Slashdot Mirror
Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?
trawg writes: It's been more than 10 years since Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, one of their first steps in their mission to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. Firefox was instrumental in shattering the web monoculture, but the last few years of development have left users uninspired. "Their goal was never to create the most popular browser in the world, or the one with the best UX, or the one with the most features, or the one with the best developer mode. ... It would be foolish to say a monoculture will never arise again (Google are making some scary moves with Chrome-only web applications). But at this point in time while Chrome is the ascendant browser (largely at the expense of Firefox), Mozilla’s ability to impact the web in general is greatly reduced." Perhaps it is time to move on to the next challenge — ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.
I've used Chrome on BSD for years but recently moved back to FF. The main reason I moved in the first place is sync of personal data across instances. FF now has this.
Also Chromium isn't as open source friendly as one would think so it's feature set is largely reduced on BSD's. Now that they've removed the ability to run 32-bit NPAPI plugins, I can't use java/flash anymore either. Plus all the Chrome UI Nazi stuff was getting annoying like the malfunctioning middle click to paste. Chrome devs calling it a feature not a bug didn't help either. Regardless, things are good again in BSD w/ FF.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
"...Chrome-only web applications..."
It isn't a web application if it requires non-web-standard features or a very specific software platform.
I don't understand your closing sentence: "ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem" - Thunderbird is stable, and if anything, they need to stop messing with the UI.
It's a mail reader. That is all it needs to be.
From: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firef...
"50% of Fx users on Windows run 64 bit OS. We've reached a threshold where the effort makes sense."
Work on the webcam side now that HTML5 video is supported.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The original goal of Phoenix(?) or whatever name they chose for the code-split from Navigator; was to build a fast, responsive and resource-minimal web-browser. When it was first released it was a HUGE success because not everybody wanted an all-in-one email/browser/calendar/contact/NNTP client.
Then they added the ability to run 3rd-party scripts, they called those 'extensions' (omg what is this new thing!) and that was super popular.
I like many of the /. readership was there at the birth of what we now call Firefox. We have loved it for what it was, and have tolerated it for what it became.
It is still my primary browser, but if I ever find a minimal-resource browser that offers functionality equal to 'NoScript' and 'Adblock-Edge' I'll switch.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
and why? conservative, i say.
ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.
Why would having an open email client help preserve free and open email? Is something threatening email rfc's recently?
Firefox has become the new Netscape. Every release was slower and once they switched to Australis I dumped them entirely for Chrome. Most of the addons I used are also available for Chrome now. I got a good laugh reading about their video chat client. Nobody ever asked for that. How about making existing features better instead of adding shit for no good reason? No wonder Google stopped funding them. Google saw the direction it was going for and pulled out.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I thought the goal was to take Netscape communicator, strip out all the crap, leaving just the lean, fast web browser. Funny they seem to have forgotten that as every release adds more and more bloat and unwanted "features". It might as well be Netscape all over again.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
exactly, communicator was a resource hog and simply the only (usable) browser for linux/bsd. Opera had some issues (not showing everything correct) with the HTML world of IE and was shareware.
Firefox was not super in its pre 0.9 versions, but IMO became worse after version 3. (Coincidentally, this was also the case with Netscape Navigator 3 growing into Communiicator 4).
That said, Firefox has proved to be an indispensible tool for web development (firebug).
Where is this statistically significant group of people who are not using webmail today? BTW - That is from someone who has used Thunderbird for the past 10 years. If you are going to post questions then at least raise the postulation above troll-bait levels.
Email is moving towards webmail that scans your emails to do targeted advertising. Doing everything in the cloud makes it way too easy for companies to extract value from users. Software like Thunderbird is truly free in that we can use it and Mozilla takes nothing in return.
In fact I think email should either die or have a massive protocol update of some kind to block spammers, otherwise it's a lost cause.
I'm not aware of anyone who used to use email who has stopped using email, are you? Given how effective spam blockers are these days, I'm not feeling a need to drop SMTP quite yet myself.
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.
TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."
I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.
The goal may not have been to take over the world. But the goal was also not to become a bloated browser with an unusable UI that is driving users away.
Well, presumably that's what we were told at the time, but truly what was going on was Netscape throwing as much open source code out there before being gobbled up by AOL. There was zero promise AOL would continue browser development, they had a deal with IE. Netscape was very much aware that IE might be the only game in town. Much of the email code couldn't be open sourced because I don't think Netscape had full rights to the code.
----- obSig
+1 for this great suggestion. A good audio codec, video codec, encryption and emoticons. Clean new open code that works as a new instant messaging app :)
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The source is open, but i read about how chromium's way of packaging dependencies with itself has had it rejected from official software repositories on various linux distros. Perhaps this also reduces it's portability.
On an unrelated note, you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash, that's really not how the web should work or will work in the future. (for the record i'm fairly browser agnostic, except when talking about IE of course :P).
Right now, I use three different web browsers (on Windows that would be IE, FIreFox, and Chrome, and on Linux, that would be Opera, Firefox, and Chrome) because there are too many websites that only work under one or the other of them. A few years ago, this wasn't necessary, so we have backslid a fair ways. The "success" is far from complete, and getting farther as each day goes by. I expect HTML 5 to make the situation even worse.
Firefox has lost favor with me because it has pretty much abandoned the things that I loved about it, while continuing to make changes that are not only unnecessary, but actively make the browser worse. Mozilla needs to realize that their original goal is far from accomplished and get back on that horse. If they did that, I'll start giving them money again.
I'm wondering if this article is a joke. a troll. a nudge towards crazy.
Is open source email management really the next big challenge? If Mozilla targeted that they'd lose their funding in 3, 2, 1...
Thought they'd say something like data privacy, data portability, online anonymity, etc.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
For a long time, I was pretty sure that Firefox's goal was to suck up all of the free memory space in the universe. It's better now, but they damn near succeeded there for a while.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
How is open code everybody can see, work on, understand and create with "a different monoculture?"
The past closed proprietary DHTML features?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You clearly never worked with Microsoft Outlook.
There is no application whose usage future is more certainly bright than e-mail. The complaints you make are symptoms of ubiquitous usage and unstoppable success.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I think the SMTP protocol is relatively fine. I'd love to see some semblance of standardization for HTML layout in email messages. I understand how and why we are where we are today, but it's ridiculous how many hoops you have to jump through just to get a decent email to render correctly across all major email platforms.
I can't stand web-based mail readers, so, yes, I do use a PC email client, and I think many others do for the same reason.
Furthermore, I couldn't stand to have to actively check for new email, so for me it's:
1. postfix with sender-dependent relay hosts and -authentication
2. fetchmail to periodically poll all email addresses i have for new mail, handing it the local postfix for delivery, which then "delivers" it to
3. procmail in order to sort the incoming mail into various maildirs, triggering
4. a script that watches ~/.maildir/new for new files, and if positive, puts a 'new mail' label into my WM's status bar, which causes me to fire up
5. mutt to read the mail. it doesn't even need to be compiled with IMAP/POP3 support this way, which is neat.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Firefox does not use WebKit. It uses Gecko.
Firefox Hello bundles this kind of thing right into the web browser. I kind of like this idea for allowing basic functionality (think of the browser-based IM in Google and Facebook) and even extending that to voice and video (the way Google Hangouts does), but I'd ideally like to see a more powerful stand-alone client for people that want more than just a few casual conversations here and there. (This is an even better idea for Thunderbird, since your contact list lives there.)
Fortunately, we have pidgin, a stand-alone IM client with a great feature set and wonderful cross-platform support (Adium is merely an OS X implementation of Pidgin). Pidgin desperately needs help, as it hasn't successfully had an easy-to-use voice (let alone video) capability. I'm hoping that WebRTC (which powers Firefox Hello and, I think, Google Hangouts) can provide this, at least for using Firefox Hello and/or bridging between two Pidgin/Adium/Libpurple users.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).
Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.
R.Mo
Unlike some other mobile operating systems, FirefoxOS is completely open and uses HTML5 to deliver content. BlackBerry and Windows Phone each have small market shares, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So we mostly have only two choices of mobile OS. Don't get me wrong: I very much like my Android phone (Sony Xperia Z3 Compact) and my iPad, but I think that it's a worthwhile challenge to contribute to the FirefoxOS platform and/or to build apps for it.
Just thinking out loud here, the IE6 monoculture was terrible, and we all hated it...and justifiably so. However, with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all based on WebKit now, have we simply embraced a different monoculture? Admittedly the main difference here is that WebKit is more open than Trident, and the days of ActiveX and Java are more behind us than not...But is having an alternative render engine a better situation, or just redundant coding?
Firefox is Gecko based not WebKit.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Opera has been using the same rendering (and JS?) engine (Blink) as Chrome for over 1.5 years (ever since Opera 15), so you may only have to run your preferred choice of Opera vs Chrome in addition to Firefox on Linux.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I personally never use the online email client its all forwarded to my windows Live email client no embedded ads. I never use my phone to read email why waste the bandwidth? it can wait until i get home to read. That,s just me though i don't live in my phone or PC.
Jack of all trades,master of none
I think I learned about uBlock from someone's sig here. It accomplishes the same goal as Adblock Plus/Edge, but uses significantly less memory. A freshly launched Firefox instance with Adblock Plus (only one empty tab open) used slightly over 230MB of RAM; with uBlock that figure is down to around 100MB.
I too first started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, but I disagree that Mozilla has failed. In my experience Firefox is fast and responsive. Resource-minimalness (is that even a word?) isn't an issue for me, as I don't think Firefox requires unreasonable amounts of disk space or RAM. Especially after switching to uBlock. I suppose RAM usage starts to matter more if you like to keep hundreds of tabs open; it's a valid concern but not relevant for me.
(I couldn't figure out how to get the micro sign to work on Slashdot.)
Email is moving towards webmail that scans your emails to do targeted advertising. Doing everything in the cloud makes it way too easy for companies to extract value from users.
This is true, but even if you don't use their webmail interface, the free email service providers can still scan your email. There's nothing to stop them from doing that.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Do you by any chance have a more detailed write-up of how you configured your system anywhere? I have no interest in using an external webmail service, but I've been considering setting up some sort of networked mail store so I can read and send from multiple devices while keeping everything centrally for admin/back-up/security purposes. However, that would be a side project that needs to be done in my spare time, and every time I start looking into it, the documentation and UIs I find for relevant FOSS packages usually seem to be either incomplete or so comprehensive and detailed that I find them overwhelming.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
>"Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?"
Here is what I *HOPE* is next:
1) Stop trying to be and look like Chrome. Just stop.
2) Stop trying to force users to not have tabs on bottom, having a menu bar, having separate buttons, etc. Let users control their user interface how they want.
3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.
4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.
5) Focus on speed, security, stability, bug-fixing, and documentation. You don't have to be a feature-of-the-month club.
6) Continue to support as many platforms and systems as possible, including old ones.
Oh- and thank you for all the hard work that went into Firefox- the browser of my choice (and that for my users, family, and friends) for the last decade.
Speech-to-Text works very well on both Android and Apple products for texts and emails.
Remember when FF was all about making it a lean, mean browsing machine compared to the silver-bullet one-for-everything Netscape behemoth? I think FF would really benefit from making these virtues of old their new priorities again, instead of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation trying out-do Apple in feel-good, empty world-improvement campaigns and slogans and trying to out-do Apple and Google in UI design with yet another "UI improvement". Or doing things like completely crippling developers who are using self-signed certificates. This paternalism is just ridiculous.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
monoculture = all one thing. How exactly is having several different browsers all based on the same engine NOT a monoculture? It's not a *proprietary* monoculture, and as such may avoid many of the pitfalls that made the IE monoculture so toxic, but it is definitely a monoculture.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I can't see myself using webmail. Ultimately, I download all my email.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Or Mulberry.
Or Gmail.
I haven't been paying close attention, but I believe IE's use has dropped pretty hard. I wouldn't say Chrome has just been sniping Firefox.
Regardless, FF is still the most configurable browser I know of. I like Chrome, but FF has plug-ins that give it superpowers Chrome still can't match. And THAT is Firefox's raison d'etre.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
when i started the pyjamas-desktop project i assumed that the "open-ness" that is written into the mozilla foundation charter would be an inviolate quantity that they would adhere to. taking this on faith i found the python-hulahop bindings of the OLPC project to be perfect to allow HTML5 DOM to be entirely (even exclusively) manipulated *python-side* instead of using javascript.
for anyone not familiar with the difference between pyxpcomext and python-hulahop, pyxpcomext was a project funded in 2000 by the mozilla foundation to *literally* embed python - making it a peer language of javascript - *within* a firefox browser. you downloaded a whopping 10mbyte extension for either linux or windows and you could do *not* just script language equals javascript and it would work, *including* accessing the *FULL* and complete DOM manipulation functions that we normally expect to have from javascript (exclusively, as it turns out in most peoples' mindsets).
python-hulahop on the other hand is (or was) a pygtk widget which allowed one to create a GTK window that happened to have a Gecko (HTML5/DOM) engine running in it, which *happened* also, amazingly, to provide one with the full set of DOM manipulation functions, starting from a python function GetDOMDocument() and going from there to the thousands of functions one normally expects to be the exclusive monopolistic domain of javascript.
the irony is that the python-hulahop project was only created so that the OLPC team could create their own embedded browser (in python), and they went to the trouble of using just a tiny fraction of the available functionality to implement the "Go" button, "Back" button, history and so on, all using the python bindings to the internal XPCOM interface that allows direct access to the full functionality of the Gecko Engine.
one other thing is needed to be explained before we can get on to what the problem is: XPCOM was "inspired" by Microsoft COM, and it *could* have been absolutely brilliant. COM is... deeply awe-inspiringly powerful, it is that flexible and ubiquitous. you may have heard me mention in the past that COM is what allows binary Active-X components compiled *TWO DECADES* ago to still be useful and useable on modern Windows (and Wine) systems today, even though in some cases the company that created them will have gone out of business.
technically the problem with XPCOM is that they forgot to implement co-classes, meaning that the only choice available to them is to *remove* quotes broken quotes functions and to constantly upgrade upgrade upgrade. this problem is at the heart of every single complaint for the past *TEN YEARS* by 3rd party developers using the Gecko Engine in java or c++ applications. they're SICK of having to recompile their applications to suit the mozilla foundation's schedule, particularly as it is such a mammoth task and may need to be done frequently (especially due to a security fix).
so with that as background we start to get some hints as to inherent problems that have been stressing out the developers for some considerable time. ...so what did they do about it? well, they responded to the "threat" of webkit (the engine behind chrome) by announcing a "speed, speed, speed" pathological binge - this was around 2010 or 2011. the ABSOLUTE top priority became not to be "open" - even to the extent of violating the spirit *and* the letter of the mozilla foundation charter - but to be "The Best". "The Fastest".
one of the first things that were removed was a single line from a header file - a "friend class" declaration. this one tiny change was utterly profound: it was a key absolutely critical change that prevented and prohibited the python-hulahop source code from accessing the XPCOM infrastructure. without that "friend class" declaration, there was absolutely no way that the GNU/Linux distros could take the standard gecko / xulrunner source code and have hulahop get that key strategic pointer to the Gecko Engine's top level XPCOM object.
but even if you don't use their webmail interface, the free email service providers can still scan your email. There's nothing to stop them from doing that.
While they can scan and read unencrypted messages, OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption would like to have a word with you.
So we know the Mozilla code for the most part is finally reliable. I think it's performance time, it really is time for this to kick into high gear, ASAP.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Elect...
Nevermind that there are hardly any universally good email clients..... None do encryption well
There are two very good e-mail clients, IMHO:
Thunderbird, which can handle gpg with Enigmail
https://www.enigmail.net/home/...
And Claws-mail, which has gpg and S/MIME support by default:
http://www.claws-mail.org/
OSX users can just install gpgtools and keep on using Mail.
https://gpgtools.org/
As I've said before, Thunderbird supports S/MIME out of the box. Get a key from Comodo you're set for S/MIME.
You need the Enigmail plugin for gpg, but then you're set with gpg
I've never used or even seen Thunderbird in my life but I'm pretty sure email cross-platform compatibility is not something we need to worry about.
In fact I think email should either die or have a massive protocol update of some kind to block spammers, otherwise it's a lost cause.
I use Thunderbird, and find it useful particularly in transferring mails b/w e-mail accounts. Also, if I receive a mail to a 'wrong' account, I can respond to the same email from a different account, thereby enabling me to organize it better. Probably Outlook can do the same thing, but it's way more than what I need, aside from being Windows only (or Windows, iOS and Android only)
For a corporate environment, Outlook definitely makes more sense. Calendar meetings get synchronized, and those who follow Franklin-Covey methods would also use Tasks and other functional folders. That's not available in Thunderbird, and I believe if a corporate environment was working w/ non-Windows and non-Mac platforms, then Seamonkey would probably be a better idea than Thunderbird
Firefox is our weapon to tame misbehaving behemoths. Be it Microsoft. Be it Google. Be it Apple.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I've used Thunderbird since the beginning of time it seems.
Keep in mind that happy users are silent users. I use Firefox, and enjoy it. It runs fast, supports the plugins I want, and seems to be quite stable. More than that, it largely keeps out of my way, so honestly, I don't think about the browser all that much. I've never thought of submitting feedback on that site, because I have no real feedback to offer. That is, I have no real problems, and can't think offhand of anything the program is really lacking.
The only way you can get a true picture is if you get a random sampling among regular Firefox users. Any action initiated by the user to send feedback automatically will skew the result.
If 86% of users didn't like Firefox, I don't think they'd have the market share they do now. BTW, let's take a look at one of the sad faces I picked from the top of that list:
Stop that annoying paranoid shit about "update you flash or it will burn all your family to ashes and eat your left eye while pooping in your mouth". It's not THAT dangerous, user should have a possibility to shut it OFF. And not by clicking on every damned page to allow older plugin work, but by just choosing that option in the settings. I thrusted(sic) you, you were the last normal browser in a pile of shiny useless shit that thinks that user is an idiot. Now you doing this. Damn.
This user apparently wants an option to stay silent about older versions of Flash, which undoubtedly have security issues that need fixing. Should Mozilla "fix" this problem to the user's satisfaction? It's ironic that the user complains the browser "that thinks that user is an idiot" when he's advocating doing something incredibly stupid - not keeping all his plugins current.
Here's another frowny faced gem:
Please fix Norton toolbar 2014.7.8.23 been to long now makes me not want to use Firefox .....
Mozilla apparently needs to fix the Norton toolbar, or this user won't be happy. Good luck with that Mozilla!
I'm not saying that Firefox doesn't have legitimate issues, but my point is that looking at a feedback site such as that one is going to give you very, very skewed results. I've just pointed out two examples on the front page.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I can see why Firefox was created, and I used it quite happily for years. But when it kept memory-leaking worse and worse with every release, I had to let it go. (My job necessarily involves a LOT of web browsing and tabs... and no, I don't work for a porn site.) Chrome does what I need it to, never locks the HDD light on with swap activity, and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. It's fast, and has all the function I require.
GMail. I have essentially infinite storage, access on every internet device in the world, a nearly-perfect spam filter, a great search engine (which is necessary as I do not use folders), and it's fast.
I know what Google "charges" for Chrome and GMail (privacy) and it's a price I'm willing to pay for two products that have made my life much easier.
Do you by any chance have a more detailed write-up of how you configured your system anywhere?
No, I haven't. I can however help you out with specifics, or bits of configuration to get that going, if you care to drop into #fstd on Freenode, say.
read and send from multiple devices while keeping everything centrally for admin/back-up/security purposes. However, that would be a side project that needs to be done in my spare time
Mhm, making the mail accessible to multiple devices would probably involve additionally running an IMAP server (e.g. dovecot). My setup doesn't currently implement that, for remote mail checking I ssh/putty home
[...] or so comprehensive and detailed that I find them overwhelming.
Fortunately those often come with a reasonably default configuration.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Gone Defunct, I guess:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
You want all the stupid flowers, comic sans fonts and other excrescence that your co orkers brighten their day with?
Bog no.... just the ASCII please.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Thanks for the reply. I was indeed thinking of running dovecot or something similar as well.
I think my fundamental problem is that I understand maybe 75% of the underlying theory of how the relevant e-mail infrastructure and general Linux sysadmin work. That's certainly enough to figure out roughly which combination of packages I need to install and what should be possible. However, it's not enough to be confident of not getting some of the details wrong and potentially losing data or otherwise bringing the system down.
I mostly work from home and would potentially be running the mail for some family businesses through the same system, so that risk looks like a very high barrier to entry until I can find the time to learn the remaining 25% and make sure the information I've got is all current. That last point seems to be one of the recurring problems with finding good documentation for some of the popular mail-related tools -- many people have written about one aspect or another, but a lot of the case studies are just a little too far out of date to work with recent versions of everything, which is why I was interested in whether you'd written anything up about a system you're currently working with today.
I won't trouble you for any more information right now, as I don't want to waste your time when realistically I probably won't have time to have another shot at this for a while myself, but thanks again, I do appreciate the offer.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I run Thunderbird on my laptop. It connects to gmail, downloads my mail, and lets me sort the mail into folders. Not to mention always having a local copy of my mail. Couldn't tell you the last time I went to gmail.com from a browser.
Don't even get me started on tags. I hate tags, don't understand why anyone would like them. Put my mail into folders and leave me be.
It's a good idea to now and again go to gmail and check the spam folder for false positives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I have complained for years about memory leaks, all to no avail. I have asked for a way to enumerate memory/cpu usage on a per-tab basis - all of this also goes on deaf ears. They just turn around and pass the buck and blame the addins. In the meantime I routinely have to kill firefox and then restart it. It apologizes about how embarrassing it is that Firefox has "crashed", but the real embarrassment are the memory leaks.
I use Chrome some, but I can't say that I really like it that much. But I am increasingly disgusted with Firefox, and as time goes on, I use it less and less..
Pickup trucks!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
But I have to say, the last year of Firefox has SUCKED!!! It crashesit's slow...it chews up huge amount of resourcesit just SUCKS. And I know I'm going to get flamed with a bunch of "it's not Firefox, it's Flash/Java/other plugin", but that doesn't change the fact that Internet Explorer is handling the same plugins and isn't crashing/slow/eating memory. I'm at the point where I only have 5 websites which I'll use firefox for because I know it can handle them okay. The rest of my surfing has gone back to IE. I'm praying that the next version improves on this, but I'm losing faith...
Firefox abandoned its roots. It started as a "light weight" version of netscape. It is now by far the most bloated application living on my PC.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I'd learned to hate MS Outlook after having to use it at four jobs in a row. Then my next employer didn't want to pay for Outlook, so we all had to use Thunderbird. I learned to miss how much less shit Outlook had been. It's like there's a competition to make the worst email client.
When people like you incorrectly claim that Firefox doesn't suffer from awful performance or excessive memory usage, the rest of us who have experienced these problems know you're wrong.
FF does periodically hang on me for a few seconds to a minute, though that seems limited to just my laptop. It never happens on my wife's computer, my work desktop, or any of the computers at the lab.
Otherwise, performance seems to be more than acceptable. That is, I haven't been tempted to move back to Chrome. (Now, on old machines still running XP, the difference is night and day. Chrome is basically unusable, while FF works just fine. What I find baffling, of course, is that the reverse used to be true!)
The memory leak? It simply doesn't exist. (The original memory "leak", that started this nonsense meme, turned out to be a myth. It never actually existed.*) It's still not true today.** Of course, people still complain about it. I presume its because they either don't know what a memory leak is or just assume that "it" still exists and want to, as the AC so eloquently put it "bitch and moan". Today, it actually uses less memory than Chrome.
Chrome, incidentally, has had more than its fair-share of reported memory leaks and performance issues lately. They just don't have a meme inspired by a myth to go along with it.
But, hey, I like Australis, so nothing I say counts.
* Setting browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 0 magically made the alleged leak vanish. Can you guess why?
** There were a couple of actual serious leaks a few years back, but they were quickly fixed.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Theoretically IMAP gives you a synchronized view of your mail, but in practice there are all kinds of pitfalls.
MAPI and ActiveSync do a great job synchronizing the same view of your email from the server to their respective clients.
Fri Feb 6 2015 22:52:58 PST
This list is too long for Bugzilla's little mind; the Next/Prev/First/Last buttons won't appear on individual bugs.
Status: UNCONFIRMED, NEW, ASSIGNED, REOPENED
Product: Firefox
10000 bugs found.
Firefox bug list (probably incomplete because of a query limit of 10000)
You would think that with that many open bugs, they would know what to work on.
And I don't mean just close them as "won't fix", but actually work on them, fix them.
Jump on new ESRs when they are ready. You should be on version 31 instead. In my experience the newer the FF version, the less crashes. Versions 34 and then 35 seem to have fixed stuff, I'm not getting crap like I used to a year ago. It's more likely to pause and "think" for 5 seconds than to crash (on my PC and for now)
Perhaps he has a phone with a proper keyboard? Possibly with a slick trackpad or (real) stylus for positioning the cursor?
I know, useful tools aren't 'cool' these days...
Required reading for internet skeptics
The only thing worse than being stuck on an airplane someone talking to someone on their phone: being stuck next to someone talking to no one on their phone.
(You just know that they only do that in public.)
Required reading for internet skeptics
...when PDF display in Chrome is *significantly* slower than in Firefox. I just switched to mostly Chrome because I watch a lot of Youtube lecture videos and HTM5 support esp. for Youtube still is lacking in FF, but whenever I open a PDF I often find myself stopping Chrome and opening FF just for the PDF. Firefox's inline PDF display is a clear winner by a big margin over the slooooow Chrome. Once it's loaded it's fine, but Chrome takes about 10 times as long to load the same file. Since that's hardly due to download speed differences I guess it's processing of the incoming PDF is much slower.
They shuffled menu items around.
The horror! I didn't actually notice any changes, but when I do I'll be sure to rant about that deal-breaking change!
They deleted the status bar which showed you the full URL when you hovered over it.
Terrible, isn't it? Now it only shows the full URL when you hover over ... ummm.... er ... to hell with them!
They came out with FireFox 29 which is a UI abomination.
I know, it's crazy! The last thing users want is a simple interface they can completely customize to satisfy their wants and needs.
Required reading for internet skeptics
If I use a chat program, I use a chat program that everyone uses not one that happens to be integrated with whatever browser I use. If I use a pdf reader, I use a pdf reader that's good and not integrated in my browser to the level that it is annoying me. If I use a browser, I want the browser to be fast, responsive and not stuck all the time because some slow loading pages or slow plugins.
Seriously. Remove half your code base and FF might stand a chance in the future.
"Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity."
/svc
/medsvc
I agree. That's why I stopped using Google's Chrome. On one computer Google installed three system services without notifying me:
Google Update Service (gupdate), "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"
Google Update Service (gupdatem), "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Update\GoogleUpdate.exe"
Google Updater Service (gusvc), "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Common\Google Updater\GoogleUpdaterService.exe"
Why does Google want to run programs every time I use that computer, rather than notifying me of available updates when I run Chrome? I wasn't asked if it was okay to do that.
Also shocking: Installing Google Chrome caused the installation of a Google Chrome plug-in into Firefox. Why does Google want to have control over my use of Firefox?
"Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser available for Microsoft Windows, Android and Linux (with other operating systems in development), focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser! link
Keep in mind that happy users are silent users.
Oh STFU with that. What the heck is the point in getting feedback if all you're going to say it "screw it, most users are silent and happy"? What we KNOW is from the feedback, and it's overwhelmingly negative. Here's my feedback:
I don't like tiny icons.
I don't like black and white icons.
I don't like the reduced toolbar customizability of Australis.
I don't like the lack of a status bar.
I don't like a popup for my bookmarks by default instead of a sidebar.
And I definitaly Do Not Like tabs on top!
All of those changes were tested before major release, and major opposition to them was voiced. On every occasion, people opposing the change were told to fuck off. So I (and many others) did. Fuck you, Firefox, with your shitty UX changes.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I still use suite version, SeaMonkey (used to be called Mozilla). It was designed since Netscape days, especially its Communicator.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Slashdot removes "& # 39 ;" HTML characters (Without spaces or quote marks that is an apostrophe.). So, there are many places in the above comment where the ' characters aren't shown.
Disband and move on with your life.
Mozilla has been a mess for a couple of years already. Just let it die.
I use Seamonkey for most of the critical stuff like online banking and also for Email. (on my previous machine I used Thunderbird for Email, but I figured that since I had Seamonkey running anyway I might as well use the mail section of it.
For general browsing (like /. ) I still use FF
I don't use Chrome, and I don't hsve a Google or GMail account.
BTW SM is now up to 2.32.1
The only point I was making was that claiming "86% of Firefox users are unhappy" solely based on that feedback page is likely a mistake because of selection bias. Nothing more, nothing less.
Honestly, I do sympathize, because I felt exactly the same way about Windows 8. Your situation is worse, because you can't just safely sit back on older versions of the software due to security concerns - at least Windows 7 is kept up to date via patches for a while still. Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 also tossed a visual design that I loved from the previous version and uglified everything to an incredible degree. I elected to use it anyway because of the increased C++ functionality I wanted. Fortunately, MS has listened to the overwhelming negative feedback and has made significant improvements both in Windows and Visual Studio.
I don't really care all that much, but since you feel so passionately about the matter, I do hope Mozilla listens to yours and others opinions on the matter.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Up to 3.6.
Then they decided, lets make it worse, follow the gnome approach and remove all useful settings, next they decided "it does not look like chrome" and today its not the browser it used to be.
Oh you probably know people on Slashdot who do, even if you don't know any personally. If you've been reading the gnupg related stories lately you've probably seen a few comments with PGP/INLINE signatures.
Maybe, you'd have to define "well".
I've been using gnupg to sign my e-mail for years now. I set it up and it just works.
Thanks. I downloaded the latest preview, and I'm running into the same issues that, judging by the forums, I see a lot of users having. Startup is slow - almost 5x slower than eclipse. It doesn't peg the cpus - far from it - which leaves me guessing that their locking scheme is too conservative and their inter-process communications kind of suck (it starts up 5 processes, but none of them does very much at any one time). And they still haven't fixed the bug that, if you open the settings window and then quit the browser, it leaves the settings window open. Closing that last means that the next launch, it's the only window that shows (because it restores old windows). Exiting that leaves no windows and 4 processes that have to be killed by hand.
I did manage to get Opera running, and it starts in a couple of seconds, and uses just a fraction of the memory.
It's sad in a way ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I any day prefer FF over Chrome, it is much more developer friendly (no certificate warning permanent store/page source reloads/do not check updates everytime/etc), but the ridiculous over-use of version #s and breaking of addons incompatible with new versions ticked me off. I would rather be with a less-friendly browser which doesnt break its addons time to time.
Email is not just the way of the future. My kids use imessage to communicate with their trendy friends with Apple gear. Indeed we needed to buy them an ipad touch just so they could keep up. My wife uses Facebook to communicate. Less fashionable people communicate with Kick, and a few neanderthals even use Skype.
The idea that somebody on GMail or Outlook or even Thunderbird cam communicate with an iPhone is an accident of history. Why would anybody want to support technology that can help others steal the customers that they own? Blogs and RSS are already dead, long live Facebook! Email will follow.
I'll say one thing - now that it's working, the original opera starts up faster than any of the other browsers.
I can probably uninstall and reinstall Chrome to get it to work, but honestly, I've always preferred firefox (probably because it had the best developer tools).
Firefox still works, except for some subdomains where it insists I'm not logged in. Turns out that beta-science-beta.slashdot.org loads some scripts that science.slashdot.org doesn't. Sloppy, sloppy. Use beta to view a subdomain once, once, and then classic works fine. Cookie, me want COOKIE!
Sure, we can have decent conversations. The only issue is to try to reduce (note: not eliminate) the number of times you spam your hosts file. It really irritates a lot of people. Why not just use an account and put it in your .sig? Problem solved :-)
It's not like I ever get mod points any more, so no modbombing from me.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I have previously dealt with "sockpuppetry", but I will do so again.
For quite a while I was unable to read, much less use a computer, and sometimes I couldn't see much at all. Once I could see well enough to try again, my laptop refused to boot, no matter what. I had written down at least some of my passwords on a business card (including Slashdot), but after I was told that I would eventually go blind, and things weren't looking too good at the time (pun intended) it didn't seem to matter. I've since moved, so I don't know if I even have it any more.
While I can see with my left eye, I can't read with it - everything is too distorted even after surgery due to macular pucker and to drain debris from retinal bleeding. (gross video)
Both eyes have had 4,000 laser scars each to help control bleeding (which from my understanding is twice the norm), and my right eye is now good enough to read, though there is some distortion, which may be gradually increasing. I've tried several times to program, but there was too much "work" for my eye to do to make any sustained attempt, and even reading was a real pain until my brain learned to ignore the signals from my left eye when reading or writing.
Think of it - if those accounts had been used any time recently, there would be records of it. Plus, you don't get any karma points if you don't participate to some extent, so even if they have "excellent" karma, they haven't been used (just look at the last posts. The last ones that I could find date back to May 2012. And the posts you link to are from 2011. So, even if I had the passwords, how would I get mod points without posting for several years? It doesn't work that way.
Also, I never had any paid ads anywhere. Not from google, not from yahoo, not from my own boss. And obviously I've stopped doing web crap. Kind of hard when my color perception is now way off and I can't see straight. And I dumped all my personal sites, since I couldn't see anyway at the time, so what's the point. Ironically, I paid for 10 years of hosting in advance (a really good deal) and I still have a few years left, but ... can't use it. And honestly, don't want to. I'm glad to be out of the salt mines.
I still miss programming, but this is my new reality. I may try it again just to scratch an itch, but obviously I'd need to have further improvements in my vision, which isn't going to happen. There's no open space to laser on either retina, so any further lasering to save the center will result in more loss of peripheral vision.
And of course, with all the bad news in the last 4 years, my PTSD and MDD kind of got out of control on several occasions - the worst being 3 years ago and last fall (still recovering from the depression from this last one and have another appointment with my psychiatrist next Thursday to see if adjusting my meds again will result in further improvements).
And of course, there's my journal entry about What it is like to be mentally ill. Laugh if it will make you feel better. Tell the world if you must - I wrote it so that my experience might help someone.
But it's easy enough to verify that I haven't used those accounts in years, and I post way too frequently to get mod points (They used to have that in the FAQ). I HAVE meta-moderated a few times. Big deal :-(
PS: I still think the best approach would be to log in and put it in your .sig. If anyone mod-bombs you, it will be obvious and you can complain. Since only logged-in users get mod points, (unless they changed that), anyone foolish enough to do that kind of deserves a kick in the shins.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Seeing how much you made fun of me by calling me mentally ill over the whole sex change thing, I thought you might find it funny that I am, but for events that happened several years after I discovered what I was, and gave rise to PTSD and MDD. As well as panic attacks, hyper vigilance, and a host of other problems that I "kind of" dealt with for decades without actually dealing with them.
Seeing someone beaten to death will do that to you; more so if you know you're next and probably only have a few minutes to live. If that doesn't mess up a kid's mind, then they're probably already on the way to becoming a sociopath.
TTYL
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Every time they added features the addon developers took a hit. In many cases the features already existed as addons. They kept the addon developers busy because for every feature they added there was someone who wanted to disable it. But the worst thing they did was to keep changing the API. Some of these changes required pretty much rewritting the addon just to continue functioning.
A lot of the addon developers have walked away. A few addons have been revived from dormancy or forked, but many have just died off. The features are still needed but the developers aren't willing to keep rewriting their code. There are only a few addons that are worth maintaining. And without all the addons Firefox is just another browser.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
If you didn't know about it, you were one of the few :-) I was originally outed in 2005 or 2006 on slashdot and made no secret about it. That's why you'd see me referred to by others as "she" or "her" in others posts even under that account.
See, there's an advantage to having an account. You would have probably heard it through the grapevine (great song, btw)..
I get where you're coming from, so no more anti-APK posts from me. But you're free to continue making fun of me, because it is a free world, and I do believe in freedom of speech.
BTW, the uninstall of vivaldi has been running for 4 hours now ... turns out it had installed in my startup, and since it couldn't display a window due to the settings bug, you can guess the rest. It's gone now, but sheesh!. Oh well, c'est la vie.
And I really would encourage you to get an account. If you just put your hosts file in your .sig instead of repeatedly on every page, you might be surprised at how people will appreciate it. Just a thought.
Oh, and thanks for the "get well."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Look, I understand why you might find it's the wrong thing to do. For most "normals" it absolutely would be. And then there are those who want it for all the wrong reasons. The typical "wrong" candidate is what I call a "transvestite that went too far." They game the system, and get what they want, instead of what they need. They're not happy afterwards, they blame everyone else but themselves for the negative outcome, join some religion that will back up their need to blame the doctors, the "system", everyone else but themselves.
A few famous cases have shown that it isn't for everyone. Still,with proper screening, it works. (more reading). And there are a lot more of us than the official numbers indicate. Other countries have upped the prevalence by several orders of magnitude after trolling through their medical databases (single-payer universal health care makes that easy) to between 1 in 500 and 1 in 50!!!
On the knee: Surgeons did my left knee the old way (a 4-inch cut to get access) to fix a torn meniscus when draining off the fluid didn't work - but it's lasted decades with no real problems. Maybe it's because I was younger (19) so I healed better. The scar is pretty much invisible now, even with a tan.
Now on the question of advertisers and host files, it's not a question of proving anything. I'm just saying you'll have a better reception by being less "loud" in how you offer it. If you don't want to put it in a .sig, another way would be to post one paragraph that says "you might want to consider this as well" with a link. Posting those long challenges just makes it look like you're shouting. Give a chance for people to make up their own minds instead.
You might be surprised :-) TTYL
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Okay, whatever works for you. In the end, free speech is free speech, right ? :-) TTYL
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.