Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.
Also I’d rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.
People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site
Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.
If it’s something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide
It wouldn’t be terrible, as long as it’s based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.
But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you’ve got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.
Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.
With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.
As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.
Firefox does something else very important: provide another rendering engine for the web. When that landscape homogenizes, you get IE6 all over again. And we never want to go back there.
Also I’d rather there was a separate option for additional privacy than it be the default.
People who want the extra privacy can usually figure out what they need and how to get it. The average person will just switch back to chrome when websites break. They wont be able to figure out which settings to toggle off in order to fix the site
Keep Firefox useful for most people while also building more privacy friendly features.
If it’s something people SHOULD be using, have a popup explaining it and let people decide
This is the reason why people think privacy is hard. No, my mother should not need to find out how to set the correct settings.
A simple switch, GUI, to completely harden the browser, this would be the thing. about:preferences can be changed while running.
Also Firefox disables website pinging by default, unlike nearly all cromium based browsers where you can’t even disable it
It wouldn’t be terrible, as long as it’s based on an open source foundation. Although that depends on the specific open source license. As long as the engine can be forked, the worst of IE6 should be avoidable.
But yes, with Opera moving to Blink, you’ve got really only two-ish browser engines. KHTML/WebKit/Blink and Gecko. WebKit/Blink are Open Source, but I think mostly BSD, so Apple/Google could migrate to a proprietary license easily.
Gecko is MPL, which IIRC is somewhat Copyleft like the GPL, just a bit less stringent.
With the Apple/Google impasse with WebKit/Blink, I think we should be able to avoid an IE6 situation, but I would feel better with a stronger Copyleft license.
As much as I love Firefox, I think Firefox has less browser share than it did back in the IE6 days.
servo (already partially in Firefox) is a very interesting project.