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Mozilla plans to remove all legacy add-ons from their portal.
Support for Firefox ESR 52 will end on September 5, in two weeks, meaning there won't be any official Firefox version that supports legacy add-ons anymore.
Mozilla said today that following this date, it plans to start the process of disabling legacy add-on versions on its add-ons portal located at addons.mozilla.org (also known as the AMO).
"On September 6, 2018, submissions for new legacy add-on versions will be disabled," said Caitlin Neiman, Add-ons Community Manager at Mozilla.
"All legacy add-on versions will be disabled in early October, 2018. Once this happens, users will no longer be able to find [extensions] on AMO," she added.
Isn't modern FOSS great?/s
I can run old Blender if I need. Or go over all the archived .deb from past Debian releases. But Mozilla seems to be special. Time to call the Archive Team or the Wayback Machine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:35AM (13 children)
So now we will have to trust random sites if we ever need something old, even if just to port to newer versions?
Mozilla, you rock! As a sinking rock down to the ocean floor.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:25AM (1 child)
Surely, I'm not the only person who has ever thought of archiving stuff that he deems potentially useful? Grab what you want now, before it disappears. You have more than adequate warning.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:38AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OldVersion.com [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:56AM
They really do know how to shoot themselves in the foot.
(Score: 3, Touché) by janrinok on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:30AM (5 children)
Yes, but why should be have to? The internet is plenty big enough to hold the previous 'legacy' versions, so this seems to be nothing short of a petty move on the part of Mozilla.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:40AM (2 children)
Mozilla spent all their money on ... whatever ... and so has to cut back on their server storage.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:43AM
Hookers and blow is the traditional way for software ventures to get through lots of money. Just sayin'...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:44AM
Just a few ideas:
On giving their Apple buildfarm to another project (WTF?).
On pushing people in and out of quite important positions in their company, so...
On digging dirt of them all time which ends in courts, In consequence...
On barking back to a dog.
On HEURISTICS*! :)
On separating with Thunderbird.
This looks like famous method of transferring gains without taxes from developing countries. You take over the large company in a developing country, you run it, but cannot transfer profit outside without paying larger taxes, so you re-brand the company and buy from yourself a brand name, or technical means to do re-branding, for the money you want to transfer out.
* I tell you, I won't upgrade my Firefox 3.6 installation if it won't be ready!.
P.S. Archive Team, you have my VM.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:32AM
Because we've learned from Microsoft's forced upgrades from WinXP into Win7 and then from Win7 into Win10, that the best way to not have the old version out there in the wild is to remove anything surrounding it that is of value and that helps to keep it alive.
Everyone must upgrade, the borg say so, do not resist, you will be assimilated.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:15PM
Situations like this, I have to imagine the real reason to get rid of backwards-compatibility is so that people can't continue using the old stuff while calling the new stuff out as being the steaming pile of shit that it is.
I recall that when they rolled out Australis, the #1 most popular add-on that weekend was Classic Theme Restorer, i.e. "give me an add-on to get rid of all this new interface shit."
How embarrassing.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Freeman on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:24PM (3 children)
Or you can do what I do. Use whatever works. I can't tell you how much crud I have backed up over the years, that I never touched again. Except to look at occasionally and delete or think, man I should get rid of some of that junk. The only things I care about backing up anymore are things I've created, my games, or my music/video. I don't have much in the way of music/video, either. I like a movie enough, I get a DVD, Blu-Ray, or DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack. A Really Old Piece of Software from the 1990s, No one cares about, you don't care about it, I don't care about it, and certainly the company doesn't care about it anymore. Yes, it's interesting to see what Linux from the 90s looks like, but no one in their right mind would use it. Sure, there could be some random use case for some things. In general, though, you'd be a lot happier, if you just don't care about old junk software. Is there something else that could replace? Great! Use that. There isn't? Is it worth it to create a replacement for it? Probably not. Otherwise, there would probably be some solution.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:12PM (1 child)
The problem is there isn't always something that works. I've lost some old add-ons that have been discontinued, and I can't find anything equivalent. The old Cookie Monster add-on for cookie control, for instance. Yes, there are a lot of cookie add-ons, but none of them offer the same level of granularity and simplicity. Even the closest options have horrible UIs and don't fill the same requirements.
Sometimes new just means less useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:50PM
> Sometimes new just means less useful.
Usually new just means less useful.
FTFY...at least for the case of consumer-type software.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:50AM
For me personally it's so I can support my clients' software on old OS builds.
It's uncommon for my clients to so much as request that. I do it anyway because I feel very strongly that no one should have to buy a new box just to run my code.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:45AM (42 children)
It has been clear to anyone who isn't blind and deaf that Mozilla is in the terminal stages of SJW infestation, that part where it becomes unable to carry out the original purpose of the organization, for several years. If one reverts far enough to eliminate the damage there is still value in the Firefox codebase. It is far past time to fork the damned thing, go through one more rename cycle and get on with it. Version 52 ESR is probably a very reasonable candidate version to use for the baseline code to go in the fork but parts of it should probably be reverted.
Yes it is a daunting task to accomplish without money from political contacts at Yahoo! and Google but if GNOME could be successfully forked without a sugar daddy it is likely Firefox can also be forked. Or perhaps we could all just adopt Palemoon and help the small team currently struggling to maintain that to get the kinks out and get the code up to scratch to the point it could be the default browser in major Linux distributions. What everyone should be able to agree on is the current choice of an increasingly erratic Firefox or the spyware known as Chrome is a terrible position to be in.
I have switched to Brave on destops that are fast enough to run it without chugging, but those resource requirements probably exclude it from being the default for any distribution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:50AM (10 children)
Palemoon is no longer being maintained. https://www.basilisk-browser.org/ [basilisk-browser.org] is the new direction.
(Score: 4, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:15AM (4 children)
Considering there was a Palemoon release last week, I wouldn't call it "no longer maintained". Or to use the vernacular on your comment - "citation needed" :P
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 22 2018, @11:59PM (3 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:15AM (2 children)
Since I'm still an ESR hold-out and haven't flocked yet, what precisely do you mean by "gone the way of firefox"? Last I saw they were still busy trimming off useless and used-less features and generally making it a better browser?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday August 24 2018, @11:10AM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday August 25 2018, @12:03AM
Interesting. I must admit that one big reason I haven't switched to PM is that I don't trust them to make good decisions on what to cut. The fact that they ripped out the accessibility support raised a big red flag for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:17AM
There was a major release less than a week ago:
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/08/16/pale-moon-28-0-major-update-released/ [ghacks.net]
Why are you lying?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:37AM
lolwut? If you want to point out an alternative to the stage four cancer patient in hospice that is Firefox, that's great. Just don't spread lies and bullshit about other alternatives. It's really not helping.
https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml [palemoon.org]
Looks maintained to me...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by janrinok on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:39AM (1 child)
Wrong, the Pale Moon team is also supporting Basilisk, but from the Basilisk home page:
The final quoted paragraph explains that it is 'beta', and we all know the community's views on 'Beta', don't we? It is currently for development purposes.
Suggesting that people move to it is not a good idea.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:56AM
Fuck beta.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:12PM
This is a common misconception, based on the peculiarities of the Mozilla code, which is not the source code for a single application, but a platform for building various applications (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.). The Pale Moon developers have forked the Mozilla 52 code, to create the "UXP platform". Two applications built using that platform are Basilisk, which is Firefox 52 with internal changes and little to no external changes other than rebranding, and the recently released Pale Moon 28, which looks just like the previous version, but internally is a completely different beast altogether. The two are distinct applications and none of the two is intended to replace the other. If you are a Pale Moon user, update to Pale Moon 28 and enjoy the latest and greatest; use Basilisk only if you want to help in the development of the UXP platform.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Arik on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:17AM (2 children)
I'm not sure how you determined that but it strikes me as dangerously wrong.
I'd suggest forking from 3.6.28 and then backporting anything of value that's been added since. Should take all of 3, 4 minutes.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Touché) by shortscreen on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:12AM
Can we do that for the whole www?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:39PM
I'm still running Version 52 ESR, 52.5.0 to be exact, seems to be stumbling along OK. When I check Help|About, it offers to update to 52.9.0, maybe I'll do that before 52 support ends.
A few times over the last years, composing/editing in Gmail has started to act a little erratic, and updating Firefox usually straightens things out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:59AM (7 children)
I agreed with you right up until you suggested PaleMoon.
The PaleMoon team *intentionally removed the Accessibility subsystem* & has no intention of ever putting it back.
I asked them why & was told it made the code cleaner, leaner, & more secure.
I let them know that by doing so they were shooting themselves in the foot.
They. Didn't. Care.
So PaleMoon is a non-starter, non-option, non-functional pile of festering, rancid, Satan's scrotum scrapings.
FF ESR 52 is what I'm using as it's the only version of FF that is compatible with my screen reader.
Any newer version of FF ESR screams about my screen reader being incompatible (& FF ESR 52+ is the *only* program to ever claim that) & thus refuses to run worth a damn.
If I want to use my screen reader (and I can not use a computer without one) then my choices are Internet Explorer 11 or FF ESR 52.
I don't know what Mozilla thinks they're doing, but unless/until they release an ESR that *does* work with a screen reader, I'll be stuck on this old & no longer secure version.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:37AM (1 child)
Did you try Waterfox? (Honest question; I don't have any idea about if it would work.)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:08PM
No, I haven't tried WaterFox yet. I shall go search for it now & give it a try. Thank you for the pointer.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:13AM (4 children)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:37AM (3 children)
I'd love to join folks on IRC, but there's a problem with that.
My screen reader doesn't play well with anything that updates in real time - every refresh of the screen (every time someone posts a message) causes my 'reader to reread the. entire. screen.
There's never any way to jump to the last post I was in the middle of hearing about when the screen refreshed, I can't just Control+End to the end of the page & cursor up to find that message because there may be HUNDREDS of new messages in the time it takes me to do it, & the only way I have to keep track is to listen to the log files after the fact.
It's like trying to enjoy a tennis game running at 120KHz when your brain is only doing 30FPS.
By the time you've seen something & can react to it, the situation is so old as to make your input irrelevant.
*Comical pout & sigh*
The easiest way is either a forum like this one or via email.
I can actually keep up & my 'reader doesn't go haywire with all the refreshing.
=-J
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @04:17AM (2 children)
Out of curiosity, what screen reader do you use? I know plenty of people that use IRC clients with screen readers. If I remember, I'll ask them what they use for both the reader and IRC client.
(Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
Win7Pro64 & Jaws 16 from Freedom Scientific.
Thank you! =-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @03:21AM
Ok, I asked a buddy of mine and he said that there are two main paths people take when on Windows. Now this is coming off my memory from talking to him, so it may not be completely accurate in paraphrase. The first is ChatZilla, an extension for Firefox. It plays nicer with JAWS and most other screen readers than most clients you will use. The problem is that some users are getting nervous because of the EOL of Firefox ESR 52, which not only kills ChatZilla but Quantum doesn't play as nicely with screen readers in some aspects. Another browser based one he did say that qWebIRC (and another one whose name he couldn't remember) can play nicely with JAWS, if the web interface uses that and the IRC admins properly set it up. However, that is not true of every web based one.
Instead, he recommends the second option. He says you should try mIRC and one of the sub-options. First is that mIRC plays pretty nicely with JAWS out of the box. Second and the one he uses because he can see basic shapes, set JAWS to ignore mIRC completely and use its built-in reader, which allows him to still interact with mIRC and have it in the background reading things off while doing other things that don't require the screen reader and voice commands. Third, is to use JAWS as your registered speech component, to better integrate them. Fourth, is that there are plenty of FLOSS mIRC plugins (scripts?, addons? I'm not sure the lexicon) that allow it to play nicer with JAWS.
Another suggestion he made was using IRSSI. Apparently the TUI plays nice with JAWS. The final note he gave was that it has been a few years since he searched and got his setup, so everything I told you could be wrong or out of date. There is probably some accessibility group somewhere with suggestions that he missed.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:51AM
Because deleting deprecated software is totally about social justice. There has never been a software company that did that before. Hitler would never delete deprecated software.
Actually, it has been clear to anyone who isn't blind and deaf that jmorris is in the terminal states of SJW infestation. Symptoms include delirium, paranoia, hallucinations of bugs under the skin and micropenis.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday August 22 2018, @08:17AM
I've been using Palemoon and the win2k/xp build Mypal more and more lately. It's the best alternative that's left.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:09AM (6 children)
That's what Palemoon actually _did_.
If you think a fork would be good, lend some labor or perhaps give some money to Palemoon's open source effort.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday August 22 2018, @11:50AM (5 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:37PM (2 children)
[Citation Needed]
As has been pointed out repeatedly above, it has NOT been abandoned. Stop spreading FUD.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @02:19PM (1 child)
The developers had said they were moving to Basilisk, an Australis based fork, for new development. So did the future of palemoon change, or have they just finalized the release of the most recent dev branch?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:12PM
Stop trolling this thread.
https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=17384 [palemoon.org]
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:57PM
What is going on with that "I want attention" font of yours?
Are you like, the red site version of creimer from the green site?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:42AM
That is, the project openly stated that they wanted to develop libraries that other folks could use to create such applications as browsers and mail clients.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @01:18PM (9 children)
I'm guessing this decision has absolutely nothing to do with SJWs, and everything to do with the ongoing efforts of all kinds of organizations to prefer walled gardens over open marketplaces. An alternate explanation that is at least as likely is that there's a large organization with a substantial influence on what Firefox does due to supplying substantial funding that has an incentive to make Firefox suck: That organization is Google, and now that Microsoft's browsers are largely defeated they want Firefox to suck so that more people will switch to Chrome.
The reasons for the walled garden approach seem clear enough to me: In the world of The Cathedral versus The Bazaar, they've figured out that the way to make bank is to replace The Bazaar with the Shopping Mall that you can't escape from, and own the Shopping Mall so that you make rent regardless of which of the competitors the customers buy from.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:59PM (8 children)
SJW infestation has several consequences leading to the death of the organization. First, as SJWs assume all of the important decision making positions they begin diverting resources into pointless SJW bullcrap. But equally important, SJWs aren't generally competent at the goals of the organization, being mostly affirmative action hires from Hell, so they don't even know how to carry out the original goal. Third they drive out the actual talented people, both to make room for their SJW allies and to eliminate the pain that comes from being around talented people and being reminded daily of their own incompetence. Combine all three and look at Moz Corp through that lens and tell me you can't see reality more clearly.
They are doing incompetent buzzword driven crap because they no longer have very many there who realize it is bullcrap and they are terrified to speak up and call out their SJW superiors because they need the job, otherwise they would have left already.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:28PM (7 children)
And your evidence supporting any of this is what, exactly?
Because as far as I can tell, what you are trying to imply without explicitly stating (because if you don't flat-out say it, you must not be bigoted) is "Straight white guys are simply the best at programming, anyone else is inferior, and we should abhor any efforts to let anyone else do it. It's just common sense." Which is absolute nonsense: I've worked with women, white people, black people, various varieties of brown people, homosexual people, trans people, old people, and some of the folks in each of those demographic categories were brilliant programmers, and some were idiots, and most were somewhere in between. I also know for a fact that there are people in tech that will reject a brilliant and well-qualified candidate for a programming position because they are black, brown, homosexual, trans, and old, mostly because they told me (a straight fairly-young white guy) sometimes very publicly that's why they weren't hiring certain job applicants, so I am quite certain that the SJWs have a legitimate concern.
And that leaves me with one of two conclusions:
1. You are one of the people who would choose to reject candidates based on being black, brown, homosexual, trans, or old, and are trying to justify that position with bigoted nonsense. Which would be a reason why I'd as a manager never ever consider putting you in any position where you were responsible for hiring or managing other people, since that pretty much guarantees you will overlook the best candidates / employees due to factors that have nothing to do with their ability to do the job (and are in most cases illegal to use in personnel decisions, but that's almost besides the point).
2. Possibly due to the reason above, you haven't gotten far enough in your career to be involved with the hiring side of the interview table and thus not been privy to why certain candidates were chosen or not chosen. Because the kinds of things people have told me during that process aren't limited to a single company, not by any means.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday August 22 2018, @09:35PM (6 children)
Here's the only difference:
When a SJW demands "no more white male hiring" then the top 90% of the hiring marketplace is excluded and you get a lot of bad decisions and bad code and that is not survivable.
When a non-SJW does the opposite, then the roughly bottom 10% of the hiring marketplace is excluded, which is quite survivable.
Its pretty much like the recent Hugo awards, where if the first criteria is exclusion of white males, then the product that remains is guaranteed to suck. Whereas in the old days, 1950s american south for example, the folks they excluded couldn't product much worth anything so it was quite survivable.
The fundamental problem with anti-white racism is white folks make the world run, like it or not, so hating them means returning to a pre-modern world in all senses of the phrase which makes it even more ridiculous in the topic of "science fiction". I'm not sure sure if Africa can produce a rotating wheel, much less a warp drive. Likewise if you run a software development business where rule #1 is "hate white men" then you'll be lucky to get hello_world.c to compile.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:53AM (5 children)
So, by my math, that means you believe that about 8% of the world's population (white guys) is the top 90% of the hiring pool, while the remaining 92% of the world's population is the bottom 10% of the hiring pool. That is an absurd claim, because of the simple fact that variation within demographic groups on characteristics not directly related to the demographic categorization is nearly always much much larger than any difference between demographic groups.
I can also supply an obvious counterexample: The best programmer I ever worked with was a Chinese guy, with a PhD and proven and demonstrated expertise in natural language processing. And your policies just ensured that even if you're solving an NLP problem, you're going to pick white guys with less skill in NLP over my Chinese PhD, simply because he isn't white.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:40PM (4 children)
I agree with you in that anecdotes do in fact exist in a large enough pool of humanity.
The point is the relative strategic damage to a company of anti-white-male pro-somalian-woman hiring for a programming position, for example, is simply not survivable in the modern economy. Being either neutral or biased toward the whites is perfectly survivable given large scale racial production.
You can't be seriously claiming that a company that had a 'no white men only asian men' programmer hiring policy could possibly survive in the economy, regardless of the admitted existence of an anecdote? Also regardless how great that one Chinese dude is, Google has approximately 59000 white employees if you believe the google stats, surely you put them on a scale and its not going to balance very well...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:21PM (3 children)
Goalpost move: Your argument specifically stated that banning white men was banning the top 90% of the potential hires, while banning everyone else was banning the bottom 10% of potential hires. Ergo, white men must have (in your mind) been the top 90% of job candidates. I demonstrated that you were in fact banning excellent candidates with your "white dudes only" rule, which was all I needed to do to demonstrate that your argument was wrong.
Misstating my point: I didn't advocate for a "no white men, only Asian men" policy, I advocated for recognizing and addressing your own biases that are leading you to pick inferior candidates for jobs.
However, it's easy to demonstrate that a company made up of Asian men can not only survive but thrive in the marketplace: Mitsubishi, Nikon, Samsung, Nintendo, and lots of other well-known brands were started by Asian men, employed only Asian men in their infancy, and still are dominated by Asian men. I've also encountered successful startup companies that were founded and run by Asian guys. Which again isn't a surprising finding: Asians make up somewhere in the ballpark of 40% of humanity, so odds are that about 40% of the people that have the potential to be good techies are Asians, and all available evidence is that the educational systems of many Asian countries are quite good, so the idea that there are millions of highly trained and capable Asian programmers out there isn't at all far-fetched.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 24 2018, @05:40PM (2 children)
That "you" is rather theoretical in that the only people implementing racist hiring policies are currently devoutly anti-white, and my point is that is not survivable long term in the marketplace, unlike, say, no Somalians which is quite survivable.
Yes Asians are quite smart indeed with impressive IQs on a racial average. They get to enjoy being discriminated against much like white people, with racist phrases like 'non-asian minority'. Asians are quite capable as a race in general of living in civilized communities, which makes them nice enough neighbors and nice enough immigrants. Good people in general.
I think we're mostly argumentatively agreeing with each other with a thin layer of word choice propaganda and some anecdotal stuff on top.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday August 24 2018, @06:15PM (1 child)
No, we're not cordially disagreeing with each other: You believe that race is a useful factor for determining intelligence, I don't.
For instance, you hinted that Somalis were stupid. A simple demonstration that Somalis aren't stupid is that they've figured out how, in a dirt-poor country torn by civil war, to make literally boatloads of money using a couple dozen guys armed with relatively cheap AK-47s and a few small motorboats, out-maneuvering experienced and educated mariners who are backed by the most powerful navies in the world. You can't pull that off if you're stupid.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 26 2018, @12:52PM
So, it all boils down to I believe in the scientific method and statistics, and you seem to believe in the opposite; perhaps a religious conviction.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 23 2018, @09:17AM
My primary browser is SeaMonkey (Palemoon as a backup), solely because of the interface. I want normal damned menus, not a fucking cellphone interface. When FF switched, I stopped installing it on new builds at all, even as a backup. If Palemoon's traditional interface vanishes -- well, the day comes when I won't install it anymore either.
Much as I loathe Chrome, FF is now a worse experience. In fact with the latest FF, which came along with whatever linux distro I was looking at, I couldn't figure out how to do some fairly basic shit (don't recall what) and promptly fled to the provided Chrome.
BTW, here's a guy who is doing XP and Win2K compatible builds of Palemoon (which dropped XP support as of v26.something) and KMeleon-Gecko:
http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2018/08/weekly-browser-binaries-20180818.html [blogspot.com]
http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2018/07/new-build-of-browsers-for-win2000.html [blogspot.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by soylentnewsfan1 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:18AM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:38AM (4 children)
I also wonder if basilisk [basilisk-browser.org] and seamonkey [seamonkey-project.org] are BGTOW in this regard.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:01PM (3 children)
"BGTOW"?
Never encountered that acronym before, and Google returned dozens of definitions.
Care to take a moment and educate those like myself who have no clue what your talking about?
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:51PM
Its not supposed to be human readable.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
Browsers going their own way?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday August 25 2018, @07:09PM
^^^
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:07AM (7 children)
- Ago:
Because a change in the Add-On API broke quite a highly-popular - as in tens of millions of users - Add-On that I depended on for my webmastering work.
I don't doubt that someone coded up a replacement But Quick. That's not the point.
What the point is, that early one evening I was able to find my Add-On in the status bar, then later that evening that was no status bar. I spent well over an hour trying to figure out how to get my damn status bar back.
What happened was that despite my most-diligent efforts to specifically _prevent_ firefox from updating itself, it had done so anyway - silently, with no other announcement than this key add-on simply disappearing.
I regard it as a fundamental right of every computer user to consciously decide whether to install updates. For me to disable silent updates then for Firefox to go ahead and update anyway and by doing so lead me to devote well-over and hour just looking for the damn status bar?
I will tell you that some good _did_ come of this:
In scouting around for where my status bar went I found an argument between a MozzilaBot and some Indian guy.
Recall a few years back that quite suddenly and completely out of nowhere all our menus disappeared, ultimately to turn up within those three horizontal bars that at the same time appeared quietly, without point out that YOU MUST CLICK HERE TO GET YOUR MOTHER FUCKING MENU BARS BACK.
Well anyway that Indian guy called it "The Pile Of Elephant Dropping Menu".
Good Times.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Freeman on Wednesday August 22 2018, @03:27PM
I blame Google Chrome for "The Pile Of Elephant Dropping Menu." And / or anyone who thought such design was "good."
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday August 22 2018, @05:36PM (5 children)
Yup. But it wasn't always a problem. I'm old enough to remember when we all eagerly installed every update to a Linux distro because you could see things getting better with each one. Even the exceptions to that rule like the blood splattered users who got cut on Red Hat adopting a few things like glibc a wee bit too early were ok with it since things quickly got better. Red Hat Linux 5.1 was a horror show so bad I spun up a new install CD to integrate all of the errata but 5.2 was golden. Things got better. Then that all changed. Now I tend to only update when I have a lot of spare time and still won't always bother because the bugs fixed are mostly theoretical security patches that a good firewall will keep away and the "new features" are almost uniformly regressions or just weird crap. Or things that work suddenly replaced with new more complex things that don't even claim to work yet and generally never really do. Now we all upgrade when we can't run a supported browser on the current OS and accept that a lot of crap will break because we are addicted to the Internet and it's mad race to keep html5 in a state of constant churn. In other words the OS vendors have weaponized our dependency on browser updates to force all sorts of crap on us and drive hardware sales.
Show of hands everyone, if security errata for remote exploits and current browsers were available could you live a happy and productive existence with Centos 3.x or even Windows XP? Imagine what would happen to the stock of hardware makers if half of computer users were able to happily use hardware from that era with perhaps a memory upgrade and an SSD dropped in.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @06:35PM
Still have a couple of old ThinkPads (T61 and T42) running Win XP and they are perfectly functional, MS-Office 97 runs pretty darn fast and if there are any bugs in Office I must have learned to work around them. I update MalwareBytes and AVG every now and then, never used the MS anti-virus stuff. Stopped updating Acrobat Reader at v9 and mostly use Sumatra PDF reader instead.
Back in the '80s and '90s, I was buying a new PC every year or two. The gains were easy to see and I was running big math models where performance mattered. For my current use, XP was a nice place to pause and take stock...while my associate does the heavy lifting with the math modeling now.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @12:47AM (1 child)
I expect you can figure out why.
I even did that for Windows so quite likely I possess a complete set of WinXP updates starting with its final service pack.
I took a stab at doing that for Win8.1 then quickly conceded it was just not possible for just one person to do so.
Were I to continue using windows for anything other than to do a fresh install in a VM EVERY SINGLE TIME I NEED WINDOWS FOLLOWED BY MY DELETION OF THE VM I'd set up a local Windows update server.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by jmorris on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:36AM
You are doing the VM thing wrong. You don't reinstall and patch up Windows from scratch every time!
Install. Update. Take a copy of that image for safe keeping. Now use whatever your virtualization calls it to flip writes into a different file/stream/snapshot that you can discard. Install whatever you want to use, use it, then roll back to the perfect blank install. Rinse, repeat as needed. Never again worry about crap left in the registry when you uninstall, never worry about getting infected, never even worry about downloading a Trojan horse version of something since no matter what it won't live beyond the rollback unless it is so utterly vile that it breaks out of virtualization and attacks the real OS underneath. Avoid the temptation to add a persistent volume because if things CAN live squirreled away on D:, eventually something will. Make an scp client part of the base install and move the couple of files you need to keep out manually before wiping the image back to base.
Once in awhile switch off the rollback, do a fresh round of updates to the base image, take a fresh "just in case" backup of the image file and switch the rollback on again.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:11AM (1 child)
That's why we stuck with slackware (and some of us swtiched to Debian till pottering the scum screwed shit up).
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:05PM
It was because of the cruelty that all the SlackWare Neckbeards showed toward newbies in the Slackware newsgroup.
My experience with Debian was that it was generally hospitable to newbies. Why did I bail on Debian?
Because Debian Is The Self-Righteous Distro.(R)
What did I prefer to Debian?
Ubuntu. Hilarity Ensued.
Now I'm using Linux Mint Cinnamon. One box has 17, the other 17.1. While I know I would do well to dist-upgrade I like 17.1 and 17 so much that I don't really feel the need. I do from time to time "$ apt-get update" then "$ apt-get upgrade", but I'm reluctant to dist-upgrade unless I know there's a real good reason.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @10:42AM (1 child)
maybe it's just my config, but:
on opensuse, firefox quantum doesn't play "mp4" videos.(*)
latest palemoon 28 also doesn't.(*)
chromium >=68 also doesn't.(*)
however, on the same system, firefox ESR 52.9 and chromium 66 do play *.mp4 inside a html5 video tag (or directly selected).
is it just me or what kind of water-shed moment just happend?
(*) selecting the *.mp4 files directly via "file > open file> ..." also doesnt work.
Firefox quantum has been downloaded via "official" repositories AND directly from firefox.com. both don't do mp4 anymore?
(Score: 2) by number11 on Wednesday August 22 2018, @07:09PM
I think it's you, or maybe opensuse. On Win10, via "open file" mp4s work for me with both FF Quantum 61.0.2 (32 bit) and PM 28.0.0 (32 bit). (MP4s created with both GoPro and with Womble.) Chrome 68.0.3440.106 (64 bit) I can't find an "open file" choice. I don't normally use a browser to view mp4s (VLCPlayer rules!), and I'm not at my Mint computer to try it there.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:05PM (3 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:52PM
try linux. networking comes from its core :)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday August 23 2018, @08:40PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 24 2018, @08:24PM
Yup this - with JS off, refcontrol running, adblocking, I see a web as fast as 2005-2008. Slower than 1999-2002, there's still a lot of images and very few all-text pages rendered with inline tables (instead of pulling multiple files), but way better than unprotected internet activity right now. Whenever I have to use someone else's browser, I feel like it's the early scene in the old blade runner, when the whole world is flashing at you and trying to get your, /your/ attention, right now please this is important over here beep beep buy our tacos!
Oh, to have text-and-tables back, and images considered large at > 10kB jpg...
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday August 23 2018, @01:38AM
I will remove Firefox from all my devices; because of this Add-On https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/transliterator/ [mozilla.org]
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.