I can’t help but wonder, how many of you know that Mozilla is a non profit organization that has a company subsidiary?
Sounds like many here conflated how Mozilla approaches their projects with how Google does it, doesn’t match with the fundamental difference between their orgs. Mozilla (non profit) foundation can create another company and still retains control over them, Google however can’t create a non profit that takes away their power of decision making.
Here’s hoping they make it back to the top spot…
I don’t understand what you mean. Google can and does spin off independent non-profits (like CNCF to own stuff like kubernetes) and wholly-owned non-profits (like Google.org – a wholly-owned, probably tax-exempt, registered 501c3 non-profit).
My point was that one browser maker is in the ads/tracking business and the other resells VPN service at a discount.
Meaning Alphabet/Google Inc. can’t be overruled or even removed by any non-profit they formed (non-profit made by giant companies are mostly tax evasion tactic btw, but that’s another topic), while Mozilla Foundation has those powers over their for-profit subsidiaries.
There is no perfect web browser nor the circumstances involving their ecosystem, but only in Firefox a non-profit has ultimate power over its code or directions, none of the other browsers are controlled by non-profits; Safari, Chrome, Edge, Brave, they’re all using WebKit or Chromium and also controlled by for-profit companies. When it’s about Google Chrome, we also need to consider that it’s not open source, unlike Chromium.
I think that is a reasonable concern; with Google’s resources, I can imagine it intentionally or inadvertently growing a project such that it would be prohibitively expensive and complex to manage long term development by a community or even a small company.
Just building the Blink/Chromium externally does not seem to be an issue; I remember some discussion on new.ycombinator.com or somewhere similar a few years ago, where someone mentioned how the Chromium build instructions mention a slightly different process for Google employees. This does not seem to be of much consequence; plenty of others are currently able to build forks and work on ports to other architectures.
However, many derivative projects seem to sit fairly close to upstream. I am curious how well a complete fork would fair; or if Google went belly-up, how easily could development continue?
To really know, I suspect it would be revealing to look at what happened in the WebKit-Blink fork process, or the KHTML-Webkit fork process.
GNOME does this with Epiphany/Web; it actually has quite prominent listing on webkit.org
I think I tend to see it as attribution being the “natural” state of things, and copyleft (GPL) and proprietary licences are kind of like necessary evils for certain projects. Good things can come of both, but they are both mechanisms of controlling those who read what you write. Sometimes I think of it as a gradient:
copyleft → attribution ← proprietary
Since everything eventually returns to public domain, but even afterwards we still remember authors.
I do think it is better that the web as a whole maintains multiple rendering engines. While Blink and Webkit prevent Google or Apple from having complete control, I also think having a completely independent viable implementation of a HTML+CSS+ECMAScript renderer, like Gecko, is important to keep websites from devolving into something nearly inseparable from WebKit/Blink.
Since I use uBlock Origin, CNAME-uncloaking and some other features work better under Firefox:
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox · gorhill/uBlock Wiki · GitHub
Edit: @CodeDragon57 recently started a thread about this
Just got to say a few more things. I love using Firefox as my main browser. Yes, some of its quirks are annoying like the forced restart after an update - ugh I don’t use Windows for this reason among others. But Firefox is worse than Windows in this regard. After I update my system with my package manager, Firefox won’t even let me navigate to a new url without restarting. And since I clear cookies between sessions this gets rather annoying. Additionally, while I have noticed Firefox use more CPU than Chrome occasionally, it hasn’t been significant like you guys have experienced. I also wouldn’t put it past Apple to engage in an anticompetitive trick on Macs though tbh - on iOS (and iPad OS) Firefox and Chrome are limited to using an old Safari Webkit backend. Furthermore, Firefox is ahead of most other mainstream browsers in many ways. Their devtools are great and no other mainstream browser is as configurable.
Plus, because of the Tor Uplift project, Firefox has insane privacy tweaks that get accepted upstream. Some of them eventually become defaults like Firefox’s privacy.trackingprotection.fingerprinting.enabled andprivacy.trackingprotection.cryptomining.enabled while others are availableprivacy.firstpartyisolate.enabled, and privacy.trackingprotection.enabled. Heck Firefox even has the option to only connect to sites over HTTPS in its regular settings because of downstream Tor Project work. Also Chrome is just now getting around to implementing container tabs, whereas Firefox has had them forever. I could go on an on, too, but Firefox is way ahead of its competitors in many areas. In most areas that matter I would say. Sure maybe Chrome has a better sandbox or isn’t as buggy in YouTube - which is just Google being anticompetitive anyway, but Firefox is a truly underrated piece of software.
wow. I haven’t logged into the forum in awhile xD. And these are my first posts in weeks lol. Anyway I do want to clarify that I do not hate Mozilla. On the whole I really like them and do not actually think of them as being evil. That being said, Mozilla makes a lot of stupid mistakes and blunders and never really seems to learn from some of them as many of their mistakes are the ones that reoccur over and over again. That being said, I feel that Mozilla as an organization really does care about internet freedom and privacy. The good things they do outweigh the bad. Namely, Firefox is the best browser because of all of it’s privacy options. I feel like Firefox could force the Tor Project to fork Firefox if their privacy claims were Apple-style PR, but the fact that they don’t is enough for me. Honestly, people complaining of performance or ease of use largely have made the decision that convenience is greater than privacy and security imo. In 2018, we found out how many corners Intel cut in order to fullfill their priority of performance. Some gripes are legitimate, and also Firefox’s defaults suck - but so do Chrome 's and Safari’s.
While I get your sentiment, I also see why this is a thing. They are applying the same rules to every browser and not making exceptions (because that would just invite the “why do I not get an exception, that is anticompetitive”-argument). And that rule is in place so that randodev123 can’t implement a completely broken and/or potentially dangerous rendering engine.
That’s a stupid reason though. The Apple App store already has the best track record for accepting quality apps and rejecting terrible apps. This is just redundant; and yes it is anti-competitive the way it is - especially since competing browsers are forced to use old versions of the safari backend rather than the current version. Thus competing browsers will always be worse on iOS than Safari.
It really is not; modern ECMAScript (Javascript) engines use JIT compiling that requires writing and then executing arbitrary code; even if Apple was entirely free of any possible malevolence it would still be wise to heavily restrict write+execute permissions.
In Apple’s talk at Blackhat 2016 (slides, video) the presenter mentions the special exemption to write+execute memory protections and code signing that system-WebKit’s JIT compilation memory region is given to allow high-speed ECMAScript execution.
Can you provide a source for this?
It’s a bit long in the tooth, and I didn’t remember everything correctly, but I remember the title of the article. A quick duckduckgo search pulled this up. It may not be true in 2021, but Apple’s already set a precedent of abuse - which is arguably more significant than something that’s open for abuse but never exploited.
Looks like that was changed in iOS 8, according to this article that came out a few months after what you linked:
So my rough understanding then is:
dynamic-codesigning entitlement, but blocking use in 3rd party embedded WebKitAdditional source: This slide deck on slide 21 indicates that the SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX, Nitro) JIT was added in iOS 5.
Unfortunately, Matrix’s Element is a bad site under this train of thought. They used too many new web standards that it basically meant you needed the absolute latest Chrome and Firefox to use it.
Yes, it is.
Oh dear, this is going to affect hotlink prevention based “DRM” where some content is inaccessible without a referrer or the wrong referrer.
Yes, people still use hotlink protection.
MEGA is also bad for blocking downloads of 2GB+ on Firefox specifically, because it uses a Chrome-birthed web standard. You also cannot use the MEGA app a la carte without an account to download said large files, so you have to create a burner account to get your file.
using mega.
You’d be surprised how many indie 3D animators use it to showcase work, only to find out this crap happens, and then they don’t take responsibility for using a crappy service.