Firefox devs reveal disturbing signs of sanity





  • Just so you know, I clicked on none of these links, I did not even check in the status bar to see the actual destination, yet I feel entitled to say that TRWTF is that people keep talking about Firefox while it is beyond obvious that because of Chrome, Safari and IE, there is no platform or situation or organization where Firefox is an optimal choice. And their logo is ugly.



  • I dunno. All the Webkit browsers have what looks to me like butt-ugly font rendering, I truly dislike the IE8 and IE9 user interface, and the availability of extensions and plugins for Firefox is second to none. I've been using it as the main browser at the school I netadmin since I first worked out how to use login scripts to configure FF 1.5, and it gave me very little trouble until the rapid-release insanity started and fucked up the extension compatibility system.

    The school is currently using version 6, but I will very soon be switching it to ESR 10.



  • Chrome is Google's attempt at lock-in, and is as aesthetically pleasing as a decaying opossum. Safari doesn't run on Linux, and is miserable on Windows. And IE 10 doesn't run on anything but Windows 7 and 8. So, Firefox might be just the thing to get a uniform environment in the workplace.

    Reversed that for you!



  • @flabdablet said:

    I've been using it as the main browser at the school I netadmin since I first worked out how to use login scripts to configure FF 1.5

    Ah, the Dictature of the Proletariat in action. Forcing a sub-par browsing experience on innocent, helpless children... shame on you.



  • Opera



  • nobody likes Opera. Go away.



  • @flabdablet said:

    All the Webkit browsers have what looks to me like butt-ugly font rendering

    I guess Webkit uses Mac-style font rendering instead of Windows-style; whichever of the two you're used to, the other tends to look {fat|anemic|out of place|ugly|wrong|…}.



  • @Gurth said:

    whichever of the two you're used to, the other tends to look {fat|anemic|out of place|ugly|wrong|…}.
     

    This is partially true.

    On an actual Mac, the AA looks fine, even if it's not what you're used to.

     But Safari/Win (and incidentally Firefox's) AA is some crazy fucked up bullshit.



  • @dhromed said:

    nobody likes Opera. Go away.
    Now don't be so dismissive. There are a couple of good ones, especially from the italian composers, like Puccini or Rossini.

     



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    there is no platform or situation or organization where Firefox is an optimal choice. And their logo is ugly.
     

    I give you one: smartcard client side SSL authentication under linux. The only browsers i know capable of accepting pkcs11 librairies are firefox and internet explorer. You can't pay your taxes online in my country without one of these browser :)

    I give you another one: workplace with linux, windows and apple. Need a common browser to reduce maintenance cost of internal web sites and  web applications :)


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Anonymouse said:

    @dhromed said:
    nobody likes Opera. Go away.

    Now don't be so dismissive. There are a couple of good ones, especially from the italian composers, like Puccini or Rossini.

    I prefer The Marx Brothers, although Looney Toons will do in a pinch.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I prefer The Marx Brothers,
     

    What I notice from that old stuff is how much they're swaying. It reminds me of in-game characters when idly standing aboot. I never understood why animated game characters always sway like fuck. Even in really good stuff, like the in-game dialog cutscenes in Deus Ex: Hurrmen Ruvelushen the characters are swaying about like they need to pee really bad.



  • @Gurth said:

    I guess Webkit uses Mac-style font rendering instead of Windows-style; whichever of the two you're used to, the other tends to look {fat|anemic|out of place|ugly|wrong|…}.

    On non-Mac platforms (particularly on Linux) I have no idea what Webkit is trying to accomplish with font rendering, but it looks horrid (in particular, letter spacing seems too tight). It looks far worse than normal Mac text on a Mac, which is OK to my eye provided you're using a nice hi-res monitor (on a 1280x1024 screen, the Mac's ideological aversion to any degree of hinting makes text look like arse).



  • What is about the Internet that has caused it to spawn so many amateur typographers?



  • @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:

    I prefer The Marx Brothers,
     

    What I notice from that old stuff is how much they're swaying. It reminds me of in-game characters when idly standing aboot. I never understood why animated game characters always sway like fuck. Even in really good stuff, like the in-game dialog cutscenes in Deus Ex: Hurrmen Ruvelushen the characters are swaying about like they need to pee really bad.

    That bothered me about DXHR too. They all have the same exact animation for it, too, so it makes it look like they're all really the same person wearing different costumes and talking with their hands a lot.



  • @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:

    I prefer The Marx Brothers,
     

    What I notice from that old stuff is how much they're swaying.

    THEY'RE ON A SHIP.




  • @dhromed said:

    nobody likes Opera. Go away.


    How about • Firefox Opera?


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @DaveK said:

    @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:

    I prefer The Marx Brothers,
     

    What I notice from that old stuff is how much they're swaying.

    THEY'RE ON A SHIP.

     

    [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avaSdC0QOUM&feature=relmfu"]THEY'RE ON A BOAT![/url]

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @DaveK said:

    @dhromed said:

    @boomzilla said:

    I prefer The Marx Brothers,
     

    What I notice from that old stuff is how much they're swaying.

    THEY'RE ON A SHIP.

     

    THEY'RE ON A BOAT!

    A ship can have boats.  A boat can't have ships.  The thing they're on has lifeboats.  Therefore it is a ship.  QED!




  • @Someone You Know said:

    That bothered me about DXHR too. They all have the same exact animation for it, too, so it makes it look like they're all really the same person wearing different costumes and talking with their hands a lot.
     

    Same goes for every other game. My Diablo character is shufflin' like she's got a catchy tune playing on her earbuds.



  • @DaveK said:

    THEY'RE ON A SHIP.
     

    I DON'T CARE.



  • @dhromed said:

    @DaveK said:

    THEY'RE ON A SHIP.
     

    I DON'T CARE.

    It's good acting, and comic genius.  Stuffing loads of people into a tiny space is funny.  Stuffing loads of people into a tiny space and they've all got some different job to do in that space and get in each others' way all the time is comedy.  But stuffing loads of people into a tiny space and they've all got some different job to do in that space and get in each others' way all the time AND the tiny space is tipping them from side to side all over the place?  *That* is genius.



  • @Ben L. said:

    @dhromed said:

    nobody likes Opera. Go away.


    How about • Firefox Opera?

    Too soon!



  • Wait I didn't read this thread because of course I didn't, but is someone here disparaging the Marx Brothers!? Them's fighting words.

    This is one of the best comic songs ever.



  • Damn, I'm proud of what I did to the thread. And with a single word.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Wait I didn't read this thread because of course I didn't, but is someone here disparaging the Marx Brothers!? Them's fighting words.

    This is one of the best comic songs ever.

    Indeed, it redeems an otherwise mediocre movie. But this song would make a reasonably good theme song for this site. Plus, it's from a football movie.



  •  "Your users do not "love" your software. Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need. Developers have an emotional connection to the project; users don't."

    Someone's been speaking to Spectaters.

    (interesting info on those links, Flab)



  • @dhromed said:

    It reminds me of in-game characters when idly standing aboot. I never understood why animated game characters always sway like fuck. Even in really good stuff, like the in-game dialog cutscenes in Deus Ex: Hurrmen Ruvelushen the characters are swaying about like they need to pee really bad.

    If they stand too still they don't look human. Unfortunately the animators overshot the target level of dynamism.



  • @DaveK said:

    It's good acting, and comic genius.  Stuffing loads of people into a tiny space is funny.  Stuffing loads of people into a tiny space and they've all got some different job to do in that space and get in each others' way all the time is comedy.  But stuffing loads of people into a tiny space and they've all got some different job to do in that space and get in each others' way all the time AND the tiny space is tipping them from side to side all over the place?  *That* is genius.
     

    It sounds funny just with you saying it like that.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    is someone here disparaging the Marx Brothers!?
     

    I don't think I ever did.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Gurth said:
    whichever of the two you're used to, the other tends to look {fat|anemic|out of place|ugly|wrong|…}.

    This is partially true.

    On an actual Mac, the AA looks fine, even if it's not what you're used to.

    But Safari/Win (and incidentally Firefox's) AA is some crazy fucked up bullshit.

    Firefox has been using DirectWrite ever since it got hardware accelerated rendering in version 4. The rendered text is similar to Internet Explorer 9, if anything. It looks nothing like Safari/Win, which is god awful in comparison. (Actually; Safari/Win quite literally gives me a head-ache when I have to read anything longer than 5 lines of text at a basic 12 point font size.)



  • I don't know about Safari, but my installation of Chrome on Windows is entirely ClearType'd, so unless you're one of those people who turns off ClearType*, I'm not sure what's up.

    * or still uses a CRT



  • @Ragnax said:

    The rendered text is similar to Internet Explorer 9,
     

    That might be. I had a screenshot somewhere. I should compare.

    @Ragnax said:

    It looks nothing like Safari/Win
     

    I kno



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    I don't know about Safari, but my installation of Chrome on Windows is entirely ClearType'd
     

    Chrome uses plain ol' Cleartype, yes.

    Safari's and Chrome's engines have diverged so dramatically that to call them both "Webkit" can't be called correct in any practical sense of the word.



  • @Anonymouse said:

    @dhromed said:

    nobody likes Opera. Go away.
    Now don't be so dismissive. There are a couple of good ones, especially from the italian composers, like Puccini or Rossini.

     

    I love Rossini's overtures, but the operas that they belong to have never impressed me much.

    I'd listen to the overtures all the time if I could, but I've had to swear off playing them in the car because they make me drive too fast, which may be a result of the way they were written:

    <font face="VERDANA" size="2">"Wait until the evening before the opening night [before writing an overture]," Rossini once advised a young composer. "Nothing primes inspiration like necessity, whether it takes the form of a copyist waiting for your work or the coercion of an exasperated impresario tearing his hair out in handfuls. In my day all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty... </font><font face="VERDANA" size="2">"I wrote the overture to La Gazza Ladra, on the very day of the first performance of the opera in the theatre itself. I was imprisoned under the guard of four stage hands who were ordered to throw down the music pages, sheet by sheet, to copyists seated below. As the manuscript was copied, it was sent page by page to the conductor who then rehearsed the music. If I had failed to keep the production going fast, my guards were instructed to throw me in person to the copyists."</font><font color="#808080" face="VERDANA" size="1">
    </font>

     

     



  • Pipelined JIT composing! It's beautiful!



  •  Buffer underrun! AAAAAAaaaaaa



  • @flabdablet said:

    Everybody hates Firefox updates
    While it is nice to see someone at Mozilla finally admit what the rest of us already knew: @Evil Brain Jono said:
    We pushed out a seemingly endless series of updates that nobody was asking for, and provided no way to opt-out:  This isn't "Firefox answers to nobody but you",  it's  "Firefox answers to nothing but Mozilla's arbitrary six-week update schedule".  Whatever we wanted the brand to mean, Firefox is now firmly associated in people's minds with "that browser that kept breaking all my add-ons with unwanted updates".
    Unfortunately, he is still cluesless about what the real problem is: @Evil Brain Jono said:
    The way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system.
    Wrong. So very wrong.  The problem is not the updating system.  Firefox's updating system works just fine.  The problem is the updates themselves.  Updates are less of a problem for Chrome, not because their updating system is "better" but because:

    (a) Chrome has fewer features.  People are afraid to update Firefox because they know from past experience that new versions of Firefox will break their extensions.  Chrome on the other hand, has very few extensions.

    (b) Chrome rarely makes major changes to the UI.  There may be lots of changes "under the hood" but Chrome 20 that I have on my computer right now doesn't look too much different from what I remember of earlier versions.  Firefox on the other hand, regularly makes major changes to the UI, almost all of them bad.  Not only is this extremely annoying, it has led to people being forced to use extensions to get back features that have been changed or removed.  Which leads to problems when a new version breaks existing extensions. Lather, rinse, repeat.



  • @dhromed said:

    Safari's and Chrome's engines have diverged so dramatically that to call them both "Webkit" can't be called correct in any practical sense of the word.

     

     

    They still exhibit identical rendering artifacts. I just dealt with one today.

     



  • @El_Heffe said:

    The problem is not the updating system.  Firefox's updating system works just fine.  The problem is the updates themselves.
     

    No, he did mention that: it wasn't how they updated, it was the end effect - the user experience of the updates - that pissed people off: breaking plugins, work interruptions and UI changes:

    @Evil Brain Jono said:

    1. The download/restart takes forever and interrupts your work with a bunch of intrusive dialog boxes.
    2. The update may break stuff that you counted on, either by removing features you were using, or by breaking compatibility with other software you use. Maybe the developers never tested your use case, or worse - they tested for it but decdided it didn't matter because only 2% of users used it. Tough luck to you if you're one of those 2%.
    3. If they changed the interface, your productivity will be lower than usual until you've spent a bunch of time learning a new interface. Even if the new interface is "better", in some theoretical way, to some hypothetical average user, re-training yourself to use it is nothing but a time sink.

    He just pointed out that Chrome's updating system was more successful because it was invisible and unintrusive - no UI changes, few plugins to break, no user interruptions, simply because of its design, in the paragraph you quoted:

    @Evil Brain Jono said:

    Credit where it's due: the way Google handled Chrome updates was very, very smart. They recognized that updates are one of the hardest things to get right, so they solved that problem first, before releasing version 1. The first release of Chrome was little more than an empty box of a browser, but it was wrapped around an excellent updating system. This let them gradually transform that empty box into a full-featured browser, without the users ever realizing they were getting updates.


    Summary: he did specify the stuff you said he omitted.  At least in the areas I read.

     



  • @oheso said:

    They still exhibit identical rendering artifacts. I just dealt with one today.
     

    Do tell. I am professionally interested in this.


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