You're very welcome!
Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?
The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as:
Can this be used as precedent to dismiss all the pending RIAA and MPAA lawsuits? What about reversing past suits whose victims are already in the body count?
Don't I wish.
Brendan knew about this and approved of it long ago. Carry on dreaming.
We at Mozilla do not regard popularity as an end in itself. Instead, we regard it as an essential part of our strategy for executing on our mission. The amount of influence we have to make the Internet better is, in many spheres, proportional to Firefox market share.
As to whether we'd lose users due to Netflix, Hulu etc eventually not working in Firefox
Brad Kuhn misquotes Mitchell. She did not say "an approach", she said "MozillaÃ(TM)s fundamental approach".
You're mischaracterizing Brendan's position on DRM, as I'm sure he would tell you if you just asked him personally. I strongly recommend you do so.
He doesn't like DRM, and neither does anyone else at Mozilla, but you do realize that he was CTO and then CEO while most of the negotiations with Adobe were happening, right?
We've tried sandboxing the plug-in process Flash runs in. It breaks all sorts of existing Flash-using stuff, unfortunately.
The benefit of having a sandbox from day 1 is that you don't have that problem.
The difference is that the CDM will be sandboxed in a low-privilege process with no direct access to the OS and kernel, which is not at all how Flash works.
You really think this sort of decision, complete with all the negotiations involved, was made over the course of a month?
1) A third party is writing the plugin.
2) We did wait until it was inevitable. Every single other browser is already shipping it, Netflix is using it, and other sites are starting to use it. The only alternative to shipping this was to make sure Netflix and other video sites continued to work with Flash or Silverlight _and_ that Flash and Silverlight continue to work indefinitely.
Mozilla decided to create B2G for several reasons, but one of them is because most of the world's population in the near future will be accessing the internet from a phone or _maybe_ a tablet, not a full-on laptop or desktop. And people using phones or tablets don't install non-default web browsers, statistically speaking, not least because storage is pretty limited on phones, so if Mozilla wanted to be in the market at all it needed to be shipping the default browser on a phone people would use.
There was also the reason of wanting a phone/tablet marketplace without vendor lock-in, which requires apps to be portable between phones from different vendors. That's where web apps come in. And yes, apps that you can move to your new phone even if you get it from a different manufacturer are intrinsically more valuable than apps that you lose if you move from iOS to Android or vice versa.
As for why you'd go for Firefox OS over Android, one answer is it performs better on limited hardware (think a phone with 256 megs ram, and yes, it's pretty hilarious what counts as "limited hardware" nowadays). If you say you're not likely to be buying a phone with those sorts of hardware specs, then you're not the target market. Remember what I said about "most of the worlds population" above? Well, the total population of Europe and North America is about 25% of the population of the world. The other 75% is not out to buy $600 phones. Neither are parts of Europe and North America, of course...
The search bar is there for a simple reason. It's to allow a place to do searches with search autosuggest without sending every single URL you type to the search provider.
Chrome adopts the "send all the URLs the user types to the search provider" approach by default, unsurprisingly.
Of course if you don't care about the search autosuggest feature, you can just customize away the search bar.
The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have his head knocked off. -- Bill Conrad