I use Firefox on my desktop. Until I started getting ULV processors for me ultrabooks and such. Firefox tanks there, even with SSDs. So much so that my need to maintain syncing between portables and desktop caused me to abandon Firefox on the desktop too. Australis just encouraged me to ditch it.

So, your condescension aside, I did manage to talk to Firefox developers over IRC and they themselves concede that Electrolysis is not even close to stable and the problem with Firefox being single threaded (which includes the XUL rendering) is just too deeply entrenched to have any easy solutions.

You've never been to reddit. That commenting system is close to perfect. It does it's job, and it's scaleable.

Well, the core of Firefox was written more than 10 years ago, and while it didn't necessarily have to be that way, the truth is that it has simply not kept up. Just getting Firefox to optimally use a modern multi-core processor is considered a massive effort. It is time for Mozilla to close down Firefox development (like they did with Thunderbird). Or at the very least, fork Chrome - it's been done before and it will give them instant parity with all modern web browsers.

And then there are people like me who discover after going through 3-4 distros that their new laptops will only work properly with all features as advertised on a Windows install. To begin with Laptop power management and suspension states on Linux absolutely sucks. Period.

All Samsung Ativ books have problems due to a video driver upgrade that has not yet come through. You know how many of those Samsung has sold ?

This story will now be flooded by the "I am so retro-cool because I own a Nokia 1100 with a 1-incg monochrome LCD and it does all I ever need it to do" crowd.

The judge has now made sure that no American company will ever admit to having stored any data anywhere, or risk losing business.

1. Proprietary software could have a million bugs like this. You just wouldn't know it. They do not become less dangerous because they are proprietary, nor do security flaws become more dangerous because they are in open-source code.
2. Open-source software at least has the possibility of being looked at over and over. Proprietary code may be reviewed or not depending on the resources, interest, and monetization capability of that code. A possible review by all relevant coders in the world is always more review than by a limited team of programmers and analysts at one company.
3. The real problem with Heartbleed is the time that passed between code being written and a bug being discovered. That delay exacerbates the security problem. However, there will be some sort of statistical (probably Poissonian or normal) distribution of the time required to catch a bug since introduction into code. As with anything, there are outliers. Heartbleed with its serious and longstanding flaw must be considered an outlier unless shown otherwise. I have not seen evidence that this happens on a regular basis with any software, FOSS or otherwise.

I would appreciate it if future Slashdot discussions were let out through the upper orifice with some maturation period in the brain, rather than through the lower orifice after festering in the colon.

Who knew that the best thing to do when something dangerous was coming at you was to get out of its way as fast as possible...

It's cool that they observed the fly behaviour...but it's not the most deeply insightful finding.

Zorin OS is claimed to be designed specifically with Windows XP refugees in mind. They try to get the GUI essentials similar to Windows. It might be a smoother transition to Mint and eventually Arch (I'm kidding about Arch, of course).

Pretty much agree with what you said. If you're looking for a Notepad++ replacement, you might be pleased by Sublime Text or any of the other alternatives.

With a wide enough spectrum for the definition, solar energy is the most polluting kind of energy we've used...because all energy is eventually solar energy. Except, maybe radioactive decay from Uranium in the earth's crust. It has provided energy for 4.3 billion years to the Earth's mantle, with a safety record of 1 catastrophic event per billion years.

You see how overly wide sprectra for terms makes them pliable to interpreted in too many ways to be useful for communication?

Funny non-sense with the back and forward buttons . The forward button appears or hides dynanimcally making the whole URL bar increase or decrease in length everytime you change between tabs that have forward history or not. Are these guys idiots?

There is an extension which brings back the older theme, but it does something funky to the minimum tab width which makes the whole tab bar go jitter crazy the moment you have more tabs than can fit on the screen. Seems like Firefox tries to make a scroller, and the extension keeps trying to make the thing fit.

You know the best UI out there is this theme for FIrefox called FXChrome. That theme + a couple of user styles basically makes Firefox look exactly like Chrome. The fact that it works SO well, is only indication of the fact how bad Australis really is. Mozilla could never put together a decent UX ever. Look at Thunderbird, then look at Postbox. Look at Firefox, then look at Chrome. And I am still waiting for e10n.

But beta is beta...so let's see.

I don't know if you've been keeping up. But people fully EXPECT the NSA to be upto nasty secret snooping habits. That is actually the minor part of the story that caused the outrage. The more dangerous fact is that the NSA can demand companies or individuals turn over data to them and impose a gag order thus forcing them to keep it secret.

So AC is right in this case. Just more lip service. Encryption on your own servers is the only way to remain relatively protected.

Real writers use tablets...clay tablets.

In all seriousness, I never found a suitable program to store all my lab notes that I couldn't do better than just text files.