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Firefox has a lot of issues, but maybe we don't have any other option.
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Firefox
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I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It's a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.
I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.
But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave's Basic Attention Tokens, DDG's Privacy Pro, etc.).
Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.
It has always felt so goofy to see people say "x" based Chromium browser is better than Firefox because Firefox takes Google's money but "x" based Chromium browser doesn't. Like... It just completely ignores the investment Google puts in Chromium lol. Google's money into Firefox equals bad, but Google's money into Chromium, oh, that's actually not bad because we just cover our eyes and ears and go "LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" or something???
All that to say, I'm glad to see someone else explicitly share this opinion.
Isn't the only reason firefox gets google ad money is because google is afraid they would slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit? Firefox getting money from google doesn't seem like a valid criticism.
I believe it is because Google is the default search engine in Firefox.
It is, but I'm pretty sure they have to give all users the choice now in the EU, when you launch first time.
I think it's the other way around, Android has to ask you what you want your default browser (and search engine?) to be, but if you choose Firefox, it will still have Google as its default search engine.
Firefox's marketshare isn't big enough to count as a gatekeeper, I don't think.
I'm not in the EU, but I have Firefox set as my default browser on Android and it works fine.
Ah yes, maybe you are right.
Come to think of it, I only saw this on Safari, Android and Edge, and they are all gatekeepers.
When Chrome came out it was heavily promoted by everyone I knew (apart from my best friend) I tried it, didn't like the UI (still don't) and didn't see the point of it.
People talked abour how fast it was, and I felt that Firefox was fast enough, and Firefox just worked as I wanted it to, why change?
I kept stedfast with Firefox, apart from when the horrible Australis UI was launched, then I switched to a fork called Pale Moon, which I used for several years untill the current UI was launched.
it actually WAS really good when it first came out and for a few years, it was also back during the days where google still kind of follows the "don't be evil" principle.
Yeah there's a good reason we all started to use it, unlike Firefox it was far far quicker to boot up and load pages. And used significantly less resources, so there was really little upside to using Firefox apart from a few addons not being available for a while.
Yup, I used it for a year or two, then I found Opera, which was about as fast and also had an independent rendering engine. Around that time, the independence of the rendering engine really mattered to me, so when Opera switched to a Chromium base, I switched back to Firefox. Firefox has since caught up in perf and is the best non-Chromium browser for me (well, I use Mull on Android because FF isn't on F-Droid and has some defaults I prefer to Fennec).
I have very strong doubts about the security of Palemoon
Today I am not certain I would use it, but at the time I wasn't concerned.
Why?
It is based on a old version of Firefox but I don't see evidence of them back porting security fixes
Ah man, shucks.
Chrome was so lightweight and fast when it was launched. And it had a blazing fast Javascript engine. No other engine came close to it.
It was a pretty awesome browser back then during the "do no evil" era of Google.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but I never had an issue with Firefox and Javascript.
Oh, I understand. I'm just saying that the reasons were enough for a lot of people to give it a go, me included. You probably had a beefed up machine back then in 2008. I didn't, and launching a browser took several seconds, whereas Chrome launched like in one second or so.
Of course, Chrome started to suck and I came back to Firefox, especially when they caught up with Javascript.
I think it had more to do with the webites I visited, and being used to slower connections
Got it.
I've best heard it described as: people love Firefox to death.
People, use whatever you like, but if you actively discourage everyone to stop using it, we might lose it - and with it, Librewolf, Palemoon, Tor Browser, and everything that's not Chrome or Safari.
Not true.
Navigator died a horrible death, and Phoenix (later Firefox), being a fork of it, survived just fine.
Building a browser was a hugely different (and waaaay smaller) job back then.
But let me know when Servo or Ladybird are viable. Until then, don't burn any bridges.
My point is that none of those forks have to start from scratch if Firefox disappears. One of them will replace it.
As long as a browser is good enough for browsing the net, I'm okay with it.
I don't need, for example, DRM. If half of the web uses it, and a new browser alternative doesn't support it, then fuck it. The other half is still hundreds of millions of web pages for me to consume.
They won't have to start from scratch, but they'll fall behind on webcompatibility and security patches in no time.
I think you're assuming too much.
If Firefox disappears overnight, do you think the devs working for it are just going to sit down and twiddle their thumbs? They'll pick another project and carry on.
There are several examples of this happening. MySQL vs MariaDB, OpenSSL, PDF viewers, hell, even Linux can be included here too.
The issue at hand is not Firefox disappearing overnight. It's the slow decline of the userbase continuing until the ones that do don't bring in enough money to keep paying enough developers.
And no, the devs aren't going to twiddle their thumbs - they're going to take jobs elsewhere. Firefox is still mainly dependent on paid labour.
People could try to start a new company (hopefully another non-profit), but it'll face the same challenges. I hope it would be successful, but I sure as hell won't be counting on it and actively contributing to the demise.
Kinda weird that you focus on the financial side on this site of all places. I thought Lemmy didn't care too much about that.
But regardless. I don't care about the financial side. There are several competing open source browsers and any of them can take the helm.
I care about viability. There is no way to keep up a project like Firefox and maintain web compatibility and proper security hygiene by relying on volunteers in today's world. All those competing open source browsers only have the luxury of not caring about the financial side because they're relying on the efforts of organisations that do.
I can understand you, friend. We both want the same thing. Unfortunately, I don't know how to help in that respect, so I'll help in the ways I can - spreading the word and contributing to code if necessary.
That's exactly what I'm calling for - keep up the good work!
As soon as there's another spectre level security incident that requires a massive rewrite of the engine, any rendering engine developers with sub 100M budgets are sunk. Frankly 100M is probably being optimistic.
Eh. Like I said... financial shit I don't care about.
Spectre wasn't even Firefox's fault. It was a CPU vulnerability.
In the end, if an open source browser cannot step up, some other will and take its place. I'm okay with that.
You may not care about financial shit, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation. My point is precisely that the financial costs are so prohibitive, that the most likely scenario is that no one will be capable of stepping up long term.
I don't know, man. Look at where big projects are at right now. Blender, Gimp, Linux, Inkscape, KDNLive...
It can happen.
But anyway. The day I can't use a secure, open-source web browser is the day I'll stop web browsing. Just like when I decided to never buy commercial music, go to the movies or buy a Smart TV.
Honestly it's more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.
That was after the reddit migration. Lemmy was much better before the reddit doom-and-gloom gang made themselves home.
I don't see what's relevant about your argument. Whether they came from Reddit is irrelevant, they're here now and this is how they behave.
It was not an argument. Just an observation. And your opinion doesn't make it less relevant.
As the matter of fact, both can co-exist.
Reddit fucked up Lemmy, and now that they're here, welp, it's bullshit.
Reddit didn't do anything to Lemmy, people came to lemmy.
I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.
I don't understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn't have competition in the browser space?
It doesn't have competition in terms of a "private browser". As far as I can see there is only Brave, and Ungoogled Chromium which is soon to be an unviable option because of the switch to Manifest V3 for Chromium.
There are of course browsers like Mullvad Browser, GNU Icecat and Librewolf etc. but they are all based on Firefox, so I wouldn't really count them.
It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn't a fork
Are you talking about the rendering engine? Safari still uses WebKit. Everything else was killed off by chrome. No one wanted to make addons for Internet Explorer, so they switched to Chromium as well.
It would be extremely difficult to put something new into the market at this point. If even Microsoft lacked the resources, it's hard to imagine anyone succeeding IMO.
We will watch Ladybug with great interest
True, I forgot that is happening. Hopefully it makes a big splash. It'll be interesting to see how they handle add-ons. I doubt that a modern browser can succeed without it. From my understanding, there may not be any interoperability with existing browser extensions.
That's certainly what I mean, but I can't speak for anyone else. I used Opera for years until they switched to being a Chromium-based browser, and Safari isn't an option on Windows or Linux, so I use Firefox. It's really not any more complicated than that.