2.) They use up way less bandwidth. I once cut down an HTML document from my space fanatic buddy from 80kb to 36kb just by converting from spaces to tabs. When 50+% of your bandwidth is used up by whitespace, you're a shit coder.
As a standalone statistic, 10% isn't very useful, because it's not 10% across the board for everyone. In some ways, it's less impressive than that, and in others, it's much more impressive.
The situation being addressed here is that certain graphics card drivers are notoriously buggy, such that processes that use normal accelerated graphics APIs will randomly crash for certain OS/driver/chipset combinations. Historically, Firefox has had to play whack-a-mole by finding patterns in reported crash data that says, for example, "ATI graphics driver x.y.z, with chipset Foo, under Windows 8, is showing an unusual number of graphics-related crashes, so don't use graphics acceleration on those machines." This results in slower rendering for those users in general; and, for those troublesome combinations that have not yet been blacklisted, you end up with users who see Firefox crash a lot (see, e.g., drinkypoo's comment below).
If you're not one of the people with a magically horrible combination of graphics card, graphics driver, and operating system, then this will make absolutely no difference for you. But for those poor users who have found this sweet spot of graphics card misery, performance will improve immensely (for those on the blacklist) and crash rates will plummet (for those who are not). And these users crash *so* *often* that just providing this workaround for their bad graphics card drivers will make *overall* Firefox crash rates go down 10%.
If you've been to Holland, you'll notice that the drivers are extremely careful -- it would be hard to get hit by a car. I'm certain these light-lines are to keep pedestrians from getting run over by bicycles. In Holland, I think bikes actually earn points, Deathrace-2000-style, for aiming at pedestrians.
I find it amusing that you would say Firefox -- which has approximately as many monthly active users as the population of the United States -- "has withered away". It's easy to get lost trying to untangle percentage market share from absolute market share.
What's interesting about a lot of these fingerprinting metrics is that they aren't the result of just asking something like "navigator.getCoreCount()" -- these are sophisticated techniques that run very carefully crafted bits of code, and then measure the time certain operations take in order to deduce the number of effective cores. There's really no way to "lie" other than to intentionally be slow.
Mozilla is; there's just not much marketing around it.
To be clear, the level of de-featuring you're asking for makes for pretty good privacy, but a shitty modern browser. However, Mozilla is strongly committed to the prospect that the trade-off between features and privacy should remain in users' hands, which is why we work very closely with the Tor project to produce a browser that does exactly what you're proposing. The reason Firefox doesn't do this out of the box is that a browser that has been de-featured in this way does not come close to fitting the average user's needs. But you have choices, and Mozilla is committed to supporting Tor Browser to give people like you exactly what you're asking for.
...and before that, it was Game of Thrones. Media companies don't seem to get that this isn't yesteryear where they could corral people into paying for a very broad service with exclusive content. Meanwhile, online sales of television series remain brisk, even at prices around $30 to $50 for a single show season. Sure, consumers aren't acting rationally here -- you can get the entire prime video catalog for the same price as two to three shows -- but that's how economies *actually* work. It blows my mind that the people selling these shows and services still can't see that. I really have very little sympathy for those content owners who choose not to sell their shows free-and-clear of other services. They get exactly the piracy they're asking for.
Fuck you Google (and fuck you Mozilla, Google's lapdogs).
You need to update your conspiracy theories. The paranoid series of twisted, ignorant logic that was once used to make this statement was utterly undermined when Mozilla stopped taking search referral money from Google.
While literally true, that's hardly an honest assessment. It's impractical for all but 0.01% of the userbase. The rest are just stuck with whatever mozilla decides.
Right. What you want is horrifically insecure, which is why everyone is moving to disallow it. Chrome beat Firefox to the punch, but this change has been desperately needed for a long time. As long as you have a product used by millions of users, it's a giant blinking target for malware. Signing is entirely about being able to pull that malware out of the field after it is discovered -- and there's some really skanky add-on based malware out there.
As has been mentioned, if you don't like it, you have options -- unbranded builds and ESR releases let you do exactly what you want to do. And, again, that's far more than you can say for Chrome.
So, really, your complaint resolves to "Firefox will now be secure by default when it comes to add-ons, and I'll have to go through the inhumane and grueling task of downloading my Firefox from a different location on the web if I want to keep doing what I'm doing." That's a little hard to take seriously.
Alternately, you can grab the add-on and push it to the add-ons server for signing yourself -- it's all automated. The point of signing is that it allows Mozilla to shut off malicious add-ons when they arise. As mentioned elsewhere, all add-ons hosted on Mozilla's servers have already been signed, so you'd only have to do this if you found some unmaintained add-on lying around elsewhere on the web. To be honest, that sounds kind of fishy, so I'd proceed with caution.
Replying to myself, because I realize this isn't entirely accurate: Firefox lets you host your (signed) add-on on your own site if you want. Chrome absolutely requires you to download it from Google servers.
Ah, I follow your logic: "Whoa. Firefox is now better in performance and memory footprint than Chrome. But it has THE EXACT SAME ADD-ON SIGNING POLICY AS CHROME, so... you know... fuck it. I'll stay on the worse browser."
Free? No, the implicit agreement you have with Google is your privacy for its services. Google didn't uphold its end of the deal, so he should ask for his privacy back.
AM/FM radio still has commercials and does in fact pay the music industry (not sure about artists cut) to play songs. Internet radio, like Pandora, follows the same sort of rules as AM/FM radio. The product (music) is free to the consumer, but the distributor (radio station) gets paid by ads.
The same is true for Spotify, which he takes a swipe at as well. That kind of partisan bickering makes this seem far less like a principled objection to Youtube's business model (which does, by the way, pay revenue to artists) and more like an attack at anyone competing with his employer.
Not as much as I'd like to, but I have a certain amount of influence over feature implementation. If you want to describe the idea here, I'll pass it along.
Oh, and I forgot to mention -- I run with hundreds of tabs open from time to time as well, and it's usually just one or two bad apples that grind things to a halt. Since you're on 47 or later, you can go to about:performance and see which pages are chewing up CPU time. Closing the top CPU-hogging tabs makes everything work *much* better.
If you're going to go multi-core at least give me 1 full core for my current tab...
A lot of the pain you're feeling is probably due to on-thread content rendering. Since you're already living on the bleeding edge by running nightly, you might as well try turning on async pan/zoom, which renders content on a separate thread. This has some dramatic responsivity improvements. Go into "about:config" and set the pref "apz.drag.enabled" to "true."
I have creatinists on my family, so I’m always looking for more simple and direct arguments about the age of the universe... - Where did all the water go? - At what rate was the water lost? - What, therefore, is the minimum age of the planet planet on the basis of this analysis?
Answer: God took it away to test our faith, and it disappeared instantly. You're fighting a losing battle here. In the same way that you can't prove religion with logic, you can't disprove it with logic either. They are unrelated concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
https://www.merriam-webster.co...
sooth adjective [süth]
(Entry 1 of 2)
1 archaic : true
2 archaic : soft, sweet
sooth noun
Definition of sooth (Entry 2 of 2)
1 : truth, reality
2 obsolete : blandishment
Click the gear in the upper right corner of that page. Unselect anything you don't want to appear. Viola! Disabled.
If this were true, they would have pushed for the privacy rules to be clarified rather than repealed.
This is very much a case of "you shat that bed, now you get to lie in it." Zero sympathy for the carriers here.
2.) They use up way less bandwidth. I once cut down an HTML document from my space fanatic buddy from 80kb to 36kb just by converting from spaces to tabs. When 50+% of your bandwidth is used up by whitespace, you're a shit coder.
The '90's just called and they want their webservers back.
With a data point of one, it appears that people who use tabs might not understand the technology they're using. This may have explanatory power.
As a standalone statistic, 10% isn't very useful, because it's not 10% across the board for everyone. In some ways, it's less impressive than that, and in others, it's much more impressive.
The situation being addressed here is that certain graphics card drivers are notoriously buggy, such that processes that use normal accelerated graphics APIs will randomly crash for certain OS/driver/chipset combinations. Historically, Firefox has had to play whack-a-mole by finding patterns in reported crash data that says, for example, "ATI graphics driver x.y.z, with chipset Foo, under Windows 8, is showing an unusual number of graphics-related crashes, so don't use graphics acceleration on those machines." This results in slower rendering for those users in general; and, for those troublesome combinations that have not yet been blacklisted, you end up with users who see Firefox crash a lot (see, e.g., drinkypoo's comment below).
If you're not one of the people with a magically horrible combination of graphics card, graphics driver, and operating system, then this will make absolutely no difference for you. But for those poor users who have found this sweet spot of graphics card misery, performance will improve immensely (for those on the blacklist) and crash rates will plummet (for those who are not). And these users crash *so* *often* that just providing this workaround for their bad graphics card drivers will make *overall* Firefox crash rates go down 10%.
Hard data on *early* experimentation here the final numbers look even better: https://ashughes.com/?p=374
If you've been to Holland, you'll notice that the drivers are extremely careful -- it would be hard to get hit by a car. I'm certain these light-lines are to keep pedestrians from getting run over by bicycles. In Holland, I think bikes actually earn points, Deathrace-2000-style, for aiming at pedestrians.
I find it amusing that you would say Firefox -- which has approximately as many monthly active users as the population of the United States -- "has withered away". It's easy to get lost trying to untangle percentage market share from absolute market share.
What's interesting about a lot of these fingerprinting metrics is that they aren't the result of just asking something like "navigator.getCoreCount()" -- these are sophisticated techniques that run very carefully crafted bits of code, and then measure the time certain operations take in order to deduce the number of effective cores. There's really no way to "lie" other than to intentionally be slow.
Mozilla is; there's just not much marketing around it.
To be clear, the level of de-featuring you're asking for makes for pretty good privacy, but a shitty modern browser. However, Mozilla is strongly committed to the prospect that the trade-off between features and privacy should remain in users' hands, which is why we work very closely with the Tor project to produce a browser that does exactly what you're proposing. The reason Firefox doesn't do this out of the box is that a browser that has been de-featured in this way does not come close to fitting the average user's needs. But you have choices, and Mozilla is committed to supporting Tor Browser to give people like you exactly what you're asking for.
In case you missed it, Mozilla recently started taking Tor's modifications in as part of core Firefox code, both to make thing easier for the team that maintains Tor Browser, and to allow users to turn certain Tor-provided privacy-focused features on in base Firefox.
That seems a fair analysis as well, especially given that Amazon doesn't seem to have weighed in on the topic yet.
...and before that, it was Game of Thrones. Media companies don't seem to get that this isn't yesteryear where they could corral people into paying for a very broad service with exclusive content. Meanwhile, online sales of television series remain brisk, even at prices around $30 to $50 for a single show season. Sure, consumers aren't acting rationally here -- you can get the entire prime video catalog for the same price as two to three shows -- but that's how economies *actually* work. It blows my mind that the people selling these shows and services still can't see that. I really have very little sympathy for those content owners who choose not to sell their shows free-and-clear of other services. They get exactly the piracy they're asking for.
Fuck you Google (and fuck you Mozilla, Google's lapdogs).
You need to update your conspiracy theories. The paranoid series of twisted, ignorant logic that was once used to make this statement was utterly undermined when Mozilla stopped taking search referral money from Google.
While literally true, that's hardly an honest assessment. It's impractical for all but 0.01% of the userbase. The rest are just stuck with whatever mozilla decides.
Or you could click here: http://archive.mozilla.org/pub...
You aren't as locked out as you're claiming to be.
Right. What you want is horrifically insecure, which is why everyone is moving to disallow it. Chrome beat Firefox to the punch, but this change has been desperately needed for a long time. As long as you have a product used by millions of users, it's a giant blinking target for malware. Signing is entirely about being able to pull that malware out of the field after it is discovered -- and there's some really skanky add-on based malware out there.
As has been mentioned, if you don't like it, you have options -- unbranded builds and ESR releases let you do exactly what you want to do. And, again, that's far more than you can say for Chrome.
So, really, your complaint resolves to "Firefox will now be secure by default when it comes to add-ons, and I'll have to go through the inhumane and grueling task of downloading my Firefox from a different location on the web if I want to keep doing what I'm doing." That's a little hard to take seriously.
Alternately, you can grab the add-on and push it to the add-ons server for signing yourself -- it's all automated. The point of signing is that it allows Mozilla to shut off malicious add-ons when they arise. As mentioned elsewhere, all add-ons hosted on Mozilla's servers have already been signed, so you'd only have to do this if you found some unmaintained add-on lying around elsewhere on the web. To be honest, that sounds kind of fishy, so I'd proceed with caution.
Replying to myself, because I realize this isn't entirely accurate: Firefox lets you host your (signed) add-on on your own site if you want. Chrome absolutely requires you to download it from Google servers.
Ah, I follow your logic: "Whoa. Firefox is now better in performance and memory footprint than Chrome. But it has THE EXACT SAME ADD-ON SIGNING POLICY AS CHROME, so... you know... fuck it. I'll stay on the worse browser."
A lot has been written on this, but this is a good and recent analysis: http://www.erahm.org/2016/02/1...
tl;dr: Chrome uses twice as much memory as Firefox on all platforms.
Free? No, the implicit agreement you have with Google is your privacy for its services. Google didn't uphold its end of the deal, so he should ask for his privacy back.
AM/FM radio still has commercials and does in fact pay the music industry (not sure about artists cut) to play songs. Internet radio, like Pandora, follows the same sort of rules as AM/FM radio. The product (music) is free to the consumer, but the distributor (radio station) gets paid by ads.
The same is true for Spotify, which he takes a swipe at as well. That kind of partisan bickering makes this seem far less like a principled objection to Youtube's business model (which does, by the way, pay revenue to artists) and more like an attack at anyone competing with his employer.
You don't develop by any chance do you?
Not as much as I'd like to, but I have a certain amount of influence over feature implementation. If you want to describe the idea here, I'll pass it along.
Oh, and I forgot to mention -- I run with hundreds of tabs open from time to time as well, and it's usually just one or two bad apples that grind things to a halt. Since you're on 47 or later, you can go to about:performance and see which pages are chewing up CPU time. Closing the top CPU-hogging tabs makes everything work *much* better.
If you're going to go multi-core at least give me 1 full core for my current tab...
A lot of the pain you're feeling is probably due to on-thread content rendering. Since you're already living on the bleeding edge by running nightly, you might as well try turning on async pan/zoom, which renders content on a separate thread. This has some dramatic responsivity improvements. Go into "about:config" and set the pref "apz.drag.enabled" to "true."
I have creatinists on my family, so I’m always looking for more simple and direct arguments about the age of the universe ...
- Where did all the water go?
- At what rate was the water lost?
- What, therefore, is the minimum age of the planet planet on the basis of this analysis?
Answer: God took it away to test our faith, and it disappeared instantly. You're fighting a losing battle here. In the same way that you can't prove religion with logic, you can't disprove it with logic either. They are unrelated concepts.
d) Does not play Netflix.
Huh? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/...
And, for the Mac users, you should be good once Firefox 47 comes out: https://blog.mozilla.org/futur...