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Re: [LUG] Old Laptop

 

On 06/02/2020 09:52, Brad Rogers wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 09:19:28 +0000
> Neil <barnaby@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> Hello Neil,
> 
>> story so I won't go there, but basically I find their attitude very
>> arrogant.
> 
> Indeed.  My reply to mr meowski says as much, and a whole lot more
> besides.
> 
> Probably rather more than was asked for.   :-)
> 
> 

Well actually I had to pause and think about it and eventually came to 
the conclusion that whilst I (mildly) disagree with some of your 
conclusions there's nothing particularly weird or nonsensical about your 
Mozilla/Firefox stance. It's pretty normal for people to look at the 
same evidence and reach different conclusions so fair enough I guess?

Is it fair to say that your anti-Firefox stance is at least partially an 
anti-Mozilla stance rather than specific technical issues? You're not 
the only person - by far - to have said that recently and again whilst I 
don't necessarily agree that's not really important. It's your computer, 
you've settled on an alternative and all is well. I'll keep using 
Firefox personally so I guess we're all happy.

That being said you are technically wrong (in the strict sense) about 
one thing, and that's the status of the old XUL extensions. They were 
broken, unmaintainable and a gigantic unfixable security hole and had to 
go. Sure, it wasn't necessarily handled in the best possible way and the 
new Web Extensions aren't perfect either but that doesn't change the 
fact that XUL was a dead man walking. There are countless technical 
discussions on this on the internet and if you don't accept them then 
you're simply wrong on this one specific detail because you don't 
understand the technical details sufficiently. But I will grant you the 
changeover was messy, broke everyone's favourite must-have extensions 
for months and annoyed everyone, including me.

Flash is a more thorny issue and whilst I have a lot of sympathy for 
your argument even Adobe for god's sake are begging people to just stop 
using it. I do get asked about it by users about a million times every 
week though (barely exaggerating here) and it personally annoys me a 
little bit too so yeah, I hear you. "Flash is dead and insecure and 
hateful and stop using it" is all well and good but if you have to use 
sites that use it that's cold comfort. Maybe in another ten years we'll 
finally be rid of it?

I'll give you a bit more ammo for your argument as well while I'm at: my 
biggest gripe with Firefox, which is really more a complex 
Linux/graphics/drivers issue which admittedly is a hard problem to fix, 
is the lack of hardware accelerated video playback. Please Mozilla it's 
2020, fix it. Currently I have to keep a hacked about Chrome fork* (oh 
god the shame) just for watching youtube cat videos without horrific 
screen tearing on my enormously powerful workstation.

*https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Well, at least we have multiple browsers to choose from, each with their 
own strengths and weaknesses.

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