Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:"The Next Challenge..." (Score 1) 296

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, Thunderbird does not need "improved," at least in the sense that the article summary seems to be implying. It's been a long time since I've used it and when I did my *only* complaint was execution speed, and that may well have been due to running it on ancient hardware.

Comment "The Next Challenge..." (Score 3, Insightful) 296

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.

Comment Re:There are no such things as human "rights". (Score 1) 313

No amount of history education is going to stop the herd mentality from handing your privacy over to some domestic intelligence type claiming it's Required to combat terrorism or pedophelia or both. Don't want to hand over your rights? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

(watching this happen in the UK is predictably hilarious)

Comment Re:2015: Still using Facebook (Score 3, Insightful) 80

It doesn't matter if you use Facebook or not - they can already infer that TV shows and musicians exist via user data and automatically construct pages for them - WKRP In Cincinnati is a good example or was when I looked at it last summer. If they can infer media exists then it stands to reason that they can infer that you exist. Imagine that, if you will - a near future in which you have a fairly accurate social media profile rather you want one or not.

Comment Re:Something that gets me... (Score 1) 93

This would be why I snort derisively at rapture-like interpretations of The Singularity - evolution is an endless process of optimization, not a directed A to B to C progression. Animals that haven't evolved in millennia - sharks, for example - aren't "Evolutionary dead ends," they are in fact optimized for survival in their habitats.

Comment Here's my picks... (Score 0) 321

1. Best overall - Menage a 3.

2. Funniest - Sam and Fuzzy.

3. Best art - Massively subjective, I'll go with Supernormal Step.

4. Most relevant to me - Why, my own of course! Among The Chosen. Finished two chapters of Dead City Radio, produced a prequel, and got series production heading forward again after four years going back and sideways.

Comment Not Searchable. (Score 5, Insightful) 171

Time isn't the issue for me. The issue for me is the fact that video "tutorials" feature voices that frequently grate on my nerves. Worse, the video tutorial cannot be quickly searched for the relevant information.

Seriously. I can find out if a text tutorial is relevant to the issue at hand in seconds. With video tutorials, I've typically closed the tab before the "host" finishes talking about how great he is, how great the software is, and what the tutorial is going to cover.

Slashdot Top Deals

Physician: One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well. -- Ambrose Bierce

Working...