The experience is laggy, as the top reply suggests. Your users which aren't doing much[should they even have their own box anyway? (No)] won't notice, but people who actually use the box[I was a quant in a former life] will hate you for it.
Dual monitors are also somewhat common nowadays[vital for actual productivity], how the heck is that gonna do over Comcast lines?
When the day comes[never] that we have ubiquitous/cheap bandwith, this idea is nearly practical. Until then it is DOA for "real work".
So the access providers will change their behavior on the basis of your serious doubt?
Will they add new infrastructure and absorb that cost without price increases?
Netflix's issues with ISPs is actually a counter example to my position?
As time goes on, we'll use less data rather than more?
Video[GUIs are video] require a lot of transfers even when you have good connections/protocols. I do remote work[a lot] and I have a typical uplink and it stinks. I use CLI/SSHFS as much as possible to avoid lags and it is still laborious.
Still on the other hand things like Onlive/Gaikai realtime game streaming are really quite impressive and responsive. But they obviously had cost issues as well and it remains to be seen when that experience would be possible in real 1080p at a high bitrate. Not even thinking about 4K here...
- Reconsider investing more efforts and funds into Persona.
"Leaving it up to the community" - we all know what that means. Even if it doesn't mean it though, what image does that leave? Sure, they use it as their internal auth system, but nobody outside mozilla cares about their internal auth.
Mozilla is in favour of the open web. An open web needs properly open third party authentication. They obviously know that since Persona does things right. It seems like, since it didn't gain the traction they wanted it (in my opinion due to bad marketing and bad prioritizing than anything else), they're just giving up.
If Persona was really of use to the Internet community at large, I think we would've seen it be rapidly adopted, regardless of how much "marketing" Mozilla engaged in.
While it might be nice to have from an ideological standpoint, in practice it just isn't of much value to enough people. This may not be pleasant to admit, but I do think that it's the reality.
Compare it to Firefox. Firefox proved to be a product that was useful to a lot of people, and it rapidly gained a comparatively large share of the market quite quickly.
Persona has been the opposite of that. Its adoption never took off, and there's nothing to suggest that it ever will. It just wouldn't make sense for Mozilla to waste more resources on a dead-end effort, especially when those resources could be put toward improving a product like Firefox, which is actually used by millions of people today.
> Compare it to Firefox. Firefox proved to be a product that was useful to a lot of people, and it rapidly gained a comparatively large share of the market quite quickly.
Woah. Put those pink glasses away. Firefox took YEARS to become anything else than a toy browser in the eyes of even developers.
Firefox was released in 2002 (and let's not even count before it was actually "Firefox" and not the Mozilla browser). In 2005, IE still had almost 90% market share. In 2007, it still had almost 70% market share.
Chrome was the game changer, not Firefox. Firefox managed to stay around and slowly grind its way to 20ish % not because it was an exceptional browser, but because the alternatives were awful.
I still can't decide if Firefox was copying Chrome's UI, or if it was just following the minimalist trend of nearly everything else these days. Either way, I prefer it to the previous versions
What do you gain through a separate search field, anyway? Like, if you started with a unified search/address bar, what would be the arguments for separating the search bar out into a separate bar?
The reason it's bad to do it at all is because you're destroying user faith.
I get that companies need insight about how users use their products. This is not an instance of that, because companies definitely don't need insight about which websites are visited.
My biggest issue is ending up with search results when I forget to use http:// for a tld that is only accessible from the network I am using.
Other than that, I don't like the idea of automatically sending my browser history to my search provider. To that end, I also immediately turn off phishing protection on all new installs.
You should really look into how phishing protection works in Firefox [1], it's not implemented in a naive way (i.e. does not send the url to a third party), and does not compromise your privacy.
With the combined search/URL bar in Chrome, every single keystroke of every single URL you type into your browser is sent to Google. With a separate search field, you get the advantages of auto-completion of search entries without the privacy issues of leaking every URL you type.
I guess I don't find much of a problem with this--or rather, I don't think "my URLs aren't being sent to Google" is much of an aid in protecting my privacy; any number of intermediary routers could log the same information for all non-HTTPS traffic (which is most websites where the URLs are at-all telling), and personally-interested attackers are just as willing to tap my line as they are to ask Google for my browsing history.
What I'm really saying is, if you think something is important enough to use any sort of a private-browsing mode? Spend the extra few seconds and open up Tor instead.
That's a really black-and-white way of thinking about privacy. If using Firefox reduces the amount of logs Google collects about you by, say, 50%, then it's a pretty major gain, even if you're still leaking half of your web history.
How so? I think of it more like a power-law distribution: there are only a few websites anyone would care that I visit, and they're pretty obviously-so when I think about them. Those, the "signal" among the noise, I use Tor for.
Everything else is the same boring noise everyone else generates. The more noise you put out, the less suspicious you look. Nothing says "this person leads a secret life" to the NSA better than having a blank "file" in their automated-dredging system. You want such a file to be full of mundane detail, such that your data doesn't have a different "shape" under traffic analysis than the average 16-year-old who makes public posts about their plans to hang out with their friends at the mall on Saturday.
I like to maintain a history of things I've searched for. I'll often have to monkey with the terms and the sequence to get anything good out of google for the stuff I look for. Sometimes it's just useful to have it separate.
I rely a lot of searching the history and bookmarks from the address bar while the search box heads directly to the search engine and suggests instant results. I also like the privacy I get for not feeding everything I type into Google.
I find that for this kind of query in Chrome, I end up using keyword search: I focus the address bar, type "goog" and press tab, and then type my search query.
It never occurs to me to do it until I see the error page, though; it's always a bit of a hassle.
Is it because you want Firefox to be distinct with its own aesthetic or that Chrome is ugly. I don't understand why people keep on bringing this up as if there is much in Chrome's UI to copy. Chrome UI is just tabs with a menu button to the right. And it is open source, a.k.a you may copy it if you will.
It isn't about Firefox needing to have its own distinct appearance, and it isn't about "ugliness". It's about usability, plain and simple.
Chrome-style UIs are quite dumbed down and non-standard. Now, this might actually work tolerably for average or casual web users, or those with very tiny screens. But for other users, especially those who expect a lot from their browser and push it hard, this approach is just plain ineffective.
Chrome's single menu, for instance, is a total mess. A traditional menu bar and menu hierarchy is a much saner way of organizing functionality. Best of all, there's a lot of similarity between applications, which in turn makes them all easier to use.
Firefox used to have a UI that offered a good balance between not wasting space, while still making important functionality quick and easy to use. As they've copied Chrome's UI more and more the past few years, Firefox has become decreasingly useful for a lot of users.
Having to remedy these deficiencies using more and more add-ons with each release is getting increasingly tedious. The worst part, however, is that all of the major browser vendors have fallen into this let's-imitate-Chrome trap, so it's not like there's a viable alternative to switch to.
-Slightly slower release schedule[achieved in part by the previous item]
It's actually pretty slow. It doesn't matter if you have 29.1 and 29.2 at a 6-month interval. You will have to patch security fixes quickly and release urgent bug fixes like constant crash. The release cycle is pretty slow... And users actually expect to see more constant updates to ensure they are getting the latest bug-fixes.
Mozilla does not do this. Individual has the freedom to pursue their political belief just as anyone can choose to work for and not work for someone you do not agree with. Just as you can vote for a President who is in favor of X solution X instead of solution Y. An open web means exactly that: everyone can participate. And by that we don't mean everyone has to agree on everything.
Sure, but even the open web has some basic ground rules. What what special about Prop. 8 (as opposed to virtually any other issue) is that it represented a direct attack on the 14th Amendment - which is one of the basic pillars of our democracy.
For any flourishing society, a broad spectrum of opinion is vital. But when you start attacking the underlying system that make that open society possible in the first place, you've crossed a bright and shining line.
After all, not everything is up for debate. Indeed, that's the whole point of having constitutionally protected rights. People are comfortable with the back and forth of democratic rule if - and only if - they know that their fundamental human rights and basic legal equality are beyond the reach of public debate.
On the scale of techies trying to ruin people's lives, I'd put the level of these donations pretty low down the list of concerns myself, even if I don't love them (Peter Thiel's right-wing donations worry me more, for example, because they are much, much larger).
I don't mind money going towards Libertarian asshattery because frankly, I'm happy to see it crash and burn as publicly and spectacularly as possible.
Or not. In which case I'm prepared to change my views. But I'm not prepared to change my view about the 14th Amendment and the wisdom and decency of assuring basic legal equality for everyone. To my mind, that is an entirely settled issue. I'd no more go back on that than I'd tolerate a return to slavery (which, let's not forget, is the horrible error that necessitated the 14th in the first place).
You are happy to implicated in some bullshit libertarian experiment to see if it crashes and burns, harming many people, but are offended about being implicated in some bullshit Christian experiment to see if it crashes and burns, harming many people? To me, the collateral damage of Christian fuckery and libertarian fuckery are roughly comparable.
But in any case, Thiel gives money not only to candidates of the Libertarian Party, but also (in fact, mainly) to the regular, anti-gay GOP. It could be that he hates gays. It could be that he doesn't, but just considers funding anti-gay propaganda to be acceptable collateral damage in a quest to promote the Republican Party's other positions. Either way, he's a much bigger problem in my mind than some small fry giving 4-figure amounts to them, because he's giving 6-figure amounts to the bigots, which they can use to promote bigotry.
Oh, sorry, didn't mean to break your reply. I felt my remarks got a bit emotional but I suppose that's par for the course when it's your own family that's being attacked.
Regarding Thiel: I'm not defending the guy. I simply didn't realize how big a GOP supporter he really was. But now that I know, yeah, he can go die in a fire.
Political differences I can accept. Debates about the basic legal equality of one's fellow citizens are beyond the pale.
I guess to me economic equality of citizens is also part of basic equality. I can quibble on how exact the equality needs to be, but people should be qualitatively equal, and as a very loose lower bound should at least being able to live. The idea that people should monopolize all resources needed to live, to the extent of having 1000x or 10,000x what some of their fellow citizens have, with some of their fellow citizens having no food or shelter, is beyond the pale from my perspective, a weird American aberration. From a Scandinavian perspective, the libertarians and the conservative Christians are equally stone-age American sicknesses, and I perceive both of them as basically enemies. If anything, the libertarians have less excuse for not learning from their defeat, because they were defeated >100 years ago, while the Christians were only defeated ~50 years ago.
I agree that political differences are tolerable, but we must be speaking of political differences that respect the opponents' basic right to live. Neither libertarians nor fundamentalist Christians meet that standard. And to the extent that I have American friends who are denied healthcare because of these libertarian fucks, something that doesn't happen in civilized countries, I blame the startup scene for their tolerance of the antisocial libertarian assholes in their midst.
It's a software company. Please give them the leeway to be agnostic toward non-technical social issues. Not everyone needs to express an opinion on every matter, regardless of whether they agree with you.
The CMOS battery often has nothing to do with BIOS settings, on many modern laptops it's stored in the BIOS flash memory, with no such reset sequence available.
If properly secured, physical hacking is not as easy as it used to be.
I want to live in a society of people who are working together to make human existence meaningful. What I don't want is the pseudo-free market designed to further despotism and self-interested behavior which we have today.
That said, I'm not for giving someone food, shelter, water, and health care for falling out of a uterus. You have to contribute in some measurable way. Also I believe that we should provide, specifically these things...NOT currency/income.
I've seen too many examples of people having children for well-fare checks.
No reason this couldn't be a drone, and no reason it'd necessarily be a recon craft - being able to hit a target anywhere with weapons with only a couple of hours notice would make acting on intel easier.
Dual monitors are also somewhat common nowadays[vital for actual productivity], how the heck is that gonna do over Comcast lines?
When the day comes[never] that we have ubiquitous/cheap bandwith, this idea is nearly practical. Until then it is DOA for "real work".