It's certainly a possibility, but if that is the explanation then I have corrupted profiles on multiple installations on systems with completely different specs, and obviously it's still bad that a formerly working browser became an unreliable browser during the transition in those cases.
I've wondered about doing the same, as my observations have been strikingly different on different systems. Clearly something didn't work right in some cases, but it's certainly possible based on my experience to date that it was due to some sort of profile corruption or failure to migrate extensions on some of the machines I use that is the root cause.
Yes, I'm fairly sure the new extensions are the cause of those problems, because I have observed far more instability on systems with several extensions installed than those with few or none. Since one of the biggest selling points of the new architecture in 57 was that it was supposed to isolate these things better and thus improve stability and security, that's still rather disappointing, though.
I first learned web development with little more than the W3C's own documentation and some browsers to experiment with. It's true that browsers always had their quirks, but in the early days you were talking about, things like HTML and CSS did basically do what the documentation said. You didn't lose much if you just avoided the browser-specific oddities as much as possible, and since browsers in those days were at least relatively stable, the quirks were well understood and workarounds for the major ones were widely known.
Perhaps more importantly, I would argue that the "golden age" of the Web, when it really took off and entered the mainstream, was not until a few years later. There was a window of perhaps a decade or so when Microsoft were updating IE again, Mozilla/Firefox was a strong alternative, there were a handful of other smaller competitors around as well, server technologies were developing rapidly, and you really could design your site/app around standardised HTML, CSS, HTTP and increasingly JS and expect it to work with little if any change on just about anything.
For me, the picture then changed for the worse as mobile devices and then Chrome and other evergreen browsers became more established.
Apple's decision to kill off Flash set us back several years, because the supposedly standardised replacements for things Flash was good at simply weren't ready. Ironically, Apple's own mobile devices gave the worst experience of all, since every browser on iOS is essentially a wrapper around Safari, and Apple's implementation of the new standards was broken in countless ways, not least because they farmed the multimedia stuff out to a separate proprietary plugin! For several years, you'd run into sites that simply didn't work on iOS devices as a direct result.
Add in Google's increasing dominance on the desktop, Mozilla forgetting what made Firefox special and trying to turn it into a poor Chrome clone, and Microsoft's strategic missteps with Edge hurting its attempts to gain traction, and we reach the situation we're talking about today. We don't have design-by-committee so much as design-by-Google-diktat now, and that's even worse than slow-paced consensus-building we had before, because this time we don't have any stability or longevity to rely on either.
Why is your personal, anecdotal experience more valid than mine? I also run Firefox on a range of different machines, on a range of different platforms, with a range of different extensions installed. I do a lot of web development work, so I have all the major browsers running on test setups regularly.
I'm happy for you if you're happy with Firefox 57. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me or anyone else in my position. I am reminded daily of several useful things that I no longer have because the extensions that provided them are no longer available. I filed crash reports when things blew up in the early days of 57 too, but given that it was the machines with lots of extensions that were proving to be unstable while the ones with none installed were generally OK, it seems the most likely culprit is that the new architecture doesn't really isolate extensions as successfully as it was intended to.
As for your other comment, obviously I'm no more an AC than you are, I did file reports with Mozilla, you're not the only one who's been using Firefox and its predecessors for a long time, please don't put words into my mouth, and if you really think it's trolling or FUD to share a simple personal observation about a competitive browser not being as good as it used to be when the subject of the discussion is the increasing dominance of Chrome then maybe lay off the tin foil for a while.
It's also been horribly unstable for me since the 57 update. Not a crash for years before. Practically a daily occurrence when 57 first came out.
So far, Firefox 57 is somewhere around Windows 10 on the scale of new versions I don't want anywhere near my machines, but given security risks, staying on an older version is not practical in the long term.
This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over.
The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
I certainly don't claim to know the future.:-) So yes, maybe my idea will turn out to be wrong.
I don't see the Netflix-Uber analogy as a very strong one, though. Netflix always had a revenue generation model, and was reasonably successful for a considerable time with its original business model before transitioning to the online streaming where it makes its serious money today. In contrast, Uber is providing a commodity service in a competitive market and can't just increase prices, and its current prices don't appear to be financially viable without other factors helping. In short, its current business model is only sustainable as long as big investors keep pouring money in and/or governments and regulators keep allowing it to bend the rules.
Uber's real USP, IMHO, is that it has a strong brand that "works everywhere", instead of people having to look up the number for a local taxi firm in every city they visit and in some places take a risk on trusting those local taxis. That would dovetail nicely with the idea of driverless cars, and that shift in business model would presumably reduce its costs and risks in the long term. But without that, I just don't see that its position is defensible without some other fundamental change in its business model.
Not necessarily. At the moment, they are undercutting established local taxi and private hire business in a lot of places, but they can only do that thanks to a combination of escaping (perhaps temporarily) all kinds of regulations and employment laws that affect their competitors and having VC funding that means they can afford to price as a loss-leader (but again only for a finite amount of time).
If they start pushing prices up to try to cover the real running costs on a level playing field, they are naturally going to become as expensive or more expensive than local firms in many cases, and they are also going to be more vulnerable to less toxic competitors like Lyft.
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
As far as I can see, Windows 10 Enterprise is a very different product to the Home/Pro editions. Windows 10 seems to have a few modest technical improvements under the hood, but the things that have stopped us moving to it are the usual objections to telemetry, forced updates, adware, etc. The Enterprise version seems to have useful controls over those, which isn't surprising since clearly no large corporate IT department is going to surrender control of their essential systems to Microsoft. It's just surprising that the Pro edition, which in previous versions has been aimed at smaller businesses, independent professionals and maybe power users, doesn't appear to be suitable for a lot of professional users in Windows 10.
You mention Debian, which is actually a good example of where we need more choice. When I last installed Debian I do not remember being given the option to choose which init system I wanted to use. Systemd was forced on me, against my will.
No, it wasn't. You can replace systemd with whatever alternative you want. Debian doesn't stop you. As you're clearly aware, Devuan do it routinely.
I am as sceptical of systemd as the next guy, but there is nothing infringing your freedom here. Well, not unless you think people maintaining a large, complicated software ecosystem that they make available to you for free should be compelled to customise it to whatever degree you personally wish out of the box, in which case I'd like to introduce you to a new adventure called living in the real world.
That would explain the poor response when contacting CS, but not things like mishandled products that wind up obviously damaged before they are even shipped, or packaging that clearly has no chance of protecting fragile products. Apparently either their basic product handling procedures or their staff's use of basic common sense or often both are deficient, long before anything gets raised with the CS team.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's terrible. I have a personal example just this week, where they shipped something obviously not in a good enough state to give as a gift. It's true that they sent a replacement straight away when I told them, but I don't think that's unusually impressive from an online retailer in this situation when I've already paid for fast delivery and the fault was all on their side. Meanwhile, I've spent probably a couple of hours by now dealing with hassle about how to return the original, because they have managed to hide necessary information about returns that used to be clearly shown on their web site and then provided actively misleading information when I contacted them directly to ask about it.
For us here, the pattern seems to be that every 2-3 years, Amazon's customer service collapses horribly around this time of year. Then the next year it's usually much better, but it tails off again. I assume this is because when it gets bad enough, people really do start to shop elsewhere instead.
Interesting, thanks. Alas, it looks like those only support North American radio at the moment, and in any case their preconfigured devices are both out of stock, but that's definitely another source I'll keep an eye on.
Do you know that thing where you have to upgrade your apps or their online elements stop working properly, but then you have to upgrade iOS or your apps stop working properly, but if you upgrade iOS on your device that is more than a few months old then your whole device stops working properly? It's related to the one where your app prompts you to install a new version, but afterwards you find that the thing you already paid for and were happy hasn't had bug fixes or performance improvements but instead now has ads and in-app purchases and some new bugs that stop it working properly, and you can't roll it back.
iOS and Android dominate the market today, but there are a few alternatives with potential to escape from the app/spyware hell. Silent Circle make the Blackphone, which is Android-based but with a heavy emphasis on security and privacy compared to most of the major off-the-shelf brands. Perhaps more interesting, Purism are working on the Librem 5 and recently beat their funding target by a comfortable margin, which potentially means a privacy and security focussed phone that runs a different platform entirely could be available in the not too distant future.
Ironically, it looks like some of the better newspapers and magazines are now making some of the most successful transitions to a subscription/paywall model online. Several of the organisations that produced original, high quality content in the offline world are now able to do so in the online world, still funded by real money from real readers. No doubt it helps that the target audience for these publications is probably both relatively wealthy and interested enough in good information and analysis to pay for it.
What drives me crazy as a software and web developer is when you get people expecting anything you make, no matter what it does or how much work is necessary to make it happen or how much it costs to produce any original content it includes, to be basically free if it's accessed as a web site or no more than a dollar or two if it's standalone software. In a world of $1 torch apps and low budget, free-to-play games loaded with pay-to-win in-app purchases, consumer expectations for what it takes to produce something original and significant are wildly out of sync with the real world, which means a lot of the time you simply can't do it any more and the cheap junk with indirect revenue models is all that's left.
Things are changing so fast and so broadly that the only way to keep up is to make that trade off.
What an odd thing to write. We used to compensate people who provided new things we liked to have by paying them.
The reason privacy is dying is because invading privacy has become profitable, and that in turn is because it provided a way to monetize people using a service or enjoying some digital content online without them having to do anything or even necessarily realising what was going on.
Google and Facebook, with their culture of spying-for-ads, and Apple, with its app store culture of software-costing-$3-is-expensive, have much to answer for.
Maybe you're right, legally speaking, but I'd like to hear a judge say that before I assume it. Given the way Airbnb works, it wouldn't surprise me if an argument based on having an implied duty of care could be made either. In any case, presumably the guest can report the matter to the police, and the police could/should then take action against the host.
Exactly. Banning the host and refunding some money isn't even close to good enough here. In almost any civilised country, this should be a police matter, and someone should probably be going to jail and getting added to the sex offenders register or local equivalent.
They've rolled out updates which report data back to Google
The first one you mentioned was literally the only example I could think of, and obviously it was controversial and much criticised. What have they done that sends stuff to Google?
Oh, that's right, it was one of those things people were complaining about that never got installed here because all our computers were set not to install updates automatically...
Slashdot Mirror
It's certainly a possibility, but if that is the explanation then I have corrupted profiles on multiple installations on systems with completely different specs, and obviously it's still bad that a formerly working browser became an unreliable browser during the transition in those cases.
I've wondered about doing the same, as my observations have been strikingly different on different systems. Clearly something didn't work right in some cases, but it's certainly possible based on my experience to date that it was due to some sort of profile corruption or failure to migrate extensions on some of the machines I use that is the root cause.
Yes, I'm fairly sure the new extensions are the cause of those problems, because I have observed far more instability on systems with several extensions installed than those with few or none. Since one of the biggest selling points of the new architecture in 57 was that it was supposed to isolate these things better and thus improve stability and security, that's still rather disappointing, though.
I first learned web development with little more than the W3C's own documentation and some browsers to experiment with. It's true that browsers always had their quirks, but in the early days you were talking about, things like HTML and CSS did basically do what the documentation said. You didn't lose much if you just avoided the browser-specific oddities as much as possible, and since browsers in those days were at least relatively stable, the quirks were well understood and workarounds for the major ones were widely known.
Perhaps more importantly, I would argue that the "golden age" of the Web, when it really took off and entered the mainstream, was not until a few years later. There was a window of perhaps a decade or so when Microsoft were updating IE again, Mozilla/Firefox was a strong alternative, there were a handful of other smaller competitors around as well, server technologies were developing rapidly, and you really could design your site/app around standardised HTML, CSS, HTTP and increasingly JS and expect it to work with little if any change on just about anything.
For me, the picture then changed for the worse as mobile devices and then Chrome and other evergreen browsers became more established.
Apple's decision to kill off Flash set us back several years, because the supposedly standardised replacements for things Flash was good at simply weren't ready. Ironically, Apple's own mobile devices gave the worst experience of all, since every browser on iOS is essentially a wrapper around Safari, and Apple's implementation of the new standards was broken in countless ways, not least because they farmed the multimedia stuff out to a separate proprietary plugin! For several years, you'd run into sites that simply didn't work on iOS devices as a direct result.
Add in Google's increasing dominance on the desktop, Mozilla forgetting what made Firefox special and trying to turn it into a poor Chrome clone, and Microsoft's strategic missteps with Edge hurting its attempts to gain traction, and we reach the situation we're talking about today. We don't have design-by-committee so much as design-by-Google-diktat now, and that's even worse than slow-paced consensus-building we had before, because this time we don't have any stability or longevity to rely on either.
Why is your personal, anecdotal experience more valid than mine? I also run Firefox on a range of different machines, on a range of different platforms, with a range of different extensions installed. I do a lot of web development work, so I have all the major browsers running on test setups regularly.
I'm happy for you if you're happy with Firefox 57. Unfortunately, that doesn't help me or anyone else in my position. I am reminded daily of several useful things that I no longer have because the extensions that provided them are no longer available. I filed crash reports when things blew up in the early days of 57 too, but given that it was the machines with lots of extensions that were proving to be unstable while the ones with none installed were generally OK, it seems the most likely culprit is that the new architecture doesn't really isolate extensions as successfully as it was intended to.
As for your other comment, obviously I'm no more an AC than you are, I did file reports with Mozilla, you're not the only one who's been using Firefox and its predecessors for a long time, please don't put words into my mouth, and if you really think it's trolling or FUD to share a simple personal observation about a competitive browser not being as good as it used to be when the subject of the discussion is the increasing dominance of Chrome then maybe lay off the tin foil for a while.
It's also been horribly unstable for me since the 57 update. Not a crash for years before. Practically a daily occurrence when 57 first came out.
So far, Firefox 57 is somewhere around Windows 10 on the scale of new versions I don't want anywhere near my machines, but given security risks, staying on an older version is not practical in the long term.
This is what we get for doing away with real standardisation and allowing "evergreen" browsers and nonsense like "living standards" to take over.
The only meaningful standards left today, for a lot of practical purposes, are the de facto ones of what works in the browsers your visitors are using right now. Anything else can change tomorrow anyway.
I certainly don't claim to know the future. :-) So yes, maybe my idea will turn out to be wrong.
I don't see the Netflix-Uber analogy as a very strong one, though. Netflix always had a revenue generation model, and was reasonably successful for a considerable time with its original business model before transitioning to the online streaming where it makes its serious money today. In contrast, Uber is providing a commodity service in a competitive market and can't just increase prices, and its current prices don't appear to be financially viable without other factors helping. In short, its current business model is only sustainable as long as big investors keep pouring money in and/or governments and regulators keep allowing it to bend the rules.
Uber's real USP, IMHO, is that it has a strong brand that "works everywhere", instead of people having to look up the number for a local taxi firm in every city they visit and in some places take a risk on trusting those local taxis. That would dovetail nicely with the idea of driverless cars, and that shift in business model would presumably reduce its costs and risks in the long term. But without that, I just don't see that its position is defensible without some other fundamental change in its business model.
They can always charge more.
Not necessarily. At the moment, they are undercutting established local taxi and private hire business in a lot of places, but they can only do that thanks to a combination of escaping (perhaps temporarily) all kinds of regulations and employment laws that affect their competitors and having VC funding that means they can afford to price as a loss-leader (but again only for a finite amount of time).
If they start pushing prices up to try to cover the real running costs on a level playing field, they are naturally going to become as expensive or more expensive than local firms in many cases, and they are also going to be more vulnerable to less toxic competitors like Lyft.
I suspect that the history books will show Uber gambled on self-driving cars arriving soon enough to plug the financial hole from paying their drivers, and lost.
As far as I can see, Windows 10 Enterprise is a very different product to the Home/Pro editions. Windows 10 seems to have a few modest technical improvements under the hood, but the things that have stopped us moving to it are the usual objections to telemetry, forced updates, adware, etc. The Enterprise version seems to have useful controls over those, which isn't surprising since clearly no large corporate IT department is going to surrender control of their essential systems to Microsoft. It's just surprising that the Pro edition, which in previous versions has been aimed at smaller businesses, independent professionals and maybe power users, doesn't appear to be suitable for a lot of professional users in Windows 10.
You mention Debian, which is actually a good example of where we need more choice. When I last installed Debian I do not remember being given the option to choose which init system I wanted to use. Systemd was forced on me, against my will.
No, it wasn't. You can replace systemd with whatever alternative you want. Debian doesn't stop you. As you're clearly aware, Devuan do it routinely.
I am as sceptical of systemd as the next guy, but there is nothing infringing your freedom here. Well, not unless you think people maintaining a large, complicated software ecosystem that they make available to you for free should be compelled to customise it to whatever degree you personally wish out of the box, in which case I'd like to introduce you to a new adventure called living in the real world.
PureOS is what Purism use on their laptops, which are clearly intended to be freedom-respecting.
That would explain the poor response when contacting CS, but not things like mishandled products that wind up obviously damaged before they are even shipped, or packaging that clearly has no chance of protecting fragile products. Apparently either their basic product handling procedures or their staff's use of basic common sense or often both are deficient, long before anything gets raised with the CS team.
Amazon's customer service is very good, though.
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's terrible. I have a personal example just this week, where they shipped something obviously not in a good enough state to give as a gift. It's true that they sent a replacement straight away when I told them, but I don't think that's unusually impressive from an online retailer in this situation when I've already paid for fast delivery and the fault was all on their side. Meanwhile, I've spent probably a couple of hours by now dealing with hassle about how to return the original, because they have managed to hide necessary information about returns that used to be clearly shown on their web site and then provided actively misleading information when I contacted them directly to ask about it.
For us here, the pattern seems to be that every 2-3 years, Amazon's customer service collapses horribly around this time of year. Then the next year it's usually much better, but it tails off again. I assume this is because when it gets bad enough, people really do start to shop elsewhere instead.
Interesting, thanks. Alas, it looks like those only support North American radio at the moment, and in any case their preconfigured devices are both out of stock, but that's definitely another source I'll keep an eye on.
Do you know that thing where you have to upgrade your apps or their online elements stop working properly, but then you have to upgrade iOS or your apps stop working properly, but if you upgrade iOS on your device that is more than a few months old then your whole device stops working properly? It's related to the one where your app prompts you to install a new version, but afterwards you find that the thing you already paid for and were happy hasn't had bug fixes or performance improvements but instead now has ads and in-app purchases and some new bugs that stop it working properly, and you can't roll it back.
iOS and Android dominate the market today, but there are a few alternatives with potential to escape from the app/spyware hell. Silent Circle make the Blackphone, which is Android-based but with a heavy emphasis on security and privacy compared to most of the major off-the-shelf brands. Perhaps more interesting, Purism are working on the Librem 5 and recently beat their funding target by a comfortable margin, which potentially means a privacy and security focussed phone that runs a different platform entirely could be available in the not too distant future.
Ironically, it looks like some of the better newspapers and magazines are now making some of the most successful transitions to a subscription/paywall model online. Several of the organisations that produced original, high quality content in the offline world are now able to do so in the online world, still funded by real money from real readers. No doubt it helps that the target audience for these publications is probably both relatively wealthy and interested enough in good information and analysis to pay for it.
What drives me crazy as a software and web developer is when you get people expecting anything you make, no matter what it does or how much work is necessary to make it happen or how much it costs to produce any original content it includes, to be basically free if it's accessed as a web site or no more than a dollar or two if it's standalone software. In a world of $1 torch apps and low budget, free-to-play games loaded with pay-to-win in-app purchases, consumer expectations for what it takes to produce something original and significant are wildly out of sync with the real world, which means a lot of the time you simply can't do it any more and the cheap junk with indirect revenue models is all that's left.
Things are changing so fast and so broadly that the only way to keep up is to make that trade off.
What an odd thing to write. We used to compensate people who provided new things we liked to have by paying them.
The reason privacy is dying is because invading privacy has become profitable, and that in turn is because it provided a way to monetize people using a service or enjoying some digital content online without them having to do anything or even necessarily realising what was going on.
Google and Facebook, with their culture of spying-for-ads, and Apple, with its app store culture of software-costing-$3-is-expensive, have much to answer for.
Maybe you're right, legally speaking, but I'd like to hear a judge say that before I assume it. Given the way Airbnb works, it wouldn't surprise me if an argument based on having an implied duty of care could be made either. In any case, presumably the guest can report the matter to the police, and the police could/should then take action against the host.
Exactly. Banning the host and refunding some money isn't even close to good enough here. In almost any civilised country, this should be a police matter, and someone should probably be going to jail and getting added to the sex offenders register or local equivalent.
They've rolled out updates which report data back to Google
The first one you mentioned was literally the only example I could think of, and obviously it was controversial and much criticised. What have they done that sends stuff to Google?
Which Linux distro(s) will frequently and automatically try to install the sorts of malware you described during their normal update process?
What's GWX?
Oh, that's right, it was one of those things people were complaining about that never got installed here because all our computers were set not to install updates automatically...
It looks like you're trying to mock Microsoft. Would you like help with that?