dblohm7

I'd love to see the original source for that one! Kind of ironic given RTO+bullpen approach we're seeing now.

> Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.

...for now. What happens if they end up with a future CEO who is more like Zuck?

> Why couldn't they use either the same PC as before

Windows 11 requires that the machine have a TPM.

This is wasting the time of accessibility engineers who are doing very important work. Please don't.

Windows 95's USER and GDI implementation was essentially an enhanced version of Win 3.1's. user32.dll and gdi32.dll were just thunking layers. The 16-bit components were guarded by a mutex named "Win16Mutex" to ensure serialized access to them from the 32-bit side.

Re: COM: I'd say it really depends on how you define "fail." I'm going to suggest that you're asking why it does not come up with most developers on a day-to-day basis.

I say this because COM and DCOM are very much alive in the Windows ecosystem, underlying WinRT, which underlies the object-oriented APIs for modern Windows apps.

This calls for a plug for https://webcompat.com/

Report compatibility issues and they'll either try to work with the websites or browser vendors to mitigate the issue.

Can confirm that catzkorn is a badass.

(Former Mozilla engineer)

Your complaints about Android are valid (I should know, I used to work on trying to get Android sandboxed), but site isolation on desktop has been out for a long time.

Respectfully, posting a bunch of bug numbers whose context you aren't familiar with is not a valid representation of the state of things.

Even if he said something in his role as CEO of Facebook?

"Young people are just smarter" and so on...

I don't do this often, but when I do, it's almost always when writing non-trivial concurrent code. I'll often "fuzz" the scheduling of multiple tasks around the region of code I'm working on to prove to myself that it works.

> All of its other problems are... caused by other provinces

I'm going to gently push back on that one a bit. Partially, yes, but also in part due to the federal government deferring to provinces in cases where it actually has the constitutional authority to override them.

You know you can remove that, right?

I worked at Mozilla during this time, originally on desktop and later on mobile.

I think the fundamental problem then (and still a problem today) is that Mozilla only ever had the budget to do Desktop XOR Mobile. Not both.

They basically mortgaged Desktop Firefox to build Firefox OS, but when things didn't pan out was quickly as they liked, they had to revert back to Desktop to save the cash cow.

After that experience, upper management became averse to mobile, to the extent that it was (and probably still is) very difficult to get resources allocated to mobile implementations of Gecko features that are supposed to be cross-platform. In practice many of those features are never implemented with mobile in mind.

> I have no insider knowledge but from my perspective the reason Firefox OS failed is the same reason WebOS failed and the same reason Windows Phone failed: apps.

I was at Mozilla during this time, and I remember a huge blocker was WhatsApp. They were not interested in porting, but at the time it was essentially the killer app in the same emerging markets that Firefox OS was targeting.

I can't say I'm surprised, TBH. I had a rough idea of where the problem might lie just by reading the title of the post. But I was fortunate enough to do an undergraduate degree where concurrency was actually taught, plus I've learned a lot over the years working in highly-concurrent, asynchronous environments.

Concurrent programming has been mainstream for some time now, but I don't think the level of expertise of most engineers has kept up. That becomes most apparent when software starts hitting concurrency pitfalls: performance problems, deadlocks, UAFs, and so on...

Thunderbird donations go directly toward funding the Thunderbird project, not the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation.

I know the other founder, Jamie Teh. Great guy, and probably the one engineer I've ever met who I can communicate with so well that we can do it in shorthand. I refer to our technical discussions as "mind melds."

> If you rely on the *-windows-gnu targets and have expertise in this area, we would be very happy to have you as a target maintainer.

Damn, I'd love to take that on, if only I had the time...

Albertan here: a supermajority of Albertans are opposed to separation, but it continues to be amplified by the press.

Danielle Smith, our provincial premier (equivalent to a state governor) is trying to pull a David Cameron to appease the separatist wing of her party.

The post should have included an asterisk next to cooperative multitasking: _Windows_ applications were cooperatively multitasked. DOS applications were run in V86-mode VMs that were preemptively multitasked.

As usual, there's a Raymond Chen post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100517-00/?p=14...

Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.

As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.

I had always kind of hoped that somebody would try to build production decoders using something like Halide. [1]

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3150211

Mozilla's Bugzilla instance is not an out-of-the-box installation of Bugzilla. It's awesome IMHO. I use GitHub issues now, and it pales in comparison. I miss bugzilla.mozilla.org every day.

I haven't worked for Mozilla since 2021, but back then the branches named after trees were used as feature branches for large projects, at least until those projects were in a good enough state to cleanly merge back into trunk without breaking CI.

I understand what you're saying, but still:

GitHub issues is terrible compared to Mozilla's Bugzilla instance. It's not even close.

Former Mozilla employee here.

I've been gone for a few years now and have no insight into this decision, so take anything I say with a grain of salt. Having said that, I think that, for better or worse, GitHub is probably the best location simply because it provides the lowest barrier to entry for new contributors.

I know that's spicy enough to trigger dozens of keyboard warriors hitting the reply button, but every little thing that deviates from "the norm" (for better or for worse, GitHub is that) causes a drop-off in people willing to contribute. There are still people out there, for example, who refuse to create an account on bugzilla.mozilla.org (not that this move to GitHub changes that).

I once compared the onboarding experience of a previous product I worked on to walking the timeshare gauntlet in the arrivals area of Mexican airports.

I’ve implemented them as you describe, but it’s still a bit hacky due to lots of corner cases — what if your target thread is currently executing in the kernel?

The special APC is nicer because the OS is then aware of what you’re doing— it will perform the user-mode stack changes while transitioning back to user-mode and handle cleanup once the APC queue is drained.

> The 2 implies an older API, its predecessor QueueUserAPC has been around since the XP days.

I wasn’t implying that APCs were new, I was implying that the ability to enqueue special (as opposed to normal) APCs from user-mode is new. And of course, that has always been possible from kernel-mode with NT.