Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi
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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
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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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..."
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Ad block *
uBlock Origin *
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I use it on mobile. It's mostly OK tbh, and the addition of a working ad blocker means it's far better than Chrome for me.
In fairness that is an invalid URL in my book, but it should at least be consistent across desktop and mobile, or at least tucked behind an option.
Web standards don't care about "your book", spaces in URLs are valid.
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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.
Yeah support either doesn't know or care. They just say, weird the website doesn't work with your device. Do you have another computer?
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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.
There's been investment bubbles, overshooting and disingenuous rent seeking in many economies before. It was temporarily reduced in many western economies by various FDR type policies in the '30s-'60s. The '70s and '80s were just the banks wresting back their freedom to implement market "rationality". And we get the benefits ever since.
People do keep voting for it though so it is hard to argue they're not satisfied. Even the ones who protest vote don't seem to see the "investment" markets as any part of the problem; or as important at all. That's either some pretty effective demagoguery, or some dumb fucking electorate.
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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.
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Web standards don't care about "your book", spaces in URLs are valid.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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I run IronFox for Android and Librewolf on Desktop.
Since they are both Firefox forks, migrating is not that bad.I don't mean to disagree with you, but isn't IronFox pretty slow? I was using it for like one to two weeks after I got an Android, but I switched to Bromite because of the horrible performance.
Maybe it's because of my devuce though (I'm running an 2018 second-hand Pixel 3a with EvoX) -
Yeah support either doesn't know or care. They just say, weird the website doesn't work with your device. Do you have another computer?
As someone who's worked in IT, in corporate and not so corporate companies, it's often not that the support techs don't care. It's that management doesn't. In most companies, I was explicitly told to not care about certain things. If I cared too much and spent too much time on one single problem, to fix it for good, I was told off. As long as users could work in some way, it didn't matter. Even if that included ineffective or costly workarounds. That kind of thinking has and will always rub me the wrong way.
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I don't mean to disagree with you, but isn't IronFox pretty slow? I was using it for like one to two weeks after I got an Android, but I switched to Bromite because of the horrible performance.
Maybe it's because of my devuce though (I'm running an 2018 second-hand Pixel 3a with EvoX)I don't feel it is particularly slow, but I have a Pixel 7. It may be slow on 7 years old HW unfortunately
Chromium is probably better optimized.I got used to bottom bar on Firefox and since then, I am unable to use Chromium based browsers on mobile. It is just so bad to have the bar at the top. So Bromite is not an option for me.
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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 ?
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Mozilla is Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox | Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice
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