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Comment by zlg_codes | Hacker News Reader

Watch the already limited traffic I send to Google servers go even lower. I am not entangled in their mess. None of the faangs can touch me because I wasn't stupid enough to put my entire digital life in the hands of a company.

I'm looking ten or more years in the future, though. By that time, the Firefox/Chrome duopoly will be broken by alternatives that don't compromise between the user and business models.

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"Firefox/Chrome duopoly"? You're forgetting Safari; they have larger market share than Firefox.

Safari's share is capped to a specific hardware. Firefox can grow by converting people without needing to wait for them to buy new devices.

That said, I'm not really holding my breath for FF to grow again.

WebKit is portable and is used by a lot of browsers, including on Linux

It took me a bit of searching, but it's nice to know that there are desktop browsers that are not based on Chromium or Gecko, i.e. WebKit [1]. I would like to try Otter Browser [2], next time I use my Windows machine.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/nkzrj0/comment/gz...

[2] https://otter-browser.org/

Firefox works very well on iPhone, by the way. It’s my daily browser there.

It doesn’t support extensions though. I think only Orion supports extensions on iPhone.

Safari itself supports extensions

Not Firefox and Chrome extensions though, only a much more limited selection

right, but Firefox only supports Firefox extensions and Chrome Chrome, so what’s your point?

Both Firefox and Chrome implemented Google's EEE WebExtensions format so there's rough parity between the two.

As a result, Firefox extensions got dumber. Bye bye Vimperator, DownThemAll, etc.

oh really? this must have been fairly recently, right?

My understanding was that until next year when EU+UK legislation regulating digital marketplaces comes further into force, all of these iOS apps for browsers like Chrome, Firefox, etc. MUST be wrappers around the exact same Webkit rendering engine that Safari uses. I think it’s cool that everyone can enjoy the better UIs today (myself included), but everything other than the UI is placebo.

It's a reskinned safari if you are not aware. The hope is once Apple allowed sideloading, we can start to use the actual firefox with extensions.

Well I did not know that. Perhaps that's why it works so seamlessly. Well one of the upsides then is that switching to Firefox in IOS is very painless then.

But it uses the Safari engine

Apple is not on my tech radar at all due to their approaches to product design and their developer business model.

In about 6 months, I won't consider Google either. I'll simply start targeting reasonable, good, healthy Web standards and implement them with progressive enhancement.

If they support the standards, then there won't be a problem.

The Web is fragmenting and it's gonna be ugly.

Bookmarking this comment. See you in 10 years. Hope I'm still alive and I hope you're right!

I hope I'm right, too! Choice is the most important part of technology imo, and we don't have enough of it.

Which phone do you use?

I see your gotcha and respond by saying I'm at least looking at other phones, but until the FCC mandates the opening of basebands, building a phone with trustable software is still a long way away.

Pine64 and Purism are making headways on that front, but again the situation is too thorny and regulations are hamstrung by the relevant companies bidding for spectrum. I've not heard of anyone having a smooth experience with PinePhone, Librem 5s, or the OnePlus line of phones.

Also, how many of these devices just run Android? So Google's got your ass there anyway. The ones that don't are foolishly following XDG and so are GNOME, KDE, or Enlightenment stans. The moment upstream changes, they'll be forced to go along because they don't fully own their UI experience.

We need portable libraries for accessing baseband stuff so that no vendor can lock a life feature (smartphone) behind their ecosystem.

I actually don't much like my phone. It's the most reliable way to find out where I am or what I'm doing, and who honestly deserves that information just because? I guess I wish I didn't use a phone at all. Despite its conveniences, on paper it's really just added a bill and a constant mental "on"ness that stresses me out.

So, not much of a gotcha because I've thought about this and it bugs me, but there's also no actually good alternative ready yet. When I'm able to BYOD with free hardware on a mainstream network and there aren't signal or reliability problems, I will. The whole point of a cell phone is remote availability, so it needs access to a reliable network to be of any use.

Please, if my understanding of free phones is out of date, correct me. It'd be nice to get one step closer to a completely user-controlled cellular device.

Email still working for you without a FAANG host?

Fastmail and Protonmail are fine.

Outlook.com isn't FAANG.

But it is GAFAM, which seems to be more relevant when you're looking at things from an overall size perspective. The focus on FAANG never made much sense to me.

[cynic speaks: ] Sometimes it seems that a catchy acronym lends an association a degree of tacit validity, and/or experiences an almost viral spread, simply by virtue of its easy uptake by the casual reader.

tbh I'm less concerned about the order or makeup of the acronym and more concerned with the reason we discuss those acronyms and their (undue) influence over the tech world.

The structure of our markets ensures players like this will coalesce, but it's no reason to let giants of commerce dictate the terms of engagement for everyone.

That is a social problem, not a technical one.

Even hosts that correctly implement $CURRENT_YEAR's email security dance end up on spam lists erroneously. The problem is allowing these hosts to have that much influence to begin with. The creation and spreading of those lists is pernicious to the protocol, but in absence of new RFCs and matching client behavior, I see the need to add some light 'hazing' to setting up e-mail.

The problem is when Google tells everyone your site is spam and they listen. Tech can't solve that problem.

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