Called it
I can’t keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don’t get worse!
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my “feed” browser. Qutebrowser you don’t need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it’s a fork of firefox and they’re at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there’s a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it’s been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I’ll never use a different browser again.
I’ve been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.
That’s a weird way of saying firefox is not fine.
It’s no longer the fault of long-term CEO Mitchell Baker, she of the six-million-bucks salary. She took the cash and left in February 2024. After the February 2024 layoffs that went with the “open source AI” announcement, in November, new boss Laura Chambers laid off another third of the staff, but somehow found the money to hire new executives.
Money is the problem. Not too little, but too much. Where there’s wealth, there’s a natural human desire to make more wealth. Ever since Firefox 1.0 in 2004, Firefox has never had to compete. It’s been attached like a mosquito to an artery to the Google cash firehose. The Reg noted it in 2007, and it made more the next year. We were dubious when Firefox turned five.
…
Mozilla’s leadership is directionless and flailing because it’s never had to do, or be, anything else. It’s never needed to know how to make a profit, because it never had to make a profit. It’s no wonder it has no real direction or vision or clue: it never needed them. It’s role-playing being a business.
I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.
Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).
let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4 (Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.
The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.
They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.
They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.
Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.
Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)
Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.
It’s just a versions list. And I’m mostly joking. Rather that the “feel” of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn’t seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)
What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.
But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.
All firefox really needed to be once google took over everything, was to be a viable alternative and find a way to metabolize all this cash in a way that doesn’t damage google’s own cash machine or threaten it’s actual dominance.
For google the pitance they give firefox is a very cheap insurance policy against against anti-trust legislation. Just like Intel with AMD, this shows how toothless the liberal anti-trust legislation are, even if they were really being enforced, they cannot handle a token 2nd player. It cannot handle controlled opposition if it’s credible and believable. So an actual thriving ecosystem doesn’t need to exist, we just get duopolies instead of monopolies but in practices we get ducked up the cloaca just the same.
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.
mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
I personally think it’s not about Mozilla. It’s about the Web.
You need to see the bigger picture always.
The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.
The Web wasn’t intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.
It’s used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.
Why the Web and not just “Facebook native application” and “Google native application”? Well, it’s hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don’t work in a browser, that browser is doomed.
While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.
So - there weren’t that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).
Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.
But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It’s an oligopoly.
So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn’t allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn’t its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn’t think of such consequences.
And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that “post #12435324646dasgtshdryh” would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.
That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.
stand up against racism and discrimination
What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don’t want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.
I don’t think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don’t care if websites make money, I just care they don’t profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.
I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I’d otherwise block ads on.
If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it’s working.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
Felt kind of out of nowhere. How does a web browser stand up to racism?
i was talking about both mozilla and firefox… and the internet has plenty to do with that as a communication device for good.
instead of using the internet for war and hate, use it for unity and openness.
y’all need to stand up against racism and discrimination
I concur, I think they should push towards a more positive internet. Though I think they are a bit wary of doing it ever since the toxic backlash to this blog post
https://blog.mozilla.org/blogarchive/blog/2021/01/08/we-need-more-than-deplatforming/
which is exactly why they need a strong positive leadership that doesn’t bend the knee to bigots.
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.
For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though
If that’s true, shame on them. But it doesn’t mean their browser isn’t good.
with a project named ladybird you’d think otherwise.
I suppose, unless you’ve watched King of the Hill.
I think this may be the issue to which you are referring:
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
While this is troubling to read about, this narrative’s lack of evidence or references keep me from accepting it at face value. Old mastodon chatter (and perhaps deleted posts or scuttled instances) may be difficult to retrieve, but GitHub discussions shouldn’t be hard to find.
So I’m withholding judgement for the moment.
UPDATE: Commenter lime!@feddit.nu wrote this terrific comment that provides confirmation of the above narrative, corrective action that the LadyBird engineering team has taken taken, plus some vitally important context of the entire kerfuffle. A+ work.
You don’t consider it rather exclusionary to imply that only men use computers?
at one point or another we all have a penis in us.
Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird
Both currently sucks.
