I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.

> [citation please]

http://www.charlesmann.org/art... has a good summary.

CrimsonAvenger's point was that we've had evidence since the early 1800s that humans (and probably other hominids, in fact) ate mammoths. Nowhere did he say that humans were eating mammoths in the 1800s.

It's really not that complicated. Firefox releases work like this: 6 weeks of development, 12 weeks of testing and stabilization (split up into two 6-week phases called "aurora" and "beta"; the former corresponds more or less to feature freeze and the latter more or less to "code freeze unless we discover a stop-ship issue"), then release.

So right now 31 is released, 32 is beta, 33 is aurora, and development is happening on 34.

You have control. As the article says:
> Users will have options to activate or deactivate it

I suggest you take that browser from the old days, run it on today's web sites, and see how many hundreds of MB it takes. Assuming it loads them at all.

> In short, the designers are (willfully?) ignorant of the fact that
> not everyone uses their web browser exactly the same way
> they do.

Aren't you make that mistake yourself? I know our designers collect a lot of data on what many users actually use. More data than individual Slashdot commenters have collected, I expect.

> Any time they change the interface, add an easy-to-find
> checkbox under the options to restore the old functionality.

That leads to an explosion of difficult-to-understand checkboxes in the UI, and an unmaintainable mess under the hood.

> "Automatic handling of pdf and ogg files" - I have a pdf reader
> already. I dont need another one, and I dont need one
> 'integrated' in my browser, period.

From the release notes: "audio/video .ogg and .pdf files handled by Firefox *if no application specified*" (emphasis added).

> "loaded with new features for developers." Pretty sure that
> means for advertisers.

You just made that up.

Preventing canvas tracking isn't simply a matter of fixing a bug. A solution would require something like "don't use the GPU" or "don't use platform font rasterization", either of which are completely unacceptable for most users due to degradation of performance or visual quality.

If you've got a simple fix to canvas tracking, let the world know what it is, OK?

sendBeacon was already possible with JS using XHR, just in a slower and more user-unfriendly manner. And unlike XHR, you can disable sendBeacon without breaking the Web, so it's actually better for privacy.

However, if you want to completely prevent any sendBeacon-like activity, you need to just disable JS on that page.

It's a matter of funding.

Looking at the chart at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and in particular the inflation-adjusted line there tells you pretty much what the story was: at the peak of the Apollo program NASA's budget was about $40 billion/year in today's dollars (the red line in that graph is in 1996 dollars). NASA's budget today is less than $18 billion/year.

Or to put it in relative-to-the-economy terms, in 1966 NASA was 4% of Federal budget expenditures. 4% of the 2013 US expenditures (actual, not requested) would be $138 billion, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

I bet if you funded NASA at that level (even just the inflation-adjusted one; I understand that the overall budget structure is quite different now from what it was in 1966, so the $138 billion number is pretty much meaningless), I bet it could produce results a lot quicker than it can at current funding levels...

Considering fission weapons have been around for 70 years, we've done surprisingly well at limiting their proliferation. I think mass-market availability of fission weapons is pretty far down the list of things to worry about. However, terrorists and rogue states having them in small numbers is definitely high on my list.

Mass-market small-scale kill-bots based on rockets and drones are also high on my list.

Unfortunately the most effective method to prevent use of such weapons will be to put a chip in everyone's head. I honestly think that might be worse than mass murder, but you can imagine it looking attractive both to the Powers That Be and the public.

We agree that alpha channel and animations are required features for any next-gen image format, but that doesn't change the analysis. It doesn't make sense to try to get WebP support everywhere for those features or for small compression gains, when in a couple of years or less we could introduce a new format with those features and big compression gains.

The reason we're not merging WebP in a hurry is because it's not very good. The study results linked to in the article show that WebP isn't much better than mozjpeg. (This is especially clear in the second part of the study where mozjpeg is tuned for SSIM.) On the other hand the study shows HEVC *is* much better than WebP/mozjpeg, so we know a much better format than WebP is technically available *now*. We can't simply adopt HEVC as is due to patent licensing issues, but we should be able to create an unencumbered format with similar or better performance (e.g. using VP9 or Daala as a base). It doesn't seem like a good idea to try to move to WebP when we know a better format is coming fairly soon (probably within a couple of years).

That would take a lot more development effort, since plug-ins depend on a lot of functionality being present in-process with them that's based on libraries that make up a good bit of that 54MB.

On Mac, the plugin process is the same binary as the 32-bit Firefox process...