I understand your point, but in my experience it's quite rare for any product I've used to get slower through regular use, no matter how much I use it or "stuff" I add to it. Performance usually tanks only after some kind of patch or upgrade. It's very obvious that progressive performance issues in consumer products are due to stupid architectural changes implemented largely for political/egotistical reasons, and forced patches are only making the problem worse.
Seriously, almost all the cataloging, indexing, verification, maintenance, and authorization done on modern OSes is completely unnecessary. It's just bureaucracy.
Cars can absolutely get autonomous with less than GM claims.
Not with existing computer technology, unless you want to suggest that a modern industrial computer is as adept at pattern recognition as a typical person with an IQ of 100.
It's not just car companies, let alone GM, that are struggling with this problem.
The entropy of any computer system will tend to increase with system and application updates - databases will grow, files will fragment and access to them will slow.
If they're shit. Perhaps its time to stop stuffing in all kinds of stupid crap people never asked for or wanted?
The search feature of WindowsXP was way, way faster than the "improved" feature in Win7, despite the fact that I had the index turned off in XP and in Win7 the index is mandatory or search won't work at all. I just gave up and now (as usual) use a 3rd-party utility to search for files on my system, despite it not supporting any kind of index system, either. I'm not stupid enough to believe that slow performance is just a natural consequence of progress.
There is no way to go back at Google and say "meh, that was crap, forget that I clicked on it".
I'd have to believe their telemetry records how long you look at something (or at least tries to). Web pages these days don't just fetch data for analytics, they stream it. Even Slashdot does this to a point -- every time I close a tab/window a little "Working" tab shows up at the bottom of the screen and the window refuses to close until the page phones home one last time (sometimes I can't close windows at all because the connection lags).
The question is whether Google actually gives a damn about how long people look at a page so long as the ads are shown and people keep clicking on more bait.
Netscape 3? Even last year's browsers don't work! Creating a totally blank page and using Javascript to load in the body content is the dumbest thing ever.
By turning every web page into an app, it's Flash all over again.
So, unlike Google Chrome, it's very likely that either your favorite script blocking extension will eventually work on Mozilla, or you'll find a nice alternative to your taste.
My main concern is that Firefox has lost so much market share that they are below critical mass, and nobody will make the alternatives.
Perhaps if Mozilla hadn't been ignoring the public's pleas for... oh, the last decade...
I had worked for that employer for 9 years and never signed any kind of contract, so it must have been some "automatic consent without having to inform you" kind of thing. You know, sort of like how EULAs aren't legally binding in a lot of ways because they are agreements, not contracts.
It was a blue-collar job, but it was also a multi-billion Fortune 500 company, not some mom-and-pop shop. When it comes to companies that large, I presume there is some kind of legal loophole that makes this fully legal. At least, I found out this practice is actually quite common.
Regardless, I made it quite clear to home office that I did not approve, and (for many other reasons) they are now an ex employer.
Bonus fact: after leaving the company, I elected to continue my health coverage via COBRA. I signed up for COBRA online. When that new insurance provider mailed me my first bill, they printed my online account password in plain text on the invoice. Needless to say, I told off that insurance company for their shockingly bad security practices and got coverage through the ACA instead. Big or small, it doesn't seem that any company takes your personal data seriously.
I already had direct deposit with my primary bank. They created an entirely new account with a bank I didn't know, apparently in some kind of deal to get me to switch.
If by robbed blind you mean you get something for free
I'm pretty sure plenty of my personal data is being mined without my permission.
My last employer, for example, sold my information to a bank and automatically opened an account for me, later crooning the benefits of having my checks tied to a special debit card. All I had to do was place a phone call to activate my account, which was all set up and ready to go.
And people wonder why I don't want a smartphone and refuse to use Facebook.
I like how everyone forgets that MacOS originally used the colon for directory separators, among other weirdness.
Conforming to UNIX standards was not that common in the budding PC industry. MS always gets the blame because they're one of the few companies that actually survived.
It is not one that gives you half a dozen options (all equally badly described:: telling the user what they do, not what their effect will be) for half a dozen more operators.
Unless that's a program requirement.
User friendliness depends on the tasks you're trying to perform and the type and skill level of the user (including developers, who generally need a million options). Sensible defaults are a must, but you can't just make a single UI, built for the lowest common denominator and based on marketing telemetry, and call it a day.
So people aren't allowed to stream music and work on their car now?
Back when I was working in a warehouse, iPods were still a thing and phones were not ubiquitous. The biggest problem we had is that iPod people would play with their phones all damn day, constantly changing music every minute, as if they had to choose JUST the perfect song for their mood. Apparently playlists aren't good enough. People would also do it while operating heavy machinery, which resulted in a number of serious safety infractions and accidents. There was almos no point in the day when I didn't see someone fiddling with their iPod while speeding down the narrow hallways in an 8-ton machine. The company let us have radios, but had to outright ban music players. It wasn't about productivity -- management (and myself) were concerned people would get killed.
Being obsessed with checking your electronic gadget every 15 seconds didn't start with phones. It's pretty much human nature not to focus on what you're doing, especially on someone else's dime.
Apple doesn't subsidize their hardware by selling your private information to people.
Prove it.
No, I'm not saying that Apple does sell private data, but I just don't get this attitude that corporations can be trusted with any behavior that happens behind closed doors. Nobody in corporate ever says "no", because they love to keep all options on the table.
I had this problem a lot until version 27 was released. I have virtually no compatibility problems with it anymore.
But, yeah, some dumb web frameworks are hard-coded to look for Firefox by brand name, and will fail to work with PaleMoon (or any other browser with less than 5-10% market share).
I've done a diff of Gecko vs Goanna, and literally the only differences are:
- Replaces "Gecko" and "Firefox" trademark names with "Goanna" and "PaleMoon".
- Telemetry points removed.
- Support for XP and OS/2 removed.
The real shocker is how many times Mozilla hard-codes their trademarks into their code, including using it as the basis for hash calculations. They're just trying to make it as big a PITA as possible to fork.
Gee, as if I didn't already have enough problems with auto-complete.
Hell, I'm unable to log in to some device control panels without clearing my browser history, because the Firefox auto-complete insists on capitalizing my username, when the login is case sensitive and needs to be all lower-case.
Every UX designer in the world needs to read The Design of Everyday Things. It explains at length how oversimplifying an interface can greatly increase its functional complexity.
Sometimes it is a usability issue, as in the case of PayPal.
As with Creimer's example, PayPal also redesigned their site a while ago so you have to wait several minutes (or in my case, up to a day) for your account balance to update after a transfer. However, the reason why this annoys me is that PayPal no longer gives you a transaction confirmation number at the time of your payment -- you have to go to your account and look it up after the fact. I have to wait for that replication thingy to finish before I can view my account to retrieve the transaction number. On one occasion, I had to wait two damn days for my account to update just so I had a confirmation number to prove I made a payment. Would it really hurt them to give me invoice details and a transaction confirmation number at the time of my payment, and then do the replication? Oh, no, that would mar the beautiful design. Better to adhere to stark minimalism by putting only a humongous, animated green checkmark on the screen, which is completely useless for my accounting purposes.
So, yeah, maybe replication is the proper and safe thing to do, but there are situations where delays can be a UI issue and not strictly a DB issue. I'd have to believe there are ways to fix things like this.
We don't need usability testing, because that would give us results we don't want to hear. The endless stream of telemetry is way easier to manipulate into whatever management wants it to mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I have never met a customer who knows what he wants until he sees it.
In the consumer market, perhaps, because 99% of consumer devices are crap and just don't need to exist at all. Anything IoT, for example.
For developers and businesses this is not the case at all, but generally those markets are smaller, so we don't count.
I understand your point, but in my experience it's quite rare for any product I've used to get slower through regular use, no matter how much I use it or "stuff" I add to it. Performance usually tanks only after some kind of patch or upgrade. It's very obvious that progressive performance issues in consumer products are due to stupid architectural changes implemented largely for political/egotistical reasons, and forced patches are only making the problem worse.
Seriously, almost all the cataloging, indexing, verification, maintenance, and authorization done on modern OSes is completely unnecessary. It's just bureaucracy.
Cars can absolutely get autonomous with less than GM claims.
Not with existing computer technology, unless you want to suggest that a modern industrial computer is as adept at pattern recognition as a typical person with an IQ of 100.
It's not just car companies, let alone GM, that are struggling with this problem.
The entropy of any computer system will tend to increase with system and application updates - databases will grow, files will fragment and access to them will slow.
If they're shit. Perhaps its time to stop stuffing in all kinds of stupid crap people never asked for or wanted?
The search feature of WindowsXP was way, way faster than the "improved" feature in Win7, despite the fact that I had the index turned off in XP and in Win7 the index is mandatory or search won't work at all. I just gave up and now (as usual) use a 3rd-party utility to search for files on my system, despite it not supporting any kind of index system, either. I'm not stupid enough to believe that slow performance is just a natural consequence of progress.
There is no way to go back at Google and say "meh, that was crap, forget that I clicked on it".
I'd have to believe their telemetry records how long you look at something (or at least tries to). Web pages these days don't just fetch data for analytics, they stream it. Even Slashdot does this to a point -- every time I close a tab/window a little "Working" tab shows up at the bottom of the screen and the window refuses to close until the page phones home one last time (sometimes I can't close windows at all because the connection lags).
The question is whether Google actually gives a damn about how long people look at a page so long as the ads are shown and people keep clicking on more bait.
A Pastafarian is every bit as legitimate as a traditional Christian or a fundamentalist one
More so. At least the guy who started Flying Spaghetti Monster admit it was a joke religion. The other religions just keep pretending.
Netscape 3? Even last year's browsers don't work! Creating a totally blank page and using Javascript to load in the body content is the dumbest thing ever.
By turning every web page into an app, it's Flash all over again.
Mozilla lost me a while ago. They can tout new technology as much as they want, but the UI (and their attitude about it) is still garbage.
So, unlike Google Chrome, it's very likely that either your favorite script blocking extension will eventually work on Mozilla, or you'll find a nice alternative to your taste.
My main concern is that Firefox has lost so much market share that they are below critical mass, and nobody will make the alternatives.
Perhaps if Mozilla hadn't been ignoring the public's pleas for... oh, the last decade...
I had worked for that employer for 9 years and never signed any kind of contract, so it must have been some "automatic consent without having to inform you" kind of thing. You know, sort of like how EULAs aren't legally binding in a lot of ways because they are agreements, not contracts.
It was a blue-collar job, but it was also a multi-billion Fortune 500 company, not some mom-and-pop shop. When it comes to companies that large, I presume there is some kind of legal loophole that makes this fully legal. At least, I found out this practice is actually quite common.
Regardless, I made it quite clear to home office that I did not approve, and (for many other reasons) they are now an ex employer.
Bonus fact: after leaving the company, I elected to continue my health coverage via COBRA. I signed up for COBRA online. When that new insurance provider mailed me my first bill, they printed my online account password in plain text on the invoice. Needless to say, I told off that insurance company for their shockingly bad security practices and got coverage through the ACA instead. Big or small, it doesn't seem that any company takes your personal data seriously.
I already had direct deposit with my primary bank. They created an entirely new account with a bank I didn't know, apparently in some kind of deal to get me to switch.
If by robbed blind you mean you get something for free
I'm pretty sure plenty of my personal data is being mined without my permission.
My last employer, for example, sold my information to a bank and automatically opened an account for me, later crooning the benefits of having my checks tied to a special debit card. All I had to do was place a phone call to activate my account, which was all set up and ready to go.
And people wonder why I don't want a smartphone and refuse to use Facebook.
I like how everyone forgets that MacOS originally used the colon for directory separators, among other weirdness.
Conforming to UNIX standards was not that common in the budding PC industry. MS always gets the blame because they're one of the few companies that actually survived.
It is not one that gives you half a dozen options (all equally badly described:: telling the user what they do, not what their effect will be) for half a dozen more operators.
Unless that's a program requirement.
User friendliness depends on the tasks you're trying to perform and the type and skill level of the user (including developers, who generally need a million options). Sensible defaults are a must, but you can't just make a single UI, built for the lowest common denominator and based on marketing telemetry, and call it a day.
So people aren't allowed to stream music and work on their car now?
Back when I was working in a warehouse, iPods were still a thing and phones were not ubiquitous. The biggest problem we had is that iPod people would play with their phones all damn day, constantly changing music every minute, as if they had to choose JUST the perfect song for their mood. Apparently playlists aren't good enough. People would also do it while operating heavy machinery, which resulted in a number of serious safety infractions and accidents. There was almos no point in the day when I didn't see someone fiddling with their iPod while speeding down the narrow hallways in an 8-ton machine. The company let us have radios, but had to outright ban music players. It wasn't about productivity -- management (and myself) were concerned people would get killed.
Being obsessed with checking your electronic gadget every 15 seconds didn't start with phones. It's pretty much human nature not to focus on what you're doing, especially on someone else's dime.
Apple doesn't subsidize their hardware by selling your private information to people.
Prove it.
No, I'm not saying that Apple does sell private data, but I just don't get this attitude that corporations can be trusted with any behavior that happens behind closed doors. Nobody in corporate ever says "no", because they love to keep all options on the table.
I don't give a shit. What I care about is, if I don't like Face ID, do I have an alternative, or will I be forced to use it?
If you want to know a bit more of their train of thought, here's a bit for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I had this problem a lot until version 27 was released. I have virtually no compatibility problems with it anymore.
But, yeah, some dumb web frameworks are hard-coded to look for Firefox by brand name, and will fail to work with PaleMoon (or any other browser with less than 5-10% market share).
I've done a diff of Gecko vs Goanna, and literally the only differences are:
The real shocker is how many times Mozilla hard-codes their trademarks into their code, including using it as the basis for hash calculations. They're just trying to make it as big a PITA as possible to fork.
Gee, as if I didn't already have enough problems with auto-complete.
Hell, I'm unable to log in to some device control panels without clearing my browser history, because the Firefox auto-complete insists on capitalizing my username, when the login is case sensitive and needs to be all lower-case.
Every UX designer in the world needs to read The Design of Everyday Things. It explains at length how oversimplifying an interface can greatly increase its functional complexity.
Is this another one of those illusions of control where, "you can always opt-out, unless you can't for some unexplainable (or inconvenient) reason."
Sometimes it is a usability issue, as in the case of PayPal.
As with Creimer's example, PayPal also redesigned their site a while ago so you have to wait several minutes (or in my case, up to a day) for your account balance to update after a transfer. However, the reason why this annoys me is that PayPal no longer gives you a transaction confirmation number at the time of your payment -- you have to go to your account and look it up after the fact. I have to wait for that replication thingy to finish before I can view my account to retrieve the transaction number. On one occasion, I had to wait two damn days for my account to update just so I had a confirmation number to prove I made a payment. Would it really hurt them to give me invoice details and a transaction confirmation number at the time of my payment, and then do the replication? Oh, no, that would mar the beautiful design. Better to adhere to stark minimalism by putting only a humongous, animated green checkmark on the screen, which is completely useless for my accounting purposes.
So, yeah, maybe replication is the proper and safe thing to do, but there are situations where delays can be a UI issue and not strictly a DB issue. I'd have to believe there are ways to fix things like this.
We don't need usability testing, because that would give us results we don't want to hear. The endless stream of telemetry is way easier to manipulate into whatever management wants it to mean.