I was fully in the Google world prior to gorhill's posts on manifest v3
as a direct result the only thing I have left is a pixel phone, which will be going with the new iPhone
(and in the meantime my entire family has been 'helpfully' migrated too)
I may be up the extreme end of the distribution, but this sort of grassroots push is what dethroned IE, and the resultant loss of control of the web eliminated Microsoft's near total influence over the computing industry
Not to burst your bubble but if you are leaving the Android ecosystem because of Chrome manifest v3 I definitely urge you to see what you're getting yourself into. Not only does Apple enforce that you use their browser engine, it also abuses this position to disable features that they keep enabled on desktop Safari where users have an actual browser engine choice. Also, Safari imposes limitations on extensions that aren't all that different from manifest v3.
I spent years hoping for Apple to see the light, allow other browser engines, AT LEAST give us proper WebM and Opus support. Yet, today, it is no sooner to happening. I finally got fed up and switched back to Android where I grabbed Fennec F-Droid, installed uBlock Origin and finally had a decent mobile browser.
> I spent years hoping for Apple to see the light, allow other browser engines
as soon as apple tried to remove flash, they've shown their hand tbh. While it was generally considered good, the ideology behind removal of flash is the same ideology for their policy to not allow other browser engines.
Strong disagree here. Flash represented a proprietary takeover of web standards. It was bad technology with a bad license and had bad consequences. Apple’s ideology resulted in a pure gain for the open web.
Apple’s dictatorial control over browser engines on iOS represents, somewhat ironically, the last significant defense in the cause of browser engine diversity. While Apple’s motives might be less pure here, the outcomes are no less of a win for the open web.
The outcomes are definitely less of a win for the open web in many cases. It is astounding that I have to deal with Apple proponents unironically trying to argue that WebM and Opus are bad things.
Of course Safari on iOS supports Opus, but it just doesn't support it in any standard container... which is one of the most pointless things I can think of.
Wikimedia doesn't care. They just load a polyfill with WebAssembly-compiled codecs for VP8/9/AV1/Opus/etc. and do it on CPU. The net effect is that iPhone users get a worse Wikipedia experience for basically no reason.
I don't disagree that support for open codecs should be more of a priority for Apple/Safari/WebKit. But you're missing the bigger picture. The web should be resilient to clients which don't support all of the latest features. It shouldn't be necessary to be using a bleeding edge version of Google Chrome (or its clones) in order to have a first class web browsing experience.
While one might complain about the inconvenience of supporting the few gaps in Safari on iOS, this complaint is actually of having to support people who don't (or can't) run the latest software because they (for example) haven't chosen to pay money to upgrade their computing device to something which supports Windows 10 or a recent release of MacOS.
The fact that Safari on iOS isn't bleeding edge is actually an under-appreciated gift to people who choose to/are forced to run older software. It's one of the last vectors forcing lazy web developers (i.e. most web developers) to continue taking browser diversity seriously.
Came to mention that you don't need a rooted Android to run uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, Enhancer for YouTube, Augmented Steam, Decentraleyes, I Don't Care About Cookies, Violentmonkey, or Darkreader... you just need FF Nightly:
Note one thing, if your collection name contains spaces, you need to use the hyphenated version - basically the url segment that is in the collection's url when viewing it in the browser. That's not said in the article and it wasted some time for me.
Adobe very poorly maintained it, it had constant security issues, it was poorly coded, and was abused as an ad platform.
When Linux moved to amd64 / 64bit exes, it took them years to port it from 32bit to 64bit. Why? The codebase was a mess, and they put one dude on it, and his complaints leaked all over the place (I'm sorry it's taking me so long, but this codebase is a mess of spaghetti, I'm having to re-write the whole thing, etc)..
As with everything Adobe buys, their only goal was to ride it into the ground. It is a testament to how popular flash was, that they even updated it at all, ever!
Apple/Jobs may have had fiscal reasons for this move, but it was a great benefit for all regardless.
I had no idea it was this bad behind the curtain. My association with Flash is positive, though entirely for the animation culture it engendered and not the problems like these. I wonder whether Director/Shockwave was any better?
Also, mad respect to the developers at http://ruffle.rs, who are having to do it _again_! Maybe they have a chance to implement the Flash runtime cleanly.
Heck yes. This shouldn't even be a controversial statement. Flash was famous for its seemingly perpetual conga line of serious security vulnerabilities. It laughed at the browser security model. The web is a much, much, much, much, much better place because it was forced to die.
Flash was a kind of devious problem in the same way as IE was and Chrome is:
Those who depended on it got benefits while messing up the lives for everyone else.
To be fair to IE and its modern replacement Chrome, if you develop and test mostly on IE and Chrome you can make things cross browser if you put effort into it, something you couldn't with Flash.
Getting rid of Flash - whatever the reasons was - was a huge gift to the web and by extension people like me who develop on and for an open web.
It’s worth noting that from Safari 14.1 on macOS 11.3 and from Safari 16 on all macOS they do support WebM fully. (Source: https://caniuse.com/webm.) Still not on iOS, and still no Opus outside of CAF packaging, but one can continue to hope.
This isn't reasonable. Today on iPhone, even if you pay $100/year to be able to run unsigned code, you can't get a copy of Firefox running, because nobody maintains the port. That kind of crippling grasp on the ecosystem is difficult to tolerate, and simply nothing compared to what's going on with Google.
Today with Pixel phones, you can secure boot third party OSes without even voiding your warranty. You can unlock the bootloader. Even if this ever were to go away, Android still has multiple ecosystems and you can sideload apps as long as your OEM doesn't disable this, and Google doesn't.
Apple isn't getting more consumer friendly. iOS is less private than ever, not more, and Apple seems intent on making it worse; they dropped the needless CSAM debacle, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. Apple has made their position clear: an iPhone is not your phone. It's Apple's phone. You may borrow it on their terms. The law may say otherwise, but Apple thwarts your attempts to work around it.
Android is imperfect; it's definitely not good for privacy if you use stock ROMs, it's behind on security in many fronts, and Play Store lock-in has definitely put a damper on innovation. That having been said, though, at the end of the day, Google gives you options that lets you take control over the device. The future of being able to control your own devices is unclear with remote attestation once again on the horizon, but being able to control what software runs on your device to a decent degree is absolutely an important feature for me, especially after hoping and praying that Apple would eventually fix the problems I had with iOS. But they were not bugs to Apple, they were features, and Apple knows if people could run their own code, those features wouldn't work very well.
That left a bad taste in my mouth. Until it's fixed, I don't think I can consider phones that Apple sells today as serious options as they are a different class of device to Android phones the way that a game console is a different class of device to a typical laptop.
Reading your comment, my final thought was that essentially if you want to maintain another computer, similar to your desktop, buy an Android phone. Research and install your ROM of choice, route it and install the programs you want, and you are responsible to make sure it all works.
If you don’t want yet another computer to maintain consuming hours of your time, buy an iPhone.
I do use Android for my streaming set top boxes, because of that flexibility. Devices like the Fire TV are flexible, like having an energy efficient and much more affordable version of a PC. But for my phone, for such an essential device that just has to work, it’s too much to ask out of me.
You aren't wrong in a technical sense but the amount of effort to make it work is really overstated here. It shouldn't take more than a few hours tops for everything you are describing, not including the time spent choosing the phone of course.
You have to compare it to the time lost with iOS as well, whether it's from missing apps/features or salary hours spent on the Apple ecosystem because of the lock-in.
Your second paragraph is a bit of a stretch in my humble opinion. Missing apps and features, on iOS? I see. And salary hours?
I was a long time android phone user. I used Cyanogenmod, which became Lineage. I was kind of left in a lurch once CM dropped support from my phone. Then I was using some truly obscure software. It doesn’t feel comfortable to use with banking apps.
There used to be a good handful of distinct advantages for Android on phones. But today if anything important is missing, it’s more likely be missing on Android. Outside of someone who really wants FF with UBO. For example, if you buy a Sonos sound bar and want to use the room adjustment software, it only exists on iOS. Sonos can’t guarantee the quality of the microphone used to enable the software for Android.
In regards to your first point, yes it may only take an hour or two if you know what you’re doing or have done it before. But most users are not going to be doing all of that on their phone.
For me, I found that chasing secure and up-to-date software on android ended up being like duplicating my desktop PC. And I say that as someone who is an Android fan. Just for certain use cases. And by no means a partisan in this whole debate. It’s really just my experience as a software developer that has spent five years or more on each platform.
I quite like the Samsung phones. If I went back, I would pick up one of those. I really like the Dex feature and the USB-C is mandatory. But there’s not much that personally draws me in from the points that you mentioned, the time and technical investment, any missing features or lock in.
If you don't mind the way the Pixel device works out of the box, then obviously it's basically on par with an iPhone in terms of ease of use and setup. They trade blows obviously, but I'd call the experience comparable. I can switch between iPhone and Pixel with absolutely no confusion.
But if you do mind the way it works, you don't necessarily have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes, you can get the changes you want without having to do a whole lot of work. If all you want to do is sideload an APK, like the F-Droid store for example, it's some straight-forward taps. The system even guides you into it, no blatant dark patterns in my view of it. This is honestly pretty good, maybe even nicer than the modern macOS defaults!
That will get you Fennec F-Droid and uBlock Origin very easily and quickly. No developer mode. No confusing dark pattern UX. No $100/yr payments. No flashing ROMs, no rooting, nothing. Just tapping the screen a bit. Keep in mind that Android also has the intents system so many default things can be changed, not just browser or e-mail client; pretty much any action that can open a third-party app can be supported by another third-party app.
If you want to go deeper, you might root your device, install something like Xposed, or at least modify system APKs. It's not all that bad, although obviously the tradeoffs start to hit here: Safetynet no longer passes unless you bypass it somehow, OTA updates might undo some of your modifications, etc. But, it's still pretty powerful for not all that much work. Guides and tools are usually made so that moderate power users can do it. Plenty of kids do it for sure.
And finally, if you want full control over everything, you can install third-party ROMs like GrapheneOS. Honestly, sometimes this is even easier than rooting, but it does come with some downsides still (I don't believe SafetyNet would pass on most third party ROMs, although miraculously, Pixel devices do support Secure Boot with third party ROMs, which I honestly feel was a very unexpected improvement of recent years.)
Are Android phones generally less usable? I don't know. My whole family has always used Android phones and it seems fine. I do think the ecosystem of Android phones is a little weak right now, but at least we finally have CPUs that aren't so damn weak; that was one major score in favor of iPhone that was really hard to argue. They're probably still not all that close in the benchmarks, but it doesn't mater; the subjective experience is better. Android phones can finally drive high-refresh-rate displays very smoothly, and Firefox no longer feels like trying to browse the internet on a Pentium II. What I will say is that Apple has more advanced features for casual users provided that you stick to their ecosystem, but the "stick to their ecosystem" part is a hard sell for some of those features.
Which part isn't resonable? I was proposing a thought experiment in understanding motivation and the version of the future these companies are building towards.
The reason why is because on iPhone, I can only hope and pray for things to get better, which I have been doing for three years; there aren't really any options if you don't like the intentional limitations of the iPhone. With the Pixel phone, I have options today and indefinitely, regardless of the motivations of Google. Comparing Google's motivations vs Apple's motivations is missing the bigger picture.
It's not a panacea, but it's about as close as they come.
It makes no sense to assume how companies will act in the far out future, as companies are not people and their motivations shift with management, investors, and markets. You can at best look at the motivation as an explanation of the short to medium term. Long-term, the company might be in entirely different hands. Look at Sun. Apply your strategy to Sun as of a few years before they went under and chunks were bought by Oracle. Sun's motivations meant very little in the end, only what they actually did (such as open sourcing things) survived.
SDM 845 devices, Especially OP6/6T and Xiaomi Poco F1 has changed the landscape for PostmarketOS(Still is not for everyone though).
Firefox/Fennec F-Droid is indeed great (Especially since UBO is supported), But unfortunately in Android almost every enthusiast project involves privilege escalation and in this case F-Droid auto update apps requires one too.
Apple offers a Content Blocking API which is leveraged by most apps and similar to mv3.
Most of these apps (now) also include a JavaScript extension to block the harder ads (eg youtube). This a recent development that apple seems to encourage.
Some apps also offer network-level adblocking by using a local VPN server, which allows for blocking in apps.
Firefox for Android used to implement scroll coasting in a way that felt very different from Chrome and native Android apps. I just gave it a try now and it seems like they've fixed it, scrolling feels native now.
I just retested in case they fixed it and no [1]. The easiest way to tell it's non-native scroll is that Android has this effect when you reach the top or bottom that it "stretches" the content. You can try it everywhere (even inside Firefox settings menu) and it will work like that, except for the actual webpage in Firefox.
Another difference in the scroll is that it has much higher friction (deceleration) in Firefox than native Android.
[1] Firefox 103.2.0 on a Samsung S20 with latest updates.
Little late, but for the record, your first issue reeks of a Samsung-specific bug. My Pixel 2 running LineageOS stretches the same in the [phone] settings app as it does in the [Firefox] settings page. Samsung has always had weird quirks in the way their skinned Android runs, and AFAICT, were the absolute worst for causing app developer headaches in the earlier Android days. I would be shocked if they've gotten dramatically better since.
I'm sure the settings page does - but because Samsung implements APIs a little differently, and this has caused devs issues in the past, I'm assuming the browser with a smaller dev team may have missed this quirk at first glance. Other Chrome-based browsers probably don't have this issue - Chrome's team is very well-funded, and forks likely benefit from Google doing the edge-case testing.
Maybe Firefox is doing something weird, but I've got a coworker with that same phone - so at the very least I can compare my Pixel to his Samsung, and see who threw standards out the window.
I'm not the GP but I've noticed since the switch over to "New" Android Firefox (Fenix or whatever?) scroll events aren't handled properly. That is, dragging your finger around on the screen works, but any other source (keyboard, for example) does nothing. Maybe that's what they were referring to; maybe they have a different issue.
Check out https://www.bromite.org/, it's a android chromium fork with adblocking built in like brave but without the crypto stuff. Also has support for userscripts!
I find Firefox on Android to completely unusable for many of the sites I visit because it doesn't support the Google Translate plugin for some completely idiotic reason. I can only use it on sites that are in English. For everything else, I have to use Chrome.
I have Firefox Nightly, and it still shows the same small handful of extensions as regular Firefox. Is there some secret menu I have to go to or something? Honestly, this is ridiculous, and it's pretty obvious that Mozilla simply does not want us using any other extensions. They have no right to complain when I use Chrome instead. I need translation just to survive and pay my bills.
To be clear: it is a willful choice by Mozilla to fully protect Android users but to leave iOS users in the turmoil of a constant stream of invasive and malicious ads. I specifically took my parents off of Firefox for this express reason. Brave has a built-in adblocker, as do many other iOS browsers.
And it is not like Mozilla isn’t aware, I believe there are 2-3 open issues on Bugzilla, years old, that have just been left to wither.
Isn't there some rule that any browser on iOS must use the native Safari engine? So if iOS Safari doesn't support something, there's no way for Firefox to add that support. It's basically just a skin.
Yes, but like I said, many other 3rd-party browsers have perfectly fine built-in adblockers.
Hell, you can install Firefox Focus (which is a ‘private mode only’ browser) and that does have built-in adblocking. More perversely, you can use it as a content blocker for Safari.
(No, other browsers using Safari’s engine do not inherit the content blocking)
I repeat: Mozilla is willfully choosing not to protect iOS Firefox users from ads. Plain and simple.
I know it's Safari under the hood, but Brave on iOS is great.
I do hope that Apple decides to / is forced to allow real 3rd party browsers at some point, though. I also hope that a decent Linux phone becomes a realistic alternative.
I'll check back in 10 years to see if either of those materializes.
LineageOS was good back when it first formed from CyanogenMod but then had a patch of issues with call quality and reliability which forced me off it. Hopefully that’s all long resolved, I would otherwise switch back but I reply to much on my phone for work.
I think that what dethroned IE is that using your monopoly to maintain a moat of bugs only works for so long. If the browser is going to continue to be developed, eventually you're going to have to fix the bugs. By then, they were competing with Chrome, which was not bug-ridden and also backed by a juggernaut.
The grassroots push that dethroned Microsoft's browser was Google's browser (aided by Firefox's suicide.)
This comment is perhaps the most accurate take on the fall of IE.
Firefox dethroned IE not because it was "MuH fReE oPeN sOuRcE sOfTwArE" or "MuH nEtScApE", it was because Firefox was superior to IE in performance and feature set. It was better than IE at being practical and enabling users to do things they needed or wanted to do.
Shortly after, Chrome rolled around and it was superior in performance (RAM hogginess aside) and feature set (for Joe Average, not necessarily power users) to Firefox and dethroned the dethroner.
Firefox will not be a dethroner again, because Firefox is not superior to Chrome. In fact, it's inferior to Chrome: It's been a third-rate Chrome ripoff for at least the last 10 years. None of the Chromium forks will dethrone Chrome either, because they are also third-rate Chrome ripoffs by their very nature.
It is conceivable that some browser superior to Chrome will eventually come out and dethrone it, but that's probably still a long ways away and I would argue the challenge of dethroning Chrome is several orders of magnitudes harder than dethroning IE ever was.
Which is probably why Google is pushing for so many web extensions - to make sure that they stay ahead of everyone else and you need billions just to catch up.
Unfortunately it seems Firefox is falling into the trap and is desparately trying to chase Chrome instead of focusing on significant user experience innovations to distinguish themselves from Chrome, especially ones that Google is unwilling to add to Chrome.
At least for me, Chrome was always faster than Firefox, though this always came at a substantial cost in RAM demands among other computer resources. This difference in speed has only become more and more apparent over the years as more and more websites have gotten bloated with reams of JavaShit and HTML5 nonsense.
I'm also of the impression that Mozilla and Google's respective marketing ultimately had a very minor impact on overall adoption. The key driver behind Firefox and subsequently Chrome's mainstream adoption was initial uptake by power users who then spread it to the commons by word of mouth. The latter is arguably still ongoing, seeing as OS-default browsers like Edge (let alone third-party browsers like Firefox) still can't even hope to compete with Chrome.
as a direct result the only thing I have left is a pixel phone, which will be going with the new iPhone
(and in the meantime my entire family has been 'helpfully' migrated too)
I may be up the extreme end of the distribution, but this sort of grassroots push is what dethroned IE, and the resultant loss of control of the web eliminated Microsoft's near total influence over the computing industry