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I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat

I think Firefox news is what I comment most on here. I don't know why. Well I guess I do. Web browsers, javascript etc is front and center here - which somewhat means the digital world. All my friends use Chrome, and think I'm weird. I think _they_ are. They care about human rights, at least I think they do. But, having Google, an ad company, dictate how our window to the digital world looks like, is now _way worse_ than what Microsoft with IE6 ever did. They had their share, but nothing compared to this. At least Microsoft was just a software company. If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. "Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox". I see these comments all the time here. Even in this thread. Firefox. Linux. Postgresql. Wikipedia. Xmms! The WORLD WIDE WEB! Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN (funny how Google made their initial fortunes). AMP would be the least of your worries. Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. All of these open source projects are just mindblowingly awesome. They help people. Me. You. But who cares right? Certainly not the lot with money in the 80/90s that didn't understand how or why this would be important. Which is why all these amazing things happened. Now they do of course. So none of this anymore. Which is why I think humanity is doomed to succumb to our newfound overlords. The Big Four. Five? Six? Seven? Who cares really. A handful. I wish people, especially like what this place definitely represents, would stand up more (including me!). Teach people, politicians, your parents, your siblings, your kids. We understand tech and it's implications. We understand how big tech is now stifling everything. Good luck training a neural network that competes with 50 billion uploaded photos. Facebook, Amazon. Google. Microsoft. But noone will - "it doesn't matter". But make no mistake. It does matter. And humanity is just sitting here. It's like we're heading for this High Class Great Filter. Good thing I'll be dead before all this comes to full fruition. (Sorry for the rant - hope it was still relevant and on point, and I really encourage discussion here!)

Kye 5y ago
>> Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&filters=FulfillmentOptionType%2Cvendor_id&FulfillmentOptionType=AWSDataExchange&vendor_id=0af153a3-339f-48c2-8b42-3b9fa26d3367 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...
411111111111111 5y ago
Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from Google.
- fabrice_d 5y ago
  Also remember that at the same time Google did everything they could to make sure Firefox market share would be as low as possible. See https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 and the billions spent in Chrome marketing, bundling with other software, and the free ads on Google properties.
- tester756 5y ago
  so what? ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    Probably for legal reasons. Firefox exists so chrome is not a monopoly and stricter government action is not taken. Google doesn’t give money to control Firefox, they just need it to exist.
    - tester756 5y ago
      yea, that's what I meant :P
- 40four 5y ago
  That doesn’t mean anything. It’s a tired attack that gets repeated over and over, but has nothing to do with the values and goals Mozilla/ Firefox represent.
  - berniemadoff69 5y ago
    I think if I learned Greenpeace was single-handedly funded by Exxon, my reaction wouldn't be to say 'that doesnt mean anything'
peakaboo 5y ago
Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use chrome.
- bergheim 5y ago
  I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things). I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over. Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.
  - moate 5y ago
    Everything old is new again. Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in). Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. I saw a physical poster or sign the other day which didn't even go that far. It had ("f" logo)/name. I had the same reaction.
- daveguy 5y ago
  It's not a matter of it being faster for me. It's a matter of it being more stable. I used Firefox for years, but when my extensions started breaking with FF updates I switched. I tried again recently, but now it's the extensions.
bennysomething 5y ago
How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.
- grumpyprole 5y ago
  Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their unrepairable e-waste.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.
    - grumpyprole 5y ago
      Yes, I like YouTube, but it was great even before Google bought it. Now it does come with privacy concerns. Luckily, there are other similar offerings.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    Those things where invented with public money yes. But Moore's law wouldn't have been a thing without profit incentive.
- ergot_vacation 5y ago
  It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm. What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.
walrus01 5y ago
the future is a walled garden stepping on a face, forever.
laurent92 5y ago
> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault). Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of the people 2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?
  - fleddr 5y ago
    It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not. Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that. Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects. Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape. If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base. Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use One obvious reason would be if the company in question is directly supporting various causes that you like or dislike. You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money. Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game. Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.
- blaze33 5y ago
  > The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays. So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals. I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.
zajio1am 5y ago
> If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.
- toper-centage 5y ago
  For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    Chromium has ~5 million lines of code. The Linux kernel has ~28 million lines of code. We also very much have a monoculture with the Linux kernel and society hasn't collapsed. Disagreement lacking argumentation indicates to me that I'm absolutely 100% correct. Thank you for your input!
- lgvld 5y ago
  Mozilla vs Google/Alphabet (values shared by...).
xpressvideoz 5y ago
The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at the same time. How can a tech company improve their product without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people responsible for that? Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  So whats the better, more ethical alternative? Certainly not Chrome
  - shadilay 5y ago
    Servo
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Edge
    - benrbray 5y ago
      I was really rooting for Edge back before they switched to Chromium. Now it's just worse Chrome. I do use it as my default PDF viewer though as I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs. (there's Master PDF but it's a bit overkill when I just want some multicolored highlighters.)
      - atatatat 5y ago
        Security-wise, it's far better Chrome. Privacy score really depends on your views on MS/Google/Mozilla. Firefox is taaaaalkative.
      - 5y ago
systemvoltage 5y ago
Thanks for a good spank. HN needs one once in a while.
voidnullnil 5y ago
If the internet as it is right now was what was put forth as the initial internet experiment, one would wonder what kind of shit for brains thought this up. I honestly cannot comprehend how people can talk about software without "fuck off" being used as a greeting. Firefox and Chrome are not even usable. The people who claim they are, are either nerds tunnel visioned and hyped on some super specific thing like their latest sandbox thing or CSS feature, or someone who spent a lot of money on their computer and are desperate to prove they have a premium experience. My parents don't think browsers are usable. Nobody I know IRL does, aside from my most consumerish friends who see buying digital goods as a the new drinking beer. They feel like they are gettign some premium state of the art protection when they idiotically crouch over their phone to enter the 500th SMS based 2FA (read: snakeoil garbage used as a bandaid to fix mind numbingly insecure software on the client as well as the server) token of the day. All it takes to remove the current web is to make something that has a UI at least as good as a 30 year old toaster. Insane bugs aside, all modern software GUIs are slow and unresponsive as hell. A layman trying an actual good alternative will understand its better without needing to know why. Modern web UX design is pure garbage, but it's not much worse than initial web 2.0 design. Everything is a clusterfuck of, "oh can I do this?" 403, "huh I guess not", and "how do I do this? oh there is no button for that? it would be really simple why did they not add this? oh, because it's not relevant to the company's revenue model?". tl;dr we need the Firefox of Firefox The web should be static documents. <video> is still something that can go in a static document. There is no need to execute someone's poorly written application hacked together in a <script> tag to view documents in some unreadble form where the text constantly flickers on and off (to gracefully upgrade or whatever it's doing) as they try to impress you with their "type" knowledge. By definition, the majority of websites must be poorly written since there are not as many good programmers as content creators, and the default is for websites to be loaded via a JS in a JS in a JS. Note also how browsers like Firefox and Chrome (and moslty the old web specs) try as hard as possible to make default CSS look horrible. 99% of my usage of the web is for viewing articles, and unfortunately banking which for some reason chooses to implement their online service in the most insecure possible way. tl;dr the web should be static documents Now the next problem is that all content has to be hosted on a server that is paid for by someone, and they even pay for a stupid string in the URL bar. Well I guess I should say the web is for commercial content and not for humans (btw, it's a common misconception to claim domain names are human friendly). If the web was on something like IPFS or Freenet, then anyone could make their own website. This brings the web back to what it is about: sharing information (which is an entirely different concept than trying to compose content that will bring the most revenue). However, there is a big problem with this: the American police state doesn't like people sharing files. They prop up false dilemmas like that some rich company's "music" can be illegally shared. If such p2p web materializes, the american police state will be finding new ways to arrest random people and make everything as insufferable as possible. I have tried to host websites recently and basically the only place you can do this is on github.io (I do not want to pay money for hosting a website, because domain names are literal garbage, electronic payments are literally garbage, and having my IRL identity tied to stuff I post online is literally garbage. i do not understand the new trend of using your real identity online other than to promote yourself aka make bad bait content), and then it's not certain if some idiot who has no right to moderate what I say decides to remove my articles discussing old patched security vulnerabilities. Plus github.io makes zero profit so they might just remove my stuff at some point (whereas I could just keep it up forever without changing URL on IPFS or Freenet, and it would stay up forever as long as people or even just I care about it, but nobody uses either). tl;dr the web should be content addressable and 'murica should stop pretending uploading bits of data is a problem, so people can actually post their websites Corporations cannot comprehend this because they reason in terms of graphs of consumer happiness and competing with the 3 products that are 0.001% different than theirs. Corporations cannot innovate because the employee spends all his life chasing simple goals laid out by his boss who puts in the minmal effort to define what the goals should be while making it look like he is a better boss than his competitors. Corporations do not require their developers to understand any engineering concepts, they just need to be able to fill tick boxes of features. tl;dr literally anyone competent can beat big tech
jimbob45 5y ago
> All my friends use Chrome I’m guessing 99% of the users of this site use Chrome…Dev Tools. The real question is what people use for personal browsing after hours. I wish Mozilla would just import Chrome’s Dev Tools because they’re just undeniably better than anything else on the market.
- rd07 5y ago
  I have been a long time user of Firefox, but as a web developer I use Chromium occasionally to test a web application I develop. I would like to know, what kind of feature that Chrome/Chromium dev tools offer that Firefox doesn't?
design-material 5y ago
This is ridiculous and hyperbolic on a few points, namely that Chrome's position is way worse than Microsoft's. Even if we ignore the fact that Chromium is open-source, that Chrome is heavily extensible, that Google has demonstrably shown commitment to developing the web in an open manner (eg WebRTC) - ignoring these and other facts, when Microsoft was 'in charge' of the Web (via IE's power) they locked IE down, killed their competition, and literally single-handedly stalled the progress of the Web. The fact that you say IE at it's peak was worse than Chrome shows incredible ignorance on the matter. Your anecdote about your friends reminds me of this odd joke from school There's a senior citizen driving on the highway. His wife calls him on his cell phone and in a worried voice says, Herman, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there is a madman driving the wrong way on Route 280! Herman says, I know, but there isn't just one, there are hundreds!
pjmlp 5y ago
> Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN CERN did not invent hypertext, just made a popular version on top of TCP. Hypertext already existed at Xerox PARC and had multiple implementations since then across UNIX and 16 bit home computers.
raxxorrax 5y ago
> Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox For the longest time this was actually the other way around. Firefox decoupled rendering from scrolling, which made it a far better option in many cases (there are some disadvantages, but FF just was further from the technical side). Chrome cannot render nice pictures. It neglects quality for speed. I think it still does. Isn't visible in every image and you can disable this with tuned CSS tricks, but the issue remains. But of course you are correct that all this is completely secondary... Any serious developer that doesn't at least appreciate freedom and open source is an idiot in my opinion. Please excuse my strong language.

Kye 5y ago

>> Imagine if Amazon "invented" Wikipedia. You can get an idea from how much IMDB data costs. They didn't invent it, but they did buy it. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&filters=FulfillmentOptionType%2Cvendor_id&FulfillmentOptionType=AWSDataExchange&vendor_id=0af153a3-339f-48c2-8b42-3b9fa26d3367 https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/search/results?page=1&fil...

411111111111111 5y ago

Just remember that Mozilla gets over 90% of its revenue from Google.

fabrice_d 5y ago
Also remember that at the same time Google did everything they could to make sure Firefox market share would be as low as possible. See https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686 and the billions spent in Chrome marketing, bundling with other software, and the free ads on Google properties.
tester756 5y ago
so what? ofc Google wants FF to be *viable*, but not good.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  Probably for legal reasons. Firefox exists so chrome is not a monopoly and stricter government action is not taken. Google doesn’t give money to control Firefox, they just need it to exist.
  - tester756 5y ago
    yea, that's what I meant :P
40four 5y ago
That doesn’t mean anything. It’s a tired attack that gets repeated over and over, but has nothing to do with the values and goals Mozilla/ Firefox represent.
- berniemadoff69 5y ago
  I think if I learned Greenpeace was single-handedly funded by Exxon, my reaction wouldn't be to say 'that doesnt mean anything'

peakaboo 5y ago

Good post. I've given up on the tech community though. They don't care about what's right. If chrome is faster, they use chrome.

bergheim 5y ago
I agree (and of course I know of the Mozilla things). I remember years ago when things began to really go off the rails. I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. If companies like that have to resort to this, it's over. Pity we couldn't (again, myself included) protect the free internet.
- moate 5y ago
  Everything old is new again. Anyone remember AOL and its entirely contained ecosystem? I think the first two searches my 12 year old brain came up with were Superman (took me to DCs AOL listing) and Playboy (which took to long to load for me to risk someone walking in). Everything is terrible, but everyone knows this and hates it. Eventually something will happen (and this feels more likely as facebook takes put these insane “we support regulation” ads) that will make things marginally better. Governments are designed to move VERY slowly, and they’re the only things capable of taking on megacorps.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > I saw a Nike commercial which for the first time did not say "nike.com", but: "facebook.com/Nike". Man I was bummed. I saw a physical poster or sign the other day which didn't even go that far. It had ("f" logo)/name. I had the same reaction.
daveguy 5y ago
It's not a matter of it being faster for me. It's a matter of it being more stable. I used Firefox for years, but when my extensions started breaking with FF updates I switched. I tried again recently, but now it's the extensions.

bennysomething 5y ago

How is big tech "stifling everything". Big tech has provided the amazing hardware advances over the last few decades. Amazon Google and Microsoft provide amazing platforms that make it way easier for anyone to boostrap a scalable business. I no longer use Chrome, I just prefer Firefox but at the very least chrome gave browsers the kick up the back side they needed, mainly through V8 giving us JavaScript that runs fast. Also I'm pretty certain Google fund a lot of Firefox Dev.

grumpyprole 5y ago
Actually much of the "hardware advances" were engineered with public money: internet, GPS, GSM, GPRS, battery, touchscreen etc. Big tech certainly takes more than it gives back in taxes. Even worse, some are polluting the planet with their unrepairable e-waste.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I am pretty much as anti-big-tech as it can get, but I can't lie to myself: YouTube has improved the world tremendously and provided me with tens of thousands of dollars of value. I cannot even fathom.
  - grumpyprole 5y ago
    Yes, I like YouTube, but it was great even before Google bought it. Now it does come with privacy concerns. Luckily, there are other similar offerings.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Those things where invented with public money yes. But Moore's law wouldn't have been a thing without profit incentive.
ergot_vacation 5y ago
It's not at all uncommon for monopolies to provide benefit to the public. They're uniquely capable of doing so, given their vast wealth and power. The problem is that they ALSO cause harm, and that benefit ends up not being worth the harm. What harm has Big Tech caused? We don't have an Internet anymore thanks to them. Not a real Internet. Seven or eight major sites and a smattering of others you occasionally visit is not the Internet. The Internet is supposed to be a vast sea of individual sites, small communities and small businesses each discoverable, each doing their own thing. Instead we have a few walled gardens you barely even need two hands to count.

walrus01 5y ago

the future is a walled garden stepping on a face, forever.

laurent92 5y ago

> bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values It does, but Mozilla is not representative of those values to my opinion. They represent the values on the left of humanism, but are opposed to right values, and therefore it doesn’t embody neutrality or democracy. They go as far as thinking everyone should share their opinion on gay marriage, and a private donation in that matter is grounds to fire someone. Given their clear left leaning on other public stances, I think activists on the right should be wary of sudden account deletion if they store data with Mozilla (e.g. the password vault). Not that they could trust Google either, of course. But neutrality would be much better if we mention democracy.

t-writescode 5y ago
1: democracy isn't neutral, it tends to follow the will of the people 2: Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use, as long as they abide by the stances they say they have regarding my privacy and making the best product possible?
- fleddr 5y ago
  It depends on whether the topic is divisive or not. Protecting privacy, holding big tech accountable, etc are not divisive topics. Any internet user wants that. Yet if you tread in more divisive topics, you may lose part of your audience. Examples: women in tech, trans rights, advancing the black community with special projects. Each of these are politically divisive. It doesn't matter where you stand on these issues, I'm just commenting on how they are divisive topics in an extremely polarized political landscape. If these issues are central to your belief and mission, one should go for it. Yet you then need to accept the risk of abandoning part of the potential user base. Which for a browser maker is dumb. But I wonder what Mozilla really is these days.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  Why should I care about the politics of the software company I use One obvious reason would be if the company in question is directly supporting various causes that you like or dislike. You might also choose to care about the people working at that company. Suppose they support and/or practice policies that are harmful (or beneficial) to their employees. You might choose to discourage (or encourage) such policies by voting with your money. Really, your question is disingenuous -- surely you understand? It seems like you simply don't want to care or don't feel that giving or witholding your support will make a sufficient difference. That's your call. Just be honest with yourself and others.

ergot_vacation 5y ago

The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. To the extent that wide social change ever happens, it only happens because the path of least resistance shifted from one thing to another. If you despair for the actions of the masses, never try to reason with them. Skip straight to assembling a good marketing campaign. I admire the spirit, but nobody's going to "stand up" and fight the good fight. Most people are only capable of being consumers. If you want them to change, give them something more attractive to consume. These are the rules of the game. Also, Firefox isn't some beacon on a hill. Its creators/owners are intensely corrupted at this point: politically, ethically, and pragmatically. They stopped building a tool to serve ordinary people a long time ago, and pivoted to attempting to build the most stylish and trendy browser instead. IE, a browser that looks as much like Chrome as possible without being Chrome. Firefox is still better than Chrome, but the differences become more superficial with each release, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually just becomes a shell for Chromium like everything else has, a way for a certain crowd to signal how ethical they are while still being tapped in to the Gooogle ad hivemind like everyone else.

blaze33 5y ago
> The general mass of humanity never does things because they're "right": Ethical, Forward-Thinking, Better For Society etc. They do them because they're easy. Already in 1947, Georges Bernanos wrote: "it's always more profitable to satisfy man's vices than his needs" in his essay "France against Robots" (La France contre les robots, no idea if there's a good English translation though). Slightly off-topic but I can't recommend this book enough, it's quite forward-thinking and the chapters on freedom and privacy in an increasingly technological society might interest some of you here. I especially remember a brilliant rebuttal of the 'nothing to hide' argument that is still relevant nowadays. So yes, I agree with you, good ideas by themselves rarely happen to actually change how things work. Like you said "a good marketing campaign" might be more impactful. Is there still hope? I've had this question for quite some time now: how do you efficiently implement some change in a system that won't cooperate? Seems to me that it requires some hacker mindset to find how you can exploit the rules of the game to trick the system into working towards your goals. I've been given a great book full off details about what should be done if we are to improve our world in the coming decades, but it's a bit of a let down for me: what should be done is rarely a secret, how you actually manage to pull it off at scale is the real issue.

zajio1am 5y ago

> If a class of people on a forum such as this with so many brilliant minds cannot even be bothered with the values of open source and how this pertains to democracy and human values I really don't see how any other part of our species could. Not sure how that is relevant to Firefox vs Chromium debate. Both Firefox and Chromium are open source.

toper-centage 5y ago
For a project as massive as a browser, being open source is vastly irrelevant. Only major companies are able to truly maintain a browser these days. You can fork Chrome, sure, but you won't get anywhere with it. Chromium is Google.
- wayneftw 5y ago
  Chromium has ~5 million lines of code. The Linux kernel has ~28 million lines of code. We also very much have a monoculture with the Linux kernel and society hasn't collapsed. Disagreement lacking argumentation indicates to me that I'm absolutely 100% correct. Thank you for your input!
lgvld 5y ago
Mozilla vs Google/Alphabet (values shared by...).

xpressvideoz 5y ago

The time I lost my faith in Firefox was when the CEO of Mozilla got a huge pay increase, whilst firing many technical people at the same time. How can a tech company improve their product without those technical people? Oh, never mention the ever-decreasing number of Firefox users. Weren't the C-level people responsible for that? Anyway, that was the moment when I realized Mozilla was just another company, not a flagship open source advocator or something. They're not even pretending anymore. Look at the sneaky attempts to integrate ads on Firefox. Look at the user experience being degraded every year. They are not listening to me, so I decided to not listen to them.

twelvechairs 5y ago
So whats the better, more ethical alternative? Certainly not Chrome
- shadilay 5y ago
  Servo
- atatatat 5y ago
  Edge
  - benrbray 5y ago
    I was really rooting for Edge back before they switched to Chromium. Now it's just worse Chrome. I do use it as my default PDF viewer though as I don't know of any other free tool for linux that lets you annotate PDFs. (there's Master PDF but it's a bit overkill when I just want some multicolored highlighters.)
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Security-wise, it's far better Chrome. Privacy score really depends on your views on MS/Google/Mozilla. Firefox is taaaaalkative.
    - 5y ago

systemvoltage 5y ago

Thanks for a good spank. HN needs one once in a while.

voidnullnil 5y ago

If the internet as it is right now was what was put forth as the initial internet experiment, one would wonder what kind of shit for brains thought this up. I honestly cannot comprehend how people can talk about software without "fuck off" being used as a greeting. Firefox and Chrome are not even usable. The people who claim they are, are either nerds tunnel visioned and hyped on some super specific thing like their latest sandbox thing or CSS feature, or someone who spent a lot of money on their computer and are desperate to prove they have a premium experience. My parents don't think browsers are usable. Nobody I know IRL does, aside from my most consumerish friends who see buying digital goods as a the new drinking beer. They feel like they are gettign some premium state of the art protection when they idiotically crouch over their phone to enter the 500th SMS based 2FA (read: snakeoil garbage used as a bandaid to fix mind numbingly insecure software on the client as well as the server) token of the day. All it takes to remove the current web is to make something that has a UI at least as good as a 30 year old toaster. Insane bugs aside, all modern software GUIs are slow and unresponsive as hell. A layman trying an actual good alternative will understand its better without needing to know why. Modern web UX design is pure garbage, but it's not much worse than initial web 2.0 design. Everything is a clusterfuck of, "oh can I do this?" 403, "huh I guess not", and "how do I do this? oh there is no button for that? it would be really simple why did they not add this? oh, because it's not relevant to the company's revenue model?". tl;dr we need the Firefox of Firefox The web should be static documents. <video> is still something that can go in a static document. There is no need to execute someone's poorly written application hacked together in a <script> tag to view documents in some unreadble form where the text constantly flickers on and off (to gracefully upgrade or whatever it's doing) as they try to impress you with their "type" knowledge. By definition, the majority of websites must be poorly written since there are not as many good programmers as content creators, and the default is for websites to be loaded via a JS in a JS in a JS. Note also how browsers like Firefox and Chrome (and moslty the old web specs) try as hard as possible to make default CSS look horrible. 99% of my usage of the web is for viewing articles, and unfortunately banking which for some reason chooses to implement their online service in the most insecure possible way. tl;dr the web should be static documents Now the next problem is that all content has to be hosted on a server that is paid for by someone, and they even pay for a stupid string in the URL bar. Well I guess I should say the web is for commercial content and not for humans (btw, it's a common misconception to claim domain names are human friendly). If the web was on something like IPFS or Freenet, then anyone could make their own website. This brings the web back to what it is about: sharing information (which is an entirely different concept than trying to compose content that will bring the most revenue). However, there is a big problem with this: the American police state doesn't like people sharing files. They prop up false dilemmas like that some rich company's "music" can be illegally shared. If such p2p web materializes, the american police state will be finding new ways to arrest random people and make everything as insufferable as possible. I have tried to host websites recently and basically the only place you can do this is on github.io (I do not want to pay money for hosting a website, because domain names are literal garbage, electronic payments are literally garbage, and having my IRL identity tied to stuff I post online is literally garbage. i do not understand the new trend of using your real identity online other than to promote yourself aka make bad bait content), and then it's not certain if some idiot who has no right to moderate what I say decides to remove my articles discussing old patched security vulnerabilities. Plus github.io makes zero profit so they might just remove my stuff at some point (whereas I could just keep it up forever without changing URL on IPFS or Freenet, and it would stay up forever as long as people or even just I care about it, but nobody uses either). tl;dr the web should be content addressable and 'murica should stop pretending uploading bits of data is a problem, so people can actually post their websites Corporations cannot comprehend this because they reason in terms of graphs of consumer happiness and competing with the 3 products that are 0.001% different than theirs. Corporations cannot innovate because the employee spends all his life chasing simple goals laid out by his boss who puts in the minmal effort to define what the goals should be while making it look like he is a better boss than his competitors. Corporations do not require their developers to understand any engineering concepts, they just need to be able to fill tick boxes of features. tl;dr literally anyone competent can beat big tech

jimbob45 5y ago

> All my friends use Chrome I’m guessing 99% of the users of this site use Chrome…Dev Tools. The real question is what people use for personal browsing after hours. I wish Mozilla would just import Chrome’s Dev Tools because they’re just undeniably better than anything else on the market.

rd07 5y ago
I have been a long time user of Firefox, but as a web developer I use Chromium occasionally to test a web application I develop. I would like to know, what kind of feature that Chrome/Chromium dev tools offer that Firefox doesn't?

design-material 5y ago

This is ridiculous and hyperbolic on a few points, namely that Chrome's position is way worse than Microsoft's. Even if we ignore the fact that Chromium is open-source, that Chrome is heavily extensible, that Google has demonstrably shown commitment to developing the web in an open manner (eg WebRTC) - ignoring these and other facts, when Microsoft was 'in charge' of the Web (via IE's power) they locked IE down, killed their competition, and literally single-handedly stalled the progress of the Web. The fact that you say IE at it's peak was worse than Chrome shows incredible ignorance on the matter. Your anecdote about your friends reminds me of this odd joke from school There's a senior citizen driving on the highway. His wife calls him on his cell phone and in a worried voice says, Herman, be careful! I just heard on the radio that there is a madman driving the wrong way on Route 280! Herman says, I know, but there isn't just one, there are hundreds!

pjmlp 5y ago

> Imaging if Google invented hypertext and not CERN CERN did not invent hypertext, just made a popular version on top of TCP. Hypertext already existed at Xerox PARC and had multiple implementations since then across UNIX and 16 bit home computers.

raxxorrax 5y ago

> Chromium scrolls 5% better on my machine so who cares about Firefox For the longest time this was actually the other way around. Firefox decoupled rendering from scrolling, which made it a far better option in many cases (there are some disadvantages, but FF just was further from the technical side). Chrome cannot render nice pictures. It neglects quality for speed. I think it still does. Isn't visible in every image and you can disable this with tuned CSS tricks, but the issue remains. But of course you are correct that all this is completely secondary... Any serious developer that doesn't at least appreciate freedom and open source is an idiot in my opinion. Please excuse my strong language.