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I remember a time when Firefox didn't work for anything that required ActiveX.

I remember when Firefox didn't support Flash without a seriously dangerous plugin.

I remember when somehow enough people woke up and banded against ActiveX and Flash.

It seems popular here to make the argument that "doing what's right" poses an existential threat to the right-doer. The corollary to that argument is that in order to survive you must do what is wrong.

For some, it is better to die than to go along with what is wrong. Luckily, it often works out that those who have the courage to do the right thing survive. And when they do the world is often a better place.

Don't cave into the naysayers who predict the end of the world. Keep fighting the good fight.

"And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men."




Cool story, I still have to use Chrome to talk to my doctor, view my healthcare documents, and get my W2. While Firefox is "doing the right thing," me, the Firefox user, has to use a different browser that doesn't respect my privacy because they don't do what web developers expect.

And you can blame web developers, businesses who hire them, or Google for turning the world into this sorry state. But oftentimes the only choice I have as a consumer is what browser I use, and most of the time it's Firefox. But more and more frequently, I can't choose to use Firefox because some functionality is broken on a website I need to visit.

The more of this functionality that they break, the more often I need to use Chrome.


Your claims are suspicious. A company cannot require you to have internet access to supply you a W-2 tax form. You choose to keep your healthcare documents in some format that requires Chrome? That seems very very strange. Your doctor won't talk to you in person or on the telephone? Again, strange.

You are not forced into any of these things. You choose them as a matter of convenience, cost-savings, or some other reason. You have your reasons, but it is highly unlikely that you don't have a choice.

The choices you have purportedly made have allowed others to make poor choices with little consequence. With less effort than it took to install Chrome, you could have asked for a paper copy of your W-2. That would have put the pain of a bad decision back upstream where it belongs.

> The more of this functionality that they break, the more often I need to use Chrome

From context, "they" would refer to the party that breaks functionality. From the sentence above, I take that to be "Google for turning the world into a sorry state." Your response to this is to "need to use Chrome." Your choices seem irrational to me.

But again, they are your choices and you do have them.


Many of my documents are accessed electronically through various web services. Many of them function poorly or not at all with Firefox. I'm sure I could make a phone call and get them mailed to me, but "don't use the internet" is not an acceptable workaround to a website failing to load in Firefox.

The "they" I refer to is Mozilla's engineers. They have consistently broken or failed to implement their platform as developers expect, and since their market share is tiny, developers do not care and bug reports.

I accept that by using Firefox my experience on the web is degraded. That's a tradeoff I make. What I'm reacting to is that it seems you've put on the blinders from the high horse you're sitting on. In the real world, Firefox is technically limited by the many decisions to ignore what developers are doing.

Instead of blaming the users for following the path of least resistance, blame Mozilla for failing to make the "right thing" the path of least resistance for developers. If Firefox were easier to target than Chrome, supported more APIs and had better developer tools, then we wouldn't have this reality.


> The more of this functionality that they break, the more often I need to use Chrome.

On the other hand, if Firefox is just going to be a clone of Chrome (behavior-wise), then what's it's purpose for existing?


+1

Your handle "freeopinion" reminds me that although people often say "you get what you pay for," just because something's free does not mean that it's worthless.




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