It's not a controversial opinion as much as it is incongruent.

> IMO It's better to adopt Chromium-based browsers and put pressure on Google to avoid letting it become the sole decision-maker about the web.

But by using chromium/blink-based browsers, you have already taken the pressure off Google. You have already given them what they want, so you've forfeited your hand.

For anyone out there who values the swiftly fading open-ness of the Internet, Firefox or other smaller FLOSS browsers are the right tools of choice.

> For anyone out there who values the swiftly fading open-ness of the Internet, Firefox or other smaller FLOSS browsers are the right tools of choice.

Mozilla had their chance at this decades ago and Firefox was the dominant browser against IE, 16 years ago, until they did a deal with Google, fell asleep at the wheel and allowed them to overtake and get sabotaged via Chrome's dominance. The same Mozilla CEO at the time believed they could live without Google's money [0] and now 16 years later, they are still heavily reliant on Google and at this point are on life-support.

Mozilla already gave Google what they wanted and forfeited their so-called 'privacy-focused browser mission' over giving the CEO a decades streak of multi-million dollar pay days, whilst the 'Mozillians' only got layoffs and all left with little to nothing.

Mozilla is now a joke to the 'open-ness of the web'. They have nothing to fight with and lost as soon as the took Google's money.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120105090543/https://www.compu...

The problem IMO is that Mozilla became a corporation for Firefox. Their goals are now aligned with the parties they're supposed to fight against. Obviously that doesn't work.

Chrome became popular by being bundled as shovelware with Flash and being marketed on google.com. There is literally no way for an open source browser to compete against that.

Mozilla has a lot of mismanagement but that's more of a symptom of Firefox being out-marketed in a way that was impossible to fight against.

Respectfully, I don't care that you have two backlogs. Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer.

I'm already sick of how much I have to kowtow to large companies because they treat developer time as costly, but user time as free.

I think FF users need these sites more than the sites need them. There's little motivation to support a browser with relatively few users, and a big motivation to get users to switch to their platform.

I think you're right, but not supporting firefox leads more people to use chrome and suddenly we're living the exact definition of a vicious cycle.

FWIW I'm not a firefox user myself, but I am not a fan of Google hegemony in browser tech.

I guess many people are in your situation. If they used Firefox, maybe it would help the "Google hegemony in browser tech" problem?

I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

> I use Safari so for now I don't consider myself part of the problem.

Got it, I misunderstood your sentence above!

> Though I do launch Chrome to use Teams (because Teams is mandated by my org and I am too shrill and opinionated to install the desktop client).

Yes, it doesn't help that companies don't give a damn, either :)

I think you're looking for "kowtow", however much I enjoy "cow-toe"

> Support the prevailing web-standards or lose me as a customer.

Respectfully, a lot of developers don't care about losing a small percentage of users. They will get to focus their effort on Chrome users and increase the service quality for them.

That's fine. If they can't manage to make a service work using appropriate web standards then I don't think I trust them with hosting a service, my data, or to create adequate products anyway. -- I mean, what other corners are being cut?

It's quite probable that they are not cutting the corners that make them money and they're cutting (or might cut) everything else. After all, Firefox Nightly's share is a rounding error for Teams (and its users probably not Team's target anyway)

Yes. but things like backups or security will not make them money either. So I can’t assume that they're protecting my data.

Seems like a strange business decision to give up a a percentage of the market to the competition like that.

The percentage of the market that holds a strong opinion about a nondefault web browser with already minuscule (and consistently declining) market share, and will actively avoid you for not supporting it, almost definitely costs more to cater to then to ignore. (Testing time, engine specific bugs and code, etc.)

That small percentage will be extremely loyal to whichever services will cater to them though. A small percentage of users all choosing to use your service can still be quite a lot of users if there is no real competition in the segment.

That works in reverse though: they can do that to people that they're happy to lose as a customer. In case of ff nightly, number of users are a rounding error. It's entirely possible that cutting them off is worth having a smaller backlog.

That's why everybody should support Firefox, and only Firefox. Hey, you wanted controversy.

> IMO It's better to adopt Chromium-based browsers and put pressure on Google to avoid letting it become the sole decision-maker about the web.

Google doesn't care about us raging on HN, normal people are not going to 'put pressure on it' so all you're really doing is letting Google to become the sole decision-maker about the web, even more so than it already is.

A good way to put pressure on Google is actually to use Firefox.

Yes, because using Firefox doesn’t put money in Google’s coffers.

Oh wait…

The way I use Firefox it definitely does not.

By using alternatives to Chromium, you put pressure on the developers to support those alternatives (if 50% of the users were pissed to see a "only works on Chromium" banner, it would matter for the websites).

Hopefully the developers then use features that are compatible between those different browsers, and now those browsers have a word to say against Google if they disagree with a specific feature.

Obviously the goal is not to not put money in Google's coffers... how would you do that? They make money by selling data they took without your consent. It's not like non tech-savvy users can do anything to protect their data. Already tech-savvy users mostly can't be arsed to make that kind of effort.

How the fuck could that happen if their browser engine is the only one supported in most websites and their browser has close to a monopoly when it comes to market share?

What about Safari?

From my experience, most WebRTC issues (i.e. Teams) are involved around Safari instead of Firefox or Chrome, provided the SDP negotiation is sequenced correctly.

I Wonder what features are used here which Firefox doesn’t support. It is certainly not the serial Interface.

how exactly do you plan to put pressure on Google