ago
I kind of agree. We can't let a single corporation drive some almost-universally-used thing like a web browser. I mean, look what an oligopolistic market did to US car manufacturers. Stifled innovation, downgraded product, the entire industry almost went under in the mid-to-late 70s. Look at what happened when Microsoft attained near-universal presence with IE 6. Their innovation stopped, security went straight down the toilet. Of course, at that point, Microsoft also lost their edge and began losing mindshare and dominance in emerging technologies, but that's a bit beside this point.

87 points by boreq 7y ago

No it is not. Why? - Browser fingerprinting protection? Nope - No ads on start page? Nope - Https everywhere? Nope - Ad block? Nope If you want to support firefox, download TOR browser. Else, use brave. But please don't support further degradation of privacy in the web.

chupa-chups 7y ago
I'd like to correct myself: the new nightly build from Firefox supports browser fingerprinting protection: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protections-against-fingerprinting-and-cryptocurrency-mining-available-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/04/09/protectio... And thanks for downvoting the original comment despite valid concerns and a link to the TOR browser.
- sdinsn 7y ago
  > No ads on start page? Nope You can set your own startpage > Ad block? Nope You can easily add an extension for ad block.
secstate 7y ago
The point isn't that Chrome doesn't do things to help privacy. But having a monoculture web built around Blink is terrible. We know this from experience with IE. Brave uses Blink. Chromium uses Blink. IE now uses Blink.
beatgammit 7y ago
There are extensions/options for all of that, and they work well. And why would I use Brave? It's just another chrome browser, so it isn't helping solve the monoculture in browser rendering. We had that problem when IE ran things, and now we're having it with chrome. Why do we put up with it?

ohiovr 7y ago

Actual paying users would be better than millions of users that just want to complain. At this point with so much immorality online, what browser you use is just a matter of taste.

flukus 7y ago
I was a paying user (at least a donated to them) before they started breaking extensions, putting tracking in, putting DRM in, rewriting things in rust and working on crap like webasm that will make the web even more user hostile. At this point paying them to literally do nothing all do would give me a better return on investment than the direction they're heading.
- ohiovr 7y ago
  I would not at all balk at paying for software that works and doesn't churn everything every 2 years. That was the main appeal to me of MacOS. There is a threshold of crappy changes to abandonment and Microsoft crossed it and Apple just mismanaged it. Firefox doesn't bother me so much that I hate it yet. But I got to wonder if the only voices that matter were the users that actually paid for it, I would imagine the paying users would be mostly happy. That seems to be the case for commercial software that offers free beer wares on the side like Unity3D.

lawrenceyan 7y ago

Is there any reason why you should use Firefox over Safari in this case then? How are we defining the "moral superiority" of web browsers here because it all seems to bit iffy to me. Why not use NetSurf if we're really talking, something that's actually open source and not only in name like Mozilla does with Firefox.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Arguably that Firefox is open source, and Safari is not.
- lawrenceyan 7y ago
  I really think the whole open source designation Mozilla tries to play off of is sort of slimy. Hundreds of millions of dollars regularly funnel through it. I understand the legality of it all and the technical truth to it, but it seems like the spirit of open source really isn't being portrayed that well as compared to a browser like say NetSurf, which I look at and can actually see a group of likeminded hobbyists supporting something they enjoy without money clouding everything over.
  - seba_dos1 7y ago
    That's completely orthogonal to "open source".
chupa-chups 7y ago
Safari doesn't support disabling click tracking anymore: https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/Safari-link-tracking.html https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/Safari-link-tracking.htm... Firefox does this (as well TOR and brave)
- twiceaday 7y ago
  But Safari ITP is wrecking havoc on the ad-tech industry right now.
7y ago

fxbl0i 7y ago

It is Mozilla Corporation's leadership moral obligation to resign for their privacy scandals and mismanagement of Firefox.

sdinsn 7y ago
> their privacy scandals and mismanagement of Firefox Explain further? Haven't heard of these
- panda888888 7y ago
  Here's a good start (the Pocket integration debacle): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9876016
  - ctnb 7y ago
    Personally, I wouldn't consider it Mozilla Corporation's moral obligation to resign over including an add-on by default, that can be disabled.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - panda888888 7y ago
      I agree that there isn't/wasn't a need for them to resign. Just wanted to provide some historical context.
newscracker 7y ago
If resignation is warranted for some mismanagement, then I guess the people still at Facebook, Google, Amazon and many other companies ought to have resigned a long time ago and should’ve vowed never to work in this field ever again. Outrage is good, but it also needs to be directed well and fairly.

pat2man 7y ago

No mention of Safari here (or Epiphany on Linux). The latest version of Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1 is pretty good at fingerprint protection.

nanaboo 7y ago

lol at firefox in 2019. It's a joke of a browser. Gimped to the biggest extreme. It's basically a chrome clone. edit: I mean I use it (not the latest version anyway) but with distaste.

Thetawaves 7y ago
Care to elaborate why you believe it is a chrome clone?
- Lowkeyloki 7y ago
  Yeah, Firefox predates Chrome by quite a few years. Even more if you count its Netscape lineage. I don't know how you could honestly claim it's a clone of Chrome.

webwanderings 7y ago

FF was also behind in using auto update the software without user interaction. That was a big change from user’s perspective (who didn’t much care that a certain service was also always running behind the scenes).

marssaxman 7y ago
That was a plus from my point of view. I don't want my machine getting independent opinions about how to manage itself; it's my machine, after all.

WalterGR 7y ago

If it’s a moral obligation, can I mention a problem on a forum without being asked for my bug report or my patch? Or am I both morally obligated to use the software and either open tickets for any issue I mention or fix those problems myself?

beatgammit 7y ago
You're not morally obligated to open bug reports, just encouraged. That's the way things get fixed with Firefox, and if you want that, then learning how to do it is a big help. If you don't want to, feel free to ignore that recommendation.

PHGamer 7y ago

lol firefox. i wouldnt hate the guys if they had stuck to their guns on DRM and didnt kick the guy because he made a religious donation.

Lowkeyloki 7y ago
Calling it a "religious" donation is pretty reductive IMHO.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  It was still none of their business what he uses his personal funds for. From what I could tell, he kept his personal views very separate from his professional work. However, it's water under the bridge and Mozilla is fine. I don't think that fiasco contributed in any meaningful way to Firefox's loss of market share.

ncmncm 7y ago

I agree. I have tried Chromium at times, but the weight of Google hegemony always sends me back. HOWEVER! I run it in a VM on a Qubes host, with UMatrix add-on and a Google Analytics blocker. It has no access to a GPU. It crashes, sometimes, hundreds of times a day. (Most usually this is a tab crashing, but frequently enough the whole thing goes.) Nothing else on the machine is even slightly unstable. At the moment, 66 is entirely unable to bring up a Google Maps tab for more than a half-second; it draws the map, then BOOM. Frequently it can bring up a page, but then crashes at the first hint of scrolling. Looking back, this seems to have started sometime around 60 or 61, and got really bad around 63 or 64. I really would like to see an end to its crashing.

RickJWagner 7y ago

No, thanks. I don't like being told what my moral obligation is. I'll figure that out for myself, thank you.

Avamander 7y ago

Make GPU acceleration work, 1080p YouTube videos play under Linux and I'll consider it.

stunt 7y ago
Try the latest version. I don’t have any issue with Youtube 1080p videos.
dusted 7y ago
had 4k video work just fine under linux in firefox for as long as youtube has had 4k videos
- Avamander 7y ago
  I can't call stuttering video in firefox for as long as youtube has had 1080p videos, "works just fine".
yoasif_ 7y ago
Have you set `layers.acceleration.force-enabled` to `true` in about:config? It may help.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Last I tried enabling that FF just started freezing randomly after, WebGL was still much slower than Chrome's and had artifacts, YouTube still didn't play 1080p smoothly. It just didn't work and reading the issue tracker they have no proper plans to fix all the acceleration issues under Linux either.
  - yoasif_ 7y ago
    That is too bad. What distro are you on? What version of mesa are you using?
    - Avamander 7y ago

skybrian 7y ago

"With every year it is more likely that one day you will not be able to create a website using the technologies of your choosing and you will not be able to make it behave as you see fit. Others will make those decisions for you." This is already how it is for almost everyone and it's... fine? I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't even be bothered to keep up with emerging web standards, let alone make any decisions about them.

c22 7y ago
Fortunately you still have the option of not keeping up with modern web standards and just writing some html 3.2 into a text file.

msla 7y ago

I'll use it when they bring back RSS functionality, make it possible for me to configure its UI like I could before, and stop tracking me by default. I'm sick of updates stealing functionality from me, and I'll use qutebrowser or something similar until Firefox is no longer run by people intent on destroying the software.

garciagomezluis 7y ago

Great browser. It has really been improved over the last months. I think that extension portability is needed in order to compete with the chromium family. Why firefox? It is the next major browser (after chrome) in desktop. Promoving the use of another may lead to the parity in the very long term.

stunt 7y ago
Mozilla is doing a great job on mobile as well. I use “Firefox Focus” on mobile.
orev 7y ago
What is needed in extension portability? You can use Firefox Sync to sync extensions between devices.

Lowkeyloki 7y ago

Although I also despair the lack of choice in web browsers nowadays (not to mention certain coworkers of mine who try to spin "standardization" on Chrome/Chromium as a good thing), I wouldn't go so far as to claim there's some moral component to one's choice of browser. While I have strong feelings about this, I can't judge people who choose the path of least resistance when picking the software they use. Sometimes you want stuff to just work. People's priorities are their own and not everyone has the luxury of being able to be different because of their views. Some people just need to get things done.

austhrow743 7y ago

Poor title. The content doesn't try to defend it unless you accept "the web as it is now/has been is morally right" as a truism.

jrs95 7y ago

It's too late. Firefox already has compatibility issues with sites I use heavily. There's a much better chance I'd use the new Chromium based Edge than Firefox at this point. And with it's usage share dropping...if moral superiority is the only thing Firefox has going for it, it's a sinking ship. Having more contributors/users of Chromium/Blink seems to be a better path towards a less Google-dominated browser landscape at this point.

beatgammit 7y ago
Do you have a list of those sites? I use Firefox as my only browser and I honestly haven't had to use chrome for anything beyond debugging web stuff on chrome. I'm sure Mozilla would be very interested in fixing any issues there are. However, most of the issues seem to be hard-coding to Chrome's nonstandard quirks, which is really a sad state of affairs. Do we really want a more cross platform IE? Because that's what we're getting if everyone jumps to chrome-based browsers.
- jrs95 7y ago
  Biggest issue for me is Twitch, HBO Now, and to a lesser extent YouTube although I've noticed issues with any site streaming video. Even on a gigabit connection and a new $2k desktop, Firefox buffers or the video just goes black and I have to refresh the page to watch for another 10-15 minutes before it happens again. Chrome never does this. I can't be the only person that's had this experience. I know I also had issues with JavaScript on some sites causing tabs to freeze that wasn't an issue in Chrome as well, but it's been long enough (6+ months) I have no idea what those sites even are now.
  - stunt 7y ago
    I remember having some similar issues with old versions. But a couple of versions after their major redesign they are all gone. There was an issue with Youtube last year and they blamed Youtube for it, but that is fixed now too. You can give the latest version a try.

dusted 7y ago

I'm just using firefox because it's the better browser. it's got better plugins, better settings and better performance (except in cases of google frameworks like angular, but come on, a webframework that "just so happens" to perform better on the vendors browser.."

mariushn 7y ago

The most important advantage of Firefox for me is being able to run extensions on mobile

forumer 7y ago

Morals aside, I agree with the points made regarding key Firefox fumbles at times when Chrome was making significant inroads. Of course there are many other mistakes Firefox/Mozilla made that people have also commented on here. Over the years I saw these mistakes take place and lamented about them often. I'm just not sure that even if all these mistakes were avoided Chrome wouldn't still dominate the market, especially in the mobile space - Platform bundling is a powerful thing! As we know, even a poorly performing browser (like IE) can get a large market share when it's the default for the masses. I see a lot of non-technical Windows 10 users browsing away in Edge these days because it's there and seemingly as a bonus it works well enough for them. I personally would like to use Firefox exclusively, but I often deal with equipment that demands Chrome whether it really needs to or not. This is especially common when it comes to IP video applications.

bediger4000 7y ago

I kind of agree. We can't let a single corporation drive some almost-universally-used thing like a web browser. I mean, look what an oligopolistic market did to US car manufacturers. Stifled innovation, downgraded product, the entire industry almost went under in the mid-to-late 70s. Look at what happened when Microsoft attained near-universal presence with IE 6. Their innovation stopped, security went straight down the toilet. Of course, at that point, Microsoft also lost their edge and began losing mindshare and dominance in emerging technologies, but that's a bit beside this point.