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Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

blog.mozilla.org

211–220 of 311 posts

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla did agree, following the criticism on Pocket, that shipping new things like Pocket should be done as addons, and would do the work to fix that.

Citation needed.

Apologies to Randall Munroe: http://www.controller.com/listingsdetail/aircraft-for-sale/C...

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#212
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? That doesn't mean they are obliged to comply with whatever you think is "the right thing"®. Yes they are. Those who own one or another monopoly-type chokepoints are required to do the right thing in the sense of not abusing their monopolies. ISP are required to connect you to the real internet rather than a walled-garden simulation, Airline are required to not to hold their passengers ransom for more at inte…

Yes, and is Apple required to open their platform to porn apps ? This is USA where private property rights are supposedly important despite government's attempts in other direction.

> is Apple required to open their platform to porn apps ?

If they reached the same percentage numbers on mobile that Microsoft has on desktop, yes they would be.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#213
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad how true this is. I still fondly remeber the days of Firefox 2.5. IMO the best browser ever. It feels like Mozilla is trying to shove more shit down my throat with every update. I'm by no means trying to defend Microsoft here. I installed Win10 yesterday, and they replaced my FF default with Microsoft Edge (which is arguably better than IE, but still not something I'd use voluntarily). Why can't Mozilla ship…

Mozilla did agree, following the criticism on Pocket, that shipping new things like Pocket should be done as addons, and would do the work to fix that.

Pocket is not only piece shoved down user's throats - just one of the most obvious ones. There are also at least Hello and Sync, and then lots of less noticeable stuff.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the Dart VM running in Chrome and it's called Dartium. If Mozilla had not been so vigorously negative towards Dart the story of Dart and Blink may have turned out differently.

No, Google Chrome people rebelled against the overhead of a cross-language-engine garbage cycle collector. Are you aware of the technical details? Before this, before Blink forked WebKit, Apple rejected naive DartVM pre-integration changes for the same reason: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... Whining for the poor Google-Goliath, blaming little Mozilla-David, is rich. No comment on the P…

The Dart team is not a large team and not an arrogant team. Led by Lars Bak, they thought to try and make something that ran faster than JavaScript by doing away with 'monkey patching.' Lars and Kasper Lund took all their experience working with V8 to make something that avoided the bottlenecks. Gilad Bracha designed a good working language and it works without many "gotchas" along the way. It's a pleasure to use. The Google Chrome team was not enthusiastic about it even before Blink, as you correctly state, but what I was trying to say is that if the industry hadn't reacted so negatively to Dart because of some percieved ulterior motive by Google, the Chrome team may have been persuaded to put some more thought into it and make it happen. Lars Bak, Kaser Lund, Gilad Bracha and the rest of the team did something cool and don't get any props for it because they work for Google. Such is life. I recall Mozilla disliked it the most, which I assume was driven by you, the creator of JavaScript. Dart was never going to replace JavaScript you know, because even then they were saying that anything that can be written in JavaScript, will be written in JavaScript. JavaScript is unstoppable, but people should look at Dart for what it is, another tool in the toolkit.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#216
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to settings. There is an entire section to set all your default apps.

Oh I'm aware as that's where I had to change it (chrome didn't give me a "make default" button which makes me wonder if that's not possible in Windows 10).

It's not possible. Microsoft intentionally removed the API that allowed web browsers to offer that option in Windows 10.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#217
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, everybody feels like they should have a say in the direction of large Free SW projects, even if they have never contributed. Some criticisms of Mozilla are fair (even if blown out of proportion, like the Pocket issue), but one can not expect a project to make development even more complex by adding a "revert it because this one guy doesn't like it" button for each change or feature.

Technically, everyone has a say in the direction of a large, free software project. It's called a fork.

Practically, it's impossible to maintain one without a proportionally large team that can spend proportionally big amount of time.

As one of most obvious examples (unrelated to Mozilla or Microsoft): there are uncountably many custom Android ROMs out there, left abandoned. And most were merely cosmetic changes or even packaging (like inclusion or removal of certain pieces by default). Usually, unless luck is that there's a large social momentum and a lot of advertising among same-minded people, fork maintainer struggles for a few versions then gives up and surrenders to the upstream way of thinking. Sad but true.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about Mozilla or Firefox. I used to, but not anymore. Two reasons why. First, copying Chrome's UI. Second, forcing Brendan Eich out. These days Mozilla comes across as a bunch of whiners and activists rather than a technology company. Maybe Rust will be successful but I don't want to be part of an ecosystem where straight talking and free thought is banned. Do you want to submit a pull request and be tol…

> Do you want to submit a pull request and be told not to use gendered pronouns or avoid using certain words because it makes people feel unsafe? Is that really true? Can you give an example of that?

    > avoid using certain words because it makes people feel
    > unsafe
Which words do you think should be appropriate for a non-profit software organization which Mozilla don't think are?

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this: It was wrong for Microsoft, and it was wrong for Mozilla. But it's worse when it's Microsoft, because it's easier to move to a different browser than to move to a different OS, and so it's harder to escape Microsoft's attempts to force you to do what they want you to. Also, Microsoft has much more of a history of deliberately doing this to people, and so the suspicion is higher with Microsoft. Mozilla…

Is it harder to move to a different browser in Windows 10? I feel like you keep emphasizing how easy it is to change your browser and yet are still registering a complaint. I'm not sure what you are complaining about.

I read a summary of the results of a user research team checking whether end-users managed to actually set a different default browser on Windows 10.

Outside of the "power users" group, I seem to remember that not a single user succeeded.

Re: Open Letter to Microsoft’s CEO: Don’t Roll Back the Clock on Choice and Control

#220
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to defend Mozilla's hypocrisy. Microsoft is in a different league with Windows 10, however. This was what they dreamed of 15 years ago. Once you install Windows 10, it's no longer your PC, it is Microsoft's. You can't choose to avoid an update. Think about that. This means Microsoft can do anything it wants to with your computer: * change your settings * farm your compute cycles * put in advertising * i…

No, they can't legally do any of the negative things you've listed, and they aren't an organization with a history of criminal action against customers. This brings the OS in line with the behavior of many applications (Chrome for example) in keeping things always up-to-date & secured, and it's done because most users are incredibly lazy and ignorant.

> they aren't an organization with a history of criminal action against customers

Technically correct I guess. However: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation

Until recently, Microsoft wasn't really dealing with their users' data. This requires that you trust them. Personally I trust them just enough to use their OS (or rather, I rely on the fact that they know people watch closely what Windows does), but I definitely don't trust them to keep my data.

More precisely I don't trust them (or any other company) when they say they won't sell my data, or spy on me, or use my data against me. Because, when you think about it, there is absolutely no way to verify that they keep their word.

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