A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Mar 31, 2023 21:28 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: A quarter century of Mozilla by donbarry
Parent article: A quarter century of Mozilla

> When you get to the point where you have to say Firefox's primary advantage is that "it's not Google's Chrome," there's a real problem. And that's because in a certain way it is, just one step removed, because Google remains far and above Mozilla's primary sugar daddy.

Eh.

Firefox never had the advantage of being the default browser on most platforms. Everyone installing it had to make an explicit choice to do so. Back in the day, that was an easy choice to make, as its competition (mainly MSIE) was so awful that Firefox was objectively better in every respect, even for non-technically-inclined "to use the internet click on the E icon" folks.

Today however, the default platform browsers (Chrome, MS Chrome, and Safari) are more or less equivalent feature-wise, and Firefox continues to lack not only a default browser advantage, but also doesn't control any common www destinations, unlike its competition who continues to push "this site best experienced on Chrome / Edge / Safari". Meanwhile, the corporate market never embraced Firefox, instead switching from IE to Chrome.

So yes. from an end-user's perspective, all Firefox really has going for it is "better privacy". Unfortunately there aren't that many folks who genuinely care about that stuff -- And even among those who do, when you spend all day logged into Facebook, Google/Gmail, O365/MS/Github, Facebook, and so forth, what privacy are you protecting any more?

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 3, 2023 8:23 UTC (Mon) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link] (4 responses)

> So yes. from an end-user's perspective, all Firefox really has going for it is "better privacy". Unfortunately there aren't that many folks who genuinely care about that stuff -- And even among those who do, when you spend all day logged into Facebook, Google/Gmail, O365/MS/Github, Facebook, and so forth, what privacy are you protecting any more?

Firefox has containers, something that AFAIK no other browser offers. I too need to be logged into a few of these for work (and some others I choose voluntarily, like this fine site), but only in the respective container. They don't see each other, and every other random site I visit gets a pristine session that's deleted when I leave (courtesy of the Temporary Containers extension).

This is one of the main reason I won't even consider switching to any other browser for regular use, despite all the screw-ups and questionable decisions Mozilla has made over the years.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 2:40 UTC (Fri) by rjones (subscriber, #159862) [Link] (3 responses)

Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice. I don't know how they compare on a technical level besides there is no problems having multiple logins in the same sites at the same time in different profiles.

By default the quick change UI is hidden. Once you make more then one profile it pops up.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 11:54 UTC (Fri) by leromarinvit (subscriber, #56850) [Link]

Interesting, thanks. So the basic ability to separate sessions is there. I quickly tried and failed to find something equivalent to the "Temporary Containers" Firefox extension, so it seems manual action is required to switch profiles.

This is only one part of the setup I currently have in Firefox. I've got it set up to create temporary containers with an empty session whenever I follow a link to a different domain (besides a few sites that automatically get assigned to their own permanent containers), which seems impossible with Chrome currently. That way, even if I click a link on a site where I'm logged in, the target gets a new session and any cross-site tracking will have a harder time linking the two visits.

Now, I'm sure my setup isn't for everyone, since now it matters how you arrived at a particular site, which is probably confusing if you don't expect it (there can be any number of sessions for any particular domain). But I find that property useful, since it trivially enables multiple different logins to the same site without any setup (just manually open a new tab and open the site, and you've got a new session).

I'm (usually) happy with Firefox, so I won't invest a lot of time to recreate this setup with Chrome for now. But it's good to know that this workflow could probably be implemented there with some effort, in case Firefox for some reason ceases to be a viable browser (which I hope it won't).

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 7, 2023 18:52 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> Chrome has the ability to juggle multiple profiles, which amounts to the same thing in practice.

Not quite. Chrome can't run two parallel profiles in the same window. For example, I use containers in Firefox to log into multiple AWS accounts (with color-coding for prod/non-prod accounts) using a small plugin: https://imgur.com/a/S9uhNTv

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 10, 2023 18:59 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

My understanding (which may very well be out-of-date) is that this is more like Firefox profiles with a completely separate `.mozilla` subdirectory with some helpful selection UI (whereas Firefox profiles are more or less completely oblivious of each other). Firefox containers are allowed to co-exist within a single window and can be for as little as a single website rather than an entire "browser session"

I suspect it works just fine if you use OAuth to separate your accounts, but I try to avoid cross-linking accounts whenever possible.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 4, 2023 13:18 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Mozilla never understood that their success was linked to the success of the FLOSS desktop, because that’s the only established platform where they are not in competition with the platform owner, who has many ways to make sure they never succeed over his own corporate projects.

With web offerings replacing traditional local apps they had a golden chance to make the FLOSS desktop shine, growing with it (and the multiplicity of distributions is a protection against someone taking over their success via a fork).

Instead, they blew it first by chasing proprietary platforms that were all too happy to get their features first while limiting their platform share, second by trying to corner this opportunity with their own Firefox OS, and third getting distracted from their core competencies favouring the startups of their buddies.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 20, 2023 16:07 UTC (Thu) by immibis (subscriber, #105511) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think that Mozilla could have ever been successful and not evil. That's just not a possible outcome within the socio-economic power structures we find ourselves in. A successful version of Mozilla looks like Google - using their technical prowess to form a monopoly in one market and expand to adjacent markets and form monopolies there. Suppose Firefox was the best web browser - Firefox OS might have taken off and we'd all use Firefox Phones and pay for things with Firefox Pay. Pretty much the same position Google is in. We might have Firefox Home voice assistants spying on us instead of Google Home. And I assure you, a detachment of sweaty nerds on LWN would be celebrating 25 years of Google Chrome bravely competing against the evil Firefox monopoly.

Power corrupts.

A quarter century of Mozilla

Posted Apr 30, 2023 14:44 UTC (Sun) by sammythesnake (guest, #17693) [Link]

> Power corrupts.

Let's not forget that the flipside is also true: "Corruption Empowers". I.e. those who play fair and eschew evilness miss out on successful (shitty, but undeniably successful) strategies to gain market share / revenue / control...

That's why "enshittification" is so endemic, why legal tools like anti-trust legislation, monopoly commissions etc. exist (with somewhat limited success) and so on.

Sadly, we live in a world where those with the influence (obviously this involves money, but not *just* money) to do so are so richly rewarded for using that influence primarily as a tool to get more influence that inevitably the top of the pile is utterly dominated by those whose priorities heavily lean that way. Any influence spent elsewhere means getting behind on the race to own The World.

Those with enough influence can outspend governments on finding bugs in the legal code, and even influence the drafting of that legal code in the first place through political "donations" etc.

We've reached the point where a handful of people have gained such an egregiously disproportionate share of "The World" that the phrase "The World is Not Enough" starts feeling literally true for them and they start working on projects like "leaving the planet", and "owning lumps of space"

Yay.