I must say that Mozilla have made the right call with extensions in Firefox 57.
Web extensions are probably a small part of it but I have switched back to FF after ~5 years of Chrome. I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.
Firefox 57 was directed at people who moved away from it, to Chrome users, I'm glad it has made an impact - however, it has upset many people who were using it as their main browser and who depended on a number of extensions which used APIs which were disabled.
There's talk that some API's will be built back, and hopefully with the increase in new users it should be worth it.
For example, on Xubuntu, a low resource friendly Linux distribution run by many on devices with small screens, Firefox 57 now is unable to hide the title window bar and unable to customise the size of tabs, reducing available screen estate by about an inch. In development versions of Firefox, they are enabling CSD for Firefox windows, so in a few months this might be better for the title bar, and in the article it seems as if theming tabs are being addressed.
A particular bug for me is the second time they removed being able to change to the next tab by mouse wheeling over the tab bar. They removed it in Firefox 34 or so (it was default, in built function) and pointed to using Extensions as the workaround. Now they have removed these very extensions that enabled that.
If only an extension could change userChrome.css! That would solve many people's problems.
Users who wish to continue using legacy Firefox extensions can use Firefox ESR 52. It will receive security updates through April 2018 at which point it will move to a later version of Firefox which no longer supports legacy extensions. Over the next 5 months, the WebExtensions API will continue to be expanded enabling more of the older extensions' features to work with the modern extensions framework.
I agree. Been using Firefox continuously since it first appeared. And I miss some of my extensions.
But they're clearly working on improving what you can do with extensions, only now they're doing it in a coherent manner rather than just letting people have access to the browser chrome to hack about whatever they fancied. And that feels much more stable and architecturally stable as something to build on for the future. I'm prepared to give them a few releases to build on that and make it both fast and extensible.
> And that feels much more stable and architecturally stable as something to build on for the future. I'm prepared to give them a few releases to build on that and make it both fast and extensible.
This should also enable them to keep the extensions that use supported apis working between releases much easier. I remember the early days of firefox where any update meant that some random subset of your extensions would break because they were doing something to the UI that the devs didn't expect.
But the people who chose a browser for speed already had Chrome. Now the people who would choose a browser that lets them run their software of choice, on which they have been relying on years, have no browser.
There are hundreds of people tweeting about how Firefox 57 has ruined their browser experience, and they are representative Firefox users -- the kind who have been using it all along, and relying on all the software Mozilla just broke. I don't think Firefox will gain market share by alienating all these people, while attempting to beat Chrome at its own game.
I wonder if there is any set of circumstances that would cause Mozilla to realize that making a new browser and calling it Firefox was a bad idea. If market share still continues to tank -- like were they realize for every person like the parent commenters, there may be many pre-existing users who have no reason to use Firefox anymore -- would they then admit it was a mistake? My guess is there is no such set of circumstances... witness the fact that Mozilla originally cited declining market share as a motivating factor for this big change, but then recently we have stories like this https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/07/25/new_war_for_mozilla...
I'm personally really happy for firefox 57. I never switched to Chrome, primarily because of privacy concerns, and I suspect that there are a good number of users in a similar situation. The migration to web-extensions was a little annoying (had to find a different password generator).
While they could have split the product into two (like they did with Firefox & Seamonkey) and let the former product languish, I'm not that would have made many users much happier. For what it's worth, you can still use Firefox 56 (or even Seamonkey).
There was no way forward for a better browser without braking the old extension system. It is bound to irritate some people, but a rational person should find it hard to blame Mozilla for their choice. It is now a modern browser capable of making use of a modern computer's capabilities.
As a counter anecdote, I'm removing FF from all my workstations today. I've been using FF for years. I gave quantum a chance until NoScript shipped. Now it's clear that this is not going to work for me anymore. Moving to Brave. Bye FF.
>I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.
FYI, it was faster when NoScript worked. Tabs didn't crash constantly either.
Not having slowdowns like you, nor tabs crashing. Reminds me of when Chrome first came out, I ditched Firefox, till I realized Chrome didn't have proper adblocking, and when they did it was awful compared to Firefox's adblocker. It's improved since, but I'm not interested in Chrome since. Firefox has only gotten better and better for me. I guess everyone will experience the new versions differently.
I've been a long time user of Firefox, and after v55, I've been incredibly pleased with the improvements in tab handling (I'm one of those imbeciles who often has hundreds and hundreds of tabs open) and browser performance overall. Like you, I haven't had any stability issues, and the overall resource use is still far lower than Chrome/Chromium/derivatives (like Brave). I'm somewhat disappointed with the removal of the old XUL API and the death of many extensions, but expecting this, I trimmed what I had installed to an absolute minimum. So far so good; can't say I'm really missing anything except maybe Session Manager.
I do have some empathy for your parent comment: I'm not particularly fond of NoScript v10's UI either, if that's their chief complaint. It's different and somewhat cartoonish, but I don't know if my reaction is because of the stylistic changes or the fact that it just changed.
Regardless, Raymond Hill released a version of uMatrix for Firefox 57 which I feel has somewhat more power than NoScript in certain areas (selectively blocking cookies is a nice addition), and I like the UI better. It's not as intuitive, arguably, as the original NoScript, but it's information-dense and provides a fantastic picture of what's going on--better than NoScript ever did.
It launched with a new UI that I am still in the process of figuring out. If the parent lost their patience, I can't blame them asbut there is definitely a learning curve to NoScript 10 and zero documentation to help people figure it out.
NoScript 10 caught me on a good week, if I had been busier this week I wouldn't have had the patience either because it's definitely not doing things in a way I would expect.
So here are my notes for the previous version, I literally went to type this up only to find NoScript updated itself in the past day or two.
You have Default, Trusted, Untrusted and Custom.
Double-Clicking on either of those will give you more granular control ranging from scripts to media to fonts and webgl, which is nice. Untrusted has everything unchecked by default, Default seems to have scripting and most other things turned off by default, and Trusted and Custom you have to set yourself, with Trusted I think having Scripting on by default.
Now if you change the settings for any of these, at least on the previous version, your changes will apply to all domains under that category, so if you have scripting on for Custom, you'll have Scripting on for all domains you've set to Custom. Now whether this is still the case for the latest version, I couldn't tell you at this exact moment, but hopefully that's enough to get you started.
"Temporarily allow" also seems to have been replaced with a clock icon which you can find next to the Trusted and Custom category markers, which I only knew about from reading the blog updates. The latest update added three icons to the top right which are fairly self explanatory, one is options, one is for temporarily allowing all of the page and one is for revoking temporary permissions.
All in all I wouldn't say it is the most intuitive UI, particularly after having used NoScript for about 10 or 11 years. That said, if you're willing to allow yourself a bit of time to get used to it, most of the core functionality is retained, and is in fact a little bit more granular than before. When I have a little bit more free time, I intend to test out Custom a little bit and see if I can use it to allow some websites to render custom typography without having to run JavaScript. Theoretically that should be done completely in CSS, but I haven't kept on top of web standards since deciding not to be a web developer about 10 years ago so I'm not sure to what extent websites still depend on JavaScript for typography.
Thanks so much for this. They sound like some improvements, especially the timed/clock feature. Useful for not wanting to whitelist a website you need to view. I never find temporarily allow all too work that great - sometimes required several cycles.
Wether it was the right thing or not depends on the details. The overall decision is a sane one, but FF now has to develop enough of a flexibility to have a good extension ecosystem again. At least now they can get that flexibility with sandboxing and access management.
Anyway, Mozilla's history is such that I am not convinced they will do this.
Overall I agree, but NoScript not working anymore directly resulted in me having to kill all Firefox processes when an ad stopped me from closing a tab by constantly opening new alert windows.
You can just close the tab regardless of whether it’s showing an alert nowadays. (I also recommend µMatrix – it’s pretty much a better version of NoScript.)
> I also recommend µMatrix – it’s pretty much a better version of NoScript.
No, it isn't. uMatrix is a replacement only for the shallowest feature of NoScript. There's a ton of stuff that classic NoScript does that nothing else provides (including the new WebExtensions NoScript, so far).
The shallowest feature of NoScript – content blocking – is the only useful thing it provides. The rest of it, like the XSS filter, is poorly-written misfeatures, or stuff that’s available in about:config. (To be fair, µMatrix has its own misfeatures – looking at you, UA switching.)
> The rest of it, like the XSS filter, is poorly-written misfeatures, or stuff that’s available in about:config.
NoScript classic has a lot of functionality that helps you keep sites usable when scripts are blocked, or to help you stay secure when you have to allow some scripts. Some of the latter features are protections that will occasionally get in the way of sites that are fucked up in non-malicious ways, but that doesn't make them misfeatures. In my experience, the only XSS filter false positive has been Wolfram Alpha, and I've only encountered the clickjacking protection with advertisements that are getting in the way of the content I'm trying to interact with.
> NoScript classic has a lot of functionality that helps you keep sites usable when scripts are blocked
Sounds good, but have you looked at the code behind this? The XSS filter is the same way – a giant mess that only protects against the most trivial of XSS anyway.
I forgot about its clickjacking feature, though. You’re right, that one is valuable.
NoScript ("allow first-party scripts" and block everything in "Embeddings" tab) + FlashBlock seem to be the only way to block all autoplaying crap in Firefox for me.
You can also add uMatrix, uBlock & RequestPolicy and surprisingly they don't conflict with each other!
As long as Firefox and Chrome are somewhat similarly performant, I will always choose Firefox. I'm trying to wane off google products and services as much as I can, as I believe they have too much control over our digital lives. Most people are fine with that and I respect that, but I rather take as little control back as I can.
I've been using Firefox since way back in the day when I stopped using Opera 12 (and I had been using it even before that, I just had really crap hardware for a long time so I had to use Opera).
The devs obviously care about the product and its users and sometimes have to make tough decisions.
I think Firefox 57 is a good thing for Firefox's future. It's basically what the Mozilla rewrite or Firefox's being spun off from Mozilla did, but this time with less of a big-bang. And 1 year from now 99% of the current extensions will work.
And no, for the obvious question, they couldn't have done it the other way. I've been part of several migrations of this kind and people don't really move voluntarily 100% during migrations. Yes, the nice folks do it in time (say, 40%) but the rest have to be dragged along kicking and screaming.
I agree that they had to force turn off old-style extensions at some point to force adoption, but I feel like the same release where most of the APIs needed to port the old extensions over (and still missing a bunch of things) was way too soon. Even quite a few of the actively maintained, high profile extensions are not ready. Same reason why a disturbingly large number of Jetpack extensions has to use require("chrome")… they never got around to flushing out the implemented API set.
My guess is that they had a long and hard discussion (or several) about this exact subject we're talking about. Due to budget constraints (development budgets aren't infinite, even for Open Source projects), they probably decided they had to switch. Otherwise the banner of Firefox would be flown by 0.5% of the world's browsers. Chrome is currently crushing everything and I don't see anyone else stepping up.
Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions [0]. Would you have preferred 5 years? a decade?
Every change breaks someones workflow [1]. It sucks, but it happens because we need to acknowledge a point when the current system holds back progress more than the headaches introduced by a new system.
> Firefox has given developers 3 years and over 10 FF releases to work on migrating extensions.
No it hasn't: Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions. The developers of those extensions haven't had three years to port; they still can't port.
I really like how fast the new Firefox is, but I won't use it until Keysnail works.
Same here. Tab mix plus (for multiple tab rows) is the reason I kept using FF all these years. WebExtensions does not provide the capability to manipulate tabs the way TMP did.
JS-based (crippled IMHO) vertical tabs are also in Chrome. Why would someone switch from Chrome to Firefox to use a crippled extension?
I hope I am wrong but I don't think Firefox will be able to increase their market share. They may be able to stop losing their market share, which is not really a huge achievement.
Crippled? Sorry, I don’t get what you’re trying to say. Tree style tabs work fine in FF57. Only annoyance is that the top tab line cannot be removed. That’s supposedly coming soon though.
Like you, I care not how much of a speed improvement may be had as without certain add-ons, my end value is 0. I have been with Mozilla since, IIRC, netscape 0.96. I only use Chrome if absolutely necessary for site functionality.
NoScript, Session manager and Self destructing cookies are the hurdles to clear for me - the rest I'll miss but can probably get by without. Note that both the session and cookie manager are in fact features that should already be part of Firefox and are not. And when I say 'clear', I mean functionally equivalent in all regards to pre 57 (NoScript fails that test).
> Firefox still doesn't ship an API capable of supporting many existing extensions.
And I doubt they're ever going to.
It's the Design Disease: Once a company has it in its head that it Knows Better, anyone who ditches their way for a different one is Wrong, just... Wrong in some way the company thinks is objective, based on whatever Design it has in its head, and must be brought back into the fold.
How tabs work is Design. Design must not be questioned. If you want your tabs to open such that you get a new tab right beside your current tab, instead of over a dozen tabs away at the end of the tab bar, you're Wrong, and having more than three or four tabs is Wrong, too.
They can say that Firefox is faster. I say it's easy to be faster when you're not solving the whole problem.
I've been using Mozilla based Web browsers since before the ice age - I paid for a copy of Netscape in a box from an actual shop.
Many people are unhappy with the extension situation. Mozilla have to take that into account and provide equivalent functionality fairly sharpish or face just being a chrome-clone.
Downvoting this is preposterous when it's a legit point. I've been using Firefox since the Phoenix days and now many of my old extensions that I've been using for years are non-functional; it's very much telling old users to pound sand for the sake of new users.
It's really not though. Try to put yourself in Mozilla's shoes for a moment:
You run arguably the most "free" and "open" internet browser in the business. You are constantly pushing for standardization in the face of competing browsers like Safari, Chrome, and Edge; all of which are trying to establish a walled garden powered by browser specific features. Your browser is consistently losing market share to Chrome because you don't have the cash to spend on marketing partnerships and pre-installs like Google does. Your browser is a means to an end, not the end itself. Your browser exists purely to push forward the tenets of the open internet and open source software. You need market share to push further standardization and improvements to the web experience. To get this market share you need to ensure that your browser offers at least the same performance and security as other browsers. In order to do this, you need to make some backwards incompatible changes or risk falling into obscurity. It's a sacrific you have no choice but to make.
There's no question that breaking backwards compatibility is eventually necessary. That doesn't mean Mozilla did a good job of handling this transition. They absolutely screwed a lot of their existing users, and without good reason. They have had no overlap between support for WebExtensions and XUL extensions. They've been marking XUL extensions as "Legacy" for months but prohibiting you from installing a WebExtension on anything prior to FF 57, forcing everyone to deal with jarring changes to all of their extensions at the same time.
Backwards compatibility was not an option for Mozilla to move their architecture forward for a modern multi-core computer. A rational person would understand this and move on, or find a way to support a fork of FF 56.
I have been a user of extensions since the earliest days of Mozilla Firefox (and earlier) and I love the new browser.
The migration to a multiprocess architecture was handled relatively painlessly early this year. It had nothing to do with the migration to WebExtensions. Many extensions were incompatible with the multiprocess Firefox architecture, but when the user had one of those extensions enabled Firefox simply fell back to using a single process. Many popular and well-maintained extensions were modified to be multiprocess compatible without widespread user-visible breakage or loss of functionality.
Starting to think that they should have forked and rebranded, and let XUL Firefox live on within Mozilla much like the Suite/Seamoney did after Firefox and Thunderbird.
But then Mozilla management has been "weird" ever since they decided to chase Google's tail with rapid fire releases.
And frankly i fear that it, like some other big name FOSS projects, have attracted managerial types that are there more to pad their resume with "social" projects than actually caring for what they are dealing with.
And those in turn have introduced a "push to prod" culture of development...
The fork is Firefox 52 ESR. It's probably enough to wait for some extensions that weren't ready when 57 was released, but 52 ESR isn't going to stick around indefinitely.
SeaMonkey isn't a good role model here. Even before 57, the SeaMonkey release interval had lenghtened to multiple months. That is, evidently it hasn't been tracking Gecko security updates at Firefox's pace.
I started with Netscape Navigator and used FF until 2016. As of FF 55 I started to like Firefox again. As of 56, I was mostly sold on it. As of 57, it is the only browser I consider worth using.
I understand getting salty about losing extensions, but sometimes a company has to make decisions that will get them back on track and recording some growth again. Sometimes a company has to overhaul their product to make it work for _more_ people and not their "minority but vocal core."
My first browser was Mosaic, and I was on Firefox while it was called Phoenix. v57 brought me back to Firefox (from Safari), so I think it's great to see they're not just laser-focusing on what was a rapidly shrinking userbase.
It's not a zero-sum either: those of you who always used Firefox will surely benefit from it not dwindling into obscurity.
I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.1, and a Mozilla Suite/Netscape user before that. I used Chrome for a couple of years, but went back around when FF56 was released.
FF57 is absolutely the greatest version of Firefox to date. I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.
I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.
It breaks about 2/3 of the extensions I was using, and many of them don't currently have similar replacements available. That's a big loss in some of the functionality that made Firefox attractive as my default browser.
I understand the desire to fix fundamental architectural limitations. In the medium term some of those extensions will probably be updated or replaced. In the long term, the improvements may well pay off in terms of better security and better performance and easier development allowing faster progress. As a software developer I can see that the move was rational even if it is also somewhat controversial.
But in the short term, the loss is still significant for some users. That's a perfectly legitimate concern, and it's apparently sufficient that some people are not upgrading this time.
I'm very much on the pro-webextension side, but really, people's workflow being broken is not a legitimate complaint? What exactly would constitute a legitimate complaint then?
It broke web experience for me. I write userscripts / extensions for most websites I frequent, and almost none work anymore. Granted, it's because Greasemonkey decided to break backward compatibility, but that was triggered by this move to a new extension model.
I tried to think forward, and proactively convert my greasemonkey scripts to new style FF extensions a few months back, to avoid dependency on GM. But abandoned that after it became clear that I'm not allowed to install my own extensions on regular Firefox, because of forced thir-party signing requirement. I have no need for signing. I could create an extension by zipping a directory. Now the workflow is 1000x more complex with all the crap loaded from npm required to sign it.
My web experience is s*it, ATM.
Firefox is great anyway. But it is power user hostile in some aspects too. Personal extensions/userscripts are central to my use of the web. So this is all quite annoying, since signing was enforced. And now even my userscripts broke with 57, as expected.
This point is irksome. How hard would it be to provide a switch to disable mandatory signing? Something similar to the unknown sources option in Android.
To all those claiming that Mozilla doesn't owe this to their users, you are technically correct. But why piss off users when you can easily satisfy them with a simple option. I shouldn't have to use a patched browser for something so basic.
Last I knew, there were "unbranded" editions of Firefox - editions without the Firefox logo and name - which allowed users to disable the signing requirement. The ESR (extended service release) edition might also allow it.
Pretty easy, I think; there was a switch in the UI for a while, then hidden in about:config, then hard-coded into the browser.
I think that the issue was that they were worried about people who don't understand the security implications turning verification off and getting themselves into trouble.
Then you'll be overjoyed to hear about the unbranded builds! The exact same code, except it's yours, so it allows all extensions and doesn't say "Firefox" on it.
Without this it’s significantly easier to install bad extensions posing as a “good” extension. It’s happened many times and is a huge win in terms of security.
> It broke web experience for me. I write userscripts / extensions for most websites I frequent
Sorry to hear this; but I think it's arguably more important for Mozilla to improve the web experience for a hundred million users who may never "write userscripts / extensions" for any website than to hamstring their development in order to avoid inconvenience to a single user who feels the need to customize every point of their web experience.
Also mandatory signing doesn't improve web experience for anyone. It's a security feature. Security is always inconvenient, almost by definition. So your point is invalid.
I don't mind change, I like new Firefox features, what I dislike is imposition of stupid lockdowns, and pointless control. One valid point, I might concede, is that there are innocent third parties affected if someone clueless confirms installation of some malevolent extension. So restricting it is somewhat justified.
Anyway, it's all still a sham. Anyone can still disable mandatory signing with a simple 10 line script patching omni.ja in any Firefox. So it's still no security against people who can be persuaded to enbale something in about:config, or run firefox with a command switch, or add some file to /etc/firefox/, or run a simple 10 line script "to make firfox compatible with our great extension".
I've been using FF57 on OS X since its release, and it's been great. Two issues have proven particularly difficult to get used to, however, and I'm surprised they aren't talked about more:
1. Video performance. Even something as simple as opening a video in reddit spikes my CPU to 100%, and before reluctantly installing Adblock Plus I ran into multiple kernel panics from opening articles on mainstream news sites and blogs.
2. Pinch-to-zoom isn't supported (closest alternative I could find is some about:config settings to make the pinch gesture equivalent to cmd++/-, which isn't useful).
I'm still using Firefox, and there's a lot that I like about it more than Chrome, but I'm seriously considering switching back because of those and some other minor issues.
I thought I was the only one with an issue with Firefox57. Got a Macbook Pro 16 GB, 3.1 Ghz Core i7, MacOSX Sierra (10.12.6). The CPU goes wild during a search on Google Maps and also on certain pages of forbes.com. On forbes I've disabled the Ublock origin coz they politely asked me to.
At one point the whole browser crashed. So right now got Chrome and FF open and am switching depending on the site. Might just end up back in Chrome if this isn't resolved.
Yep, apparently. (Technically not macOS, but OS X, since I haven't upgraded from El Capitan just yet.) I'd never had an issue with frequent kernel panics before, so I'm not sure what could be up with videos in Firefox.
You can't inspect websocket frames. It is a tiny quibble in the face of big amazing improvements. But it is a thing (and is why I still use chrome primarily for development), and the extension used to patch this in to the devtools broke in the big extensions change.
I don't believe that's the case. Evolution is important. Sometimes you have to get rid of old stuff to get ahead.
By doing so, Mozilla shows that it cares about his user. Letting use old stuff that are not maintained anymore (if they are, a compatible version will shows up) lead you to situations like win32
By doing so, Mozilla shows that it cares about his user.
By completely trashing a tool I'd spent years customizing without anything resembling feature parity ready by release? It's not really on the devs to port something when the new system is missing APIs. The "They had 5 years!" argument directed at the addon devs could just as easily be directed back at Mozilla...
Or perhaps by ignoring the loud negative feedback when I and many others said we didn't want paternalistic "thou shalt not install unless we say okay" controls on add-ons like Chrome has?
Or was it instead by ignoring my repeated questions on how to fix a ten-year-old SSL handling bug that causes a great deal of pain for sysadmins? (Vendors have a poor habit of reusing SSL certs - Firefox will flat out tell you to pound sand and not allow you to visit a site with a dupe cert. Chrome, IE, Opera, and I believe Edge will warn you that this is abnormal, but otherwise continue)
If this is how Mozilla cares for its users, I'd hate to see what they consider neglect.
I have been a Firefox user since it was called Phoenix.
This is the best Firefox , but I have lost a ton of extensions including my Vim extensions. So right now I use Qutebrowser and know that the new plugins will get added.
Vimium is _good_ but I really wish it would use the browser's native search widget when searching via `/`. I've been meaning to look into the documentation, but my assumption is that this is a limitation of the WebExtensions API.
The problem with all vim-style extensions is that they have been limited in potential functionality. For instance they won't work in any builtin pages such as about: pages or the new tab page or https://add-ons.mozilla.com. This forces the user to think about whether their command will work or not and induces an uncertainty in their flow.
The other issues regarding limited control over the browsing experience may be resolved with future API expansion, but the previously mentioned hobbling is something with which we are most likely permanently stuck.
I understand that in principle the new model of extensions is the way to go... but then Firefox without Session Manager, FireFTP and no way to read MAFF files just doesn't have the distinct functionality that kept me using it in the desktop. Perfect is the enemy of good I guess.
I do the Berlin-Stuttgart train journey regularly to visit my parents and quite like taking the train as it gives me a block of uninterupted time to read, work and just plain relax that I usually take for myself.
So this sounds like an excellent way of making this even more enjoyable. I think I will give this a try next time I'm travelling south.
I live in Germany and it is by no means a "giant brothel". Yes, there are large ones scattered around motorway exits and industrial parks. To me, them being tacky capitalist sex shopping centres is preferable to being underground, dingy and dangerous.
Trafficking and exploitation is definitely a problem but I'm not sure if the law change from 2001 has made matters worse or better.
But it is so typical for the Economist to make far fetched claims. In my view it is one of the most overrated magazines. Their use of statistics or their pseudo objective way of juxtaposing views doesn't hide that essentially their articles are just a collection of anonymous opinion pieces.
I used to read the Economist, and I was very much under the impression that they were champions of objectivity, and that they provided a very critical and unique point of view. Nothing further from the truth: they also have an agenda, so they shoehorn the facts to their conclusions. Exactly as everybody else is doing (maybe not so cleverly). I stopped reading it when I could pretty well predict what they would say about a certain topic. And currently their "I told you so" attitude disgusts me profoundly.
Let's not forget that the Economist has the privilege of sending journalists to Bilderberg meetings (a secretive lobby attended yearly by heads of industry and government) then not reporting on proceedings.
I'm assuming this is primarily meant for apps that get deployed to in-house servers rather than being submitted to the public Debian repositories, whose packing guidelines are indeed quite strict.
I really don't like it but I can't shake off my smug European sense of being weirded out when I read about how atheists are seemingly treated in America.
Is it really as bad as it's made out in this article or on Reddit? Do your neighbours really get into your hair because you don't have a faith?
> I really don't like it but I can't shake off my smug European sense of being weirded out when I read about how atheists are seemingly treated in America.
That's OK, 'cause we Americans can be smug right back at you over the way Gypsies are treated in Europe.
Just as we treat atheists the way Europe did a century ago, Europe treats the Gypsies the way America treated black people a century ago. Actually, Europe doesn't seem all that friendly to blacks yet, either, at least judging by what soccer fans have been chanting at opposing team black players.
From my experience as an agnostic I've been heckled more by my own family than anyone else. My world view is basically opposite of theirs and I've learned to just not open my mouth when they begin talking about it (politics, religion etc). It makes for very uncomfortable family gatherings for me :/
I've never really experienced any type of heckling, however, where I live (Missouri) most people just assume you are a Christian of some form. I do feel like if my employer knew I was an atheist I'd see some discrimination at work. Not to mention that, for the most part, you won't get elected to public office if you are a atheist. In fact in Texas an atheist can't run for public office.
"Sec. 4. RELIGIOUS TESTS. No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office, or public trust, in this State; nor shall any one be excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being." [1]
This doesn't actually say that an atheist can't hold office, but a non-believer can be excluded from office.
There are some particularly egregious examples of public-office tests listed in [2]; in particular Tennessee.
Well, I am from Slovakia. I was never met with open criticism or any kind of aggression towards me for not being christian. I think majority of Europeans are only Sunday Christians.
The level of engagement I have seen in US is far beyond this.
Parts of the UK (e.g. Northern Scotland, Western Isles) could be pretty strict about some things - particularly observing the Sabbath. Even though my parents were "heathens" we didn't hang up washing outside on a Sunday or go out on bicycles - for fear of upsetting the neighbours.
If you've seen Lars von Trier's excellent Breaking the Waves you will get the idea.
[NB I don't think things are nearly as strict as they used to be.]
> Is it really as bad as it's made out in this article or on Reddit?
It probably depends on where you live. Here in PA, it's been a non-issue for me.
But then, be careful. America is much larger than Europe, and while we are all part of the same country, we aren't the same people. There are big difference among the different parts of the country, and making them out to be all the same would be like me using a single country and extrapolating that out to all countries in Europe.
Even still, I have religious friends, and non-religious friends. It's never come up, and never been an issue.
"But then, be careful. America is much larger than Europe"
Europe (the continent) actually has a larger area (10,180,000 km² > 9,826,675 km²) and a much larger population (739.2 million > 313.9 million ) than the United States (the country).
I presume you mean the EU (which still has a much larger population) or maybe Western Europe? Or maybe North America (the continent)?
I think that's a bit harsh. In the case of the USA my impression is that the main source of cultural diversity is from immigrant communities whereas in Europe the main diversity is between long established communities - often at a level well below that of the current nation state (particularly noticeable in places like the UK and the other larger European states).
Personally, I think that Europe does have a lot more cultural diversity than the United States - but I can see that the point is arguable and that it's hardly a case of being "delusional" to argue the opposing point.
True, but then I'd go so far as to add that the USA is more diverse than any one country making up the EU.
And if that's the case, treating the USA as a comparable EU country in terms of diversity ignores that diversity found here. Which is what was being discussed in the first place.
I really did mean in area. The US dwarfs the EU nations. Apologies for using Europe instead of EU. I'd hoped the obvious context from the previous poster would help.
Still, I'd argue that the US is far more diverse than any single country of the EU, so treating the people of the US as all being the same is as silly as treating the people of the EU as all being the same.
Yeah, so what? How does that relate to the context of the discussion? Are you really suggesting that any single EU country is more diverse than the USA?
This article doesn't actually make it to be all that hard.
I mean, let's be reasonable. You are part of a community that strongly identifies with a set of beliefs and activities. You become disillusioned with said set of beliefs and activities. How are you going to stay part of that community? Doesn't matter if its NASCAR, hacking around in python, DIY bioengineering, whatever.
What happens is that there are situations where entire physical communities (in the sense of the set of people you will likely run into) also form a single actual community (in the sense of some sort of in-group), which is really unfortunate. I mean, no matter how welcoming and polite that ingroup is, your going to feel left out and somewhat alienated.
It really goes beyond this, because taking on some labels gets you labeled as a walking blasphemy, an immoral person who subscribes to a philosophy of mass murder. Atheism is understood as opposition to God (Satanism) in much of rural America. One area where Western Europeans really can be smug with justification.
Well, I don't mean both at the same time. What I'm saying is, it's more difficult socially and in terms of community if you are not a sports fan (at all, of any type) than it is to be an atheist. Most people are smart enough to avoid religion and politics so that leaves sports for the small talk.
I grew up in Arkansas as an atheist (I guess that's "Bible Belt" though I find the term insulting), and really I don't have any problems that would cause me to seek out other atheists. I had minor problems as a teenager but that's probably because I had the view that christians cause all the world's problems, such as my inability to attract enough females. Realizing that was far from the truth was a big part of growing up I think.
FWIW, I've written to my member of parliament [0], expressed my dissatisfaction and asked him to oppose the law. He wrote back saying hat his parliamentary party is already opposing this law but for slightly different reasons: It won't increase the quality of journalism and will just create a flood of lawsuits. Lastly it is far too vaguely phrased as to not have grave side effects.
The changes of the opposition are slim though as there is a conservative majority the parliament.
Interestingly, he has a personal axe to grind with Axel Springer AG as he was a big part of the student movement of '68 which was so intensely vilified by said company ("Youth in the street - Germany going down the drain ...").
fuck ströbele ! he voted in favor of the war in afghanistan and yet he still participates in all the peace rallies.
He's just another lying corrupted politician
I always thought of WSGI as a bridge between the web server and whatever web framework you happen to use, but this and the referenced article talk a lot about interaction between different frameworks and applications.
I don't really understand what is meant by this. Does this mean they want Django to interact with, say, Bottle?
tl;dr: Yes they are indexed separately, and yes it's up to site owner to decide which content may be indexed for Google News -- via proper META tags and robots.txt.
There is an important difference in UI between Google Web Search and Google News: the Web Search presents a very short snippet of text and link, while Google News presents a bit more of the news content. Effectively, Web Search directs viewers straight to the original website, while News lets them just browse Google News, sending less traffic to the original website. [1]
Which means Google News may provide less ad revenue to original website -- probably the crux of the problem here.
To handle that, Google provides two different bots: one with user agent `Googlebot', the other with `Googlebot-News'. If a website wants its content only in Web Search, and not in News, it's supposed to return proper /robots.txt -- and that does the trick. Way quicker and cheaper than any lawsuit!
[1] but hey, less is more! whoever makes it to the original site via Google News has clearly show elevated interest in the news piece, and thus should be worth more to ad providers.
The longer answer is that the newspapers are struggling financially, Google is not struggling, when snippets of content appear on the Google news page the newspapers believe they are 'improving' the Google brand without being compensated. They sued to have either Google pay them, or remove them from the News site.
What they fail to realize (and Google no doubt knows) is that if you aren't listed in Google you're not going to get nearly as much traffic (hence 'profit'). So Google apparently took a literal interpretation of the order and struck them from the books as it were, complete removal from the index.
So the newspapers have to make the following evaluation, 'what is it worth to us to be in Google's search results?' And is that value more or less than what we think they owe us for having our results on their news page?
Google clearly understands that its value for them to be in the search results and I believe they would say off the record that the value of being in the results is worth more than the ad revenue they get from the occasional story that makes it to the front page of Google news.
Sort of extortion, sort of natural consequences. Humorous though.
I guess SIP has weak support for Instant Messaging, which was the primary use case for Google Talk before video chat came along.
On the other hand the Jingle spec [1] contains many references to SIP:
"Furthermore, Jingle is not intended to supplant or replace existing Internet technologies based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP; RFC 3261). Because dual-stack XMPP+SIP clients are difficult to build, Jingle was designed as a pure XMPP signalling protocol. However, Jingle is at the same time designed to interwork with SIP so that the millions of deployed XMPP clients can be added onto existing Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) networks, rather than limiting XMPP users to a separate and distinct network."
If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways.
I really don't understand why the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft and the telcos can't agree on a standard. Guess business reasons are behind this. After all, walled gardens are great if you are the incumbent, it's how Skype got to be so valued.
If this had happened for email, we would have had to deal with a myriad of different clients, servers and 'interworking' gateways.
That was the networking prior to the wide adoption of IP and SMTP. There were DECnet mail clients, and clients for various other networking protocols, and users needed to know explicit bang-path routes and gateways.
Seeing this churn and this fragmentation is unpleasant, but it also means that you can see rapid advances and new features and different approaches. Once the market matures and the churn settles down, we'll see more of this sort out toward protocol consolidation.
In general, areas with high churn are some of the most interesting parts of the whole computer business. They're among the least mature, and often with the most innovations.
I hadn't looked at it from this perspective, thank you for the enlightenment. I'm just too impatient.
What irks me is that the IETF keeps banging away at protocols to solve issues like the transition from PSTN to IP (e.g. ENUM), or IM interoperability, but then nobody really implements them, or as in the case of ENUM, the incumbent telcos, at least in the USA, sit on it forever. Or some startup cooks up their own solution and kills it, like Skype.
I'm all for interoperability sorting itself out, but it does not seem to happen in the messaging/real time communications space. We still have SMS, a gazillion IM protocols, and many isolated islands of video calling. Skype, Qik, MSN, Yahoo, FaceTime, Google, I could go on. On top of that is the confounding issue of different audio and video codecs and whatever patent issues surround them. A formidable gordian knot, of which it will be interesting to see how it will be cut - if ever.
I'm far too impatient as well, I suppose. It seems to me (from the armchair where I quarterback) that IM interoperability isn't happening not because companies prefer the advantages of their chosen protocol, but because they simply want to "be the platform." I can't imagine a better advantage than actually being able to talk with any of my friends on any other client.
If email hasn't proven a standard can be beneficial to everyone, I don't know what would.
Web extensions are probably a small part of it but I have switched back to FF after ~5 years of Chrome. I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.
I consider myself a fan again!