Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?
theregister.com
theregister.com
I know there are problems around Mozilla the org, or the how firefox is funded, but I hope it's not going anywhere.
Thanks to LibGen and Anna’s Archive, I find myself reading actual books more these days, many published long before I was even born, to scratch my itch for learning. Wikipedia aside, a bunch of pirated grayscale scans from university libraries is suddenly more fulfilling than the information superhighway that the web was hyped to be.
The fact of the matter is that the web has been losing to native mobile apps and closed ecosystems. For many people, Facebook's mobile app is the Internet, and they're installing it from a closed app store. The web is an open application platform, whether you like it or not, and it either evolves to compete with mobile apps, or it's going to die.
For this reason, Google does more to preserve the open web than its competition in the browser space. And yes, I find these stats worrying when opened in Firefox:
https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/
And look, if you want to use a text-based browser like it's the 90s, go for it, but I'm pretty sure that most people are glad to see apps running in their full-fledged browser; because the browser is cross-platform, it's the perfect sandbox, and opening a web page isn't gated. YMMV.
My first thought was that I must have accidentally visited a website or downloaded something that exploited the browser to insert advertising shortcuts. However, I discovered that this is actually a built-in Firefox feature called 'Sponsored Shortcuts.'
Mozilla could have been an exemplary company, but they continue to squander the trust people place in them. It's shameful.
PS: You can turn off sponsored shortcuts here https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy
The defaults of Firefox may not be optimal but they're easy to change and don't pester you to change them back.
(with that being said I sure would like it if Firefox remembered my choice to disable sponsored shortcuts in my synchronization account)
This is just a greedy clueless MBAs trying to show themselves they are not useless. Can't wait for Ladybird to hit stable.
Now I want ladybird to succeed even more.
browser.shopping.experience2023.enabled
dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled
I got a feeling Mozilla will push more and more of stuff like this as Google's money dry out.
I need to check what defaults the Debian FF package comes with.
It might be other stuff like ocsp or domain stuff.
Implementation diversity is absolutely essential to an open-standards based Web, and right now the Web is pretty much the only open channel for pretty much all of human discourse.
Having said which, Mozilla is in real trouble, and desparately need to sort out their business model.
The question is why they focused on DEI, weird social activism so much and not on engineering itself.
Look at SQLite. SQLite is notable example where they don’t even have CoC(!) and focus only on getting engineering done. No marketing, events, sponsorships.
Pure wonderful code that works.
Edit: read more here about their „progressive” transformation https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/diversity/2022/
They kind of do have a CoC, called Code of Ethics.
https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html
But it's probably not what "tolerant" people are looking for. And it's fine.
Also, SQLite is open-source, but not open to contribution, so they can "get away with it". Although I completely support their model of doing development.
"First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. "
"Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." "
"Fulfill not the desires of the flesh; hate your own will. '
I hate sjw corrupting coc's invading the foss meritocracy as much as the next guy but this is so radicaly on the other side of the spectrum I think I hate it just as much .. being reactionary to sjws like this is still letting them win.
As for your highlighted excerpts, the first one says about having respect for the rules. Second one is about respecting the chain of command. Third rule is about having self control over oneself, and discipline.
Of course you've also failed to mention that in that COE there is also a comment that you're free to not obey those rules. They've just written those down, but you're not expected to follow it.
How is that radical?
The thing is Firefox (and Mozilla) became very off putting. They did things which weren’t exemplary or ideal - yes, when you are Firefox your very existence in my books is based off the premise of you trying to be ideal (because if you are not there really are good and better alternatives) - and they kept doing it, still do.
Had I not been on the Internet long enough I would have assumed Firefox still generally matters just seeing comments online just like a lot of folks assumed this US election result was to be a landslide (in opposite direction) from Reddit alone :)
Last time I used Chrome, you can only mute all at once.
It is untrustworthy as it will keep turning on features. Example - sync. If you aren't using sync, it will eventually turn it on. If you aren't syncing history it will turn that on at some point.
At least Brave and Chrome don't do that.
Edge, a browser that comes bundled with Windows, has 13.55%.
All this says is the majority of people use a mobile phone's default browser.
There is not much real choice when it comes to WWW browsers. For people that refuse Chrome, Safari and Samsung (distrust is sufficient), the 1-digit-percent remainder is the actual solutions space.
So: either things "matter" in practical terms, e.g. choice, which as said can be pretty scarce, so all plausible options are important, or why should the idea of "matter" be important at all.
It is said that this browser was so good, so ahead of the others from his time, that he achieved the power to... monopolize the entire web stack. Ultimately achieving 95% market share, websites for a while didn't bother to support other browsers.
However, time passed. IE6 got old and other browsers got progressively better. Suddenly, IE6 that was so good (compared to the 5.1 and 5.5 era and its competitors) was not so hot anymore.
So, we transitioned to the better browsers, right? Wrong! Companies that homologated IE6 took almost a decade to transition. Devs took almost a decade to cultivate a workable cross-browser culture. There was a particular dark era that required you to support 3 or 4 different IE versions (6 through 10), each one with its own quirks.
So, yeah. Anyone who lived through that era will never, ever, support a single browser implementation. It is a deep trauma. We want browsers to get their shit together, so huge gaps like that will not happen again.
Firefox still matters because we don't have a good independent replacement yet which actually rejects surveillance capitalism, just privacy protecting forks that remove the data collection, but it's not really clear how well they'd be maintained and developed if work stopped on Firefox.
I have to say that besides the gradual decline in respecting user privacy Firefox has been a great browser. I've been using it since switching from Netscape. Before they got involved with Anonym I would recommend it to anyone. With a bit of work and a lot of about:config edits you can lock firefox down harder than anything else. That's a niche no other browser has much interest in.