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HN is a very tough crowd. First everyone wonders why there is no successful fork of Firefox, then someone makes one and nobody is happy.

FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago
Everyone just ignoring PaleMoon? https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/
- gkbrk 5y ago
  Pale Moon is very hostile to packagers and distros, threatening them with lawsuits within the first few messages of a conversation. I wouldn't want to give a userbase to them if they treat people like that.
- losingom 5y ago
  The problem with Pale Moon is it's effectively a dead end from a development standpoint. Yes, it gets security fixes from upstream (for which are applicable) but it doesn't receive much in the way of meaningful web compatibility (the elephant in the room being WebComponents, which none of the team have the capability of implementing in the current codebase). It's based on Firefox 52 and refuses to re-base on later versions, partially due to lack of XUL-based extensions and partly due to the introduction of Rust (which does not exist on some platforms which Pale Moon supports - including Solaris/Illumos).
  - jclulow 5y ago
    FWIW, illumos has excellent Rust support.
d3nj4l 5y ago
For some reason, Firefox (and its variants) seems to attract an especially tough crowd. People will let Chrome hoover up every last bit of information about you but FF will get relentlessly pilloried for every minor decision.
- coldpie 5y ago
  You see the same thing with non-profits. For-profit companies can ask $50 for a product, do whatever they like with the profit, and everyone is happy. A non-profit asks for voluntary donations for a similar product and gets all of their receipts to local pizza joints examined.
- wink 5y ago
  The problem with Mozilla is that most of us seem to be holding them to a higher standard. It's not minor details that are scrutinized but more like "HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA", and sadly there's been about 1-2 of those per year.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    That is pretty much a problem they created themselves by claiming to be a champion of tge free Internet and then doing stuff like invetsing in an adtech company and then handing a sample of user browser history to said company. Why does a corporation owned by a foundation do stuff like that? If you have an official mission other than making money people will hold you to a higher standard than normal for profit companies.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Those are two different groups of people. The Firefox complainers are Firefox users. The people satisfied with Chrome are Chrome users.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  Please stop making excuses for Mozilla - their management has made many questionable decisions including bundling unnecessary extensions like Pocket and closed source DRM plugin without user permission, aggressive telemetry tracking, downloading and running codes / features without your knowledge (it's opt-out but only if you know what to opt-out of) and now even bundling adware into the browser. Instead of ensuring their engine is easily modular and usable they are more concerned about others making competing browsers and thus let greed drive their design decisions to make a clunky and poorly architected product that just lags in development. Fire the greed driven management of Mozilla, and bring a team more concerned about developing a good product than letting money drive the design decisions, and Firefox will be back on track.
pixxel 5y ago
HN seems to shoot down everything with negativity. Maybe I’m romanticising my memories, but where’s the hacker spirit gone? Perhaps we’re all jaded.
- roughly 5y ago
  @dang pointed out when I commented similarly on another thread that early comments on threads seem to tend towards the negative, and sentiment often shifts more positive as things go on (which is exactly what happened on that other thread)
  - LordDragonfang 5y ago
    I'll fill in for dang here. It's the contrarian dynamic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      For the chemistry-inclined, it's also known as Le Chatelier's Principle.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  Meh, go back to this day, 2013 [0] and you’ll see the same constructive/non-constructive criticism. It’s an exacting crowd, which is what I love personally.
- t0bia_s 5y ago
  I wouldn't say that it is negativity. It's criticism that is mostly constructive, which I appreciate because nowadays it is popular to ban/cancel criticism on forums or social networks.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > HN seems to shoot down everything with negativity Except marketing-driven products, which get really overhyped here.
paxys 5y ago
Everyone wonders why there's no widely used alternative to Chrome, then someone makes a great one (Firefox) and nobody is happy. In reality, there are two categories of users – one group (the vast majority) is perfectly happy with the status quo regardless of privacy issues or anything else, and the other is simply looking to endlessly nitpick and complain about everything in pursuit of some hypothetical perfection that can never be reached. There's no wonder then that new products will mostly cater to the first group than the second.
- chasil 5y ago
  I am partial to the Bromite fork of Chrome on Android. It has built-in adblock, and DNS-over-HTTPs in the setup menus. https://www.bromite.org/ https://www.bromite.org/ I understand that stock Chromium can do DoH with options on the command line; I have been meaning to set this up in a few places.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  This is a bad view of users and people in general. It's also a really bizarre view of the Firefox complainers, who are the ones demanding that the status quo be kept. One can end up in contradictory situations like that when you judge people based purely on how much they agree with you, or with institutions you support. People who hate the thing you hate are not "haters," and people who like the thing you hate are not "sheep." Very few people are choosing their opinions in order to annoy you, or in order to annoy Mozilla. Supporting the management status quo is the opposite of supporting the product status quo; Firefox now is an absolutely unrecognizable product compared to Firefox 5 years ago. Not coincidentally, Chrome isn't unrecognizable, it's dependable. I wonder why it's successful? Is it because google isn't playing fairly, or because anyone who has ever been satisfied with Chrome has never been given any good reason to leave, while every change in firefox seems tuned to peel off 2% of the userbase? If there's an effective way Google isn't playing fair, it's probably that they have some indirect but strong influence in directing Firefox development.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    The parent of your post is pretty accurate. I've complained about it before, but Firefox is unfairly targeted by an outsized number of complainers here on HN.
eslaught 5y ago
HN is not a hivemind. There could easily be two groups (or more) of people: one who shows up to Firefox threads and complains, and another who shows up to Firefox fork threads and complains. There may be some overlap between these groups, but there doesn't have to be. In my opinion, it's pretty easy to spot this pattern, because when you've read HN long enough, you know what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group. But that's not to say any given group is representative of HN as a whole, which I think is still largely dominated by lurkers.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Users that comment on a post are not a random sample of the community at large. So you can't draw conclusions about the community by looking at a biased sample of posts, because it just projects that bias into the comments. This is a truism of most online platforms, e.g. Twitter.
- no-dr-onboard 5y ago
  > HN is not a hivemind. Big claim. Add the keywords "Rust", "Webasm" or "Burnout" to your title and your chances of making it to the frontpage increase significantly.
  - timeon 5y ago
    Maybe you are just closer to the group that gets triggered by these keywords. And that is OK. But my point is that these 'opposing' sentiments are always present in those threads. Which begs the question: where is the hivemind?
  - skrtskrt 5y ago
    Also make sure you note somewhere in your post: * that MBAs and VCs are useless leeches * but rich tech founders are folk heros and visionaries * that all regulations are just market capture by entrenched players * Europe's government health plans work great and America's private one is an embarrassment * but that also government cannot possibly be an efficient provider of services and the only true answer is pure libertarianism
- 5y ago
uncomputation 5y ago
I think this is the reckoning of people realizing that technical solutions do not always solve social problems. Firefox itself started as a fork against Netscape’s commercialization, and now has reintroduced many of the same issues: Pocket, telemetry, DRM. Google’s original paper explicitly identified the conflict of interest in search engines funded by ads, and now it is the largest ad marketplace in existence. I think now when people see something like LibreWolf they ask “for how long?”
rvz 5y ago
Brave used Firefox's core Gecko (and forked it) several years ago, encountered problems with it and called it a day. Then they switched to Chromium and they are more alive than ever. Had they kept using it, well that would have certainly been another dead Firefox-based browser fork.
- hereforphone 5y ago
  Careful. Every time I've mentioned Brave here I've been downvoted. Getting on point: I've used Brave for awhile now and it's been fine. Major issues for me are updates are frequent enough to be annoying, and I haven't been able to access sites with self-signed certificates.
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  Reminds me of a Star Wars quote: Luke Skywalker: Is the dark side stronger? Master Yoda: No, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive I try to stay far away from Google.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

FuriouslyAdrift 5y ago

Everyone just ignoring PaleMoon? https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/

gkbrk 5y ago
Pale Moon is very hostile to packagers and distros, threatening them with lawsuits within the first few messages of a conversation. I wouldn't want to give a userbase to them if they treat people like that.
losingom 5y ago
The problem with Pale Moon is it's effectively a dead end from a development standpoint. Yes, it gets security fixes from upstream (for which are applicable) but it doesn't receive much in the way of meaningful web compatibility (the elephant in the room being WebComponents, which none of the team have the capability of implementing in the current codebase). It's based on Firefox 52 and refuses to re-base on later versions, partially due to lack of XUL-based extensions and partly due to the introduction of Rust (which does not exist on some platforms which Pale Moon supports - including Solaris/Illumos).
- jclulow 5y ago
  FWIW, illumos has excellent Rust support.

d3nj4l 5y ago

For some reason, Firefox (and its variants) seems to attract an especially tough crowd. People will let Chrome hoover up every last bit of information about you but FF will get relentlessly pilloried for every minor decision.

coldpie 5y ago
You see the same thing with non-profits. For-profit companies can ask $50 for a product, do whatever they like with the profit, and everyone is happy. A non-profit asks for voluntary donations for a similar product and gets all of their receipts to local pizza joints examined.
wink 5y ago
The problem with Mozilla is that most of us seem to be holding them to a higher standard. It's not minor details that are scrutinized but more like "HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA", and sadly there's been about 1-2 of those per year.
- jeltz 5y ago
  That is pretty much a problem they created themselves by claiming to be a champion of tge free Internet and then doing stuff like invetsing in an adtech company and then handing a sample of user browser history to said company. Why does a corporation owned by a foundation do stuff like that? If you have an official mission other than making money people will hold you to a higher standard than normal for profit companies.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
pessimizer 5y ago
Those are two different groups of people. The Firefox complainers are Firefox users. The people satisfied with Chrome are Chrome users.
webmobdev 5y ago
Please stop making excuses for Mozilla - their management has made many questionable decisions including bundling unnecessary extensions like Pocket and closed source DRM plugin without user permission, aggressive telemetry tracking, downloading and running codes / features without your knowledge (it's opt-out but only if you know what to opt-out of) and now even bundling adware into the browser. Instead of ensuring their engine is easily modular and usable they are more concerned about others making competing browsers and thus let greed drive their design decisions to make a clunky and poorly architected product that just lags in development. Fire the greed driven management of Mozilla, and bring a team more concerned about developing a good product than letting money drive the design decisions, and Firefox will be back on track.

pixxel 5y ago

HN seems to shoot down everything with negativity. Maybe I’m romanticising my memories, but where’s the hacker spirit gone? Perhaps we’re all jaded.

roughly 5y ago
@dang pointed out when I commented similarly on another thread that early comments on threads seem to tend towards the negative, and sentiment often shifts more positive as things go on (which is exactly what happened on that other thread)
- LordDragonfang 5y ago
  I'll fill in for dang here. It's the contrarian dynamic. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    For the chemistry-inclined, it's also known as Le Chatelier's Principle.
uncomputation 5y ago
Meh, go back to this day, 2013 [0] and you’ll see the same constructive/non-constructive criticism. It’s an exacting crowd, which is what I love personally.
t0bia_s 5y ago
I wouldn't say that it is negativity. It's criticism that is mostly constructive, which I appreciate because nowadays it is popular to ban/cancel criticism on forums or social networks.
goodpoint 5y ago
> HN seems to shoot down everything with negativity Except marketing-driven products, which get really overhyped here.

paxys 5y ago

Everyone wonders why there's no widely used alternative to Chrome, then someone makes a great one (Firefox) and nobody is happy. In reality, there are two categories of users – one group (the vast majority) is perfectly happy with the status quo regardless of privacy issues or anything else, and the other is simply looking to endlessly nitpick and complain about everything in pursuit of some hypothetical perfection that can never be reached. There's no wonder then that new products will mostly cater to the first group than the second.

chasil 5y ago
I am partial to the Bromite fork of Chrome on Android. It has built-in adblock, and DNS-over-HTTPs in the setup menus. https://www.bromite.org/ https://www.bromite.org/ I understand that stock Chromium can do DoH with options on the command line; I have been meaning to set this up in a few places.
pessimizer 5y ago
This is a bad view of users and people in general. It's also a really bizarre view of the Firefox complainers, who are the ones demanding that the status quo be kept. One can end up in contradictory situations like that when you judge people based purely on how much they agree with you, or with institutions you support. People who hate the thing you hate are not "haters," and people who like the thing you hate are not "sheep." Very few people are choosing their opinions in order to annoy you, or in order to annoy Mozilla. Supporting the management status quo is the opposite of supporting the product status quo; Firefox now is an absolutely unrecognizable product compared to Firefox 5 years ago. Not coincidentally, Chrome isn't unrecognizable, it's dependable. I wonder why it's successful? Is it because google isn't playing fairly, or because anyone who has ever been satisfied with Chrome has never been given any good reason to leave, while every change in firefox seems tuned to peel off 2% of the userbase? If there's an effective way Google isn't playing fair, it's probably that they have some indirect but strong influence in directing Firefox development.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  The parent of your post is pretty accurate. I've complained about it before, but Firefox is unfairly targeted by an outsized number of complainers here on HN.

eslaught 5y ago

HN is not a hivemind. There could easily be two groups (or more) of people: one who shows up to Firefox threads and complains, and another who shows up to Firefox fork threads and complains. There may be some overlap between these groups, but there doesn't have to be. In my opinion, it's pretty easy to spot this pattern, because when you've read HN long enough, you know what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group. But that's not to say any given group is representative of HN as a whole, which I think is still largely dominated by lurkers.

infogulch 5y ago
Users that comment on a post are not a random sample of the community at large. So you can't draw conclusions about the community by looking at a biased sample of posts, because it just projects that bias into the comments. This is a truism of most online platforms, e.g. Twitter.
no-dr-onboard 5y ago
> HN is not a hivemind. Big claim. Add the keywords "Rust", "Webasm" or "Burnout" to your title and your chances of making it to the frontpage increase significantly.
- timeon 5y ago
  Maybe you are just closer to the group that gets triggered by these keywords. And that is OK. But my point is that these 'opposing' sentiments are always present in those threads. Which begs the question: where is the hivemind?
- skrtskrt 5y ago
  Also make sure you note somewhere in your post: * that MBAs and VCs are useless leeches * but rich tech founders are folk heros and visionaries * that all regulations are just market capture by entrenched players * Europe's government health plans work great and America's private one is an embarrassment * but that also government cannot possibly be an efficient provider of services and the only true answer is pure libertarianism
5y ago

uncomputation 5y ago

I think this is the reckoning of people realizing that technical solutions do not always solve social problems. Firefox itself started as a fork against Netscape’s commercialization, and now has reintroduced many of the same issues: Pocket, telemetry, DRM. Google’s original paper explicitly identified the conflict of interest in search engines funded by ads, and now it is the largest ad marketplace in existence. I think now when people see something like LibreWolf they ask “for how long?”

rvz 5y ago

Brave used Firefox's core Gecko (and forked it) several years ago, encountered problems with it and called it a day. Then they switched to Chromium and they are more alive than ever. Had they kept using it, well that would have certainly been another dead Firefox-based browser fork.

hereforphone 5y ago
Careful. Every time I've mentioned Brave here I've been downvoted. Getting on point: I've used Brave for awhile now and it's been fine. Major issues for me are updates are frequent enough to be annoying, and I haven't been able to access sites with self-signed certificates.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Reminds me of a Star Wars quote: Luke Skywalker: Is the dark side stronger? Master Yoda: No, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive I try to stay far away from Google.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]