Fighting for the open web [image]
davidrevoy.com
davidrevoy.com
The biggest reason they were afraid to move was because they had stored years worth passwords and other setting on their browsers.
Take some time and help a few people out. If everyone convert a few people and explain why they need to and help them with their issues. We can do this.
Mr don't be evil has become too evil at this point.
There is always a huge temptation to choose convenience over privacy or security. If then some technical person recommends that avenue ...
And then comes along some accidental change, that breaks YouTube or GMail or whatever on Firefox ...
In this case, the non-techies don't need to know or care much about free software, convenience vs privacy/security, who is most knowledgeable, how to not be in the control of large corporations, etc., since it'll be the techie's job to help them set up their OSes and teach them how to use the functionality that they want to use. Additionally, I am assuming that techies are principled enough and knowledgeable enough to hold their own against corporations' anti-user decisions and advertising.
As a practical example, if a techie is culturally expected to buy and set up a laptop for a non tech-savvy member of the family, then the techie can simply install Tor Browser instead of Chrome and set it up to make sure it's working. Any additional instructions, if needed, can be taught via post-it notes. Humans are adaptable, and if the internet speed is acceptable via Tor, then I don't think most people would care or complain.
Of course, I cannot ignore the fact that to some people this seems like a power-grab by techies, or that people's expectations of technology has changed from "oh I'll just ask the IT family member" to "I expect to be able to use <device> out of the box". But I think this is an idea worth exploring, given how flexible it is.
Definitely this. This is the only way to make-sure people around us are protected. If enough tech people do this, we will have a better tech ecosystem for all of us.
Whenever I fix something or install something I explain what I am doing, and why I am doing it, and I think at least in my experience years of helping my friends and family they at this point trust me when explain to them why something is important. Everyone values their privacy everyone gets concerned when they realize how creepy some companies are.
While switching browsers, I also adopted an open source password manager that has a Firefox plugin. Because passwords are migrating, I opted to move to a cloud-free solution. (This tip might be too much to suggest, depending on who you're trying to convert)
https://adtechexplained.com/interoperable-private-attributio... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...
Personally I switched to Brave, which has basically worked perfectly for me, other than a few sites that didn't handle blocking 3rd party cookies.
This is FUD. Can you please name specific sites that don't work in firefox? Even all of google's stuff works fine, particularly when seen thorugh the eyes of non-technical people.
I got endless issues opening an app the second time. Didn't happen in Chrome.
As for sites that specifically doesn't care about Firefox, that was in a private talk with another frontend developer, so I can share neither the name or a URL as proof.
As a tech-savvy person, I can handle it, but my old parents can't. I do not now the right thing to do here.
> The internet is for end users: any change made to the web platform has the potential to affect vast numbers of people, and may have a profound impact on any person’s life. [RFC8890]
> User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.
Ref: https://www.w3.org/TR/design-principles/#priority-of-constit...
That ship sailed when the W3C accepted EME. The internet ceased to be about the end users, but for media company and their DRM. They didn't have to accept it as a standard, if Google and Netflix wanted their own DRM system then their problem, not the web.
In the context of web integrity API, what good does it do that chromium can be open source? Whether a browser is potentially fully open source has no impact on the bad google is doing by pushing evil we. standards through the mainline chrome browser.
Personally I’ve switched to just using Safari on MacOS simply because giving Apple some power against Google in adoption of web standards is beneficial in my view. Apple is one of the few companies not incentivised by maximising ad revenues which is really toxic to the web. Not that I like what Apple is doing in general.
On Windows I’ve used Firefox only for years. (Why not on MacOS? My laptop (only macOS machine I have) is a bit old, safari runs smoother, and I like the iOS integration futures)
Also, I suspect many of those who are anti-WEI are also either not Windows users, or Windows users who are grudgingly doing so and have also killed off the spyware and customised the environment to their own liking, which can still be done even without requiring source code.
Chromium is in that awkward position where it is technically an open-source community-driven project but in practice operates like a closed-source one. Google has complete control over decisions and can make changes that serve their profits (see: JPEGXL debacle).
Of course, you can make the same critique of Firefox, but at the very least they are a nonprofit foundation and don’t have enough market share to abuse their power.
Imagine instead that chrome refuses to start if WEI can't be guaranteed (but otherwise it doesn't do anything). Is it annoying and dumb? Sure, but it doesn't limit how you can connect to the internet.
I mentioned here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36886572) that I think a better aligned proposal might be to introduce some system for pluggable 3rd party attestations that could be used by websites to verify the that the user is in some sense real. I imagine a lot of people would still object to this, but to me it would remove a lot of the concerns about the open web, since anyone would be able to build a browser integrating with the attestation services (I imagine some sort of service like LetsEncrypt would exist for this, although it's not clear what websites would settle on as being trusted attesters, if it's only a small set of companies then there's still some issues I think).
This whole debate has been interesting to me, since in some sense even with WEI the web is still a thing, it's just that it would be sent back to the 90s. E.g., any website would still be able to allow you to visit without WEI, but large swaths of the internet as used today might be unavailable without it.
As far as I know, there's no comprehensive substitute for Microsoft Office, or many other Windows-only apps.
In contrast, Firefox and Chrome are practically interchangeable for most people.
What's going to be harder is Microsoft Exchange, but if people work in a company that uses Exchange, they need to push their Exchange admin to enable SMTP and IMAP.
You should not be using Exchange for calendar synchronization anyway, and I am sure there are better dedicated alternatives in the OSS world. Probably something like Nextcloud which comes with numerous useful apps.
For video editing I think Kdenlive does everything you need for basic editing.
Nope. No. Nada. No way.
MS Office is one of hardest software to replace. On the same level as proprietary SCADA system alike. I know this hard way.
Yes, if you only need prepare new small documents and print them out into PDF or on physical paper, you could replace MS Word with almost anything - LibreOffice, OpenOffice, KWord, Google Docs (though, Google Docs has very primitive style system, but if you need to make small simple documents, you don't need good style system anyway).
As soon as you need to work with documents created by others, and exchange these documents with others in office format (not PDF), oh man. When document was created in Office'2000 (yes, in 2020s), edited by several other versions by different people on computers with different fonts and locales, when it contains images, sections with multiple columns, is formatted half with styles (both paragraph and character ones) half by direct applications by attributes like "Bold" and "Interline space"... And you need to edit it and pass to the next person with unknown version of MS Office - good luck to use anything but MS Word. Same with Powerpoint.
Yes, MS Word could break such document too - but typically by rearranging images and adding unneeded pagebreaks, not by showing only blank pages or replacing all fonts with Courier New. After any alternative you could get anything, literally anyhting. And your OpenOffice will show "perfectly" formatted document, only your counterpart with MS Office will complain that YOU ruined document.
How do I know this? My wife is freelance translator. We've tried not to pay for MS Office several times, because, you know, new version of *Office is compatible for MS Office at last. But no, it could be Ok for next 10 clients, all looks good, and eleventh will yell t you by phone because result you provided him looks completely different in his MS Office (including, as I mentioned, empty pages without text at all or all these fancy fonts replaced with one Courier New - it is real cases from my experience).
And don't let me start to rant about Excel where people write crazy macros in VBasic and such - good luck to use any other software when you need to communicate and exchange documents with other Excel powerusers.
Yes, a switch to Linux comes with some change for the people, but what do you expect? Doing a switch without changing anything?
For my grandpa the switch to Linux was easier than the switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista...
Do you know Libre Office ? Also, don't have these horrible ribbon thing interface.
Nowadays, KDE users better use Firefox.
Meh, I've been just fine with Falkon. As I was with reKonq back in KDE SC4.
Who's doing the trusting? Not the users.
"Trusted" is not equal to "trustworthy".
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784257/google-ai-bard-pr...
Google knows well enough that their solution does not attest humans - it attests machines which may or may not be used by humans.
The web is already full of vietnamese click farms of physical android devices with real accounts, their narrative is about misdirection
It's effective against thirdparty roms and competitors though.
Large companies are far less uptight about breaking ecosystems that you might think. I say this as a former VB6 developer.
Fraud prevention/anti-abuse is both an extensive use case for fingerprinting and the most obviously legitimate one. If we demand that browsers close off all the fingerprinting loopholes (it's a great goal!) but don't allow a replacement, the web will be mostly dead as a platform in 10 years. All economic activity will move to native apps on walled garden platforms that are able to provide effective anti-fraud mechanisms.
If a country sees the internet as a threat it will just create its own network and only allow its population to see what it deems alright. I would say most internet today is curated. The largest issue in addition to lack of openness networks is what the network contains, we have min maxed the internet for profitability and in the wake more tech debt which no one wants to own.
You are probably asking tech debt? Let me just say this tech debt comes in the shape of garbage data, false news articles and propaganda. Last one propaganda isn't necessarily something a government makes but business do it to for misdirection. This is usually done because there is no accountability for anyone utilizing the internet.
What I'm getting at is the fact there is a lack of accountability those who keep building up the internet keep piling garbage on garbage. One day the internet will cease because there will be so much unimportant information and misinformation on the internet that it will force governments to curate the internet. Which they sort of do already.
So before we can have truly an Open Web we need to help pick up the trash we've all created over the years. Set regulations that protect the internet from further garbage. If we don't hold someone accountable eventually we will be forced down the path of a Closed Web.
I strongly believe in Open Web from browsers to the freedom of starting your own webpage without restrictions. We just have to make progress.
just go out and do something nice and refuse to be part of something shitty and maybe things will work out.
Firstly I am for Open Web, but the lack of regulation enforcing accountability prevents this from ever occurring. Tech debt in various forms also prevent this. We need to get passed those two large hurdles.
I don't see Open Web happening because the further decades of tech debt the further we get from the goal.
Bottom-up solutions are often the hardest, and a massive undertaking compared to top-down alternatives, but if the goal is am open web I can only see that working bottom up.
Not least of all, top-down regulations that actually improve the open web would be extremely difficult when companies like Google have nearly unlimited funds and most regulators and politicians are already well accustomed to being captured. Even on a good day I would expect well-meaning regulators to ask the "experts" at Google how it's supposed to work and what the regulations should be. The FAA allows Boeing to regulate itself as does the FDA with pharmaceutical companies, why would this be different?
You can't hold anyone accountable with the Internet of Things and regulations that establish accountability allow self regulation.
Where does the internet of things fit in here?
Google sure seems to want to hammer in that final nail, but it's been a long road to get here.
Honestly I can't help but think we'd be better of revisiting early decisions made in Http itself, especially cookies though long-lived connections are also risky. The gemini protocol is really interesting in that area, but I can't help think they rolled it back to far with odd decisions like not requiring cert verification, utf-8 encoding URLs, and only supporting GET requests.
As long as FF takes Google money, it's less money going to fund anti-web activities.
The difference is the majority of national parks funding might not come from highly-pollting industry. Mozilla corp would not survive for long without Google's bribes.
Mozilla has to keep paying the bills. I expect most people would be upset if they starting charging for the browser or selling ads, and I frequently see complaints when they focus on any products other than FF and MDN. If private donations won't cut it and sponsorships tarnish their standing, what's left?
Perhaps because Firefox, and the Mozilla foundation as a whole, are one of the few projects not trying to milk you for data nor money? Might be a good enough reason in my book.
I try to balance it out by flagging unconstructive comments, leaving it alone, and participating in more constructive threads instead. For reference, take the classic "don't feed the trolls" advice, in combination with Lobster's flag types:
> For comments, these are: "Off-topic" for drifting into meta or topics that aren't related to the story; "Me-too" when a comment doesn't add new information, typically a single sentence of appreciation, agreement, or humor; "Troll" for derailing conversations into classic arguments, well-intentioned or not; "Unkind" when uncharitable, insulting, or dismissive; and "Spam" for promoting commercial services.
[1] https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-att..., discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36862494
And when was the last version of Safari on Linux?
And using Firefox on iOS or Android allows you to sync your settings and history etc and send tabs between devices (and you should be happy, it uses Webkit on iOS -at least for now- because Apple won't have it any other way).
They are the historical proponent of open web.
If Apple one day stops forcing it on iOS, that would be the day the battle was lost, nothing would be stopping Google from taking it all.