The rhetoric around Firefox is so exhausting. They change some wording while having made no actual technical changes to the browser and the internet is on fire for days calling them the devil incarnate, meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it.
What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
From long experience we expect Google and hence Chrome to act against our interests. We have not expected that of Mozilla and Firefox.
Google did give us a lot of warning that they would greatly restrict ad-blocking and tracker-blocking, so most of that angst has already been and gone.
But firefox always was a monopoly figleave sockpuppet - and now they do not need it anymore, so firefox either finds a new purpose (doing what it promised) or it tries to sell out in one final scam.
> From long experience we expect Google and hence Chrome to act against our interests. We have not expected that of Mozilla and Firefox.
HN used to gush over how great Chrome was. Some of us were saying, um guys, you know google is in the business of selling advertising right? Nobody seemed to care. Now mozilla's lawyers have them change some legalese and they are instantly the bad guys.
> meanwhile Chrome gutted uBlock and other extensions a week ago and there was barely any noise about it
Because anyone who cared knew this was coming in the near future after they published manifest v3 several years ago. Back then there was a huge kerfuffle, but since then anyone who cared has moved on.
OP's premise is that "Firefox is gone" and "Chrome is the only option". That suggests Chrome is better than current Firefox.
Personally, even though my trust in Firefox (and especially Mozilla) has been eroding rapidly in recent years, it's still so much greater than what I have for Google and Chrome that it's not even a choice.
Therefore, I agree with GP that this rhetoric is exhausting.
Bringing up the issues with FF and Mozilla is important and deserves attention. This kind of misleading FUD is not and does not.
> OP's premise is that "Firefox is gone" and "Chrome is the only option". That suggests Chrome is better than current Firefox.
To be fair, OP asked if "Chrome-ish" is the only option, i.e. Chromium-based browsers - not Chrome itself.
Even so, I don't think the implication is that Chromium is better than Firefox, but that without Firefox only Chromium-based browsers remain. "If I don't want to use Firefox, is it really only Chrome-clones available?"
> What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?
Hm, my lived experience is the inverse, and both seem sort of important to talk about.
We've been hearing about Chrome implementing the same privacy protections as Safari as a transgression for years, years, and years, as it was delayed again and again.
It was ex-Mozilla people who brought to my attention that they were deeply alarmed by the privacy-concious-Do-Not-Track people making this pivot and that it was a really bad sign.
Generally, I try to avoid loaded questions phrased like "why is X considered as A while Y is considered as B?" because it suffers from high failure rates
(likelihood you're the first person to realize the truth; likelihood these things ended up sorted neatly into opposing binaries; undecidability of 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?'; uncomfortable conversation when someone starts from 'how come everyone believes the wrong thing?' and you have to sort of lead them gently to 'is it possible you are missing something, not everyone else?' without making it obvious)
> We've been hearing about Chrome implementing the same privacy protections as Safari as a transgression for years, years, and years, as it was delayed again and again.
Well Apple didn’t turn around and try to push the Topics API..
To be clear, I don't think trying to score or rank browser manufacturers on Goodness is an achievable goal. Endless what-abouts are available, with rational arguments available to opposing opinions.
However, I must admit I am intrigued by seeing Topics posited as a stain.
I strongly believe we would have been obviously better off as consumers with topics, than the status quo, a wild west of tracking, but AFAIK, weakly, it could have entrenched incumbents further.*
Selfishly, for my individual interests, I wish Apple had proposed it.
I have a feeling it would have been more dogged in working through it, rather than Google's laissez-faire "oh well! guess we get to keep tracking" when the bottom feeders complained.**
That's probably why it seems unachievable to me to rank on Goodness, opinions abound and they're all reasonable.
* i.e. even if the topics are retrievable via JS by any page, I'd assume there's some clever way for Google to do something strictly superior from an advertiser perspective leveraging some E2E integration, ex. perhaps most pages have to wait till load to get topics, but Google can do a special preflight request given a special HEAD tag, idk
** My weak understanding is this essentially was put on pause/shit-canned after UK competition authorities relayed general concern, and I don't remember Google giving up so easily on anything ever
I’m opposed to any advertising on the web. Not because of ideology. It just makes the web worse especially on mobile.
Despite the outcry of manifest v3, if I understand it correctly it’s a standardize version of how Apple implements content blocking on the web, similar functionality works well in Safari.
When Firefox removed Do Not Track in December last year [0] people also freaked out, which came as a considerable surprise to me; I thought most tech-savvy users were well aware of the flaws with DNT, and were well aware of DNT's newfangled replacement (GPC) that Firefox had already adopted [1].
I will never understand why people attack Firefox so eagerly at every given opportunity.
>The rhetoric around Firefox is so exhausting. They change some wording while having made no actual technical changes to the browser and the internet is on fire for days calling them the devil incarnate
Having worked there, it's concerning, since if you saw the discussions that go on with regard to user data, you'd know they are trying to make sure they word things correctly, not... insert weasel words to grab your data.
You come here to write that, but you never bother to tell us why?
The issue with "wokeness" is that the people who adhere to these ideologies tries to shoehorn it into every single aspect of their lives and to every single thing they possibly can. Everything must be political, everything is about what they think matter and so on.
That's why you see companies fail so massively when ruled by people like this. They can't help themselves and alienate people, completely unnecessary, and usually turn supporters into haters.
Nearly all increase is from Google and their deal with them, a deal that was done before Brendan became CEO. So the revenue would increase no matter who became CEO.
Not to throw this discussion on too long a tangent, but this honestly reads in exactly the same way as fawning comments about Putin "saving his country" by presiding over a period of record-high oil prices.
On the bright side, he and his cronies didn't steal absolutely everything, and some scraps made it to the rest of the population.
Mozilla's leadership is a cancer that will kill it, and will take the work of many good, talented technical people down the drain. IRL parallels abound.
Listen, mozilla's got problems - we can agree on that, and you don't need to compare me to a putin apologist to make that point.
But "go woke go broke" is dumb sloganeering and plainly false. It's not a description of how the world works - it's a call to arms to boycott things labeled "woke". Sometimes things labeled "woke" do well because of their "wokeness", other times the anti-"woke" backlash kills them. Plenty of things "go woke" without ever being labeled "woke". Plenty of non-"woke" things go broke.
Either way, my only real point in citing revenue numbers is to point out that ten years after the whole Eich debacle, mozilla's still not broke. Seems like maybe their problems are unrelated to "wokeness".
What causes this phenomenon where the project with significantly less resources is held to a higher standard than the other players?