Diseased Open Source Software Community - it's about ethics in Code of Conducts

[BigGuyOS 6 : Jovial Janny]

Bryan Lunduke is creating his own Linux distro.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5751035/its-official-the-lunduke-journal-is-creating-a-linux-distro
Sounds cool, but will him and his apparent team deliver a non-meme distro?

>no politics
>no coc
>no systemD
>no wayland
This sounds based

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

At least it gave us Librewolf, Waterfox and the various forks that don't really suck (and compared to Firefox are magical, even)

I wouldn't call them magical. They don't have the support that Firefox has and the older editions of them were only good for a short time. They've largely been reduced to meme status.

 

[AnOminous]

i thought it was because lazy people realized they could just leech off of google for money instead of needing to actually be good

Like I said, troons.

 

[UNIXLover]

A system that uses the best software (and best designs)… be they old or new.

I laugh. It will be some cobbled together UNIX weenie garbage. Going back to UNIX isn't going to give you the best design. It's terrible design and it's level of security will be stuck in the 1900s.
Not requiring people to install security updates just sounds like there is no care for protecting users from malicous actors or it is trying to antagonize the idea of herd immunity for reducing the economic incentives around exploiting software.
I will give it to him that not collecting telemetry or crashes is old school. Have fun trying to build a product while blind. I'm sure users will report everytime a program crashes, or battery life has regressed, or boot times get worse, or their OS gets bricked.

 

[anustart76]

Never mind that Firefox has fallen to 3% market share and become increasingly Chrome-like over the years. You might almost start to think they weren't serious about competing...

It started (at least product-wise) back when they decided to remove support for XUL/XPCOM extensions. It killed their power user base that really liked the customization aspect of Firefox. All this crap in the name of "speed" for the normie users that were always just going to use Chrome (which is the modern day Internet Explorer 6) and it's still no better than Chrome most of the time.

It actually reminds me of how entertainment companies have ruined their media for "modern audiences" and lost their old audiences instead, while failing to attract the "modern audience" they wanted. Like how Disney tried to turn Star Wars into a girl brand, intending to attract girls to Star Wars, and not only completely failing to do so, but also driving away the male audience that loved the brand before. Same thing Firefox has done, they drove away power users by killing off more and more customization in the browser (you still can't set your homepage to a local file in Firefox), to attract normie users, but those normie users don't care, and will stick with Chrome because it's easy and already there.

Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't seen Firefox dump the Gecko engine in favor of becoming another Blink/Webkit wrapper like everything else. The leadership are a bunch of soyboys and woke women.

 

[Hall of Cost Payer]

It started (at least product-wise) back when they decided to remove support for XUL/XPCOM extensions. It killed their power user base that really liked the customization aspect of Firefox. All this crap in the name of "speed" for the normie users that were always just going to use Chrome (which is the modern day Internet Explorer 6) and it's still no better than Chrome most of the time

Back when they announced it and I read a bunch of explanations and blog posts why they removed XUL it made sense to me. Exposing a bunch of internals can be a problem for a big software project. It hinders their ability to refactor and freezes their architecture so to speak. The argument they gave "It will be a clean slate and in short time we will expose all features of XUL that way, with few exceptions".

But it turns out that was corpo speak. Mozilla was an enterprise that LARPed as an open source project. The new API still doesn't expose all it did. Looking back, XUL was their product. And instead of making this rug pull, they should have slowly refactored their codebase and slowly deprecated their APIs with ready alternatives.

What it did was much worse for Firefox. Now FF and Chrome are nearly drop in replacements for each other. Why stay on FF if all plugins are available for Chrome now anyway?

 

[Eternal Gopnik]

Why stay on FF if all plugins are available for Chrome now anyway?

TreeStyleTab isn't. That's literally the only reason I'm still on FF. There's some Chrome addon with the same name but it's shit.

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

TreeStyleTab isn't. That's literally the only reason I'm still on FF. There's some Chrome addon with the same name but it's shit.

The current incarnation of TreeStyleTab is already a lame imitation of the previous XUL-based one (which was way more responsive and less buggy) so I shudder to imagine how bad the Chrome one is.

 

[Penne Dreadful]

The current incarnation of TreeStyleTab is already a lame imitation of the previous XUL-based one (which was way more responsive and less buggy) so I shudder to imagine how bad the Chrome one is.

It's the same with Vimperator - Tridactyl is a janky, watered-down version of what used to be possible, but still far better than what Chrome is capable of supporting.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

What it did was much worse for Firefox. Now FF and Chrome are nearly drop in replacements for each other. Why stay on FF if all plugins are available for Chrome now anyway?

Back when the forum was leapfrogging domains I wrote a LibRedirect-like extension called KiwiDirect and it was the first time I had created a browser extension. I did it based on the MDN docs and was shocked to find it didn't load at all on Brave. I thought we were living the WebExtension dream and had given up on actually useful APIs for the utopian ideal of compatibility, why doesn't it work?!

It turns out there's two patterns for accessing WebExtension APIs, one which Mozilla pushes on MDN and the Chrome-method that Firefox begrudgingly supports while pushing their special sauce. To achieve cross compatibility you have to do browser detection, stuff like var isChrome = browser === undefined; and browser = browser || chrome as the API is declared as "chrome" for Chrome and "browser" for Firefox. Here's an example from the script used for the settings page:

    if(isChrome) {
        chrome.storage.sync.set(data, () => showMessage("Saved!"));
        return;
    }
    browser.storage.sync.set(data).then(() => {
        showMessage("Saved!");
    }, (error) => {
        // Try again with local storage instead
        browser.storage.local.set(data).then(() => {
            showMessage("Saved to local storage!");
        }, (error) => {
            showMessage(error);
        })
    });

Credit to the people out there writing useful extensions as I don't think I will ever touch this kinda shit again. Just too retarded.

 

[Autism Contractor]

TreeStyleTab isn't. That's literally the only reason I'm still on FF. There's some Chrome addon with the same name but it's shit.

It's a built in option in brave, works well for me and looks pretty good.

 

[Carpenter Trout]

It's a built in option in brave, works well for me and looks pretty good.

as well as Vivaldi

 

[anustart76]

Back when the forum was leapfrogging domains I wrote a LibRedirect-like extension called KiwiDirect and it was the first time I had created a browser extension. I did it based on the MDN docs and was shocked to find it didn't load at all on Brave. I thought we were living the WebExtension dream and had given up on actually useful APIs for the utopian ideal of compatibility, why doesn't it work?!

Depending on the details of what you were doing with it, the easy route might be to just write a ViolentMonkey userscript.

 

[UNIXLover]

All this crap in the name of "speed" for the normie users that were always just going to use Chrome (which is the modern day Internet Explorer 6)

It wasn't just for speed. There also were concerns about software stability and due to there not being a proper abstraction layer Firefox developers constantly ran into Hyrum's Law making Firefox stagnate. Broken addons causing crashes or broken behavior with the browser leads to a poor user experience and usually the user will simply blame Firefox and not the addons. Considering they haven't added more customization capabilities to the extensions API Mozilla has likely determined that most of their users do not actually prioritize such features to justify the cost of adding and maintaining them.

Chrome is not the modern day IE6. The deal with IE6 was that after Microsoft won the browser wars with it they moved everyone from the Internet Explorer team over to the Windows team and then IE was handed over to a skeleton crew to maintain it. This is in stark contrast to Chrome where Google continues to invest in improving both their browser and the web platform as a whole despite being a dominant market leader.

Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't seen Firefox dump the Gecko engine in favor of becoming another Blink/Webkit wrapper like everything else. The leadership are a bunch of soyboys and woke women.

I think about this to. I'm not sure if Mozilla actually gets that much of a benefit of maintaining and entirely separate browser engine. Instead of doing duplicate work, why not become a fork of chromium so Mozilla can dedicate all of their resources into creating differentiating features for their browser. Since it's open source they still have the same control as they once did. If they don't want to enable some API or want to implement it slightly differently they are free to make the change. Microsoft and Opera already successfully pulled this off.

 

[Eternal Gopnik]

It's a built in option in brave, works well for me and looks pretty good.

No, all Brave can do is put the tab bar on the side, it can't do collapsible trees - that's the main advantage of TST.

 

[0gh]

collapsible trees

That doesn't give it the credit it deserves. It's multi-level sub-trees, and I haven't found a limit yet.

A sub-tree gets automatically made when you open a tab from inside a tab, making it easy to open 50 links when you research random shit online without losing track of things. You can also unload them all at once, move them, close them, and it's compatible with Tab Session Manager

It's incredible for organization. Even with hundreds of tabs I either know exactly, or can easily find where something is

 

[Kendall Motor Oil]

I think about this to. I'm not sure if Mozilla actually gets that much of a benefit of maintaining and entirely separate browser engine. Instead of doing duplicate work, why not become a fork of chromium so Mozilla can dedicate all of their resources into creating differentiating features for their browser. Since it's open source they still have the same control as they once did. If they don't want to enable some API or want to implement it slightly differently they are free to make the change. Microsoft and Opera already successfully pulled this off.

What features? There are other blink based browsers that already do this along with a ton of extensions.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

I'm not sure if Mozilla actually gets that much of a benefit of maintaining and entirely separate browser engine. Instead of doing duplicate work, why not become a fork of chromium so Mozilla can dedicate all of their resources into creating differentiating features for their browser.

Because, as has been stated upthread, Google funds 90% of Mozilla, because that's cheaper than an anti-trust suit. Firefox's whole raison d'etre is being the sole non-Chromium browser out there.

 

[UNIXLover]

What features? There are other blink based browsers that already do this along with a ton of extensions.

Local page translation, privacy features, Pocket, etc.

Google funds 90% of Mozilla, because that's cheaper than an anti-trust suit.

Mozilla would still have full control over the project. Just because Chrome and Firefox would share open source components (spoiler: they already do right now), that doesn't mean that Google has stripped Mozilla of their control over their browser. Being the default search engine is very lucrative. Keep in mind that the current deal is a revenue share of ad revenue. Google profits from every search that's made from the Firefox search box and if they did not bid high enough all of that search traffic would go to a competitor and Google would lose out that revenue.
Going by your logic of Googlr trying to save money by keeping Mozilla afloat, why wouldn't they underbid Bing, so that their competitor has to be the one paying the money to keep Mozilla funded? That way Google could benefit from Mozilla's existence without having to fund them. The fact this is not taking place is a piece of evidence that shows that Google actually profits financially from making this deal and they would continue to profit financially even if Firefox changed browser engines.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Mozilla would still have full control over the project. Just because Chrome and Firefox would share open source components (spoiler: they already do right now), that doesn't mean that Google has stripped Mozilla of their control over their browser.

Lol. If your business gets 80% of its revenue from its competitor, you do not have full control over your product, even if you think you might do. I am absolutely certain that Mozilla would not be allowed to switch to Chromium.

Being the default search engine is very lucrative. Keep in mind that the current deal is a revenue share of ad revenue. Google profits from every search that's made from the Firefox search box and if they did not bid high enough all of that search traffic would go to a competitor and Google would lose out that revenue.
Going by your logic of Googlr trying to save money by keeping Mozilla afloat, why wouldn't they underbid Bing, so that their competitor has to be the one paying the money to keep Mozilla funded? That way Google could benefit from Mozilla's existence without having to fund them. The fact this is not taking place is a piece of evidence that shows that Google actually profits financially from making this deal and they would continue to profit financially even if Firefox changed browser engines.

The fact that Microsoft aren't interested in Firefox is PROOF that everything is above board, guys.