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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.

27 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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."
    6. 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."
    7. 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."
    8. 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.
    9. 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.

  2. 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!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

  5. 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 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.

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

    Bueller?
    Bueller?
    Bueller?

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

      Yep.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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?

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

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

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