I have been using the same web browser, in terms of ideology, codebase and heritage, since the release of NCSA Mosaic.
That was 32 years ago. And holy f**ck, that dates me.
Sure, I dabbled around with others. There was the original Opera, back when Netscape cratered and the only other real option was IE. Opera’s tab behaviours made me install Tab Mix Plus for FF, and I still find that extension to be the second-most critically important extension FF has, right after UBlock Origin.
And lately I took a shine to Vivaldi, but I have been weaning myself off of it once I realized that the Manifest v2 shutdown was unavoidable for it as well.
And the only reason why I even have Chromium is as a sandbox for any Google services I access and as a “naked” web browser for those websites who implement malware and spyware in the name of “website security”. Which, of course, also means a majority of websites that are “protected” by CloudFlare’s incredibly hostile anti-user practices.
And of course, I also run forks, such as Librewolf and others, also with the appropriate anti-malware and anti-spyware add-ins. It can be useful having multiple web browsers up at once.
But my main will always be Firefox.
Yeah, this is part of the new Reaganomics I like to call AIconomics. The goal isn’t to produce a good product, the goal to make something flashy that tech billionaires want to throw cash at. It’s not unlike crypto. Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big. Meanwhile tech billionaires keep minting new ones to entice new suckers every other week. The tech billionaires want you hooked on AI so you’ll give up your private info that they can sell to each other so they can cash in, the software companies are investing their time and resources into making AI LLMs in order to get tech billionaires to give them money. It’s a viscous capitalist circle. Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation. But with Republicans in charge that will absolutely never happen. Trump practically made his entire cabinet out of billionaires and corporate shills. And too many Democrats gave them the thumb up, so don’t count of Dems doing a whole lot to stall the big tech chokehold on everything either.
Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.
That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.
BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.
Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.
Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?
Well, if everything else failed…
“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.
The problem with light regulation is that it would probably be too easy to workaround, not that a heavy regulation do not have the same problem btw, but more than the regulation itself is the punishment (and the certainty and timeliness of it) that is important.
Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.
I noted it. That is why I said that the problem is the punishment.
They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.
I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.
One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
…
Zawinski has repeatedly said:
Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.
Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.
Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they’re all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services
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That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.
What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then? The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.
Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.
Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.
Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).
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Sadly I am running into more and more things that don’t work on firefox. Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently. They don’t say it is the browser. I don’t know how they are doing it, but google is winning the fight.
Stuff like medical record portals, financial websites for my companies retirement plan. Stuff I have little choice about. And most fail silently.
I recall how South Korea literally painted itself into a corner for becoming too dependent on Internet Explorer after years of using it with a security implementation based entirely on ActiveX.
I’m currently using a user-agent switcher plugin. Allows me to spoof servers into believing I’m running a different browser.
I tried the spoofer on a few, and they still failed. I thought it was supposed to be all chromium under the hood, but somehow it’s different. And companies don’t test firefox, nor care.
You could always use a WebKit-based browser. They’re still out there, and as they aren’t owned by a company that also sells web ads they are significantly more privacy focussed.
& they are ?<br> BTW, Who disliked your non-controversial comment ?
The main browser to use WebKit these days is Safari. You’ll find that on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I’m guessing that would be why someone downvoted me (some people have strong feelings about Apple, even though WebKit is Open Source and is very highly privacy focussed).
I had thought there were more options out there outside the Apple ecosystem, but it seems many of the browsers I once knew were using WebKit moved at some point to Blink (like Maxthon and Slepnir). The Gnome Epiphany browser for Linux however is built atop WebKit.
There are others, but you’re not likely (or able) to use them on desktop systems. PlayStation’s Orbis OS for the PS4 and PS5 uses WebKit as its underlying browser engine, for example. And there is WPE that is intended for use in embedded system environments (like for digital signage).
I did think there were more options out there (there once was!), but it seems a bunch of them moved to Blink when I wasn’t looking!
I used basilisk for a short while. Very minimal browser, indeed.
But it’s chromium, so you do you. I personally favour anything that doesn’t bloat me. Early on I used opera back on a j2me device, there was also a browser with a nice data saving feature, I had access to all cricket news and cricket sport teams because it was heaviliy featured there, there was a squirrel as a logo but it’s all I remember.
Edit it was ucbrowser
For clarity, Mozilla isn’t one thing. There’s Mozilla Corporation (profit) and the Mozilla Foundation (nonprofit). Firefox is a product of Mozilla Corporation. And yes, the need to make a profit is a bug not a feature.
Firefox still hasn’t fixed Bug 1938998 despite me reporting it multiple times. There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile. I’ve been using the internet for 26 years, and have used Mozilla based browsers since 2001, I want them to survive to the next era of the internet, but they are struggling to keep up. Opera and Edge already gave up their engines, Webkit and Blink are basically the same engine with different standards enabled, and Firefox is under 2% on some days on Statcounter. I feel that soon AI based browsers using their own AI-engine will probably take over the internet soon anyway.
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There’s a reason why Firefox is almost non existent on mobile.
And the reason is monopoly abuse by the big tech companies. Apple is banning other browser engines from the app store and does not allow Firefox onto iPhones. Google is shipping its own Chrome with every Android device and they are breaking their own sites like YouTube or Gmail on purpose for Firefox users and push them to install Chrome. Microsoft is bundling Edge with Windows as a default browser and will aggressively enable it as a default browser during updates.
I use Firefox on mobile all the time. Works fine for me. The fact that I get adblock on mobile makes it a no-brainer to use over chrome.
I just moved back to ff in November, because of ubo. I have to move again? Where to?
I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop. Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.
Librewolf
Called it
The fact that they are now selling our data seems like both a browser problem and a leadership problem. If the browser were fine, we wouldn’t be seeing a moderate exodus to choices like Librewolf and Zen.
Both currently sucks.
