Comment Results of the census (Score 1) 32
I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.
I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.
You have control. As the article says:
> Users will have options to activate or deactivate it
> 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
> "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.
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).
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".
Funny, as a Mozilla employee I feel much more bullied --- by both sides of the culture war --- than bullying.
It feels like someone smacked us in the side of the head, we fell over, and then someone else came along shouting "weaklings!" and kicked us on the ground.
Certainly, in hindsight, it was a mistake to promote Brendan to CEO. But without hindsight, very few people can honestly say they saw this coming. Before this blew up, no-one was openly saying "OK, no-one on the pro-Prop-8 donation list can be a CEO in California now unless they publicly repent or the company is willing to take major damage". In fact AFAICT a large majority of people, even in California, were surprised and somewhat horrified to find out that's the case.
As CTO, co-founder, and linchpin of Mozilla for all 16 years of its existence, not to mention creator of Javascript, Brendan was already as "public face" and "guiding force" as he was going to be as CEO. That's what bugs me about the whole "public face" argument.
I said he was not coerced or pushed out *by Mozilla*. No way does that imply a free pass to the lobby groups that hounded him out of the job.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
