Features Firefox should implement to weaken Facebook's stranglehold of the web
blogg.forteller.net
blogg.forteller.net
1) All the people are on facebook. Only a % use firefox (as opposed to chrome, and all the others,) so this doesn't actually mirror your existing friend network, let alone solve the problem of making it easier (which is the only way people will actually switch.)
2) Facebook and google chat already have a list of your friends/contacts right there to hand. Firefox would need to gather this data somehow, which would either be intrusive (think LinkedIn "import your gmail contacts") or annoying (I am not going to mess around exporting things manually, and neither will the real humans).
3) Existing network implementations. As per Adam Lerymenko's "Redecentralize" talk[1], all the existing services are based on centralised network architectures. Unless Mozilla build their own central network of contacts etc, we'll be stuck using the existing monolithic sites that don't respect privacy as backends. Which (as per the Talkilla example) isn't the point. If Zero tier one et al are successful one day, then maybe we'll all be own our own separate VPNs with our friends (although that doesn't mirror the global social graph either.)
[1] http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/07/30/02-adam-zero...
Other alternatives are syncing contacts via IMAP or LDAP -- although I'm not entirely sold on either of those...
As for "liberating" your contacts from Facebook/Google/Etc -- your browser might actually have an advantage -- everyone that uses these sites, already trusts their browser with the login information. That's not much of a stretch to implement some wrappers around the various apis to get a "local" (in browser profile) copy of the list(s).
Firefox (or Iceweasel) already manages many of my passwords, I'd have no problem syncing my contacts with Firefox too (although I currently don't see much of a need for it. Might make a good addon either way -- makes using disconnected webmail services even easier if Firefox has my address list...).
Unless you're using some form of one-time token, a compromised browser process could still expose your passwords (not to mention that it of course have access to whatever data you protect with that password (emails, documents etc)).
I use a mixture of things I've been meaning to consolidate for a while... all of which are a big list of unique (obviously) passwords stored somewhere encrypted by a long password.
Yes, and in fact Mozilla Weave is actually cryptographically really sharp.
Of course, users of Facebook chat can't add arbitrary XMPP contacts to their friends list, but that's a different problem.
Chrome has done this and thrived. I still use Firefox for the extensions and the fact that Google can not be trusted.
First one: That only needs to switch the Feed button to a "Like" button that subscribes you to the feed in one click. Then it needs to change the "new tab" page from a speed dial to a stream of those feeds. This stream could be hosted in the cloud (probably it should, to be available anywhere), and so would not add any bloat.
The chat I understand can be seen as bloat. But still, it's just one function, not those hoards of functions that the original Mozilla suite had.
And the point here is that it's really important to make people less dependent on Facebook, to pave the way for other initiatives and efforts to create another chip in the Facebook wall, and then some others another chip, etc. until the wall finally comes crashing down. IMO that's so important that one extra function, adding a little bloat, is well worth it.
Complexity isn't easy, but it's not that black and white. Just because the first time round it didn't work out so well doesn't mean it won't this time; especially since the circumstances are so very different.
In any case, things like personas are supported, but most of the complexity isn't in the browser; new functionality doesn't need to be tightly coupled to the browser - just exposed.
I actually think the problem isn't so much on the software side, it's organizational: trying to do too many things at once means making sacrifices.
What do I mean not visible enough? For people to use it, they need to know about it. Most people don't even know they can use extensions (or even what a browser is), but they do know that Facebook has a chat function, because it's right there.
Remember, this is not about making life easier for geeks like us. It's about making it just as seamless to use Open web technologies/social networks for normal people as it is to use closed/private systems like Facebook.
The point of adding it to core is also argued in the article, which proposes an alternative to the monopoly Facebook and Google are currently obtaining.
Forteller already addressed both these questions!
This seems to suggest a web app or suite of web apps that "competes" with Fb, in some sense. You don't have to install (or even know the URL of) a web app! Mozilla may get there eventually, but they're not going to travel the obvious, NSA-(or plug in your favorite bad actor-)vulnerable way. I think their current work with identity on Persona could grow into that, but they're going to keep it distributed, which I appreciate.
EDIT: Now that I've RTFA, I find that you also are thinking along these lines. However, I think you've glossed over who is actually running the server. In order for Persona to function, in order for all my data to be synced across all my devices, in order for any of my friends to see any of my comments, someone has to pay an electric bill every month. If there is a vast marketplace of server-operators, they can compete on price, {NSA, advertising}-resistance, etc.
I could see Mozilla carrying the web to that paradise of individual autonomy, but I could also see Fb and Fb-alikes derailing the effort along the way. They embraced-and-extended the web once already; I can imagine them doing it again: "Sure I can chat with my friends and "like" my favorite brands through Firefox, but did you see that Facebook allows me to frobnicate my Facebook snorrzlers as well?"
A decent (stable, open) xmpp client somewhere in my FF session would be much appreciated, given that GTalk's going away/moving to Hangouts and I'm migrating to my self-hosted XMPP server.
Remember, this is not about making life easier for geeks like us, people who actually know what XMPP is. It's about making it just as seamless to use Open web technologies/social networks for normal people as it is to use closed/private systems like Facebook.
Of course this time around there is a slight difference; rather than adding a chat client to the browser they will prefer to keep adding features to the browser until somebody can write a chat client inside it. Either way the original criticism still stands, which is that doing everything in a single application means duplicating a lot of the work of the host OS, but generally not as well (from window management to scheduling threads to reclaiming memory to supporting hardware features like parallel computation to managing files).
The current plan at Mozilla seems to be for Firefox to be an OS that people use for everything, not just one of many applications that people use. This would give them a great deal of power. The power to kill services or applications that they don't like (e.g. Facebook), the power to prevent application developers supporting hardware they don't like (e.g kinect) and so on. More so than the traditional desktop OSs which have been open in allowing anybody to write software that talks directly to the hardware: browsers are sandboxes that prevent hardware access.
Note: none of this means I like Facebook. I refuse to use it. However I don't think Mozilla should be killing things on their platform just because they don't like them, especially when they are trying to set themselves up as an OS provider.
I (having started this subthread) didn't suggest to start creating a Nescape Navigator kind of suite here. I'd just love to have a decent xmpp client as optional extension. Granted, this doesn't have to come from Mozilla.
https://support.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/kb/instant-messag...
It works decently well.
The two issues I have with that:
1) I don't use Thunderbird right now, for anything. Mails are either in FF (webmail) or in other applications. I'm not sure if I want to drop webmail in favor of Thunderbird.
2) The status of Thunderbird is still a mystery to me. I'm still not sure if Mozilla is slowly backing off or if they're just not praising TB anymore.
Mozilla's development efforts are limited to security and maintenance updates.
It's more important that FF enable downstream to make applications which can then compete with Facebook and break the silos model, which I think is happening with WebRTC.
I wish there were a better alternative (could this be an opportunity?).
Maybe it's just me but when I go out various places in Austin I don't hear people talking about Facebook anymore. And I see fewer "Like us on Facebook" signs on trucks and business storefronts.
"Mozilla Persona is Free and Open Source all the way down, which is great, but not quite good enough. You need to be able to choose your own provider and switch from one (say Mozilla) to another (say Google or your own server) whenever you want. So Mozilla Persona should just be one of many options for your online account."
The author has a common misunderstanding of what Persona is and what it does. Persona is not an account system and it is not "provided" by Mozilla. It is a federated identity protocol that allows you to use your existing identity (e.g., at Google or Yahoo or Facebook) to authenticate to relying parties. The "account" is held by the Identity Provider (assuming the IdP speaks Persona), and the IdP may also speak other federated identity protocols, e.g., OpenID Connect.
Related confusion is in the below statement:
"Why not have your Persona account also handle your subscription list and logs?"
There is no Persona account, unless the author means the user's account at her Identity Provider.
Especially about the RSS feed feature, everyone cried a river when Google stupidly got rid of it's reader; here ya go, manage your feeds in the browser. Bam, done! It was right there in front of us all along.
Side note; interestingly enough HN does not have an RSS feed. Just saying.
Okay, and that syncs my feeds to read offline to my phone and iPad and keeps track of what I have and haven't read across platforms, right? Oh, wait.
You tell your friends your social media URL and they add it to their social media client. If your browser had a client, then it would be responsible for merging all of those feeds into one news feed (just like Facebook's). The important thing here is that everything can be decentralized. It is a bit like merged RSS feeds.
Of course a majority of people would hand that responsibility over to a social media hosting company (such as Facebook), but if you really wanted to, you could write your own client, or hook it directly into your website.
Everything would be secure by default.
I personally prefer having my chat and browser separate although I do agree with the need for RSS to be simplified/made more understandable for the level of the average facebook user.
The other important reason why Flock failed was that they where new. Firefox already has a huge user base who would just get these new functions trough a normal update.
It's about visibility: People can't use what they don't know exists. Most people didn't know Flock existed.
There was some noise about this in August but it doesn't look like more than an initial trial balloon: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/08/06/firefox-makes-it-ea...
Opera already tried that. They weren't very succesful.
Now? How many lines of code do you have in Gecko or Webkit, and a reasonable browser built around them? And all the things they depend on? Let's not forget you also need support for one of the most complex programming languages. Browsers really are HUGE.
As I say:
«Facebook is taking over the web and we need to save it. The issue is too complex to have one solution. The most obvious solution is federated social networks, but it’s also a very long term solution. We need more, sooner. One of these thousand small solutions should be to take back chat and subscriptions, by making them dead simple to use for everyone straight from the browser.»
Also, if you want to compete with Facebook. Find a way to make a social network company grow to 100s of employees without advertisements. That's really all it would take.
Thats right, its only facebook and google internally that take advantage of XMPP while keeping the rest out. Thats what federation does and this idea is no better than jabber which we thought was a good idea 11 years ago.
This is a bad idea because a web browser should not become a chat or client as well.
You know what is a good solution to the "facebook is taking over the web" Remove their like-buttons from your pages! It is all of the web devleopers of the world who chose to add facebook scripts to their webpage that are the problem. Thats what needs to be solved. Facebook wouldnt be nearly what it is if it wasnt for all those webdevs that thought it was good idea to run fb scripts and snitch out their and the webs user.
This battle can be moved to the browser if need be, just run ghostry and better privacy by default, block all accessess to facebook domains form any other domains, and thats it.
Well, the browser already is a chat client for millions of people. It's called Facebook. So since the browser already is the only chat client tons of people use, why not make it a client for a Free/Open chat system instead of Facebooks chat system, that they control, censor, give access to to NSA, etc.
> Remove their like-buttons from your pages!
I agree we should do this. But that won't help people keep in contact with their friends. And so it won't change the thing I'm focusing on here.
I just dont think XMPP fulfills the uncontrolled and uncensored and surveillence resistent parts. We need to look at web of trust, bitmessage and such instead, those are more fun problems than "to spite facebook".
But sure, any solution will benefit greatly if its bundled with the browser since that appears to be the only program most users actually use on their computing devices. Imagine if Tor and a tor-relay or even tor-exit-node came preconfigured with every Firefox and turned on by default. That would be fun.
"Is a" and "has a" are worlds apart.
I'd rephrase it. Browser is turned into a virtual operating system for millions of people already. While it can be useful, I don't really like when that trend is pushed to the extreme and everyone rushes to run everything through the browser even without clear benefits. The point of that? I always prefer standalone chat clients (as well as e-mail clients and etc.). If some chat service can't interoperate with standalone clients, it's garbage.
Facebook can by the way, since they do use XMPP. Their problem is unwillingness to support federation. They are too selfish. So I never use their service (nor do I use their social network anyway).
Those are the majority, and if we want them to use Free and Open systems (which is my whole point here), then we have to create those systems in a way normal people will start switching from the closed systems and over to the open ones. And that is only going to happen if the open systems are easier to use and more accessible than the closed ones.
I am aware of the fact that Facebook uses XMPP (I mention it in the post). Still, extremely few people use it through a client. They use it through fb.com.
It's trickier than that. There are many open and federated XMPP services around, including those with web clients / interfaces available. Options are around. It's the sabotage of federation by "big" players which is a problem (or sabotage of interoperable protocols altogether).
Counter-example: email.
The frontier days for this sort of communication are over for the most part. Anything that shows signs of being significant will get jumped upon by commercial entities who will try to direct it in a manner that helps their larger goals (and if we are more cynical, expressly in a manner inconvenient to their competitor's goals) potentially (in fact most likely) at the expense of the overall scheme (despite publicly doing it to "help the users/community/public".
Anything new now has forces acting to shape it (for better or, often, for worse) that email never had to contend with until it was so widespread no one entity or collection of entities could wreck it for everyone (despite the best efforts of some such entities!).
Some people are worried about Facebook taking over the internet? First of all, I'm worried about the web taking over the internet. And becoming more and more centralized in the process.
Alas, any truly distributed scheme will face the lack of symmetric bandwidth. Which is why MegaUpload ever existed in the first place: if we could upload as fast as we download, distributed networks such as Bittorent would be too damn efficient. (On average, we're ultimately limited by the smallest of the two. Upload minus download is exactly zero over a closed peer to peer network.)
Federated is not the same as peer-to-peer. While there are big providers, email is still open to anybody with a non-dynamic IP address, and the fact that almost everyone uses third-party servers doesn't change that.
Another, more realistic possibility is that a consortium arises to fight spam, and the result is that email that doesn't come from big players or registered entities will simply be ignored, on the grounds that most mail from little domains would be spam (which by the way is probably true). The next step will be about refraining themselves to send email that look like spam, never mind the freedom of speech issues that will ensue.
And voilà, we have a world without spam. Too bad I can't send email to most of my friends any more (I control my own domain name).
Now Facebook is even worse. It already took over. You could try and build a federation, but unless you can force Facebook to communicate with it, it will still be a mere competitor, which starts at the wrong side of the network effect. Just like any Facebook competitor, actually.
The biggest selling points of XMPP are that everbody already has XMPP. The counter argument that weakens this position is that everybody already has email, an IP and a phone number too.
Being published by the IETF doesn't mean anything. The IETF has a spec for SIMPLE, too. Should we blame all XMPP networks for sabotaging that "standard"?
Why should a third party have to do something just because you don't like how they run their own networks?
Oh, really? Inaction can be damaging as well. In this case - it's sabotage. Since you bring SIMPLE, which of these major closed networks support it?