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Comment by nologic01 | Hacker News Reader

There needs to be an alternative to big tech so that we can move on from this perennial angst of abusive corporate practices and focus on the positive, hopeful, uplifting aspects of computing.

Not a niche, nerdy altermative. A mainstream, institutionally recognized and supported alternative.

The capability is already there, almost, in the form of all the amazing open source communities have achieved.

But now we need to win maybe the most important battles of all: Winning the moral and political argument and.convincing people that free and open source computing is not a weirdo obsession but the bedrock on which a democratic society will be built.

Really looking forward to a future HN where every second entry is not about how an entrenched business class has confiscated and abuses our digital future.

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What's wrong with Firefox?

and why would anyone sign-into and use edge.

It has the best (and most reliable) integrated AI-based web experience. The Bing side bar can read what is in the open tab, etc. It's useful but it probably not worth the trade-offs

It is fast and well integrated with Windows.

There is really no reason to use Chrome on Windows 10/11 these days.

I am no Microsoft fanatic but it is useful and convenient for me to use it also on iPad and Android to share bookmarks, send tabs between devices.

Is it perfect? Nope. Somehow scammy Microsoft Rewards is enable by default.

* No real ad-blocking plugins

* Under control of your employer (spying that you'll actually care about), more so than chrome, and a LOT more than firefox.

* Constant changes by the evil empire, never in the interest of the user, including the evil empire that you work for in the case of active directory

* Still (imho) doesn't match Google services and syncing in functionality and how well it works

* Same browser engine as Chrome, so no real advantage

Huh? Edge, as you say, is based on Chrome. It has an extensions store where you can get uBlock. You can also get normal Chrome extensions if you want from the Chrome web store.

> No real ad-blocking plugins

Just install your favorite ad blocker directly from the chrome web store

> Constant changes by the evil empire

Same problem with Chrome

In my eyes edge is mostly equivalent to chrome. Edge has native vertical tabs and slightly better Windows-integration, Chrome slightly better Google-integration. Both are under the control of both your employer and a tech giant with questionable ethics. And both tech giants use their respective platforms to aggressively promote their browser.

I guess we could agree that you should use neither.

1- the vast majority of people who access a computing device never alter settings that matter, such as browser, location access, etc. Etc. and simply go with the flow. So when these people open Edge (or Chrome for that matter) they likely won't even notice they're logged in, and if they do will either think it's convenient or don't care

2- with the hype and hoopla of ChatGPT, a surprising number of non-tech savvy people heard " Microsoft has AI, Google doesn't", so they'll actively use Edge (and Bing) for the generative AI

It's the power of defaults. Microsoft goes hard on trying to get you to sign in anywhere in Windows with your account and if you're not careful about which button you press, it'll then use that account for everything MS-related, including Edge.

Depending on how you installed windows, logging into Windows is enough to have you logged into Edge (and other MS services) when you open it.

Edge can still auto login my account from other Microsoft application, even if I'm not login to my Windows devices.

Yep, it did this to me and helped itself to the data from my Firefox profile, and presumably uploaded this to MS servers. Great way to obtain data on a person I suppose.

I'm still using Firefox and it works great.

The tricking people to sign in stuff is nefarious and is a more recent and growing problem. Google even gets away with it through iOS by forcing app logins/"authorization" that then results in the user logged in to Google on Safari. The whole Chrome logging in if someone checks their Gmail is terrible.

If your computing experience solely comes from a non-tech role in a corporate work environment where your employer legally owns your devices and they are remotely controlled and monitored, then all of this may seem fairly mundane. Otherwise, it is concerning anyone on hn would think what is going on here is ok or does not need to be actively avoided.

I do to use Bing+ChatGPT, which I find very helpful for research and generating code. I have also been using CodePilot for over a year. But it is a decision to use these services, and I totally understand some people not wanting to use them.

The Center for Humane Technology has good articles and video presentations on good tactics to use tech to your advantage. https://www.humanetech.com/

I use Edge at work because it suits my needs best.

I can log into my work account in the browser, letting me save my work passwords to a trusted account, and search internally using Bing. It also has decent Outlook integration, which is helpful to my workflow.

I also love vertical tabs, because I end up managing 100+ tabs at work regularly. I'm eager to see a fully conceived version of this appear in other browsers because it's honestly a game changer.

And, not a huge deal, but when you copy a URL from the address bar, it pastes as a formatted link, which is really helpful when you have to do this regularly.

It really isn't a bad browser, it's just got poor privacy, which isn't important for me when I'm working. My employer already knows what I'm up to anyway.

I use Chrome as a personal browser, so it's nice keeping them completely separate from each other.

Is there actually any way to pay for Firefox directly? I don't need their VPN service, but would probably be willing to pay something for Firefox.

Sure (kind of)! Make a donation to the Mozilla foundation. https://donate.mozilla.org/ It's not directly paying for the product, but it also does show as "this user wants our vpn" in the stats.

I reckon because it's not possible to pay for the product directly, Firefox is getting less financial support than it could. For example, I may not want to support many of the goals of the Mozilla foundation, but paying for a product that I'm using (Firefox) sounds reasonable.

As always, a note needs to be attached to this link. Money donated to the Mozilla foundation goes exclusively to their advocacy work, and none goes to the Mozilla corporation, which develops Firefox.

There's also Relay. I believe you can buy it alone or bundled with their VPN.

https://relay.firefox.com/

Have been using Relay for months, I think it's a pretty good product. Shame that it's gotten onto virtually all abuse lists now, it's impossible to use my emails anywhere, even if I have a custom subdomain.

It's not quite the same, but I pay for MDN Plus[1] even though I don't actually need any of the features

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/plus

Not yet https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

I'd donate to the EFF instead. I love FF and use it exclusively, but organizations like the EFF are why software like FF can exist

The answer to that question, taken literally, could fill a novel (so could a description of what’s right with it).

As for Firefox Sync, the protocol is byzantine and poorly documented[1], while using it “properly” requires emailing a human at Mozilla to “document expectations and timelines”[2], which for a hobby or small-scale application I read as “fuck you”. (Using it improperly, like filching the API key from one of the official clients, risks tripping the hostile and deliberately undocumented security heuristics.) For me that’s already enough to reject it for anything I couldn’t bear losing (like my passwords).

[1] https://www.codejam.info/2021/08/scripting-firefox-sync-lock...

[2] https://www.codejam.info/2021/08/scripting-firefox-sync-lock...

Video and WebGL (Google Maps Street View/GeoGuesser) are a slideshow under Firefox on Linux, because they do compositing in software on Linux (copying the video buffer back and forth between GPU and RAM). That's the whole reason why I use a chromium based browser. Really missing containers. They are really letting Linux support slide. :(

Not my experience, even in a budget notebook, at least for video. I'm making sure that the video is decoded in hardware. It's a bit easier and more secure on wayland.

I'm still on a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760, but I have a 4k monitor (X11, desktop). Perfectly smooth in Chromium browsers, but YouTube and Street View are basically unusable in Firefox. Before when I had a Full HD monitor it was usable in Firefox, though even back then Chromium based browsers where a bit smoother at those tasks. And yes, I've set all the flags in about:config that you can find on that issue. No change.

But I need to upgrade my PC. When I do I'll try Firefox again. Would be awesome if it would work for me again.

> Really looking forward to a future HN where every second entry is not about how an entrenched business class has confiscated and abuses our digital future.

Really hoping that dang will start cracking down on extremely emotionally manipulative rhetoric like this. Your post makes no interesting points, and is instead a stereotypical example of emotional, empty, partisan political rhetoric that is present throughout most of the internet and media these days.

An enormous amount of bad behaviour has been seemingly "normalised" in a relatively short period of time. Whether this new brand of "hypernormalisation" is short-term or long-term is still unknown, IMHO.

There needs to be? Who will pay for it?

This is a false argument that destroys the soul of tech.

We are paying for pretty much everything and in countless different ways (including taxes)

The idea that the only way "to pay" is to some oligopoly keen on surveillance capitalism is absurd. If well-intentioned it is just self-limiting.

Even if we believed that we have to steal money from everybody to pay for an alternative to instagram... we have already tried that. The EU gives grants. You can tell a business is European and has taken a grant because the footer of the website includes the EU flag. This programme has existed for a long time now. How many websites do you use daily that have the EU flag in the footer?

...yeah, thought so.

You still didn't answer their question. Creating well made privacy first browsers, web tools, apps is expensive. Open source is great, but isn't going to appeal to the masses, who prefer features + convenience over privacy. Someone has to build it.

Who is going to win in the long run? The small number of people who care about privacy/their data VS the billions willingly using these malicious services? Even in tech/IT crowds, most don't care about privacy first products. Even on this forum it seems to be pretty split down the middle. Internet users have been getting free browsers, email, search, etc, for a very long time now.

I don't see the average person waking up one day and saying, 'I want to take my data back'. The government is not to be trusted. Personally, I think abstinence is the only solution.

This is defeatist and normalizing a situation that is abnormal. People pay for hardware, bandwidth and pretty much all software but somehow a few trinkets must be paid with relinquishing privacy.

The only reason people pay for those things is because no one offers them for free yet. If they did they would be really happy to trade their privacy. For example, Chinese smartphones are full of tracking ads, which is why they are so cheap, and they are extremely popular.

This is true, but its also an unworkable dead end for the tech industry. Private data is worth alot, but it cannot compensate for all the potentially valuable products people would happily pay for.

By undermining trust with users (turning them into products) they put a lid on the market.

So even from a pure financial perspective they have opted for short term profit and killing the golden goose.

I'm on your side ... The defeatism is real, I can't really name a single win. GDPR? Protests against SOPA/PIPA? Net neutrality? Apple not giving up passcodes to LEO (they do)?

I've attempted to educate friends/family on tech privacy concerns, but nobody cares, even my friends in the industry. I have many tech friends that won't even modify their home network, let alone ditch FB or Google or Snapchat or Tiktok. Ultimately, computing and the internet is untrustworthy and always will be so. I don't possess the knowledge or time to assess every line of code or dependency in a project. Let alone backdoors in chips, hardware, and my ISP providing a line to the NSA.

Abstinence + sabotage of platforms is probably the only way. Keep the corporate developers busy fighting spam, fraud, abuse - make it unprofitable to build spyware.

I cant deny any of that. Its more or less my experience. Ultimately it boils down to fundamental optimism or pessisism that is not necessarily linked causally to empirical data.

To me the commingled business models of big tech as we have come to know them, dipping their fingers at every possible data jar, are an outlier, a dissonance.

How and when this could resolve into something more stable its not obvious. Politicians can go being immoral and look the other way for a long time. But you cant buy all the politicians all the time.

If we start by clearly separating what is really free (because its a commmon public good paid by all), from what is paid by users to private companies for real services provided in competitive markets and with respects to their clients (not product) we'll be on a good path.

National security related privacy is another can of worms altogether. You really dont want a repeat of 20th century dictators dissolving democracy and exterminating whomever they managed to cast as the enemy with the ruthless efficiency of an AI guided panopticon.

I mean these things are pretty basic. Only when we give up on common sense will dystopia become a reality.

> This is a false argument that destroys the soul of tech.

It's not a false argument, it's a question. Which you pointedly didn't answer, and instead resorted to base emotional manipulation.

> The idea that the only way "to pay" is to some oligopoly keen on surveillance capitalism is absurd.

Strawman - nobody proposed that idea except you.

It be healthier if users would pay for the services with money.

But they don't want to. I sure don't want to pay to watch videos on youtube. I'd rather they made a profile of me and stored it to serve me ads that I won't even see.

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