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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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  • I'ld like to vote Cryptonimics as term, because it encompasses both the cryptic nature of the product, and the clear example of cryptocurrency.

    Where do you think you are?

  • How's that on mobile? Oh, right. It isn't.

    We need real solutions.

    IronFox is really good on mobile.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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:

    1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
    1. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
    1. 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

    Yup. Firefox alone isn't really a business. It needs to be like Linux where businesses that create web applications or want to distribute their owned custom browser contributes in some way to support Firefox core development.

    A core web browser is an expensive to develop piece of software that doesn't have a good business model. It's a support product. It supports web applications and it can integrate/market other services with extensions/plugins. FirefoxOS failed, maybe with better leadership it wouldn't have, but now they should be supporting PostmarketOS and driving adoption for mainstream Linux adoption.

    KDE is a really good example of what looks a great open source collective of projects with great current stuff and a long term vision. I imagine it plays into why Valve contributes and works with KDE for SteamOS

    You got the desktop, you got Plasma Mobile for stuff like PostmarketOS, you have Krita, Kdenlive and a bunch of other things. Saying that makes me want a phone to have PostmarketOS on with Plasma Mobile just to support a healthier alternative to Android/iOS. Praise the KDE Project for continuing with Plasma Mobile for what I'm certain is an incredibly small user base compared to their other applications while probably being a huge development project

  • How's that on mobile? Oh, right. It isn't.

    We need real solutions.

    Firefox forks are real. They are also on mobile.

  • 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.

    Ad block *

  • I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan

    I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice

    I applaud you for supporting same-sex marriage, but - apologies if this sounds like I'm picking on you, I'm really not - this is like someone who claims to be a young-earth creationist but agrees that radiocarbon dating is accurate. I don't understand how these mutually-exclusive thoughts can happily coexist in your mind. I wish we could discuss this over a drink because I'm very intrigued by whatever epistemic process led you there.

    I'll try explaining with a different example that's less emotionally charged: gambling.

    I think gambling is terrible and nobody should do it. It's addictive and has ruined tons of lives, and I absolutely refuse to do anything related to it for fear that I'll get hooked.

    So I should be in favor of gambling bans, right? No, quite the opposite, and I genuinely get excited for my coworkers and friends that do gamble when they do well. They know my personal opinion on it, but still share their ups and downs with me because they know I won't judge or lecture them.

    The same is true for a variety of policies, I generally believe in fewer restrictions on individuals. For example:

    • I don't drink but support looser liquor laws
    • I believe prostitution should be legal, and also that it's bad
    • I don't use drugs, but believe that all recreational drugs should be legal if they can be used safety (i.e. under medical supervision)

    As long as it doesn't restrict those who don't want to participate, I'm in favor of more options for people.

    I believe everyone should be able to live the way they choose, and I can be happy for someone who makes different choices than me. I don't have to understand why someone values something to feel happy when they achieve it.

    My view of homosexuality applies to me, not you. Me preventing you from doing something I consider to be a sin is worse than you doing the sin. You have every right to decide how to live your life, and I can feel happy for you finding happiness even if I believe it's the wrong choice.

    I don't think that's at all comparable to your creationism example, which is about accepting two opposing views simultaneously. If you accept science that conflicts with your religious views, you need to adjust your religious views so they're compatible. Likewise, society and law don't need to match your religious views, they just need to be compatible (e.g. religious institutions shouldn't be forced to perform or accept same sex marriage for religious rites).

    I hope this makes sense.

  • I'll try explaining with a different example that's less emotionally charged: gambling.

    I think gambling is terrible and nobody should do it. It's addictive and has ruined tons of lives, and I absolutely refuse to do anything related to it for fear that I'll get hooked.

    So I should be in favor of gambling bans, right? No, quite the opposite, and I genuinely get excited for my coworkers and friends that do gamble when they do well. They know my personal opinion on it, but still share their ups and downs with me because they know I won't judge or lecture them.

    The same is true for a variety of policies, I generally believe in fewer restrictions on individuals. For example:

    • I don't drink but support looser liquor laws
    • I believe prostitution should be legal, and also that it's bad
    • I don't use drugs, but believe that all recreational drugs should be legal if they can be used safety (i.e. under medical supervision)

    As long as it doesn't restrict those who don't want to participate, I'm in favor of more options for people.

    I believe everyone should be able to live the way they choose, and I can be happy for someone who makes different choices than me. I don't have to understand why someone values something to feel happy when they achieve it.

    My view of homosexuality applies to me, not you. Me preventing you from doing something I consider to be a sin is worse than you doing the sin. You have every right to decide how to live your life, and I can feel happy for you finding happiness even if I believe it's the wrong choice.

    I don't think that's at all comparable to your creationism example, which is about accepting two opposing views simultaneously. If you accept science that conflicts with your religious views, you need to adjust your religious views so they're compatible. Likewise, society and law don't need to match your religious views, they just need to be compatible (e.g. religious institutions shouldn't be forced to perform or accept same sex marriage for religious rites).

    I hope this makes sense.

    Thanks for taking the time to explain - that does make a lot of sense, if you coisider being trans or gay a learned/chosen behaviour. That hadn't crossed my mind, which is why the premise seemed impossible to me. The difference, of course, between being gay and being a gambler is that nobody is born a gambler, therefore the comparison doesn't really hold up. That's why I used the creationism example: Carbon-14 is what it is. LGBT people are who they are. They didn't choose to be that way any more that C-14 chose its decay rate. I suppose that doesn't matter all that much in practice - if more people thought like you rather than being homo- or transphobic, the world would undoubtedly be a better place than it is.

  • Most of my family is against gay marriage and don't believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied.

    no, that’s fucked up… less fucked up than making a big deal of it, but it shows a huge lack of empathy… people close to them that they know quite well are validating that non binary people exist - that it’s not just people “looking for attention” and all that other garbage that people throw out there and they still don’t think they should be treated with respect and as equals by society

    that’s “i don’t respect you but i don’t want to make a scene”

    this is why the rate of self harm in the queer scene is so fuck high… because families suddenly don’t respect people they’ve know and loved their entire lives

    I went into detail here in case you want to read it. I'll keep this reply short.

    Basically, it's possible to be happy for someone who makes decisions you disagree with because you know it makes them happy. For example, I think gambling is bad and nobody should do it while also being genuinely happy for someone after a profitable trip to a casino. Likewise, I can also be happy for someone who finds happiness in a gender identity and use their preferred pronouns while also believing gender is an arbitrary social construct, not something baked into the human condition.

    Supporting someone doesn't mean believing exactly the same way they do. If it's important to them and isn't harmful, support them in it unconditionally. I do that with people who have conflicting religious views from mine, and I think that's completely reasonable.

  • After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.

    Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.

    In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.

    It was a trivial change to some documentation. The fact that he chose this hill to die on says a lot.

  • Chromium does a lot of heavy lifting to fix problems with websites which enables certain web developers to be lazy.

    Smae thing that Nvidia does with OpenGL. Their driver handles a lot erroneous out of spec behaviour so developers think their game works fine but the moment you run it on AMD or Intel GPUs, you get all sorts of issues because they actually implement the spec accurately.

  • Thanks for taking the time to explain - that does make a lot of sense, if you coisider being trans or gay a learned/chosen behaviour. That hadn't crossed my mind, which is why the premise seemed impossible to me. The difference, of course, between being gay and being a gambler is that nobody is born a gambler, therefore the comparison doesn't really hold up. That's why I used the creationism example: Carbon-14 is what it is. LGBT people are who they are. They didn't choose to be that way any more that C-14 chose its decay rate. I suppose that doesn't matter all that much in practice - if more people thought like you rather than being homo- or transphobic, the world would undoubtedly be a better place than it is.

    nobody is born a gambler

    I disagree. You can have two people from the same upbringing and one becomes addicted to gambling and the other doesn't. So there's absolutely a predisposition toward addictions, which is why some people struggle a lot more than others at breaking bad habits.

    My views on transexuality are a bit different though. I don't think the issue is necessarily that some AFAB person is actually a man and biology/God got it wrong, I think the issue is that people feel more comfortable with a given set of social norms that may not match the social norms of their sex. This doesn't have to be a conscious decision either, they can just feel uneasy with things and blame their sex, but really the issue is society not matching their mental model of themselves. For those people, sex changes and/or hormone therapy can be the most effective solution, because changing society is much more difficult than changing how you present. I've even heard some people can change how they present from day to day because they're feeling like they align more to one or the other extreme that day.

    I suppose that doesn’t matter all that much in practice

    Agreed 100%. Whether non-binary genders (or genders at all) are an actual thing or a social construct doesn't really matter, what matters is love and acceptance.

    Does calling someone by their preferred gender cost you anything? No. Does arguing semantics about whether what they're experiencing is innate or a subconscious processing of societal norms help? No. Just accept people for who they claim to be if it doesn't harm anyone.

    And yeah, I think homo- and trans- phobias are stupid. We're all just people, so treat each other with respect and fight for each other to get whatever they need go feel loved and accepted.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • If a site I have to use doesn't work for no apparent reason, I e-mail the company's Support. Let them sort it out, or provide another way I can do what I'm trying to do. Personally, I think a lot of the problems are from more and more websites integrating privacy-invading "features", and FF interfering with their operation.

    I talked to tech support once, they said it won't get fixed, and there was no workaround. It was a platform type site. So I'm not their direct custom. A small business is. And the people at the small business have never heard of firefox. So they don't even understand the problem.

  • When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.

    It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Yeah, I'm not a dev, but I work with dev teams. They all don't test with firefox anymore. Not enough ROI according to the product managers.

  • I have never encountered that bug, seems like an issue with the duck duck go not doing proper url encoding. I daily Firefox on mobile and its the best option by far with all the available extensions and of course working adblock

    It's got nothing to do with the specific search engine, it's Firefox thinking the URL itself is a search query and sending it as-is to the search engine.

    I just tested it and it sent the URL to both DDG and to Google.

  • 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.

  • 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:

    1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
    1. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
    1. 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

    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).

  • When I asked a couple of developers who work on websites/webapps with a lot of moving parts, they said it was easiest to just test for chrome, since that's what most people use.

    It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    I switched from Chrome to Firefox at work recently once they added tab groups. A few parts of one of the web apps my team maintains straight up don't work. I mentioned it in a meeting, received a full 10 seconds of silence before someone said "Well customers aren't complaining..."

  • AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study

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    I already told you my experience of the crapness of LLMs and even explained why I can't share the prompt etc. You clearly weren't listening or are incapable of taking in information. There's also all the testing done by the people talked about in the article we're discussing which you're also irrationally dismissing. You have extreme confirmation bias. Everything you hear that disagrees with your absurd faith in the accuracy of the extreme blagging of LLMs gets dismissed for any excuse you can come up with.
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  • Firefox 140 Brings Tab Unload, Custom Search & New ESR

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    Read again. I quoted something along the lines of "just as much a development decision as a marketing one" and I said, it wasn't a development decision, so what's left? Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn’t increase the major version that often. This does not appear to be true. Why don't you take a look at the version history instead of some marketing blog post? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ Version 2 had 20 releases within 730 days, averaging one release every 36.5 days. Version 3 had 19 releases within 622 days, averaging 32.7 days per release. But these releases were unscheduled, so they were released when they were done. Now they are on a fixed 90-day schedule, no matter if anything worthwhile was complete or not, plus hotfix releases whenever they are necessary. That's not faster, but instead scheduled, and also they are incrementing the major version even if no major change was included. That's what the blog post was alluding to. In the before times, a major version number increase indicated major changes. Now it doesn't anymore, which means sysadmins still need to consider each release a major release, even if it doesn't contain major changes because it might contain them and the version name doesn't say anything about whether it does or not. It's nothing but a marketing change, moving from "version numbering means something" to "big number go up".
  • CBDC Explained : Can your money really expire?

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    CBDCs could well take the prize for most dangerous thing in our lifetime, similar to nuclear weapons during the Cold War. I'm thinking of that line from the song in Les Mis. Look down, look down. You'll always be a slave. Look down, look down. You're standing in your grave.
  • iFixit says the Switch 2 is even harder to repair than the original

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    My understanding is that if they've lasted at least a month and haven't died on you, you probably got a "good" batch and what you have now will be what it stays as for the most part, but a fair number of gulikits just sort of crap out at the 1-2 mo mark. So heads up on that.
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    The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been. The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don't know.
  • Large Language Models Are More Persuasive Than Humans.

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    aka psychopathy is a natural advantage for managers.
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    ...is this some sort of joke my Nordic brain can't understand? I need to go hug a councilman.