All I got out of that was, "blah blah blah, been using it for a decade, don't want to change." Tough. Maybe I should mention that I was using Windows since Windows 95 (first computer: 1997), so when I finally pulled the plug in 2006 it was not a light move. I had dozens of programs that I was so used to I felt almost as if I couldn't function without them. The landscape was slightly different back then, but yet eerily similar to what people are dealing with these days... just replace a couple OS names and the stories could probably be interchanged. The only difference is, the Linux world is lightyears away from even where it was when I first used it. NTFS-3G? Hah, highly experimental. X11? It was only beginning to truly get simplified. Now it's mostly a cakewalk, I really don't see much room for excuse. Either put up with Microsoft's shit, or get up and do something about it. It's as simple as that.
Really. XP's future was looking a bit bleak about 8-10 years ago, why the fuck would anyone want put up with the torture this long... and then *STILL* (!) not want to let it go even at the official end of its life? Which, I might as well add, was continually put off by Microsoft due to their own failures (Vista) and the unexpected success of their competition (Linux) in markets that they themselves weren't quite a part of. Now it's such a crusty old turd, you have to be a masochist to keep wanting to use it. If that's the case... have at it. Cut away.
I will never know why people have such a reliance on such an antiquated operating system, but then, I don't really care, because I jumped ship back in 2006 for Linux, just in time for the V-Bomb. It's been much better ever since. The simple solution is to get a new, "modern" computer; or if you're cheap, switch to a different operating system. It's not rocket science.
What exactly makes you think that Firefox should always work the way YOU want it to, and that Seamonkey (or any other browser) won't eventually change so much that you hate them too? Can't you be a little less of a child about this?
...
Um, he uses Firefox.
Exactly. For, like, ever, in fact. I have actually been a Firefox user since before it was even *called* Firefox, and I heavily recommended it to everyone I knew for years starting sometime around its official 1.0 release. Anyone remember Phoenix? Any time there was a virus conversation, one of the key things I always said (aside from basic common sense) was DO NOT USE IE... use, you guessed it, Firefox. Those people listened to what I said, and in turn told people *they* knew to do the same thing. Most of the people I know have, as a direct result, been users of Firefox.
Now, Mozilla seems like it doesn't even want Firefox to be Firefox anymore; they want it to be Chrome. So why should a user who has been there praising the browser from the beginning, who used it in large part *for* those design choices that made Firefox what it was, have to shut up and take it up the ass while Mozilla competes with Google on their race to get the first Chrome version 100 out the door?
In recent years, I have been more hesitant to recommend Firefox. Hell, Mozilla wouldn't even be where they are today if it wasn't for people like me. And now, I'm considering abandoning it. I think I have the right to show my dissatisfaction with Mozilla, which started happening little by little with the 3 series, and then went into overdrive starting with 4.0.
If I wanted to use Chrome, I would be using Chrome right now. But I'm not--I use Firefox, and have been putting up with Mozilla's shit for years now, screwing up and dumbing down the interface. Now, they're making it a direct Chrome clone. I think I'll be switching to SeaMonkey soon. I'm sick of Mozilla's bullshit. The creation of the Mozilla Corporation, as I see it, was the start of Mozilla's downfall.
Every Debian I've used in the last several years just plain worked. Back to 4.0/Etch, which marked the beginning of my interest in Linux and my early distro hopping days.
So true. On the Windows (8.1) side of my laptop, I can spend 10+ minutes doing attempted (failed) boots, forcing shutdowns when it stops responding during boot, and repeating the whole process before the OS finally decides to actually boot. Maybe if I'm unlucky I'll even get a "sorry, Windows has failed to boot" message, requiring--yep--another reboot. And that nightmare speaks nothing of the stupid Metro crap including Start Screen.
Not fun when I only need to reboot from the Linux side to get into Windows for five or ten minutes at the most. This problem has been known since about November last year, I've had it since I got my laptop and set it up in December, and there is *still* no fucking fix to this madness. Sure am glad I am on the Linux side the majority of the time, where everything is fast, nice and pleasant (and stable) in the i3 window manager.
Well, at least it seems like they got the traditional Windows user experience right... they should at least get credit for that. It's nice to know that there is consistency between their products, so you can know what you're getting (into) ahead of time... even if the shared traits are 95% undesirable.
"It mostly seems that some people can't quite grasp that Mozilla isn't able to do EVERYTHING, and sometimes an old feature that's convenient for some of us has to be let go. The people who really need that feature should be the ones who figure out how to make it work, not one company with limited resources who are already maintaining what's required for us to maintain such addons."
You must use Apple systems. Yeah, let's dumb everything down, for all the idiots out there...
No, I'd rather not see GUIs become crippled, while powerful options get buried in messes like about:config or some registry or something. Just because advanced users are more capable of finding things and getting around a system, doesn't mean the developers should make it unnecessarily difficult to do so.
The browser could at least help, by not automatically assuming that everyone wants JavaScript support and re-enabling it even for anyone who willfully turned it off in the first place, while at the same time removing the GUI, requiring digging through the bowels of the hell that is about:config just to find the option to re-enable. The first step to cutting web bloat is to disable JavaScript, but ironically Mozilla seems to be directly against this idea.
Probably because they figured if there is a chance of them selling the brand/company and they were really serious about it, they would rather not shoot themselves in the foot by killing Winamp before a potential deal goes through.
Personally I probably wouldn't run something like CentOS/RHEL on my primary desktop or laptop since I like to run all the latest stuff without too much of a wait. But if I had a secondary "work" machine and wanted absolute rock-solid stability and unsurpassed support (ten years), then such an OS would be excellent. Running a machine with for the most part only minor updates being required and no major, potential stability-damaging upgrades for its entire working life does sound somewhat appealing if you just want a machine to work, and that especially suits a desktop in the corner that just always works, is always there, never needs any maintenance...
But yeah, I'd probably still upgrade once every other OS version at least anyway. I would eventually get bored and want to start playing with something new.
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux. It is also not Linux's fault that both Apple and Adobe guard and keep their programs' source code secret, so it is impossible for anyone else to compile it for anything other than the operating systems that these two companies choose to compile these programs for themselves.
One, you could argue that it is "ridiculously easy" for security programs to check anti-virus software, period, but people still get screwed--whether it's because they have not kept up to date on something, haven't kept their antivirus subscription going, or their program just didn't catch it.
Two, you really think the NSA gives a flying fuck if something is "illegal"? Really? Literally all of the information we have so far on them thanks to Edward Snowden only proves that they don't give a rat's ass about what is "legal" or not, and the agency is run by a scumbag who will lie under oath to Congress and the entire population of United States of America and try to cover it up. Their "top-secret" information blatantly says that they break any law they have to (or want to) if it will suit them--and anything that seems questionable, they will try to twist their interpretation around so it fits you so they can "claim" that they're somehow following the law.
While I do agree with you, an interesting negative to that would be:
If everyone runs their own Tor exit node, including unknowingly every dumb Windows and Mac user out there, then malware writers (the NSA?) would have a field day writing bad stuff that attacks and takes advantage of a very large number of exit nodes. So which is better: fewer exit nodes but a few known bad ones as it is now, or shitloads of exit nodes where the vast majority cannot be trusted? All it would take is one major outbreak to basically destroy Tor's purpose...
I wouldn't have stopped using Winamp back in 2006 if it supported Linux. In fact, I'd probably still be using it now, but because I was forced to search for an alternative I've settled mostly on Audacious. I still think Winamp is one of the best players though. I'm not quite as crazy about Foobar2000, but it least it runs better in Wine.
It's as simple as that, and I am an American myself. I sure as hell wasn't one of the masses crying for "protection" and for the government to infiltrate every aspect of every citizen's lives back when 9/11 happened. My exact thoughts at the time were something along the lines of, "shit happens. People will get over it." Only, apparently I was wrong about people "getting over" it; if they really did, we wouldn't have the dragnet of mass surveillance placed upon us by the federal government as we do now and find ourselves forced to figure out how to reclaim our 4th-Amendment rights (and others).
All 9/11 did was make the whole horde of pussies come out in droves and produce legislation to help drive the government into the ground and weaken its people. The worthless yellow journalism that is the mainstream news sure as hell didn't help much. If that is what the terrorists wanted (to erode the U.S. into a rogue, fascist government with powerless citizens), the Americans didn't put up much of a fight, because that is exactly what they got and with no trouble at all.
The way I see it, the real "terrorists" are my own government. Its citizens need to grow a pair and quit going apeshit over "terrorist attacks" and stand up for their rights and freedoms. It's ironic the way people sharply and strongly react to even just the word "terrorists"; why no talk of all the *wars* going on? Why does no one give a fuck about those, some of which the U.S. is directly a part of? How did people get such a strong hatred of terrorists that kill, and not their own government that does the same fucking thing *on their own behalf*? Looks like another win by the mainstream news corporations, which no doubt have their own political agendas.
I have to admit, I laughed while reading the above post. Then I thought about it. What if they did? Order a shitload of Windows 8.1 donation copies at Microsoft's expense and then burn them all. And no, I don't mean in an optical disc drive. It would be amusing, at least, and it would attack Microsoft in a way. Obviously Microsoft is doing this at a loss, with the intention of increasing Windows 8 sales, but if a good portion are wasted...
Then based on that claim, I can install and run AdBlock Plus, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, etc. in my web browser to display the sites that I request the way I would prefer to view them and the advertisers can just shut the fuck up. But no, they seem to think that it's "wrong" to render HTML as you see fit and to block their garbage. Shit, this article alone is yet another confirmation that the assholes don't want us to block their cookies (ie. tracking method). Fuck them, I'll block it as I damn well please--I want nothing to do with their shit.
That's a very good method if you have very few sites to log into that you want to remember your authentication. The problem is, I have way too many sites to waste time whitelisting a bunch, and then realizing that I forgot one. So I just disable all third-party cookies and leave it alone. After all--I don't really mind the sites I'm actually visiting storing cookies for the most part. It's the people I never intended to communicate with that can fuck off. I use Adblock Plus, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe and a few other extensions to complete the effect.
But when you add a saving today, a saving tomorrow and a saving the next day, you do in fact get "savings" in daylight time. Or at least, that's what they want you to believe--I think they need to ditch the garbage completely. It causes more harm than good and is not worth fixing. We need reliable time, and you can't have that when you're forced to waste time fucking with your damn clocks every year. Just fucking give us standard time year round already, enough of this DST bullshit.
If 'trolling' these days is speaking your own 100% honest opinion, then yes, I guess I must be trolling. I wasn't aware that you are a troll for having an opinion, though. Learn something new every day.
"You clearly have little experience actually using Photoshop and certainly not a recent version."
No shit, I'm pretty sure my first couple sentences made it obvious that I was never a fan of the program, its price, etc. I'll take almost *anything* over that overpriced crap.
It's a well designed program, which is why it costs what it does.
Sorry, I did not get that impression, and I felt it was a massive rip-off at twice the price of a fucking Windows licence. Does that make me even more of a troll? Seriously though... operating system, $300... bitmap editor... $650?!
I find it odd how you kept downgrading, but Linux pretty much made that nessisary.
I find it odd how you keep talking as if you're a know-it-all professional and that your opinion is *the* definitive answer, and yet mine is trash. I have to ask you at this point the same question you started off asking me: are you a troll? Your use of "zealots" only makes it seem even more likely... and your entire second paragraph seems to have "troll" stamped all over it.
Yeah... 2.x IMO was the last truly great release, and after that it went downhill. For 3.x I was forced to start bookmarks, because of that god damn [anything-but] "awesome" bar, and I refused to use it until 3.6 (which added a few notable features that made it worth it). The problem is, 2.x is now obviously horrible out of date, lacks things like out-of-process plugins, leaks like a sieve, and is just unstable. Backport the rendering engine, security fixes, memory leak plugs, and maybe some of the better (key word there: don't want to end up with yet another shitty Chrome knockoff!) ideas and I'd switch in no time.
A chore? How do YOU install new Firefox releases? All I do is go to Help->About Firefox->Check for Updates->Install.
It's not exactly spring cleaning.
su [root password] zypper update
Unfortunately, there is a delay between official release and openSUSE repository binary package, but it's relatively short. I think the "chore" part of it that he's referring to is that there's no longer any real reward: Firefox has become old and boring, and new updates (if anything) cause more trouble than anything in terms of fucking stupid design and GUI decisions, as well as extension hell (although the extension problem has been solved for while now it seems). Not to mention, Mozilla's huge bullet-point lists of "features" in every new artificially-inflated version number is full of garbage that no one needs (and in some cases, even wants).
Getting creaky, "just" a few years back? It got old over a decade ago for me. And sorry, but demanding $650 for a fucking bitmap editor is just robbery. Which is why I never bothered to buy it, and years ago bought Paint Shop Pro (back when it was still by Jasc), and have long since switched to Paint.net and finally (after switching from Windows to Linux in 2006) the GIMP. I never did get the point behind Photoshop anyway... it's beyond slow, bloated and just a nightmare to find anything that you need. Its menu system is a trainwreck.
Slashdot Mirror
All I got out of that was, "blah blah blah, been using it for a decade, don't want to change." Tough. Maybe I should mention that I was using Windows since Windows 95 (first computer: 1997), so when I finally pulled the plug in 2006 it was not a light move. I had dozens of programs that I was so used to I felt almost as if I couldn't function without them. The landscape was slightly different back then, but yet eerily similar to what people are dealing with these days... just replace a couple OS names and the stories could probably be interchanged. The only difference is, the Linux world is lightyears away from even where it was when I first used it. NTFS-3G? Hah, highly experimental. X11? It was only beginning to truly get simplified. Now it's mostly a cakewalk, I really don't see much room for excuse. Either put up with Microsoft's shit, or get up and do something about it. It's as simple as that.
Really. XP's future was looking a bit bleak about 8-10 years ago, why the fuck would anyone want put up with the torture this long... and then *STILL* (!) not want to let it go even at the official end of its life? Which, I might as well add, was continually put off by Microsoft due to their own failures (Vista) and the unexpected success of their competition (Linux) in markets that they themselves weren't quite a part of. Now it's such a crusty old turd, you have to be a masochist to keep wanting to use it. If that's the case... have at it. Cut away.
I will never know why people have such a reliance on such an antiquated operating system, but then, I don't really care, because I jumped ship back in 2006 for Linux, just in time for the V-Bomb. It's been much better ever since. The simple solution is to get a new, "modern" computer; or if you're cheap, switch to a different operating system. It's not rocket science.
What exactly makes you think that Firefox should always work the way YOU want it to, and that Seamonkey (or any other browser) won't eventually change so much that you hate them too? Can't you be a little less of a child about this?
...
Um, he uses Firefox.
Exactly. For, like, ever, in fact. I have actually been a Firefox user since before it was even *called* Firefox, and I heavily recommended it to everyone I knew for years starting sometime around its official 1.0 release. Anyone remember Phoenix? Any time there was a virus conversation, one of the key things I always said (aside from basic common sense) was DO NOT USE IE... use, you guessed it, Firefox. Those people listened to what I said, and in turn told people *they* knew to do the same thing. Most of the people I know have, as a direct result, been users of Firefox.
Now, Mozilla seems like it doesn't even want Firefox to be Firefox anymore; they want it to be Chrome. So why should a user who has been there praising the browser from the beginning, who used it in large part *for* those design choices that made Firefox what it was, have to shut up and take it up the ass while Mozilla competes with Google on their race to get the first Chrome version 100 out the door?
In recent years, I have been more hesitant to recommend Firefox. Hell, Mozilla wouldn't even be where they are today if it wasn't for people like me. And now, I'm considering abandoning it. I think I have the right to show my dissatisfaction with Mozilla, which started happening little by little with the 3 series, and then went into overdrive starting with 4.0.
If I wanted to use Chrome, I would be using Chrome right now. But I'm not--I use Firefox, and have been putting up with Mozilla's shit for years now, screwing up and dumbing down the interface. Now, they're making it a direct Chrome clone. I think I'll be switching to SeaMonkey soon. I'm sick of Mozilla's bullshit. The creation of the Mozilla Corporation, as I see it, was the start of Mozilla's downfall.
Every Debian I've used in the last several years just plain worked. Back to 4.0/Etch, which marked the beginning of my interest in Linux and my early distro hopping days.
So true. On the Windows (8.1) side of my laptop, I can spend 10+ minutes doing attempted (failed) boots, forcing shutdowns when it stops responding during boot, and repeating the whole process before the OS finally decides to actually boot. Maybe if I'm unlucky I'll even get a "sorry, Windows has failed to boot" message, requiring--yep--another reboot. And that nightmare speaks nothing of the stupid Metro crap including Start Screen.
Not fun when I only need to reboot from the Linux side to get into Windows for five or ten minutes at the most. This problem has been known since about November last year, I've had it since I got my laptop and set it up in December, and there is *still* no fucking fix to this madness. Sure am glad I am on the Linux side the majority of the time, where everything is fast, nice and pleasant (and stable) in the i3 window manager.
Well, at least it seems like they got the traditional Windows user experience right... they should at least get credit for that. It's nice to know that there is consistency between their products, so you can know what you're getting (into) ahead of time... even if the shared traits are 95% undesirable.
"It mostly seems that some people can't quite grasp that Mozilla isn't able to do EVERYTHING, and sometimes an old feature that's convenient for some of us has to be let go. The people who really need that feature should be the ones who figure out how to make it work, not one company with limited resources who are already maintaining what's required for us to maintain such addons."
You must use Apple systems. Yeah, let's dumb everything down, for all the idiots out there...
No, I'd rather not see GUIs become crippled, while powerful options get buried in messes like about:config or some registry or something. Just because advanced users are more capable of finding things and getting around a system, doesn't mean the developers should make it unnecessarily difficult to do so.
The browser could at least help, by not automatically assuming that everyone wants JavaScript support and re-enabling it even for anyone who willfully turned it off in the first place, while at the same time removing the GUI, requiring digging through the bowels of the hell that is about:config just to find the option to re-enable. The first step to cutting web bloat is to disable JavaScript, but ironically Mozilla seems to be directly against this idea.
No. Lynx/Links/w3m. Beat *THAT*, bitches.
Probably because they figured if there is a chance of them selling the brand/company and they were really serious about it, they would rather not shoot themselves in the foot by killing Winamp before a potential deal goes through.
And there is a distro for just that purpose:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=stella
Personally I probably wouldn't run something like CentOS/RHEL on my primary desktop or laptop since I like to run all the latest stuff without too much of a wait. But if I had a secondary "work" machine and wanted absolute rock-solid stability and unsurpassed support (ten years), then such an OS would be excellent. Running a machine with for the most part only minor updates being required and no major, potential stability-damaging upgrades for its entire working life does sound somewhat appealing if you just want a machine to work, and that especially suits a desktop in the corner that just always works, is always there, never needs any maintenance...
But yeah, I'd probably still upgrade once every other OS version at least anyway. I would eventually get bored and want to start playing with something new.
It's not Linux's fault that the developers of Final Cut Pro and Lightroom specifically chose *not* to support Linux. It is also not Linux's fault that both Apple and Adobe guard and keep their programs' source code secret, so it is impossible for anyone else to compile it for anything other than the operating systems that these two companies choose to compile these programs for themselves.
One, you could argue that it is "ridiculously easy" for security programs to check anti-virus software, period, but people still get screwed--whether it's because they have not kept up to date on something, haven't kept their antivirus subscription going, or their program just didn't catch it.
Two, you really think the NSA gives a flying fuck if something is "illegal"? Really? Literally all of the information we have so far on them thanks to Edward Snowden only proves that they don't give a rat's ass about what is "legal" or not, and the agency is run by a scumbag who will lie under oath to Congress and the entire population of United States of America and try to cover it up. Their "top-secret" information blatantly says that they break any law they have to (or want to) if it will suit them--and anything that seems questionable, they will try to twist their interpretation around so it fits you so they can "claim" that they're somehow following the law.
Fuck them.
While I do agree with you, an interesting negative to that would be:
If everyone runs their own Tor exit node, including unknowingly every dumb Windows and Mac user out there, then malware writers (the NSA?) would have a field day writing bad stuff that attacks and takes advantage of a very large number of exit nodes. So which is better: fewer exit nodes but a few known bad ones as it is now, or shitloads of exit nodes where the vast majority cannot be trusted? All it would take is one major outbreak to basically destroy Tor's purpose...
I wouldn't have stopped using Winamp back in 2006 if it supported Linux. In fact, I'd probably still be using it now, but because I was forced to search for an alternative I've settled mostly on Audacious. I still think Winamp is one of the best players though. I'm not quite as crazy about Foobar2000, but it least it runs better in Wine.
It's as simple as that, and I am an American myself. I sure as hell wasn't one of the masses crying for "protection" and for the government to infiltrate every aspect of every citizen's lives back when 9/11 happened. My exact thoughts at the time were something along the lines of, "shit happens. People will get over it." Only, apparently I was wrong about people "getting over" it; if they really did, we wouldn't have the dragnet of mass surveillance placed upon us by the federal government as we do now and find ourselves forced to figure out how to reclaim our 4th-Amendment rights (and others).
All 9/11 did was make the whole horde of pussies come out in droves and produce legislation to help drive the government into the ground and weaken its people. The worthless yellow journalism that is the mainstream news sure as hell didn't help much. If that is what the terrorists wanted (to erode the U.S. into a rogue, fascist government with powerless citizens), the Americans didn't put up much of a fight, because that is exactly what they got and with no trouble at all.
The way I see it, the real "terrorists" are my own government. Its citizens need to grow a pair and quit going apeshit over "terrorist attacks" and stand up for their rights and freedoms. It's ironic the way people sharply and strongly react to even just the word "terrorists"; why no talk of all the *wars* going on? Why does no one give a fuck about those, some of which the U.S. is directly a part of? How did people get such a strong hatred of terrorists that kill, and not their own government that does the same fucking thing *on their own behalf*? Looks like another win by the mainstream news corporations, which no doubt have their own political agendas.
I have to admit, I laughed while reading the above post. Then I thought about it. What if they did? Order a shitload of Windows 8.1 donation copies at Microsoft's expense and then burn them all. And no, I don't mean in an optical disc drive. It would be amusing, at least, and it would attack Microsoft in a way. Obviously Microsoft is doing this at a loss, with the intention of increasing Windows 8 sales, but if a good portion are wasted...
Then based on that claim, I can install and run AdBlock Plus, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe, etc. in my web browser to display the sites that I request the way I would prefer to view them and the advertisers can just shut the fuck up. But no, they seem to think that it's "wrong" to render HTML as you see fit and to block their garbage. Shit, this article alone is yet another confirmation that the assholes don't want us to block their cookies (ie. tracking method). Fuck them, I'll block it as I damn well please--I want nothing to do with their shit.
That's a very good method if you have very few sites to log into that you want to remember your authentication. The problem is, I have way too many sites to waste time whitelisting a bunch, and then realizing that I forgot one. So I just disable all third-party cookies and leave it alone. After all--I don't really mind the sites I'm actually visiting storing cookies for the most part. It's the people I never intended to communicate with that can fuck off. I use Adblock Plus, NoScript, DoNotTrackMe and a few other extensions to complete the effect.
But when you add a saving today, a saving tomorrow and a saving the next day, you do in fact get "savings" in daylight time. Or at least, that's what they want you to believe--I think they need to ditch the garbage completely. It causes more harm than good and is not worth fixing. We need reliable time, and you can't have that when you're forced to waste time fucking with your damn clocks every year. Just fucking give us standard time year round already, enough of this DST bullshit.
"You're trolling and ill-informed."
If 'trolling' these days is speaking your own 100% honest opinion, then yes, I guess I must be trolling. I wasn't aware that you are a troll for having an opinion, though. Learn something new every day.
"You clearly have little experience actually using Photoshop and certainly not a recent version."
No shit, I'm pretty sure my first couple sentences made it obvious that I was never a fan of the program, its price, etc. I'll take almost *anything* over that overpriced crap.
It's a well designed program, which is why it costs what it does.
Sorry, I did not get that impression, and I felt it was a massive rip-off at twice the price of a fucking Windows licence. Does that make me even more of a troll? Seriously though... operating system, $300... bitmap editor... $650?!
I find it odd how you kept downgrading, but Linux pretty much made that nessisary.
I find it odd how you keep talking as if you're a know-it-all professional and that your opinion is *the* definitive answer, and yet mine is trash. I have to ask you at this point the same question you started off asking me: are you a troll? Your use of "zealots" only makes it seem even more likely... and your entire second paragraph seems to have "troll" stamped all over it.
Yeah... 2.x IMO was the last truly great release, and after that it went downhill. For 3.x I was forced to start bookmarks, because of that god damn [anything-but] "awesome" bar, and I refused to use it until 3.6 (which added a few notable features that made it worth it). The problem is, 2.x is now obviously horrible out of date, lacks things like out-of-process plugins, leaks like a sieve, and is just unstable. Backport the rendering engine, security fixes, memory leak plugs, and maybe some of the better (key word there: don't want to end up with yet another shitty Chrome knockoff!) ideas and I'd switch in no time.
A chore? How do YOU install new Firefox releases? All I do is go to Help->About Firefox->Check for Updates->Install.
It's not exactly spring cleaning.
su
[root password]
zypper update
Unfortunately, there is a delay between official release and openSUSE repository binary package, but it's relatively short. I think the "chore" part of it that he's referring to is that there's no longer any real reward: Firefox has become old and boring, and new updates (if anything) cause more trouble than anything in terms of fucking stupid design and GUI decisions, as well as extension hell (although the extension problem has been solved for while now it seems). Not to mention, Mozilla's huge bullet-point lists of "features" in every new artificially-inflated version number is full of garbage that no one needs (and in some cases, even wants).
Getting creaky, "just" a few years back? It got old over a decade ago for me. And sorry, but demanding $650 for a fucking bitmap editor is just robbery. Which is why I never bothered to buy it, and years ago bought Paint Shop Pro (back when it was still by Jasc), and have long since switched to Paint.net and finally (after switching from Windows to Linux in 2006) the GIMP. I never did get the point behind Photoshop anyway... it's beyond slow, bloated and just a nightmare to find anything that you need. Its menu system is a trainwreck.