I hate this article, and I can't help but judge the author as immature given this comparison. Me [in operatic tenor]: Too laaaaaaaaaaaate. Seriously, what a fucking stupid comparison. This...
I hate this article, and I can't help but judge the author as immature given this comparison.
It goes without saying, that emotionally abusive relationships are far more serious of a problem than what Mozilla is doing. I use the term here as a metaphor, and don’t mean to belittle anyone’s experiences with the issue.
Me [in operatic tenor]: Too laaaaaaaaaaaate.
Seriously, what a fucking stupid comparison. This shouldn't have made it past the brainstorming stage, where it should have been filed away as "a bit much".
I was going to type up a long thing just skewering this thing for being 110% drama llama behaviour but ugh, whose mental health is that good for? I dropped r/firefox because it was just non-stop martyrdom over something as basic as a few damn pixels, and it's just continuing here.
I'm so sick of all these self-proclaimed privacy and security enthusiasts and experts making such ridiculous arguments to justify not using Firefox, and thinking their own wildly limited worldviews gives them some sort of magic expertise about how to run a successful international tech non-profit that will go toe-to-toe with trillion-dollar corporations with virtually unlimited resources and influence.
Here's a handy template to look out for to spot yet another bad take on Firefox since they all seem to follow it closely:
Look how long I've been interested in privacy and security
Look how hard and deep I hoped Mozilla would be our hope and saviour without somehow participating in our capitalistic society
Look how utterly and completely I am waylaid and driven to hopelessness and despair by their not magically attaining unlimited resources and influence
Now watch as I shit all over Firefox, call it doomed, and continue to contribute nothing but harsh words and unkindness
Bonus bingo tiles:
Megabar? More like an assault on my personal being!
Google Analytics? Might as well just send my computer to the KGB!
They tried to make some money? That's as unethical as slave labour!
Their updates broke some old compatibility? Wow, way to use all the unlimited resources and funding and development talent I'm assuming they must have since they're a tech company!
I am fully with you. The tone of this article is unproductive and harmful to the conversation about web browsers and Google's anti-competitive monopoly. I think to myself, "Shut the fuuuuck up,"...
I am fully with you. The tone of this article is unproductive and harmful to the conversation about web browsers and Google's anti-competitive monopoly.
I think to myself, "Shut the fuuuuck up," as I read this passage:
I am fed up with Mozilla and Firefox. Their consistent lack of respect for their users, bad business decisions and urge to constantly re-create a bad chrome-clone clearly indicate that something has gone wrong – and I don’t see it as my responsibility to make up for it.
Firefox is a good browser. Mozilla has tried to bring privacy with convenience to the masses. I think that is commendable.
As an aside, I am partially in agreement that websites should be more "brutalist," and work on more devices and be generally less obtuse. However, for the author to brag about using these principles in his own website, which is one of, if not the worst, least comfortably viewed website I have seen in ages, is laughable. Especially since brutalism is often regarded as being heavy, oppressive architecture. There are some excellent examples that are the opposite: triumphant and forward-looking, but many are not. Dark themes are in. The future is now, old man.
The site looks fine to me on my phone. I'm not sure if it has that problem where the paragraphs are all too wide on desktop, but that's easy to fix with a bit of CSS and not a real strike against...
The site looks fine to me on my phone. I'm not sure if it has that problem where the paragraphs are all too wide on desktop, but that's easy to fix with a bit of CSS and not a real strike against writing spare, idiomatic, and human-readable markup and stylesheets.
The comparison to actual abuse seems like insensitive, especially since, unlike an abuse survivor, the community isn't blameless here. But I don't think the relationship between Mozilla and the Firefox community, especially the power-user end of it, is healthy.
Mozilla treats Firefox as a product instead of a project, and makes opinionated design changes without collecting community buy-in. When pressed, they say "the product people wanted it", "we have data we won't share that says the majority of you don't care", and "it's been in Beta Firefox for a month already".
The community, for its part, loves to rail against Mozilla and their terrible ideas, but takes whatever Mozilla eventually decides to do as fixed and unchallengeable, instead of grabbing a shovel and changing it back like a good open-source community should.
While in many ways I agree (in others disagree) - one of the core agreements being the fact that we give Mozilla insane leeway for being the only other option in town. Which means that when the...
While in many ways I agree (in others disagree) - one of the core agreements being the fact that we give Mozilla insane leeway for being the only other option in town. Which means that when the screw up marketing, screw up communication or forget their intended focus - we are more ok with it than we would otherwise be because they are the only contender in town. (like the Spyware thing, sure it could be totally innocent, but thats not how this works - blind trust is not a sexy look in the world of privacy)
At the same time there is a lot of gung-ho wording in that...
Like "Patronizing, Dismissiveness and Shutting down communication" - Firefox changed to the Megabar (which tbh I had to check up and realized its the focusing size difference of the text bar). And some people didn't like it and wanted a way to change it to the old behavior. Adding config options isn't easy, keeping them stable and a whole project stable with many config options is harder.
Development isn't possible with "just add what vocal users want" and I think ("think" because we don't know the exact numbers) that the majority of users didn't even know megabar was there or are very bothered with it. The best you can do is try to evaluate what users want to do, or the issue they have, instead of adding features they would like blindly.
The thread linked in the text isnt patronizing, it isn't dismissive, and it doesn't shut down communication. But at a certain point there isn't anything more to add to a bug report unless someone in it goes "I can do it for free for you!"
Plus the connection between a free browser and its users, and an abusive relationship is a bit rich.
Not to mention the list method is applicable to a lot of things using the same vagueness that you get when you pluck social signs from an abusive relationship between people and the relationship between any software development group of size and its users.
Not to mention the defeatist attitude to the whole subject which makes reading the text meaningless. Its not just defeatist about this specific issue - the heterogeneous internet, but smacks of "I for one welcome our new overlords" by belittling or even mocking people trying to find alternatives and talking about the great things a new overlord could get us.
A user on lobste.rs posted a vigorous counter-rant which I'll link to in lieu of largely reproducing. In short: the author has no evidence (or at least, fails to present any evidence they have)...
A user on lobste.rs posted a vigorous counter-rant which I'll link to in lieu of largely reproducing.
In short: the author has no evidence (or at least, fails to present any evidence they have) that their views are widely shared; and if we operate on the substantially more reasonable assumption that Mozilla is not intentionally or incompetently alienating large portions of their userbase, both the argument and conclusion fall flat on their face.
Plus, anyone shouting down Firefox on the web is automatically a gigantic hypocrite. They're either using Chrome, which is so superlatively worse I struggle to compose suitably intense hyperbole for it; or they're using OperaEdgeChrome; or they're using Safari (they're not using Safari); or they're using one of the myriad small independent browsers, except they're not, because none implement enough of the sprawling Google-driven technological metastasis that is the modern Web to function on social media platforms; or they're using Firefox.
It seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Chrome and other browsers is overheated in quite a similar way to this criticism of Firefox, so it's important to be a little suspicious of it. People...
It seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Chrome and other browsers is overheated in quite a similar way to this criticism of Firefox, so it's important to be a little suspicious of it. People get really upset about browsers and aren't acting as careful reporters when they're upset, so the facts are sometimes mangled a bit.
I agree. I don't understand why people are so incredibly sensitive to the slightest differences in how any arbitrary software can drive people over the edge and make people completely abandon it....
I agree. I don't understand why people are so incredibly sensitive to the slightest differences in how any arbitrary software can drive people over the edge and make people completely abandon it.
Take 'Megabar' as an example. It's an entirely aesthetic change, and it has zero impact on functionality. The only thing it really does is make it more obvious when the focus is on the address bar. How on earth is this enough to make you abandon the software you've presumably used for months, if not years?
In the lobste.rs conversation, there is a side conversation about how someone hates Firefox because it doesn't have the Chrome "Vertical Tabs" extension available, and called the Firefox "Tree Style Tabs" extension trash. Yet they both have the same functionality and even mostly the same UI - the only difference is that TST offers what it's named for, and VT has that functionality on the roadmap. And from my perspective it's especially frustrating because I know that Firefox's extension system is basically lifted from Chrome's; porting that extension over should at least theoretically be trivial.
I just finished watching Lindsay Ellis' latest video which is very rich in drama, so I withheld my words thinking it might be just a lot of the leftover energy wanting to pour out. It's been an...
I just finished watching Lindsay Ellis' latest video which is very rich in drama, so I withheld my words thinking it might be just a lot of the leftover energy wanting to pour out. It's been an hour, and now I'm glad to hear that it's not just me.
I honestly just cannot understand the mindset of the author of this piece. I can understand not wanting to deal with change in a UI - I've written about it before on Tildes - but to equate it to abuse and tyranny is just next level entitlement. And it's not as if Chrome has never changed anything.
And so much of this is just plain hypocritical. They say that they don't want to use Firefox because of privacy, but is using a browser made by literally the largest spyware company in the world. They are willing to use a community-built 'ungoogled' version of Chrome, but is not willing to use a similar version of Firefox.
Some of this is just plain unrelated to anyone's personal relationship they have with their browser. Why bring up FirefoxOS? If you are going to judge an application by the collective works of the company producing it, Google has far more failed projects under their belt.
So many of these arguements are just plain in bad faith. Firefox, the browser that has always been 100% free, is financial abuse because the company who made it also spent money developing another project which they also did not charge you for. What? Oh, and they're also completely unpredictable in spite of being an open source project and constantly publishing articles about what their plans are.
To your point: I would argue Google has killed more successful projects too, which is arguably worse than try-and-fail. Look at the death (and pandemic-related undeath) of Hangouts, Google Play...
To your point:
If you are going to judge an application by the collective works of the company producing it, Google has far more failed projects under their belt.
I would argue Google has killed more successful projects too, which is arguably worse than try-and-fail. Look at the death (and pandemic-related undeath) of Hangouts, Google Play Music, there's a whole website devoted to them!
Haha I wrote mine while listening to that same video so maybe it is just the video after all. (It's not, I've been getting progressively more and more impatient with hearing the same dumb...
I just finished watching Lindsay Ellis' latest video which is very rich in drama, so I withheld my words thinking it might be just a lot of the leftover energy wanting to pour out. It's been an hour, and now I'm glad to hear that it's not just me.
Haha I wrote mine while listening to that same video so maybe it is just the video after all.
(It's not, I've been getting progressively more and more impatient with hearing the same dumb arguments repeated ad nauseum for the past year.)
The beauty of the Web is that it is open. Instead of ranting the two largest (financially) browser companies in the world, why not try a few other alternative browsers until you find one that...
The beauty of the Web is that it is open.
Instead of ranting the two largest (financially) browser companies in the world, why not try a few other alternative browsers until you find one that largely works for you, and start using it?
And for your part as a web dev, how many different browsers are you testing with? I haven't dug very deep, and I'm testing with at least 30 different ones. Are you testing with no-JS? Are you testing with console-based and/or text-only browsers? In lieu of actual vision-impaired testing, this is the best you can do. Are you testing with the browsers people are likely to use on older "legacy" (what a fucking insult of a name for older devices, btw) devices? The last browser/iOS version on iPad from 5 years ago? If you are not doing all these things, or at lease designing for it, you are directly contributing to browser monoculture and consolidation.
It's easy to just blame some other entity in the distance. It's more difficult and more rewarding to actually do something towards keeping the Web open.
That's great in theory, but in practice things don't work that way. While the web may be open, it's also monopolized by companies who are entrenched in culture. To put things succinctly, if your...
That's great in theory, but in practice things don't work that way. While the web may be open, it's also monopolized by companies who are entrenched in culture. To put things succinctly, if your browser can't run YouTube, the vast majority of people are not going to use it. No amount of activism will change that simply because the vast majority of users simply do not care about these things.
Before anyone will use a browser, it must be used by the techies. Before anyone else will use your software, you must use it yourself. You are doing exactly what I'm talking about, putting the...
Before anyone will use a browser, it must be used by the techies.
Before anyone else will use your software, you must use it yourself.
You are doing exactly what I'm talking about, putting the problem on someone else and washing your hands of it.
The forces causing these undesirable changes in the Web are all connected largely to money and the monetary-industrial-advertising system. Any project which is feed primarily by this same system...
The forces causing these undesirable changes in the Web are all connected largely to money and the monetary-industrial-advertising system.
Any project which is feed primarily by this same system is destined to become subverted, corrupted, and hijacked, in proportion to its growth and popularity.
The alternative to this is the knowledge-information-propagation system.
I think it is a dangerous road to go down, and one must tread carefully. For money is influence, and influence is dangerous. Funding also results in a tool in search of a problem, with simple,...
I think it is a dangerous road to go down, and one must tread carefully. For money is influence, and influence is dangerous.
Funding also results in a tool in search of a problem, with simple, "complete" projects exploding into bloat and instability because there are developers getting paid and looking for reasons to justify their pay.
I hate this article, and I can't help but judge the author as immature given this comparison.
Me [in operatic tenor]: Too laaaaaaaaaaaate.
Seriously, what a fucking stupid comparison. This shouldn't have made it past the brainstorming stage, where it should have been filed away as "a bit much".
I was going to type up a long thing just skewering this thing for being 110% drama llama behaviour but ugh, whose mental health is that good for? I dropped r/firefox because it was just non-stop martyrdom over something as basic as a few damn pixels, and it's just continuing here.
I'm so sick of all these self-proclaimed privacy and security enthusiasts and experts making such ridiculous arguments to justify not using Firefox, and thinking their own wildly limited worldviews gives them some sort of magic expertise about how to run a successful international tech non-profit that will go toe-to-toe with trillion-dollar corporations with virtually unlimited resources and influence.
Here's a handy template to look out for to spot yet another bad take on Firefox since they all seem to follow it closely:
Bonus bingo tiles:
I am fully with you. The tone of this article is unproductive and harmful to the conversation about web browsers and Google's anti-competitive monopoly.
I think to myself, "Shut the fuuuuck up," as I read this passage:
Firefox is a good browser. Mozilla has tried to bring privacy with convenience to the masses. I think that is commendable.
As an aside, I am partially in agreement that websites should be more "brutalist," and work on more devices and be generally less obtuse. However, for the author to brag about using these principles in his own website, which is one of, if not the worst, least comfortably viewed website I have seen in ages, is laughable. Especially since brutalism is often regarded as being heavy, oppressive architecture. There are some excellent examples that are the opposite: triumphant and forward-looking, but many are not. Dark themes are in. The future is now, old man.
The site looks fine to me on my phone. I'm not sure if it has that problem where the paragraphs are all too wide on desktop, but that's easy to fix with a bit of CSS and not a real strike against writing spare, idiomatic, and human-readable markup and stylesheets.
The comparison to actual abuse seems like insensitive, especially since, unlike an abuse survivor, the community isn't blameless here. But I don't think the relationship between Mozilla and the Firefox community, especially the power-user end of it, is healthy.
Mozilla treats Firefox as a product instead of a project, and makes opinionated design changes without collecting community buy-in. When pressed, they say "the product people wanted it", "we have data we won't share that says the majority of you don't care", and "it's been in Beta Firefox for a month already".
The community, for its part, loves to rail against Mozilla and their terrible ideas, but takes whatever Mozilla eventually decides to do as fixed and unchallengeable, instead of grabbing a shovel and changing it back like a good open-source community should.
Everybody uses Chrome as a bogeyman.
While in many ways I agree (in others disagree) - one of the core agreements being the fact that we give Mozilla insane leeway for being the only other option in town. Which means that when the screw up marketing, screw up communication or forget their intended focus - we are more ok with it than we would otherwise be because they are the only contender in town. (like the Spyware thing, sure it could be totally innocent, but thats not how this works - blind trust is not a sexy look in the world of privacy)
At the same time there is a lot of gung-ho wording in that...
Like "Patronizing, Dismissiveness and Shutting down communication" - Firefox changed to the Megabar (which tbh I had to check up and realized its the focusing size difference of the text bar). And some people didn't like it and wanted a way to change it to the old behavior. Adding config options isn't easy, keeping them stable and a whole project stable with many config options is harder.
Development isn't possible with "just add what vocal users want" and I think ("think" because we don't know the exact numbers) that the majority of users didn't even know megabar was there or are very bothered with it. The best you can do is try to evaluate what users want to do, or the issue they have, instead of adding features they would like blindly.
The thread linked in the text isnt patronizing, it isn't dismissive, and it doesn't shut down communication. But at a certain point there isn't anything more to add to a bug report unless someone in it goes "I can do it for free for you!"
Plus the connection between a free browser and its users, and an abusive relationship is a bit rich.
Not to mention the list method is applicable to a lot of things using the same vagueness that you get when you pluck social signs from an abusive relationship between people and the relationship between any software development group of size and its users.
Not to mention the defeatist attitude to the whole subject which makes reading the text meaningless. Its not just defeatist about this specific issue - the heterogeneous internet, but smacks of "I for one welcome our new overlords" by belittling or even mocking people trying to find alternatives and talking about the great things a new overlord could get us.
But some good points there still.
A user on lobste.rs posted a vigorous counter-rant which I'll link to in lieu of largely reproducing.
In short: the author has no evidence (or at least, fails to present any evidence they have) that their views are widely shared; and if we operate on the substantially more reasonable assumption that Mozilla is not intentionally or incompetently alienating large portions of their userbase, both the argument and conclusion fall flat on their face.
Plus, anyone shouting down Firefox on the web is automatically a gigantic hypocrite. They're either using Chrome, which is so superlatively worse I struggle to compose suitably intense hyperbole for it; or they're using
OperaEdgeChrome; or they're using Safari (they're not using Safari); or they're using one of the myriad small independent browsers, except they're not, because none implement enough of the sprawling Google-driven technological metastasis that is the modern Web to function on social media platforms; or they're using Firefox.It seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Chrome and other browsers is overheated in quite a similar way to this criticism of Firefox, so it's important to be a little suspicious of it. People get really upset about browsers and aren't acting as careful reporters when they're upset, so the facts are sometimes mangled a bit.
I agree. I don't understand why people are so incredibly sensitive to the slightest differences in how any arbitrary software can drive people over the edge and make people completely abandon it.
Take 'Megabar' as an example. It's an entirely aesthetic change, and it has zero impact on functionality. The only thing it really does is make it more obvious when the focus is on the address bar. How on earth is this enough to make you abandon the software you've presumably used for months, if not years?
In the lobste.rs conversation, there is a side conversation about how someone hates Firefox because it doesn't have the Chrome "Vertical Tabs" extension available, and called the Firefox "Tree Style Tabs" extension trash. Yet they both have the same functionality and even mostly the same UI - the only difference is that TST offers what it's named for, and VT has that functionality on the roadmap. And from my perspective it's especially frustrating because I know that Firefox's extension system is basically lifted from Chrome's; porting that extension over should at least theoretically be trivial.
I just finished watching Lindsay Ellis' latest video which is very rich in drama, so I withheld my words thinking it might be just a lot of the leftover energy wanting to pour out. It's been an hour, and now I'm glad to hear that it's not just me.
I honestly just cannot understand the mindset of the author of this piece. I can understand not wanting to deal with change in a UI - I've written about it before on Tildes - but to equate it to abuse and tyranny is just next level entitlement. And it's not as if Chrome has never changed anything.
And so much of this is just plain hypocritical. They say that they don't want to use Firefox because of privacy, but is using a browser made by literally the largest spyware company in the world. They are willing to use a community-built 'ungoogled' version of Chrome, but is not willing to use a similar version of Firefox.
Some of this is just plain unrelated to anyone's personal relationship they have with their browser. Why bring up FirefoxOS? If you are going to judge an application by the collective works of the company producing it, Google has far more failed projects under their belt.
So many of these arguements are just plain in bad faith. Firefox, the browser that has always been 100% free, is financial abuse because the company who made it also spent money developing another project which they also did not charge you for. What? Oh, and they're also completely unpredictable in spite of being an open source project and constantly publishing articles about what their plans are.
To your point:
I would argue Google has killed more successful projects too, which is arguably worse than try-and-fail. Look at the death (and pandemic-related undeath) of Hangouts, Google Play Music, there's a whole website devoted to them!
Haha I wrote mine while listening to that same video so maybe it is just the video after all.
(It's not, I've been getting progressively more and more impatient with hearing the same dumb arguments repeated ad nauseum for the past year.)
Ironically I actually think FirefoxOS was way ahead of its time and I wish it were still around!
It's still actively developed in the form of the KaiOS fork!
The beauty of the Web is that it is open.
Instead of ranting the two largest (financially) browser companies in the world, why not try a few other alternative browsers until you find one that largely works for you, and start using it?
And for your part as a web dev, how many different browsers are you testing with? I haven't dug very deep, and I'm testing with at least 30 different ones. Are you testing with no-JS? Are you testing with console-based and/or text-only browsers? In lieu of actual vision-impaired testing, this is the best you can do. Are you testing with the browsers people are likely to use on older "legacy" (what a fucking insult of a name for older devices, btw) devices? The last browser/iOS version on iPad from 5 years ago? If you are not doing all these things, or at lease designing for it, you are directly contributing to browser monoculture and consolidation.
It's easy to just blame some other entity in the distance. It's more difficult and more rewarding to actually do something towards keeping the Web open.
That's great in theory, but in practice things don't work that way. While the web may be open, it's also monopolized by companies who are entrenched in culture. To put things succinctly, if your browser can't run YouTube, the vast majority of people are not going to use it. No amount of activism will change that simply because the vast majority of users simply do not care about these things.
Before anyone will use a browser, it must be used by the techies.
Before anyone else will use your software, you must use it yourself.
You are doing exactly what I'm talking about, putting the problem on someone else and washing your hands of it.
On the contrary, I think that grass roots is the only way.
The forces causing these undesirable changes in the Web are all connected largely to money and the monetary-industrial-advertising system.
Any project which is feed primarily by this same system is destined to become subverted, corrupted, and hijacked, in proportion to its growth and popularity.
The alternative to this is the knowledge-information-propagation system.
I think it is a dangerous road to go down, and one must tread carefully. For money is influence, and influence is dangerous.
Funding also results in a tool in search of a problem, with simple, "complete" projects exploding into bloat and instability because there are developers getting paid and looking for reasons to justify their pay.