Being as good as Chrome is exactly the problem, I think. Mozilla still seems to be under the delusion that they are a top-tier contender, but the truth is they are an underdog now. Mozilla is as good as Chrome, they are neck and neck. The real problem is that it is not better.

The market leader can be merely "good enough" still grow their user base. The underdog has to be better, much better. Being merely good enough their market share will erode and transfer to the market leader. They'll only be a niche player, an "alternative." Being an alternative means you are always defined by the thing you are an alternative *to*.

I think the ship has sailed. How do you beat Chrome on features? What is there that Chrome doesn't do? The web is not the wild west anymore, you can't just invent new stuff and expect anyone to care. Google is setting the standard now anyway, your idea won't catch on unless they implement it, and that kind of defeats the point.

The best way to be a successful niche player is to do everything the big guy does, but do it better. Faster, smoother, more efficiently, more reliably. Big guys become arrogant, lazy, and sloppy. Mozilla needs to stop thinking of itself as a "major player" and embrace being an underdog. Get hungry.

Apple is the poster child for this. They have always played second fiddle, and they do it with style. They never displaced Microsoft in PCs, instead a new technology (internet) came along and Google won it. Apple did beat Microsoft but in a new technology (mobile) but again Google won the top seat. But Apple is super successful playing underdog in both markets, they know how to do it. Honestly I think if they became the monopolist it would ruin them, just as it ruined Microsoft and is now ruining Google.

Mozilla needs to be the Apple of browsers. I don't know what that looks like (or I'd be a millionaire) but that's their best outcome. Apple didn't beat Microsoft by aping Windows, or beat Google by aping Android. It wasn't afraid to be different. It invested heavily in design and quality. It catered to a (wealthy) niche. It sold status, style, experience, luxury. What would a luxury browser look like? I'm not a fan of Apple but I know success when I see it.

In the end, Firefox remains a fine browser. Packed with features, very compatible, fairly stable. It has nothing to be ashamed of, and it's near impossible to displace Google at this point. The friction is about as low as it reasonably can be. It is definitely good enough, and honestly we are lucky to have more than one solid option.

For me, Chrome is my work browser and Firefox my personal browser. Keeps things nice and separate. That's a useful niche.

Its the new micro-nagging economy. Every time you press the "fuck you" button to shut her up, you pay Microsoft 1 cent.

I'll bet she'll still be active and silently reading your email.

Coming soon from Microsoft: there's a robot for that.

Can I just put my brain in a jar instead of exercising?

One of the nice things about lisp is that it is so clean. Lux appears verbose and cluttered with odd symbols.

Lisp:

(defun hello ()
    "Hello, world!"
)

Lux:

(;module: {#;doc "This will be our program's main module."}
        lux
        (lux (codata io)
                [cli #+ program:]))

(program: args
        (io (log! "Hello, world!")))

Why should we care? Porn is ubiquitous, and you can see much kinkier stuff from your local web-pimp. Hop over to fetlife and you can find someone to do it with. If it's that he paid: again so what? Prostitution ts legal in (parts of) the US and Canada.

Oh the horror! Trump may have done something that I* do! But it's bad when he does it! (*Not saying you're into peeing hookers; likely your tastes would make Trump blush.)

But really, what does this have to do with Lux?

How long before we see malware kits that hack these devices via firmware exploits? Set all the fridges in the USA to "freeze" or "off". Or turn on the camera and capture pix of folks walking around their kitchen in their underwear. Or inventory your bluetooth-enabled groceries, upload it to Walmart so they can target you with grocery mailers and spam that your pickles are expired, or upload it to your health insurance provider so they can raise your rates because of all the junk food you consume? You'll get a health insurance "discount" if you enable your fridge to upload your groceries, but pay top dollar if you choose privacy.

Then again maybe I can install Linux on my fridge, program it to upload my neighbor's data instead of mine.

I would love this. Install Linux and add a cordless mouse and I have a replacement desktop, and can play games when tired of editing code.

Battery is a useless waste of space and weight, though. Replace the battery with an extra drive and a heavy duty cooling unit, I'd just carry a power cord.

Eh, speaking for myself: not likely. I loved curses programming! Clean and straightforward compared to modern stuff. (And curses was kind of ugly even then. Its just that everything is so much worse now.)

What you can do today -- that you couldn't then -- is make much more complex programs, and use them in more places. The code is butt-ugly and tedious to develop, but the end result is impressive.

But clean elegant simplicity is fun and satisfying. I love to refactor a function until it is clean and simple. Makefiles are so much more enjoyable than coding in XML, at least until you try to do something complicated. C++ was fun when it was little more than "C with classes." Linux was fun until we got Systemd. HTML used to be fun until you had to add CSS and Javascript etc. Of course you can still code straight HTML in vim, and you can also write 8-bit assembler in a an emulator, but these things are not relevant any more. You almost have to use an IDE for some things, like programming Unity or Unreal. As soon as I "have" to use an IDE the fun is gone.

But for fun coding, I think it was more fun back in the day. I had more fun doing BASIC on an 8-bit system, more fun writing curses in C, more fun working with PC graphics in Turbo C, just because it was clean and simple. It's always more fun to pioneer new territory, even if it's crude. In my opinion simplicity is more fun, but it never lasts because it is limited. Sometimes a language like Python brings back the simplicity but only for a little while until it gets extended with new features.

We need to rebuild things from scratch, to reinvent the wheel on a regular basis, because then we can change the paradigms and abstractions so they simplify current technology. Old systems are always lousy for up to date things, with patch upon patch. Its not nostalgia or failure to keep up with the times, it is that kludgy patches are just not good. Why don't we have threading and graphics and networking and decent error handling built right into C? We have 1970s style libraries instead. THAT is the problem. It's a great language when you don't need that stuff, but cumbersome when you do. C++ will be trotted out as the answer, but it has become utterly arcane, defeating the point. Java is targeted toward 20 year old technologies, and extensions are awkward. So is OpenGL. Things collapse under their own weight.

Wait. You're saying that SJW's can give out a tongue lashing for "causes" but everyone else has to just silently take it? You're saying you want to dish it out but you're too pathetic to take it in return? It's not the priests who are attempting the rape here.