Firefox 38.0.5
Firefox 38.0.5
Posted Jun 5, 2015 8:40 UTC (Fri) by seneca6 (guest, #63916)In reply to: Firefox 38.0.5 by gerv
Parent article: Firefox 38.0.5
But this Pocket thing is more than just a deleteable URL, it's code - open source, sure - whose only purpose is to connect to a proprietary service to fulfill a function for which at least one Free alternative exists. I do fail to see why this should be included by default, and I thank in advance the Iceweasel maintainers that it is very likely not included by default on my system.
The alternative is not to start using exclusively open-source search engines, but to keep Pocket as an extension.
Posted Jun 5, 2015 13:12 UTC (Fri)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (23 responses)
Or do you know of someone giving away this service for free, using open source code, who has server infrastructure than can cope with hundreds of millions of users? If so, where do they get their funding?
Although your "at least one Free alternative" qualifier is interesting; are you saying that the rightness of including a feature or not depends on whether there's a Free alternative? Surely if there's a principle involved, from your point of view, then this shouldn't matter, and we should all go without rather than use a proprietary thing?
Pocket is not an extension because in our opinion, being able to save stuff to read later is a widely-useful feature.
Gerv
Posted Jun 5, 2015 13:48 UTC (Fri)
by seneca6 (guest, #63916)
[Link] (18 responses)
I'm not saying anything of what you cited, and I certainly do not insist that people go "without". It's the "included by default" that I think is a pity. The promise of Firefox was a minimalist browser with lots of easily installable extension. Including Pocket by default does not really fit in that picture.
Go on, I'm sure Mozilla will find plenty of other "widely-useful" features in the future. Then again, you said you deserve the support of everyone in LWN's readership, and that the state of the Free Web would be worse without Mozilla. Certainly! but not every minor issue that people complain about - and rightly so - questions the very existence of Mozilla. You cannot ask for full support of all your decisions from all of LWN's readers. And nothing worse than some criticism is what happens here.
Posted Jun 5, 2015 14:17 UTC (Fri)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (17 responses)
Right - and yet the Pocket service complies with Mozilla's privacy policy. So we've managed to find a way to provide a service that people want to use, at no cost, not even in their privacy.
"The promise of Firefox was a minimalist browser with lots of easily installable extension."
The web was a very different place 10 years ago; is it at least possible that what people expect of a browser has changed? If you want to know what I think about what a browser should be, see: http://blog.gerv.net/2015/05/the-jeeves-test/ .
Gerv
Posted Jun 5, 2015 20:43 UTC (Fri)
by seneca6 (guest, #63916)
[Link] (16 responses)
But when there is criticism about features - apart from trolling, of course - it is because people care, they like their browser, they want it to improve, and for my part, I get unhappy when they see it moving in the wrong way. It's not just about Pocket in particular, it's the idea of including more and more into the core what used to be outside.
Which brings me to the second part. Sure, the web was different 10 years ago (and particularly 15 years ago). What has not changed - rather, it has grown - is the extreme diversity of people using it. As you see in these discussions, everyone wants his browser to be something different. The idea of a minimalist core with plenty of extensions is brilliant and timeless. It has the potential of making everyone happy. So one can have a "Firefox Jeeves Edition" that bundles extensions, which might even be the default download! And at the same time, one can strip them off or get a minimal build for those who do not want _all_ of the bundled extensions.
But now? If I want to get rid of feature X (yesterday EME, today Pocket), I have to resort to alternative builds. What if I then want _one_ of these features? There won't be any extension to add to my minimal build. All or nothing.
Posted Jun 6, 2015 8:42 UTC (Sat)
by rghetta (subscriber, #39444)
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Posted Jun 7, 2015 7:16 UTC (Sun)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (14 responses)
Absolutely right, and I'll say it more directly: I have no idea what Firefox is trying to be anymore. Is it still about being a web browser?
Today, Pocket and Telefonica. Tomorrow, who knows?
(Seriously, if anyone knows, I'd love to hear. These core features look like random weekend projects to me.)
Posted Jun 7, 2015 12:10 UTC (Sun)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (12 responses)
Your slippery slope is not very slippery, IMO.
Gerv
Posted Jun 8, 2015 15:18 UTC (Mon)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (11 responses)
This is my question: why build video chat into the browser? Why not a bitcoin blockchain, or instant messaging, or bittorrent, or todo lists, or email (ha), or Dropbox, or blog publishing, or anything other truly awesome, groundbreaking thing? What is the vision?
Posted Jun 8, 2015 15:55 UTC (Mon)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (7 responses)
One application: have you ever been to a website where it offers "Having trouble? Click here to talk to a customer service person", and you click, and you get a puny little text box to connect to a guy in Nowhereistan who is probably talking to 3 people at once, and replies once every 5 minutes? What if that was an actual no-hassle voice and video connection? Much better and quicker to get your problem solved.
Gerv
Posted Jun 8, 2015 18:29 UTC (Mon)
by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
[Link] (2 responses)
Could be... I'll believe it when I see it. For now, to me, it just looks like gluing fun hacks into Firefox because that's easier than fixing bugs or keeping YSlow working. *shrug*
Posted Jun 10, 2015 8:47 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (1 responses)
Gerv
Posted Jun 10, 2015 16:44 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link]
Sorry it's not better news. If you need YSlow, I believe it does work with some not-too-old versions of Firefox.
Gerv
Posted Jun 10, 2015 13:18 UTC (Wed)
by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
[Link]
You didn't answer (that I saw?) the specific question about Pocket. It had a working extension - it was NOT a "weekend-project" to include it in Firefox core. Pocket very much feels like something that worked best as an extension - entirely optional - and that also addresses any issue about it being a proprietary service as well. Why go to the effort to include it in the core, and probably what's on most people's minds: was there money involved? If so, that is the slippery slope, IMO.
Posted Jun 10, 2015 19:04 UTC (Wed)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (2 responses)
I much prefer text chats to voice. I have in fact sat down with someone and opened a notepad window so we could communicate more clearly. It isn't worth the time to work through accents or stuttering.
Posted Jun 10, 2015 19:17 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (1 responses)
I also think that people are yet to think up some of the cooler use cases for the instant ability to be talking to someone else over the web with voice and video.
Gerv
Posted Jun 10, 2015 19:20 UTC (Wed)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
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Posted Jun 8, 2015 16:07 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (2 responses)
The browser as an OS need to provide APIs which access hardware, like cameras and microphones, for video chat applications to work over the net without a separate client application. This is the same reason WebGL exists, or the touch API, to provide a hardware API that can be used by platform independent code in the browser OS.
Im not sure what hardware APIs are missing from the browser these days, there is support for local storage, GPU graphics, maybe not GPU computation (so no bitcoin yet), video and audio encoding as well as playback, client/server and peer/peer sockets, maybe not wireless configuration or bluetooth, and there still must be some work to be done on two-factor auth because the standards the browser does support don't seem to be widely enough used.
So to know where the browser is going to go, look at the negative space of where the browser isn't now, then you know where it is going to be. Posted Jun 8, 2015 15:42 UTC (Mon)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
Probably more than anything causing confusion is that the definition of a minimal web browser has increased in scope substantially in the last 10 years on its trajectory of being a standard OS platform, a scope which was predetermined the moment browsers (Netscape Navigator) gained the capability to run code client side. The fact that a browser is an OS platform all on its own is what scared MS so badly in the late '90s, they saw that the future was web applications, like WebRTC, and not native like Skype. It has just taken us a while to get there, to where something like a Chromebook is actually a viable computer, even with the rough edges that exist today the browser will only ever get more comprehensive to the point where traditional desktops and client applications will become a minority market rather than the dominant one.
Well actually mobile phones are the dominant model of computer now, in 20 years there will probably be adults who have never used a traditional desktop OS.
Posted Jun 8, 2015 23:19 UTC (Mon)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (3 responses)
If we are to accept your condescending, snarky, rhetorical questions as an answer, then Mozilla's own Weave service isn't Free by that definition either, is it?
Posted Jun 9, 2015 8:18 UTC (Tue)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (2 responses)
I assume the original questioner's definition of Free service was that it has a free-as-in-freedom client and a free-as-in-freedom server. If that's the definition, Weave is Free.
Gerv
Posted Jun 9, 2015 20:26 UTC (Tue)
by seneca6 (guest, #63916)
[Link] (1 responses)
There are public instances of Wallabag; the good folks from Framasoft run one. It seems to be at least partially translated in English. Certainly not good enough for the hundreds-of-millions-of-users-immediately criteria, but a start.
I also think that it is a false dichotomy to say: you can either use Google or other for-profits with big data centers, or you self-host (and are thus considered marginal). Even for the self-respecting geek, the Internet gets too complex to self-host everything from mail to voice to collaborative services. Given the ridiculous prices for renting dedicated servers, there is a middle ground that I call "friend computing" - you are hosted by the geek of your confidence. (I do know this does not work for everyone; some prefer being watched by a presumably anonymous NSA or other big-data to _possibly_ being watched by your friend. But it can work for some others.) And, on a larger scale, you have non-profits and communities like Framasoft, running public instances of Free Software services and asking for donations. In the long run, peer-to-peer web applications (where each browser is also a tiny server) might become another alternative.
Posted Jun 10, 2015 8:25 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link]
I agree that a) the API the Pocket integration uses should be open, b) it should be fixed, and that c) it should be possible to configure Firefox to use a different API endpoint. a) and c) are certainly true; I'm not sure what the position is on b).
Gerv
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I second that. With all respect to the hard work of Mozilla developers, I also find that building the pocket extension into the core of the browser is worst than offering an official Mozilla extension, especially since Pocket is not a Mozilla service.
But which Mozilla ends up advertising and "locking" its users into.
As other comments pointed out, there was an official pocket extension, AFAIK already working.
Is the new core option better ? There was something an extension cannot do and this pocket interface needs ?
If there are technical reasons to have a pocket client in core code, IMHO a better move would be defining a standard interface aimed at extension writers, perhaps it will be used not only by pocket-like services.
Otherwise is difficult to understand what users gain from this change (apart not having to download the pocket extension) and why pocket and not, say, Dictionary.com, ebay or whatever else users request.
Looking at bugzilla entries, it appears that pocket integration was a big work, it has even its own telemetry. Frankly, all this just to integrate a read-later third party service seems a bit overkill.
Again, why not simply offering an extension ?
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I'm willing to buy off on adding audio/video functionality to Firefox as a way to leverage video chat and so on. I see value in that for a large number of users. But I think this thread was derailed a bit by that discussion.
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