It worked fine for me yesterday, that is all I know. Have not tried it again since then... yet

I have to admit that I also noticed this improvement. The last several versions of Firefox were becoming very painful to use because of such performance issues and I would have to close and reload Firefox every few days because of it.

Everything seems MUCH faster now. It is a shame they ruined the user interface at the same time :(

I absolutely, positively *DETEST* the UI redesign. I immediately installed https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

I have no idea why they would want to ruin a perfectly good browser like this. There is nothing wrong with having REAL menus on the top line, nor the ability to have tabs on the bottom, where they belong. It is beyond reason why they would not make such a change OPTIONAL... resorting to an addon is a huge and irritating kludge that will annoy the S*** out of me every time I have to install a new Firefox somewhere and will likely cause breakage later.

Color me very, very annoyed.

When you make it illegal (or very difficult) for good and law-abiding people to own weapons, then only criminals will own guns.

Make no mistake- people that are out to do bad will have no trouble at all obtaining weapons and using them and will have a field day knowing that even more of the good citizens have been stripped of their rights to protect themselves, their families, and their property.

The reality is that it doesn't matter WHAT the law says. If they obtain the data, they can and will do anything they want with it. I knew this long before the whole NSA "expose`".

I am not saying we shouldn't make laws about it, or even try to enforce them, but I am saying that laws and enforcement are not enough. To some degree, the government (and businesses) simply should not have access to certain data in the first place because it is the ONLY way to prevent it from being used in an abusive way.

Not sure what the big news is.... like we didn't already know this? They probably already have access to every state's DMV records, which include photographs for every person who has a driver's license or ID card. I would estimate that is maybe 90% of every adult citizen, alone.

And yes, it upsets me.... far less than fingerprinting or DNA, however. The only privacy-friendly biometrics are those that we don't "leave" all over the place, and can't be collected or taken without our knowledge. That leaves things like retinal scans and deep vein pattern recognition.

And in other technological "news for nerds"....

Hurricanes hit the Mid-Atlantic
Tornadoes spawn in the Midwest.
Snow falls in the Northeast.
Taxes go up.
Civil liberties go down.
Google makes money.

http://www.earthquakecountry.i...

Replying to self- my message above was in response to wolrahaes, not X0563511

For some reason, the indenting on Slashdot on this thread is broken. Sorry about that.

You clearly don't understand what it means to run real-world business IT infrastructure. Just because something is oldler doesn't mean it is "outdated" or "insecure". RHEL/CentOS update the packages for a long time making them relevant and still secure through backporting and patches.

Sometimes stability and reliability are far more important and efficient than constantly ripping everything out and starting over again every year or two. Besides, the more bleeding edge like Fedora and Ubuntu and Mint are more likely to have NEW security holes with less manpower behind them to fix it quickly.

There is a reason that RHEL and CentOS are so popular for servers and "utility" boxes.

Yeah, the article is extremely uninformative. They say 2.6 and yet RHEL/CENTOS 6.5 are 2.6... so that meaning nothing as far as being "old" or "outdated".

More likely to be an Apache vulnerability, but who knows. Maybe some other article could shed some light on it.

OK, I better understand what you are saying. I wasn't trying to attack her, however. I was just pointing out the irony of the apparent situation.

It doesn't matter if it is MS, MS Research, MS Marketing, or even a third party. What I said applies to anyone with an MS bent in their view. That is why what I said was modded up.

Many of us not only remember the past, but lived through the whole MS "evolution" and can recall many dozens and dozens of examples of MS ruining compatibility, stifling innovation, corrupting standards, destroying competition, lying about FOSS, tampering with regulations, punishing vendors who try to give customers non-MS choices, locking down platforms, buying competing products that were multiplatform and ruining them or simply dropping them, creating unfair licensing agreements, etc, etc, etc.

>"author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd [...] Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"

That's a good question, Ms. "Microsoft researcher". Perhaps you can imagine a world where people can exchange documents freely and accurately without proprietary software like MS-Word. Or a world where consumers can put any OS they want on any computer without MS working with vendors to try and block them at the BIOS level. Or imagine people sharing calendar events easily without using MS's Exchange/Outlook formats. MS tried to hijack the web with IE (and did so successfully for years), and lied about their competitors to prevent diversity, locked out vendors from including Linux or other FOSS on machines, corrupted exported filters to make sure files to/from competitors would be partially broken. And the list goes on and on. Microsoft has been responsible for more lock-in and anti-compatibility than any other tech company, so perhaps I find it ironic that someone from Microsoft would ask us to imagine any kind of world of incompatibility.

Thanks for the thoughtful and informative response. I did opt out of most of the stuff; have location tracking off, disabled Google +, Google Play Music, Books, Magazines, Games, Video, Hangouts, etc; use Startpage for most searches, use Firefox not Chrome, have Now turned off. Only occasionally use Gmail but I love Google Maps and Play Store.

In any case, I tend to be a pessimist and skeptic about such things, especially when I have no real proof that "opting out" really does anything. It is nice to hear someone a bit more on the "inside" that relays positive info.

>"they revealed that Google's data is now safely protected from the prying eyes of government organizations. "

That is nonsense. The NSA could probably STILL access the information if they want to (and likely will) or Google can be compelled to reveal it with a super secret demand order, or even a regular warrant.

No information that is ever collected is ever "safe" from prying eyes. And even Google having the information is certainly nothing to be comfortable about. They have ENOUGH information about consumers already... certainly enough to be creepy.