I despair at some of the comments on posts like this.
"Mozilla needs to attract new users!!"
Mozilla proceeds to add new features which new users might like
"No! Not like that"
Like, what do you actually want? A browser with a UI that hasn't changed since Stallman was in nappies? Things have to change in order to grow. Not everything is going to be right for you and that's OK.
> Not everything is going to be right for you and that's OK.
Yes, this is exactly right, some things won't be for everyone. The best part of Firefox (for me, besides being able to have vertical tree-style tabs) is that more times than not, you can disable and/or hide the change you don't like, as demonstrated by the blog post.
Sure, I might not agree with every change they make to default choices but they at least let us power users configure the browser so it ends up just like how we want it to be, and for that I'm very grateful, as it tends to be uncommon in this day and age.
I don't understand what you're upset about here. Firefox added this feature and, like all features, it gets in the way for some people. This article is explaining how to disable it if you're one of those people.
Nobody is saying the feature should be removed or scolding Mozilla for adding it, they're just explaining how to get rid of it if it annoys you.
The post is fine. People can disable whatever they want - I certainly do. But (at the time of writing) half a dozen comments were complaining about "useless cruft" being added.
Same as the AI integrations. There's obviously a market for them so FF has done some fairly sensible work to add them. And then people here explode like Mozilla has kicked their puppy.
Welcome to the amazing firefox user community. Out of 10 commenters, you hear 15 different complaints, very often contradictory but always stated very strongly as the absolute way that firefox should be (even when it lets you configure it that way anyway).
But in all seriousness, it seems to me that firefox has relatively more opinionated users, or users who are very specific/strict about their setup and what they want, and many are often fast and vocal in expressing opinions compared to the other browsers. I don't think we see posts around with people complaining about features in other major browsers in the same way (of course I could just miss them because I would pay less attention to other browsers).
I am pretty sure somebody must have complained about the ff quantum update too, back in the days.
> I am pretty sure somebody must have complained about the ff quantum update too, back in the days.
You're right, a bunch of extensions weren't working initially, large parts of the community were upset about that. Eventually, as more extensions were supported and new alternatives emerged, it eventually died out and was almost completely forgotten about, until you reminded me of it just now.
> You're right, a bunch of extensions weren't working initially, large parts of the community were upset about that.
Honestly, I'm still sad about that. It caused a hit to the usability and functionality of Firefox. Some of that has since been compensated for, but parity has not yet been achieved and probably never will.
But even with the functionality reduction, Firefox is still better than the alternatives for me, so I continue to use it regardless. Perhaps, eventually, something better will come along.
Isn't the point that browsers should, ideally, be for web-browsing and nothing more? Even embedding a PDF reader is controversial, but it seems entirely unnecessary that a browser should come with its own emoji-picker—what's wrong with the system's own?
I'm old enough to remember people grumbling when audio and video elements were added. Useless crap in a browser! Just compile your own MP3 player if you want to listen to music on a website!
Same as WebUSB - heaven forbid that a website can become more useful by flashing firmware to a device!!
The web is a platform. It will grow and mature into something we can't possibly imagine. It's OK for browsers to try new things to see what sticks.
I assume that Mozilla have done some research showing people like typing emoji but don't know how to use their system emoji picker. Even in an ultra-purist world where a browser does nothing other than render HTML (death to JS!!!) surely people will want to type into boxen and POST text somewhere?
Even before that, there were folk moaning that "Mosaic has ruined the web with its pesky IMG tag - images should be opened in a user-specified viewer app rather than inline!".
Similarly, there were people who complained about forms and buttons at roughly the same time and, a few years later, img maps, frames, layers (okay, with good reason), and CSS.
They (or their spiritual heirs) always pop up on Firefox threads, for some reason. For those people, I want to point out that Lynx is right here and is as usable as it's ever been: https://github.com/ThomasDickey/lynx-snapshots
I used it for both GrapheneOS (it flashed a new OS to my Android phone) and for updating the firmware for a niche LoRaWAN electronics board.
The alternative would have been booting to Windows, downloading some dodgy .exe from an advert infested site, and running untrusted code which inexplicably required my admin password.
I'm pleased the Web is able to put a stop to nonsense like that.
They can start by supporting more standards. It's getting harder and harder to view any modern site on this engine and the page load times are insane when compared to a Chromium stepchild like Vivaldi
> It's getting harder and harder to view any modern site on this engine
Is it? What website can you not view in Firefox today? I almost exclusively use Firefox on my computer (Safari on mobile), and can't remember the last time I encountered a website that wasn't viewable in Firefox. Even my bank, which tends to be whiny about what browser you use, works 100% in Firefox too, even with all the warnings.
I'm sorry, but that's bollocks. I browse exclusively in FF and I can't remember a single page in the last couple of years that refuses to work on it (unless it's a weird web experiment).
I've used Firefox since it's early days and I don't want UI changes. The move from XUL was bad, but I moved on. Since Photon, and even with Australis the UI changes have been undesirable to me.
The only modern Firefox feature I like is the omnibar and the "bangs" - * for bookmarks, % for tabs, ^ - for history, @ for named search engines etc. But we have lost far more features then we have gotten. We don't even have configurable search engines from the settings anymore.
Emojis always felt juvenile to me, call me a boomer (not really a boomer in age), but they are an eyesore for me.
My ideal Firefox build would regain classic chrome from pre-Australis days with integrated omnibar. The UI would never change. Along this I would like some plugins that were only possible with XUL. But I know we will never get this unless someone actually makes these classic forks as secure and performant as modern Firefox.
If it weren't for prefs and userChome.css I would have long since abandoned Firefox. Those are the only things that makes it still worth using.
> We don't even have configurable search engines from the settings anymore
It's annoying, but you can still toggle `browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` to true and it will restore the add/edit/remove buttons for search engines.
The default camera app has this off by default. Most of the ones I've tried do.
But do you remember every options you've randomly toggled over the years? It's pretty easy to see how someone would flip on geotagging, forget about it, then be shocked a few months later when they discover all their photos are leaking their location.
> But I don't honestly think Google could have consulted their community. It's just too big.
The thing is, they frequently do. They have developer relations people, they publish blog posts about breaking changes, they work with W3C and other standards bodies, they reply on bug trackers.
But, in this case, nothing. Just a unilateral change with no communication. Not even a blog posts saying "As of April, this functionality is deprecated."
On Android 16. Open photo. Hit share. Hit Bluetooth. Pick a device to send it to. Wait for xfer to finish. Observe in exifview. What detail is missing?
At the height of the pandemic, the UK mandated zero-rating data for mobile connection to .gov.uk and .NHS.uk domains, along with several other charitable sites.
(I was part of the team working on that proposal.)
Do you have heared of IP addresses and that large institutions especially government institutions have their own blocks from the address space? Mapping these is kind of easy.
meanwhile Czechia literally BANNED free Wi-Fi in restaurants and other establishments during COVID, so people will spend there less time, I understood the rationale if people already didn't have mobile data in phones anyway
other things Czech gov banned during COVID-19 was singing in public places, no kidding!
And I'm not even going to complain they banned sale of the toys, colored pencils and other items so people will spend less time in the shop, so me and kids could just look at the colored pencils behind the tape because we had to go to shop anyway.
> other things Czech gov banned during COVID-19 was singing in public places, no kidding!
So, wait, no Christmas carolling? Was this the doing of Babis? Then only the drunk shall sing in public places, mainly because they're too drunk to care.
"Church services are limited to a maximum of 100 people, and singing is prohibited; the same applies to public participation in municipal and regional government meetings."
"In other regions, the operation of schools and educational facilities is being restricted in accordance with the Education Act, and that of universities in accordance with the Higher Education Act, such that singing is not part of the curriculum; furthermore, with the exception of the first stage of primary education in elementary schools, sports activities will also be temporarily excluded from the curriculum."
The UK does have net neutrality, and it's quite strictly regulated by Ofcom, which produces an annual report showing compliance and highlighting any issues it has investigated:
Things like restrictions on tethering and using a SIM in a router are forbidden.
Unlike most countries, net neutrality has never been a political football in the UK.
Ofcom groups zero rating schemes into three types:
Type one - government and NGO services (always allowed).
Type two - where categories of service (e.g. video or music streaming apps) are zero rated, but any service fitting into the category can apply to be zero rated by the network.
Type three - any other kind of zero rating.
Things like the VOXI Unlimited Social Media packages fit into Type Two, so are expressly permitted.
For the rest, Ofcom assessed the impact on consumers, which is generally low.
This is not net neutrality, all network traffic is not treated equally.
Ofcom seems to have invented their own definition of net neutrality and placed it on that website, but calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. This is tiered access.
It doesn't meet a perfect theoretical definition of net neutrality, but it's a set of defined legal limits on the extent to which providers can treat different kinds of traffic differently.
Net neutrality is not theoretical, it is literally the default setting.
Any deviation from that default requires special effort be taken to identify network traffic and treat it differently, and as soon as you have made that effort you cannot truthfully claim to have net neutrality. The UK does not prohibit net neutrality but it does not require it either (according to the comment I replied to which I have not verified).
I guess to me this seems a bit like saying that free markets are the default setting. We’re not in some kind of perfect state of nature. We’re in a complex interconnected society where virtually everything of any importance is regulated to some extent. What you’re saying seems like saying “as soon as you impose one regulation you no longer have a free market”.
This non sequitur strains my ability to assume good faith on your part. We're not talking about markets, we're talking about a utility.
Does your water company bill you differently depending on what you use the water for? Your gas company? Electric? This is not a complicated concept to understand, please make an effort.
What would be the model of a country with stronger net neutrality laws? I think EU regulations are now a touch stronger than UK regulations due to post-Brexit divergence, but by world standards, the UK has strong net neutrality protections.
I'm in the UK and am currently being paid to use electricity.
My energy provider uses a tracker tariff which can change every half hour (it does have a maximum cap to prevent the issues seen in Texas). Prices are currently negative, so every kWh I use right now means the electricity company pays me.
Nuclear promised energy which was "too cheap to meter". But solar actually delivered.
If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
It seems silly, but actually... it's driving useful behavior I suppose. Then again, maybe a good government would notice this and just fast track grid storage rather than distribute that work to all the citizens.
A lot of the value to homeowners is essentially arbitrage on the retail cost of electricity: when prices are high you're going to be paying a lot more to pull electricity from the grid than you would be paid to supply it, so you're better off using up the buffer yourself as opposed to paying for electricity from the grid.
> If you had a big enough battery, could you sell electricity back to the grid later? Get paid to charge the battery, get paid to discharge the battery?
Yes, some people do this. There's even a startup built around the idea: https://www.axle.energy/
Sure you could. How much do you think they will pay you per kw? 1/10 what you paid them and they will charge you for using their infrastructure..at least in the US they do.
There is no such thing as "the utility" in Europe. It is legally not allowed for a single company to both operate (parts of) the grid and trade in electricity.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive.
If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
>A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
And is that actually worth it to anyone who does the math?
An optimistic 161 pound saving compares to how many of my battery cycles for example? My car costs 50-60k so battery degradation is not nothing.
The arbitrage difference between filling your battery cheaply and discharging when prices are high is greater than any theoretical wear on your battery.
Even better if you are being paid to charge your battery.
The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour. That's enough of a buffer to spin up gas turbines for example, so you can actually shut them completely off.
>The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k.
Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost.
Some will still take it but this seems just like a more deceptive version of those uber driver that get a pricey car and then find out that combined with maintenance, degradation/devaluation and other hidden costs they don't actually make that much driving around.
>I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour.
I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there.
You can't discharge those to 0% shouldn't charge them to 100%, many won't be charged fully (or connected)
+ If I need to leave in the morning like most I don't want to necessarily be dropping charge into the grid.
>My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k. Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost
Problem is we don't have good data on actual costs. So we don't know if we're talking about something substantial or something hypothetical. Absent that data I think my comment is fair.
>I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there
No. We are talking about 10% of battery capacity so your battery at 80% would only need to go down to 70%.
A problem we have in the UK at the moment is that we have gas turbines running even if not needed just incase the wind suddenly drops. It takes (or can take) about an hour to spin up a turbine from cold. So a battery supply that could cover that hour would mean we could use a lot less gas. Most of the time it isn't even used, and if it is, most probably won't use that full 10% and once the gas turbines have spun up it could recharge the batteries.
To link it back to the earlier comment, even if the maths is bad for EV as battery storage, you can still use it as battery of last resort. It would be expensive, so ev owners would still be up on the deal, but there would be a system on place to actually use them when actually needed.
"Mozilla needs to attract new users!!"
Mozilla proceeds to add new features which new users might like
"No! Not like that"
Like, what do you actually want? A browser with a UI that hasn't changed since Stallman was in nappies? Things have to change in order to grow. Not everything is going to be right for you and that's OK.
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