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Open Source Anniversaries: 6 Years of Go, 11 of Firefox (golang.org)

Posted by timothy on from the tradition-of-heritage dept.

digitalPhant0m writes: Six years ago today the Go language was released as an open source project. Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the project's 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories. And, offline, we see new Go events and user groups pop up around the world with regularity And Opensource.com notes that Mozilla Firefox has just hit 11 years of age, too.

65 comments

  1. i cant resist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    go get them foxy

  2. How the mighty have fallen by LichtSpektren · · Score: 1, Troll

    When Firefox was the hot new thing, it was mindbogglingly awesome. I remember just how happy I was when I first installed it (I think 2004?) and realized it was about twice as fast as Internet Explorer 6. I just about shit myself when I first installed Adblock Plus and saw it skip video ads.

    Dark times followed. I think the manufactured outrage over Brandon Eich was the shark that Mozilla jumped over. After that, our fast, secure, modular, FLOSS browser became a shitheap and is now inferior in just about all ways to Chromium and Pale Moon.

    1. Re:How the mighty have fallen by squiggleslash · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure Firefox 4.0 was the point most of us started seriously panicking about the direction of Firefox, which was some years ago. That was the browser that suddenly kept needing gigabytes of memory, had the first Chrome-inspired UI, and the first enforced updates. It's never been the same each.

      Eich? I was going to use Firefox regardless of whether Eich stayed or not. It's ironic how many people seemed to feel that it was an outrage that people might stop using Firefox over Eich's poor handling of his scandal, but then themselves felt they should stop using Firefox because Eich resigned.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    2. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      And yet, when Mozilla tries to get back on track with Servo, e10s and a new add-on API to make it secure once more, they get nothing but sh*t from devs. There is no winning for them, only whining from the likes of you.

    3. Re:How the mighty have fallen by LichtSpektren · · Score: 1

      Eich's resignation was the turning point. I don't know what influence he had behind the doors of Mozilla (perhaps it's just a coincidence that his resignation is when everything started falling apart), but after his departure is when the Mozilla board decided to monetize Firefox with Pocket and integrated spyware advertisements.

    4. Re:How the mighty have fallen by LichtSpektren · · Score: 1

      Until Mozilla decides to rip out Pocket and the ads that read your browsing history, there's nothing they can do to win me back, thanks. The lack of x86_64 build for Windows, telemetry and Bing by default, the stupid shit they can't stop adding ("Hello" for starters), memory leaks and RAM gobbling are all tertiary problems in comparison.

    5. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dark times followed. I think the manufactured outrage over Brandon Eich was the shark that Mozilla jumped over. After that, our fast, secure, modular, FLOSS browser became a shitheap and is now inferior in just about all ways to Chromium and Pale Moon.

      I would date it back further to Mozilla dropping support for the MNG format while the format was used by Mozilla's own themes, ignoring the developers who fixed all of the technical reasons for keeping it out, ignoring the large number of users who called for support to be reinstated, and citing the fact that users wanted the format supported as a reason for keeping it out. Then there were rumors of the executive staff being filled by people who were not technical and didn't do a damn thing for the browser except move money from Google which was used to hire more nontechnical people. Then some idiot decided to raise the major version level every patchlevel release, breaking convention and plugins, and Mozilla sent their engineers here to try to argue to other software engineers that there is no possible way for software to have a minor or patchlevel release, and I feel sorry for the guys who had to do that. This may be related to Mozilla hiring as their senior release manager someone from Model View Culture who had a stronger reputation as a feminist activist than as a software engineer.

    6. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bullsh*t. Mozilla is "fixing" something that isn't broken.

      Their "fixes" will break add-ons that have millions of users.

      Their "fixes" require devs to completely rewrite existing, working code.

      Their "fixes" will turn Firefox into FireChrome, which nobody wants or needs.

      R.I.P. Firefox, hello Pale Moon (http://www.palemoon.org)

    7. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Firefox can still be lean-ish, you just have to beat the lean into it.

      One thing that helped controlling Firefox's memory addiction for me is to install some extension that suspends tabs that aren't in use. I use Auto Unload Tab, but there are others. For me, this cut that memory use from about 2.5G to 1G, with about 6 windows open and a total of about 200 tabs. I cannot believe that this feature doesn't come as standard...

      Firefox isn't perfect, and I disagree with a lot of decisions they made, but, if we are honest for a second, we'll admit that Chrome is pretty addicted to resources too. Right now, my chrome is eating up almost 1G of memory with 5 tabs open. I could probably bring that number down by installing an extension that suspends tabs, but I just can't be arsed to do it.

      I think that this is more the fault of the current state of the web rather than the browsers themselves: Websites pull so much crap from several different sources that there is no wonder a couple of tabs kill all existing memory.

    8. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you remember wrong. People have been complaining about Firefox starting to suck maybe a year before.

    9. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One thing that helped controlling Firefox's memory addiction for me is to install some extension that suspends tabs that aren't in use. I use Auto Unload Tab, but there are others. For me, this cut that memory use from about 2.5G to 1G, with about 6 windows open and a total of about 200 tabs. I cannot believe that this feature doesn't come as standard...

      If you restore a previous session it will lazy load the tabs, closing the browser once a day does the trick.

      The issue is that implementing thousands pages of web standards is pretty hard. so you're stuck with the same engines and web appers wanting new features.
      It would be easier to just replace browsers with a virtual machine.

    10. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      when the Mozilla board decided to monetize Firefox with Pocket and integrated spyware advertisements.

      Integrated spyware advertisements?! Huh, what exactly have you been smoking?

      Firefox is the browser that brought us the do-not-track flag, and since almost
      noboy seemed to honor it Mozilla introduced integrated tracking protection in
      the latest Firefox release.

      Oh...wait! Sorry, my bad.
      I shall not feed trolls!
      I shall not feed trolls!
      I shall not feed trolls! ...

    11. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure Firefox 4.0 was the point most of us started seriously panicking about the direction of Firefox, which was some years ago.

      Users: "Where's the status bar?"
      UXtards :"You don't need a status bar."
      Users: "You UXtards obviously never hover over links to see if they're RickRolls or goatses, do you?"
      UXtards: "Fuck you, users, it's our product, you just use it. If you don't like the UX, just write an extension."

      4.0 was where I got off the ride. The last good UI was 3.6. Every UX decision since then has been about the "X" - crossing out, closing down, and denying features that users wanted, in favor of misfeatures that UX designers/marketroids wanted.

      A product is fatally flawed when its designers tell its userbase that the community's job is to undo the work of its own development team.

    12. Re:How the mighty have fallen by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Once upon a time, I donated enough money so that Firefox put my name (and the name of others) in a newspaper ad - a full page. I thought then, "That's a waste. Why did I donate?" Opera was getting a bit buggy at the time and bloated. I used Firefox for a while. Opera rewrote their browser, based on Chromium I guess, and it's actually pretty good so, for a while now, I only use Firefox long enough to download Opera - unless I just add the repo and do it that way. I usually stick to the beta builds, they're stable enough.

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    13. Re:How the mighty have fallen by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Pale Moon has one of the oddest installers (on Linux) that I've ever seen and, let's just say, Linux has some odd installers. :/

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    14. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When Firefox was the hot new thing, it was mindbogglingly awesome.

      So why not keep using that version and continue to boggle your mind?

      now inferior in just about all ways to Chromium and Pale Moon

      What's an example of inferiority?

    15. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Once upon a time, I donated enough money so that Firefox put my name (and the name of others) in a newspaper ad - a full page.

      Dude get over it, the donation was $30 to get your name in that that ad. But it is an example of where monetary donations to open source projects goes wrong, it isnt necessarily used to improve the software. Contract people to do a specific thing or contribute code/documentation.

    16. Re:How the mighty have fallen by KGIII · · Score: 1

      Oh, I am over it. On the other hand, I think I donated like ten times that amount. At the time, I was hopeful. I got my money's worth of use from it. I just wish that they'd have kept it up. Given that I donate to lots of other projects, I'd probably still donate to Firefox if they needed money, spent it wisely, and created a good product. But no, over it is exactly what I am. In fact, that's why I mention it. 'Cause I'm done using them unless I'm somehow inconvenienced into doing so. It's bad enough that I don't go to BSD-land as I can't get a decent browser there. (At least, I've yet to find one.)

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    17. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Users: "You UXtards obviously never hover over links to see if they're RickRolls or goatses, do you?"

      Umm, what? You should try the current version of Firefox and hover over a link.

    18. Re:How the mighty have fallen by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      When they rip out core technologies that devs have been working with and spending time on for years like XUL and XPCOM, damn straight they get shit from devs. And they deserve it, and for their product to wither and die.

      --
      == Jez ==
      Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
    19. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's called "evolving" , I know devs hates that though. If it were for them, we'd still all be using COBOL

    20. Re:How the mighty have fallen by exomondo · · Score: 1

      Users: "You UXtards obviously never hover over links to see if they're RickRolls or goatses, do you?"

      TinyURL and the like removed that.

    21. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      UXtards: "Fuck you, users, it's our product, you just use it. If you don't like the UX, just write an extension."

      Well yes. Are you making a meaningful contribution to have them do what you want them to do? Probably not. It is their product, they arent beholden to your whim and if you dont like it then dont use it but stop being an whining little entitlist bitch.

    22. Re:How the mighty have fallen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Which is why I never follow any shortened links. Not only do you not know what's behind it, but they are absolutely pointless anywhere besides in a face to face conversation where neither person has a computer, tablet, phone or piece of paper with them.

  3. GStreamer as well by Omega+Hacker · · Score: 2

    Might as well throw this out there too: GStreamer's first release was 16 years ago on Halloween - 0.1.0 "gscreamer".

    --
    GStreamer - The only way to stream!
  4. Re:Firefox nostalgia by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Remember when the #1 selling point of Firefox, though, was that it was lean, mean, and efficient (at least compared to the browser then-called Mozilla...)?

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  5. Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Firefox SUCKS nowadays. Can't stop a page from loading, can't go back or forward, takes 10 clicks and a tapdance to accomplish what used to be simple and obvious, can't even sort your bookmarks alphabetically. Really, Mozilla? We can't even sort our freaking bookmarks anymore? W... T... F?

    The add-on system, which seemed innovative at first, has devolved into a clusterfuck of incompatible and abandoned projects. Configuring firefox now takes about 3 hours when it used to take 10 minutes, and you STILL don't have all the functionality of firefox 3.x.

    1. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That all is more a symptom of the way WebPages now are laden with javashit malware. People want to think of themselves as 'web developers', not just plebes marking up text.

    2. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It would be super cool if browsers could handle this new reality of JS scripts by not allowing them to block the UI.
      A simple timeout is insufficient.

    3. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The add-on system, which seemed innovative at first, has devolved into a clusterfuck of incompatible and abandoned projects. Configuring firefox now takes about 3 hours when it used to take 10 minutes, and you STILL don't have all the functionality of firefox 3.x.

      Pale Moon. Firefox 3.x UI. None of the Firefux 4.x marketing / bloat / UXtard gang rape.

    4. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like Opera used to do?

      Opera 12 NEEDS to be open sourced yesterday!

    5. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pale Moon crashes every 30 seconds.

    6. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pale Moon crashes every 30 seconds.

      I have used it for months, and have yet to experience a crash. It must be your machine.

    7. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Opera 12 NEEDS to be open sourced yesterday!

      That's bullcrap! Firefox has been open source for years and people are still bitching and whining about it being buggy and crashing and using too much memory. Opera has nothing to gain from open sourcing their code. Stop pretending open source is the solution, it just isnt!

    8. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Pale Moon crashes every 30 seconds.

      I have used it for months, and have yet to experience a crash. It must be your machine.

      Probably holding it wrong, you dont have the problem so of course it isnt a problem.

    9. Re: Agreed by Visarga · · Score: 1

      The user interface should always be on and prioritized so we can cancel anything or go back. I am looking at Safari mobile too.

    10. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The point was Opera is now based on Chromium (so just a Chrome clone). Opera 12 has actual useful features that got wiped out in the rebooted version.

    11. Re:Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For me, it crashes every 29.5 seconds, to be exact.

    12. Re: Agreed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So use Opera 12 then. Even if they open sourced it its not like the "community" would maintain it just like they dont fix the bugs in Firefox, just like they dont maintain a pre-systemd fork of Debian (despite all the vocal anti-systemd complaining). That is one of the biggest attempted cons by open source advocates, that the "community" is some kind of entity with unlimited capability and resources and all you have to do is open source your code and the community will maintain it.

  6. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The story of Firefox is a sad one indeed.

    When 1.5 came around, it was finally great, it was a nice solid browser that could only get better, more speed, better memory management and efficient.
    Then 2 happened. Then 3. Time to start embedding extensions in the browser core, that'll be NEAT.
    Then 4 through god knows what version now.
    Now goes the NPAPI.
    Worse, soon goes the entire extensions framework in favour of a less flexible system. (not that it fucking matters, every damn FF extension has been constantly getting killed by new versions of the API because Mozilla don't understand the purpose of APIs and default values)

    RIP Firefox. You were bloat. Now you're just streamlined bloat.

  7. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And what will you install instead, chrome? A browser that will also support WebVR, has multiprocess browsing and a revamped add-on platform?

    Honestly, Firefox was dragging behind badly with an unsecure plugin architecture and single process thread that would lock up the browser when it was loading an heavy page.

  8. Firefox is open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Correction: Iceweasel is the open source project, and Firefox is Iceweasel plus a proprietary talkback crash reporting system.

  9. What about Phoenix/Firebird? by wardrich86 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Weren't Firefox's precursors also open-source? This would make it the (roughly) 17th anniversary for them.

    1. Re:What about Phoenix/Firebird? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Phoenix 0.1 was released in September 2002, so that's 13 years, not 17.

    2. Re:What about Phoenix/Firebird? by eWarz · · Score: 1

      Phoenix is predated by the original Mozilla Application Suite, which was a huge monstrosity of a browser, email/newsgroup client, and others. It was slow, used a ton of memory, and was buggy. According to Wikipedia it was founded in 1998, which makes sense since I remember using it somewhere around the end of the 90s or early 2000s. That being said, that would make Mozilla 17 years old, not 13 as you mentioned.

    3. Re:What about Phoenix/Firebird? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think you meant to reply to me. We were talking about Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, not Mozilla AS, and that product had it's first release 13 years ago.

      If we were talking about the NGLayout/Gecko engine, that one is 17 years old.

      If we're talking about the oldest pieces of code used in Firefox, we might as well be taking about how old my grandfather's old axe is...

  10. Does Anyone Use Go? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Bueller?
    Bueller?
    Bueller?

    1. Re:Does Anyone Use Go? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Everyday, all day. If you can get over occasionally feeling like a secondary citizen when running anything but 64-bit linux, it is fantastic.

    2. Re:Does Anyone Use Go? by Ixpath · · Score: 1

      Yep.

    3. Re:Does Anyone Use Go? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No.
      I guess you can say Go never really went anywhere.

  11. Re: Firefox nostalgia by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 2

    I remember when one of the marketing points of Opera was that it was so lightweight and portable that the entire installer fit on a single 1.44M floppy disk.

  12. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Death to webkit.

  13. Get off my lawn by psyclone · · Score: 1

    I was using Firefox as my primary browser since 0.7, which is about 12.5 - 13 years ago.

    Damn, that makes me old.

    1. Re:Get off my lawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was using Firefox, I mean Firebird, I mean Phoenix, since version 0.2

    2. Re:Get off my lawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I was using Firefox, I mean Firebird, I mean Phoenix, since version 0.2

      Me too. We should have known that one day the project would be managed by people that would ruin it.

    3. Re:Get off my lawn by eWarz · · Score: 1

      I've been using it since it was first released...Phoenix I believe it was. Revolutionary for the time. Chrome has since superseded it in both speed and reliability. I quit using Firefox after getting tired of pages crashing the browser. It's probably gotten better since, but my life now revolves around Google Chrome.

  14. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Rosy goggles about a Firefox that never existed? Loathing for Firefox doing what they must to remain tenable? Yup, I'm on Slashdot alright. Up next: blind Mozilla hatred and baseless claims of Chromification.

  15. Re:Firefox nostalgia by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 2

    Before they started bundling crap like "Hello", and changing the UI every 45 seconds to try and copy Chrome, while ignoring 11 year old bugs.

    I feel 3.0 was peak Firefox. I remember the buzz and the huge counts of Downloads on release day. 3.6 was the last reasonable version before the whole project went off the rails.

  16. Re:Firefox nostalgia by exomondo · · Score: 1

    while ignoring 11 year old bugs.

    As in they are not fixing them or they are ignoring pull requests from OSS contributors that fix them?

  17. Firefox is still the best. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What started as Mozilla Suite has turned into many forks. They were going to call it Phoenix (and did) but the name was patented so they chose the name Firefox.

    Many of the extensions are very good. It would suck to surf the web without several of them tbh.

    Here's portableapps.com's sourceforge folder for portable versions.
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/files/Mozilla%20Firefox,%20Portable%20Ed./

    For Linux/BSD users, you already know how to use older versions if you want to.

  18. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Midori.

  19. Re:Firefox nostalgia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Before they started bundling crap like "Hello"

    It wasn't what you were looking for? I can see it in your comment; I can see it in your words. It's nothing you ever wanted, and your arms aren't open wide.

  20. Re:Firefox nostalgia by LinuxIsGarbage · · Score: 1

    More like "Bugzilla reports repeatedly marked 'won't fix', and reopened several times over the past decade".

    Unfortunately I can't post examples right off.

  21. Re:Firefox nostalgia by exomondo · · Score: 1

    If they're actually bugs then perhaps the community should submit fixes (or fund fixes).