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Mozilla Releases New Open Source 'Internet Health Report' (venturebeat.com)
Slashdot reader Krystalo shared this VentureBeat article:
Fresh off its brand redesign, Mozilla has released The Internet Health Report, an open-source initiative to document the state of the internet, combining research and reporting from multiple sources... Mozilla's goal is to start a constructive discussion about the health of the internet by exploring what is currently healthy and unhealthy, as well as what lies ahead...
One notable statistic is the number of people who can't get online in the first place. The report shows that 57.8% of the world's population cannot afford broadband internet, and 39.5% cannot afford an internet connection on their mobile device. Other findings include the fact that there were 51 intentional internet shutdowns across 18 countries in the first 10 months of 2016; almost one-third of the world's population has no data protection rights; and 52% of all websites are in English, even though only 25% of the global population understands the language.
They're now gathering feedback and choosing which metrics to revisit every year, but five key topics include "decentralization: who controls the internet" and "open innovation: how open is it?" as well as security, web literacy, and digital inclusion. But Mozilla says their ultimate goal is very simple: to identify what's helping -- and what's hurting -- the internet.
One notable statistic is the number of people who can't get online in the first place. The report shows that 57.8% of the world's population cannot afford broadband internet, and 39.5% cannot afford an internet connection on their mobile device. Other findings include the fact that there were 51 intentional internet shutdowns across 18 countries in the first 10 months of 2016; almost one-third of the world's population has no data protection rights; and 52% of all websites are in English, even though only 25% of the global population understands the language.
They're now gathering feedback and choosing which metrics to revisit every year, but five key topics include "decentralization: who controls the internet" and "open innovation: how open is it?" as well as security, web literacy, and digital inclusion. But Mozilla says their ultimate goal is very simple: to identify what's helping -- and what's hurting -- the internet.
Hey, are you trying to kill Mozilla's efforts to refresh their brand experience? You're aware they have a new logo now, right? What's with the logo-shaming? I thought Slashdot was better than this. Disappointed.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
As a bonus we can stop using Unicode and go back ahem to ASCII!
Who ordered that?
From the summary: "The report shows that 57.8% of the world's population cannot afford broadband internet"
In the 2010s, Internet access has become a necessity to find and keep a job. But how is Internet access at home a necessity? I've found a bunch of people on Slashdot and elsewhere who claim that home Internet is a luxury, as opposed to (say) Internet access at the local public library or in a restaurant.
Get the goddamn multiprocess support working.
Firefox 50 supports multiprocess for users with no extensions or select extensions, and Firefox 51 (currently in beta and in use on my PC) will add support for multiprocess with more extensions. To see if you're already using multiprocess, go to about:support and search the page for "Multiprocess". If it shows up as disabled, go to about:config and set browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true. If it shows up as blocked by add-ons, install Firefox Beta. If you were asking why it's not already enabled for more users, I'm guessing that Mozilla is making changes slowly and carefully in order not to break things and thereby leave people without a working web browser.
Fix the excessive memory usage. Reduce the CPU usage.
To fix these, go to about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true. It's turned off by default because it breaks some websites. These are mostly ad-supported sites that don't know how to fall back to advertisements that do not track the viewer from one site to another, such as WIRED, the INQUIRER, and The Atlantic.
And conveniently, you don't have to change anything about what you're doing at all, or learn anything, or even try. Just put the work on billions of other people. Must be a coincidence.
It's very convenient for us English speakers, but it also happens to be true. English is fast becoming the world's "common" tongue, especially in areas of technology. If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. Some languages are not well suited for general-purpose computing, like the 50K+ logosyllabic Chinese characters. English, with its simple alphabet, most certainly is.
Learning English, especially if you want to code, work in a technical field, or communicate with others online, is very important. Japan has known this for decades, as their schools teach mandatory English from early on. Slightly over half of Europeans speak English as well. It makes no sense to move against the natural flow and promote a more neutral or even an invented language, because then you just inconvenience everyone equally. Perhaps more fair, but infinitely less practical. Besides which, I'd argue English-only speakers are the poorer for not knowing a second or third language.
That being said, I'm certainly not opposed to native-language resources being made available to people, of course. If the tools are made available, I think that will tend to happen organically over time as demand grows.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If one knows their native language plus English, they'll have the vast majority of the world's knowledge at their fingertips.
And tools. For every mainstream app there's ten obscure apps that haven't been translated to your language. And other people interested in the same things you are. The Internet has made a vast difference here, dubs / subtitles / translations worked pretty well for broadcast and print media and international calls was rare. And I don't mean just chit-chats, go on eBay and the whole world is your marketplace as long as you pay shipping. There are so many other benefits to language convergence that you won't get through more translations.
There's really no credible competitor to English because there's no other big pairings. If you know two major languages it's likely Chinese/English, Spanish/English, French/English, Portuguese/English, Japanese/English, Arabic/English, Russian/English, German/English, Hindi/English etc. you just don't find many Chinese/Spanish or Hindi/Portuguese speakers. If you look at the EU it's quite clear that 94% now learn English and fewer people learn French and German, I don't have the numbers for Spanish or Portuguese but I'm guessing the trend is the same.
Sure it's always possible that English is locally going a little backwards like that Spanish is creeping up into the US but for the world as a whole there's no debate. Particularly since China as the only potential challenger has put huge effort into English proficiency, giving everybody else much less reason to learn Chinese instead. I know linguists hate it but I think that's misunderstood, if all you needed to know was your native language and English most can be bi-lingual. If you should learn your Amazon tribe's language, Portuguese, Spanish and English then it's for the few.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
New brand design, Internet health report... I would be more pleased if Mozilla could focus on writing good software instead.