lmorchard

I mean, also computers are hard and this is a thing that's worth getting right by reducing variables and taking it small steps at a time?

Nope, not correct.

Frankly, very few people know Mozilla. Many people know Firefox. There's been lots of brand research into this.

So, for many years now, "Firefox" has been morphing into a brand that encompasses many online tools beyond the browser that are all intended to be tied together by Mozilla's mission & manifesto.

Consider another angle: Mozilla doesn't have experience running a VPN. There are a lot of terrible mistakes to be made there.

If Mozilla can secure a good contract with folks who have run a VPN, isn't that a better technical scenario? I mean, sure, you have to assume that the contract has teeth to enforce privacy guarantees. But I think that's part of the value proposition here.

The VPN tech itself is not the only concern. Localization & payments & legal are also huge concerns beyond the US. This is also aimed at not necessarily tech-savvy folks, so that is also a concern.

> If I were a systems or c++ dev I'd start my own browser, apparently it's very profitable to do so...

If it were that trivial, systems & C++ devs would already be doing it.

Reads like FUD. From everything I've seen, "Firefox Premium" is not a thing as such. I can't read German, so maybe Chris Beard revealed something different in the interview from what he's been saying in other public meetings - but I doubt it.

There are plans to launch paid subscription services & products in a Firefox brand family. Some of services may even be independent from the browser and be separate standalone apps & products. Some of the services may even - gasp - work in a non-Firefox browser.

Think of things like Firefox Send, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Lockbox, a system-wide VPN, an in-browser secure proxy. Specific plans are still in progress, but I don't think any of them are literally "you pay for browser now"

Yeah, this is a kind of misleading headline. I can't predict the future, but AFAIK there are no plans to launch a paid version of Firefox.

There are plans to launch paid subscription services & products in a Firefox brand family. Some of services may even be independent from the browser and be separate standalone apps & products. Some of the services may even - gasp - work in a non-Firefox browser.

Think of things like Firefox Send, Firefox Monitor, Firefox Lockbox, a system-wide VPN, an in-browser secure proxy. Specific plans are still in progress, but I don't think any of them are literally "you pay for browser now"

You wrote "But you don’t get to dictate social norms for everyone else." My response of "you don't get to dictate boundaries" refers to that.

No assumption there, other than what you've been asserting about social norms as somehow justifying violating boundaries.

Doesn't matter that you have some anecdotal experience with the people you've asked. I've asked people about this in person and they seem to agree with me, so it's a wash.

And I'm sorry your enjoyment might be lessened, but maybe that's just a price you have to pay in a world where other people and their respective enjoyments & preferences exist.

Lots of people find hugs & contact both pleasing and comforting. Maybe there's even a general biological need for it. That doesn't generalize to suggest that unsolicited random hugs & contact with you in particular is necessary or welcome.

If you don't know a person, you don't know whether or not they find touch invasive. Don't touch them. You don't get to dictate boundaries for everyone else.

That's commonplace.

What can be done in the circumstance is this: keep your hands to yourself unless you know for sure. It's not difficult.

> most people are fine with casual touching

That's a nice assumption. Are you sure about that? Have you asked most people?

You might find that there are a lot of people who don't actually like it, but who find the consequences of making a fuss about it even worse.

Or, maybe, what if people kept their hands to themselves so that others didn't need to be on assertive defense against touchy grabby hands?

If you know for sure someone welcomes contact from you, then sure go ahead.

Otherwise, you're asking double from the person whose boundaries were violated: First, the discomfort of the unsolicited contact. Then, second, the discomfort of causing a scene to assert their boundaries.

It's nearly always easier to just accept the first small and incidental discomfort and move on - but it doesn't mean it was okay.

> just tell the person

Sure, that always works fine. They won't take offense or make it a thing or blow it up and make everything awkward from then after.

Of course, I'm being sarcastic. It's usually easier to just eat the discomfort and not make a fuss. But, it would be nicer to not get touched by randos in the first place.

I was alternating between a Windows desktop gaming PC and a Mac laptop for work since 2001 or so, with periodic hardware upgrades along the way. Finally gave up on the Mac laptop about 3 years ago and haven't been back.

It's definitely not "terrible as ever" as far as I'm concerned. I've been using Windows since the start and it's fully usable as my daily driver for development these days. Web dev under WSL and building Firefox works as well for me as it did under OS X.

Also I would say that the statement "The DOM is extremely challenging and working to the DOM destroys architecture" is a straw-man here, or at least a red herring.

The DOM is not all that challenging. It can be a tedious API, though. React shifts much of the effort to manage element and attribute changes to an algorithm, thus relieving tedium. Many folks find managing the DOM through a functional paradigm to be an enjoyable & productive approach to working with client side web apps.

Calm down, have some dip.

This article claims Web Components could replace frontend frameworks. React is a component library often used in a frontend framework.

React wraps the DOM with a Virtual DOM that provides a declarative abstraction for stateless updates. That is, you can write a plain function - given data X, produce DOM state Y - and React works out all the DOM calls required to arrive at the desired DOM tree from the current actual DOM tree.

So, with React, a developer does not need to make granular element-by-element, attribute-by-attribute changes. Many developers have found that leaving this diff / patch work up to the computer is easier than working out all the DOM calls themselves. Even more so than the concept of components, this has enabled architectures that many developers find pleasing.

Now, you can call that stupid or delusional if you like, but at least understand what's being referenced here.

Honestly, that machine is more a "luggable" than a laptop, in the grand tradition that includes Kaypro CP/M and Commodore SX-64 luggables with built-in CRTs.

See, the problem is being limited to OS X. Windows is good these days. Linux is good too.

Or, at least, when I left OS X, it was just as clunky & crashy & inconsistent as everything else. And I realized that all my tools ran elsewhere or I could find decent alternatives.

I got really tired of limiting myself to the Apple silo. IMO, Apple's only thing was that they were nearly perfect, and that was reason to accept lock-in. Now, not so much.

FWIW keyboard failures, lackluster upgrades, and the touchbar that looked gizmo-y but not useful led me to try a Dell XPS laptop a few years ago after nothing but Mac for 15 years. Windows is pretty good these days and nearly all my stuff works in WSL. I'm not going back.

I'd be surprised if those assumptions are largely true.

When so much of tech takes place in an open office setting, "don't work at a place that utilizes one" approaches "don't work in tech". And when so much of white collar work in general happens in that setting, it approaches "don't work"

Depends on the exact problem definition. This is a small, single-binary server, offering a built-in web UI & API, requiring very little configuration, working with a mobile app for Android phones. Took me 5 minutes to start getting some notifications from things around my house.

Sometimes you don't need a cargo van or a jumbo jet to get the job done when a skateboard will do.

The "standard" would have basically read "link your browser with SQLite v3.x.x or an exact bug-compatible clone".

An attempt was made to break down the SQL dialect and exact behavior of that version of SQLite, but the objection was that it's not really great to reverse engineer a standard from a single vendor implementation even if that vendor's product is open source. (eg. what happens when sqlite changes? do browsers stay fixed on an ancient exact version?)

If memory serves, the internet before 1993 had an official policy via the NSF that all but forbid commercial use. No e-commerce, no advertising, etc.

Sure, folks set up trades and conducted private sales via Usenet and whatnot. I think it was kind of frowned upon in many places, though. But, overall, it's weird to think that at one point, the whole net was basically non-profit.

I think it was around 1993 that NSF started bringing in commercial network providers. By 1998, the core pieces of the net had gone private.

Erlang makes me break out in facial twitches to this day.

The irony with your comment is that this is exactly one of the purposes of Test Pilot - to give new features a trial run rather than just "cramming stuff in as default".

It's an opt-in experiment, and at the end it's possible to a) be rolled in as a feature, b) spun off as an optional add-on, c) scrapped entirely.

Oh yeah, or d) taken back to the drawing board & re-engineered for another go-round.

For what it's worth, that is one of the proposed exit plans for experiments in Test Pilot. If it doesn't look like it would succeed as a built-in feature, spinning it off as an add-on is a possibility if it has enough support from developers & users to maintain it that way.