Or as C++ programmers will say: What you want is a &&, not a &

...when describing an Electric Monk in his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

"video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself"

Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) was probably the first game to introduce the concept of the 'video game character'. Before that, games such as Pong, Breakout etc. were mostly just based on purely abstract graphics (ie. blocks (largre pixels)) that did not have any personality. Space invaders managed to give the aliens a distinct look (and even made the effort to animate the characters (even if it was just two frames), which was a big deal back then), and thus giving them a distinct character. Nearly all games after that had some sort of character - hence Space Invaders may have given birth to video game characters.

I've made posts about it here, here, here and maybe a few other places too.

My main message to the FireFox devs is this: Be aware that your user-base is power-users who want to customise the heck out of their browsers. Your attempt at simplifying the UI by copying Ch*me is quite frankly misguided. It's because of this that there's a big disconnect with what the Mozilla managers imagine FireFox users want, and what FireFox users actually want. To fix this, all they need to do is to bring back the customization they took away. So basically, this is another way of saying that FF needs to concentrate on winning people back from browsers like Pale Moon, Basilisk, Waterfox, and not Chr*me, Edge, Safari, etc. It doesn't matter if the browser has the biggest market-share, it just has to fill a niche and be good at filling that niche

Two specific things that annoy me:

• Please do not merge the stop and reload buttons in a misguided attempt to save screen real-estate. What if you want to stop a web-page from loading that's taking ages to load (in the hope that it stabilises or uses less resources when it's not in it's "waiting to load" state) and then you just happen to press the stop button when the webpage either finished loading or timed out, only for it to have changed into the reload-button and then your webpage reloads. And besides, stopping and reloading are two separate functionalities and should not be merged.
• Document-tabs belong UNDER the UI and immediately above the webpage-area - NOT right above all the controls. Last time I tried FireFox, it was not even possible to fix this even with an extension. Don't know if that's still the case, but it was when I stopped using FF.

Oh, and could you make sure JPEG-XL support is enabled by default?

This article discusses a plan for re-filling the Aral sea by diverting part of the river Ob to flow southwards towards the Aral sea to prevent it from completely evaporating. This will also have the side-effect of reducing the amount of freshwater being discharged into the Arctic Ocean, and thus reducing the dilution of salinity in the Arctic ocean with fresh-water from the Ob, which might help prevent the Gulf Stream from shutting down (apparently, increased salinity would keep it going). Considering the situation in Russia right now, the chances of this happening are almost zero, but considering that the port of Murmansk would no longer be ice-free without a Gulf-Stream might just motivate the Russians to do something.

While the 800XL apparently had the best case for modding and expanding, the 400's case looked the best. It had what's now called the Cassette futuristic aesthetic. It actually looked like it came from the future and now has a very retrofuturistic look. Later home computers such as the Atari 800XL, Commodore 64, etc actually looked like they belonged in their time period at the time.

This article discusses a plan for re-filling the Aral sea by diverting part of the river Ob to flow southwards towards the Aral sea to prevent it from completely evaporating. This will also have the effect of reducing the dilution of salinity in the Arctic ocean which might help prevent the Gulf Stream from shutting down. Considering the situation in Russia right now, the chances of this happening are almost zero, but considering that the port of Murmansk would no longer be ice-free without a Gulf-Stream might just motivate the Russians to do something.

When HDTV came out, we had 720p and 1080p resolutions (on broadcast, it was only 1080i, but the TVs could mostly handle a 1080p input signal (eg. from a Blu-Ray player or PC)). This meant that not only did 1080p content have to be downscaled to be viewed on a 720p TV, but 720p content had to be upscaled to be viewed on a 1080p TV. Because 720 is not a factor of 1080, it meant that each pixel of a 1080p display does not correspond to an integral number of pixels in a 720p display, so some blurriness might occur. With 2160p (AKA 4K) displays, 1080p can be upscaled losslessly by just repeating each pixel twice, and 720p by repeating it 3 times. I was hoping that with 4k and 8k resolutions, we'd get rid of those pesky 2/3rd resolutions, but then along comes 1440p (which was not part of the original plans for resolutions beyond 1080p) to screw things up. 1440p cannot be upscaled to 4k losslessly. At the moment, 4320p (8K) displays are prohibitively expensive, so most of us are stuck with lossy upscaled (or downscaled) 1440p content.

While any 3D game can easily adjust to any screen-resolution (not including performance-issues), the problem is that 1440p monitors encourage people to make native 1440p videos in this this 2/3rd resolution.

1440p is a bastard-resolution. Please don't encourage it!

Pale Moon - a fork of FireFox currently supports JPEG-XL by default (ie. without having to mess around in the configuration), but unfortunately, it's only got a negligable share of the market. I think maybe a few other FireFox derivatives also support it out the box. Would be great if FireFox itself would enable it by default, but unfortunately, FF only has a 3% or so market-share (6.5% on Desktop). As EDGE uses the Chromium engine, I'm not sure if Microsoft can add JPEG-XL to EDGE without distancing itself from Chromium, and I'm not sure what the situation is with Safari.

I made a post about this in another Slashdot article which basically said that what caused IE to lose it's market-share was it's stagnation (IE6). Not only did it have many security bugs, but it's implementation of certain web-standards was poor. FireFox came at just the right time, filled in the gap in the market, more web-developers felt confident using things that were broken on IE6, and FireFox chewed away at IE's share of the browser market.

Nowadays, Chr*me's lack of support for JPEG-XL might seem similar, but it's just one issue, compared to IE6's notorious buggyness. This might be a chance to break the hegemony of Chr*me, but for that to happen, there would have to be a lot of websites that serve content in JPEG-XL. From a website's point of view, the reduced bandwidth would greatly benefit the site, and from a developer's point of view, existing JPEGs can be transcoded to smaller JPEG-XLs losslessly, and if they had the original images (or JPEGs at higher resolution/quality), even bigger savings can be made.

The only reason Chr*me has a hegemony on the web is because we allow it. For most end-users, there is little incentive to switch browsers. But if more sites offered JPEG-XL content, refused to offer content in AVIF and asked users to use a different web-browser to view it, it might just be the tipping point. Of course, if Google change their mind and add JPEG-XL, there will be less incentive to move away from Chr*me, but then, we still have an unhelathy domination of the browser-market going on.

Again, the definition has been bent just to label something as Raytracing for marketing purposes. Back in the early 90's, I saw a PC game that claimed to do Raytracing, but it looks like fake-phong-shading.

Similes such as "Avoid it like a plague" and "Sober as a judge" are becoming obsolete. Now add "Dead as a dodo" to that list.

>Given that Firefox is extremely important for the health of the web, we absolutely should be pushing for it.

Being a company that develops the most popular web-browser and also develops popular web-apps (Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive, GMAIL, Google Anything, and of course search) is not healthy. This is why we need other web-browsers, or Google will take control of web-standards meaning they will no longer be open.

Brendan Eich was ousted in 2014, and the decline of FireFox began long before then. Already in 2010, FireFox was slower and than Chr*me and had a reputation for "senior moments" (where it was unresponsive sometimes). In 2011 (or thereabouts), FireFox began their rapid release cycle. Not only did they start the version-number madness (presumably to prevent people from being seduced by Chr*me's unfeasibly high version-number) (which had the effect that unmaintained versions of extensions stopped working because of the version-number and extension authours needed to keep updating the extensions to keep up with this (you could modify the XPIs themselves to give a higher max version but this didn't always work)), but the rapid release cycle was done in such a way that a new version of FF _had_ to be released every 3 months regardless of whether or not it was ready. This meant that many .0-releases were buggy. Also, it meant that FF was adding new features nobody wanted just for the sake of adding something new. Also, the 'Hipsterization' of the UI also begun in 2011 when they replaced the familiar dropdown menu (FIle, Edit, View, etc.) with this so called 'hamburger' menu and started taking things away that people needed (such as the status-bar), and merging the stop and reload buttons for no reason other than a misguided atrtempt to save Navigation-Toolbar real-estate. As I said, all this happened before Brendan Eich was ousted.

Back in 2003, Microsoft looked like they had won the browser wars, with MS Internet Explorer having some ridiculously high share (IIRC, something like 95%). Part of the high share was due to the fact that IE came pre-installed on just about every version of Windows, and many people just didn't seem to find the need to change web-browser. This caused Microsoft to stagnate development on IE at around version 6. Not only did some features remain so buggy that they became unusable (CSS-implementation, I'm looking at you), but certain web-standards had to be modified just to avoid IE's bugs (IIRC, this is how CSS 2.1 developed from 2.0). For a web-developer, working around the quirks of IE 6.0 was the most stressful part of their job. Meanwhile, Netscape had been in decline for a while, and the new Mozilla browser just came across as too bloated. And then, along came Phoenix/FireBird/FireFox as a lightweight fork of Mozilla (Mozilla later morphed into SeaMonkey). Firefox was getting momentum just at the precise moment when IE was becoming notorious for it's security bugs. FireFox somehow managed to ride this momentum and capture a huge share of the market - even before FF 1.0 was released back in late 2004. Web-developers felt more confident in using things that broke on IE, and even more people moved to FF to see the web with a working web-browser. Fast forward a few years ... FireFox was becoming slower with each new release and was leaking memory like an incontinent toddler with their finger in a bucket of hot water. Also, there was the notorious "senior moments" that Firefox was said to have around 2010 just before the version-number madness began (this was the slow responsiveness). Meanwhile, Google started to push their Chr*me browser as shovelware meaning that it ended up on a lot of people's machines as their default browser. At first, Chr*me was behind FF and IE, but it quickly caught up, and around 2010 or thereabouts, became faster and more responsive than FF ... and so, the decline began. Chr*me on the other hand tried too hard to over-simplify the UI (which later versions of FireFox blindly copied), and has a reputation for all sorts of Spyware^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanalytics

AFAIK, there are no major security bugs in Chr*me (unless you count it's data-harvesting as a 'bug'), and Chr*me can render just about every website flawlessly and keeps up with the latest web-standards, and MS Edge is probably the same nowadays, so the niche that FireFox had in the days of IE's stagnation in the mid 00's just doesn't exist anymore. There is still the niche of power-users who want a hyper-configurable browser or users who prefer old-skool UIs, but FF has been turning it's back on these users for many years, so they've moved to FF-forks such as Pale Moon, WaterFox, etc.

So basically, FireFox only became as popular as it did back in the day because it filled the gap left by the stagnation of IE. Now, Chr*me and the other major browsers are not stagnation, so the wave that FF originally rode does not exist anymore.

In summary, the problem with FireFox is that there's a massive disconnect between it's user-base and what it's managers think it's user-base is.

To the FireFox devs, I'll say this. What made your browser great was it's configurability and the fact you could extend it to do just about everything you wanted. You took this away from us and messed around with the UI just because you could (just because you could doesn't mean you should), and in doing so, either took things away from us or made us jump through all sorts of hoops to get them back. Also, please don't add things (eg. Hot Pocket) as a default feature that is not part of the main browsing experience (if someone really wants it, it should be an extension and not part of the main browser). These days, I now use Pale Moon - "Your browser, your way".

One glimmer of hope (even if it's just a micro-glimmerette) is that Ch*me has recently decided to drop support for JPEG-XL, JPEG-XL is likely to become a major future inage-format. Pale Moon has already started supporting JPEG-XL, and if FireFox follows suit, web-developers will feel more confident to use JPEG-XL, and if Chr*me takes a while to plough through the bureaucracy of reversing a decision, FireFox (and it's derivatives such as Pale Moon, WaterFox, etc) can seize the initiative and rely on it's support for JPEG-XL to boost user-numbers. This is unlikely to happen unless you also get support from other major browsers, but something similar (decent CSS support and translucent PNG support that wasn't broken) did help people transition from IE to FF back on the md 00's.