Sounds a little like you are blaming FF for the fact that the extension devs are too lazy...
No, we're blaming mozilla for being too lazy to to care about
backwards compatibility, and too egocentric to pay any attention
at all to their users opinions about what they're doing.
They keep offering themselves as a development platform, and then
yanking the rug out from under developers.
Mozilla has screwed us over multiple times, making it difficult to pick the point at which it should be forked. The Palemoon project exists if you want to stick with pre-Australius code-- to my eye it responds faster on light duty loads (less than a dozen tabs, let's say), and there are various XUL-based extensions that continue to work. It was having trouble with video the last time I looked, but nothing forces you to stick with just one browser for everything you do...
Sorry were you trying to make a point? Ad blockers work fine on the new WebExtensions API
Yes, the point I'm making is that there are customizations the pwople really do want, which is to say that your main premise has some minor holes in it. But feel free to keep moving those goal post around, it could be you need the exercise.
I might also make some other points, that there isn't any obvious reason an open source project should care about "market share"-- ten percent of the web is still a big chunk of the web, and it's big enough to exert some leverage on the rest of it-- like if google moves to the dark side a little too blatantly, you can get a mss migration back to fire-lit side.
The point that people are making here is pretty solid: for years, the best reason to use firefox was it could be customized
Yes but that has nothing to do with their market share now does it given that browser market share seems to be inversely proportional to the level of customisation.
But we're talking about history, and how we got to this
point. It could be that it wasn't actually such a great idea for
Firefox to continually piss off the most loyal segment of it's
user-base by telling them that they don't matter because mozilla
is going after the pinhead masses, and look at how pretty our new
curvey tabs are (oh, I mean our old tabs, because it turns out they
weren't so cool after all...).
I might also make the point that using precisely the same
strategy as the other guys does not actually create much in the
way of "product-differentiation", as in Firefox's current moves:
"switch back to firefox, we're going to be just like chrome!"
(And futher, it would be kind of cool, if someone, somewhere wasn't scheming
on going after mobile phones: the ultimate point-and-drool
interface, pretty much useless for anything like serious work...)
The people complaining do appear to be pretty far right, and tend to see left-wing bias under the bed.
But then, it's pretty easy to have a post modded down into oblivion (I think the threshold is something like two blackballs), particularly if you're someone like myself with an obnoxious sense of humor. (Can you believe the people at/r/firefox didn't like my suggestion that the new dark blue fox icon should be named "the death spiral"?).
If you look at a place like/r/politics, the bias isn't so much "left" as toward the middle (but it's the actual middle, not the Very Serious pundit middle). During election season, every single opinon piece at WaPo got posted there and modde way up, to the point where I was wondering if Bezos had a merry band of hired astroturfers acting in concert with Hillary's Brock-puppets....
Reddit often does feel like a bubble-factory... a group of people can create a sub-reddit, and then camp out there enforcing their own view of reality, or standard of politeness, or whatever. If that's what you're looking for, maybe reddit works well for you... myself I'm constantly looking for the magic tool that's going to fix our badly broken collective intelligence, and as far as that goes, reddit blewit.
That's a pretty good question. Let me try some answers.
You could suck-it-up and simply admit to yourself that user
moderation on a mass scale is inevitably going to gravitate
toward a middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator, and
minority opinons, even sizeable minorities like Trumpsters
or Chomskities or what not, are likely to be dismissed.
You could just suck-it-up and presume you're creating a place for
like-minded people and write that into the ground rules. Let's
call that idea "the dailykos but preferably not run by an idiot".
It has the unfortunate side-effect of not scaling terribly well--
as it increases in importance (presuming it does) then you need
to put more efforts into policing attempts at subversion.
You could rely entire on hired, vetted moderators who are
instructed on how to enforce a certain standard of intellectual
integrity (and yes, probably "politeness", much as that crap
drives me up the wall).
You could draw from a pool of volunteers, but require them to
pass a training course in rational thinking and discourse--
and if that sounds silly, ask yourself what "science" is, and why
does it work?
And this particular story-- true or false-- is a fine example of the problem of suppressing speech... The racist idiots crawl off into a corner and tell themselves that they're the iconoclasts in touch with the real truth, which never gets challenged, because their persecution complex keeps their beliefs safe.
The hyperbole here is a bit thick ("stalinistic"), but my fellow lefties could indeed, for example, take the trouble to learn how to make a logical case against racism. Just screaming "racist" at people has limited utility. (Not that I expect a lot from going around making logical cases, but you know...).
Dude: it's possible to try to reply to something on slashdot, cut-and-paste a quote into a TEXTAREA, and then find that it doesn't display correctly. Slashdot's input doesn't understand it's output. That's PFD.
Does anybody care? I only spent five minutes researching the subject, but from what I can find virtually nobody is using Reddit's Open Source code to run their own websites.
There are people complaining that their pull requests have been
left to die on the vine-- they were trying to add features and
fixes to reddit itself.
There are multiple attempts at reddit-alternatives out there, and
I would be very surprised if at least some of them weren't using
an older version of reddit code as a base. (If you care, most of
them look to me like failures of imagination-- "we be just like
reddit, but better... somehow".)
One of the big complaints about this move is that it looks like a
move away from transparency in general-- reddit's stated
reasoning for what it's doing doesn't make a lot of sense-- unless
there's something they're developing that they know would piss
off their users: time to keep the advertisers happy, right?
(Every other day I wonder why everyone gave up on usenet.
Something or other about spammers is what they usually say,
but compared to other crap we've got to deal with, there had to
be some hack that could cover for that problem...)
Yeah, the conspiracy theories are tempting, but the entire UX world seems to have a similar disease. When Faaborg was trying to sell everyone on tabs-on-top, he started spouting the line "First they hate it, then they love it": that sums up the Designer Philosophy in a nutshell. They're willing to do stuff to you that you hate, because they know better, they're completely confident you'll come around... so they can do more stuff to you that you'll hate.
Two words for you, "ad blocker".
A customization option is something no one much cares about until everyone cares about it.
The point that people are making here is pretty solid: for years, the best reason to use firefox was it could be customized, so they did their best to fix that, and here we go again for another round of breaking everything.
We are casually discussing the issue, got anything constructive to add?
Yes, he's obliquely making the point that ad-blockers aren't the
only thing we need, we could also use some sort of system that
flags libertarian fanatics as time-wasters that can be safely
ignored.
I predict that there will be a booming market in libertarian-blockers.
> I don't know Javascript, but Ruby is deficient in error checking.
Client-side javascript is even better: you never need to worry about error messages because you never see them.
I disagree. You can't run a photovoltaic setup without material
inputs, they just take the form of replacement panels and
batteries, and it doesn't get called "fuel".
Calling it "renewable" is a scam to convince people it's magic:
pay one price now and it works forever. It's completely
non-polluting as long as you don't look too closely at the
manufacturing process.
It isn't exactly what I want,
It isn't exactly what we need-- wind and solar are useful
(anything that isn't burning hydrocarbons is useful) the idea
that it's the only thing that will job it is just wrong, and the
idea that we solve the problem just using them is probably also
wrong-- at best it's "not yet established".
The minute people have the means to leave your treeless urban hellscapes they do it; nothing uniquely murican about it.
You're completely out of touch with what's actually going on--
going by rents and tourist dollars, those "urban hellscapes" are some of the most popular places in the US, and young people have completely gotten over the "romance" of spending your life stuck in a car commute.
Remember the good old days when you'd get nice liberal
environmentally-minded economists talking about stuff like carbon
taxes or maybe emissions trading, and correcting for
externalities while avoiding trying to "pick winners"?
Now it's always subsidies for their favorites, wind and solar,
I suspect because they realize that nuclear would win a real
competition for clean energy.
And they stopped talking about "clean" energy, now they talk
about "renewable" energy, as thought that actually means
something and is somehow of critical importance.
I sincerely hope these guys don't get the planet fried--
we're up against a nasty problem, and both the left and the right
are stuck on crazed delusions.
And nuclear power has been estimated to have saved 1.8 million
lives, but it doesn't stop the anti-nuclear folks from
complaining about the horrible subsidy of government-underwritten
insurance (which hasn't actually cost us anything).
By the way, you want to take renewables-enthusiasts with a grain
of salt.
And we're required to "keep up with demand"? And even if you conclude the Bay Area needs to build more, why exactly should the entire burden fall on San Francisco, and not those suburban paradises down south of here?
(We could just wait for bubble 2.0 to pop, and for the demand to go away.)
And like I've been aaying, on this subject, no one in their right mind would trust a real estate investor, a building developer or a libertarian.
And the amount of housing construction in the Bay Area is literally almost zero-bubble. The problem really here is a lack of construction that is coming almost completely from overly strict zoning and building codes.
Consider that in 2015 the Bay Area added 64,000 new jobs, most of them in the Silicon Valley, but less than 5,000 new homes were constructed, Motter said.
The inventory of Silicon Valley housing has declined by 10 percent since 2014, and the region has experienced a shortage of nearly 25,000 units since 2007, according to the Joint Venture Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.
Even just using those numbers, that is not anything like "literally zero",
and it's also "the Bay Area" as whole. If we take a look at what they say about San Francisco:
Some 5,500 apartments currently under construction will provide some relief for the San Francisco rental market.
So, San Francisco is about to add as many units as the entire Bay Area did in 2015. Just using these numbers.
I'm emphasizing that I haven't checked these numbers because this actually looks like junk news to me-- it's a real estate investment rag, quoting building developers. You might as well ask a Hollywood producer about the quality of their upcoming releases.
I know a bunch of people who work for Google and none of them do it in SF.
Yeah, if they started letting programmers work in SF the exodus from Mountain View would quickly overwhelm the space they have up north.
Me, I think they should steal a page from the sports stadiums, and tell Mountain View they're thinking about moving to Fremont if they don't get the building permissions they want.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're blaming mozilla for being too lazy to to care about backwards compatibility, and too egocentric to pay any attention at all to their users opinions about what they're doing.
They keep offering themselves as a development platform, and then yanking the rug out from under developers.
Mozilla has screwed us over multiple times, making it difficult to pick the point at which it should be forked. The Palemoon project exists if you want to stick with pre-Australius code-- to my eye it responds faster on light duty loads (less than a dozen tabs, let's say), and there are various XUL-based extensions that continue to work. It was having trouble with video the last time I looked, but nothing forces you to stick with just one browser for everything you do...
Yes, the point I'm making is that there are customizations the pwople really do want, which is to say that your main premise has some minor holes in it. But feel free to keep moving those goal post around, it could be you need the exercise.
I might also make some other points, that there isn't any obvious reason an open source project should care about "market share"-- ten percent of the web is still a big chunk of the web, and it's big enough to exert some leverage on the rest of it-- like if google moves to the dark side a little too blatantly, you can get a mss migration back to fire-lit side.
But we're talking about history, and how we got to this point. It could be that it wasn't actually such a great idea for Firefox to continually piss off the most loyal segment of it's user-base by telling them that they don't matter because mozilla is going after the pinhead masses, and look at how pretty our new curvey tabs are (oh, I mean our old tabs, because it turns out they weren't so cool after all...).
I might also make the point that using precisely the same strategy as the other guys does not actually create much in the way of "product-differentiation", as in Firefox's current moves: "switch back to firefox, we're going to be just like chrome!"
(And futher, it would be kind of cool, if someone, somewhere wasn't scheming on going after mobile phones: the ultimate point-and-drool interface, pretty much useless for anything like serious work...)
The people complaining do appear to be pretty far right, and tend to see left-wing bias under the bed.
But then, it's pretty easy to have a post modded down into oblivion (I think the threshold is something like two blackballs), particularly if you're someone like myself with an obnoxious sense of humor. (Can you believe the people at /r/firefox didn't like my suggestion that the new dark blue fox icon should be named "the death spiral"?).
If you look at a place like /r/politics, the bias isn't so much "left" as toward the middle (but it's the actual middle, not the Very Serious pundit middle). During election season, every single opinon piece at WaPo got posted there and modde way up, to the point where I was wondering if Bezos had a merry band of hired astroturfers acting in concert with Hillary's Brock-puppets....
Reddit often does feel like a bubble-factory... a group of people can create a sub-reddit, and then camp out there enforcing their own view of reality, or standard of politeness, or whatever. If that's what you're looking for, maybe reddit works well for you... myself I'm constantly looking for the magic tool that's going to fix our badly broken collective intelligence, and as far as that goes, reddit blewit.
That's a pretty good question. Let me try some answers.
You could suck-it-up and simply admit to yourself that user moderation on a mass scale is inevitably going to gravitate toward a middle-of-the-road lowest-common-denominator, and minority opinons, even sizeable minorities like Trumpsters or Chomskities or what not, are likely to be dismissed.
You could just suck-it-up and presume you're creating a place for like-minded people and write that into the ground rules. Let's call that idea "the dailykos but preferably not run by an idiot". It has the unfortunate side-effect of not scaling terribly well-- as it increases in importance (presuming it does) then you need to put more efforts into policing attempts at subversion.
You could rely entire on hired, vetted moderators who are instructed on how to enforce a certain standard of intellectual integrity (and yes, probably "politeness", much as that crap drives me up the wall).
You could draw from a pool of volunteers, but require them to pass a training course in rational thinking and discourse-- and if that sounds silly, ask yourself what "science" is, and why does it work?
And this particular story-- true or false-- is a fine example of the problem of suppressing speech... The racist idiots crawl off into a corner and tell themselves that they're the iconoclasts in touch with the real truth, which never gets challenged, because their persecution complex keeps their beliefs safe.
The hyperbole here is a bit thick ("stalinistic"), but my fellow lefties could indeed, for example, take the trouble to learn how to make a logical case against racism. Just screaming "racist" at people has limited utility. (Not that I expect a lot from going around making logical cases, but you know...).
Dude: it's possible to try to reply to something on slashdot, cut-and-paste a quote into a TEXTAREA, and then find that it doesn't display correctly. Slashdot's input doesn't understand it's output. That's PFD.
There are people complaining that their pull requests have been left to die on the vine-- they were trying to add features and fixes to reddit itself.
There are multiple attempts at reddit-alternatives out there, and I would be very surprised if at least some of them weren't using an older version of reddit code as a base. (If you care, most of them look to me like failures of imagination-- "we be just like reddit, but better... somehow".)
One of the big complaints about this move is that it looks like a move away from transparency in general-- reddit's stated reasoning for what it's doing doesn't make a lot of sense-- unless there's something they're developing that they know would piss off their users: time to keep the advertisers happy, right?
(Every other day I wonder why everyone gave up on usenet. Something or other about spammers is what they usually say, but compared to other crap we've got to deal with, there had to be some hack that could cover for that problem...)
Yeah, the conspiracy theories are tempting, but the entire UX world seems to have a similar disease. When Faaborg was trying to sell everyone on tabs-on-top, he started spouting the line "First they hate it, then they love it": that sums up the Designer Philosophy in a nutshell. They're willing to do stuff to you that you hate, because they know better, they're completely confident you'll come around... so they can do more stuff to you that you'll hate.
Two words for you, "ad blocker". A customization option is something no one much cares about until everyone cares about it. The point that people are making here is pretty solid: for years, the best reason to use firefox was it could be customized, so they did their best to fix that, and here we go again for another round of breaking everything.
Oh nonsense. All that exists exists for the better, in this, the freeest of all free markets.
Flamebait? My god. If even slashdot can't handle snark, the internet really is over.
Have fun in your Safe Spaces, kids.
But if there is a market for Kool Aid, shouldn't Kool Aid be sold?
You're a typical elite intellectual, denying the masses their Kool Aid even though the Raspberry flavor goes so well with Arsenic.
Why is everyone always so prejudiced against skim milk? There's really nothing wrong with 1% milk! The less fat content the better, right?
Yes, he's obliquely making the point that ad-blockers aren't the only thing we need, we could also use some sort of system that flags libertarian fanatics as time-wasters that can be safely ignored.
I predict that there will be a booming market in libertarian-blockers.
Gr8Apes wrote:
And the moment they realize they can't sell breast augmentation surgery and penis pumps to us, we'll be back to where we are.
Welcome to the ad supported internet: dumb is where the money is.
You know, somehow this story seems to lack punch. Bloomberg needs to do something to jazz it up a little.
(If only they gave us some obvious hypocrisy to complain about, then it might really go viral.)
> I don't know Javascript, but Ruby is deficient in error checking. Client-side javascript is even better: you never need to worry about error messages because you never see them.
I disagree. You can't run a photovoltaic setup without material inputs, they just take the form of replacement panels and batteries, and it doesn't get called "fuel".
Calling it "renewable" is a scam to convince people it's magic: pay one price now and it works forever. It's completely non-polluting as long as you don't look too closely at the manufacturing process.
It isn't exactly what we need-- wind and solar are useful (anything that isn't burning hydrocarbons is useful) the idea that it's the only thing that will job it is just wrong, and the idea that we solve the problem just using them is probably also wrong-- at best it's "not yet established".
You're completely out of touch with what's actually going on-- going by rents and tourist dollars, those "urban hellscapes" are some of the most popular places in the US, and young people have completely gotten over the "romance" of spending your life stuck in a car commute.
Remember the good old days when you'd get nice liberal environmentally-minded economists talking about stuff like carbon taxes or maybe emissions trading, and correcting for externalities while avoiding trying to "pick winners"?
Now it's always subsidies for their favorites, wind and solar, I suspect because they realize that nuclear would win a real competition for clean energy.
And they stopped talking about "clean" energy, now they talk about "renewable" energy, as thought that actually means something and is somehow of critical importance.
I sincerely hope these guys don't get the planet fried-- we're up against a nasty problem, and both the left and the right are stuck on crazed delusions.
And nuclear power has been estimated to have saved 1.8 million lives, but it doesn't stop the anti-nuclear folks from complaining about the horrible subsidy of government-underwritten insurance (which hasn't actually cost us anything).
By the way, you want to take renewables-enthusiasts with a grain of salt.
And we're required to "keep up with demand"? And even if you conclude the Bay Area needs to build more, why exactly should the entire burden fall on San Francisco, and not those suburban paradises down south of here?
(We could just wait for bubble 2.0 to pop, and for the demand to go away.)
And like I've been aaying, on this subject, no one in their right mind would trust a real estate investor, a building developer or a libertarian.
I have an idea, let's look at the article you just posted a link to: https://www.curbed.com/2016/2/...
Even just using those numbers, that is not anything like "literally zero", and it's also "the Bay Area" as whole. If we take a look at what they say about San Francisco:
So, San Francisco is about to add as many units as the entire Bay Area did in 2015. Just using these numbers.
I'm emphasizing that I haven't checked these numbers because this actually looks like junk news to me-- it's a real estate investment rag, quoting building developers. You might as well ask a Hollywood producer about the quality of their upcoming releases.
Yeah, if they started letting programmers work in SF the exodus from Mountain View would quickly overwhelm the space they have up north.
Me, I think they should steal a page from the sports stadiums, and tell Mountain View they're thinking about moving to Fremont if they don't get the building permissions they want.