Firefox 49 Postponed One Week Due To Unexpected Bugs (softpedia.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Softpedia: Mozilla has announced this week that it is delaying the release of Firefox 49 for one week to address two unexpected bugs. Firefox 49, which was set for release on Tuesday, September 13, will now launch the following Tuesday, on September 20... Firefox 49 is an important release in Mozilla's grand scheme of things when it comes to Firefox. This is the version when Mozilla will finish multi-process support rollout (a.k.a. e10s, or Electrolysis), and the version when Firefox launches the new WebExtensions API that replaces the old Add-ons API, making Firefox compatible with Chromium extensions.
Firefox's release manager explained the delays as "two blocking issues and the need for a bit more time to evaluate the results of their fixes/backouts" -- one of which apparently involves opening Giphy GIFS on Twitter.

Comments

Ah.. another week....

[beheaderaswp]

Another week until I do not use this slow browser....

Glad they keep going for diversity sake- but it's a sluggish pile of code. Beloved though it is.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[jandersen]

Another week until I do not use this slow browser....

Glad they keep going for diversity sake- but it's a sluggish pile of code. Beloved though it is.

Browser speed has always struck me as slightly irrelevant, when in the majority of cases it is the fault of the websites, when things are slow. Although there is one case where it is definitely something about Firefox: Try to load http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/ (Denmark's Radio - "the Danish BBC" if you are kind) - it loads fast enough, but the whole browser freezes for ~10 sec when you scroll down; loading the same page in Konqueror (yes, there are some that use it) displays none of these problems. I have no idea why.

But the real problems, for me at least, are: 1) The tendency in Firefox to switch to https when you activate Javascript, and then being unable to load the page, and 2) The increasing number of unwanted features, like embedded search engines that cannot be disabled and similar. I hate it when I mistype an address and get an idiotic search result from Google, Yahoo or whatever; all I want is an error message.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what you mean by browser speed. Firefox slows down massively when you use a ton of tabs. There must be some 2^N algorithms under the hood as that's the only conclusion I can come up with to explain the massive UI jitters. Closing many of those tabs does speed the browser up again, but it never releases a corresponding amount memory. If you're a heavy tab user and like to keep Firefox open, you eventually run out of memory or are forced to restart it due to the frustration of 15-25 second UI freezes when you open a page in a new tab. Oddly enough Firefox tends to crash a lot on closing when you're near max memory limits, so you can keep using a slow browser or close and crash. Then you reopen a profile with a thousand or more suspended tabs and it can take over 10 minutes until the UI responds to anything. Think about that. While very few people use that many tabs, there's no reason it should take 10 minutes. These are suspended tabs. Firefox is database focused, so all the browsers needs to do is load a 1000 list of tab ids, 1000 looks ups for the tab names, and 1000 look ups for tab icons yet it spends over 10 minutes doing that ( meaning 5 operations a second). Something is just not right with its performance, though I doubt the other browsers can handle that may tabs at all. Despite how advanced browsers are, they're also horribly designed pieces of software.

Hopefully their multi-process support will help, but considering there's something fundamentally wrong with how they manage tabs I doubt they're going to handle this properly too.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate it when I mistype an address and get an idiotic search result from Google, Yahoo or whatever; all I want is an error message.

Go to about:config and set:

    keyword.enabled false
    browser.fixup.alternate.enabled false
    browser.fixup.dns_first_for_single_words true

Enjoy!

Re:Ah.. another week....

[AmiMoJo]

I've noticed that the x64 build of Pale Moon is much more stable and doesn't have nearly as much slow down as the x86 version. Don't know if the same applies to Firefox, from which it was forked.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[Anonymous Coward]

There must be some 2^N algorithms under the hood as that's the only conclusion I can come up with to explain the massive UI jitters

UI jitters are caused by the fact that, in Firefox, content script blocks chrome script. The more tabs open, the more likely it is for this to happen. The main point of the Electrolysis project is to fix this, so that the chrome never has to wait for the content.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[ChoGGi]

That page works fine for me. I'll trot out the usual problematic extension installed?

1) No idea
2) this page?

Server not found

Firefox can't find the server at www.fdsgdfgdfg.com.

        Check the address for typing errors such as ww.example.com instead of www.example.com
        If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
        If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[CrashNBrn]

I used to have that massive slowdown and lockups. Electrolysis has mitigated that somewhat. If you've enabled Electrolysis try adding this to about:config

dom.ipc.processCount = 10

Works fairly well with 8GB of ram. I haven't tested with a higher value (and more ram) yet.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[doom]

Browser speed has always struck me as slightly irrelevant

Have you ever tried to do manual edits in the location window? You hit backspace five times and then wait a second for firefox to catch-up. How is that possible? It's just editing text.

Re:Ah.. another week....

[TangoMargarine]

it loads fast enough, but the whole browser freezes for ~10 sec when you scroll down; loading the same page in Konqueror (yes, there are some that use it) displays none of these problems. I have no idea why.

You think that's bad, for awhile loading the facebook mainpage would lock the entire OS for a literal minute while it waited for akamai or whatever to resolve.

Compared to what?

[Mal-2]

Aren't all bugs more or less "unexpected"? If you expected them, you'd check for them and hopefully squash them before they are committed.

I think the more appropriate word here might have been "blocking". They're severe enough to delay a release over.

Re:Compared to what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't all bugs more or less "unexpected"?

You don't use Windows much, do you?

Re:Compared to what?

[Mal-2]

Actually, I use both Windows 10 and Linux.

On a Chromebook.

You'd think my whole day would be spent chasing after head-scratcher bugs, but no, it actually works quite well. Haswell (and to a slightly lesser extent, Broadwell) Chromebooks are quite amenable to "off-label" use. Even OS X is an option if you choose the right one. (I didn't.)

Re:Compared to what?

[MoarSauce123]

No, working in QA and going back and forth with devs and business analysts I often get overruled because devs claims this or that "cannot be done". Fact is, they are just too lazy and the BAs don't want to deal with it either...until a customer complaints about exactly that, then it is top priority and a fix is put in place within ten minutes. Those are bugs that at least from the QA side are indeed expected...and totally avoidable if folks would do their job and do it right the first time.

Re:Compared to what?

[squiggleslash]

Devs say "It can't be done", or devs say "Given everything else on our plate, there's no way we'll get it in before the release date"?

There's a world of difference between the two, and that's why when customers start complaining about a particular bug, it gets fixed - not because devs were lazy the first time around, but because management cleared their time to work on it.

Re:Compared to what?

[swillden]

No, working in QA and going back and forth with devs and business analysts I often get overruled because devs claims this or that "cannot be done". Fact is, they are just too lazy and the BAs don't want to deal with it either...until a customer complaints about exactly that, then it is top priority and a fix is put in place within ten minutes.

That they are just too lazy is one possibility, but I've worked with a lot of devs in my career, and I haven't met many who work that way. Some more likely explanations are:

1. It can't be done without either massive work or an ugly hack that the devs expect will bite them on the butt later.
2. It can't be done without hugely complicating other, in-progress work.
3. It can't be done without creating large problems for other teams (e.g. it creates a potential for a doubling of server workload in pathological scenarios).
4. Maybe it can be done, but it's not clear what the implications might be, and it's too risky.
5. It can be done, but the devs are buried, don't have time to deal with it and perceive it as low priority, but you've shown in the past that you won't accept that.

Of course, when a customer raises the priority, then devs may be forced to drop other work to do it, or to accept whatever the other implications are, no matter how painful. You apparently choose to take the proof that it can be done as evidence that the devs are lazy liars, but that probably says more about you than about them. Or maybe they really are lazy liars. I'd bet against that, though.

Re:Compared to what?

[swillden]

Nice try, Tanya.

Tanya?

Re:Compared to what?

[swillden]

Some places are held back by ill-advised enterprise junk foisted on them. Others are buried in legacy clusterfucks. But when you start a new project and every other word out of your mouth is "can't," what's the point?

Sure. On the other hand, sometimes to a first-order approximation and given an understanding of the context which QA engineers tend to lack, stuff really can't be done.

Re:Compared to what?

[Masked Coward]

Love the sig. 3

Re:Compared to what?

[allo]

Not for Mozilla. They have important bugs, that are a decade in their BTS. Such big projects have a hard time to fix everything, especially when they set the priority on moving forward to new features.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
> By the way, if you appreciate irony, note that Zvi Har'El, who analyzed this bug 9 years ago (see above), is my father. He unfortunately died 8 years ago, and today I ran into the same bug. My daughter already reached the age that she started to use Firefox too, so soon she'll probably run into this bug too, and this will have become a 3-generation bug...

WebExtensions API

[Dracos]

The Chromification of Firefox continues.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Anonymous Coward]

so long firefox, and all those wonderful addons.... sure a few good ones may make the transition, but rip all the rest. noscript is one in particular that is having a hell of a time working with e10s.

the last thing firefox needs is the complete SHIT that is chrome addons.. there is so much crap and bogus scammy shit in the chrome 'store' for addons... it's nearly enough to make a guy run straight into the familiar and comforting arms of internet explorer 6

Re:WebExtensions API

[Anonymous Coward]

you might want to consider switching from noscript to umatrix, gives you more control and works fine with e10s

Re:WebExtensions API

[AmiMoJo]

It's not a bad thing really.

The old extensions API needs to go. It's single threaded and can't handle per tab processes well. It's also a massive security problem, having no security model. Extensions can easily conflict too.

So they could have made a brand new API, but no one would have made extensions for it. At least new devs only have to write their extension once too.

I see no real down side. They can add some FF specific stuff.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Yeah, this update kills thousands thousands of add ons, whiles many others will stop working properly.

Next on their agenda is killing XUL off which means Firefox will become yet another Google Chrome with a tad better cache management.

It looks like Google Chrome, it acts like Google Chrome, it is Google Chrome. Now tell me, what the reason for Firefox existence? Once a unique web browser with unique add-ons (NoScipt, Firebug, DownThemAll, etc), soon only a shadow of itself.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

It's also a massive security problem, having no security model.

LMAO. Pretty much all Chrome extensions require access to "all websites" and your "entire browser history" which means they can gather all your browser information, including keystrokes, aka passwords.

So much security, my ass.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Anonymous Coward]

forget 'the year of linux'.. 2016 might just be 'the year of pale moon'.. IF (and this is probably a really, really big 'if') they can manage the code and updates and security all by themselves while firefox diverges too far to be a useful upstream. perhaps even to the point of hosting their own addon site as mozilla's addon site goes to hell (err, i mean gets chromified). seamonkey is still around too, and that may see an uptick in users as well. and don't count on firefox esr, even mozilla's own site shames you for running an 'out of date' browser when you go there using the latest version of esr.

Re:WebExtensions API

[AmiMoJo]

Are least Chrome HAS a permission system. That's only part of it though. Chrome extensions run in a sandbox. Firefox extensions run in the main browser process and can patch in to pretty much any of the UI and core features.

Also, you exaggerate, most of the extensions I use don't need access to all sites, and the ones that do are justified (e.g. uBlock and Privacy Badger).

Re: WebExtensions API

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of that has to do with sites going secure and setting the no-cache header.

Re:WebExtensions API

[LichtSpektren]

If you turn e10s on (which will be the default in FF 49), then the extensions are sandboxed.

Re:WebExtensions API

[Luthair]

As a Java supporter... No. The trouble with the Java model is it attempts to blacklist actions rather than whitelist them, it also doesn't help that as a full featured language it has considerably more going on.

Re:WebExtensions API

[AmiMoJo]

Sure, but many don't work because much of the API is unavailable. And by API I mean they can't patch random stuff any more.

Re:WebExtensions API

[_xeno_]

I see no real down side.

Really?

"Hey, you know that one differentiating feature we had between ourselves and Chrome, the extensions that are available for Firefox that just aren't really possible in the Chrome extension model? Let's get rid of those."
"So we'll just basically be a crappy version of Chrome that uses more memory, is less stable, and is slower?"
"Yeah!"
"Sounds like a great idea! Let's do that!"

The only reason anyone is still using Firefox instead of Chrome is to get access to Firefox extensions. Once Firefox makes their extensions be Chrome extensions, there will no longer be any compelling reason to keep using Firefox.

The only one I can think of is "at least Google won't be spying on you" but with Firefox you're still being spied on because they still want to do ads when you open new tabs and as you enter URLs in the "Awesome Bar." (No, really, that's what Mozilla calls what you'd think is the URL field. It's the "Awesome Bar.")

Re:WebExtensions API

[Blaskowicz]

Add-ons used to fail routinely in the "golden old times" of 0.x, 1.0 and perhaps for another couple years.
Now, everything works unless it's been completely unmaintained for too long. There's an automatic check and extensions update when needed. Although, I only need half the extensions I used to, because many actual browser features were added over time (simple example : open a plain text link)

Re:WebExtensions API

[strikethree]

perhaps even to the point of hosting their own addon site as mozilla's addon site goes to hell (err, i mean gets chromified).

Just yesterday, I turned on a computer that I have not used for 4 years. I fired up Firefox and clicked update. It went from version 14 to version 43. I then had to update it again because 43 is not the latest. Needless to say, the really cool theme that I had on it was not compatible and had no update so I went looking for other themes that could work.

Wow, I could not really find any themes like I used to be able to. I did manage to see three themes while scrolling through dozens of pages. It seems like the Firefox folks do not like the idea of us making Firefox look the way we want it to look. WTF?

Re:WebExtensions API

[ChoGGi]

You mean like https://addons.palemoon.org/ex... ?

Re:WebExtensions API

[iampiti]

It's not Google Chrome: It doesn't send any of your data to Google. It's not controlled by a huge corporation. It has its own rendering engine which is a plus in my book. Diversity of web rendering engines is what makes web standards relevant. Get every browser to use WebKit and WebKit is the standard which is the same situation as when IE 6 was king.

Re:WebExtensions API

[whodunit]

It looks like Google Chrome, it acts like Google Chrome, it is Google Chrome. Now tell me, what the reason for Firefox existence?

SCROLLING. TAB. BAR.

Re:WebExtensions API

[doom]

I gave PaleMoon a serious try recently, and while I thought it was okay, I found it much more memory intensive than modern Firefox, and lately I've been using Iceweasel (though that's just an alias for what's effectively LTS Firefox). Using PaleMoon reminded me that not all of the recent changes to Firefox were stupid and useless, sometime around 2010 there was a genuine improvement in memory handling, where you could reduce Firefox's memory usage by closing a lot of tabs. With PaleMoon, I was back to watching the memory use rachet upwards, with nothing much to do about it except re-start.

But I do appreciate that the PaleMoon project is out there, and it's true if this latest Firefox ReallyCoolMajorUpgrade turns out to be the usual we-know-better-than-those-pesky-users debacle, I appreciate having something around I know is at least useable.

Re:WebExtensions API

[allo]

No sandbox, just a api limited by permissions.

You notice the difference, if there is some exploit. A sandbox will protect you (i.e. the flashplayer sandbox of chrome), but the extension api doesn't protect you from extensions for example exploiting a weakness in V8. And the weakness may allow the extension to use all api functions. Or run native code. Or whatever.

Re:WebExtensions API

[LichtSpektren]

I'm not a developer so I couldn't tell you anything about that, but I have over a dozen extensions installed in Firefox Nightly and none of them have broken in the past two years.

Firefox 49?

[Gravis Zero]

Allow me to respond in a way you can appreciate.

Re: a win for open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is anything but a "win" for the community. With users abandoning the buggy slow piece of shit in droves it is an example that even Open Source gets it wrong sometimes.

Who gives a flying f*ck

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope Janders... Start a CPU meter and watch how much of your CPU Firefox consumes while it does pretty much nothing. Display a few static web sites and watch your CPU run hot while Firefox god knows what. People have been complaining about this for years in the Firefox forums. They don't fix it. Electrolysis will make it worse, the same way multi-process made Chrome worse: Yes, you can give each tab it's own process to protect it from instability when it crashes, or write a stable browser which doesn't crash. Derp. Multi-process will make Firefox even slower. F*cking idiots.

Waiting for someone to deliver to the world a lean fast browser. FF49 won't be it.

And Firefox releases are now so frequent this is scarcely news. e.g. Release *49*!

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[MoarSauce123]

The "we release a new major for each typo fixed" craze started with Chrome. Google pushes a new version on an hourly basis. Shows that browser version has become somewhat irrelevant.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Anonymous Coward]

can't confirm really. It might have had problems in the past but recent version (on linux) generally consume less than 1% for me when idle.

And this is with over a 100 tabs open.

I do not understand all the hate. Its a decent browser. So is chrome, but I have no idea why it is somehow superior.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Luthair]

Mine is at 0%. If Firefox (or Chrome, because it does it too) is burning CPU cycles it is the fault of a browser tab, I've seen a few sites that regularly cause issues if they're open for an extended period of time. Interestingly on Linux this seems more likely to occur than on Windows.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[flink]

I've got gmail, Feedly, a couple of /. tabs, and my Youtube subscriptions open right now. CPU usage is hovering between 0.02% and 0.8%. Occasionally it spikes all the way up to 2.5% -- I assume this is when either Feedly or Gmail auto-refreshes in the background. I've seen FF shit the bed before, and it definitely has some problems, but just having a few static tabs open shouldn't be tanking your CPU.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope Janders... Start a CPU meter and watch how much of your CPU Firefox consumes while it does pretty much nothing. Display a few static web sites and watch your CPU run hot while Firefox god knows what. People have been complaining about this for years in the Firefox forums. They don't fix it.

My favorite is on OS X you can close all Firefox windows and leave Firefox running - this is an OS X feature due to the way OS X apps work. OS X apps are entirely allowed to have no open windows and still be running because you can still interact with them via the menu and via the Dock icon. It's just the way Macs work and dates back to the original Macintosh.

So this makes an interesting use-case for Firefox: how much CPU time does Firefox take to display literally nothing?

In my experience, about 5%-10% CPU.

Which is why I use Chrome on OS X.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Blaskowicz]

Well yes, but it is a failure of either the browser or the OS to not provide some control over it to the user. I should be able to limit Firefox to e.g. 20% CPU use (with the 100% == one core convention), and perhaps pause the browser.

As it is, when the browser idles from 10% to 20% CPU use, you're being lucky. If it idles at 80% or 110% CPU, then there's nothing you can do except restart it (a pain, since the crap needs reloaded and that's hundreds of network requests, and over a hundred billion CPU cycles) or kill all your hungry tabs, which defeats the purpose of having these pages opened in tabs.

The mad CPU idling is a problem, as hardware ages but is still fast, and overheats. It's getting hard to watch a video and keep the CPU under 80 C (degree Celsius). Disassemble and reassemble cooling is the solution, but if you download a youtube video on such a computer, open in it VLC and kill the firefoxes, the CPU use drops by an order of magnitude. (graphics card does full H264 decode but I don't trust the open source driver and graphics stacks to work. So my position for VDPAU etc. still is : forget about it.)

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Luthair]

Its not lucky, its the sites you have open. The browser (and OS) don't have the ability to know what code running is important (e.g. is it doing background processing, or is it a shitty ad?) to change this automatically. On Linux you could probably start your browser with nice, though that would probably have a negative effect for actual browsing.

Re:Who gives a flying f*ck

[Blaskowicz]

I think nice is only about priority, so if I set Firefox at very low priority and it uses 80% CPU, it will still use 80% and thus waste power.
I would have to investigate about putting Firefox in a cgroup.

Thinking about setting the CPU clock at 1.0 GHz in the BIOS and voltage at 0.9 V. Because, fuck you CPU. And fuck you Linux for feature regressions (panel applet that ought to display CPU frequencies doesn't work anymore on my hardware. Automatic underclocking may be broken, but I have no real way to check for now.)

More details on the Bugs

[sciengin]

- UI still made some people not throw up
- Slowness not increased by 50% as promised by the dev team, some pages unfortunately still load as fast as in the times of ISDN
- Critically low use of memory: Some memory is still not used up by Firefox despite our best efforts
- Android port does not crash often enough
- Not quite like Chrome yet

Re:More details on the Bugs

[rossdee]

You missed
                  some add-ons/plug-ins still work

Re:More details on the Bugs

[Luthair]

• minimal UI is better than old UI
• Firefox is generally competitive on speed
• Firefox has lowest memory usage of all browsers
• Android port never crashes for me on Nexus devices /shrug
• You mean it isn't bloated and doesn't use a lot of memory like Chrome?

Re:More details on the Bugs

[sciengin]

• minimal UI is better than old UI
• Firefox is generally competitive on speed
• Firefox has lowest memory usage of all browsers
• Android port never crashes for me on Nexus devices /shrug
• You mean it isn't bloated and doesn't use a lot of memory like Chrome?

1. Absolutely not: The old UI presented orders of magnitude more functionality to the user

2. define competitive. I notice that every update makes it slower compared to the previous one

3. Thats not saying much, too much memory is too much memory, regardless of how much the others use

4. For me its multiple times a day, on my Samsung NotePro 12.3 (it was the flagship device in early 2014, I doubt it has become this bad in less than 2 years). Unfortunately FF is the only browser that allows uBlock origin and some measure of JavaScript blocking (sadly not NoScript), since I am allergic to ads that means I am stuck with it. (yeah some niche Browsers like Dolphin, Ghosterry... also block ads but they have tons of drawbacks in terms of usability)

Re:More details on the Bugs

[Blaskowicz]

To enable 90% of what's missing from the older UI
1. Right-click somewhere like the bookmark buttons, plus button, download arrow or sandwich made of one slice of bread between two slices of bread
2. Click on "Menu Bar"

Re:More details on the Bugs

[CrashNBrn]

1. Australis enables you to have the Old-UI. Australis enables you to have a dozen extension toolbars if you want them. Australis enables you to specify *exactly* how you want the UI to appear.
2. Your opinion? FF definitely uses less memory now (V49) than it did for V30+.
3. Memory use as needed. Firefox is the only browser that can open hundred(s) of tabs like Opera used to - but even classic Opera can't do that any longer as it chokes on modern image sizes.
4. No Comment, I use Opera on Android, when I infrequently need to browse to a page.

Re:More details on the Bugs

[AmiMoJo]

The low memory usage is a problem for me. If i open a load of tabs I want them to load in the background and be ready when I switch to them. Firefox delays decoding images, so when I switch it judders and stutters like crazy. Then it has a fit as I scroll down and reveal even more images.

Re: a win for open source

[MoarSauce123]

The problem with Firefox is that the community has little say in what that browser does. Plenty of excellent proposals were made that all got shot down by the arrogant lead developers who see Firefox as the coded manifestation of their egos. FF is open source only because the source is open, but not because a community is working on it together taking user feedback into account. Maybe they fix the update bug, my tests systems are stuck on version 47 although 48 is available.

This is a good thing

[trawg]

I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general). Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software (... lo and behold I think that's what we see with Firefox more and more, rather than the introduction of great new features).

I understand the motivation though - it's nice to have targets to keep everyone working for those little milestones, and have a date attached to it so things can be roadmapped and planned and all that.

I don't think it's at all a big deal for a date to slip on a particular version - especially as we're getting into actual serious-change Firefox territory with this release. The Electrolysis stuff is the first major advancement (... that I've cared about) for something like 20 versions so I'm keen to make sure it's stable.

As an anecdote, the current version of Firefox is the first one that I've EVER noticed it feeling sluggish and like it is using too much memory. I know Firefox has a weird reputation has a memory hog but I have personally NEVER noticed this despite it being my sole browser for years. As of right now it's using 1.9GB whereas before this I don't recall it getting significantly above the low 1GB range (FWIW I have Electrolosys disabled by config).

I don't really care that much about the memory usage but it certainly feels a little more sluggish than usual, which I do care about. So I'm very happy for them to take their time with the v49 release and make sure it's all ship-shape before it lands.

Re:This is a good thing

[Ash-Fox]

Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software (... lo and behold I think that's what we see with Firefox more and more, rather than the introduction of great new features).

As someone that uses Firefox everyday, I have not really observed the potential new issues you speak of honestly.

Re:This is a good thing

[Waccoon]

I believe it has to do with what sites you browse, especially those that use tons of Javascript.

I've had the memory hogging issues since Firefox 2.0, resulting in massive pauses that last for 2-10 seconds at a time, and they've driven me crazy. They are all related to the Javascript heap and garbage collection cycles. Image-heavy sites that use JS tend to build up the most garbage. I can navigate my own web site all day, but even 5 minutes on DeviantArt will reduce Firefox to a whimpering crawl, using 1.5+ GB of memory and forcing me to restart.

It's painful to hear people telling me constantly that the memory leaks/GC issues don't exists when they simply don't visit web sites that trigger the problems. I love art, and visit a lot of image-heavy sites, and for that kind of browsing Firefox is simply painful.

I switched to PaleMoon a long time ago and it has none of these issues, despite being based on similar code (and far more modern than Firefox 2.0). The pauses and freezes must be related to some kind of "optimization" settings that the PaleMoon developers had the good sense to shut off or remove.

Re:This is a good thing

[Luthair]

The incremental delivery really leads to the major features being broken up into a bunch of tiny stuff that we don't notice. If you think about Chrome also, what was the last major change they launched, personally I can't remember anything there either.

Re:This is a good thing

[Ash-Fox]

everyday is an adjective

It's also an adverb.

Re:This is a good thing

[Blaskowicz]

It's stupid to go to such lengths, but ugprading to 8GB RAM and a 64bit OS works well. (4GB + 64bit or 32bit with Firefox e10s is not bad either)
I don't know why, but I have a firefox instance running at 3.2GB real memory here, and 4.7GB virtual memory. It's fine i.e. today is a lucky day.

[It's still possible to find ddr2 memory to upgrade, in fact I guess most people that would be inclined to make such an upgrade don't care about ddr2 systems anymore and thus don't drive the prices up.]
Although, if it's the CPU overhead that murders it, you may have as much RAM as you want and still be fucked.
I think I noticed that Firefox gets worse than usual if it's hitting against the 2GB virtual memory limit (32bit process) and hovering there. 64 bit gives effectively infinite virtual memory, so it seems to help a lot. (e10s on 32bit makes it harder to reach the 2GB limit, but in no way impossible).
Obviously, when firefox is running at 1.97 to 1.99 GB virtual memory there must be a lot of "urgent" and "last chance before nuclear meltdown" garbage collection going on.

Re:This is a good thing

[swillden]

I've never been a fan of the regular release schedule of Firefox (or software in general).

I'm a huge fan of regular release schedules

Releasing a new version just for the sake of having a new version every three months seems like a way to just make sure you're introducing potential new issues in your software

Quite the opposite. Delaying release until you have some significant new "release-worthy" features leads to "big bang" releases that require endless testing because there is so much new code in them. It makes it hard to get something out the door, ever, and means you need a separate cycle of frequent bugfix releases, with corresponding management of separate dev and release trees (separate trees are good, but allowing them to become very different is not). Worst of all, it motivates developers to get their feature into the release even if it's not quite ready, because if they don't get on this train the next one isn't leaving the station for a long time.

A fast, regular release cadence means that large features get broken up into many small features, which are much easier to test and manage. It removes the need for lots of bugfix releases, because you just fix the bug in the next regular release -- unless it's severe, of course, in which case you hold either the release or the feature until it's fixed. Best of all it means that if developers decide their feature isn't quite ready, it's not too painful to wait for the next.

For server-side work, my preferred release cadence is weekly. Getting to that level requires automated testing and a well-tuned QA team and process, but it makes for a very fast, smooth development process, and the cost of not getting your feature into a given release is almost nil. It also means that if a release fails QA it is very reasonable to simply skip it. If releases get skipped too often, that's a strong signal that the dev team needs to slow down and focus on quality rather than features. If they never get skipped, that's a signal that the dev team is probably being too cautious.

For application software like Firefox, a weekly release would create too much burden on users. The six week schedule is a pretty good compromise, as long as the team is willing to delay or even skip releases as needed. Again, if the team is releasing on schedule like clockwork, that's an indicator that they should probably get more aggressive. If delays (or, especially, skips) are common then they should retool their processes to slow down and catch more bugs early.

Re:This is a good thing

[CrashNBrn]

If you've enabled Electrolysis (e10s), take a look in about:config for "dom.ipc.processCount". I saw a recommendation for a setting of dom.ipc.processCount = 10. It's possible FF uses more memory than without that setting, but its much more stable and responsive overall.

Re:This is a good thing

[trawg]

All good points! I guess when I said 'software in general' I really meant 'desktop software', not really web-based stuff. I certainly prefer regular updates in web-based stuff so completely agree.

Re:This is a good thing

[FrankHaynes]

Despite having 16GB in this Windows 7 desktop machine that I built a year and a half ago, Firefox becomes much less usable when it exceeds about 1.2GB Working Set (as displayed by Task Manager processes). Right now as I'm typing this it shows 1.43GB Working Set memory and 1.33 Commit Size and seems to be operating smoothly enough with 2 FF windows open, one window with 2 tabs and the other with 8 tabs running moderate and lightweight stuff.

But if I do anything requiring heavy lifting like watching a bunch of YouTube videos or sites with lots of scripting and the memory consumption has approached 2 GB during that session FF becomes close to useless. Even shutting it down becomes an ordeal as it sometimes can take 3-4 MINUTES to wipe its butt and finally exit, as shown in Task Manager. Having all this RAM in the computer doesn't ever seem to pay off as the applications or memory/heap management in Windows doesn't do well with large memory consumption.

If Electrolysis can streamline the overall operation and make it more stable and secure, I'm all for it. I won't be the first in line to be a guinea pig, tho.

Re:This is a good thing

[TangoMargarine]

No, the adverb form is "every day."

Re:This is a good thing

[Ash-Fox]

No, the adverb form is "every day."

I asked Google and Google said "adverb: every day; adverb: every-day; adverb: everyday". Sorry, I don't see the issue.

Re:This is a good thing

[TangoMargarine]

If you spoke that sentence, you'd put a brief pause between "every" and "day." Let's just be consistent and write it that way as well.

Re:This is a good thing

[Waccoon]

According to my tests with the built-in memory profiler, the pauses are apparently related to locking garbage collection and cycle collection, so it's all CPU bound. Stuffing more memory into the machine won't help. I'm already running Win64 with 16GB of memory.

One interesting thing is that this appears to be related to the Javascript engine, possibly the JIT/optimizer. If I close all but one window and point the last window to "about:blank", memory usage doesn't go down at all. I just hangs at, say, 2GB forever, all of it occupied by the Javascript heap. This might be why people blame memory leaks. It looks like it, but I think it's just really bad script cache management. Palemoon has none of these problems (I've had an instance of Palemoon open for two weeks with a ton of windows open, and it's still using ~700MB)

I've also tried torturing Firefox to test its memory limits. On 64-bit it seems to max out around 3GB memory usage, with no other side effects besides the frequent pauses. On 32-bit, it maxes out around 1.6 GB and then starts running into massive graphics corruption issues, but doesn't crash. Actually, one nice thing I can say about Firefox is that it never crashes on me. Ever. It's rock stable, but does have a lot of performance issues and they're mostly related to memory management.

Re: a win for open source

[nnull]

Sad what a lot of opensource projects have come down too.

Re:Why not just fix it in 49.0.1?

[campuscodi]

My thoughts exactly

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

As soon as OSS got traction, quite a few big-ego-small-skills people moved in and took over projects that they did not have the skills to do well. Firefiox, systemd, Gnome, etc. are all problems, not solutions. Open/LibreOffice managed to do fork at the last moment and is doing fine. The Linux kernel has successfully repelled hostile borders from the SJW-people and is still doing fine (although Linus has to avoid being alone in a room with women).

But the bottom line is this: People that have vast ambitions but no skills to match exist anywhere and far to often they manage to get into positions of power. The OSS world is no exception to that. Firefox is just one of the latest victims.

Re: a win for open source

[John Da' Baddest]

As a counter point, though not in the OSS realm: The profiles of Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak. It's vision and ambition which eventually made the company king of the heap, not (or not just) engineers with great ideas within their own domain.

Re: a win for open source

[Anonymous Coward]

But the current CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, is certainly somebody who has "vast ambitions but no skills to match".

Re: a win for open source

[Ash-Fox]

With users abandoning the buggy slow piece of shit in droves

People have been repeating this since 2003, yet here we are in 2016... You would expect Firefox wouldn't even be news if this was reality.

Re: a win for open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, systemd is *really* successful. As long as you define successful as "ruining your init system by replacing it with a pile of stinking crap".

Re: a win for open source

[AmiMoJo]

Have you seen their market share? It's been falling steadily for years, down to single digits.

It's not just users abandoning them, but it's a factor.

Re: a win for open source

[Ash-Fox]

Have you seen their market share?

Yes.

It's been falling steadily for years

I wouldn't say steadily, but certainly falling. But nothing equating to people "leaving in droves", if that was the case, it would have reached 1%, 10 years ago.

Firefox doesn't get a break

[LichtSpektren]

I was a pretty harsh critic of the 'personalized ads', but Mozilla removed that, so now Firefox is back to being the best browser. Its performance is slightly shy of Chromium in my experience, but it has better features, customizability and a selection of add-ons.

Anyway, what I'm taking from the comments on this article is that Mozilla really shouldn't read Slashdot, because most commenters here hold that Mozilla really cannot do anything right. I'm sure Firefox would've been heavily criticized if a major release was too buggy, so it seems to be the right course of action to delay its release, but they're getting shit for that too. Oh well. Some people are just unpleasable and can be safely ignored for that reason.

Re:Firefox doesn't get a break

[LichtSpektren]

I'm guessing you first coined the term "unpleasable" when looking for rationalizations while referring to your female partners.

Your mom's a fussy lady indeed, but she didn't deprecate my extension ifyouknowwhatimsayin.

Re:Firefox doesn't get a break

[strikethree]

Anyway, what I'm taking from the comments on this article is that Mozilla really shouldn't read Slashdot, because most commenters here hold that Mozilla really cannot do anything right.

Any time that there are multiple people commenting about something, you will get mutually exclusive comments. If you read the comments without involving your ego, you can get some extremely useful insight into what is going wrong with your development.

I argue that the Firefox team SHOULD read the comments. Perhaps then they would start giving more control to the end user. Same with Gnome. Open Source software should give all control to the user without the user having to rewrite the source code.

Re:Firefox doesn't get a break

[LichtSpektren]

The telemetry in Firefox is very easily disabled.

Re:Firefox doesn't get a break

[LichtSpektren]

Your post is somewhat contradictory, don't you think? First you talk about the mutually exclusive diversity of opinion, then you suggest that the Firefox team should listen to one monolithic "the end user" as if they form a collective.

Re:Firefox doesn't get a break

[TangoMargarine]

Anyway, what I'm taking from the comments on this article is that Mozilla really shouldn't read Slashdot, because most commenters here hold that Mozilla really cannot do anything right.

I was a huge fan of Firefox from 2.0 right up to the 4.0 release. But even 4.0 and on was tolerable because they'd always let you turn off the annoying stuff they added.

Somewhere along the way in the last year or two when they started removing the ability to disable stuff from about:config was when I really knew the Firefox I loved was gone.

Re: a win for open source

[Luthair]

If you don't like what they're doing, fork it. Don't expect that open source means you can dictate what developers choose to do.

Re: a win for open source

[Luthair]

Doesn't hurt that their main competitor Chrome bundles flash making life more convenient for users and promotes people to switch on the world's biggest search engine.

Re:Firefox always buggy

[Ash-Fox]

I gave up on Firefox, it's always buggy so this is not news.

I counter your vague point with my vague point:

I gave up on Chrome, it's always buggy so this is not news.

Re: a win for open source

[blackest_k]

Ok I can only comment on systemd has caused problems for me. I have a nas running debian. Because a USB drive wasn't able to be mounted it stopped booting and dropped to an emergency shell. The device was able to be pinged but ssh wasn't running as this is headless with no access other than via ssh I was screwed, I was able to open the drive on another machine but there was no log information to say why it hadn't completed the boot.

Obviously being an Arm build I couldn't boot the drive on an x86 system.

The only thing that got me sorted was in a debian page about openssh in jessie, some kind soul had written that systemd now would drop to an emergency shell if it found something it couldn't mount in fstab.

So I got lucky and was able to fix the problem but no thanks to systemd it was just a data drive not essential to the booting of the os.

Lets say you have a server in a rack somewhere and a hdd dies in the raid rebooting that server remotely would end up in exactly the same situation. So systemd is a success but only when things don;t go wrong.

So what are you supposed to do remove drives that are not essential for your server to start from fstab and manually mount them once the server has booted maybe not init any services that will be using those drives either....

wouldn't it be better if systemd was able to init what it can and finish booting and issue a cry for help once the system was up and running?

If you were running a windows server sure sometimes not all services get started, There is one domain controller which quite often fails to start the mail server. This results in no email for the domain and a remote login to restart the service. not a shutdown of the lan ...

Systemd has potential but I'm not buying it as being ready for deployment when it can wreck your morning if not your entire day because of it;s behavior when there is a problem.

.
   

Re: a win for open source

[AmiMoJo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Sure looks like a steady decline to me. Seems like they will hit 1% in about 3 years time if it doesn't level off.

possible firefox fix

[Bobtree]

The page you linked loads and performs fine for me, but I had a similar issue recently. My Firefox install is relatively ancient, and it began taking ages to load and then incorrectly render one particular site. What ultimately fixed it was creating a new profile, switching to it to test, and then switching back to my original profile.

What's an "expected bug" look like?

[mpercy]

Isn't a bug pretty much by definition unexpected?

Re: a win for open source

[Ash-Fox]

Sure looks like a steady decline to me.

You're missing the numbers from 2003 (where it actually went up), which is when I referred to the whole "users abandoning in droves" comments started.

Re: a win for open source

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Come on, Gnome is not that bad.

Re: a win for open source

[serviscope_minor]

Have you seen their market share? It's been falling steadily for years, down to single digits.

True, but they've been heavily under attack. The world's largest advertiser has had a fairly persistent campaign against firefox. For quite a while, every time you visited google, it recommended chrome to you. And then there's mobile devices. Not only is Chrome installed on Android by default of course, but now even if you set Firefox as your default, clicking on a link from the search box brings up the link in Chrome.

I'm frankly amazed that firefox has held on as well as they have given that they're by far the smallest of the major players in terms of reach.

Re: a win for open source

[Ash-Fox]

Well, they were wrong from 2003 to 2009 (presumably, from the graph). And you've been wrong since 2009.

My point was that if they were leaving in droves as has been claimed since 2003, it would have hit 1% marketshare ten years ago.

It's not a "steady decline" if it's gone up rather than down consistently during the period I was highlighting either. The fact you have to move the goal posts to even manage to say I'm wrong doesn't make much of a point.

Re: a win for open source

[The-Ixian]

Why would you want Flash embedded at all? That is just a vector for 0 days in Flash.

I have been running Firefox for years without Flash installed at all and have been perfectly happy with it.

Firefox is great if you don't want a memory hungry spying agent installed on your computer.

uMatrix + uBlock

[CrashNBrn]

uMatrix + uBlock Origin (both by Gorhill) will do everything that is handled by NoScript, Ghostery, AdBlock*|Request Policy.

Re:uMatrix + uBlock

[mrchaotica]

What's the point of adding uBlock Origin if you're already using uMatrix anyway?

Re:uMatrix + uBlock

[CrashNBrn]

uMatrix can only Allow|Deny a resource by its domain and type (css, image, xss, etc).
Whereas uBlock can block|allow based on the resource's partial path|name|regex.

Both will be needed in order to have an exception for a given resource - where the exception (with uBlock) can be either a partial|full url path or regex.
For Instance, if you need to:

1) Block All Scripts on a domain (uMatrix), but allow one|some (uBlock).
2) Allow All Scripts on a domain (uMatrix), but block one|some (uBlock).

uMatrix is much more efficient at its job (out of the box, without any subscriptions) than ANY of the other "Ad-Blockers" incl. uBlock.
To use both, effectively, you will want to not subscribe to blocklists on uBlock either. I believe Gorhill says it best:

gorhill commented on Nov 1, 2014

There are significant differences aside the ones you mention.

Matrix-based filtering and its inheritance model (cell/rows/columns/scopes) can't be obtain with uBlock. uBlock follows ABP-filtering semantic, which is very simple:

Allow everything
Unless there is a matching block filter
Unless there is a matching allow filter

Then it stops there. You can't override beyond this.

There is no such restriction with matrix-filtering, it is fully hierarchical with no limit, and since it's written from the ground up this way, it far more efficient than pattern-based filtering. However, a higher granularity can be obtained with pattern-based filtering. So they complement each other in a way.

But a majority of users just want an install and forget blocker, and this is uBlock. Power users however like to be fully informed about what web pages do, and be able to act on that information with a tool that makes it all easy, this is uMatrix.

Just like RequestPolicy can't fully replace Adblock Plus and vice versa, and using one doesn't prevent using the other.

Although, if Gorhill really believes uMatrix is for power users, it doesn't make much sense to me why he's denied the capability (and all similiar requests on GitHub) of uMatrix to Allow/Deny specific resources by url|regex|name... as eventually you will need to do so, and you can't with uMatrix.

Re: a win for open source

[blackest_k]

Systemd doesn't seem to differentiate between essential to boot and essential to run some service.
if it started SSH then it wouldn't be that bad, it wouldn't be so bad if it wrote something to one of the log files (in a human readable format ideally).

The problem really is that systemd basically halts the system with no comms. On a previous version of debian i used to run a backup program that would login to my computers on the lan and back them up automatically. If it couldn't do the job it sent me an email. Now thats a useful behavior not this i'm having a bad day i'm going to crawl into this emergency shell and hide from the world.

It's better to let the someone know your having a rough day, rather than waiting for someone to notice you hung yourself.

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

I don't think this is a valid counterpoint. Apple has nice design and an impressive cult-based marketing, but they never did anything to further technology. In fact it seems more like Apple is somewhat behind with regards to technology. Sure, if you compare them with Microsoft, they are paragons of innovation, but anybody looks good compared to the class retard.

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

"you are simply wrong" = "I strongly believe you are wrong, but have no supporting evidence and a big ego so I think I do not need any"

I call that a fail.

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

This is simply incompetent design, made by morons that think that they like it is enough indication that it must be good. You never, ever fail silently if there is even a slight chance you can push a diagnostic to the sysadmin. But that obviously is an outdated Unix idea and the brave new world of system management does not need any old ideas, as new is clearly universally better than old.

My employer has a policy that you may install Linux with systemd, but it must be gone before anything goes productive. This thing is far, far too much of a risk for very little gain (usually none at all).

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

Back at you. There must be something seriously wrong with you to come up with that suggestion in this situation.

Re: a win for open source

[LichtSpektren]

You get more early boot information using journald than you get with rsyslog and syslogd.

In every case I know about, everywhere systemd will fail-to-boot but initd would not, there's some extremely dangerous setup that could easily result in data loss. The user is often not aware of this, so either they'll get frustrated and think systemd is a buggy piece of crap, or they'll immediately Google how to bypass whatever the error is and continue their danger, then blame systemd when the data loss occurs.

Re: a win for open source

[LichtSpektren]

Rather big difference between oppressive governments and free software that you can not use by choice, is there not?

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

I was wondering who would bring up Eich first, might have known it would be you.

People criticising the guy who was trying to harm them by denying them equal marriage are not "SJWs". They are people who want the right to marry whomever they like, the same as he enjoyed. That is made his position untenable is irrelevant, because the only other option is to deny their freedom of speech rights.

Why are you opposed to freedom of speech?

Re: a win for open source

[AmiMoJo]

Technical merits aside, can you honestly say that it's not been successful when Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Mint and many others have adopted it? Slackware and Gentoo are the only two big distros that haven't.

Hm

[backslashdot]

When they found out about the bugs, didn't they become expected bugs? So it's totally shippable.

Re: a win for open source

[gweihir]

That is utter bullshit. Early boot information comes from the _kernel_ (you may have heard of it?) Anything journald can to is _late_ boot information. Unless you are so brain-washed that you thing systemd is the kernel?

Re: a win for open source

[HiThere]

That's untrue. Apple has done significant things to forwards technology. It's true they were all aimed at the aggrandization of Apple, and often at making it a walled garden, but the Macintosh was a significant step forwards. Apple also did significant work in increasing the density of floppy disks. Etc.

That said, I have sufficient problems with their EULA that I refuse to use them. But to deny that they have contributed significant technological progress is to close your eyes and go la-la-la.

Re: a win for open source

[HiThere]

What are the best choices? I've found systemd booting to be a minor, but continual, nuisance. It's a lot slower than sysv-init was, and doesn't seem to have ANY advantages.

I seem to have worked through most of the major problems I've had with it, but this does not make me a fan. It also makes me worry about the problems I haven't yet encountered, but which I've read reports of from others. (They were *probably* early bugs, but their severity causes me to doubt the quality of error checking that is being followed.)

Re: a win for open source

[TangoMargarine]

You mean like systemd should have done?

You don't get to break everything in the main tree and then tell me if I want to fix it I should fork and fix everything you broke.

Well, when you're systemd you apparently do.

Unexpected?

[TJHook3r]

Nobody expects the etc etc They're bugs, that is kind of what bugs do, be unexpected.

Re: a win for open source

[HiThere]

Depends on your definition of "successful". I can definitely say that when systemd appeared on my system I started having problems I'd never had before. I can't positively say that systemd was the cause, and even if I could I'm not sure it would matter to your definition of "successful". To me it matters enough that if BSD could handle ext4 file systems I would have likely started dual booting to BSD in preparation for a migration. It matters enough that I've started seriously considering reformatting one of my large partitions to some file system that both BSD and Linux can handle.

P.S.: I *AM* considering using a linux distribution that doesn't include systemd, but so far I haven't reached a decision, partially because this is a decision with long term consequences, and many applications (e.g. KDE) have said they are going to start requiring systemd, so a different OS might be a better choice.

thought for the day

[doom]

Whenever anyone really wants to screw you over, they always say "Security!".

Re: a win for open source

[thegarbz]

With users abandoning the buggy slow piece of shit in droves

People have been repeating this since 2003, yet here we are in 2016... You would expect Firefox wouldn't even be news if this was reality.

It's not news. It's covered on Slashdot which I will remind you also feature stories about HURD releases.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

You still have not suggested a way that Eich could have remained in his job without silencing other people. It's impossible.

It's the same technique you use in every debate. Condemn the offered solution but fail to produce an alternative.

Re: a win for open source

[arglebargle_xiv]

arrogant lead developers who see Firefox as the coded manifestation of their egos

This has to be the best one-line description of what Firefox has become I've seen. Wish I could mod you +6 ("You're on +5 Insightful here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're modded +5. Where can you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Mod to +6").

Re: a win for open source

[LichtSpektren]

That is utter bullshit. Early boot information comes from the _kernel_ (you may have heard of it?) Anything journald can to is _late_ boot information. Unless you are so brain-washed that you thing systemd is the kernel?

Why don't you read about how the Linux boot process works sometime? First of all, start_kernel() happens midway through, it's not the very first thing (what do you think you're booting if the kernel's already loaded into memory?). Secondly, you get more information with journald because it starts with initramfs, rather than rsyslog which starts later at runlevel 2 under sysVinit. See: https://debian-handbook.info/b...

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[mi]

You still have not suggested a way that Eich could have remained in his job without silencing other people.

You never explained, what "silencing" you are talking about.

Condemn the offered solution but fail to produce an alternative.

The burden is on those seeking to change the current situation — they have to prove, the change will be an improvement.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

Eich resigned because his position became untenable due to criticism of him. You suggested that was a bad thing. You now need to propose how said bad thing could be avoided without trampling on anyone else's rights, or accept that words and actions can have consequences.

I'm not seeking to change anything here, you are.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[mi]

You now need to propose how said bad thing could be avoided without trampling on anyone else's rights

You never explained, whose rights would've been "trampled" by Eich remaining where he was.

This entire conversation was never about rights. Eich had a right to oppose whatever it was he opposed, SJWs had a right to boycott him over it.

The resulting — perfectly legal — boycott led to Eich's dismissal. Quality of Mozilla software went down.

Again, nobody — neither Eich nor the SJWs boycotting him — have done anything illegal. No rights were violated by anyone — and I never accused anybody of violating anybody else's rights.

I do, however, accuse the SJWs of causing the deterioration of Mozilla software. Your only objection to my logic was that the folks calling for Mozilla boycott over Eich "were not SJWs" — but you dropped those attempts at semantics-arguing when I asked for your definition of the term. Since then you started insisting, this was a question of rights — without ever explaining whose rights they were and how has Eich ever violated any.

Re: a win for open source

[YouGotTobeKidding]

Thats a load of flamebait bullshit. Love or hate MS they helped create the market. Windows may not do much new NOW but they pushed the GUI to the front of the pack and allowed non-skilled peeps the ability to use a PC.

As for Apple... holy shit are you ignorant of history. Sure apple now is just coasting on old innovations but daymn son there was a time when Apple were cutting edge. The Wizard of Woz was a genius at creating ONE chip that replaced a board of them. His ideas still live on in modern IC design. Steve (hand)Jobs also was a genius at making computers sexy. Plenty of peeps got an Apple as their first 'PC' because it was not an ugly beige box.

Re: a win for open source

[YouGotTobeKidding]

Thats like claiming McDonalds makes the best hamburger in the world because they sell a ton.
This whole systemd will either work in the long term (ie big fixed) or be scrapped once devs come to their senses. Either way SystemD in its current form is a stinking piece of shit that replaced an actually working 'product'. Change for the sake of change is dumb... but has infected FOSS and will hopefully burn itself out. How many more FOSS 'products' will die before then (just like FF is all but dead) before they come to their senses? Who knows... but MS and Apple are laughing all the way to the bank over it.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

Ah, okay, I see your mistake now. Eich wasn't dismissed, he resigned. He found is position had become untenable because he continuing to do the job would have harmed Mozilla. So to be absolutely clear, they didn't fire him, he left because he realized he couldn't do his job and would ultimately be a disaster for is employer.

So with that in mind, the only way Eich could have been made to feel he could continue would have been to silence his critics, hence my question.

Are you now arguing that people should have self-censored their criticism for the benefit of Mozilla's products,or is that just an observation?

Re: a win for open source

[lsatenstein]

The problem with Firefox is that the community has little say in what that browser does. Plenty of excellent proposals were made that all got shot down by the arrogant lead developers who see Firefox as the coded manifestation of their egos. FF is open source only because the source is open, but not because a community is working on it together taking user feedback into account. Maybe they fix the update bug, my tests systems are stuck on version 47 although 48 is available.

Gee, your complaint reminds me of Gnome, and the gradual responding only to itself as to what is implemented. Wayland is a heavy overhead, exactly what is required in a GUI interface -- right?

Further, instead of design changes presented to a user mailing list, it's "Here is the next great thing our designers thought about". But.... that feature was implemented in Gnome 2 about 4 years ago. And what about the missing features that made Gnome a programmer/system users delight? Will we ever see those changes re-implemented?

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense. I disagree that the distinction between resigning and being fired is irrelevant, but it's not worth arguing about.

To answer your question, it's up to Eich. There is no freedom from consequences of speech. You can't expect people not to react if you say something controversial. All you can do is decide if it is worth saying and accepting whatever people say in response, or speak anonymously. In the latter case, there is always a risk you will be exposed as Eich was, you just have to decide if you trust the system protecting you.

Perhaps now you can see why people want safe spaces. Sometimes they want to say things or discuss ideas with like-minded people who won't make their lives difficult, often before going public. In a world where people have freedom of speech, such privacy is extremely valuable.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[dywolf]

you've truly gone off the deep end.
you've really outdone yourself.
bravo.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[dywolf]

once again you routinely completely ignore the whole slavery thing, the jim crow thing, the systemic exclusion of blacks from the New Deal and the prosperity following WWII, and other vitally important factors in explaining the historical and systemic denial of an equal prosperity in the nation.

you have debated no one and nothing in a corner in your entire tenure as a /. troll.

all you've done is once again prove that you are a racist ignorant of the history of his adopted country.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[AmiMoJo]

So it's the fault of the people exercising their right to free speech and to criticise, not the fault of the guy whose choices made his position untenable. Right.

Re:Blaming SJWs (Re: a win for open source)

[mi]

So it's the fault of the people exercising their right to free speech

You tried this bullshit argument earlier. When a teen is driven to suicide by some bullies' (free) speech, the death is the bullies' fault, yes.

The death of Mozilla will be too, should it come to that, and its current sickness already is.

See also the AC's response, exposing you as a hypocrite:

When SJWs criticize Eich, it's "free speech", but when Eich criticize gay marriage, it's "choices", that have "consequences" that are "untenable"

Re: a win for open source

[toddestan]

Not to mention the Flash installer also bundles Chrome.

I don't actually have Flash installed anymore.... can't say I really miss it.