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Comment Re: Information wants to be free. (Score 1) 242

The new strategy at least on Android I see is to use an internal browser for the click-through so that you can still inject your own advertisement. LInks used to open in external apps, but now pretty much all apps (including Facebook and Gmail) have an internal browser that harvests your click and keeps you in their cage.

Comment Re:"at least the conversation is on the table" (Score 1) 354

It's also a result of the "Scandinavian Paradox" - the more free choice in a society the more STEM field jobs tend towards a balance of 80/20 men vs women, and the opposite on social jobs. Addressing the "Misbalance" will always also include taking choices away from both men and women.

Comment Re:The Add-ons Dilemma (Score 1) 660

I meant to log in when I wrote this. Should use /. more often...

As an Indie Thunderbird / Seamonkey / Postbox / Waterfox / Ex-Firefox Add-ons developer I have to say that switching to at least Freemium subscription models is the best way to go: hand out free versions of the software which are regularly updated for free and sell yearly subscriptions for "pro-level" versions of the software. Whether Software should be auto-renewal subscription or just expire is an individual call.

But the reason for not having perpertual licenses for Add-ons is that without regular maintenance and a usual 6-weeks release cycle of the multiple host systems the expectation that Add-ons would function for more than a year (let alon perpetuity) is preposterous. At least in the browser market innovation is aggressive and as shown with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) last fall, many Add-ons were rendered completely dysfunctional. One of the consequences was that the capabilities (since now the chrome sandbox model was applied to all Add-ons, and also XPCOM and XUL / overlay mechanisms were removed) were severely diminished, for added security and chrome compatibility (Web Extensions)

As a result a lot of developers simply walked away. Once you have a subscription model for software there is a much bigger incentive to keep Add-ons working into the future.

So even if you want to develop completely free (as in beer) software, in this model you will have to perpetually work into the future in order to support your legacy user base, and you don't want to choose between the old (I never update my host software because of the old add-ons, it works don't fix it) crowd and the cutting edge (always run the latest beta, daily or nightly builds, and report anything unexpected) crowd, so you're relegated to endlessly writing shim code to stay backward compatible.

For example the advent of ECMA script 1.7 was a bit of a conundrum as the introduction of for..of and deprecation of for..in would lead to Syntax errors in older hosts (Postbox) and I had to find a way to bake both possibilities into the same software (forking is too time expensive - the solution was using platform specific overlay paths in chrome.manifest).

Freemium is a good compromise as it also includes an incentive for improving (adding new premium features) in order to reward users for paying for a yearly subscription. The hardest thing here (as with any product) is finding an acceptable price point, but thankfully with software you can use marketing to serve various users. (E.g. a special 50% off period around black Friday / Xmas.)

In conclusion, the subscription model is going to seep into open source and is around to stay, and it's not a bad thing.

Comment Use Pale Moon, and keep updating my own Addons (Score 1) 465

Not much choice here. I have 2 indispensable addons (Tabmix plus and ADblocl Plus) plus three more I have written myself.

QuickPasswords - for maintaining passwords and quickly accessing them using the built in password manager. includes import / export and SSO change. This one is pretty impossible to port to a web extension, plus I feel it would actually make it less secure. I don't know whether firefox is going to completely remove the ability to display modeless windows (xul based dialogs) so I don't feel very motivated to rewrite it. Chances are that some of its functionality is eventually going to be offered by Firefox itself but I am not holding my breath.
Zombie Keys - for entering Umlauts and other non English diacritics without remembering Unicode numbers this one also works neatly in Thunderbird. Works both in the pages as also in every "chrome" input box such as the search box. Probably the most likely candidate for turning into a web extension, but I do like the fact that it currently runs in browser elements (such as the search box) without having to exclusively live within the browser window
Menu On Top - just a styling thing, I like it though as it give a mini bookmark menu and a nice personalisation of all my profiles (who doesn't love LOL chibis and Pepes) which somehow overcomes the blandness of modern "minimal" UIs. Guess this is going to go the way of the dodo, just as full themes will.

Overall, not too happy about the process of having a faster better browser with much less functionality. Not going to switch to chrome, because its just the same experience anyway, just shilled out by an even larger corporation. Also entering something in the search box and then being impolitely redirected to a different GUI element somewhere else on the screen, not a good or safe user experience. I don't like the philosophy "the web is the platform", I prefer my programs running on my desktop and the web being just merely content.

Comment Retarded arguments against civilisations (Score 1) 521

"would not have happened without crypto".

What kind of retarded argumentation is this? It probably would not have happened without the invention of guns, of the cellphone or literally any of the "modern" methods used. Is that an argument against civilisation because it enables terrorism? Retarded.

This is _not_ an argument. It is like the suggestion of banning knives because they can lead to knife murders and unintentional self injury. It is not an adult approach to the subject.

Comment Better Folder Navigation with Addons: QuickFolders (Score 1) 388

For folders + their navigation, you can use my addon QuickFolders; it added several productivity enhancements, such as Tabs for folders, mouseless navigation (jump to or move mail to by entering folder name), bookmarks to emails (reading list) that make it very easy to navigate the folder tree.

In my own experience, traversing the folder tree was wasting too much of my time, with QuickFolders you can completely omit that. I have about 400 folders and I do almost never use the tree; especially not for categorizing / filing emails or navigating through my folders; this can be done exclusively with QuickFolders.

Having to use Outlook at work I really experience finding and navigating Emails is a lot slower and more cumbersome there than on my Thunderbird.

Another addon I have written is an assistant for generating new mail filters (outlook calls them rules) - with quickFilters this greatly simplified.

Finally there are some good addons out there for making it easier to do standard replies to emails; check out Stationery and SmartTemplate4 for this.

I think Thunderbird's weak point is in fact the composer, which is a pity because it can display 100% standards compatible CSS3. Due to using Mozilla's superior Gecko engine Thunderbird is very well suited for handling html emails, but the feature set of Thunderbird Composer (which comes from the mozilla central build so it basically a firefox feature) is sadly lacking a lot of features.

I am hoping that there will be some ground breaking improvements in the next 2 years, if not I will start writing some addons for addressing this gap.

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