Switch to firefox
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Never stopped using it in the first place. :)
what's this from?
Watchmen
Y'know, it never stops being exciting when you get to watch someone become one of today's lucky 10,000.
@/u/caboose12000, I'll add that the author is Alan Moore. The book is a masterpiece and absolutely worth reading. He also wrote V For Vendetta and honestly too many other increxible works to try to list here.
These guys are the real winners in all this
No.
Then feel free to suffer from and be manipulated by targeted advertisement.
It's been ages since I saw an ad on my browser. Without any extension. I'm sorry for you.
Ok. I also care for it blocking data mining and annoying popups, and out working as a google safebrowsing alternative, but that's harder to argue for.
Which we’ll soon be a paid browser if the US breaks up Google and they can’t send any money to Firefox anymore.
You may want to educate yourself before spreading unnecessary FUD. Firefox is free and open source, and always has been. There's no danger in Firefox becoming a paid browser because even if they tried, it would just be forked and maintained by another community or group.
Mozilla does have a for-profit arm called the Mozilla Corporation, and they manage the money received from Google and others. But that doesn't mean Firefox is going to become paid even if Google gets broken up by the antitrust efforts of the US government.
Maintaining a web browser in the 2020s is an expensive thing to do. You need full time employees who specialise in all the systems that make up a browser, and can't leave security-critical parts like ensuring the integrity of the JavaScript sandbox to volunteer hobbyists. It's far from the only thing Mozilla spend money on, so if they need to mage cost savings, it won't necessarily stop them being able to maintain Firefox, but another organisation picking it up if they do stop isn't likely.
You are not totally wrong, but I think if you were totally right, the internet as a world-changing technology would have never come to be in the first place. An internet operated by a single company is basically just a cable service. I think right now there certainly is apathy in the public consciousness towards the value add of keeping the internet decentralized, because it is taken for granted. But I think this is temporary, human society has always been reactionary in that way, we let things back slide, until it gets bad, and we only do something about it when we feel the pain.
When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren't thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn't mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world's first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.
I appreciate what you're saying, and you're not wrong about the level of effort. But I take exception to the implication that, somehow, paid developers are better developers than OSS or hobbyist ones.
Getting paid for something doesn't make you good, or diligent. It doesn't even make you competent.
But it does mean you can spend forty hours a week or thereabouts putting effort into a particular goal and maintaining the knowledge, skills and experience to keep doing it to a high standard without having to sink time and effort into something else in order to get paid enough to live on.
There are already other open source forks of Firefox that are community driven and maintained without employees or a for profit organization behind them. The obvious example is LibreWolf which describes itself as "a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom". There's no argument that maintaining a web browser is currently complex and needs to make security first decisions, but LibreWolf as an example shows us that it is not only possible but I argue proves it will continue even if Firefox as we know it goes away.
I'm a Librewolf fan too, but the majority of the hard work is done by Mozilla developers. Their work is very important too, but what they are doing is preconfiguring prefs, adding patches, and writing the patches sometimes. Much easier to be done as a team of volunteers.
Makes sense that Librewolf work is done by Firefox devs - a recent LW notification recommended installing FF
Those forks aren't maintaining Firefox itself, just their own modifications. If a bug is found in Firefox, the LibreWolf team don't have to fix it themselves, they can wait for Mozilla to do it, and incorporate the fix once it materialises. There are forks that diverge further, but they either get quickly abandoned after their creator realises how much of a headache maintenance will be, or they're left with gaping security holes.
honestly? Id pay for it
Eh, I would think that if they're under fire for being a monopoly any non monopolistic actions like funding their rivals will be pretty well received.
They're paying Firefox to make google search default. That is a monopolistic practice.
How is that monopolistic if we are able to change our default search engine?
This isn't the first time that something being the default was considered part of a monopoly case. Most notably internet explorer in the Microsoft monopoly case.
The big thing is that even if there are other options... A lot of people won't ever bother to change it.
You gotta explain this one, that parable doesn't fit the situation in the way it's typically used
This is clearly about all the youtube advertisement changes lately. (though maybe with a dolllop of not being happy about their other ads being blocked either) I've not seen a single one on FF with Ublock, no slowdown, no nothing. He was (as I understand it) making changes as needed to stay ahead of or abreast of them. (I already wasn't using their browser long before this.)
He beat them. They didn't crush him with their technical prowess and all their genius engineers, they didn't find a way to legally challenge him (I'm sure they had their lawyers working on it), they didn't find a way to outmaneuver him, the only thing they could do is ban his extension from being used on their browser. Because they literally could not force their shit down our throats as long as we were using it.
So I guess, maybe not a beat for beat fit for the parable, but he's very much the little guy, and they very much are the gigantic IT megacorp, so I think it was a glorious victory.
I'd call it a pyrrhic victory at best. It's like if Ukraine got Russia to use their nukes on them and there was no response from the rest of the world. Sure, you got them to use their strongest weapon, but you still got nuked and they'll continue as usual.
I do see your point, but OTOH Chrome ain't the only browser. Ublock getting kicked off Chrome is just going to be one more factor that will tip some people away from it. I don't strongly disagree, but I see it as a net positive. Maybe that does undo my shower thought a little, but hey, it was literally a shower thought. 🙂
Chrome ain't the only browser
It almost is, though. That's why it's important to support FF/Gecko