Roy TanckDec 23, 2023

This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox’s market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. There are two main reasons why switching is important.

“Red Panda” by Mathias Appel is marked with CC0 1.0.

1. Privacy

Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data. There’s been a lot of talk about websites tracking users using cookies, fingerprinting and other nefarious technologies that hurt your privacy. But owning the browser puts Google, Apple and Microsoft in a position where they don’t even need those tricks. We need to use browsers that are independent, and right now that means Firefox.

2. Browser engine monopoly

Wikipedia lists four browser engines as being “active”. Browser engines are the bits that take a web page’s code and display it on your screen. Ideally, they conform to the official W3C standards, and display all elements as it describes. If that’s the case, web developers can easily write sites that work on all browsers. No proprietary vendor lock-in nonsense, just glorious open standards at work.

It’s happened before

In the early 2000’s, Internet Explorer had a massive 95% market share. This meant that many sites were only developed for use with IE. They’d use experimental features that IE supported, in favor of things from the official HTML standard. This was a very bad situation, which hindered the development of the World Wide Web.

Currenty, Chrome, Safari and Edge all use variations of the closely related Webkit and Blink engines. If we want to avoid another browser engine monopoly, we need to support Firefox, and its “Gecko” engine.

Firefox is actually really good

If Firefox would be a bad browser, I would not recommend you to switch. It’s fast, has a nice user interface, and feels every bit as modern and elegant as its competition. I’ve been using it as my main browser for a couple of years now, on Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android. As a web developer, I usually have at least three browsers open, but when I go look something up on the web, I pick Firefox.

So please, help save the web by using the best browser out there. It’s an easy thing to do, and it makes a big difference.

https://roytanck.com/2023/12/23/in-2024-please-switch-to-firefox/

#Firefox #privacy

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Show threadcurtosisDec 24, 2023

@roy @_dmh While I support encouraging people to move to Firefox (and am a FF user myself) there are a couple misleading elements here.

1) “Apple makes money from ads” is technically true, but that’s a long way from using their browser platform to enable it. It’s simply inaccurate to lump that in with the Chromium ecosystem’s approach to enabling ads. Safari’s privacy measures cost FB *billions* when they rolled out.

1/

Show threadcurtosisDec 24, 2023

@roy @_dmh

2) There are good reasons to support rendering engine diversity, but calling WebKit and Blink “closely related” is like saying PostgreSQL and Ingres are closely related: true when the fork happened, but completely irrelevant at this point given the development since then. Again, while technically accurate, stating it this way implies a relationship that isn’t there.

As I said: I’m a FF user and fan. But we can support it without blurring distinctions that do matter. 2/2

Show threadRoy Tanck

@curtosis I basicallyy agree with both points, but I wanted to keep this post short and easy to understand for non-experts.

I personally don't trust Apple one bit, but didn't want to go into that in this post.

And honestly, I don't know how different Blink and Webkit are these days, and whether they're different enough to call them competition. But an independent third option is preferable no matter what.

Dec 29, 2023 at 10:58amWeb
Show threadMcSpaddenDec 29, 2023
@roytanck @curtosis do you plan to expand on your Apple position? would def read a post about it
Show threadcurtosisDec 30, 2023

@mcspadden @roytanck Not sure who this was directed to, but my argument is quite simple:

Google has a long, documented history of actively grabbing every bit of data they can to feed their ad machine.

Apple has a long, documented history of actively trying to *improve* privacy. Including having worse AI b/c they kept it on-device.

There are plenty of reasons to critique Apple, and nobody should blindly trust any service. But equating them is a bit like saying the FBI is as bad as the KGB.