Chrome is the gold standard.

Missed a lot on this, so fill me in.

I wasn't a fan of the old UI code (I'm grokking that it's been replaced?) because it made the UI elements slow and choppy to render and react to clicks. It felt like using Linux+X in 1999, even on modern hardware.

This UI feels fast and native, and it's also much cleaner and doesn't do half-assed things like stretch images and icons in the UI out of aspect ratio or scale them without anti-aliasing, which always made me snicker about the old default UI.

The last five years? I stop by once every couple of months, just because.

So no, I haven't visited in a few weeks, and when I do visit now and then, I just page through maybe the first 10-15 items in the scroll and then move on. It's usually a matter of boredom that brings me in.

I almost scrolled right past this story, because in my mind, Firefox has been effectively dead for years.

but it would appear that the new rendering is optimized for multi-core, so it's possible that the YouTube video was run on a two-core machine (I'm on four) or that it had a slower clock speed per core (multiplication factor of clock speed increase with multiple cores when code can take advantage of them efficiently).

In any case, I can say that on the sites that I regularly visit, it's clearly faster to render the whole page in most cases I've tried so far. I work in SaaS these days, so I spend a lot of time in a browser (and will still have to spend a lot of time in Chrome regardless). But with the number of hours that I'm working in a browser every day right now, I have a pretty good complacency going on, and this beta definitely knocked me out of my complacency, especially compared to my usual experience of Firefox (average on render speed, with slow, choppy UI elements).

I'm on 1Gb fiber and most major brand pages give me a pretty complete render in less than a second on an i7-4770k and achieve interactivity within 2-3 seconds tops and the UI elements feel native. Not checking for when all resources have completed load on a page, as that's often irrelevant to UX. But the experience of using for actual browsing it is that it's blazingly fast, at least in my reckoning. I used it for another couple of hours last night and I'm using it again right now and I'm impressed.

Now we'll see about stability...

Just for fun, I downloaded the beta and installed it on my Mac OS desktop (core i7-4770k, 32GB).

Two initial impressions:

1) SHIT it's fast.
2) The UI is neither ugly as sin nor weirdly laggy any longer.

Okay, I have been using Chrome for many years now, but this is tempting. I've always kept Firefox installed but rarely use it. But I have just added it to the dock. I can see myself starting it instead of Chrome just because it's so damned fast.

I don't track Firefox development at all, so I have/had no idea this was in the works. I'd never have believed it, I thought FF was effectively doomed. Call me at least initially convinced. Using it now to post this.

We've been hiring for some engineering roles having to do with large-scale data and related systems and we started out by posting on our website, on some major job search databases, and on LinkedIn. We got tons of interest. Tons. And we are not a particularly well-known company and the positions were run of the mill mid-senior level. There was nothing too remarkable about the postings.

We did get a decent group of very good applications, but there was a huge amount of nonsense to go through. Everyone from "right field but low quality and poor qualifications/experience" to "WTF? Why are you even applying for this job? Your degree is in history and your experience is in HR?" ended up in the pile. And we were very specific. A lot of cover letters expressed a great deal of aspiration, rather than a great deal of qualification.

This has always been a thing with candidate seeking, but it seemed significantly worse this time for some reason. The volume was higher, but the ratio was far worse.

I can see why a very well-known, aspirational company might flip the script and make a posting that is discoverable by invitation only for a role that is company-critical.

I posted upthread but modern cars often have fairly involved networks onboard with multiple systems where serialized modules are "known" to the network as secure. Tamper with the module, and dealer software can refuse to work. There is a cottage industry of people disassembling electronic modules and doing "brain transplants" by transplanting an EPROM or affixing a kludged daughterboard to new ones so that dealer computers are willing to talk to the car. Yes, the dealers can do something, but they often quote entire subsystem replacements, multiple units and 5-6 figures so that all the components are "new" and "match" (i.e. come from the factory already talking), so customers end up buying a grey-market ECU or whatever unit, then shipping their old one and the new one to transplanters to do the switch.

The article was nonspecific, but I imagine it was more like for the dealer to do it the "right way per the dealer" they'd have had to ship the car back to its original market, then shell out half its value to have a bunch of stuff replaced/reprogrammed.

If you can only get a dealer quote from overseas, and the dealer quote is like $10k on top of that, then "impossible" is an apropos word.

On all Volvos since 2000, you have to have a CAN network module in the car programmed with the ID of any new key, and this requires a VIDA subscription, a DiCE unit, and access to Volvo's network. So yes, if you lose your key you *will* have to have your Volvo towed to the mechanic and pay for programming time while they hook your car up and tell it about a new key.

You can get 10-20 charge cycles with disposable alkalines using an alkaline battery recharger. They were pretty popular for a while in the '90s and even advertised heavily on TV as a way to save costs.

that could charge both disposable alkalines a few times and rechargeable alkalines many times.

Used it for a few years but found that getting a dozen of two charges from off-the-shelf batteries wasn't worth it and trying to track down the ones with more charge cycles was inconvenient, not to mention that they behaved more like NiCd cells in many ways (didn't like deep discharges, had a sort of memory effect, etc.)

But they were out there.

Computing these days is about the ecosystem. That's the reason for the dominance of app stores and Chrome.

Chrome = integrates with everything else that I use, yes including Google slurping my data. That's *why* I use Chrome. To get my data slurped, so that other Google services that I use (say, Google Now and Maps) work better. Shares bookmarks, sessions, and cache data across devices. A bunch of apps that I use can go back and forth between in-browser version and in-window (as a Chrome app) version, with the same interface. Is the native OS on my Chromebook.

Firefox... is just a standalone app. When they release a smartphone OS that integrates with Firefox and competing services to Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. that are *better* than Google Now, Maps, Gmail, etc. then I'll consider Firefox again. Until then, it's just another web browser in an age in which the web browsers are obsolete and have been replaced by operating-eco-systems.

that we have had regular release-process GTM sessions that have gone on for more or less entire workdays with people hopping on and off.

It works SO MUCH BETTER because everyone can see so-and-so's screen as they run scripts, manage infrastructure, whatever, and can coordinate their own activities on their other monitor.

In person, all ten people would be standing around so-and-so's monitor stretching their necks to see, or as people popped in and out for lunch or whatever, they'd invariably pull other team members away with them in herd mentality. At the very least, it's disruptive because of social norms—when someone leaves the room or the office, everyone has to wave goodbye to them.

On a GTM session, someone can just pop a "brb" into the chat window and drop off and nobody has to do anything.

If someone's remote, they need to be available. If they're routinely unavailable, they're gone. Problem solved.

See my post above—our entire company is routinely half out of the office and it's not that big a deal.

I'm in senior management at a firm where coming into the office is basically optional. Everyone is welcome and has a desk and a PC, but people more or less manage their own work schedules and location.

We collaborate via Slack, GotoMeeting, and Altassian products. We exchange files via s3 buckets or, in a pinch, Dropbox. And now and then we also touch base by phone if someone is working somewhere with a slow connection.

We are very productive and have releases every couple of weeks. We're in SAAS, so there is a personnel and technology fit—naturally it wouldn't work if we were steps in a division of labor to manufacture watch movements or lots of our employees were technology-averse or something—but aside from physical limitations where people actually have to work on a *thing*, I don't see the problem.

N.B. when I joined the company in 2013 it was already like this. There are lots of co-workers that I know very well and have collaborated very closely with that I have never met face-to-face.

We often have meetings where half the people on the GotoMeeting are in their cars on speakerphone.

I don't see (in that article) any evidence for the case that reviews are actually a part of the problem here.

I don't need to read a single review to know whether I want to see more PoC (seen too much, over it) or Baywatch (over it 20 years ago).

Using existing IP to churn out film after film is not a safe bet. At some point, audience interest saturation will be reached. Very little could convince me to go and see most of the retreads out there these days. I've already seen most of them half a dozen times over the course of my lifetime. Why would I pay again to see the same thing?