Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
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Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?
If Firefox doesn't keep up with web standards, neither will any of the forks
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I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?
Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.
Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.
This article appears to be pretty even-handed.
My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.
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i can offer some context to that, but first let's clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by "code of conduct" PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it's not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they're not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn't show each change, it just shows "n files changed, +n lines -n lines", and a description talking about "gender-neutral language". now, kling is not a "typical" developer. he's a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don't know what that's like, but i imagine it means you don't have a lot of mental overhead for things you don't want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn't want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn't even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!
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Called it
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I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!
I've been very happy with Waterfox so far. Made with the Gecko Engine but not maintained by Mozilla.
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I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?
Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.
Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.
like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc
That's valid tbh. Nice Muslims say Ilah. Mean monotheists say Allah.
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I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!
forks cant survive without firefox unfortunately
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unless they start curating things like censoring specific words or searches.
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This article appears to be pretty even-handed.
My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don't want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.
After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.
Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.
In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.
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let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4
(Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Hot take. Under semantic versioning everything after vista has been in essence a new version of vista.
Going from NT 5.x to 6.x was a major jump.
The reason why Vista had no/terrible drivers was because they went from an insecure one driver bug crashed the whole system model to more secure isolated drivers that don’t crash the whole system model. Developers had to learn how to write new drivers and none of the XP drivers worked.
They went from a single user OS with a multi user skin on top, to a full role based access control user system.
They went from global admin/non-admin permissions to scoped UAC permissions for apps.
Remember on Vista when apps constantly had that “asking for permissions” popup? That was the apps not using the 6.x UAC APIs.
Given the underlying architectural situation everything since Vista has been vista with polish added (or removed depending on how you look at it)
Things will go beyond vista when a new major release with new mandatory APIs shows up.
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mozilla sucks
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mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
Companies should be allowed to make a profit, you need that to cover bad years, invest in the future of the company, etc. A company without profit (unless it is a non-profit) will not survive.
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let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4
(Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
It's just a versions list. And I'm mostly joking. Rather that the "feel" of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn't seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)
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Did you read the thing?
The fact that it's aiming to be stable doesn't mean it is. It's still a work in progress unlike other browsers.
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let's ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000
That feels like a dangerous argument;
- 2000 = NT 5.0
- XP = NT 5.1
- XP x64 = NT 5.2
- Vista = NT 6.0
- 7 = NT 6.1
- 8 = NT 6.2
- 8.1 = NT 6.3
- 10 = NT 6.4
(Later NT 10.0 then 1507 for July 2015 when they made the switch to ‘agile’.)
Unless you are prepared to argue that everything since has just been an updated version of Vista.
Ok but XP was literally 2000 with a prettier default theme
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For those holding out for a hero: https://ladybird.org/
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
Why the downvotes??
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I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!
Qutebrowser is my main and Lynx is my "feed" browser. Qutebrowser you don't need anything else. it just works and you can script the thing to your hearts content.
For a long time I was using Floorp, and while I like floorp and the dev team behind it, I just stopped using it as my main. Sure it's a fork of firefox and they're at the whims of mozilla which lately has been clearly evident with the slow updates to floorp.
Qutebrowser just works. The dev for it is a nice dude who is easily accessible for help. the community for it is also very helpful. the integration with things like greasemonkey make scripting and customizing anything so painfully easy. I mean there's a great script for it right now that completely 100% circumvents youtube ads and it's been working for months straight without any need to update. It also meshes extremely well with my Bitwarden.
I'll never use a different browser again.
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After reading this, in particular the "The Facts" section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn't want to get involved with that.
Yet again, that "crowd" didn't like Ladybird's refusal to play, therefore that "crowd" does what they're known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.
In a sense, that "crowd" shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that's the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.
Refusal to make a "political" statement is very much political when the politics in question is about acknowledging non-men exist. There is no politically neutral choice when there are two options who are both political.
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mozilla and firefox need to learn more away from ai and more towards ethical not for profit governance. be the opposite of big tech and stand for the internet as a public utility and force or good and decency. instead of going ai bro, y'all need to stand up against racism and discrimination while pushing internet for everybody, free of profits.
I personally think it's not about Mozilla. It's about the Web.
You need to see the bigger picture always.
The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.
The Web wasn't intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.
It's used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.
Why the Web and not just "Facebook native application" and "Google native application"? Well, it's hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don't work in a browser, that browser is doomed.
While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.
So - there weren't that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).
Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.
But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It's an oligopoly.
So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn't allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn't its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn't think of such consequences.
And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that "post #12435324646dasgtshdryh" would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.
That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.
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Brendan Eich
I honestly don't understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that's terrible, but I've also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would've been a better CEO at Mozilla because he's interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn't that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we've had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn't have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it's called professionalism. I dislike Eich's views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,
but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla
How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? "I respect you so much I'll pass a law to make you illegal"?
