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Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

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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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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 ?

  • 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

    That assumes though that the definition of web browser and its needed stack stays static.

    What happens if we all browse the net primarily via VR then?
    The line is blurry, so is Mozilla org.

  • 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.

    Oh so it's my device issue. My apologies.

    You get the option to move the tab bar to the bottom in Cromite (it was cromite not bromite), btw.

  • 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.

    I noted it. That is why I said that the problem is the punishment.

  • I noted it. That is why I said that the problem is the punishment.

    They didn't stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.

    I've read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.

  • uBlock Origin *

    Lol yeah the comment was previously "I like the fact that I get a on mobile" or something that didn't make sense. All good.

  • How viscous is the cycle

    Very. It's like molasses.

  • Oh so it's my device issue. My apologies.

    You get the option to move the tab bar to the bottom in Cromite (it was cromite not bromite), btw.

    Oh so it's my device issue. My apologies.

    Well, I would say it is a combination on both. Your device reveals it is slower. No need to apologize. 🙂

    If I test it on my phone, Vanadium is also a lot faster, it's just that IronFox is not so slow I would care.

  • That's totally false.

    One can write using the generic masculine form without making a political statement.

    This is not even close to not acknowledge there is non-men in this world.

    What you are putting forward is absurd. No one is saying that only men exist anywhere in here.

    It isn’t totally false; the claim that the use of the generic masculine is the result of or may have been informed by sexism is based on the fact that it hasn’t always been that way.

    Here is a more nuanced and better take:

    The generic masculine in modern English is a recent development, as you noted: English used the non-gendered "they" for groups of people and hypothetical/non-specific individuals until prescriptive efforts arose to make it more like Latin. (You can find lots of traces of these prescriptive efforts in modern English: "don't split infinitives" and "don't strand prepositions" are similar rules imposed to make English more like Latin, which are still taught in schools but most people don't really follow.)

    Source

  • 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 couldn't reproduce the bug. I'm using firefox from the official archlinux repo.

  • 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.

    The amount of power shareholders hold over every major (American) enterprise isn’t talked about in a way that presents a clear problem between increasingly expensive and shitty services, layoffs, anti-worker practices, political corruption and these shareholder groups. C-suite are part of this group but they’re also afraid of removal via hostile board takeovers and so easily justify acquiescing to shareholder demands.
    Perhaps it’s because the same investors hold the same sway over (American) media with the added benefit of using it to brand themselves as exceptional leaders. Lots to untangle there…

  • You know you fucked up when even a traditionally hardcore Mozilla fan since the early 2000s like myself has had enuff and recently switched to Librewolf.

    Is it good so far?

  • Is it good so far?

    Yes! A bit annoying with no built in pw manager but I manage. It did show me how much of the problems which I thought were Gecko related were actually Firefox related, tho.

    Basically it's a faster, bluer, and less buggy Firefox. 🐺>🦊

  • 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.

    This exactly. Which is why when the tech support didn't want to file a ticket, I pushed for it to be filed. The product managers make the decision, and if they don't see tickets it doesn't exist.

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    What I'm speaking about is that it should be impossible to do some things. If it's possible, they will be done, and there's nothing you can do about it. To solve the problem of twiddled social media (and moderation used to assert dominance) we need a decentralized system of 90s Web reimagined, and Fediverse doesn't deliver it - if Facebook and Reddit are feudal states, then Fediverse is a confederation of smaller feudal entities. A post, a person, a community, a reaction and a change (by moderator or by the user) should be global entities (with global identifiers, so that the object by id of #0000001a2b3c4d6e7f890 would be the same object today or 10 years later on every server storing it) replicated over a network of servers similarly to Usenet (and to an IRC network, but in an IRC network servers are trusted, so it's not a good example for a global system). Really bad posts (or those by persons with history of posting such) should be banned on server level by everyone. The rest should be moderated by moderator reactions\changes of certain type. Ideally, for pooling of resources and resilience, servers would be separated by types into storage nodes (I think the name says it, FTP servers can do the job, but no need to be limited by it), index nodes (scraping many storage nodes, giving out results in structured format fit for any user representation, say, as a sequence of posts in one community, or like a list of communities found by tag, or ... , and possibly being connected into one DHT for Kademlia-like search, since no single index node will have everything), and (like in torrents?) tracker nodes for these and for identities, I think torrent-like announce-retrieve service is enough - to return a list of storage nodes storing, say, a specified partition (subspace of identifiers of objects, to make looking for something at least possibly efficient), or return a list of index nodes, or return a bunch of certificates and keys for an identity (should be somehow cryptographically connected to the global identifier of a person). So when a storage node comes online, it announces itself to a bunch of such trackers, similarly with index nodes, similarly with a user. One can also have a NOSTR-like service for real-time notifications by users. This way you'd have a global untrusted pooled infrastructure, allowing to replace many platforms. With common data, identities, services. Objects in storage and index services can be, say, in a format including a set of tags and then the body. So a specific application needing to show only data related to it would just search on index services and display only objects with tags of, say, "holo_ns:talk.bullshit.starwars" and "holo_t:post", like a sequence of posts with ability to comment, or maybe it would search objects with tags "holo_name:My 1999-like Star Wars holopage" and "holo_t:page" and display the links like search results in Google, and then clicking on that you'd see something presented like a webpage, except links would lead to global identifiers (or tag expressions interpreted by the particular application, who knows). (An index service may return, say, an array of objects, each with identifier, tags, list of locations on storage nodes where it's found or even bittorrent magnet links, and a free description possibly ; then the user application can unify responses of a few such services to avoid repetitions, maybe sort them, represent them as needed, so on.) The user applications for that common infrastructure can be different at the same time. Some like Facebook, some like ICQ, some like a web browser, some like a newsreader. (Star Wars is not a random reference, my whole habit of imagining tech stuff is from trying to imagine a science fiction world of the future, so yeah, this may seem like passive dreaming and it is.)
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    I know there decent alternatives to SalesForce, but I’m not sure what you’d replace Slack with. Teams is far worse in every conceivable way and I’m not sure if there’s anything else out there that isn’t already speeding down the enshittification highway.
  • Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up

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    Never had issue with Firefox in my day to day use, sites load fine, uBlock stops all the annoyances and thankfully youtube works well for me.
  • Science and Technology News and Commentary: Aardvark Daily

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    What are you on about with this? Last news post 2013?
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    I will be there. I will be armed. I will carry a gas mask. I will carry water and medical for my compatriots. I will not start shit. I will fight back if it comes to it.
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    I believed they were doing such things against budding competitors long before the LLM era. My test is simple. Replace it with China. Would the replies be the opposite of what you've recieved so far? The answer is yes. Absolutely people would be frothing at the mouth about China being bad actors. Western tech bros are just as paranoid, they copy off others, they steal ideas. When we do it it's called "innovation".
  • How I use Mastodon in 2025 - fredrocha.net

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    Sure. Efficiency isn't everything, though. At the end of the article there are a few people to get you started. Then you can go to your favorites in that list, and follow some of the people THEY are following. Rinse and repeat, follow boosted folks. You'll have 100 souls in no time.