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.
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.
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.
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.."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Safari doesn't work on Android, Linux, or Windows. Firefox works on all platforms I use, plus a few that I don't, so I'll always be able to have bookmarks and whatnot sync across my devices.
And what Mozilla does with Firefox is about as open source as it can be. I'm not really sure what you're referring to here. There are spins that remove bits that some people don't like, which means it's plenty open.
I've tried NetSurf, and while it was cool, it just doesn't do what I want. I really like syncing bookmarks and extensions, and it just doesn't have those features, much less syncing.
What's open source "only in name" about Firefox? I like NetSurf and hope it grows, but the MPL seems pretty open source to me. I build the Firefox I use from source on every release on my Talos II.
I agree with your position, especially when you compare it with Safari, which is not open source in any sense. However, all the Pocket features that Firefox integrates with are (still) closed source, even 2+ years after Mozilla spent $29m acquiring them. So the person you're responding to does have some hint of a good point.
Remember:
- Mozilla Corporation is _not_ your friend.
- WebKit is still a viable third-party alternative to both Blink and Gecko.
> However, all the Pocket features that Firefox integrates with are (still) closed source
All the integration code is open source. Pocket is a web service that is currently not open source. This is like saying that because Firefox uses Google Safe Browsing, that it is open source in name only because the Google Safe Browsing code isn't open source.
> All the integration code is open source. Pocket is a web service that is currently not open source.
Why are you saying things that I've already said? I think it's because there's misdirection here that will deceive anyone who isn't paying close enough attention to realize that you _aren't_ saying anything different than what I've said.
> This is like saying that[...]
This is such an intellectually dishonest argument. Google Safe Browsing is not a Mozilla-owned and operated service, nor was it ever reported that it would be open sourced. It's also little more than a hashtable of URIs. The extent to which Google Safe Browsing is "integrated" into Firefox is trivial when compared to the level that Firefox is pushing Pocket and pushing out Pocket-related features.
>This is such an intellectually dishonest argument.
It doesn't feel that way to me. If you don't like the article recommendations on the new tab page, you can turn them off. You can disable all references to Pocket by setting ```extensions.pocket.enabled``` to false.
You can't do much with Pocket without signing up for a login, aside from reading stories. How is that different from Edge showing stories from MSN on the home page?
Pocket related features are pretty darned minimal, too - there is no sidebar for Pocket built in, the Pocket list doesn't appear in the UI (it just redirects to the Pocket website), there is no keyboard shortcut to save pages to Pocket - there just isn't a lot there.
All that is present is a button in the address bar (that can be hidden) and in page context menus that allow users to save to Pocket. That is the extent of the integration.
So yeah, it doesn't feel all that dishonest to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
"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.
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.
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.
My video is definitely hardware (GPU) accelerated. If you don’t have working hardware acceleration in Firefox for videos/WebGL, there’s something wrong with your setup, it’s not a FF problem.
I and many others in this thread have no issue with this in FF.
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.
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.
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?
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.