CorpusCalcium
about:profiles
Perpetuating it won't do, and if in doing so we're perpetuating a larger impending security issue, then we need to resolve it stat, not defer everything because there is heaps of old hardware lying around.
That may be easy to say and harder to resolve, but there comes a time when problems need to be resolved. Maybe that won't be 2020, if the desired timeline proves unrealistic, but two years is plenty of time to move on it. It generally takes far longer to deprecate and remove protocols from the web than it does to get a replacement modem.
I get the impression that people claiming that companies like Apple are "engineering-driven" are only talking about their new, non-core projects. But then my perceptions are only colored by the folks I know working at those companies, so whatever.
They have very intelligent and capable folks trying to "do no evil", but ultimately they're a business, not a charity. They rarely actually care about their engineers' opinions unless it helps with public image or maintaining a competitive edge (no matter how artificially) or helping them start a new product line (or close one that isn't paying the bills).
Thankfully I will say that it sounds like there is just enough blowback over the past two or three years that it's not all bad. But it's certainly not a place that I would call "run by engineers", and hasn't been for at least 4 years now.
I believe what WebKit introduced was the analogous CSS image-set property, which likely influenced the picture's element's development (but image-set still hasn't managed to escape draft-spec territory).
By this logic they had already long legitimized it through their grudging support for Flash. But don't let that stop you from trying to act like it's magically different.
>where Mozilla will always be at a disadvantage
They were always at a disadvantage in the fight against DRM. They never had any real control over it to begin with, and had to constantly be at a disadvantage while it was Flash-based. The fact that they adopted EME changes nothing at all, except that some people on the Internet took it personally because they wanted to.
>the way that they worship at the feet of Google
Suuuure they do. Just like they worshiped at the feet of Yahoo before.
>The biggest mistake that Mozilla is making is adopting the for-profit paradigm that their competitors have
Some hard evidence for this shift in their mentality would sure be nice. Simply owning a corporation doesn't mean you're suddenly driven by a profit motive. Nor does the fact that you may earn some revenue from things that some people love to hate.
>Mozilla is not a business, and they don't need to convince people who don't care about web browsers or privacy to use their web browser.
They have always been a business. A non-profit organization is legally a type of business. And even by non-legal definitions they are still a business. A business does not mean "a profit-driven venture".
Just like their mission has always been to make products for everyone, whether or not they happen to hold strong beliefs about privacy or DRM or even web browsers.
>We are truly entering a dark age of technology.
I've been hearing that since I was just a kid. I'm sorry that Mozilla didn't win your DRM war for you (and me), but that doesn't mean they've given up on all attempts to avert your "dark age" prophecy. But they're just a couple of thousand people. They won't be able to avert every disaster.
I fear you're vastly overestimating the effects a few people had on Mozilla's decision to experiment with, then buy a company that could help them potentially gain some actual influence over content-makers and the ad industry, and hopefully reduce their utter reliance on Google's money.
At best, the only thing the criticism over Pocket accomplished was to hasten Mozilla's pre-existing desire to develop these kinds of features as (what became) Test Pilot extensions.
No, you really don't. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, who are the non-profit parent company who do these kinds of things, not build Firefox. Firefox is made by their subsidiary Corporation, who cannot accept your donations.
The Corporation doesn't even need your donations anyway; they make a lot more revenue than the donations Mozilla receives.
However, the more you donate, the larger the whole company is allowed to grow while legally being a non-profit. Also, the more is donated, the more they are allowed to transfer between the Foundation and the Corporation.
But you are still not ultimately donating to Firefox. You are donating to the Foundation, who need the money more in the first place so that the whole can legally remain a non-profit, even if they earn more revenue.
Whether or not you feel they should have more money to work with is up to you, but I note that quite a few people seem to wish that Mozilla could do pie-in-the-sky stuff like manage their own user clouds and VPNs and search engines while not remaining motivated by shareholder profits.
But luckily this attitude might be poised to change, because the employees at Google who still care about these things have been pushing hard, and it's now threatening to become a PR issue that Google is needlessly serving inferior versions of big apps to other browsers. When other browsers are a UA spoof away from showing that you're artificially screwing with them on your base Search engine, it becomes harder to push those browsers to adopt the web standards you're trying to push to make YouTube "better".
The Blink team are getting better at this, but they still really need to put their feet on the brakes a little more, and wait until there are at least two implementations ready before flipping their own switch to enable the feature for all of their users.
With two reasonably complete (and independent) implementations it's far more likely that the standard is engine-neutral, and not lacking in crucial detail. The web platform tests will also have been put to the tests to ensure that they have decent coverage. On top of that, the feature can be considered to have been vetted to ensure that it isn't really just being shoved on the web to meet Google's business needs, but rather in the interests of a broader set of people. These things can easily slip if pushed too quickly, even if others are generally supportive of the general idea of the feature.
And unless you're an artist who does that yourself, it's a bit much to ask others to meet your needs for free like that in the first place.
If non-dev artists want to see that gap close, they need to contribute, not just wait for mana from heaven.
No, that doesn't have to mean actually writing the software. But it could mean paying someone else to do the coding, even if the software is ultimately released as OSS.
In fact it's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't at all trying to "clone" Chrome, given that their recent Photon UI design looks less like Chrome than their previous Australis UI, all things considered. Not to mention that even their own Chromium-based products are drastically differently from Chrome, and they've just confirmed in this post that they intend to even move those over to GeckoView.
As such it's a very silly and tiresome argument to hear, and since the rest of the comment didn't seem very interested in having a conversation or adding to the greater discussion, I'm not surprised it would just get downvoted.
Other addon devs did help push things along, and they got the abilities they needed much sooner. We can only excuse ourselves so far before we share in the responsibility for things not getting done.
So yeah, the Firefox devs didn't have much to go on except inactionable "just do whatever Vimperator needs" junk, and no other vested interest seems to have lifted a finger to help the VimFX guy speed up his work on the experiment after he finally got the ball rolling, so blame doesn't really rest on the Firefox devs here.