It's Firefox containers for me. It is extremely useful to manage different environments - dev, production etc., and I can use the colors to identify the tabs.
I feel this from time to time. I found that I needed to separate pleasure, work and leisure. I do random stuff for pleasure, which does not lead to any meaningful result at work. But it makes me feel that I am learning something.
I work for money. I do not necessarily derive pleasure from work but it pays the bills. I try not to work at high pressure environments.
For leisure, I have friends who just like to chit-chat, relax and play some games or go on hikes. We rarely discuss work. I love that about my friend circle that I can totally disconnect from my personal problems and work pressure and just relax.
I think you need to take it easy on yourself and take a 2-4 weeks time off from everything. Relax and decide what is important for you.
If this is a common complaint that you have, why not just increase the font size and pick fonts you like in the browser settings? The settings are there for a reason.
HN is not a hivemind. There could easily be two groups (or more) of people: one who shows up to Firefox threads and complains, and another who shows up to Firefox fork threads and complains. There may be some overlap between these groups, but there doesn't have to be.
In my opinion, it's pretty easy to spot this pattern, because when you've read HN long enough, you know what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group. But that's not to say any given group is representative of HN as a whole, which I think is still largely dominated by lurkers.
Users that comment on a post are not a random sample of the community at large. So you can't draw conclusions about the community by looking at a biased sample of posts, because it just projects that bias into the comments. This is a truism of most online platforms, e.g. Twitter.
Maybe you are just closer to the group that gets triggered by these keywords. And that is OK. But my point is that these 'opposing' sentiments are always present in those threads. Which begs the question: where is the hivemind?
> what sorts of posts are likely to elicit reactions from a particular group
Also: given such sorts of posts, once one seeming/presumed group acquires dominance in a thread of comments, that "others" may self-select out of commenting on that particular article.
I think the question is why you apparently see rather few people show up in adjacent threads. You see this with many topics. There's the people who complain about Apple's monopoly, and there's the people who say Apple is dying because they have no marketshare, but you might reasonably expect both groups to fall under the umbrella of people interested in Apple's marketshare.
Everyone wonders why there's no widely used alternative to Chrome, then someone makes a great one (Firefox) and nobody is happy.
In reality, there are two categories of users – one group (the vast majority) is perfectly happy with the status quo regardless of privacy issues or anything else, and the other is simply looking to endlessly nitpick and complain about everything in pursuit of some hypothetical perfection that can never be reached. There's no wonder then that new products will mostly cater to the first group than the second.
This is a bad view of users and people in general. It's also a really bizarre view of the Firefox complainers, who are the ones demanding that the status quo be kept. One can end up in contradictory situations like that when you judge people based purely on how much they agree with you, or with institutions you support. People who hate the thing you hate are not "haters," and people who like the thing you hate are not "sheep." Very few people are choosing their opinions in order to annoy you, or in order to annoy Mozilla.
Supporting the management status quo is the opposite of supporting the product status quo; Firefox now is an absolutely unrecognizable product compared to Firefox 5 years ago. Not coincidentally, Chrome isn't unrecognizable, it's dependable. I wonder why it's successful? Is it because google isn't playing fairly, or because anyone who has ever been satisfied with Chrome has never been given any good reason to leave, while every change in firefox seems tuned to peel off 2% of the userbase?
If there's an effective way Google isn't playing fair, it's probably that they have some indirect but strong influence in directing Firefox development.
All this looks like to me is Google developers use Chrome (surprise!). I've seen plenty of issues exactly like this at web shops where developers primarily use Chrome.
You missed the part how it was about the conflict of interest. "We're on the same side" wasn't really true.
Especially at the higher level, Mozilla was complicit in accepting money from a competitor.
Make no mistake, that absolutely distorted how they ran the company over the next decade. That's why Firefox is so "meh" right now, why Servo got killed, why Mozilla is being seriously mismanaged.
I just can't understand why Chrome can't handle a hundred open tabs if the developers use it primarily. Firefox handles it with about the same RAM usage as six hundred open tabs.
The parent of your post is pretty accurate. I've complained about it before, but Firefox is unfairly targeted by an outsized number of complainers here on HN.
I disagree that it's unfair or outsized. You're talking about a browser that has lost 95% of its userbase and is financially dependent on its main competitor. The complainers are drawn from the tiny proportion of the people dissatisfied with Firefox development who stayed. The other 98% just fucked off somewhere else like they were told to.
Here's a quote directly from you in this very same topic:
> The comments like this from people who will complain about everything are completely valueless.
> We're lucky to have an alternative to the WebKit oligopoly. If you don't like Firefox, just stick with the other browsers and let the rest of us that are trying to prevent a monoculture continue our work.
Looks like you're doing the job just fine by yourself.
For some reason, Firefox (and its variants) seems to attract an especially tough crowd. People will let Chrome hoover up every last bit of information about you but FF will get relentlessly pilloried for every minor decision.
The problem with Mozilla is that most of us seem to be holding them to a higher standard. It's not minor details that are scrutinized but more like "HOW IN THE HELL DID THEY THINK THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA", and sadly there's been about 1-2 of those per year.
That is pretty much a problem they created themselves by claiming to be a champion of tge free Internet and then doing stuff like invetsing in an adtech company and then handing a sample of user browser history to said company. Why does a corporation owned by a foundation do stuff like that? If you have an official mission other than making money people will hold you to a higher standard than normal for profit companies.
You see the same thing with non-profits. For-profit companies can ask $50 for a product, do whatever they like with the profit, and everyone is happy. A non-profit asks for voluntary donations for a similar product and gets all of their receipts to local pizza joints examined.
Not my opinion, but from what I've seen, it's a different standard.
FF has historically been concerned with privacy and transparency. When they move contrary to that, people "hold them accountable" by issuing public critiques.
In comparison, I'm not sure that the Chromium project ever intended to have privacy as one of their forefront values.
Please stop making excuses for Mozilla - their management has made many questionable decisions including bundling unnecessary extensions like Pocket and closed source DRM plugin without user permission, aggressive telemetry tracking, downloading and running codes / features without your knowledge (it's opt-out but only if you know what to opt-out of) and now even bundling adware into the browser.
Instead of ensuring their engine is easily modular and usable they are more concerned about others making competing browsers and thus let greed drive their design decisions to make a clunky and poorly architected product that just lags in development.
Fire the greed driven management of Mozilla, and bring a team more concerned about developing a good product than letting money drive the design decisions, and Firefox will be back on track.
Honestly, do you think you'd ever be happy with anything Mozilla produces? The comments like this from people who will complain about everything are completely valueless.
We're lucky to have an alternative to the WebKit oligopoly. If you don't like Firefox, just stick with the other browsers and let the rest of us that are trying to prevent a monoculture continue our work.
I don't work for Mozilla or have ever done work on Firefox other than bugfixing, but I'll gladly run an alternative browser so the web doesn't end up stagnating like it did before.
> do you think you'd ever be happy with anything Mozilla produces?
I switched to Mozilla Gecko after Opera Presto was sold to a chinese firm and they switched engines to Chromium. After that, I have been using various Firefox forks since Firefox started bundling useless software and made really questionable decisions sacrificing user privacy for their greed. I am really glad that forks that respect the user, like LibreWolf and Tor browser, exists.
> The comments like this from people who will complain about everything are completely valueless.
I have given specifics. Your comment though is less useful.
> We're lucky to have an alternative to the WebKit oligopoly.
We are unlucky that the current management of Mozilla is slowly selling out on this, under the influence of Google and their own greed - 100's of millions of dollars and yet, making a modular browser engine is not a priority for them as that means more competition and innovation from other open and closed source developers that will threaten their cash cow.
> I have given specifics. Your comment though is less useful.
I disagree. You list a number of random topics that are exaggerated and overblown, then attack the leadership of the organization personally and ascribe motivations that you have invented. Your comments are not useful for setting future direction of a browser, and you are contributing to a browser monoculture.
When we lose the only viable competitor to WebKit because you and other commenters hold Firefox to your unreachable standards, it will be a sad day.
> Honestly, do you think you'd ever be happy with anything Mozilla produces?
I used to be happy with their output, many years ago. So yes, of course.
I haven't liked FF in a very long time. But I used to love it.
> I'll gladly run an alternative browser so the web doesn't end up stagnating like it did before.
The only thing actually stopping Google from completely owning the Web is Apple's mandating Safari's engine for all browsers on iOS. Firefox has been floundering for too long (a decade? More?) and no longer matters much, aside from providing some kind of value to Google. Microsoft's probably maneuvering to open a second front on that, despite using Google's engine now, unless they decide to team up with Google to go after Apple. FF has been an also-ran for years.
Agreed. Except to say that many recent decisions have moved Firefox closer in alignment with the monoculture. So, you have to at least consider that maybe, even if it's just a few of the people complaining have good intentions, or might even be canaries in a dark mine with potential dangers of collapse. Unfortunately, canaries can't do much to fix the problems. They can only be used as warning signs by the people who can do something to fix things.
> bundling unnecessary [...] closed source DRM plugin without user permission
Not making including a plugin required for a top 50 site would be user hostile, and I will die on this hill.
This is exactly the thing everyone else in the thread is pointing out as the issue, complaints from FOSS-or-nothing folks expecting to be catered to at the expense of the other (probably) 99% of potential users. The fact that it's even a plugin at all (that you can disable!), rather than an integrated part of the browser, is them already catering to that. Firefox already caters to this niche a ton, and nothing is good enough.
> running codes / features without your knowledge (it's opt-out but only if you know what to opt-out of) and now even bundling adware into the browser.
I'm unfamiliar with these last two things. What code do they run? And what adware?
From the top of HN literally yesterday. They can match user downloads to multiple installs across systems now. The "solution" is to select "opt out of telemetry" in the settings, which you can't get to until after you've installed the browser and it's already happened.
I think this is the reckoning of people realizing that technical solutions do not always solve social problems. Firefox itself started as a fork against Netscape’s commercialization, and now has reintroduced many of the same issues: Pocket, telemetry, DRM. Google’s original paper explicitly identified the conflict of interest in search engines funded by ads, and now it is the largest ad marketplace in existence. I think now when people see something like LibreWolf they ask “for how long?”
Pale Moon is very hostile to packagers and distros, threatening them with lawsuits within the first few messages of a conversation. I wouldn't want to give a userbase to them if they treat people like that.
The problem with Pale Moon is it's effectively a dead end from a development standpoint. Yes, it gets security fixes from upstream (for which are applicable) but it doesn't receive much in the way of meaningful web compatibility (the elephant in the room being WebComponents, which none of the team have the capability of implementing in the current codebase). It's based on Firefox 52 and refuses to re-base on later versions, partially due to lack of XUL-based extensions and partly due to the introduction of Rust (which does not exist on some platforms which Pale Moon supports - including Solaris/Illumos).
@dang pointed out when I commented similarly on another thread that early comments on threads seem to tend towards the negative, and sentiment often shifts more positive as things go on (which is exactly what happened on that other thread)
I wouldn't say that it is negativity. It's criticism that is mostly constructive, which I appreciate because nowadays it is popular to ban/cancel criticism on forums or social networks.
The project is 100% negative liberty so it doesn't surprise me that there's a negative reaction. The selling point to unbundling can't be pure fear. Consider supporting the SerenityOS browser. Andreas Kling is breaking his back creating an entirely new browser, and it actually works. It takes a true genius to do something like that.
Meh, go back to this day, 2013 [0] and you’ll see the same constructive/non-constructive criticism. It’s an exacting crowd, which is what I love personally.
Brave used Firefox's core Gecko (and forked it) several years ago, encountered problems with it and called it a day. Then they switched to Chromium and they are more alive than ever.
Had they kept using it, well that would have certainly been another dead Firefox-based browser fork.
Careful. Every time I've mentioned Brave here I've been downvoted. Getting on point: I've used Brave for awhile now and it's been fine. Major issues for me are updates are frequent enough to be annoying, and I haven't been able to access sites with self-signed certificates.
I used Elementary 5.1 for over 2 years and then switched to Elementary 6. It was very buggy and slow on Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 with very good hardware. I switched to Ubuntu 21.04 and everything worked really well. I dont think I will hop distro again.
Until such a time a HBS Case Study on Zepto is wrought, here's a bunch of MBA speak which may answer this:
1. There's always room for more companies than one may think. Oft times, the markets are too huge for a single player to dominate.
2. Addressing an adjacent market is a great way to take on the incumbents, who may or may not be able to match your unique innovation. This has the dual advantage of upending existing market and unlocking a bigger one, in tandem.
3. VCs may invest in promising companies competing against bets they missed out on. Besides FOMO, VCs also tend to value growth. Demonstrate an appetite for that, and with the right amount of luck and momentum, everything tends to fall in place.
---
Regarding Zepto (aka KiranaKart), I have no inside knowledge, but their key selling point is they've figured out a way to deliver groceries in 10mins (!) with a sustainable business model in the 6 months they've been stealthily operating in Mumbai, the most dense, expensive, and biggest metropolis in India. In short, they've demonstrated the ability to create, deliver, and harness their innovation. Now it is all about doing so in a repeatable (sales), scalable (markets), valuable (moat), and predictable (revenue) manner.
> they've figured out a way to deliver groceries in 10mins (!) with a sustainable business model in the 6 months they've been stealthily operating in Mumbai
I dunno man, smells fishy. I never understood how the whole 10mins delivery thing could work economically, much less in a place with low purchasing power like India. Or maybe its just a sign that wealth inequality is rife in Mumbai such that people are willing to pay enough of a premium to cover low cost labor that makes it profitable. Maybe thats also why I'm not a billionaire yet.
Their competition is also doing sub 20 minute deliveries!
> Foodtech unicorns Zomato and Swiggy have entered this space with 10 minute delivery in select cities. On August 17, Zomato-backed Grofers announced 10-minute deliveries in 10 Indian cities.
> Hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo has also launched its under 19-minute delivery in Bengaluru. Swiggy's Instamart continues to create 'dark (online orders only) stores' with partners in areas of operations to execute more control over their grocery inventory, as it begins 15-to-30-minute deliveries on the platform.
The secret seems to be in leveraging "Kirana stores". There's at least 10 stores in 1km radius from where I am. This is usually the case in most residential centres in urban India. The bigger problem isn't delivery and pricing, it is inventory and scale.
What's working in their favour is that most Kirana store owners use a smartphone already and have access to free/cheap internet. This could be leveraged in an Uber-style just-in-time order fulfillment. Another interesting ripple-effect could be that households turn into warehouses / dark store-fronts: Kind of like Airbnb for Grocery (everyone's a grocerer!). There's already a precedent in India of households taking to social-commerce (where goods are sold online on WhatsApp / Instagram / marketplaces like Meesho to their followers or social circle, without any store front).
I was quite interested by this article. Raising $60 million so fast for such a margin-brutal high logistics complexity business when the founders are literally straight out of high school is either very promising or very bad.
I.e this is either a massive case of FOMO investing or these founders have articulated a really novel approach that’s going to give them an edge beyond the big raises.
The Airbnb for Kirana stores explanation downthread is maybe compelling. Almost like the 10 minute delivery is a byproduct of their approach rather than an insane logistics system they’ll need to build from scratch.
