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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
byDan East ( 318230 ) writes:
This could the end of Mozilla. Sounds like a make or break type investment for a non-profit.
byPaul Fernhout ( 109597 ) writes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The project proposal was to "pursue the goal of building a complete, standalone operating system for the open web" in order to "find the gaps that keep web developers from being able to build apps that are - in every way - the equals of native apps built for the iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7." ... In 2012, Andreas Gal expanded on Mozilla's aims. He characterized the current set of mobile operating systems as "walled gardens" and presented Firefox OS as more accessibl
bybussdriver ( 620565 ) writes:
Every time I look at contributing in some way it's a big turn off and I stop. They seem like they don't have a clue about their community or volunteers. Upsetting IT people and influencers is bad policy - I personally used to bring them 100s of users and that has greatly weakened; but I could actively steer those users away all by myself. Dismissing power users hurts them. Many many examples-- such as killing off config options we use to get around whatever BS they want to push onto us. Making the thing
byPaul Fernhout ( 109597 ) writes:
Your words to Mozilla's CEO's ears! Thanks for the reply.
All great ideas -- and most (especially on customizability and supporting power users) are ones people on Slashdot have been suggesting for a long time, sigh.
Perhaps the most problematical decision Mozilla made was looking at the user base and deciding that if most people did not use a feature they could drop it, which ignores as you say the advocacy by the power users. A long time ago I read how scriptable applications typically have a user base of a pyramid,which goes something like this. Ninety percent of users are casual users who use the defaults or some popular existing plugins. Nine percent of users tinker with the defaults and customizatons, slowly going up a learning source. One percent of users make plugins and really understand the system and all the possibilities. These power users are the core of the community and also sometimes even eventually become application maintainers (if the app is FOSS). A terrible error is when application developers (or management) look at this pyramid and decide, well, hardly anyone uses advanced features so let's abandon them -- not realizing that by disempowering that one percent of power users the whole community powered by mobility up the pyramid becomes broken. And it seems to me that is exactly what happened with the Firefox community (as you outline).
I too used to be a big Firefox advocate to people I knew. The constant changes as Firefox emulated Chrome were disconcerting. As were bugs and security issues back then from not having each tab be a different process. And then there were weird Firefox incompatibility issues as Chrome took over marketshare. I don't use Firefox much now.
I did install Firefox on a new Android phone recently though when I had previously used the built-in Chrome browser. I also decided to not use the phone for web browsing any more to reduce stress and dopamine addictiveness of being always connected and always immediately looking stuff up instead of wondering about it more. Although I do let myself read weather news via the wrapped Firefox plugin for the weather widget.
By contrast, on my Chromebook laptop (with Linux development environment that could in theory run Firefox), I am using Chrome all the time, sigh. I like that Chrome by default will save a page as a single mhtml file whereas Firefox saves multiple files. While Firefox perhaps has a plugin for exporting mhtml, have become vary cautious of installing any plugins at this point as trust in the community fades. Which is a sad comment on late-stage capitalism and the growing theft economy perhaps -- as the parasite load on the community increases from both the top and the bottom of the economic spectrum.
Ironically, Amazon has started telling me sometimes that my (Chrome) browser is unsupported!
I cross-linked my comment above in this other story from yesterday:
"Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet"
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
It's sad to see what so much of the internet and operating systems (and even hardware) have become when there was such high hopes sin the 1970s and 1980s for the microcomputer revolution and then the network revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That said, the untapped potential for personal and community computing remains huge, and there is still great content out there including on old bog-standard personal websites. Computers, storage, and bandwidth are all amazingly cheap by 1970s standards.
AI right now is perhaps another distraction from realizing that potential?
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bybussdriver ( 620565 ) writes:
yup.
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