P.S. even though your last comment is stupid, I just read through the rest of your posts and decided I am a big fan. I fucking hate the Slashdot copyright groupthink. Keep up the good work bringing the truth to people.
Maybe your comment is the stupid one, both because it is factually incorrect as the other poster pointed out, and because you completely misunderstood my point. I meant to say that Firefox's explosion on the browser scene drove improvement in other browsers and even expansion of e.g. Google into the market. It did so in two ways: 1) By taking market share from IE and Opera, forcing the former to improve and the latter to go gratis, and 2) By showing people that IE could be beaten.
I never implied that Chrome was using any code developed by or submitted to the Mozilla Foundation.
It's not really a competitor. Google doesn't care how many people use which browser -- all they care about is how many people use Google search. The more people who use Google search, the more money they make. Both Firefox and Chrome drive people to Google search.
I never implied it was a bad thing. Does the word "fund" carry negative connotations for you? I simply think it's ridiculous to make Firefox into some mythical example of the "little guy" coming and beating big bad Microsoft.
Microsoft may have billions of dollars, but I'd be interested to see how much of that went to the IE budget pre-Firefox. I tend to think not much, given the quality of IE6. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, and use it whenever I need to go to a site Elinks can't handle, but I don't think it's all that "amazing" that a project set up by Netscape and funded by Google could compete with a project that Microsoft had abandoned. Especially since the Opera devs probably worked in similar (or worse) conditions, and Opera has been better than Firefox for years. (TFA's author might claim that this is less amazing because Opera is for-profit, and I think that's silly.)
The fact is, the people who pay for Firefox to be developed (call this "fund" or "contribute" or whatever you like) are in return making a profit from Firefox. As a previous poster said, non-profitness is just a legal construct, but the author of TFA was implying that it was somehow "amazing" that a non-profit company captured 25% of the market share from the likes of Microsoft.
The point is that it wasn't just some nebulous group of hackers who made Firefox in their free time, like GNU or something. It was funded by a major business. And it's not like no one is making money off Firefox either.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation? Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist, a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari, and most (l)users would be stuck with the latest version of IE -- IE6. Thank you, Firefox, for reigniting the browser wars, and here's hoping that this time around the wars will be fought with functionality, stability, security, and speed, rather than with a new incompatible extension to JavaScript every week.
Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization". Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.
Point. That's one of my main gripes with Windows, actually -- much of the time, the task manager simply silently fails to kill your stalled program. I could probably count the number of times killall -9 has failed on me on half of one hand, and it was usually because of some other process that kept respawning the one I was trying to kill (i.e., not the kill program's fault.) It is incomprehensible to me why the Windows OS is unable to consistently kill a running process. This must have its roots in some deep structural problem that would be impossible to fix without rewriting half of Windows, or else they'd have fixed it by now. I've experienced it on every Windows version i've ever used (Dos-based from 3.1 through ME and NT 2000, XP, Vista, and 7).
Another modifier; possibly the Super/Windows key, which is essential to productive interaction with modern versions of Windows and which is nice to have in an easy-to-reach position in some *nix window managers as well. Personally, I've remapped the xmonad mod-key from its default left Alt to Caps Lock, but a lot of people map it to left Super.
Troll, go back to 1998. Windows has a LOT of other problems, and I consider it a faulty, broken OS, but XP and Vista crash on me about as often as Linux.
I am assuming it was originally M$, since as you'll learn by a quick perusal of Twitter's posting history, he finds it impossible to say "Microsoft" without changing the s to $.
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I guess Apple and GNU/Linux (in the server market, at least) would be counterpoints to your claim.
I personally think Maddox's ideas for stopping Peta are the way forward. http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=sponsor
P.S. even though your last comment is stupid, I just read through the rest of your posts and decided I am a big fan. I fucking hate the Slashdot copyright groupthink. Keep up the good work bringing the truth to people.
Maybe your comment is the stupid one, both because it is factually incorrect as the other poster pointed out, and because you completely misunderstood my point. I meant to say that Firefox's explosion on the browser scene drove improvement in other browsers and even expansion of e.g. Google into the market. It did so in two ways:
1) By taking market share from IE and Opera, forcing the former to improve and the latter to go gratis, and
2) By showing people that IE could be beaten.
I never implied that Chrome was using any code developed by or submitted to the Mozilla Foundation.
Does this have any practical applications, or is it just neat?
It's not really a competitor. Google doesn't care how many people use which browser -- all they care about is how many people use Google search. The more people who use Google search, the more money they make. Both Firefox and Chrome drive people to Google search.
I never implied it was a bad thing. Does the word "fund" carry negative connotations for you? I simply think it's ridiculous to make Firefox into some mythical example of the "little guy" coming and beating big bad Microsoft.
Microsoft may have billions of dollars, but I'd be interested to see how much of that went to the IE budget pre-Firefox. I tend to think not much, given the quality of IE6. Don't get me wrong, I love Firefox, and use it whenever I need to go to a site Elinks can't handle, but I don't think it's all that "amazing" that a project set up by Netscape and funded by Google could compete with a project that Microsoft had abandoned. Especially since the Opera devs probably worked in similar (or worse) conditions, and Opera has been better than Firefox for years. (TFA's author might claim that this is less amazing because Opera is for-profit, and I think that's silly.)
The fact is, the people who pay for Firefox to be developed (call this "fund" or "contribute" or whatever you like) are in return making a profit from Firefox. As a previous poster said, non-profitness is just a legal construct, but the author of TFA was implying that it was somehow "amazing" that a non-profit company captured 25% of the market share from the likes of Microsoft.
Er... Multi-process architecture is "a pile of shit" because you can't tell which process is which in your task manager?
That doesn't seem like a difficult problem to fix, and is hardly a fundamental problem.
The Firefox project is funded by Google.
The point is that it wasn't just some nebulous group of hackers who made Firefox in their free time, like GNU or something. It was funded by a major business. And it's not like no one is making money off Firefox either.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the multiplicity of real competition as a threat, but rather as the greatest success of the Mozilla Foundation? Had it not been for Firefox, Opera would still cost money, Google Chrome wouldn't exist, a few people who paid way too much for their computers would be running Safari, and most (l)users would be stuck with the latest version of IE -- IE6. Thank you, Firefox, for reigniting the browser wars, and here's hoping that this time around the wars will be fought with functionality, stability, security, and speed, rather than with a new incompatible extension to JavaScript every week.
I'm trying to decide if that's more or less hardcore than using wget like Richard Stallman does.
Since firefox is funded almost entirely by Google, it's a bit of misdirection to claim that it's "run by a nonprofit organization". Yes, that claim is technically true, but it hides the truth about how Firefox is really kept afloat.
Point. That's one of my main gripes with Windows, actually -- much of the time, the task manager simply silently fails to kill your stalled program. I could probably count the number of times killall -9 has failed on me on half of one hand, and it was usually because of some other process that kept respawning the one I was trying to kill (i.e., not the kill program's fault.) It is incomprehensible to me why the Windows OS is unable to consistently kill a running process. This must have its roots in some deep structural problem that would be impossible to fix without rewriting half of Windows, or else they'd have fixed it by now. I've experienced it on every Windows version i've ever used (Dos-based from 3.1 through ME and NT 2000, XP, Vista, and 7).
Another modifier; possibly the Super/Windows key, which is essential to productive interaction with modern versions of Windows and which is nice to have in an easy-to-reach position in some *nix window managers as well. Personally, I've remapped the xmonad mod-key from its default left Alt to Caps Lock, but a lot of people map it to left Super.
More like pen and paper.
Troll, go back to 1998. Windows has a LOT of other problems, and I consider it a faulty, broken OS, but XP and Vista crash on me about as often as Linux.
Very true. Sorry, can't make this post too long, got to go figure out how to make the alt key work in emacs...
link? (To the Tim Berners-Lee comments)
I am assuming it was originally M$, since as you'll learn by a quick perusal of Twitter's posting history, he finds it impossible to say "Microsoft" without changing the s to $.
$80,000 per line.
The damages are intended to punish the defendent, not to model the actual amount of lost profit for the RIAA (which is probably zero or very close.)
Again, that's simply not true. Even if IE were the most standards-compliant browser in the world, the issue would be exactly the same.