After "pushing out their CEO" for political / free speach reasons
Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.
When you can have your ability to earn a living taken away from you, even though you have done nothing that violates any law, then you have effectively created a society where there is no free speech.
Why should I have to use an add-on to get the classic theme back? This should be an option out of the box!
Exactly right.
The bigger problem with the Classic Theme Restorer extension is that it only works with the default Firefox theme. Since the default Firefox them has sucked shit since sometime around version 4, it doesn't really solve most of the problems with the new Assholio version of Firefox.
I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.
Actually Chrome allows you to selectively disable Javascript by domain. Chrome's only good feature and a feature that I wish Firefox would copy.
NoScript blocks all Javascript by default and forces you to manually whitelist everything. Unfortunately, that's now the exact opposite of what we need. NoScript was created back in the old days when you could completely disable Javascript and most websites would still mostly work. Now, more and more sites won't load at all -- you literally get a blank page -- without Javascript.
According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?
The video is deliberately misleading and the claim of "a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature" is a complete lie.
A few examples:
Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. First, they removed the menu item a while back. No problem, I can just go into about:config and change it. But just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't enough. With Australis, even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Firefox says: Fuck You. You're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not.
There are only 2 toolbars - Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension doesn't work because there's no place to put it. Firefox says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You. Sure there's probably some hidden fiddling you can do to work around the problem, but that just proves my point -- A user should not have to spend copious amounts of effort just to restore the standard and expected UI.
In Australis the Back and Forward buttons are now glued to the URL Bar, so you can't arrange your buttons any way you like. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is glued to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved, and the Stop Button is gone completely. Want text labels with your buttons? Firefox says: Fuck you.
There's a lot more, but I give up. If I wanted a browser with a lousy UI that can't be changed, I would use Internet Explorer or Chrome.
Just as I feared -- Firefox has joined the growing list of applications that can never be updated because the new version sucks.
By the way, I always thought that URIs were supposed to handle precisely this - that they were supposed to be unique, universally accessible identifiers for contents and resources - identifiers that, once assigned, wouldn't need to be changed to access the same contents or resources in the future.
What happens when you want to access something on fubar.com but the domain fubar.com no longer exists?
Their best proposed solution is to ban Yahoo email users from mailing lists and encourage them to switch to other ISPs
What the fuck? Since when is Yahoo an ISP?
A lot of people use Yahoo's shitty webmail but only because they are too brain dead to use a real email client sending/receiving email via their ISP's servers.
Although I have to admit, i do like the idea of banning anyone who uses Yahoo mail.
1) He resigned, he wasn't fired. 2) There was pressure to resign, or else be fired, sure, but the fundamental reason is that users were throwing tantrums and threatening a boycott. That seems like a legit reason to fire someone to me.
No, that's coercion.
What's been lost in all this is the fact that in 2008, the same year that Brendan Eich made that campaign contribution, Barack Obama went on national television in a debate with John McCain, and said that he believes marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
Where is the outrage over that? Why is it that Obama was elected president of the United States, twice, and Eich was forced to resign from the company he helped start?
I won't bother reciting all the things that are wrong with Windows 8, many other people have already done that in great detail. When the new "Update 1" leaked onto the Internet a few weeks ago I decided to give it a try.
The Update does make quite a few improvements and results in a system that is closer to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place. Closer, but not there. After installing the Update and doing a bit of wrangling, what you have is a system that looks and works very similar to Windows 7 except for:
(a) Uglier, shittier color scheme (b) A "Start Screen" that takes up your entire desktop instead of a proper Start Menu that only uses the lower left quadrant, and you still don't have one of the best features that were introduced in Windows XP 12 years ago -- keeping a list of most recently used programs. (3) Windows Explorer (now apparently renamed to File Explorer) now has the godawful "ribbon" abomination that makes it 10 times harder to use. (d) All the other things that are wrong with Windows 8, such as installing a dozen useless "apps" on your desktop.
In other words, what's the point? Windows 8.1 Update 1 is just a shittier version of Windows 7.
You can configure noscript to temparariy allow javascript from that domain by default.
Yes, that is correct. And back when Noscript was first created that approach worked just fine. But things have changed and Noscript's default behavior (block everything) just doesn't work any more. That's not Noscript's fault. That's the fault of assholes running shitty websites. Regardless, the number of pages that are horribly broken, or don't display at all (without Javascript) continues to grow. So now, every time you visit a domain you've never visited before, you have to tinker with NoScript.
Google Chrome has a feature (or used to, I haven't used it for a while) that allows you to selectively block Javascript by domain. I find this to be a better approach -- everything is whitelisted by default and you selectively block the ones you don't like.
I got some websites that now come up with a message begging me to stop blocking their Ad shit, they need to make money.
And those are the sites that I never visit again.
You want to make money? Charge people for whatever it is you have to offer. People spend a few Gazillions of dollars every year paying for things, so it's not like this is a new concept. If people aren't willing to pay for what you have to offer then you have nothing of value and need to die.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few unobtrusive adverts, particularly if they are relevant - but turn off adblock and you often get those annoying pop-up adverts that tell lies like "you computer is infected, click OK to quarantine the virus", or ones where hitting the close icon on the window launches a pop-up or download.
And that's the *REAL* problem.
We've lived with ads our entire lives. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc. And it was annoying but not too terrible. But now, everything is dominated by assholes who are committed to making advertising as offensive, intrusive and dishonest as possible.
That's why CPM rates for Internet ads are so low --- everyone knows that they are nothing but shit and scams that nobody would ever click on except accidentally.
Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design . Good design should fall back to plain html/css with ideally, minimum loss of functionality
Thank you Captain Obvious.
Yes, it is bad design. But it is bad design done deliberately.
Use noscript , disable cookies. If your tin foil hat is too thick , Tor it out.
The problem with Noscript is that things have changed. You used to be able to block Javascript and most websites worked well enough to still be usable. Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
The targeted ads are far better then random ones that mean little to the users.
No they aren't.
Targeted ads are based on something you did in the past. Just because you searched for XYZ a week ago doesn't mean you now want to see a lot of ads for XYZ everywhere you go. So called targeted ads are just as useless and random as everything else.
but did you really expect your software to work for more than 10-15 years without needing an upgrade?.
Why not? Automobiles can last for 20 years or more with little more than minor repairs and routine maintenance. Musicians routinely use instruments made in the 1950s or earlier. But for some reason, people have bought into the absurd idea that software is obsolete and unusable after a few years.
If you think that newer versions of windows don't have anything to offer you shouldn't have to do anything at all
First, the only newer version of Windows that "has anything to offer" is Windows 7. Vista isn't as bad as some people have tried to claim, but once Windows 7 became available, Vista became meaningless and there is absolutely no reason to even consider it. Windows 8 is a mess. One of the all time worst.
But the real problem isn't that newer version of Windows don't have anything to offer. The problem is the expense of switching.. Whether it's an individual with one computer or a business with a few thousand, the cost far outweighs the benefits.
Then there is the dirty little secret of business, that isn't so secret. There are millions of computers running shitty, poorly written software that will stop working if you make the tiniest change to the underlying hardware or operating system. That makes switching even more difficult and expensive.
Bitcoin became popular in no small part because many people believe government-backed currencies are overregulated or poorly managed.
No, Bitcoin became popular because a bunch of crackpots bought into a bunch of anti-government bullshit. Despite all the problems and imperfections with governments and regulations, the bitcoin nutjobs are too busy drinking the anti-government kool-aid to understand that it's precisely those governments and regulations that create stability which in turn makes a currency actually worth something.
Could someone explain why people put bitcoins in an exchange? I mean isn't the point of bitcoin that you have a copy of the blockchain on your own computer?
Why do people open an account with a stock broker? You're saying to someone "I want to buy (or sell) X, go find me someone who has X to sell (or who wants to buy it)". The whole point of an exchange, whether it's stocks or Bitcoins, is to do the work of finding buyers and sellers so you don't have to.
And it works reasonably well if the exchanges are honest (or forced to be honest by regulations). Bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in any way so they attract people who are specifically looking to rip you off. Just look at the past year. Nobody has lost any significant money from actual trading on Bitcoin exchanges. All the loses have been from exchanges taking people's money and then disappearing.
So, basically the same as stock exchanges and future markets.
Not really.
Yes, if you buy Bitcoins and then the price goes down you lose money, just like with stocks and futures. However, most of loses with Bitcoin has not been from normal trading activity. Almost all of the losses have been from the Bitcoin exchanges stealing people's money. That's very rare with stocks and futures due to regulation specifically designed to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's rare.
For the past couple of years the Mozilla developers have been hard at work removing features from Firefox and making it less and less useful. We've been able to (mostly) work around these stupid, pointless changes with the use of additional extensions. Having to add extensions to bring back features that have been removed is stupid, but it works.
Now, with the new "Australis" design they take things to a whole new level. Australis completely destroys almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place. An enormous amount of flexibility and customizability has been removed. But not just removed. Completely ripped out in such a way that getting it back through extensions (which are just bits of Javascript and CSS) will be difficult, if not impossible. Extensions such as "Classic Theme Restorer" attempt to undo some of the damage, but are only able to do so in a very limited way.
Firefox, as we know it, will soon be gone. What a bunch of assholes.
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Free speach [sic], you say? Obligatory xkcd. The CEO has a Constitution-enshrined right to say whatever he wants without fear of criminal prosecution, but Mozilla also has a right to boot him out of the company for it.
When you can have your ability to earn a living taken away from you, even though you have done nothing that violates any law, then you have effectively created a society where there is no free speech.
Why should I have to use an add-on to get the classic theme back? This should be an option out of the box!
Exactly right.
The bigger problem with the Classic Theme Restorer extension is that it only works with the default Firefox theme. Since the default Firefox them has sucked shit since sometime around version 4, it doesn't really solve most of the problems with the new Assholio version of Firefox.
I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.
Actually Chrome allows you to selectively disable Javascript by domain. Chrome's only good feature and a feature that I wish Firefox would copy.
NoScript blocks all Javascript by default and forces you to manually whitelist everything. Unfortunately, that's now the exact opposite of what we need. NoScript was created back in the old days when you could completely disable Javascript and most websites would still mostly work. Now, more and more sites won't load at all -- you literally get a blank page -- without Javascript.
According to the video you can select the icons and menus you want to display in the toolbar... that include all the addons/plugins/extensions too. What customization has been dropped?
The video is deliberately misleading and the claim of "a powerful customization mode where you can add or move any feature" is a complete lie.
A few examples:
Tabs On Top -- No thanks, I want my tabs below the URL bar, where God intended them to be. First, they removed the menu item a while back. No problem, I can just go into about:config and change it. But just removing the menu item and burying the setting in about:config isn't enough. With Australis, even if you go into about:config and change the setting, it does nothing. Firefox says: Fuck You. You're getting Tabs On Top whether you like it or not.
There are only 2 toolbars - Menu bar and Bookmarks toolbar. No more Add-On Bar, which means the Status Bar Extension doesn't work because there's no place to put it. Firefox says: You want a Status Bar? Fuck You. Sure there's probably some hidden fiddling you can do to work around the problem, but that just proves my point -- A user should not have to spend copious amounts of effort just to restore the standard and expected UI.
In Australis the Back and Forward buttons are now glued to the URL Bar, so you can't arrange your buttons any way you like. The Reload Button has been replaced with a swirly arrow that is glued to the far right side of the URL Bar and can't be moved, and the Stop Button is gone completely. Want text labels with your buttons? Firefox says: Fuck you.
There's a lot more, but I give up. If I wanted a browser with a lousy UI that can't be changed, I would use Internet Explorer or Chrome.
Just as I feared -- Firefox has joined the growing list of applications that can never be updated because the new version sucks.
"a comedy-adventure about a misfit group of space travelers who stumble onto an alternate universe"
Who better to produce this than a company that has no clue what it is doing and historically has wasted billions of dollars on pointless crap.
What about Uranus?
By the way, I always thought that URIs were supposed to handle precisely this - that they were supposed to be unique, universally accessible identifiers for contents and resources - identifiers that, once assigned, wouldn't need to be changed to access the same contents or resources in the future.
What happens when you want to access something on fubar.com but the domain fubar.com no longer exists?
Colbert is funny, so that makes him a comedian.
But is letterman funny or a comedian? Not at all.
Letterman is pants.
Letterman is WORLDWIDE PANTS
What the fuck? Since when is Yahoo an ISP?
A lot of people use Yahoo's shitty webmail but only because they are too brain dead to use a real email client sending/receiving email via their ISP's servers.
Although I have to admit, i do like the idea of banning anyone who uses Yahoo mail.
1) He resigned, he wasn't fired.
2) There was pressure to resign, or else be fired, sure, but the fundamental reason is that users were throwing tantrums and threatening a boycott. That seems like a legit reason to fire someone to me.
No, that's coercion.
What's been lost in all this is the fact that in 2008, the same year that Brendan Eich made that campaign contribution, Barack Obama went on national television in a debate with John McCain, and said that he believes marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
Where is the outrage over that? Why is it that Obama was elected president of the United States, twice, and Eich was forced to resign from the company he helped start?
I won't bother reciting all the things that are wrong with Windows 8, many other people have already done that in great detail. When the new "Update 1" leaked onto the Internet a few weeks ago I decided to give it a try.
The Update does make quite a few improvements and results in a system that is closer to what Windows 8 should have been in the first place. Closer, but not there. After installing the Update and doing a bit of wrangling, what you have is a system that looks and works very similar to Windows 7 except for:
(a) Uglier, shittier color scheme
(b) A "Start Screen" that takes up your entire desktop instead of a proper Start Menu that only uses the lower left quadrant, and you still don't have one of the best features that were introduced in Windows XP 12 years ago -- keeping a list of most recently used programs.
(3) Windows Explorer (now apparently renamed to File Explorer) now has the godawful "ribbon" abomination that makes it 10 times harder to use.
(d) All the other things that are wrong with Windows 8, such as installing a dozen useless "apps" on your desktop.
In other words, what's the point? Windows 8.1 Update 1 is just a shittier version of Windows 7.
You can configure noscript to temparariy allow javascript from that domain by default.
Yes, that is correct. And back when Noscript was first created that approach worked just fine. But things have changed and Noscript's default behavior (block everything) just doesn't work any more. That's not Noscript's fault. That's the fault of assholes running shitty websites. Regardless, the number of pages that are horribly broken, or don't display at all (without Javascript) continues to grow. So now, every time you visit a domain you've never visited before, you have to tinker with NoScript.
Google Chrome has a feature (or used to, I haven't used it for a while) that allows you to selectively block Javascript by domain. I find this to be a better approach -- everything is whitelisted by default and you selectively block the ones you don't like.
I got some websites that now come up with a message begging me to stop blocking their Ad shit, they need to make money.
And those are the sites that I never visit again.
You want to make money? Charge people for whatever it is you have to offer. People spend a few Gazillions of dollars every year paying for things, so it's not like this is a new concept. If people aren't willing to pay for what you have to offer then you have nothing of value and need to die.
And nobody will even notice that you are gone.
I wouldn't mind seeing a few unobtrusive adverts, particularly if they are relevant - but turn off adblock and you often get those annoying pop-up adverts that tell lies like "you computer is infected, click OK to quarantine the virus", or ones where hitting the close icon on the window launches a pop-up or download.
And that's the *REAL* problem.
We've lived with ads our entire lives. Radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc. And it was annoying but not too terrible. But now, everything is dominated by assholes who are committed to making advertising as offensive, intrusive and dishonest as possible.
That's why CPM rates for Internet ads are so low --- everyone knows that they are nothing but shit and scams that nobody would ever click on except accidentally.
Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
IMHO these websites are examples of bad design . Good design should fall back to plain html/css with ideally, minimum loss of functionality
Thank you Captain Obvious.
Yes, it is bad design. But it is bad design done deliberately.
Use noscript , disable cookies. If your tin foil hat is too thick , Tor it out.
The problem with Noscript is that things have changed. You used to be able to block Javascript and most websites worked well enough to still be usable. Today, more and more websites are designed in a such a way that disabling Javascript breaks them completely -- you literally get nothing but a blank page.
The targeted ads are far better then random ones that mean little to the users.
No they aren't.
Targeted ads are based on something you did in the past. Just because you searched for XYZ a week ago doesn't mean you now want to see a lot of ads for XYZ everywhere you go. So called targeted ads are just as useless and random as everything else.
Otherwise, stop using drop box and move on to something else.
And that "something else" will still be subject to the same bad laws (DMCA) as Dropbox.
One of the consequences of using the magical cloud is that your are bound to somebody else's rules for how they manage your data.
The problem is, this isn't Dropbox's rules. They are following the law.
but did you really expect your software to work for more than 10-15 years without needing an upgrade? .
Why not? Automobiles can last for 20 years or more with little more than minor repairs and routine maintenance. Musicians routinely use instruments made in the 1950s or earlier. But for some reason, people have bought into the absurd idea that software is obsolete and unusable after a few years.
Aren't actual viruses pretty rare nowadays? Most malware attacks the browser and plugins.
The term "virus" has evolved to include all forms of malware and anti-virus programs now detect more than just the traditional "virus".
If you think that newer versions of windows don't have anything to offer you shouldn't have to do anything at all
First, the only newer version of Windows that "has anything to offer" is Windows 7. Vista isn't as bad as some people have tried to claim, but once Windows 7 became available, Vista became meaningless and there is absolutely no reason to even consider it. Windows 8 is a mess. One of the all time worst.
But the real problem isn't that newer version of Windows don't have anything to offer. The problem is the expense of switching.. Whether it's an individual with one computer or a business with a few thousand, the cost far outweighs the benefits.
Then there is the dirty little secret of business, that isn't so secret. There are millions of computers running shitty, poorly written software that will stop working if you make the tiniest change to the underlying hardware or operating system. That makes switching even more difficult and expensive.
Bitcoin became popular in no small part because many people believe government-backed currencies are overregulated or poorly managed.
No, Bitcoin became popular because a bunch of crackpots bought into a bunch of anti-government bullshit. Despite all the problems and imperfections with governments and regulations, the bitcoin nutjobs are too busy drinking the anti-government kool-aid to understand that it's precisely those governments and regulations that create stability which in turn makes a currency actually worth something.
And a few speculators looking to get rich quick.
Could someone explain why people put bitcoins in an exchange? I mean isn't the point of bitcoin that you have a copy of the blockchain on your own computer?
Why do people open an account with a stock broker? You're saying to someone "I want to buy (or sell) X, go find me someone who has X to sell (or who wants to buy it)". The whole point of an exchange, whether it's stocks or Bitcoins, is to do the work of finding buyers and sellers so you don't have to.
And it works reasonably well if the exchanges are honest (or forced to be honest by regulations). Bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in any way so they attract people who are specifically looking to rip you off. Just look at the past year. Nobody has lost any significant money from actual trading on Bitcoin exchanges. All the loses have been from exchanges taking people's money and then disappearing.
So, basically the same as stock exchanges and future markets.
Not really.
Yes, if you buy Bitcoins and then the price goes down you lose money, just like with stocks and futures. However, most of loses with Bitcoin has not been from normal trading activity. Almost all of the losses have been from the Bitcoin exchanges stealing people's money. That's very rare with stocks and futures due to regulation specifically designed to prevent that sort of thing. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's rare.
For the past couple of years the Mozilla developers have been hard at work removing features from Firefox and making it less and less useful. We've been able to (mostly) work around these stupid, pointless changes with the use of additional extensions. Having to add extensions to bring back features that have been removed is stupid, but it works.
Now, with the new "Australis" design they take things to a whole new level. Australis completely destroys almost everything that made Firefox popular in the first place. An enormous amount of flexibility and customizability has been removed. But not just removed. Completely ripped out in such a way that getting it back through extensions (which are just bits of Javascript and CSS) will be difficult, if not impossible. Extensions such as "Classic Theme Restorer" attempt to undo some of the damage, but are only able to do so in a very limited way.
Firefox, as we know it, will soon be gone. What a bunch of assholes.