The anti-enterprise position was never the official view of Mozilla; it was something expressed by a few employees of Mozilla. There are certainly plenty of others who feel quite differently about it, as you can see from reading Planet Mozilla. I don't think Mozilla has expressed a position on any of this.
For example, here's a counterpoint view. There's some good points there. The main point: major Firefox releases that include important bugfixes were taking more than a year to come out. This was very bad for many groups of people. Point releases took 6-8 to come out, but without too many major changes (the idea that Firefox point releases never included new functionality is false - out-of-process plugins came in a point release.) Mozilla has now simply merged the two: the only releases will come out every 6-8 weeks and will include whatever's ready, like Chrome.
There is, in fact, a stable extension API called Jetpack. The problem is that Firefox extensions can literally do anything at all to Firefox, access internal APIs and do whatever else they want. An external API like Jetpack is no good for that. There's a tradeoff. AMO bumps compatibility on most extensions automatically, but not all. So some extensions will be temporarily incompatible (personally, I didn't have any issues - about 15 extensions). On the other hand, users will get, for example, the massive memory improvements coming in Firefox 7 in a month or two rather than sometime in 2013.
Because from a user perspective nothing had changed. A new version number is a new product, calling a minor update a new product is confusing and fragments the user base, and 10 security bug fixes is an important, but functionally minor update. If nothing else, imagine a year or two from now and Firefox is ready to put out a new release that actually is something new and exciting and they're stuck assigning it the same importance that the assigned to this security patch, because they already assigned the highest importance possible to this update.
Hyperbole much? This is the full list of changes and it's a whole lot more than "ten security bugs." A couple orders of magnitude more. It's not even true that nothing has changed from the user perspective; there are a couple minor changes. (Of course, had there been a UI revamp as in 4.0, people would be screaming in anger.)
What _is_ the big component that is royally screwing the USA is the US corporate income tax rate of 35%, when combined with the average state income tax at around 4.5%, makes the US the 2nd-highest corporate income tax nation on the planet. That is what is screwing us.
Even assuming that most corporations paid the full tax - which they don't - and pretending that states don't offer corporations massive tax breaks for being in their state - which they do, that is not the second highest tax rate in the world. It looks to be quite average. All these countries we outsource work to have similar tax rates - India is 33%, Bangladesh has up to 45%, etc.
Either way, the tax rate cannot even be compared to the cost of labor. That's insane and you have no idea what you're talking about. I suspect you're also forgetting that corporations are taxed on their profits, not their revenue.
We don't have "job killing taxes." We have, in practice, some of the lowest corporate taxes in the world. If corporations actually paid the rates they should, that would solve a lot of problems. In fact, during some periods when we had higher taxes, companies would hire more employees and pay their existing employees more because hey, it's better than wasting it in taxes.
"Is your hypothesis testable?" If the answer is "yes", it's science, if the answer is "no", it's religion.
You're missing the entire point of the article. The problem is in practice the average person is entirely incapable of testing many scientific hypotheses, let alone understanding the reasoning behind them and their ramifications. Yes, in theory, if I spent 7 years getting a doctorate in physics, I could be seeing and understanding actual evidence. Otherwise, I'm just taking everything on faith. It does me no good if a hypothesis is testable in theory. Priests can just as well tell me that they're able to replicate miracles all the time for all the difference it makes to me.
If it only works with Firefox, then they're not clearly using HTML5 standards. Opera, Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 all have a great support for HTML5. Why is it not working with them? And this is open source project, which should have even more standard support than proprietary software. Or is Microsoft actually better? Do it correctly!
Maybe Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera implement different subsets of the "standard" (HTML5 is not what I'd call a standard) and functionality this needs is implemented only in Firefox's subset? Maybe they even implement vague parts of the standard in different ways?
Just because there is a standard doesn't mean that writing an application conforming to that standard will get you cross-platform support in every platform that claims to support that platform.
(Of course, they could be using mozilla-prefixed CSS properties and whatnot - but that's part of the standard too.)
The About box doesn't have RC in it. It just has Firefox 4.0. The last RC (quite possibly this one) is literally the final release. Nothing is changed, not even the build id or the About box.
The release candidate is the real thing, assuming no showstopping bugs are found. That's what they mean by "release candidate": it's a candidate for the final release. The link titled "Firefox 4 RC1" on the Mozilla website gets changed to "Firefox 4" - that's the only thing that changes. But yes, if there is another release candidate, it will automatically update to the newer one. Just as the betas auto-updated to new betas and now the release candidate.
I'm not sure I get what you're saying. If you want Firefox to respect your privacy settings and not remember what you did last session, then why would you want it to come up with App Tabs that have your Facebook and Gmail loaded up? From a usability perspective, this makes sense to me - treat App Tabs as permanent and regular tabs as transient - but from a privacy perspective, what's the difference? Your tabs are your tabs and App Tabs are more likely to contain personal/private information.
Panorama might be useful if you have 23237234 tabs open, otherwise yes, it's just a waste of time and space that belongs in an extension rather than bloating Firefox.
Exactly how is it bloating Firefox? Is it a huge UI distraction? No, I don't think so, it's buried in a submenu. Does the code for Panorama slow down Firefox in any meaningful way when it is not being used? I don't think so. Is the code adding megabytes to the executable? Somehow I doubt it.
I think by bloat you mean "I don't use it so nobody else wants it so it's bloat! Get off my lawn!" On the other hand, I've seen tons of Slashdot posters talking about having hundreds of tabs open at a time. I suspect they probably find it useful. I very rarely use it - usually I make a "work" group and a "play" group - but its existence doesn't bother me. It's not in my way. Some people find it useful and would rage on Slashdot if it was removed/Firefox had no jillion-tab management. You are not the world's only use case for software.
This quite possibly is the final release. When Mozilla puts out a release candidate, if no major problems are found, it becomes the release version without any changes.
For example I bet if you were to go over the MozDev blogs before Chrome you wouldn't see squat written about plugin sandboxing, maybe as a long term possibility, but nothing definite, same with JavaScript benchmarks and radical speedups.
I don't know about plugin sandboxing, but the rest is definitely not true. Mozilla already had nightly (or possibly beta builds) showcasing radical Javascript speedups before Chrome was announced. And that meant a faster UI too, thanks to that being written in Javascript.
That said, Firefox is fast and stable for me while Chrome is very slightly less fast (no difference most of the time) and not stable at all. I also have the opposite problem with memory - if they were cars, Firefox would be a Prius and Chrome would be a Hummer, especially on very large webpages, were Chrome sometimes crashes after using up gigs of memory. But evidently, mileage may vary.
For the most part, I also find the new features pretty useful. And if I don't (like App Tabs) they're not obtrusive at all and I can completely ignore them. So I don't really see the problem, personally.
...they took away even the *option* to have the status bar.
No, torn between the people that demand that all Firefox features be reduced to addons and the people who want everything in their browser, they gave in to the addon people and made it an addon if you need the old status bar back.
At this point, Mozilla can't win no matter what they do. If they take features away and put them in addons, the people who want everything (like me:) ) complain. If they add features in, the people who want all the features they in particular don't need to be addons complain. They're in a no-win situation. They put an incredible focus on performance, and people ignore it. Firefox 4 doesn't just have a new, much faster Javascript engine - there's DOM performance improvements, the startup improvements mentioned in the summary, and the UI in general is much smoother and quicker. But it doesn't matter, because my $PET_PROBLEM_X exists. I don't understand why other browsers aren't held to the same standard. Chrome, for me, is missing tons of features and crashes all the time. It's still a decent browser, and I don't spend all day on Slashdot railing against it.
That said, there is a really annoying bug in Beta 9 - some of my tabs, after I close them, still exist in the ether somewhere and the Awesomebar wants to "switch to tab" when I go to that URL, and there's no tab to switch to, making me press alt+enter to open a new tab.
But I'm pretty confident that and the other major blockers will be fixed by the final release, whenever it comes out. Firefox 4 is still a major improvement over 3.6 even with those bugs, and despite my personal pet peeves like tabs-in-titlebar.
And yet if were the IE team to say the same thing Microsoft would be being constantly trashed claiming that they're ignoring standards. Oh how double standards are fun.
Except SVG Fonts are going to be an optional part of the SVG standard, because the standards committee recognizes they are unimportant. This is because superior alternatives exist (WOFF). This is why Mozilla chose not to implement SVG Fonts. Despite all the FUD in the summary (what is with the anti-Firefox FUD in stories lately, anyway?), the vast majority of Firefox users are not crying out for Firefox to pass a meaningless, arbitrary, and outdated acid test. SVG Fonts are what keeps Firefox from passing the test. There is no benefit to adding that feature except to pass the Acid3 test.
No shit, Dr. Snell. How about "speed of light in a vacuum"?
Where can I find a perfect vacuum? Nowhere. So never in the universe is light traveling at exactly c - there are always tiny variations. So yeah, in practice, it's not really a constant.
At a shareholders meeting, you do not have the right to know who the management is having sex with, but you do have the right to know why the company is or is not making any profit. And you do get a big annual report... again, it contains all relevant information, and no "secrets". And wikileaks may have leaked some juicy relational secrets - that's not necessary imho, but harmless too - but all the rest compares to that annual report that we have been missing all those years.
Right. And you get that. But what you want is more like an annual report containing all internal employee emails.
If wikileaks can get this information, what makes you think foreign spies can't? The public benefits from this info by making the diplomats more careful about what they say and who they say it to.
I think there's a pretty massive benefit to the governmenthaving a store of honest, reliable, and thorough information they can pick through and analyze, which was what these cables were for. If diplomats are more careful about what they say, the information that the US government is able to collect is limited.
We hire politicians to be upfront and honest. We don't hire them to be two faced.
Not everyone in government is a politician. And not everyone in these cables is American. A substantial portion of them are reporting on what other countries have to say.
And do you honestly think progress with say, Iran can be made if we all denounce Iran in public and private? Or does it make more sense for say, Saudi Arabia to say "Look guys, Iran is really dangerous and we want this problem to go away" in private to the US and to Iran at the same time? Or does it make more sense for them to downplay antagonism toward Iran in public and to Iran (since they are perceived to be a threat and it could lead to war) and speak very urgently to other nations at the same time privately about the problem? (This is a paraphrased example from the leaks - the king of Saudi Arabia actually said he wanted us to "cut off the head of the snake" with regard to Iran. Other Arabian countries were equally urgent about ending the Iranian threat. But they're not going to say so in public.)
If you were talking about communications between private citizens I would agree, but these leaks are about our own government. This is supposed to be a representative democracy, and our government should have as few secrets as possible.
I agree. It also seems to clear to me that the vast majority of these cables were legitimate secrets. If you think the entire populace should be aware of all the non-critical-military/intelligence-ops of the government, then you want a direct democracy. The government in a representative democracy is there to represent our interests. We have a right to know whether it is doing so or not. A government whose every daily operation is exposed to the public spotlight will be completely ineffective in representing anyone's interests.
That is my thought as well. The best way to silence WikiLeaks is to leak tons of false data that seems right, let it make a lot of noise, then prove that it is all fake. No one will trust them again - so hearing another major leak right after the pentagon one - makes me wonder just how real is this...
The NYT was in a dialogue with the State Department over the leak, and the State Department never questioned that they were genuine.
I think a much more serious problem would be someone slipping in a small number of fakes amid the 200k real cables for malicious purposes.
Release of private communications among humans proves to be embarrassing and damaging. News at 11!
It doesn't matter what you're talking about, if you just mass released all the private documents and communications of any group of individuals, any organization, you're going to cause a lot of trouble, hurt, embarrassment, and potentially serious problems limiting their effectiveness when "scandal" breaks out. Everyone can find scandal in something, because most people hold higher standards to others than themselves. It's like the old If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
There's a such thing as responsible disclosure, and Wikileaks blew it. They're irresponsible. We do need to know about wrongdoing, yes. But there's a huge difference between reporting and disclosing serious wrongdoing and just throwing hundreds of thousands of documents at the world and saying here, read this! I don't know what agenda Wikileaks really has, but it's not a good one.
Slashdot Mirror
The anti-enterprise position was never the official view of Mozilla; it was something expressed by a few employees of Mozilla. There are certainly plenty of others who feel quite differently about it, as you can see from reading Planet Mozilla. I don't think Mozilla has expressed a position on any of this.
For example, here's a counterpoint view. There's some good points there. The main point: major Firefox releases that include important bugfixes were taking more than a year to come out. This was very bad for many groups of people. Point releases took 6-8 to come out, but without too many major changes (the idea that Firefox point releases never included new functionality is false - out-of-process plugins came in a point release.) Mozilla has now simply merged the two: the only releases will come out every 6-8 weeks and will include whatever's ready, like Chrome.
There is, in fact, a stable extension API called Jetpack. The problem is that Firefox extensions can literally do anything at all to Firefox, access internal APIs and do whatever else they want. An external API like Jetpack is no good for that. There's a tradeoff. AMO bumps compatibility on most extensions automatically, but not all. So some extensions will be temporarily incompatible (personally, I didn't have any issues - about 15 extensions). On the other hand, users will get, for example, the massive memory improvements coming in Firefox 7 in a month or two rather than sometime in 2013.
Hyperbole much? This is the full list of changes and it's a whole lot more than "ten security bugs." A couple orders of magnitude more. It's not even true that nothing has changed from the user perspective; there are a couple minor changes. (Of course, had there been a UI revamp as in 4.0, people would be screaming in anger.)
Even assuming that most corporations paid the full tax - which they don't - and pretending that states don't offer corporations massive tax breaks for being in their state - which they do, that is not the second highest tax rate in the world. It looks to be quite average. All these countries we outsource work to have similar tax rates - India is 33%, Bangladesh has up to 45%, etc.
Either way, the tax rate cannot even be compared to the cost of labor. That's insane and you have no idea what you're talking about. I suspect you're also forgetting that corporations are taxed on their profits, not their revenue.
We don't have "job killing taxes." We have, in practice, some of the lowest corporate taxes in the world. If corporations actually paid the rates they should, that would solve a lot of problems. In fact, during some periods when we had higher taxes, companies would hire more employees and pay their existing employees more because hey, it's better than wasting it in taxes.
I doubt very much a physicist is likely to cook you up some antihydrogen on demand. Does that make physics wrong?
Look - I'm a science guy. But you have to understand the practical limitations we're dealing with and look at things through other people's eyes.
You're missing the entire point of the article. The problem is in practice the average person is entirely incapable of testing many scientific hypotheses, let alone understanding the reasoning behind them and their ramifications. Yes, in theory, if I spent 7 years getting a doctorate in physics, I could be seeing and understanding actual evidence. Otherwise, I'm just taking everything on faith. It does me no good if a hypothesis is testable in theory. Priests can just as well tell me that they're able to replicate miracles all the time for all the difference it makes to me.
Exactly. The guy in charge doesn't think that HTML 5 will be a real standard with two complete, interoperable implementations until 2022.
Maybe Mozilla, Apple, Google, and Opera implement different subsets of the "standard" (HTML5 is not what I'd call a standard) and functionality this needs is implemented only in Firefox's subset? Maybe they even implement vague parts of the standard in different ways?
Just because there is a standard doesn't mean that writing an application conforming to that standard will get you cross-platform support in every platform that claims to support that platform.
(Of course, they could be using mozilla-prefixed CSS properties and whatnot - but that's part of the standard too.)
Huh? Firefox has had plugin sandboxing since 3.6
Actually, the release candidate of Firefox 4 is out. All indications so far are that this build will be the final Firefox 4 with no changes.
The About box doesn't have RC in it. It just has Firefox 4.0. The last RC (quite possibly this one) is literally the final release. Nothing is changed, not even the build id or the About box.
The release candidate is the real thing, assuming no showstopping bugs are found. That's what they mean by "release candidate": it's a candidate for the final release. The link titled "Firefox 4 RC1" on the Mozilla website gets changed to "Firefox 4" - that's the only thing that changes. But yes, if there is another release candidate, it will automatically update to the newer one. Just as the betas auto-updated to new betas and now the release candidate.
I'm not sure I get what you're saying. If you want Firefox to respect your privacy settings and not remember what you did last session, then why would you want it to come up with App Tabs that have your Facebook and Gmail loaded up? From a usability perspective, this makes sense to me - treat App Tabs as permanent and regular tabs as transient - but from a privacy perspective, what's the difference? Your tabs are your tabs and App Tabs are more likely to contain personal/private information.
Exactly how is it bloating Firefox? Is it a huge UI distraction? No, I don't think so, it's buried in a submenu. Does the code for Panorama slow down Firefox in any meaningful way when it is not being used? I don't think so. Is the code adding megabytes to the executable? Somehow I doubt it.
I think by bloat you mean "I don't use it so nobody else wants it so it's bloat! Get off my lawn!" On the other hand, I've seen tons of Slashdot posters talking about having hundreds of tabs open at a time. I suspect they probably find it useful. I very rarely use it - usually I make a "work" group and a "play" group - but its existence doesn't bother me. It's not in my way. Some people find it useful and would rage on Slashdot if it was removed/Firefox had no jillion-tab management. You are not the world's only use case for software.
The default Firefox home page asks me if I want to restore my previous session every time I open it, which brings back all my app tabs and tab groups.
This quite possibly is the final release. When Mozilla puts out a release candidate, if no major problems are found, it becomes the release version without any changes.
I don't know about plugin sandboxing, but the rest is definitely not true. Mozilla already had nightly (or possibly beta builds) showcasing radical Javascript speedups before Chrome was announced. And that meant a faster UI too, thanks to that being written in Javascript.
That said, Firefox is fast and stable for me while Chrome is very slightly less fast (no difference most of the time) and not stable at all. I also have the opposite problem with memory - if they were cars, Firefox would be a Prius and Chrome would be a Hummer, especially on very large webpages, were Chrome sometimes crashes after using up gigs of memory. But evidently, mileage may vary.
For the most part, I also find the new features pretty useful. And if I don't (like App Tabs) they're not obtrusive at all and I can completely ignore them. So I don't really see the problem, personally.
No, torn between the people that demand that all Firefox features be reduced to addons and the people who want everything in their browser, they gave in to the addon people and made it an addon if you need the old status bar back.
At this point, Mozilla can't win no matter what they do. If they take features away and put them in addons, the people who want everything (like me :) ) complain. If they add features in, the people who want all the features they in particular don't need to be addons complain. They're in a no-win situation. They put an incredible focus on performance, and people ignore it. Firefox 4 doesn't just have a new, much faster Javascript engine - there's DOM performance improvements, the startup improvements mentioned in the summary, and the UI in general is much smoother and quicker. But it doesn't matter, because my $PET_PROBLEM_X exists. I don't understand why other browsers aren't held to the same standard. Chrome, for me, is missing tons of features and crashes all the time. It's still a decent browser, and I don't spend all day on Slashdot railing against it.
That said, there is a really annoying bug in Beta 9 - some of my tabs, after I close them, still exist in the ether somewhere and the Awesomebar wants to "switch to tab" when I go to that URL, and there's no tab to switch to, making me press alt+enter to open a new tab.
But I'm pretty confident that and the other major blockers will be fixed by the final release, whenever it comes out. Firefox 4 is still a major improvement over 3.6 even with those bugs, and despite my personal pet peeves like tabs-in-titlebar.
Except SVG Fonts are going to be an optional part of the SVG standard, because the standards committee recognizes they are unimportant. This is because superior alternatives exist (WOFF). This is why Mozilla chose not to implement SVG Fonts. Despite all the FUD in the summary (what is with the anti-Firefox FUD in stories lately, anyway?), the vast majority of Firefox users are not crying out for Firefox to pass a meaningless, arbitrary, and outdated acid test. SVG Fonts are what keeps Firefox from passing the test. There is no benefit to adding that feature except to pass the Acid3 test.
Where can I find a perfect vacuum? Nowhere. So never in the universe is light traveling at exactly c - there are always tiny variations. So yeah, in practice, it's not really a constant.
Right. And you get that. But what you want is more like an annual report containing all internal employee emails.
I think there's a pretty massive benefit to the governmenthaving a store of honest, reliable, and thorough information they can pick through and analyze, which was what these cables were for. If diplomats are more careful about what they say, the information that the US government is able to collect is limited.
Not everyone in government is a politician. And not everyone in these cables is American. A substantial portion of them are reporting on what other countries have to say.
And do you honestly think progress with say, Iran can be made if we all denounce Iran in public and private? Or does it make more sense for say, Saudi Arabia to say "Look guys, Iran is really dangerous and we want this problem to go away" in private to the US and to Iran at the same time? Or does it make more sense for them to downplay antagonism toward Iran in public and to Iran (since they are perceived to be a threat and it could lead to war) and speak very urgently to other nations at the same time privately about the problem? (This is a paraphrased example from the leaks - the king of Saudi Arabia actually said he wanted us to "cut off the head of the snake" with regard to Iran. Other Arabian countries were equally urgent about ending the Iranian threat. But they're not going to say so in public.)
Being two-faced is how diplomacy gets anywhere.
I agree. It also seems to clear to me that the vast majority of these cables were legitimate secrets. If you think the entire populace should be aware of all the non-critical-military/intelligence-ops of the government, then you want a direct democracy. The government in a representative democracy is there to represent our interests. We have a right to know whether it is doing so or not. A government whose every daily operation is exposed to the public spotlight will be completely ineffective in representing anyone's interests.
The NYT was in a dialogue with the State Department over the leak, and the State Department never questioned that they were genuine.
I think a much more serious problem would be someone slipping in a small number of fakes amid the 200k real cables for malicious purposes.
It doesn't matter what you're talking about, if you just mass released all the private documents and communications of any group of individuals, any organization, you're going to cause a lot of trouble, hurt, embarrassment, and potentially serious problems limiting their effectiveness when "scandal" breaks out. Everyone can find scandal in something, because most people hold higher standards to others than themselves. It's like the old If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
There's a such thing as responsible disclosure, and Wikileaks blew it. They're irresponsible. We do need to know about wrongdoing, yes. But there's a huge difference between reporting and disclosing serious wrongdoing and just throwing hundreds of thousands of documents at the world and saying here, read this! I don't know what agenda Wikileaks really has, but it's not a good one.