The Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the legally non-profit Mozilla Foundation. They can't pay out their profit to their stake holders. So, the only profit motive comes from Mozilla employees wanting to keep their jobs.
2,318 karma · joined May 31, 2016
It has the countdown before you can click OK, so with the user holding down Enter for 5 seconds, you'd not even get a handful of files, and it blocks the file dialog from "untrusted" sites.
@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
#TabsToolbar {
-moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
}
- Without competitors, innovation is dead. If there was only one web-engine, why bother improving it further? Given that it's open-source, it could theoretically be forked, but in that moment you again have two different web engines or more. Also, Mozilla would have to fork Blink from day one, because many things in it, they do not consider acceptable.
- A monoculture means one security problem makes everyone vulnerable.
- Multiple implementations challenge standards. You still would want a definition of a standard, or an API if you will, to point web developers to. But those are only going to point problems out after you've already implemented it, and likely also after other websites are already using the feature productively. They also can't point out stupid specifications that aren't going to allow you to update your browser engine in the future. So, you'd be much more likely to have to break compatibility, which doesn't play well with the web.
- What is a "user"? Is it someone who downloaded it once? Is it just straight up the number of installs that ever happened? Or is it someone who actively uses the extension on a frequent basis? If you go by the numbers on the Chrome Store and on AMO, they likely have different definitions.
- Firefox recently introduced support for an extension API which is quite similar to the Chrome extension API (for the most part a superset), so lots of Chrome extensions have been ported over from Chrome just as recently and as a result will naturally not yet have as high user numbers.
- Firefox has traditionally had more powerful extensions and still continues to have a more powerful extension API. So, there's going to be extensions that are better, which only exist on Firefox, whereas similar extensions that were ported over from Chrome, therefore exist on both, will largely be ignored.
Analysing this on a non-empirical level:
- Firefox has less users.
- Chrome has somewhat less functionality built-in, which means users will have a higher need for extensions.
- With Firefox's extensions having traditionally been more powerful, the user base should still have many tinkerers.
- Firefox extensions are much more thoroughly vetted and malware is essentially a non-issue. On Chrome, it happens more often and I have seen people removing non-essential extensions for that reason.
- Chrome users are less likely to be privacy-conscious, which somewhat negates the previous point again and means they're more likely to just install an extension without thinking about it too much. On the other hand, Firefox users should be more likely to install privacy-enhancing extensions.
- Firefox for Android supports many extensions as well (though its user base is not the biggest).
The thing is that rewriting a browser engine doesn't just happen over night. No bigger browser engine has been written from scratch since the previous millennium. Also, no browser engine implements all currently specified webstandards. So, Mozilla would have to full-pelt develop Gecko to be able to keep up with Blink in webstandards, and then also develop Servo at more than full-pelt to be able to catch up in finite time.
That just doesn't add up, which is why Servo was specifically started as a research project. It might never be completed. They have been able to integrate various components from Servo directly into Gecko, therefore sharing the development work which they didn't really plan with, so that's one tiny reason to still hope for it to ever catch up, but yeah, just don't be too optimistic.
Having said all that, the integration of components from Servo into Gecko isn't done yet. WebRender is still missing, which should bring another good performance boost. It's sort of been overhyped with artificially complicated CSS animations [0], so the real world effect isn't that big, but it's still very much noticeable.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0hYIRQRiws
Aside from that, on Android, Mozilla is building a new framework for building Android browsers in general, called "android-components", which also includes a much cleaner integration of Gecko on Android, called "GeckoView". They've already rebased Firefox Focus onto GeckoView and are actively working on rebasing Firefox for Android (Fennec) onto it, too, which is internally called "Fenix". This should also significantly reduce the lagginess and speed up their development in the long-run.
I guess, what I'm mainly trying to say is that there's definitely still things happening.
In both of them, when sending something off to Amazon, we first of all got to rip off the bulk packaging, then individually packed each item in their oh-so-eco-friendly packaging (which I suppose still makes sense as they're individually sending those items out to customers), but then if it arrived at Amazon's warehouse and anything is wrong with that truck load, like a splinter from the pallet damaging one or two packages, then they would usually pack everything back onto the truck and send it back to us. Then we got to rip off their eco-friendly packaging to check each item, pack it again and send it off to Amazon again. The costs for sending the whole truck load back and forth, we as supplier got to pay.
To try to avoid this, we also specifically threw away pallets that would have even the slightest chance of splintering, or used them for other companies that we supplied to. So, in effect we got to put the Amazon deliveries in their eco-friendly packaging onto the shiniest dead trees that you'll ever see.
This double-role of the cartel office makes sense, because the whole point of a cartel is for a group of companies to be able to interact with the market like when they would hold a dominant market position.
There's also the step in between, which are official fusions or buyouts of big companies, which's only difference compared to a cartel is that they're officially talking to one another, not inofficially, but which would lead to one single company holding the dominant market position, at which point you would normally not count that to "cartels" at all anymore.
Also, Mozilla themselves provide a "fork", i.e. builds compiled with the corresponding flag, that allow unsigned extensions to be installed, after you set "xpinstall.signatures.required" in about:config to false. These builds are Firefox Developer Edition and Firefox Nightly, as well as Unbranded Builds [0] for Beta and Stable.
I believe most Linux distributions also compile with this flag, as disallowing unsigned extensions mostly helped against malware on Windows.
[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...
And even if that was the reason, your response didn't make anyone any smarter. How is it bad? Which you can't answer, because your only line of reasoning is that it has to be bad, because it's not as popular.
Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times.
I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time.
Obviously, the Mozilla Corporation's only stake holder is the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, so they can't pay out much of their revenue to anyone other than their employees (and to those in wages that are comparable with the rest of the industry; they have to publish their finances for that), so they certainly can afford to spend more money on things like that, but they're still trying to avoid spending huge amounts of money on something that can be done just as well in 99% of cases at a fifth of the cost.
As far as I know, they have a system where at least two independent volunteers have to approve an extension and some employees will occasionally check up on things, too, and can revoke volunteers that make mistakes too often or are plain malicious.
So, most of the time, this system will fail on the side of things being disapproved that should have been approved. It will much less often be the case that for example malware will get approved (especially since they also have automated malware scans, which is something that Google has, too).
TL;DR: OSM has marked Crimea as Russian territory with the reasoning that on the ground Russia has control over Crimea.
For example, not being able to use a smartphone is generally not considered a sensible state for a citizen to be in. Even only being able to choose from one offering, because the other is criminally bad in terms of privacy, is generally not considered sensible.
I'm saying "sensible" here, with which I mean that it's not in the interest of the population as a whole for individual persons to feel impeded like that. Often enough rulings don't come down to right or wrong, legal or not, but rather to this type of sensible.
Assuming that they properly stop personalizing ads, there should be little reason for them to continue collecting as much data.
It would especially also be a very clear violation of the law in many countries, if they did.
And since it's opt-out without a direct path to opting out, the number of users that will opt out is probably below 0.1%. So, it would likely be more damaging reputation-wise and in legal fees for them to not stop collecting this data, than to just let those <0.1% get away.
That's what I consider logical and is giving Google the benefit of the doubt. But it's your privacy. You don't need to give anyone any benefit. If you prefer, you absolutely should choose a doubt-free solution instead.
If you mean the multi-window behaviour, as of 2.10 the default is now set to single-window.
If you don't have 2.10 in your distro yet, you can toggle that on in the menubar: Windows -> Single-Window Mode
There may obviously be other problems, like the application not being available on Linux, or needing administrators with Linux knowledge, but that's nothing the end user has to deal with.
The unfortunate part is that this is just one department in our government that sort of independently does these investigations. Whether anything politically is going to come out of this result, like a law or even just a directive for other departments, is questionable at best.
Other departments will readily ignore this report, if it's convenient for them to use Windows 10. Heck, there's been a warning before from a federal data protection department that even Windows 10 Enterprise sends encrypted, undisclosed packets off to Redmond, and shortly after that the self-proclaimed Microsoft fan and Lord Mayor of Munich signed off on migrating back to Windows from their perfectly working Linux solution.
If they do that and the correct information changes without them updating, they're (rightfully) going to get sued by those businesses. By having it editable by anyone, they avoid that, even if it results in the information being wrong more often.
Proper ways to deal with this would involve employing actual human beings for moderation, for filling in / updating the map data, or for providing support and a verification process to businesses trying to correct their data.
All three of these solutions cost more money than the status quo and are things that Google doesn't really do anywhere, so I doubt this is going to get better anytime soon.
This could be a decent solution, though, if their explanation would need to be public. Basically leave a comment in order to downvote (with an indication that this comment was made in connection with a downvote), and therefore then also the ability for others to vote on this person's reason to downvote you.
Just today I was thinking to myself "All these music player apps (of which I tried five) are really convoluted, I should do my own."
So, I was brainstorming for a short while how I would do the layout and that I need this feature and that feature and yep, my idea would be essentially as convoluted as all the others. Maybe a tiny bit more refined for my specific use-case, but seriously not worth the effort.
No end user ever gets to see Google's privacy policy before their data is submitted to Google. Not even for Google Analytics, where I am pretty sure that Google does use the data, if the webpage owner isn't paying.
At the same time, Google will point to webpage owners, saying that they need to inform their users (which they do), but if Google wanted to "do the right thing", they would acknowledge that clearly webpage owners don't do that, and that therefore essentially any usage of Google Analytics data happens without user consent.
Under the GDPR, something like this would almost certainly not be legal and Google would be responsible, too, even if they're not the "controller", just the "processor", as the GDPR calls it.
Of course, we'll only know for sure once the lawsuits against Google have gone through.