Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next? 296
trawg writes: It's been more than 10 years since Mozilla released version 1.0 of Firefox, one of their first steps in their mission to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. Firefox was instrumental in shattering the web monoculture, but the last few years of development have left users uninspired. "Their goal was never to create the most popular browser in the world, or the one with the best UX, or the one with the most features, or the one with the best developer mode. ... It would be foolish to say a monoculture will never arise again (Google are making some scary moves with Chrome-only web applications). But at this point in time while Chrome is the ascendant browser (largely at the expense of Firefox), Mozilla’s ability to impact the web in general is greatly reduced." Perhaps it is time to move on to the next challenge — ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.
Back to FF (Score:5, Insightful)
I've used Chrome on BSD for years but recently moved back to FF. The main reason I moved in the first place is sync of personal data across instances. FF now has this.
Also Chromium isn't as open source friendly as one would think so it's feature set is largely reduced on BSD's. Now that they've removed the ability to run 32-bit NPAPI plugins, I can't use java/flash anymore either. Plus all the Chrome UI Nazi stuff was getting annoying like the malfunctioning middle click to paste. Chrome devs calling it a feature not a bug didn't help either. Regardless, things are good again in BSD w/ FF.
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I would agree, and add that we haven't seen the end of this, as HTML5 is changing everything. Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity. Plodding as it might be, I'll take FF, just like I'll wait for Debian to do something. I seem to be rewarded by being a little patient.
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I would agree, and add that we haven't seen the end of this, as HTML5 is changing everything. Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity. Plodding as it might be, I'll take FF, just like I'll wait for Debian to do something. I seem to be rewarded by being a little patient.
It seems to me sometimes that Google doesn't know how to do anything that ISN'T heavy-handed anymore. And they are certainly not protective of your privacy... which is one of Firefox's specialties.
And as long as it remains so, I think Firefox will continue to gain in popularity. The only reason I use Chrome anymore at all is to check compatibility with web apps. Other than that it stays locked in its cage.
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Not Open or Not Portable? (Score:2)
The source is open, but i read about how chromium's way of packaging dependencies with itself has had it rejected from official software repositories on various linux distros. Perhaps this also reduces it's portability.
On an unrelated note, you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash, that's really not how the web should work or will work in the future. (for the record i'm fairly browser agnostic, except when talking about IE of course :P).
Re:Not Open or Not Portable? (Score:5, Insightful)
you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash
If it limits your ability to browse today, especially to site you want to visit then it is relevant when choosing a browser to use.
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you shouldn't judge a browser on it's ability to support java and flash, that's really not how the web should work or will work in the future.
How the web should work or will work in the future is less important to me than how it works right now -- and right now, flash is still (unfortunately) important.
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Aside from the billion or so sites which still use flash, black boxes like vsphere *require* flash to efficiently admin them.
The death of flash and java is about as relevant as the death of IPv4 or perl 5 or the life of Duke Nukem Forever and the Linux Desktop.
Tired of hearing about the death of flash and java since 2006. Can we wait till it actually arrives before we start the utopian admonishments?
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The *only* reason I run FF anymore is because of YouTube downloader.
Chrome is just faster, less of a memory pig, and PDF + Flash + mpeg4 just work out of the box.
With the excellent extension Tab Outliner [google.com] I'm all set.
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More like Stync, I have to use that awful shit everyday.
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Are we in danger of a software monoculture if all browsers become Chromium/webkit based?
yes.
Unfortunately, those philosophical reasons rarely are enough to keep a project going. For most practical purposes, Chrome/webkit is sufficient.
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I too would like to inspire hate for Chrome whilst praising FF.
Praise FF, freedom be thy name.
Re:Firefox users: 86% sad, 14% happy. (Score:4, Insightful)
Keep in mind that happy users are silent users. I use Firefox, and enjoy it. It runs fast, supports the plugins I want, and seems to be quite stable. More than that, it largely keeps out of my way, so honestly, I don't think about the browser all that much. I've never thought of submitting feedback on that site, because I have no real feedback to offer. That is, I have no real problems, and can't think offhand of anything the program is really lacking.
The only way you can get a true picture is if you get a random sampling among regular Firefox users. Any action initiated by the user to send feedback automatically will skew the result.
If 86% of users didn't like Firefox, I don't think they'd have the market share they do now. BTW, let's take a look at one of the sad faces I picked from the top of that list:
Stop that annoying paranoid shit about "update you flash or it will burn all your family to ashes and eat your left eye while pooping in your mouth". It's not THAT dangerous, user should have a possibility to shut it OFF. And not by clicking on every damned page to allow older plugin work, but by just choosing that option in the settings. I thrusted(sic) you, you were the last normal browser in a pile of shiny useless shit that thinks that user is an idiot. Now you doing this. Damn.
This user apparently wants an option to stay silent about older versions of Flash, which undoubtedly have security issues that need fixing. Should Mozilla "fix" this problem to the user's satisfaction? It's ironic that the user complains the browser "that thinks that user is an idiot" when he's advocating doing something incredibly stupid - not keeping all his plugins current.
Here's another frowny faced gem:
Please fix Norton toolbar 2014.7.8.23 been to long now makes me not want to use Firefox .....
Mozilla apparently needs to fix the Norton toolbar, or this user won't be happy. Good luck with that Mozilla!
I'm not saying that Firefox doesn't have legitimate issues, but my point is that looking at a feedback site such as that one is going to give you very, very skewed results. I've just pointed out two examples on the front page.
"...Chrome-only web applications..." (Score:2, Insightful)
"...Chrome-only web applications..."
It isn't a web application if it requires non-web-standard features or a very specific software platform.
64 bit, webcam? (Score:2)
"50% of Fx users on Windows run 64 bit OS. We've reached a threshold where the effort makes sense."
Work on the webcam side now that HTML5 video is supported.
No they did not. They have failed HARD. (Score:3, Interesting)
The original goal of Phoenix(?) or whatever name they chose for the code-split from Navigator; was to build a fast, responsive and resource-minimal web-browser. When it was first released it was a HUGE success because not everybody wanted an all-in-one email/browser/calendar/contact/NNTP client.
Then they added the ability to run 3rd-party scripts, they called those 'extensions' (omg what is this new thing!) and that was super popular.
I like many of the /. readership was there at the birth of what we now call Firefox. We have loved it for what it was, and have tolerated it for what it became.
It is still my primary browser, but if I ever find a minimal-resource browser that offers functionality equal to 'NoScript' and 'Adblock-Edge' I'll switch.
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Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Re:No they did not. They have failed HARD. (Score:4, Informative)
Mozilla was the original code-split from Navigator, and it's purpose was to preserve Navigator as a browser for the half of the web that was optimized for it (remember the old "best viewed with..." buttons? Good days). Firefox née Phoenix was a fork from Mozilla to strip out Netscape-sponsored features of the Mozilla engine (giving us the Gecko engine). It succeeded in this goal, as well, for a time.
Your history is a bit off. Gecko was Mozilla's focus since Mozilla itself was created to continue Netscape's work on the next version of their browser after failing on their goal of improving the (horrible) Netscape 4.x layout engine, which was their original goal for version 5 (although I think they might have been experimenting with both possibilities at the same time before giving up the former). Firefox (originally Phoenix then Firebird) was created with the goal of taking that same layout engine, Gecko, but wrapping only a simple browser around it rather than the entire Mozilla/Netscape Communicator-style suite. Netscape never had many Netscape/AOL features in the Mozilla suite itself; those (e.g., AIM integration, branding, and a different default theme--Modern instead of Classic, etc.) were mostly confined to the Netscape-branded releases that AOL/Netscape released using the Mozilla suite as a base (starting with Netscape 6--skipping the scrapped version 5 attempt, though version 6 was horribly delayed and based on a somewhat unstable pre-1.0 release of the Mozilla suite). In any case, Gecko has not only been there since before Firefox, but it's one of few things that Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (which effectively lives on as Seamonkey) share, albeit a very large and important thing since it's used for so much (not just HTML rendering but also creating the UI itself via XUL and a theme).
Thunderbird was created with a pretty similar goal: take the same layout engine but include only the e-mail features from the suite.
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Firefox was not super in its pre 0.9 versions, but IMO became worse after version 3. (Coincidentally, this was also the case with Netscape Navigator 3 growing into Communiicator 4).
That said, Firefox has proved to be an indispensible tool for web development (firebug).
Re:No they did not. They have failed HARD. (Score:4, Interesting)
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I too first started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, but I disagree that Mozilla has failed. In my experience Firefox is fast and responsive. Resource-minimalness (is that even a word?) isn't an is
"preserve" with what? (Score:2)
Just the client? (Score:2)
ensuring there is a strong Thunderbird to help preserve a free and open email ecosystem.
Why would having an open email client help preserve free and open email? Is something threatening email rfc's recently?
It succeeded alright (Score:2)
Firefox has become the new Netscape. Every release was slower and once they switched to Australis I dumped them entirely for Chrome. Most of the addons I used are also available for Chrome now. I got a good laugh reading about their video chat client. Nobody ever asked for that. How about making existing features better instead of adding shit for no good reason? No wonder Google stopped funding them. Google saw the direction it was going for and pulled out.
Re:It succeeded alright (Score:4, Interesting)
So now I use a combination of IE and Firefox. And I have Firefox loaded on my phone as well as Chrome.
Why didn't I try Opera instead? I would have, but it failed to install. C'est la vie.
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Chrome has failed in this manner for lots of people. No problem with the os. Rather, a problem with, after moving the old files, trying to install a new set of files in the previous occasion - it fails.
Turns out the Opera installer hung up (because it launched 4 instances of itself for some strange reason, so it hung up). Killing all but one install processes let opera complete, but I'm not really impressed with the finished product. On another note, removing google drive really speeded up the machine. Con
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The video API is cross-browser, viz webrtc which appears in Chrome too.
I thought the goal was... (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought the goal was to take Netscape communicator, strip out all the crap, leaving just the lean, fast web browser. Funny they seem to have forgotten that as every release adds more and more bloat and unwanted "features". It might as well be Netscape all over again.
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From Wikipedia:
The Firefox project began as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project by Dave Hyatt, Joe Hewitt and Blake Ross. They believed the commercial requirements of Netscape's sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser.[28] To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite's software bloat, they created a stand-alone browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite.[29] On April 3, 2003, the Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird.
In case you didn't know, Mozilla Suite was the open sourced code base of Netscape Communicator. The "Mozilla" name being the original working name of Netscape Navigator.
"The Next Challenge..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has. If Chrome's market share has come at the expense of Firefox it may be in part because many people who jumped ship - myself included - found that each Firefox release was becoming successively more and more "chrome-like" without offering any of the benefits that make Chrome a compelling offering. In my case it was speed and performance on a 2006 Mac Mini running 10.6 - firefox was bloated slug that constantly screamed at me to upgrade my OS; Chrome ran as fast as it does on modern hardware and never complained about anything. Chrome's UI and core functionality haven't changed much since I started using it, either - I grew to dread Firefox updates as you never knew if it was going to pull an iTunes and reboot with some new horrible "feature" that didn't have extensions to revert the behavior back to prior functionality - Firefox deciding it was going to handle PDFs inline, and that functionality being far beyond slow and a real pain in the ass to disable - was the last straw for me. When I left the browser half of my extensions and customizations were to undo things the devs had "improved" over the years - the other half were ad and flash blocking extensions, which Chrome does almost as well.
TLDR; Firefox was awesome when it was Mozilla Without The Cruft. Then it started to cruft up and bloat up and horrible terrible very bad things started to happen to the UI and now it's Just Another Browser. Which is fine, really. Thunderbird does not need to be "innovated" in the same way - Firefox needs to be replaced by Firefox Without The Cruft the way Firefox replaced Mozilla. Maybe stick to the UNIX idea of "do one thing well" this time around, instead of "do one thing reasonably well and an increasingly lengthy list of perpedicular things in a totally half-assed fashion."
I used Netscape Navigator until IE5 (Mac) came along, then I used Mozilla until Safari popped up, then Firefox until it drove me to Chrome. Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on and has never nagged at me to update or screamed at me to upgrade my operating system Because Reasons. It has yet to roll out a game-changing UI element that I hate, and it isn't slowly modeling its overall UX to resemble the competition. I hope the Mozilla foundation keeps going because we need choice, now more than ever - and maybe one day they'll be my choice again.
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I completely agree with your comments and also like to point out that FF is no longer the users browser. I have no idea where they are going. Forcing Yahoo onto users. If I wanted Yahoo as a search engine I would have selected Yahoo. Unable to save exceptions to self signed certificates. I only noticed when I had to reinstall due to a faulty disk. Please do not try to argue security on this.
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I thought the Yahoo move was pretty hilarious, if only in the fact that Yahoo reported an uptick in people actually using Yahoo for search at some point shortly after.
I also find it hilarious that Bing loads faster and returns results a lot faster than Google does on Chrome, though that's not strictly relevant to the conversation.* One thing I can say for Firefox - whatever they try to default the search box to the danged thing has never sat there spluttering and not bothering to send/load content the way
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I don't care about Thunderbird's chrome so much but both Firefox and Thunderbird are losing users because it's *still* not able to use multi-core effectively due to xulrunner trying to be an OS on top of its other tasks.
Chrome is 'snappy' because it tries to do less. Users don't care why, but they know what it feels like. Just today I was typing a message in Thunderbird and it stopped accepting my keyboard input for about 8 seconds while it was busy running an index or whatever it felt like hijacking the
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Just today I was typing a message in Thunderbird and it stopped accepting my keyboard input for about 8 seconds while it was busy running an index or whatever it felt like hijacking the UI thread for.
It still does that? Geebus, I was hoping they'd have fixed that by now. I dumped Thunderbird for sylpheed back in 2006 and then found out about sylpheed-claws which is now Claws-mail very soon after.
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Just today I was typing a message in Thunderbird and it stopped accepting my keyboard input for about 8 seconds while it was busy running an index or whatever it felt like hijacking the UI thread for.
Sounds like Outlook, except for the 8 seconds part. More like 20-30.
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Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say Everything works in Chrome, I said Chrome Just Works on everything I run it on.
I don't care what features a browser has; if it's using large bold fonts and fear-mongering fraidy-text to try to goad me into upgrading my operating system so I can upgrade my browser, I'm going to switch to a browser that runs on the OS that I'm using and doesn't cry about it.
It turns out I don't miss greasemonkey all that much - I just shut off javascript on any website that feels like it's
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Oh jeeze the last thing Thunderbird needs is to be raked over the trendy UX coals the way Firefox has
[author of the article]
Completely agree, and it's what I dislike most about Firefox today (you can look at my history for several +5 comments about FF UI/UX).
I think Thunderbird is in that pre-awesome Firefox stage. It's feature complete but not polished or awesome enough to drive adoption and force other players to respond.
I also do not like random UI/UX spasms that lead to Australis-esque results. I just want a solid client that people can /rely/ on, like Firefox was.
I've used Thunderbird as my sole emai
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I'm glad Pale Moon exists. Although windows isn't my primary platform I'll download it and give it a test drive. I've never had any issues with Gecko; it's been the progressively heavier stack of everything sitting on top of it that made firefox unpalatable... then Chrome integrated so well with my general web usage across several machines that I doubt I'll be heading to anything else any time soon. That doesn't mean I don't need to occasionally look at websites in other browsers, though.
Agreed, Thunderbi
Re-writing history... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not a complete success (Score:2)
Right now, I use three different web browsers (on Windows that would be IE, FIreFox, and Chrome, and on Linux, that would be Opera, Firefox, and Chrome) because there are too many websites that only work under one or the other of them. A few years ago, this wasn't necessary, so we have backslid a fair ways. The "success" is far from complete, and getting farther as each day goes by. I expect HTML 5 to make the situation even worse.
Firefox has lost favor with me because it has pretty much abandoned the thing
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That may be the case, and yet there are websites that work right under one and not under the other.
Firefox's Goal (Score:5, Funny)
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Well played, Mr. Malignant!
Next challenge: FirefoxOS phones (Score:4, Interesting)
Unlike some other mobile operating systems, FirefoxOS is completely open and uses HTML5 to deliver content. BlackBerry and Windows Phone each have small market shares, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. So we mostly have only two choices of mobile OS. Don't get me wrong: I very much like my Android phone (Sony Xperia Z3 Compact) and my iPad, but I think that it's a worthwhile challenge to contribute to the FirefoxOS platform and/or to build apps for it.
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It will also be interesting to see how it affects the other hardware arenas.
We'll be seeing Firefox OS coming out on TVs, HDMI streaming dongles, raspberry Pi, and likely watches this year.
Upfront they focused on tuning it to run well on very low end hardware which may really pay off for them.
Here is what I *HOPE* is next (Score:5, Interesting)
>"Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?"
Here is what I *HOPE* is next:
1) Stop trying to be and look like Chrome. Just stop.
2) Stop trying to force users to not have tabs on bottom, having a menu bar, having separate buttons, etc. Let users control their user interface how they want.
3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.
4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.
5) Focus on speed, security, stability, bug-fixing, and documentation. You don't have to be a feature-of-the-month club.
6) Continue to support as many platforms and systems as possible, including old ones.
Oh- and thank you for all the hard work that went into Firefox- the browser of my choice (and that for my users, family, and friends) for the last decade.
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>"Firefox Succeeded In Its Goal -- But What's Next?"
Here is what I *HOPE* is next:
1) Stop trying to be and look like Chrome. Just stop.
2) Stop trying to force users to not have tabs on bottom, having a menu bar, having separate buttons, etc. Let users control their user interface how they want.
3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.
4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.
5) Focus on speed, security, stability, bug-fixing, and documentation. You don't have to be a feature-of-the-month club.
6) Continue to support as many platforms and systems as possible, including old ones.
Oh- and thank you for all the hard work that went into Firefox- the browser of my choice (and that for my users, family, and friends) for the last decade.
You forgot the most important part - bring back the fucking status bar you fucking shits.
Re:Here is what I *HOPE* is next (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot the most important part - bring back the fucking status bar you fucking shits.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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>https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/the-addon-bar/
Yes, well, that and this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org] (Classic Theme Restorer)
But why should the basic UI choices be an addon while they add useless stuff like developer tools, voice chat, text chat, etc directly into the program? Seems very backwards to me.
Oh and one thing I left off the list that is perhaps the most important and likely never to be added:
7) Give users a way to turn down and/or control all this new javascript animatio
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3) Remove all that developer stuff that 99.99% of users don't use or care about and put it in an addon.
4) Remove all that chat and conferencing stuff that 99% of users don't care about and put that also in an addon.
And the new baked-in "Apps" stuff that 99% of all users won't use and the associated "Tools->Apps" menu item - which could only figure out how to hide using the userChrome.css snippet below - sigh:
menuitem[label="Apps"] {
display: none !important;
}
[ Please let me know if there's a better way... ]
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Bingo. What's next? Maintenance, security.
You've got some software that works.
Now your job, Mozilla, is NOT TO BREAK IT ANY FURTHER..
Re:Here is what I *HOPE* is next (Score:5, Interesting)
>Also, don't crash constantly.
Hmm, Linux Firefox almost never crashes here, and I run it for many weeks at a time with many dozens of tabs and windows open at a time.
Back to the original mission! (Score:2, Informative)
Remember when FF was all about making it a lean, mean browsing machine compared to the silver-bullet one-for-everything Netscape behemoth? I think FF would really benefit from making these virtues of old their new priorities again, instead of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation trying out-do Apple in feel-good, empty world-improvement campaigns and slogans and trying to out-do Apple and Google in UI design with yet another "UI improvement". Or doing things like completely crippling developers who are usi
Thunderbird Mail, Own your Mail (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see myself using webmail. Ultimately, I download all my email.
At the expense of Firefox? (Score:2)
Regardless, FF is still the most configurable browser I know of. I like Chrome, but FF has plug-ins that give it superpowers Chrome still can't match. And THAT is Firefox's raison d'etre.
open to whom? (Score:2)
when i started the pyjamas-desktop project i assumed that the "open-ness" that is written into the mozilla foundation charter would be an inviolate quantity that they would adhere to. taking this on faith i found the python-hulahop bindings of the OLPC project to be perfect to allow HTML5 DOM to be entirely (even exclusively) manipulated *python-side* instead of using javascript.
for anyone not familiar with the difference between pyxpcomext and python-hulahop, pyxpcomext was a project funded in 2000 by the
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note: the use of less-than and greater-than within what i have written above has been mangled by slashdot, resulting in it being unintelligable at a key strategic point. that point is when script language is mentioned. it's supposed to read less-than script language equals python greater-than and less-than script language equals javascript.
Waterfox is genuinely stable (Score:2)
So we know the Mozilla code for the most part is finally reliable. I think it's performance time, it really is time for this to kick into high gear, ASAP.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Elect... [mozilla.org]
To break the monopoly of Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox is our weapon to tame misbehaving behemoths. Be it Microsoft. Be it Google. Be it Apple.
I have work to do, and Chrome/GMail "Just Works" (Score:2)
I can see why Firefox was created, and I used it quite happily for years. But when it kept memory-leaking worse and worse with every release, I had to let it go. (My job necessarily involves a LOT of web browsing and tabs... and no, I don't work for a porn site.) Chrome does what I need it to, never locks the HDD light on with swap activity, and I cannot remember the last time it crashed. It's fast, and has all the function I require.
GMail. I have essentially infinite storage, access on every internet
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I have complained for years about memory leaks, all to no avail. I have asked for a way to enumerate memory/cpu usage on a per-tab basis - all of this also goes on deaf ears. They just turn around and pass the buck and blame the addins. In the meantime I routinely have to kill firefox and then restart it. It apologizes about how embarrassing it is that Firefox has "crashed", but the real embarrassment are the memory leaks.
I use Chrome some, but I can't say that I really like it that much. But I am incr
Email is *so* 20th century. Enter a garden (Score:3)
Email is not just the way of the future. My kids use imessage to communicate with their trendy friends with Apple gear. Indeed we needed to buy them an ipad touch just so they could keep up. My wife uses Facebook to communicate. Less fashionable people communicate with Kick, and a few neanderthals even use Skype.
The idea that somebody on GMail or Outlook or even Thunderbird cam communicate with an iPhone is an accident of history. Why would anybody want to support technology that can help others steal the customers that they own? Blogs and RSS are already dead, long live Facebook! Email will follow.
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Crypto GUI with the signing and encrypting.
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Crypto GUI with the signing and encrypting.
Thunderbird has built in support for S/MIME, and you can install Enigmail for gpg
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-... [mozilla.org]
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It's a mail reader. That is all it needs to be.
Fixing bugs like the many year old "You have 39423 new messages" when a single message pops into my inbox would be nice.
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When one has hundreds of thousands emails, the Thunderbird just was not able to do its job. If it takes 30-45 minutes (!!) of CPU time to open a mailbox, the email client is useless.
Try Claws-mail: http://www.claws-mail.org/ [claws-mail.org]
I switched from thunderbird to Claws because of the degraded Thunderbird performance over time.
Re:Thunderbird? (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact I think email should either die or have a massive protocol update of some kind to block spammers, otherwise it's a lost cause.
I'm not aware of anyone who used to use email who has stopped using email, are you? Given how effective spam blockers are these days, I'm not feeling a need to drop SMTP quite yet myself.
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Nevermind that there are hardly any universally good email clients..... None do encryption well
There are two very good e-mail clients, IMHO:
Thunderbird, which can handle gpg with Enigmail
https://www.enigmail.net/home/... [enigmail.net]
And Claws-mail, which has gpg and S/MIME support by default:
http://www.claws-mail.org/ [claws-mail.org]
OSX users can just install gpgtools and keep on using Mail.
https://gpgtools.org/ [gpgtools.org]
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Gone Defunct, I guess:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm wondering if this article is a joke. a troll. a nudge towards crazy.
Is open source email management really the next big challenge? If Mozilla targeted that they'd lose their funding in 3, 2, 1...
Thought they'd say something like data privacy, data portability, online anonymity, etc.
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There is no application whose usage future is more certainly bright than e-mail. The complaints you make are symptoms of ubiquitous usage and unstoppable success.
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I think the SMTP protocol is relatively fine. I'd love to see some semblance of standardization for HTML layout in email messages. I understand how and why we are where we are today, but it's ridiculous how many hoops you have to jump through just to get a decent email to render correctly across all major email platforms.
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You want all the stupid flowers, comic sans fonts and other excrescence that your co orkers brighten their day with?
Bog no.... just the ASCII please.
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I've never used or even seen Thunderbird in my life but I'm pretty sure email cross-platform compatibility is not something we need to worry about.
In fact I think email should either die or have a massive protocol update of some kind to block spammers, otherwise it's a lost cause.
I use Thunderbird, and find it useful particularly in transferring mails b/w e-mail accounts. Also, if I receive a mail to a 'wrong' account, I can respond to the same email from a different account, thereby enabling me to organize it better. Probably Outlook can do the same thing, but it's way more than what I need, aside from being Windows only (or Windows, iOS and Android only)
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Don't even get me started on tags. I hate tags, don't understand why anyone would like them. Put my mail into folders and leave me be.
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It's a good idea to now and again go to gmail and check the spam folder for false positives
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Email is moving towards webmail that scans your emails to do targeted advertising. Doing everything in the cloud makes it way too easy for companies to extract value from users.
This is true, but even if you don't use their webmail interface, the free email service providers can still scan your email. There's nothing to stop them from doing that.
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but even if you don't use their webmail interface, the free email service providers can still scan your email. There's nothing to stop them from doing that.
While they can scan and read unencrypted messages, OpenPGP and S/MIME encryption would like to have a word with you.
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Or Mulberry.
Or Gmail.
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As I've said before, Thunderbird supports S/MIME out of the box. Get a key from Comodo you're set for S/MIME.
You need the Enigmail plugin for gpg, but then you're set with gpg
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Re:Firefox Hello, Pidgin (Score:4, Interesting)
Pidgin desperately needs help, as it hasn't successfully had an easy-to-use voice (let alone video) capability.
And it's never going to....now.
The plan was to add voice/video support to pidgin, but then some console dwelling neckbeards took over development. They freely admitted that they didn't use the graphical client or non-XMPP protocols so those wouldn't get much work done on them. They were the ones whose basic philosophy was: "who needs voice and video? Running finch (text mode pidgin) in screen/emacs is good enough for anyone"
They're the jerks who changed perfectly good UI like the terms login/logout to enable/disable.
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The past closed proprietary DHTML features?
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monoculture = all one thing. How exactly is having several different browsers all based on the same engine NOT a monoculture? It's not a *proprietary* monoculture, and as such may avoid many of the pitfalls that made the IE monoculture so toxic, but it is definitely a monoculture.
Re:monoculture again? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox does not use WebKit. It uses Gecko.
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Just thinking out loud here, the IE6 monoculture was terrible, and we all hated it...and justifiably so. However, with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all based on WebKit now, have we simply embraced a different monoculture? Admittedly the main difference here is that WebKit is more open than Trident, and the days of ActiveX and Java are more behind us than not...But is having an alternative render engine a better situation, or just redundant coding?
Firefox is Gecko [wikipedia.org] based not WebKit.
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What are the good open source webmail clients? I still use Thunderbird because I want my email going through my domain, but SquirrelMail and those stupid late '90s webmail apps are not a good option. I loathe to forward my email address to gmail: Yes, I preserve my address, but I lose my control.
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Ditto. I use ThunderBird (well, IceDove these days), and I kinda love it, but I'm well aware that e-mail clients have been relegated to oddities. And I do have my complaints about ThunderBird, by the way. I'm tempted to browse the whole of its source in order to track down the line of code that makes it open any message at random when you open a directory, then file a patch to eliminate it.
E-mail clients could be so much more than they ever were, though. And without breaking any protocol. But e-mail itself
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Furthermore, I couldn't stand to have to actively check for new email, so for me it's:
1. postfix [postfix.org] with sender-dependent relay hosts and -authentication
2. fetchmail [fetchmail.info] to periodically poll all email addresses i have for new mail, handing it the local postfix for delivery, which then "delivers" it to
3. procmail [procmail.org] in order to sort the incoming mail into various maildirs, triggering
4. a scrip
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Do you by any chance have a more detailed write-up of how you configured your system anywhere? I have no interest in using an external webmail service, but I've been considering setting up some sort of networked mail store so I can read and send from multiple devices while keeping everything centrally for admin/back-up/security purposes. However, that would be a side project that needs to be done in my spare time, and every time I start looking into it, the documentation and UIs I find for relevant FOSS pac
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Do you by any chance have a more detailed write-up of how you configured your system anywhere?
No, I haven't. I can however help you out with specifics, or bits of configuration to get that going, if you care to drop into #fstd on Freenode, say.
read and send from multiple devices while keeping everything centrally for admin/back-up/security purposes. However, that would be a side project that needs to be done in my spare time
Mhm, making the mail accessible to multiple devices would probably involve additionally running an IMAP server (e.g. dovecot). My setup doesn't currently implement that, for remote mail checking I ssh/putty home
[...] or so comprehensive and detailed that I find them overwhelming.
Fortunately those often come with a reasonably default configuration.
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Thanks for the reply. I was indeed thinking of running dovecot or something similar as well.
I think my fundamental problem is that I understand maybe 75% of the underlying theory of how the relevant e-mail infrastructure and general Linux sysadmin work. That's certainly enough to figure out roughly which combination of packages I need to install and what should be possible. However, it's not enough to be confident of not getting some of the details wrong and potentially losing data or otherwise bringing the
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The only thing worse than being stuck on an airplane someone talking to someone on their phone: being stuck next to someone talking to no one on their phone.
(You just know that they only do that in public.)