In general Firefox memory usage and leakiness is pretty good. Just like any other piece of consumer software, it gets into a broken state for some small number of users.
But I'm sure your witless slur made you feel good.
Publicizing flaws in deployed DRM schemes only increases the pressure from Hollywood to deploy stronger, more user-hostile schemes. Please don't do it.
Europe suffered a massive setback in the first millenium AD, but it wasn't a religious issue, it was the fall of the Roman Empire. Trade, law and order collapsed and took centuries to recover. Many books and much knowledge was lost. Where were books copied and knowledge most often preserved? Monasteries!
Edward Gibbon blames Christianity for the collapse of the Roman Empire, but I don't think that's what most people have in mind when blaming Christianity for the Dark Ages, and his thesis is not popular today.
Christian institutions sometimes did bad things that held back progress. But in other ways Christianity also fostered progress. It's incredibly important to remember that Europe != the world, and that in the second millenium AD Christian Europe opened up a huge scientific lead over every other culture in the world.
You say there is a "complete lack of action" at Mozilla but you just have to look at the source repo, or the public forums, or blogs, to see that that's far from the case. So you clearly haven't looked at all.
Claiming "Rust doesn't really improve on C++14" shows that you don't understand the important innovations in Rust (e.g. strong ownership invariants and memory safety guarantees).
Claiming "all of the unwanted changes made to Firefox starting with Firefox 4" are a complete explanation for loss of market share, ignoring the entrance of Chrome and its relentless improvement and super-aggressive marketing by Google, is one-eyed nonsense.
What are you actually advocating here? Abolishing subsidies, i.e. welfare? Making cheap hamburgers illegal? Raising corporate taxes? Pitchfork-wielding mobs?
Chrome already has push notifications. In both browsers a user action is required to subscribe to push notifications for a site so this can't be done behind your back.
iOS and Android have push notifications too. Hope you don't use a smartphone.
There is a problem with Webkit: prefixes were supposed to be for experimentation only, but Apple has always promoted Webkit-prefixed properties as being suitable for use on production sites.
Also, we've figured out that prefixes are useless for what they were designed for (enabling standards to evolve without having to be compatible with early experimental versions). Authors like to "future proof" their sites by writing CSS like "foo { -webkit-blah:pong; blah:pong; }", which means the standardized "blah" is almost as constrained by existing content as it would have been had it never been prefixed. That's why Chrome and Firefox don't prefix any new stuff any more. Instead we keep it behind flags so it's never available to all users until standardized.
Unfortunately Apple doesn't like that message and continues to implement prefixed stuff and promote its use.
In Firefox Webkit-prefixed properties are mostly just aliases to the corresponding standardized properties. We're adding very little actual new behavior.
We thought we should try site evangelism and education first. They didn't work. With Microsoft's help they might have had a better chance (though I think they probably still wouldn't have worked), but Microsoft caved before we did.
Webkit didn't do exactly what they were "supposed to do":
Prefixes were intended to be used for experimental features, eventually to be removed in favor of standardized versions. But Apple has always promoted Webkit-prefixed features as permanently supported features of Safari that developers should use in production sites. (You could argue that's Apple doing that, not Webkit, but most Webkit staff, especially in those days, worked for Apple.)
Vendors implementing prefixed features were supposed to be on the hook for getting those features standardized. Webkit people hardly did any of that; IIRC they produced a couple of half-baked specs for transitions, animations and transforms, and other vendors had to do most of the work to make those real specs. Many other prefixed features they have made no attempt to standardize at all. This is partly because for a very long time now Apple has declined to pay even one person to work full time on Web standards.
Things have gotten a lot better since the IE days, since browser competition has resurged, we've learned a lot about how to write specifications, and we've stopped chasing irrelevant or impossible dreams (e.g. XML, semantic Web).
The Webkit team is quite awesome, it's just that there's far too few of them.
Which makes some sense if you're Tim Cook. You want people writing iOS apps in the walled garden instead of cross-platform Web content, and for now you can expect they will, especially if that Web content doesn't work well in Safari.
But at some point, in some markets, that strategy may break down.
Obviously the Coulomb barrier is still relevant, but the parent's claim that the Coulomb barrier alone makes cold fusion impossible is bunk. If muons could be produced more easily, or if the probability of them sticking to emitted alpha particles was lower, muon-catalyzed fusion would actually be a legitimate cold-fusion power source.
I'm not sure why you're keen to defend an invalid argument, especially when valid ones are available.
I'm no fan of cold fusion, but the Coulomb barrier alone does not make cold fusion impossible. For example, muon-catalyzed fusion works at room temperature. (Muon-catalyzed fusion is currently impractical as a power source for reasons unrelated to the Coulomb barrier.)
Ram Jakhu says that the purpose of the Outer Space Treaty is that "there shouldn't be private property in space". So he's claiming a treaty signed at the height of the Cold War established communism in outer space in perpetuity. Hmm.
Even if he's right, which I very strongly doubt, it's a terrible idea. Communism hasn't worked on Earth and is no more likely to work off-Earth.
The environmental arguments are even worse: they assume all human modification of the environment is inherently wrong. That makes sense to the anti-human wing of environmentalism, which is strong in academia, but not to people who value human flourishing more than hypothetical exo-bacteria (i.e. almost everyone).
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Of course, 99% of users never say anything at all no matter how they feel about changes.
Either you do a proper survey or you have to guess whether those users raging on the Internet are a representative sample.
> It's more than just a "small number" of users.
Fine. How many users is it, and what is the source of your data?
You think "never change anything because some user somewhere will complain" is a path to success?
In general Firefox memory usage and leakiness is pretty good. Just like any other piece of consumer software, it gets into a broken state for some small number of users.
But I'm sure your witless slur made you feel good.
"baked it into Firefox" ... except that you can change it with literally two clicks.
Publicizing flaws in deployed DRM schemes only increases the pressure from Hollywood to deploy stronger, more user-hostile schemes. Please don't do it.
Browser vendors don't get paid by CAs. If you have evidence that they get tens of thousands of dollars a year from Comodo, present it.
After promising many times to cooperate with any inquiry, she and her staff refused to be interviewed by the Inspector General.
You should do some more reading.
Europe suffered a massive setback in the first millenium AD, but it wasn't a religious issue, it was the fall of the Roman Empire. Trade, law and order collapsed and took centuries to recover. Many books and much knowledge was lost. Where were books copied and knowledge most often preserved? Monasteries!
Edward Gibbon blames Christianity for the collapse of the Roman Empire, but I don't think that's what most people have in mind when blaming Christianity for the Dark Ages, and his thesis is not popular today.
Christian institutions sometimes did bad things that held back progress. But in other ways Christianity also fostered progress. It's incredibly important to remember that Europe != the world, and that in the second millenium AD Christian Europe opened up a huge scientific lead over every other culture in the world.
You say there is a "complete lack of action" at Mozilla but you just have to look at the source repo, or the public forums, or blogs, to see that that's far from the case. So you clearly haven't looked at all.
Claiming "Rust doesn't really improve on C++14" shows that you don't understand the important innovations in Rust (e.g. strong ownership invariants and memory safety guarantees).
Claiming "all of the unwanted changes made to Firefox starting with Firefox 4" are a complete explanation for loss of market share, ignoring the entrance of Chrome and its relentless improvement and super-aggressive marketing by Google, is one-eyed nonsense.
ServiceWorkers are the new tech for enabling offline Web apps. Much better than the old HTML5 offline manifest.
What are you actually advocating here? Abolishing subsidies, i.e. welfare? Making cheap hamburgers illegal? Raising corporate taxes? Pitchfork-wielding mobs?
Chrome already has push notifications. In both browsers a user action is required to subscribe to push notifications for a site so this can't be done behind your back.
iOS and Android have push notifications too. Hope you don't use a smartphone.
There is a problem with Webkit: prefixes were supposed to be for experimentation only, but Apple has always promoted Webkit-prefixed properties as being suitable for use on production sites.
Also, we've figured out that prefixes are useless for what they were designed for (enabling standards to evolve without having to be compatible with early experimental versions). Authors like to "future proof" their sites by writing CSS like "foo { -webkit-blah:pong; blah:pong; }", which means the standardized "blah" is almost as constrained by existing content as it would have been had it never been prefixed. That's why Chrome and Firefox don't prefix any new stuff any more. Instead we keep it behind flags so it's never available to all users until standardized.
Unfortunately Apple doesn't like that message and continues to implement prefixed stuff and promote its use.
In Firefox Webkit-prefixed properties are mostly just aliases to the corresponding standardized properties. We're adding very little actual new behavior.
We thought we should try site evangelism and education first. They didn't work. With Microsoft's help they might have had a better chance (though I think they probably still wouldn't have worked), but Microsoft caved before we did.
Webkit didn't do exactly what they were "supposed to do":
Prefixes were intended to be used for experimental features, eventually to be removed in favor of standardized versions. But Apple has always promoted Webkit-prefixed features as permanently supported features of Safari that developers should use in production sites. (You could argue that's Apple doing that, not Webkit, but most Webkit staff, especially in those days, worked for Apple.)
Vendors implementing prefixed features were supposed to be on the hook for getting those features standardized. Webkit people hardly did any of that; IIRC they produced a couple of half-baked specs for transitions, animations and transforms, and other vendors had to do most of the work to make those real specs. Many other prefixed features they have made no attempt to standardize at all. This is partly because for a very long time now Apple has declined to pay even one person to work full time on Web standards.
So you're saying the way to get market share is to tell your users to use a different browser.
Things have gotten a lot better since the IE days, since browser competition has resurged, we've learned a lot about how to write specifications, and we've stopped chasing irrelevant or impossible dreams (e.g. XML, semantic Web).
Why would developers fix them when those sites work in every major mobile browser?
And of course there's no way to become a major mobile browser while all those sites are broken.
The Webkit team is quite awesome, it's just that there's far too few of them.
Which makes some sense if you're Tim Cook. You want people writing iOS apps in the walled garden instead of cross-platform Web content, and for now you can expect they will, especially if that Web content doesn't work well in Safari.
But at some point, in some markets, that strategy may break down.
Obviously the Coulomb barrier is still relevant, but the parent's claim that the Coulomb barrier alone makes cold fusion impossible is bunk. If muons could be produced more easily, or if the probability of them sticking to emitted alpha particles was lower, muon-catalyzed fusion would actually be a legitimate cold-fusion power source.
I'm not sure why you're keen to defend an invalid argument, especially when valid ones are available.
Low-temperature fusion is possible without breaking the Standard Model, e.g. muon-catalyzed fusion. You've oversimplified the issues.
I'm no fan of cold fusion, but the Coulomb barrier alone does not make cold fusion impossible. For example, muon-catalyzed fusion works at room temperature. (Muon-catalyzed fusion is currently impractical as a power source for reasons unrelated to the Coulomb barrier.)
Ram Jakhu says that the purpose of the Outer Space Treaty is that "there shouldn't be private property in space". So he's claiming a treaty signed at the height of the Cold War established communism in outer space in perpetuity. Hmm.
Even if he's right, which I very strongly doubt, it's a terrible idea. Communism hasn't worked on Earth and is no more likely to work off-Earth.
The environmental arguments are even worse: they assume all human modification of the environment is inherently wrong. That makes sense to the anti-human wing of environmentalism, which is strong in academia, but not to people who value human flourishing more than hypothetical exo-bacteria (i.e. almost everyone).