The reason not to run the Android user-space is footprint. If you use Android apps and a browser, you have two parallel platform stacks --- rendering, compositing, VM, networking, UI, etc both running on a phone at the same time. Getting rid of the Android Java stuff means you can use the Web and local HTML5-based apps at the same time with only one stack. Saves a lot of memory and simplifies the software design considerably.
That is not correct. When I toured the South Korean side of the DMZ the tour guide brought along an escapee from North Korea. She said that at least in her village (near the SK border) people generally had a pretty good idea of the true situation.
We're already hurting their business and they haven't done that. Noticed how much money they're spending promoting Chrome? That would be easier if Mozilla was dead, wouldn't it?
Post-Opera Mozilla controls one of the three important Web engines. Any Web standard needs to be implemented by at least two engines to become a recommendation. That gives us a powerful say in what gets standardized.
We have enough Firefox users that things we do in Firefox have a real impact on the Web. For example, we introduced Do Not Track. We think Google's Native Client isn't good for the Web so we've introduced asm.js instead which is rapidly getting traction. Webkit's original CSS gradients sucked so we introduced a better alternative that is now standardized. We don't like encumbered codecs on the Web so we pushed the creation of the royalty-free Opus audio codec which is getting a lot of traction. Etc.
Having said that, we don't have infinite clout and we sometimes lose battles and have to make compromises. But then, so do our much bigger competitors.
Most importantly Mozilla is a nonprofit and promoting/protecting the open Web is a key part of our mission. We don't have shareholders or paying customers so we can pretty much do whatever we think is right as long as enough people keep using Firefox to ensure we have influence.
To elaborate on that last point: supporting native apps or a different engine in FFOS alongside Gecko would require us to write extra code to support new APIs specifically for that --- the APIs and integration points you'd need simply don't exist in FFOS currently. In contrast, the infrastructure for native apps already exists and all Apple has to do to support alternative browser engines is relax some of their rules.
Summary: FirefoxOS is roughly an Android kernel, Gecko-based userspace, and the Gaia HTML+JS homescreen apps. Anyone is free to replace the Gecko-based userspace with something else, e.g. a Webkit-based userspace. We (Mozilla) are assisting with this by standardizing the phone-specific HTML+JS APIs so they can be reimplemented by others, by trying to ensure Gaia doesn't have unnecessary dependencies on non-standard stuff, and of course by making everything under our control open source. Your OS should be able to run FirefoxOS apps and we have open-sourced our app store so you might even be able to run our app store (I'm not sure). Apple obviously provides nothing comparable for iOS!
However, if you replace Gecko then the result isn't really FirefoxOS any more and you wouldn't be allowed to use the Firefox trademark (nor would it be appropriate for you to do so).
If you're asking for the ability to install an alternative native-code Web engine alongside Gecko on FFOS, the answer is no; giving Gecko sole control of FFOS userspace simplifies a lot of problems and increases performance and security. See http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/03/canonicals-new-mir-display-server-and.html for more.
There is a simple solution: convince China that it's in their interests to replace the North Korean regime with something sane, even at the cost of some temporary instability. This has historically been difficult, but with the latest vote, maybe China starting to come around.
A couple of obvious things China could do: -- Open their border and stop returning escaping North Koreans to torture and execution. This alone could cause North Korea to collapse. It also happens to be the humane thing to do. -- Issue an ultimatum to the regime: take your loot and leave, or else China stops supplying NK across the border and the country falls apart. The NK regime would threaten war but they know it would be suicide to strike China (simultaneously being hit by China and the USA, awesome).
Many prominent US conservatives support some form of drug legalization. William F Buckley was a good example. Then you have President Obama, who despite saying his favourite TV show is "The Wire", doesn't appear to support legalization at all. The drug war appears to be a bipartisan problem.
The real reason is that Flash gets used a lot --- much more than any other plugin --- so leaving the latest version of Flash unblocked and blocking everything else gives the best tradeoff of attack surface area reduction vs user convenience.
But don't let me disrupt your enjoyment of your own cynicism.
A major difference between Scientology and the major religions (mine's Christianity) is that the latter are "open source": everything a believer might need to know is freely available to everyone.
Another major difference w.r.t. Christianity (for example, because I know it best) is that every major Christian denomination agrees you don't have to belong to one particular human institution to "be saved". Scientology and other cults teach there is no hope outside their institutions, so threat of expulsion gives them absolute power over their followers. (The Catholic church used to be cult-like in this respect, but no longer is.)
Another important difference between Scientology and Christianity is that Hubbard and his immediate successors have done very very well for themselves out of Scientology. Jesus and his immediate followers --- not at all. Unless what they taught was true.
It's enormously painful for us (Firefox) to deal with Linux fragmentation. And out-of-the-box we don't even integrate into Linux all that well; distros customize and package Firefox for us. Some people like to say "Linux is all about choice" (in the software stack) --- that's another way of saying it's all about pain for the ISVs.
On the other hand, Windows is pretty bad too once you factor in the incredible diversity of hardware and software combinations out there (antivirus software and malware especially).
On the third hand, at least on Windows you're dealing with orders of magnitude more users. It feels really bad when something's broken on a particular Linux variant and you suspect there's only a (relative) handful of users.
The W3C has few resources of its own; the pace of the W3C is largely a function of the efforts of its contributors, who for CSS are mostly browser vendors. In fact, the main reason CSS transitions, animations and transforms progressed very slowly was because the editors of those specs, Apple employees, did not work on them. One of them writes here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0356.html "Despite having billions in the bank, we don't have the luxury of full-time W3C editors like Hixie and Tab." I.e., Apple chose not to invest in standardizing their inventions.
There are other cases, for example -webkit-text-size-adjust, where Apple has shown no interested in standardizing the property at all.
It was a good thing to introduce innovative -webkit-prefixed features. It was a bad thing to not prioritize their standardization.
Note that for various reasons, policy consensus is shifting towards the view that we should try to ship experimental features unprefixed but disabled by default, so Web developers can experiment with them but not use them in production sites. This creates pressure for every vendor to assist in standardization --- a very good thing.
For what it's worth, your definition of faith is not the definition used in orthodox Christianity (at least; I'm less qualified to speak about other religions). For example, Abraham is described as a great man of faith, and also as having seen a number of miracles, conversed with angels and God himself, etc. "A commitment to ignore evidence" isn't part of Abraham's story.
Ironically, defining "faith" as anti-rational suits both atheists and a depressingly large subset of Christians (the latter in order to claim intellectual laziness as a virtue). But the latter are plain wrong as far as the tenets of Christianity go, and the former are simply carrying out a pejorative attack.
You seem not be aware that a lot of big advertisers had already promised to abide by DNT.
Maybe they would have abided by their commitment, maybe they wouldn't have. If they hadn't, we could at least call them to account for failing to abide by a previous commitment.
Now that Microsoft and their supporters (like you) have sabotaged DNT, it's not clear what will happen.
The record is very clear that DNT was invented by Mozilla and a few others in an attempt to give people some meaningful way to improve their privacy on the Internet.
You just made up a conspiracy theory because it sounds good in a Slashdot comment and gives you a warm feeling inside.
If "they" want to make an example of Assange, they need to attack him more directly. As it is, a reasonable person might conclude that all that's needed to avoid Assange's fate is to keep one's pants on and generally stay out of trouble.
A 40% reduction in ticket prices in exchange for reduced service is only catastrophic if you're relatively wealthy. For most of the population, it's a vast improvement.
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The reason not to run the Android user-space is footprint. If you use Android apps and a browser, you have two parallel platform stacks --- rendering, compositing, VM, networking, UI, etc both running on a phone at the same time. Getting rid of the Android Java stuff means you can use the Web and local HTML5-based apps at the same time with only one stack. Saves a lot of memory and simplifies the software design considerably.
That is not correct. When I toured the South Korean side of the DMZ the tour guide brought along an escapee from North Korea. She said that at least in her village (near the SK border) people generally had a pretty good idea of the true situation.
> Mozilla has just caved in to H.264
We don't always win our battles, unfortunately. Holding out against H.264 was doing no-one any good.
> they removed the feed button from their browser long before Google killed that feed reader
Come on, lack of a "feed button" != evil.
> and their new mobile OS comes with a paid "app store".
Supporting paid apps != evil.
Apps only available through a single app store controlled by the system vendor with obnoxious policies == evil. But FirefoxOS isn't like that at all.
We're already hurting their business and they haven't done that. Noticed how much money they're spending promoting Chrome? That would be easier if Mozilla was dead, wouldn't it?
Mozilla has plenty of clout.
Post-Opera Mozilla controls one of the three important Web engines. Any Web standard needs to be implemented by at least two engines to become a recommendation. That gives us a powerful say in what gets standardized.
We have enough Firefox users that things we do in Firefox have a real impact on the Web. For example, we introduced Do Not Track. We think Google's Native Client isn't good for the Web so we've introduced asm.js instead which is rapidly getting traction. Webkit's original CSS gradients sucked so we introduced a better alternative that is now standardized. We don't like encumbered codecs on the Web so we pushed the creation of the royalty-free Opus audio codec which is getting a lot of traction. Etc.
Having said that, we don't have infinite clout and we sometimes lose battles and have to make compromises. But then, so do our much bigger competitors.
Most importantly Mozilla is a nonprofit and promoting/protecting the open Web is a key part of our mission. We don't have shareholders or paying customers so we can pretty much do whatever we think is right as long as enough people keep using Firefox to ensure we have influence.
To elaborate on that last point: supporting native apps or a different engine in FFOS alongside Gecko would require us to write extra code to support new APIs specifically for that --- the APIs and integration points you'd need simply don't exist in FFOS currently. In contrast, the infrastructure for native apps already exists and all Apple has to do to support alternative browser engines is relax some of their rules.
The comments here are explain this pretty well:
http://samuelsidler.com/2013/03/firefox-os-and-browser-choice/#comment-183
Summary:
FirefoxOS is roughly an Android kernel, Gecko-based userspace, and the Gaia HTML+JS homescreen apps. Anyone is free to replace the Gecko-based userspace with something else, e.g. a Webkit-based userspace. We (Mozilla) are assisting with this by standardizing the phone-specific HTML+JS APIs so they can be reimplemented by others, by trying to ensure Gaia doesn't have unnecessary dependencies on non-standard stuff, and of course by making everything under our control open source. Your OS should be able to run FirefoxOS apps and we have open-sourced our app store so you might even be able to run our app store (I'm not sure). Apple obviously provides nothing comparable for iOS!
However, if you replace Gecko then the result isn't really FirefoxOS any more and you wouldn't be allowed to use the Firefox trademark (nor would it be appropriate for you to do so).
If you're asking for the ability to install an alternative native-code Web engine alongside Gecko on FFOS, the answer is no; giving Gecko sole control of FFOS userspace simplifies a lot of problems and increases performance and security. See http://robert.ocallahan.org/2013/03/canonicals-new-mir-display-server-and.html for more.
There is a simple solution: convince China that it's in their interests to replace the North Korean regime with something sane, even at the cost of some temporary instability. This has historically been difficult, but with the latest vote, maybe China starting to come around.
A couple of obvious things China could do:
-- Open their border and stop returning escaping North Koreans to torture and execution. This alone could cause North Korea to collapse. It also happens to be the humane thing to do.
-- Issue an ultimatum to the regime: take your loot and leave, or else China stops supplying NK across the border and the country falls apart. The NK regime would threaten war but they know it would be suicide to strike China (simultaneously being hit by China and the USA, awesome).
"WebKit based browsers are the clear majority these days." Not at all. IE and Firefox combined are about 75% of Web usage.
It's odd that that app is Chrome-only, since currently Firefox supports DataChannels and Chrome does not.
Looks like it's because they're using a DataChannel polyfill and didn't even bother testing if it works in the real DataChannels in Firefox!
Many prominent US conservatives support some form of drug legalization. William F Buckley was a good example. Then you have President Obama, who despite saying his favourite TV show is "The Wire", doesn't appear to support legalization at all. The drug war appears to be a bipartisan problem.
The real reason is that Flash gets used a lot --- much more than any other plugin --- so leaving the latest version of Flash unblocked and blocking everything else gives the best tradeoff of attack surface area reduction vs user convenience.
But don't let me disrupt your enjoyment of your own cynicism.
A major difference between Scientology and the major religions (mine's Christianity) is that the latter are "open source": everything a believer might need to know is freely available to everyone.
Another major difference w.r.t. Christianity (for example, because I know it best) is that every major Christian denomination agrees you don't have to belong to one particular human institution to "be saved". Scientology and other cults teach there is no hope outside their institutions, so threat of expulsion gives them absolute power over their followers. (The Catholic church used to be cult-like in this respect, but no longer is.)
Another important difference between Scientology and Christianity is that Hubbard and his immediate successors have done very very well for themselves out of Scientology. Jesus and his immediate followers --- not at all. Unless what they taught was true.
It's enormously painful for us (Firefox) to deal with Linux fragmentation. And out-of-the-box we don't even integrate into Linux all that well; distros customize and package Firefox for us. Some people like to say "Linux is all about choice" (in the software stack) --- that's another way of saying it's all about pain for the ISVs.
On the other hand, Windows is pretty bad too once you factor in the incredible diversity of hardware and software combinations out there (antivirus software and malware especially).
On the third hand, at least on Windows you're dealing with orders of magnitude more users. It feels really bad when something's broken on a particular Linux variant and you suspect there's only a (relative) handful of users.
The W3C has few resources of its own; the pace of the W3C is largely a function of the efforts of its contributors, who for CSS are mostly browser vendors. In fact, the main reason CSS transitions, animations and transforms progressed very slowly was because the editors of those specs, Apple employees, did not work on them. One of them writes here:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Feb/0356.html
"Despite having billions in the bank, we don't have the luxury of full-time W3C editors like Hixie and Tab."
I.e., Apple chose not to invest in standardizing their inventions.
There are other cases, for example -webkit-text-size-adjust, where Apple has shown no interested in standardizing the property at all.
It was a good thing to introduce innovative -webkit-prefixed features. It was a bad thing to not prioritize their standardization.
Note that for various reasons, policy consensus is shifting towards the view that we should try to ship experimental features unprefixed but disabled by default, so Web developers can experiment with them but not use them in production sites. This creates pressure for every vendor to assist in standardization --- a very good thing.
For what it's worth, your definition of faith is not the definition used in orthodox Christianity (at least; I'm less qualified to speak about other religions). For example, Abraham is described as a great man of faith, and also as having seen a number of miracles, conversed with angels and God himself, etc. "A commitment to ignore evidence" isn't part of Abraham's story.
Ironically, defining "faith" as anti-rational suits both atheists and a depressingly large subset of Christians (the latter in order to claim intellectual laziness as a virtue). But the latter are plain wrong as far as the tenets of Christianity go, and the former are simply carrying out a pejorative attack.
People keep saying this, but it's not true.
Here's a post from the end of May explaining why the IE10 choice is wrong, and explaining that the consensus view of the DNT group is that it is wrong. Mozilla helped create DNT, remember.
https://blog.mozilla.org/privacy/2012/05/31/do-not-track-its-the-users-voice-that-matters/
That's about five months ago, of course.
You seem not be aware that a lot of big advertisers had already promised to abide by DNT.
Maybe they would have abided by their commitment, maybe they wouldn't have. If they hadn't, we could at least call them to account for failing to abide by a previous commitment.
Now that Microsoft and their supporters (like you) have sabotaged DNT, it's not clear what will happen.
The record is very clear that DNT was invented by Mozilla and a few others in an attempt to give people some meaningful way to improve their privacy on the Internet.
You just made up a conspiracy theory because it sounds good in a Slashdot comment and gives you a warm feeling inside.
Yeah, I thought putting habitats at the poles was an obvious move. You also have access to water ice at the poles.
"comes from a country without a history of doping", really? I think not:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/more/09/02/jamaican.track/index.html
If "they" want to make an example of Assange, they need to attack him more directly. As it is, a reasonable person might conclude that all that's needed to avoid Assange's fate is to keep one's pants on and generally stay out of trouble.
Norway has a big pile of oil.
Anyway, just listing a couple of facts about a few countries and then claiming causation is totally irrational.
A 40% reduction in ticket prices in exchange for reduced service is only catastrophic if you're relatively wealthy. For most of the population, it's a vast improvement.