10 ms·

Good change. It's sad that Firefox can only do these sort of changes under the cover of Safari's or Chrome's larger marketshare. I imagine they would instigate

Good change. It's sad that Firefox can only do these sort of changes under the cover of Safari's or Chrome's larger marketshare. I imagine they would instigate more of such changes sooner if they had a more dominant position.

bawolff 6y ago
I don't really recall them doing so back when they had real marketshare.
- javagram 6y ago
  Firefox never had the dominant position that Chrome has now. Chrome can get away with breaking the web because most people wouldn’t even think to switch to Firefox or IE at this point.
  - starbugs 6y ago
    It was important enough around 2010 to have a real impact (30+%). Why wouldn't people switch to FF anymore? I'd say because they prioritize their product development in the wrong way. It's really sad. Competition would be helpful for the market.
    - emn13 6y ago
      I don't really think that's it; I think people just don't believe their personal choice of browser is going to make enough of a difference to privacy and competition to actually positively affect them; they just don't care in other words. And... I'm not sure their wrong. Sure, more competition would be good, but it's hard to see that being enough to address the monopolistic issues browsers currently face. And on iOS - you don't even really have a choice, given apples rules.
      - starbugs 6y ago
        I have tried switching from Chrome to FF multiple times in the past 18 months. It just doesn't work. Neither for development nor for general use. It's sadly just not competitive anymore.
        javagram 6y ago
        That I don’t understand personally since I use Firefox for both my work as a web developer and for personal use. It works perfectly fine and if anything I more frequently encounter compatibility issues with iOS Safari. But there are so many people who have a Chrome-only attitude that I don’t see firefox’s market share going anywhere but down in the next decade.
        starbugs 6y ago
        I like to use my Bluetooth headset (or to be more specific, the touch bar on my Mac indirectly) to control YouTube video playback. It's 2020 and Firefox still does not support it. It's really a basic feature that any other app on the Mac supports. Don't get me started on its performance in the dev console and in general. It just cannot keep up performance-wise, neither with Safari nor with Chrome. Instead, we now got a Mozilla VPN. I am not at all surprised their market share won't go up. In fact, it's just sad. I would really love to make the switch to support Mozilla as an alternative to the Google Ads monopoly. But not at the expense of giving up basic features that I have gotten used to. Maybe I'll try again once Google has managed to completely screw up on uBlock Origin and other beloved filter extensions.
        emn13 6y ago
        You've got to admit that's a pretty hyper-specific feature there. It shouldn't surprise you that many users haven't run into it. But a quick google finds an add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-keys/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-keys/ - does that do what you want? Stuff like this is largely a matter of habit. You're used to chrome's details - so they make sense. But examples the other way around exist too - e.g. I'd find it hard to miss the picture-in-picture feature from FF when watching youtube in chrome. 'course, there's an extension for that too ;-).
panpanna 6y ago
I have this option enabled and you would be surprised how many major web sites it breaks. We can blame chrome and safari all we like, but the real blame is on web devs who had 1-2 years to fix this and just can't bother (until forced by Google or Apple). Edit: I generally address this by contacting the site admins, showing them screen dumps of their broken site and say they should demand their web devs fix this for free since their design goes against industry best practices (I often include link to Mozilla article on this). If that doesn't help, I try again with the higher ups, telling them their store have silently been rejecting paying customers and their IT people have refused to fix it. This usually fixes the issue quickly, only to come back after the next major site update.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  While I agree that much is on the web developers, there is also management to blame for not allowing time for fixes, until stuff is truly broken and lies in pieces.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Requiring the whole world to change instead of just changing a choke point like three major browsers is an unreasonable ask and only postpones actual progress. Nothing is tangible to anyone until something is broken.
- treis 6y ago
  > I have this option enabled and you would be surprised how many major web sites it breaks. It's caused two major outages for us. Rather insidious as well since Chrome does A/B testing and gradually was rolling this change out. > I generally address this by contacting the site admins, showing them screen dumps of their broken site and say they should demand their web devs fix this for free since their design goes against industry best practices That's just not how the world works. Sites today are a mish mash of different application engines, SAAS providers, libraries and frameworks. If the version I built on two years ago doesn't set the Same-Site property that's not my (or the vendor's) fault. They gotta pay me to upgrade to fix it. And that's hoping that everything I depend on has upgraded their stuff to fix it.
raxxorrax 6y ago
A welcome change indeed. Not that it couldn't be a good mechanism, but abuse has shown that these steps are necessary. I would go even further. But I think this can be an argument to switch browsers. Common users might not have the technical insight, but are certainly not keen on being tracked.
slowwriter 6y ago
I feel like anyone who has the slightest interest in the web, or even tech in general, should use Firefox. I don't even think whether Chrome or Firefox is the superior browser is relevant in this context. Firefox has become the only real cross-platform and non-Google-controlled alternative to Chrome/Chromium. It needs as much marketshare as possible in order to stay relevant and prevent Google from completely dominating the web.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Agreed. As a bonus, it really is a very good browser! It's not a charity-case at all.
- nessunodoro 6y ago
  It's the only browser that gives me complete control over my session logins in containers, and it respects the cardinality of the URL - never meddles with it, conceals part of it, autocompletes it... I use Chrome only when forced to by lack of Firefox support.
  - cesarb 6y ago
    > conceals part of it Since a couple of versions ago, the history dropdown in the URL bar (but not the URL bar itself) has been hiding the "https://" https://", at least for me. Which is incredibly annoying when you're used to "not having a https:// https:// prefix" implying "use http:// http:// as the prefix", since it makes it look like every site in the history dropdown is insecure. And it's inconsistent with the URL bar itself: type "example.org" on the URL bar, and not only will it go to http://example.org http://example.org, but also it will hide the http:// http://.
    - gnabgib 6y ago
      * about:config * search: browser.urlbar.trimURLs * Double click to toggle to false.. and non-https protocol is now displayed Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261
op03 6y ago
Needs lot more imagination than what you see on the Mozilla discussion boards. Which is mostly people just reacting to issues like a mom and pop store reacting to Walmart. But timelines in brick and mortar land are very different from how things work on the internet. Since things move fast these days(See TikTok) I think its a better strategy to just speed up Google's goal of turning the Internet into an exploitative cess pit. Their main goal is to increase sewage flow and ensure all flows move through their useless cloud and devices. Every time a cell divides, if DNA has to be read from Google through Google that would be optimal. Its all great and visionary, but with those increasing flows the stink of their creation constantly rises. The more it stinks the more people can't ignore it. So lets speed it up. Mozilla get out of the way guys. They will just use you guys, as they have, to signal their generosity or openness to learning or whatever bullshit. Why allow that? Everyone likes to focus on how fast things can scale UP. But they can collapse fast too. We need tools to do both. So if Google and Facebook and Twitter want to scale up and give us 20 Trumps and Brexits this year and 200 next year and 2000 the year after, how can we help them do it faster? Thats the only way change will happen. If that's not interesting to Mozilla, its could just sell Firefox to Samsung or whoever and go off and do something totally different as the Whatsapp, Signal guys did.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Funniest written angry comment I've read recently, thank you. If the topic was not sad, I'd probably laugh by now. The problem is, that many big ones including government and also in consequence smaller fish wont quit the Googlenet, but for the sake of short term profit will stay in it, no matter how much it stinks. (Oh, you got no Google shopping card? How are we going to check your identity then? No, we cannot deal with you here, we are sorry!) This might make it very difficult for people to get official service without involving big corp.
starbugs 6y ago
Mozilla is no longer in a position to make such a change. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that management will care in most cases and the errors resulting from this will be blamed on FF and not on the site in question.
- Santosh83 6y ago
  Chrome, Safari and Edge are also implementing SameSite...
tptacek 6y ago
Chrome announced this change a year ago.

bawolff 6y ago

I don't really recall them doing so back when they had real marketshare.

javagram 6y ago
Firefox never had the dominant position that Chrome has now. Chrome can get away with breaking the web because most people wouldn’t even think to switch to Firefox or IE at this point.
- starbugs 6y ago
  It was important enough around 2010 to have a real impact (30+%). Why wouldn't people switch to FF anymore? I'd say because they prioritize their product development in the wrong way. It's really sad. Competition would be helpful for the market.
  - emn13 6y ago
    I don't really think that's it; I think people just don't believe their personal choice of browser is going to make enough of a difference to privacy and competition to actually positively affect them; they just don't care in other words. And... I'm not sure their wrong. Sure, more competition would be good, but it's hard to see that being enough to address the monopolistic issues browsers currently face. And on iOS - you don't even really have a choice, given apples rules.
    - starbugs 6y ago
      I have tried switching from Chrome to FF multiple times in the past 18 months. It just doesn't work. Neither for development nor for general use. It's sadly just not competitive anymore.
      - javagram 6y ago
        That I don’t understand personally since I use Firefox for both my work as a web developer and for personal use. It works perfectly fine and if anything I more frequently encounter compatibility issues with iOS Safari. But there are so many people who have a Chrome-only attitude that I don’t see firefox’s market share going anywhere but down in the next decade.
        starbugs 6y ago
        I like to use my Bluetooth headset (or to be more specific, the touch bar on my Mac indirectly) to control YouTube video playback. It's 2020 and Firefox still does not support it. It's really a basic feature that any other app on the Mac supports. Don't get me started on its performance in the dev console and in general. It just cannot keep up performance-wise, neither with Safari nor with Chrome. Instead, we now got a Mozilla VPN. I am not at all surprised their market share won't go up. In fact, it's just sad. I would really love to make the switch to support Mozilla as an alternative to the Google Ads monopoly. But not at the expense of giving up basic features that I have gotten used to. Maybe I'll try again once Google has managed to completely screw up on uBlock Origin and other beloved filter extensions.
        emn13 6y ago
        You've got to admit that's a pretty hyper-specific feature there. It shouldn't surprise you that many users haven't run into it. But a quick google finds an add-on for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-keys/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-keys/ - does that do what you want? Stuff like this is largely a matter of habit. You're used to chrome's details - so they make sense. But examples the other way around exist too - e.g. I'd find it hard to miss the picture-in-picture feature from FF when watching youtube in chrome. 'course, there's an extension for that too ;-).

panpanna 6y ago

I have this option enabled and you would be surprised how many major web sites it breaks. We can blame chrome and safari all we like, but the real blame is on web devs who had 1-2 years to fix this and just can't bother (until forced by Google or Apple). Edit: I generally address this by contacting the site admins, showing them screen dumps of their broken site and say they should demand their web devs fix this for free since their design goes against industry best practices (I often include link to Mozilla article on this). If that doesn't help, I try again with the higher ups, telling them their store have silently been rejecting paying customers and their IT people have refused to fix it. This usually fixes the issue quickly, only to come back after the next major site update.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
While I agree that much is on the web developers, there is also management to blame for not allowing time for fixes, until stuff is truly broken and lies in pieces.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Requiring the whole world to change instead of just changing a choke point like three major browsers is an unreasonable ask and only postpones actual progress. Nothing is tangible to anyone until something is broken.
treis 6y ago
> I have this option enabled and you would be surprised how many major web sites it breaks. It's caused two major outages for us. Rather insidious as well since Chrome does A/B testing and gradually was rolling this change out. > I generally address this by contacting the site admins, showing them screen dumps of their broken site and say they should demand their web devs fix this for free since their design goes against industry best practices That's just not how the world works. Sites today are a mish mash of different application engines, SAAS providers, libraries and frameworks. If the version I built on two years ago doesn't set the Same-Site property that's not my (or the vendor's) fault. They gotta pay me to upgrade to fix it. And that's hoping that everything I depend on has upgraded their stuff to fix it.

raxxorrax 6y ago

A welcome change indeed. Not that it couldn't be a good mechanism, but abuse has shown that these steps are necessary. I would go even further. But I think this can be an argument to switch browsers. Common users might not have the technical insight, but are certainly not keen on being tracked.

slowwriter 6y ago

I feel like anyone who has the slightest interest in the web, or even tech in general, should use Firefox. I don't even think whether Chrome or Firefox is the superior browser is relevant in this context. Firefox has become the only real cross-platform and non-Google-controlled alternative to Chrome/Chromium. It needs as much marketshare as possible in order to stay relevant and prevent Google from completely dominating the web.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Agreed. As a bonus, it really is a very good browser! It's not a charity-case at all.
nessunodoro 6y ago
It's the only browser that gives me complete control over my session logins in containers, and it respects the cardinality of the URL - never meddles with it, conceals part of it, autocompletes it... I use Chrome only when forced to by lack of Firefox support.
- cesarb 6y ago
  > conceals part of it Since a couple of versions ago, the history dropdown in the URL bar (but not the URL bar itself) has been hiding the "https://" https://", at least for me. Which is incredibly annoying when you're used to "not having a https:// https:// prefix" implying "use http:// http:// as the prefix", since it makes it look like every site in the history dropdown is insecure. And it's inconsistent with the URL bar itself: type "example.org" on the URL bar, and not only will it go to http://example.org http://example.org, but also it will hide the http:// http://.
  - gnabgib 6y ago
    * about:config * search: browser.urlbar.trimURLs * Double click to toggle to false.. and non-https protocol is now displayed Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261 https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261

op03 6y ago

Needs lot more imagination than what you see on the Mozilla discussion boards. Which is mostly people just reacting to issues like a mom and pop store reacting to Walmart. But timelines in brick and mortar land are very different from how things work on the internet. Since things move fast these days(See TikTok) I think its a better strategy to just speed up Google's goal of turning the Internet into an exploitative cess pit. Their main goal is to increase sewage flow and ensure all flows move through their useless cloud and devices. Every time a cell divides, if DNA has to be read from Google through Google that would be optimal. Its all great and visionary, but with those increasing flows the stink of their creation constantly rises. The more it stinks the more people can't ignore it. So lets speed it up. Mozilla get out of the way guys. They will just use you guys, as they have, to signal their generosity or openness to learning or whatever bullshit. Why allow that? Everyone likes to focus on how fast things can scale UP. But they can collapse fast too. We need tools to do both. So if Google and Facebook and Twitter want to scale up and give us 20 Trumps and Brexits this year and 200 next year and 2000 the year after, how can we help them do it faster? Thats the only way change will happen. If that's not interesting to Mozilla, its could just sell Firefox to Samsung or whoever and go off and do something totally different as the Whatsapp, Signal guys did.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
Funniest written angry comment I've read recently, thank you. If the topic was not sad, I'd probably laugh by now. The problem is, that many big ones including government and also in consequence smaller fish wont quit the Googlenet, but for the sake of short term profit will stay in it, no matter how much it stinks. (Oh, you got no Google shopping card? How are we going to check your identity then? No, we cannot deal with you here, we are sorry!) This might make it very difficult for people to get official service without involving big corp.

starbugs 6y ago

Mozilla is no longer in a position to make such a change. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that management will care in most cases and the errors resulting from this will be blamed on FF and not on the site in question.

Santosh83 6y ago
Chrome, Safari and Edge are also implementing SameSite...

tptacek 6y ago

Chrome announced this change a year ago.