Firefox Is the Only Alternative

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Servo

    Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine

    > They want it to (not or less) stay the same and not move forward

    I don't think this is true at all. Anecdotally, a lot of Firefox users have been very receptive towards recent changes. Quantum was a huge success and I know very few people that miss the old Firefox with all of its jank.

    > Mozilla need to follow suit in order to survive, rip that rendering engine out, build a new browser and a “browser toolkit” to let other people build their own

    This is precisely what Servo is: https://servo.org/

  • standards-positions

    I've been meaning to write almost exactly this blog post for a while now, glad that someone else did it.

    Two things that I think are worth calling out:

    1. In many ways Apple's anti-competitive behaviour on iOS/iPadOS is a blessing. It's one of the few things that keep Chromium's dominance in check. Of course, it's not great that Apple are stifling innovation like this, but consider the alternative: Chromium dominance on all platforms.

    2. Why it's worth caring about this at all? So what if Chromium is the only engine, it would make things easier for developers after all. To this I say, go read some of the discussions in standard bodies(for example about FLoC). Engineers from Apple and Mozilla are largely our bastion against Google's harmful proposals for the web. Pushback from Apple and Mozilla are only relevant as long as they have market share to speak of. The recent lawsuit against Google by many US states should be extremely worrying to anyone that cares about the open web and it should make handing over any more control to Google a terrifying prospect.

    Mozilla maintains a list[0] of their positions on various standard suggestions that is also a useful resource.

    0: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • positron

    Discontinued a experimental, Electron-compatible runtime on top of Gecko

    Mozilla has been trying to build an Electron alternative based on Gecko, but it has been discontinued

    https://github.com/mozilla/positron

  • gcp-ingestion

    Documentation and implementation of telemetry ingestion on Google Cloud Platform

    I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data.

    Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.

    I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.

  • bigquery-etl

    Bigquery ETL

    I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data.

    Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.

    I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.

  • looker-spoke-default

    Default repository for Looker spoke projects

    I used to work on Mozilla's data platform. That stuff is all open source. See e.g. https://github.com/mozilla/gcp-ingestion/ for the ingestion pipeline, https://github.com/mozilla/bigquery-etl for queries/ETL, and https://github.com/mozilla/looker-spoke-default/ for looker model definitions for that data.

    Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.

    I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.

  • serenity

    The Serenity Operating System 🐞

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • Traduzir-paginas-web

    Translate your page in real time using Google or Yandex

    Thanks! That works great. Like the parent, easy access to autotranslation is a reason I sometimes reach for a non-Firefox browser. It really ought be a feature shipped with Firefox; without it most of the web is effectively inaccessible.

    The plugin relies on Google and Yandex for translations. Mozilla doesn't seem to have a problem with relying on or providing proprietary services (for better or worse) so that shouldn't be an obstacle, though I'd love to see an open source translation service replace them eventually -- maybe LibreTranslate https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web/issues/278

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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