Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla’s Original Sin
Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.
Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.
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Still the best browser to support, still the best hope of defending open web standards from Google. Call me when they implement the ads in an onerous way.
Fucking finally. So many reactionary nerds here. Yes, it may turn to shit. It may not. The result is unknown. What I do know is Firefox has been my browser of choice for two whole decades. Chromium actively is killing adblockers. Firefox right now is not.
If something happens I’ll make a switch. Right now, nothing has.
I try my best to keep calm and judge things fairly and rationally but, truth is, you get kinda tired of seeing so many iffy-maybe-alright news about Mozilla.
Inline edit: not even a week later, Teixeira v. Moz. Why, Mozilla? Liking you shouldn’t be this complicated.
My fear is that by the time “something happens” to Firefox, it’ll be something that was entirely avoidable if only we had acted sooner. I’m always wondering if I’m at the point I should be acting.
- I’m still salty about their previous CEO, Mitchell Baker, I believe, getting bigger bonuses while Firefox market share fell (and layoffs happened, but we lack details to understand those properly).
- I’m unconvinced that, in a world where the percentage of people using an adblocker is rising, they’ll find a way to change people’s minds and look at ads, even if they are perfectly, technomagically privacy preserving.
- I’m unconvinced that owning Firefox, which puts uBlock as a front-and-center extension, and Anonym, an adtech company, will not create a conflict of interest—just like what happened to Google.
For the record, this is my first time commenting on this and I’m also deeply bothered by “reactionary nerds” (everyone switch to librewolf!!), but I understand the sentiment. Hope that added some perspective.
I mean, I definitely think it’s not ideal and there’s room for improvement and social pressure for Mozilla to change its priorities, but I also don’t think it’s any reason to abandon the project. The reality is that a modern web browser is too massive of a project for a non-commercial entity to reasonably develop and keep updated, and Mozilla is the only such entity that’s even remotely got its heart in the right place.
Oh, we’re fully in agreement. I’m not arguing in favor of abandoning Firefox or Mozilla at all. I’m just saying frustration and anxiety are to be expected sometimes. Note that I’m not excusing rudeness or the like.
Re: the burden of developing a modern browser, I wonder what librewolf evangelists think would happen to the project, if Firefox development by Mozilla were to fall due to any reason. To my view, the forks only exist because Firefox still does. After all, if managing an entire browser was possible with their resources, they wouldn’t need to fork one.
At best, another Pale Moon is what would happen. They’ve been maintaining their own hard fork of Gecko by themselves since 2016. They clearly have people capable of maintaining a browser engine, though perhaps not quite enough of them. If Firefox were to die, perhaps joining up with Goanna would be the smart move.
if only we had acted sooner
Doing what, exactly? Create a fork? Done. Fill their feedback queue with endless screeching about how everything is dooooooom? Done, 10x over. Use another browser instead, say, Chrome? That’s what virtually everyone did, yes.=
Plus shouldn’t this on paper be positive news? Mozilla can, if they run Anonym well enough, be independent of other ad networks. Run their own. Which in turn means they can control the data and where it’s stored, an important issue with third-party ad networks.
Didn’t think I had to say it explicitly. As far as influencing Mozilla’s course, I don’t believe those to be very helpful methods. A fork may be helpful, but it highly depends on the developer(s). I argue against the second one all the time. Third is laughably counterproductive.
Mozilla is capable of responding to (esp. proper) feedback. For example, regardless of what you think about the subject, the community sent a pretty clear message when they started accepting cryptocurrency donations, which I’m sure they’re still keeping in mind to this day.
Point being, engaging with them is one thing that helps and I can do just fine. No need for “endless doom screeching.”
Re: positive news. Yes, on paper it can. We’ll see how it turns out in reality. I’ve explained why I’m not immediately into it, though your comment seems to ignore that part of mine. I do want it to work out though, if for no other reason than because what’s done is done and ultimately, I just want Firefox to thrive.
I think Mozilla needs some fresh faces. They lack a vision and are just flailing around.
Yeah, everything kinda bad Firefox does, everything else seems to do worse. So I’m staying with it until that changes.
Switch to Librewolf
If something happens I’ll make a switch.
To what?
part of the reason I haven’t done anything right there. what is there to switch to? Chromium? Where they are actively killing adblockers?
Why are you applying the Wait And See philosophy to Firefox but not to Chrome?
Seems a bit… Reactionary.
Because Chrome has already announced they are killing adblockers with manifest V3, and they have been very public about that for years.
Firefox just announced 2 weeks ago they are supporting manifest V2 & V3, and going on to support adblockers.
Did they actually say that?
I think we need to Wait and See, to give the ad company the benefit of the doubt. And by “the ad company,” I’ll let you figure out whether I’m referring to Mozilla or Google.
The web dying (i mean web browsers, html, javascript, etc) wouldn’t be such a bad thing imo.
Look at what’s happened to nearly every static content site in the past few years, they’ve become nearly unusable.
News companies can try to convince ppl to use their apps, but everyone else will continue to use social media apps to get most of their news like they already do anyway. Ppl wanting static content can use the minimal protocols like gemini, gopher, or even a simple markdown web browser, which are already better than most news sites.
The trouble with “wait and see” is that people will often forget what we were waiting for.
Speaking of which, do you remember FakeSpot? That was Mozilla’s first foray into directly selling private data to ad companies. At the time, a lot of people said, “they might allow it now, but let’s wait and see.”
And today, Mozilla FakeSpot continues selling data to ad companies.
Just use a soft fork. The engine is unlikely to get compromised
Speaking of the engine, if Mozilla ever decides to stop developing gecko, it’s going to force the community to continue that work on their own. If that ever happens, it would have a big impact on all the forks too.
Why having DRM behind a “do you want to install DRM to play media” button is seen as a bad thing? Otherwise everyone would have to use chromium.
No one can tell you here beyond “DRM bad”. Which it is, and I hate it, but you’re exactly right. All it would do if Firefox refused to implement would drive most users to chrome because there DRM works.
We are not the majority. The majority (and by that I mean roughly 96% of users) want their browser just to work. Taking a moral stand doesn’t resonate with them, they just see a broken browser and move on.
Which it is, and I hate it, but you’re exactly right.
And beyond that, this is also not Mozilla’s decision. A browser-making company is not the one to ask to fix digital media copyright and its enforcement. Talk to you elected personel if you want to fix that, and/or get into politics yourself and fix it.
Bingo
They could just make a download button instead of a toggle. Also it would be nice to be able to disable DRM popups. (I’m looking at you Forbes)
The problem is that toggle gets turned on easily. They could make it the user choice with a option to rip it out completely.
people complain when they were dependent on google and now they complain when they push an alternative to google that is a privacy friendly advertising firm.
like it or not most sites depend on advertising; offering an alternative to google is exactly what the foundation should be doing.
THANK YOU
They gotta survive somehow and people would complain regardless.
Best option though. Chromium browsers are all subject to google’s wrath, and there are plenty of Firefox forks to go around. If you don’t like vanilla Firefox, try Abrowser, available on Trisquel GNU/Linux, a fully libre GNU/Linux Distribution as well as from the Arch GNU/Linux User Repository.
DRM is opt-in. For sure it is kind of in favor of Netflix and Co. But they could just forced people to use Chrome, couldnt they?
If they gave you a warning before it downloaded that would be fine. It also would be better if they had a option to completely disable it. (No popups)
But no, they decided to make it happen in the background with no user interaction. This is just one of my many complaints against Firefox.
It is opt-in when you open a site that needs it.
Not defending DRM here but it does not get loaded until I allow it.
The problem is some sites use DRM for ads.
Never had this. I use a separate profile for Netflix and never had a DRM request outside of Netflix
Spotify and Crunchyroll also require DRM, like almost all commercial video sites.
I live pretty well without them currently :)
Do Firefox forks support the same Firefox addon ecosystem, or do they have smaller selections/manual steps?
I couldn’t say as I can’t speak to every fork in existence, but I think most of them support all Firefox extensions. AFAIK LibreWolf does.
Generally yes
Thoughts on Mullvad browser?
I’m not a security expert, but I think it’s roughly on-par with LibreWolf. I think they both come without Encrypted Media Extensions.
https://mullvad.net/en/browser/hard-facts
And here’s a listing of the compile options:
[…]
- –disable-eme (Encrypted Media Extensions, for other DRMs)
TY for the info 👽
The Mullvad Browser is the Tor Browser without Tor, that is, it’s a Firefox-based browser with lots of privacy and anonymity improvements, but without the Tor network layer. Mullvad actually sponsored the Tor project in return for some help getting it done, or something along those lines.
As far as I understand (I’m not super familiar with LibreWolf), Mullvad fork should be “better” in that regard.
They do not support dark mode on web pages if this is important to you. Reason given is easy to fingerprint.
I wish the time he spend complaining was developing an alternative. But he rather support the Apple ecosystem.
He’s so petulant online with people that I can only imagine how awful it must be to have him as a boss.
Librewolf is a good option
That website raped my eyes
Yeah, it fucking sucks [blah, blah, blah], it’s green text on black.
I’m gonna keep using and recommending LibreWolf for the foreseeable future.
But I wonder what other alternative web engines do we have with both Chromium and Gecko being run by advertisers now?
I know Palemoon runs a fork of a really old version of a Gecko and I used it for a bit back when Firefox 58 broke most add-ons. But I’m a bit iffy of it’s security these days.
At the moment, we have Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Safari), Servo, Ladybird and Goanna (Pale Moon).
I wish Librewolf disabled DRM
Pretty sure they do? Unless you’re talking about a different DRM thing.
Maybe they mean compiled without it entirely instead of disabled by default, but still available?
Any opinions on Opera? I used it 1000 years ago. I liked it but then they started charging or something and switched to Firefox. Then Brave which was my favorite but is a problem I guess. I used Chrome for a short time until I learned it was Google crap. So now I’m back to Firefox. I see Opera is still around though.
opera is just chrome these days with a thin veneer of opera junk on top. Brave is just chrome with adblock built in selling you crypto, Vivaldi is chrome with Vivaldi veneer, heck, even edge is just chrome with microsoft replacing google. Firefox is the last true remaining non chrome browser, which is terrifying.
Sure is. Thanks.
The only thing worse than open source Chromium-based browsers like Brave are proprietary ones like Opera and Vivaldi.
Firefox is the last true remaining non chrome browser
safari: what am i chopped liver?
fair, it’s been a while since i used it, but when i did it was utterly useless on anything except apple products, which doesn’t make it particularly useful. Things may have changed though
things did change, they no longer even offer it for anything except apple products, so if you want to use safari on windows it’s 11 years out of date, and any other OS is just a full on no. So yeah, i’d say we’re back to firefox as the only real alternative.
Opera is now owned by a Chinese company, it is just a webkit/blink shell and, I have zero trust in them.
Vivaldi is even worse: Unlike Firefox, its proprietariness doesn’t end at a closed-source DRM binary blob.
In fact every Chromium-based browser is worse than Firefox: Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening
Vivaldi is closed source and based on Chromium (albeit modified), so it does not sound all that appealing. As long as uBlock origin, NoScript and Tampermonkey can unleash their full potential in Firefox, I’m likely to stick with it.
Vivaldi is good in some ways (I miss the old Opera and Vivaldi is a spiritual successor to it), but we really don’t need more Chromium-based browsers in the world. It’s becoming a Chromium monoculture, which is bad for the web.
If you want to use a different browser, try Librewolf.
Proprietary Chromium browser. No thanks
I would definitely use Vivaldi if it wasn’t Chromium-based, but it is so a no-go from me.
@watson387 Isn’t Chromium, in an open-source way and far away from Google, a good choice?
I don’t support Google’s web takeover so I don’t want to use their browser, open-source or not.
Others have commented on the issues with Vivaldi, but do you have points on what you like about Vivaldi? People might suggest non-chromium browsers that do the same things
I’m not op, but these are some things that I appriciate about Vivaldi:
- Mouse gestures that work anywhere in the window with different options based on what I start the gesture on (eg. Right clicking on a link and dragging down opens the link in a new foreground tab {dragging down then up opens it in the background} but doing so on empty space opens a new tab)
- A scrollable side bar for tabs instead of the horizontal one that is standard (not in addition to or requiring hacky workarounds)
- The ability to minimize tabs or send them to the bottom of the cycle order (this needs to be able to be done with mouse gestures)
- The ability to easily highlight parts of a link so that I can copy part of the text (Vivaldi highlights with a click and drag and drags the link on a click, hold and drag; Firefox doesn’t appear to do either)
- Not having to worry about third party extensions security issues or having this core functionality stop working because the extension maintainer has to update it for the new browser version.
- The fact that it just works with minimal configuration
Unfortunately I am looking for alternatives to Vivaldi since Google has decided to kill quality web browsing on Chromium browsers. Much of the web is virtually unusable to me without a tool like ublock quieting things down to work past my sensory processing issues. At times it is hard to think that the majority of web devs have anything but distain for disabled people.
I do use Fennic on Android (with ublock and darkreader) because Mozilla decided to block access to about:config in the mobile version and I have yet to find another way to always force pages to load the desktop version. (Mobile versions of sites disable most of the built in accessibility options like the ability to zoom)
The settings I set in fennic if anyone is curious:
- browser.viewport.defaultZoom (set a sane default zoom)
- browser.viewport desktopWidth (say that the screen is large enough to not trigger CSS mobille layouts)
- general.useragent.override (work around browser sniffing; I’ve yet to find an extension that actually works for this)
