I wouldn't exactly call it "painless", but probably overall a good thing.
Yeah, maybe. I suppose it's a good thing that it made it impossible to receive most of the stations anymore without either spending a lot of money on cable or spending a lot of money on roof antennae and boosters. Seriously, in my area (which is urban), those are your only two options unless you happen to live in one of the small areas that can actually get realistic digital reception.
I remember when my daughter was little and came across a rotary telephone in a box in the garage. Her comment: "so that's why we say 'dial the phone'!"
It hadn't occurred to me how weird that phrase must sound if you've only ever seen touch-tone phones.
You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight.
Indeed. I remember the day it happened to me!
I am amused by all this millennial hate. The generational wars have always been with us and will always be with us, and they're always stupid.
As a wise (older and deeply uncool) man once told me: every generation thinks:
1) That they invented sex 2) That the generation before them are corrupt idiots 3) That the generation after them are lazy idiots 4) That their generation is the last reasonable one before the collapse of civilization
All of those things are just as true now as they were a thousand years ago. Which is to say, not even a little bit true. But it amuses me to see the tradition carrying on.
Now.. since OTA has gone digital, they have introduced digital subcarrier channels. Where analog could only have 1 channel, it is not uncommon for there to be 4-5 channels available on the same frequency.
Where you live, perhaps. Where I live, you could get 6 channels with the old analog system, and you're lucky to be able to get two since the digital switchover.
Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety. Cheap ones would come with an external antenna you had to snap on.
Yeah, I haven't been able to get a decent OTA signal since the switchover (if I can get a signal at all). On the other hand, that got me to pretty much stop watching TV, so there's an upside.
My point is that the changes that have been made to Firefox over the last few years have been making Firefox consistently worse. Literally the only reason I continue to put up with it is the existence of the NoScript plugin -- which, from everything I've learned, is impossible to replicate in their new plugin system.
Adding these sorts of things to it only perpetuates that decline. I'm not necessarily against these new features (although I do miss the days when FF was a lot leaner), but I'd like to see real improvements as well.
More than anyone else, they are pumping programmer hours into making their browser better in important and fundamental ways.
I suppose that depends on what you consider "better". I'm not seeing any meaningful improvements, but I am seeing a lot of changes that are the exact opposite of that.
You will be the exact guy who brays about firefox being irrelevant and featureless for not having built-in voice search like all its rivals in 2019.
Not even close. Voice search is a feature that is off exactly zero interest to me, no matter where it appears.
There is a 99.999% chance that you never do anything that would warrant anyone spying on you
True, but that doesn't stop them. The US, for example, isn't at all shy about the fact that they spy on all of us.
Google represents the number one threat to everyone's privacy. After them come the 10000's of commercial companies who either collect your data themselves or just buy your life story from some other commercial enterprise that has better capture technology.
Exactly correct! Although I'm at a loss as to why you're so eager to give Microsoft a pass on their spying. There's no such thing as "anonymized", and the amount they try to collect is the exact opposite of "small" -- although they, like Google, etc., graciously allow you to reduce -- but not eliminate -- the scope of their spying.
Also, just because some entities spy more than others doesn't mean that it's OK for anybody to do it. I reject your implication otherwise.
I just wish they'd spend some development time to actually improve the browser, rather than let it continue on the decline it's been engaging in for years now.
Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well
A false positive means that important content doesn't appear at all - and if you're doing a bank transfer, that could be potentially disastrous.
I disagree, based on the fact that I don't use an adblocker, I use NoScript to block anything Java/Javascript/Flash/etc., ad or not.
Sometimes, this causes sites to break, but not that often. And it's never caused a failure on a bank site that led to anything remotely like a disaster. It's been, at worst, an inconvenience that is fixed in a couple of mouseclicks.
it'll only block ads that are considered intrusive and go against the standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads
The standards set by the CBA are so low that I consider them pointless. They don't even reject the worst sort of "bad" ad: the ad that tracks you or collects information about you.
But it's not exactly the same. None Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc., all tell you they're doing it (so you're making an informed choice if you use their services), and amount of data they collect isn't as comprehensive.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the other 25% of it streams music.
I wouldn't exactly call it "painless", but probably overall a good thing.
Yeah, maybe. I suppose it's a good thing that it made it impossible to receive most of the stations anymore without either spending a lot of money on cable or spending a lot of money on roof antennae and boosters. Seriously, in my area (which is urban), those are your only two options unless you happen to live in one of the small areas that can actually get realistic digital reception.
That's an excellent point -- but in skipping ads, you are saving something. Not time, necessarily, but certainly a measure of sanity.
I remember when my daughter was little and came across a rotary telephone in a box in the garage. Her comment: "so that's why we say 'dial the phone'!"
It hadn't occurred to me how weird that phrase must sound if you've only ever seen touch-tone phones.
You are the opposite of cool. It happens almost overnight.
Indeed. I remember the day it happened to me!
I am amused by all this millennial hate. The generational wars have always been with us and will always be with us, and they're always stupid.
As a wise (older and deeply uncool) man once told me: every generation thinks:
1) That they invented sex
2) That the generation before them are corrupt idiots
3) That the generation after them are lazy idiots
4) That their generation is the last reasonable one before the collapse of civilization
All of those things are just as true now as they were a thousand years ago. Which is to say, not even a little bit true. But it amuses me to see the tradition carrying on.
Yes, but even with those, antennae usually came with them. At least, in over 90% of the sets that I saw when I was younger.
Yes, antenna. Typically, there were two telescoping antennae that would pull up out of the TV's cabinet to form rabbit ears.
Now.. since OTA has gone digital, they have introduced digital subcarrier channels. Where analog could only have 1 channel, it is not uncommon for there to be 4-5 channels available on the same frequency.
Where you live, perhaps. Where I live, you could get 6 channels with the old analog system, and you're lucky to be able to get two since the digital switchover.
Most old TVs did not come with a built-in antenna. You used rabbit ears externally.
Wha? I remember pretty much all TVs coming with a built-in antenna, usually of the telescoping variety. Cheap ones would come with an external antenna you had to snap on.
All of them. That sort of thing is what keeps Monster Cables in business.
Yeah, I haven't been able to get a decent OTA signal since the switchover (if I can get a signal at all). On the other hand, that got me to pretty much stop watching TV, so there's an upside.
(while making Firefox competitive again, but all of that news suspiciously never gets mentioned here on Slashdot).
Maybe because they're not?
in order to make the browser more like Chrome
Which is one of the problems with the direction FF is going.
My point is that the changes that have been made to Firefox over the last few years have been making Firefox consistently worse. Literally the only reason I continue to put up with it is the existence of the NoScript plugin -- which, from everything I've learned, is impossible to replicate in their new plugin system.
Adding these sorts of things to it only perpetuates that decline. I'm not necessarily against these new features (although I do miss the days when FF was a lot leaner), but I'd like to see real improvements as well.
More than anyone else, they are pumping programmer hours into making their browser better in important and fundamental ways.
I suppose that depends on what you consider "better". I'm not seeing any meaningful improvements, but I am seeing a lot of changes that are the exact opposite of that.
You will be the exact guy who brays about firefox being irrelevant and featureless for not having built-in voice search like all its rivals in 2019.
Not even close. Voice search is a feature that is off exactly zero interest to me, no matter where it appears.
To be honest, I've always suspected that I was fictional.
I'd probably also load visible images from [adserver]
Not me. Accessing those images will still give the ad company more data about me than I'm willing to trust them with.
There is a 99.999% chance that you never do anything that would warrant anyone spying on you
True, but that doesn't stop them. The US, for example, isn't at all shy about the fact that they spy on all of us.
Google represents the number one threat to everyone's privacy. After them come the 10000's of commercial companies who either collect your data themselves or just buy your life story from some other commercial enterprise that has better capture technology.
Exactly correct! Although I'm at a loss as to why you're so eager to give Microsoft a pass on their spying. There's no such thing as "anonymized", and the amount they try to collect is the exact opposite of "small" -- although they, like Google, etc., graciously allow you to reduce -- but not eliminate -- the scope of their spying.
Also, just because some entities spy more than others doesn't mean that it's OK for anybody to do it. I reject your implication otherwise.
I just wish they'd spend some development time to actually improve the browser, rather than let it continue on the decline it's been engaging in for years now.
Auto-play is annoying, but it may not be possible to entirely prevent without also turning off all javascript that runs when the page is loaded as well
Firefox manages it, so it's obviously possible.
Under US law, they're fine as long as they hold to the same standards for everyone, including themselves.
A false positive means that important content doesn't appear at all - and if you're doing a bank transfer, that could be potentially disastrous.
I disagree, based on the fact that I don't use an adblocker, I use NoScript to block anything Java/Javascript/Flash/etc., ad or not.
Sometimes, this causes sites to break, but not that often. And it's never caused a failure on a bank site that led to anything remotely like a disaster. It's been, at worst, an inconvenience that is fixed in a couple of mouseclicks.
This will be a big test for all those people who claim to block ads because they have gotten so bad
No, it won't, because it does nothing about the worst abuse that ads engage in: tracking.
But blocking ads on the basis of how intrusive they are creates a clear incentive for advertisers to move away from obnoxious ads.
Unfortunately, what the CBA (and Google) considers "acceptable" includes ads that spy on you, so it's a nonstarter for me personally.
The standards set by the CBA are so low that I consider them pointless. They don't even reject the worst sort of "bad" ad: the ad that tracks you or collects information about you.
But it's not exactly the same. None Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc., all tell you they're doing it (so you're making an informed choice if you use their services), and amount of data they collect isn't as comprehensive.