Firefox 57 as the first release where only WebExtensions will be supported - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/02/16/the-road-to-firefox-57-compatibility-milestones/ <comment><USER3> Ouch, the comments over there are extremely negative. As mozilla is our last bastion of hope between advertising giants it pains me to see mozilla having an increasingly hard time to sustain a positive brand image.

It is crazy if you think about it, because Mozilla is the last giant that respects its users. It has a very good proposition with regards to privacy and user-interest alignment.

There are still tons of less-then-smartª people using Chrome. I blame Mozilla for not doing any smart marketing at all.

____

ª Its fair to call it that way. You use a browser more than a car. Yet people do research before buying a car and carefully weigh the downsides versus the upsides. But not for their most important software application in their lifes.

<comment><USER4> I agree generally with your points, but this doesn't really address the issues being criticised in comments here. I want to use Firefox (I do currently use Firefox, despite a lot of limitations), but there comes a tipping point where the balance of privacy (and apparent "user-interest") and actual usability and power leads to a not-so-good proposition.

Someone has commented above that it seems like Mozilla management may have been bought off by competitors and may be deliberately trying to run Firefox into the ground. I don't believe this, but given the recent decision-making it's not entirely implausible.

Opera went a similar path ~5 years ago. Most Mozillans don't consider this comparable as Opera was closed-source (and there's this one-track tunnel vision people have around that term), but the similarities are stark. A company with a history of listening to its users and a massive level of contribution to open standards and interoperability, making a product that served a niche userbase extremely well, decided that aping it's mainstream competitor (Chrome) directly would somehow be a good move. Now there's no discernible difference between Opera and Chrome, and no reason whatsoever to choose the former over the latter.

<comment><USER3> I can't rule that out either. It might be that it is in Googles best interest to kill firefox.

Here is an alternative view I have in mind. The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" \-- should look like. Its imho feasible to launch a television and internet campaign promoting firefox after the transition by stressing the privacy qualities. Mozilla has a quality other venders don't have.

By making it a pain free switch a big market share is possible for firefox.

Still, i doubt the current board has this view really in mind. I am thinking if I should apply for a position :)

<comment><USER5> > The strategy to mimick chrome makes sense, because the masses think this is > how the browser -- or as they call it the "internet" \-- should look like.

But that's what FF has been doing for the past ~5 years, and how has their share been doing? Not so well.

Chrome has _much_ more marketing behind it. And it comes from a name that people know and trust. Most people don't know who Mozilla is. And most people don't care about avoiding Google. So if I have two browsers, and the lesser known one is constantly following the other, why would I choose it? I'd rather take the leading browser. It seems as if the FF one is just playing catchup the whole time.

I love Mozilla and FF because it respects me. But it often feels like they are losing that respect just to play follow the leader

<comment><USER6> Is it still true you can't do extensions for Chrome on Android? If so, they should just do a commercial showing you can use uBlock Origin with it. That could get a good chunk to move on Android and if they use it there they might switch on desktop too.

<comment><USER7> Most people, aka normal users, don't care for extensions other than themes, if at all.

So I doubt it would get any new users other than geek folk.

<comment><USER6> I'm not talking about showing off extension support, just ad blocking. I hate extensions myself, I wish content blocking with white listing was just built right into the browser which is that last real feature any browser needs. Once people get a few weeks with a good ad blocker they won't ever go back. After that, if they use a browser without it, they'll think they have a virus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IMO Firefox has just 2 things to beat Chrome: better add-ons (like treestyle tabs) and politics (made by Mozilla instead of an ads company). They are burning the first one.

<comment><USER9> Only about 250,000 users use the tab modification extensions that people keep claiming is Firefox's only advantage out of 10s of millions of Firefox users. Addons that greatly alter Firefox's behavior are the main reason for crashes. And maintaining XUL is hampering Firefox future development.

<comment><USER10> There are plenty of add-ons that extend or alter the UI of tabs. There's eg. 780,000 users of Tab Mix Plus according to [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/)

<comment><USER9> I forgot about TMP. Even so, that's still not a ton of users in terms of the total Firefox users. Plus, I'd wager a large percentage of those are TMP legacy users. Way back in the day, TMP was the only way to properly manage sessions and tabs. Firefox now has full session management and you can reload, pin, undo close, close other tabs, and move tabs around to your heart's content. Heck, the most recent review of the extension even says as much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Okay, I read through the entire comment tree and I didn't see a single top- level comment explaining _why_ they're doing this. So I'm going to give it a shot.

If you don't run an ad-blocker, and you go to a typical commercial web site (say, nytimes.com), Firefox can be incredibly slow and laggy. Scrolling is janky and the whole experience is just bad. The whole browser can lock up.

This is because Firefox's UI uses the same single-threaded JavaScript engine that web pages do. Ads tend not to be good web citizens, so they cause that single-threaded engine to run poorly, which causes the _whole browser_ , even UI elements like scrolling, to run poorly.

To fix this, Firefox has moved to a multi-process model. I believe it's called Electrolysis (e10s). The UI uses a different JavaScript process than web pages.

Electrolysis is enabled today.

And yet, if you read the comments in this thread, you'll see a lot of people complaining about Firefox being slow and janky. What's up with that? Electrolysis was supposed to fix it!

Well, legacy extensions dig into the internals of Firefox. If you've built multi-process code, you know that it's very sensitive to race conditions. Third-party extensions running arbitrary code make it impossible, or at least prohibitively difficult, for Firefox to run e10s.

So e10s is disabled if you have a legacy extension. This causes Firefox to be slow and janky.

To fix this problem, Firefox is removing support for legacy extensions.

To be clear, the engineering tradeoff being made here is this:

A) Allow legacy extensions to run arbitrary code. See performance get steadily worse in comparison to other browsers.

B) Have a fast, smooth, multi-process browser. Hope that the new extension mechanism is "good enough" and that important extensions are migrated.

You can't have both. Mozilla has chosen B). You may disagree with this choice. Personally, I think it was the right one.

(You might say that the correct answer is C) run single-threaded when legacy extensions exist, and e10s otherwise. This is the situation that exists today. Look at all the people complaining about Firefox's performance. I don't think this is a viable solution, as people blame Firefox even when it's their extensions that are to blame. Also, option B) gives extension developers a reason to migrate and help Mozilla identify needed APIs.)

Apologies if I got some of these details wrong. I've been following Firefox's migration to a multiprocess model with interest, but I'm hardly an expert.

<comment><USER12> This seems to have been poorly communicated by the Mozilla team and it is a shame bevause e10s is a a real improvement

<comment><USER13> See, I don't think it was poorly communicated by the Mozilla team. I've been reading their volunteer emails and their public facing blogs, and seeing their commentary on e10s all along.

What HAS been a problem is that they keep pushing it back because they don't want to upset the applecart of the legacy apps, and thus, e10s has basically become stalled by fear. And they didn't really do much to push back on that until very recently.

I think the main problem is, people look at e10s refactoring for their extensions, and thought it would never need to happen. That Mozilla would always just offer a 'back door' for them. I think that the XUL heavy extensions thought the same thing. The problem is, those two areas are the areas where a lot of the instability and issues come from, and the only way to solve those issues is to excise the code completely.

Mozilla's problem isn't communication. It's that people never seem to believe them, and they kept pushing it back.

<comment><USER14> Again, this is not accurate.

1\. Developers are lazy. This includes addon developers. Until there is a concrete time that their existing code will stop working, there's little incentive for them to bother rewriting their code.

2\. For extensions which require non-existent WebExtensions APIs, there is nothing they can do but hope and pray that Mozilla will deign to make such APIs to enable them to rewrite their whole codebase to use them. If Mozilla declines, then the addon author can do nothing except watch their extension die.

It is not a matter of addon authors not believing Mozilla. The ball is in Mozilla's court to follow through and enable the extension authors.

Now Mozilla has set themselves an arbitrary deadline to disable XUL, using the excuse that e10s and other XUL-breaking stuff will arrive on that deadline-- which is another arbitrary deadline that _they_ set. Is there a term for this kind of internal self-buck-passing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use Firefox because of 2 things:

1) vimperator 2) single process handling multiple tabs (I typically have upwards of 40 tabs open at a time)

Firefox is in the process of removing plugins like 1) so that it makes it possible to remove 2).

Wonderful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there a way we can continue use these classic addon?

<comment><USER16> Pale Moon

<comment><USER17> However, that's pretty much the other extreme. It doesn't support Web Extensions or even Add-on SDK extensions.

<comment><USER18> Do you use any indispensable add-ons that are Web Extension based?

<comment><USER17> No. However, I am the developer of "Download Cleaner", which is made using Add-on SDK. I think it's a great solution to get started without learning XUL.

I'm sure they had their reasons for deciding what they did. I still think it's a bad decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a quick way to check whether or not specific add-ons are supported in the new version? I'm addicted to tree based tabs (100's of them open at the same time) and Scrapbook. Without those two I would have a very hard time to get through my workday.

<comment><USER20> Here's a list: [https://arewee10syet.com/](https://arewee10syet.com/)

<comment><USER19> Scrapbook: unknown :(. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An hypothesis about much of the criticism for this change, and similar movements of outrage on the Internet. It's amateur social theory and goodness knows we don't need more of that, but I haven't seen it said like this:

People naturally feel anger in their lives (about home, work, politics, health, etc.) that is not socially acceptable to act on; to varying degrees, they need an outlet. It's not a new phenomenon; some go to the gym or play video games (where some act out on audio channels); some people drink heavily; some abuse people close to them, or the waitress, or get in a fight at the bar, or join an angry mob and lynch someone in the streets. When there is a socially acceptable target, indicated by lots of other people acting out, they act out too.

Changes like Firefox's attract outrage not because they are wrong but because they create a social attack surface: People can see that the change isn't socially secure (e.g., messages about inclusiveness are relatively secure right now[0]) and thus know that it will be a target for attacks; again, it's socially acceptable. They attack because it's a vulnerable target; there is chum in the social waters.

Consider how much of such outrage completely disregards the facts and betrays a lack of interest in learning the facts. They make no effort to learn about the facts - I see almost no discussion of the merits or facts on this page - and you can put the information in front of their eyes and they will ignore it and attack you: by not joining them you expose your own social vulnerability.

It's very dangerous socially; mass bullying campaigns have serious, real effects on their victims. Whole nations embrace bad policies, from discrimination against their own to war, that can kill in the hundreds of thousands or more and ruin generations. Evil leaders manipulate this phenomenon.

But also consider the affect it has on innovation, something we should be very concerned about at HN. It stops innovators from getting too far ahead of what's already accepted; they will be judged by their social security not its merits. It kills innovations from those who are socially acceptable; for example, the Blackberry Passport was the most innovative phone in years, but it was trashed, including on HN, because Blackberry Inc. was socially vulnerable, an outcast.

If you read this far, thanks for listening!

[0] To be clear, I'm not disparaging them - I strongly support them.

<comment><USER22> I don't think so, I think its that Firefox used to be awesome. Now people who advocated for them feel betrayed when the search is "updated" to yahoo, the homepage is "improved" to have ads, the menus are "modernized" so you can't find the settings you used to, the add-on system is "secured" so you have to modify your workflow, etc.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for addressing my comment. Of course I can't speak for everyone (and neither can you or anyone else), but to my general point ...

> people who advocated for them feel betrayed ...

Consider how strong an emotional response that is to a search engine change, etc., especially from people very familiar with IT and capable of adjusting to change (changing the default search engine, for example), and in a context where they see software changes frequently (think of hosted apps like Facebook!).

I don't think Firefox's changes are enough to explain that emotion; if you'll pardon the metaphor, they don't contain enough energy to explain the reaction; the energy must be coming from someplace else. I think the emotion is from someplace else and about something else.

Also, the comments raised above don't address the merits; they reflect only anger, which is consistent with my point. (In fairness, it may not be the context to review the merits of all those changes.)

<comment><USER23> I understand your point, but I think you might be underestimating the importance Firefox has to some people. It was never just a replaceable Web browser for me. It was one of the few pieces of software that seemed to be "made right", built by people who care, and built for people who know what they want.

I always thought of Firefox as a paragon of power-user design, and I loved it for that. In terms of hours of usage, I'm sure I've logged more with Firefox than with any other program in my life. It might not be an exaggeration to say it's the most important piece of software I have ever(!) use.

So this change, in combination with the overall direction Firefox seems to be headed, does evoke fairly strong feelings, and I really don't think they are "actually about something else".

Having said that, I do want to say that I am not angry, and I don't want to vilify anyone. I'm just concerned, and a bit sad, because the browsing experience I've grown up with seems like it won't be around much longer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> November 14th. I really hope they get the promised additional APIs in order until then, but it seems like a really short time (given how they are not 1:1 Chrome yet last I checked). I personally don't mind the switch to much (since I really want better performance, and the beginning of e10s has helped, and I don't care much about non-trivial add-ons), but it's clear the promise of "We'll make new APIs for add-ons that need them" was important.

<comment><USER25> Getting the APIs in place isn't enough, though; there needs to be time for the addons to adapt too (or for new addons to show up to replace the old ones). I'm not sure they have planned enough time for _that_ to happen, but time will tell.

<comment><USER26> The change was first announced in August 2015 [0]. Some developers decided to ignore all warnings and now the Mozilla is the bad guy.

[0]: [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of- dev...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing- firefox-add-ons/)

<comment><USER27> Because the required APIs don't exist maybe?

<comment><USER26> Then they should work with FF team to get those APIs. Many developers just ignored it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> KeySnail[1] extension, which brings customizable Emacs and vi keys to Firefox, is the "killer app" I use Firefox for and it doesn't have a Chrome counterpart. Without this particular extension I wouldn't have a reason to keep using Firefox.

[1] [https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki](https://github.com/mooz/keysnail/wiki)

</comment><comment><USER29> +1 Firefox user for the better add-ons. The ones in Chrome/Chromium just haven't seemed as effective for me. Reading people's comments here, I'm actually learning about some add-ons I might add to Firefox! (tree style tabs, Vimperator)

And thanks to Debian, I appear to be using Firefox 45, so I guess the changes people are talking about won't hit me for awhile?

</comment><comment><USER30> I am honestly starting to believe that Mozilla is trying to run Firefox into the ground. I am not sure if it's just bad decision making or if the decision makers themselves had been bought off by competition, but it sure does feel like this. Why do we need one more Chrome like browser out there? I specifically use Firefox because it's a) not chrome, b) has better addons. If you hamstring the addons and make everything chrome/chromium like, what's the reasons to use FF then?

<comment><USER31> > has better addons

The add-ons might be better, but XUL-based Firefox add-ons are not better. They essentially give full control of your computer to the developer of the add-on. There's no permission model. The "APIs" are mostly the internals of Firefox itself, and when Firefox updates, lots of add-ons break.

Most add-ons can be ported to webextensions. The ones that can't probably shouldn't have ever been add-ons to begin with.

Lots of other browsers used to do the same thing Firefox does, and chose to use a webextension-like model instead. Why? Because those screenshots of folks with half their screen consumed by toolbars, weird popups, overlays in the browser viewport, extensions that sneakily inject ads into pages, and track user behavior _still exist_. And there's really nothing Mozilla can do to stop them.

Do you know how Firefox add-ons get approved? A human sits down and sifts through the obfuscated source code. I helped build these tools years ago, I can tell you it's hell. Beyond being error-prone, it causes months-long delays in add-ons getting approved.

Firefox will be better off for only supporting webextensions.

<comment><USER30> But I want the addons to have full control over my browser, that's the whole point! It's my browser and I've tailored it to myself and my requirements.

The one thing that is striking every time I try to use chrome/chromium is just how limited the addon functionality is and how much less freedom the user has. Have you seen "treestyletabs" implementation on chrome? It's a whole other window that has to be started and placed side-by-side with the browser window by user because of the addon limitations. There are also some keybindings which are fixed forever and not allowed to be changed (<C-W>, <C-N> etc).

Of course you can justify the restrictions by bringing up the case of the poor average user who will get abused by his browser having more functionality that he will ever need. But the thing is - I really don't care for the "average user" and its problems. Average user is a beast that is perfectly happy to be contained in the walled garden, but we already have Chrome and Android for that.

<comment><USER24> But Mozilla cares about average users, not about making something for power- users only. That seems to be the big conflict here: power users saying "you've lost the masses, so make something for us" while Mozilla's mission is making something that would be good for the masses, and they'd rather fail trying than failing that mission by abandoning it.

<comment><USER32> Except this doesn't make sense.

The set of clueless users who would install arbitrary malicious extensions and the set of clueless users who would download and run arbitrary executables is basically the same. Yet if they do the latter, any extention sandboxing is completely and utterly moot. It's the same issue as with mandatory extension signing; requiring signing for extensions while nothing stops someone from downloading an unsigned .exe (which could memory-patch Firefox if it so wished) is absurd.

<comment><USER33> I think the difference is that they want to try to prevent installers from installing unapproved extensions, which even many of the software that looks more legitimate often does. See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/AMO/Policy/Revie...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/AMO/Policy/Reviews)

<comment><USER32> Yes, and the point of this is what, exactly?

<comment><USER33> In particular, all the checked by default boxes to install things like the Ask Toolbar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use Vimperator. I have not upgraded Firefox since 43.0.4 in order to continue to use Vimperator. I will not upgrade Firefox past the point where it does not support Vimperator.

<comment><AUTHOR> VimFX works very well in FF51.

<comment><USER34> It's a very different experience.

Some of us who use Vimperator use it not only because of the key binding, but also for the command-line, ability to modify the UI (e.g. :set gui=none), ability to put .vimperatorrc in .dotfiles and use it across multiple systems, and such. As far as I know, VimFX still not capable of all these functionalities (some due to difference in mission, e.g. not modifying the UI.)

That said, WebExtensions at its current state still couldn't support all of VimFX's current feature either.[1]

[1]: [https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860](https://github.com/akhodakivskiy/VimFx/issues/860)

<comment><USER35> I use this all day long on Chromium -

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cvim/ihlenndgcmojhcghmfjfneahoeklbjjh)

I also use this in Chromium -

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoil...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wasavi/dgogifpkoilgiofhhhodbodcfgomelhe)

Note that they do very different things from each other AND that they are running Chromium which is a SUBSET of the plugin features that will be available in Firefox (if all goes well).

<comment><USER18> I have used all of the Chrome based variants of Vimperator. I like Cvim too.

However there is one killer feature for me in Firefox, that is the fact that I can:

nmap <C-j> 10j

nmap <C-k> 10k

Chrome has these keys already bound and there is no way to unbind them.

I am adamant about using this configuration because it matches my .vimrc - <USER2> I use the exact same navigation in my browser and my (arguably) IDE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> XUL has always been pretty terrible, IMO. But it has advantages over Chrome- style addons. Should Firefox support WebExtensions? I'd say absolutely yes. Should Mozilla remove XUL support? I'd say probably not. Or at least it should be optional, as there are clearly some people who want full control of their browser. I'm not one of those people, but I understand where they're coming from, and it would be like a food company deciding that they're getting rid of their other flavors and are just going to sell the one flavor that the competitor is selling out. Unless Firefox has an edge over Chrome, or even Chromium, there's very little reason for me to use it. This is coming from someone who was a Firefox evangelist for years since 2005.

Also, the Electrolysis project taking forever is one reason I ditched Firefox for Chrome, and I suspect I'm not the only one. It was only late last year that it finally got released(I think?), and that was a project being talked about at least since 2010. Chrome had process-per-tab a few years before that, and there was even word that Chrome was being developed in that direction long before its release. Firefox took nearly a decade to compete.

<comment><USER37> That's because chrome was built that way from the beginning, and Firefox had to break their browser into pieces. And while it did stall out for a while, remember they were completely changing their JS garbage collector at the same time, which was also a huge amount of work. And both projects kept compatibility with most addons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My first reaction was to disable automatic updates of Firefox. I'm not against change, but the whole controversy around this issue makes me a bit wary of blindly trusting Mozilla.

I want to make sure my browser experience doesn't get ruined because of this shift. I don't have the time or patience to clean up a messy first release with webextensions only, breaking my trusted browser add-ons. First seeing, then believing.

<comment><USER37> You can upgrade to FF52 ESR in March. It will support current add-ons and get security updates until mid-2018.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> According to NetMarketShare stats [0], Firefox is now at under 12% of desktop marketshare... and falling. I've switched over to Chromium (and Safari on OSX) because I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall anymore. I've also noticed it used a lot more CPU than alternative browsers... which is an issue if you're using a laptop. Once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons [1], there won't be any real reasons left to use Firefox. Lots of Firefox die-hard users I know have already moved to Palemoon which will support XPCOM/XUL addons for the foreseeable future [2].

It's amazing to me how badly managed Mozilla is these days. They've been on a downward slope for the last two years and they still haven't done much to improve their position. Last week I checked Mozilla's homepage and couldn't even figure out what their guiding purpose is anymore. They seem to care more about social issues than about browsers and technology [3]. Unfortunately, they don't have much future.

[0] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

[1] [https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of- dev...](https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing- firefox-add-ons/)

[2] [https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml](https://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml)

[3] [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/)

<comment><USER40> > I just couldn't justify slower speeds and much poorer performance overall > anymore... once Mozilla kills off XPCOM and XUL-based addons, there won't be > any real reasons left to use Firefox.

Now, make an enlightened guess as to why they're getting rid of XUL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I get that there are a lot of people here who are really concerned that, without XUL and XPCOM, there will no longer be a reason to choose Firefox over Chrome.

What I think they overlook is that, right now, it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so poorly compared to Chrome that no one will take such a recommendation seriously.

I've been using Firefox since back when it was still called Phoenix. I intend to go on using Firefox for as long as it still exists. But it's been a struggle, these last few years. Having to kick over a primary application platform, losing effectively all state save what programs are running, and reboot it every day or two, because otherwise it gets so slow that it's entirely unusable, gets real old real fast. People like to make jokes about Emacs, but even it doesn't do this! My Emacs sessions last _months_ , and die only when the machine loses power or I hose up the environment so badly while experimenting that it becomes unrecoverable without a reboot. And Emacs is thirty years old.

I don't want to switch to Chrome. Its UI sucks and I'm no fan of Google. But if Firefox keeps getting worse, I'll have to. So I am absolutely delighted to see Mozilla making real and tangible progress toward solving that problem. If doing so means deprecating an ancient plugin API that's in any case dangerous and hard to use, I'm fine with that, especially since there is no reason in the world to believe that its replacement will not eventually gain back most of the relatively few capabilities we're losing in the deprecation. Maybe I won't be able to customize context menus for a while. That's _fine_ , if the browser regains the usability it's lost over the last ten or so years.

I understand not everyone agrees with this point of view. That's not a problem. But I should not like this point of view entirely overlooked by those currently proclaiming the imminent death of Firefox.

<comment><USER21> > it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so > poorly compared to Chrome ...

I understand that this is your experience, but what is the basis for saying this is generally true? It's not my experience; theoretically, can't I also say my experience is generally true?

<comment><USER42> > it is impossible to recommend Firefox in any case, because it performs so > poorly compared to Chrome ...

See that's some odd misinformation that's been spread around since Chrome first was released, it was the fastest browser at the time. Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis update.

So yah, I'm not sure why all this "Firefox is super slow" keeps getting passed around without anything to back it up. In fact for WebGL Firefox is over 3 times faster than Chrome, so if anything Chrome is actually the old slow dog.

Current benchmark for proof: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/58doo8csebp9l62/Bench.pdf?dl=0)

<comment><USER43> "Well since then, Chrome and Firefox have been going back and forth on which is the fastest. At this moment Firefox is a good margin faster than Chrome since their Electrolysis update." In benchmarks, yes.

But in the real world, with many different tabs open, where one badly designed website could screw up your whole surfing experience, not so much.

Even thoug it is possible that they fied that behavior by now. I don't know, because since that repeatedly happened, I switched to chrome.

edit: oh and about specific performance I know and care about at the moment, because I work with those technologies is that: [http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html?500](http://kripken.github.io/box2d.js/webgl_demo/box2d.html?500)

On my system (Archlinux) chromium runs much faster than firefox.

<comment><USER42> I ran your box benchmark at 1000 boxes and all browsers were able to sustain 60fps quite easily on my system.

Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, Safari and Opera on OSX

<comment><USER43> Well, that's good, if you system is so fast, than just use more boxes ... (parameter)

On MY system chrome is still quite ahead of FF. And that was the point, not that you have a good pc ...

(oh and the benchmark is not from me, but actually from the FF dev team itself, as part of emscripten ... and they used to be quite faster than all the others, but apparently not anymore. At least not at the moment ...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I'm really hopping for Firefox to implement something like Tree Style Tabs by default. It's time for tabs to take their natural side place.

</comment><comment><USER45> I recently disabled all add-ons in Firefox. It's a lot more stable and it's faster as well.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is terrible!

One of Firefox great features are the add-ons that change the _browser_ experience itself.

I NEED TileTabs, ColorTabs, and a few others that would stop working after this change.

Yes, I understand the ideology of browsers being invisible to the content, but what about our users? I don't think people understand that these add-ons are really productivity tools that aren't otherwise available.

<comment><USER46> Power users*.

I guess we're gonna have a fork of Firefox. Pointless.

Would be better to just deprecate it by default and enable via a flag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Solution:

• _Mozilla Sponsored Add-On Migrator /Converter that transpiles to equivalent WebExtension code_

• _Separate lightweight container hosts with DTrace for Core and Extensions_ (not sure if that makes sense, can you help?)

In fact a friend of mine pursues his Dr. degree on Model-Driven "API- Transpilation" (that's how I call it, albeit limited to CMSs), such that API- breaks caused by CMS upgrades don't result in high integration costs for add- on migrations. Having a complete model for the CMS allows him to support convert add-ons to other CMS too.

Why all the anger? Because API-Breaks cause friction, are avoidable and are commonly known as the biggest "cost-centers & risk-factors" in the software industry. Software-Architects should instead try to find a composable architecture that supports the transition, instead of moving migration costs to the developers. That would allow everyone else to move over more easily.

The anger caused by the limitations of WebExtentions, are they in fact unavoidable? HN, you've a collection of the most clever engineers of the World! Can we find a solution to this?

My question to HN: Do you know an example or show-case of any complex software that reached similar goals in a way that is transferable or at least advisable to Mozilla? I am really interested, if there is a way to migrate from old to new platforms without "API hiccups". Moving (avoidable?) architecture-debts to a huge fellowship of developers doesn't sound like the way to go. I hope you know about guidelines that removes such frictions for us HN devs that we can just follow suit.

PS: I'm a n00b, but incrementally recreating kernel-level APIs on user-land, then writing an abstraction layer ontop, then exposing a limited set of it via Java-Script doesn't sound elegant and counter-productive. Why not reuse an existing kernel and create drivers and bridges or DSLs ontop of that?

Happy Monday and thanks for your time! :)

</comment><comment><USER48> At least Firefox supports older computers like the old Pentium, I submitted this comment with. Chrome doesn't ; its my back-up ; win 10 has gone down on me twice this month.

<comment><USER33> Firefox now also requires SSE2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They should conduct a survey how many add-ons will stop working, won't be ported to web extensions, and thus how many users they'll lose -- probably not that many because the majority most likely doesn't use add-ons but those people will most likely use anything other people recommend to them. I personally don't know if I'll continue recommending FF.

<comment><USER21> > They should conduct a survey ...

They have; I've seen the data on some Mozilla blog but I can't remember where.

<comment><USER27> There is [https://arewee10syet.com/](https://arewee10syet.com/) ... ~ 85% unknown (and that's compatibility with e10s, not with web extensions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just submitted [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693705) . This article has more technical details on how XUL add-on works in multiprocess Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER49> Coincidentally it's also the first release that I'm not going to be updating to.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is it just me or are Chrome's dev tools superior in every way to FF?

<comment><USER51> My recollection is that both are as bad as each other: spiteful UI with 1 watch window and a fixed window layout. Dear people - start demanding more from your tools.

Going back on topic, I've stuck with Firefox for years because of DownThemAll and Firefox Sync. But I stopped using sync a couple of years ago, so that just left DownThemAll... which won't work after this change. So I'll probably leave Firefox behind. Safari supopsedly gives you better battery life on OS X, and Chrome is more popular (i.e., people probably test their stuff on it).

<comment><USER16> DownloadThemAll will work now and into the future with Pale Moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is there any usage-statistic they base this on? I assume 90% have nothing more than an adblocker at most installed?

What about the rest? What about users that are switching to firefox from another browser?

</comment><comment><USER53> I installed Firefox a month ago, but it's just so sluggish and laggy. I only have one extension installed.

Well, today I just switched back to Chromium (but went with Vivaldi this time).

<comment><USER11> Legacy extensions prevent multiprocess support, which causes Firefox to be sluggish and laggy.

If you disable the extension you installed, you'll probably see a big difference in Firefox performance.

This is why they're disabling those extensions.

<comment><USER53> The extension I was using was ublock:origin. When I went to about:support, it showed e10 as enabled.

<comment><USER42> in about:support is your GPU composting enabled under graphics? I would recommend to refresh Firefox on that screen as well. Also you can check "about:performance" to see which extension is fucking you over.

I would recommend using adblock plus instead, as it is many leagues faster than UBlock Origin in Firefox since version 48 I believe (They optimized their code with Mozilla a couple months ago). Just make sure you go into the adblock plus filter preferences and uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" problem solved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Why?

</comment><comment><USER52> Ugh, I thought we had another year

</comment><comment><USER55> This is what a fast release cycle gets you: insufficient feedback and a snowball effect as project managers double-down on bad decisions. See also: Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER56> Firefox has 6.6% market share in browsers.[1] By the time Firefox 57 comes out, Firefox may not matter. Supporting Yahoo Search as the default didn't help.

Mozilla is dropping not only the old XUL interface, but the new Jetpack/Add-on SDK interface that's only worked right for about four years. Dropping XUL make sense; the mobile version of Firefox never supported XUL anyway. But there's no reason to drop Jetpack. That's essentially the same as the WebExtensions API, but with different names for the API calls.

I'll probably convert my one remaining add-on, but it's not really worth it.

[1] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0)

<comment><USER21> I've read it is about twice that. How does one know what numbers to believe?

<comment><USER56> Compare [1] and [2] and see if you can figure out why they are so different.

[1] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0) [2] [https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser- market-share.aspx?qpr...](https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market- share.aspx?qprid=0&qpcustomd=0)

<comment><USER21> Thanks, but you'll understand if I'm not taking the test. What is the difference?

<comment><USER56> I don't know. I suspect that whatever drives that site is broken. But StatsCounter says 6.75% for Firefox.

[1] [http://gs.statcounter.com/?chart_type=line&statType=Browser](http://gs.statcounter.com/?chart_type=line&statType=Browser)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Exec Gets New Title as 'VP of Integrity' for Less Than a Day - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-integrity-for-les-1833487854 <comment><AUTHOR> _> they silently edited the post back to 'VP of Product Management'

> 'Why must they be like this?'

> Facebook hasn't responded to Gizmodo's request for comment._

This is part of the peculiar "Facebook style" of their public communications.

On the surface, their words appear simple, straightforward and open, as if there's nothing to hide.

But when you read closely, their words obscure the truth and distort reality.

Quoting myself -> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19435955)</comment>


CS193H: High Performance Web Sites - <AUTHOR> http://cs193h.stevesouders.com/

<comment><USER2> This isn't bad, but it's client focused. Perhaps there should be a second module that focuses on specific web server architectures (apache vs nginx and lighttpd), reverse proxying performance, performance of web servers talking to different data stores and the performance of those stores. Also server-side caching architectures as well as server hardware and what works best for web servers, caching servers and data stores.

<comment><USER3> Agreed on that. I am actually currently working on a book (PHP oriented) on high performance / traffic website architecture.

Worked 4 years at a Top50 Alexa and been eager to share my knowledge (was forbidden to talk publicly about most of it while i was working there).

<comment><USER4> I also agree.

I started a proposal for Wiley publishing a long time ago on caching and networking for high performance web sites. Then I became employed by a company that forbade me from sharing (grrr) so I stopped.

I felt when writing the proposal though, that the solution isn't just client, just network, just server, or just anything... it's the combination of all parts and knowing how a change in one place impacts another part and how to balance them all to achieve the goal.

Even then, it's a stepped thing. A solution for a small but fast and resilient web site looks very different to a solution for a very large, distributed and fast web site.

A book should really include the basics building blocks in all major areas, and then offer suggestions on how to apply those building blocks at different levels of scale.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I am trying to involve a former colleague of mine who is a specialist in front-end development and optimization to complete what knowledge i have on this front.

I have been actually thinking about asking HN or other about what they would like to see in this kind of book (keep in mind this is very PHP oriented as it's my specialty), instead of trying to come up with one myself and missing some important point.

I am also thinking into recycling presentation i was hosting at internal IT gathering, on very wide subject range (internal working of PHP and how to take advantage of that knowledge, Varnish usage, HTML5 video, How to profile a PHP application with XHProf and what to look for), and make video presentation out of them. Or may be just bundling this in the book, not really sure yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is there an entire class devoted to "Rule 5: Put stylesheets at the top"? Yes, I clicked through the slides; it took 2 minutes.

<comment> johnx123-up Yep, I'm now skeptical about Stanford quality...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Steve Sounders is a wealth of information. His http archive (<http://httparchive.org/>) is already showing fundamental changes in design, as well as regularly giving good tips on high-scalability sites. I am jealous of those who get to take the full course. =]

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't get it, where's the class on multi-tier server architecture? Load- balancing techniques? Server scaling? Database / backend performance best practices? I appreciate the focus on the front-end, and YSlow best practices, but I'm surprised that this kind of class is completely neglecting the backend - which is just as, if not more important, for scaling a major production website.

<comment><USER8> Actually the entire premise of Steve's book is that he was in charge of performance/latency at Yahoo, and started out looking for issues in the backend.

But when he measured end-user latency, he realized that all the issues were in the front end. It doesn't make sense to start tweaking 100,000 lines of C++ code to shave 1 ms from the backend response time when you're taking 200-300ms to load JavaScript and such.

I think this is probably a common performance characteristic at large companies; perhaps not small ones. At small ones you probably have a database bottleneck. But at companies Yahoo/Google the backend engineers have generally optimized things quite a lot (partly because that kind of work is rewarded), and there's a lot of flab in the front end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know it's not technically computer science and it's more vocational, but I wish my school offered classes like these. Something like this would be more beneficial to me than, say, Theory of Automata, I think.

<comment><USER10> really? I'm actually glad my school doesn't offer vocational classes like this. Optimizing a website on the client side is the sort of thing you read a blog post for and then go do. I don't enjoy it at all when I actually have to do it, I certainly wouldn't want to take a course where I have to do this.

<comment><USER11> that may be the newbest thing I've read on hacker news. It only shows you haven't worked in high performance environments.

<comment><USER10> Do you believe that there aren't more useful things to learn in school? Stuff like this is fairly trivial to teach to yourself. I believe the time would be better served by taking a class in something like game theory or any one of the other mind-expanding courses offered (especially at a school like Stanford).

As for the actual content of the class, all you really need to tell someone is that various things can make pages load slowly, and then link them to some guide such as this: <http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html> .

Also, I still have this opinion after working last summer in what I would consider a high performance environment at a YC company.

<comment><USER12> I actually think high performance web architecture could make for an excellent mind-broadening course. Consider the things you need a deep understanding of:

\- DNS, how it works, DNS level load balancing, DNS client implementations in operating systems

\- Internet routing architecture and CDNs

\- Browser internals: how modern browsers access the network, how their parsers work, how they parallelise requests

\- In-depth understanding of both JavaScript and the DOM

\- How CSS style engines work

\- Different image file formats

\- How compression works

\- How to introspect and monitor web page performance

\- How to reverse-engineer complex web sites

<comment><USER10> I agree all of these things would be good to learn in a course. I think a course that taught these things would be better structured as a course that teaches about these, and then at some point have a 15 minute talk (or a set/project) about how these concepts affect the load time for web pages and how one can make pages load faster.

There is a course at my school that's somewhat similar to this (<http://courses.cms.caltech.edu/cs144/> ), but it looks at web from a very theoretical level. Out of the list you posted above, it definitely teaches about how the internet is architechted (and therefore why CDN's are a good idea). DNS is covered in a networking class, and compression (lossy and lossless) is addressed in other classes.

It seems like many of the things this Stanford course teaches are things that CS students should already know from other CS classes and they just have to figure out how to apply them. The class seems like it could be a valuable introduction to non CS majors who just want to understand how the web works so they can build some web app or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone know where this falls in the standard computer science course?

<comment><USER14> I'm guessing that this is more of a seminar-type class rather than a standard core CS course. It's very specialized and narrow and doesn't really fit into a standard CS education. I suspect the professor just really wanted to teach it, as opposed to the department deeming it a necessary part of the curriculum. Also, at my school classes starting with 19- are usually either seminars, student-taught or in "beta"; the numbering at Stanford might be similar.

As an aside, some of these classes can be really awesome. Some nice examples at my school have included a popular cloud class and--particularly epic--a Starcraft-AI class. These are definitely not part of our core curriculum, but they are nice complements to staples like introduction to AI (the prerequisite for the Starcraft course).

<comment><USER13> thanks for the clarification, that starcraft AI course sounds great! which school do you go to?

<comment><USER14> I go to Berkeley. The Starcraft AI class was structured around writing a bot to compete in a tournament which it ended up winning. I think there was a mix of graduate and undergraduate students. Unfortunately, I'm not sure they're doing it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> did anyone else just assume by default this was cs193h-class.org ?

<comment><USER16> haha. yes.

<comment><USER17> I guess after the first three weeks of ai-class.com, judging from the several stability adventures, the makers of the site could offer the knowledge of that course as well ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you know what your users want? - <AUTHOR> PG says that understanding users is the most important thing for a startup, but exactly how do you know what they want?<p>What methods do you use? How do you differentiate signal from noise? <comment><USER2> We've had success with direct communication.

Tell your users to call or email of they have questions or problems. Then personally speak with them.

You will find loads of valuable things you can do for them or find significant pain points to address.

As for sorting signal and noise, you have to find generic solutions if possible. Example: if you have any kind of reports or tables etc you will have people asking you to add, remove, rearrange them. Users will get very upset that their "really important" field isn't available. And you could add this field but then the next person will come along. So give them some options to add, remove, rearrange fields so they can get what they need without coming to you first.

</comment><comment><USER3> Asking about their problems or goals is the best. In other words, don't ask about what features they want (you'll figure that out), but ask what their goal is. Research is good, especially in helping you figure out what questions to ask and getting close to the issue, but talking to potential users is unbeatable. I'd highly recommend 4 Steps to the Epiphany for great customer development guidance.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Who are you users?" would be the first question to ask. That would help on determining what questions to ask next. For example with most SaaS products, Ford's quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" is very applicable, meaning people often a limited by their knowledge and personal experience and can't see solutions beyond those, so if you ask them what they want you won't hear what would make a good product. In other industries it can be pretty straightforward, if you are old enough you would remember questionnaires your parents used to fill in for exchange of free products (I think it was P&G) answering all sort of questions about what products they use in their daily life from soap to dishwashing liquid, what would they want improved, what's their favourite smell and whatever you can think of (that then went to phone and I imagine now online).

So my advice would be, ask who is your user first. Then pick the next question.

</comment><comment><USER5> By developing a system of pass/fail signals.

A lot of early approaches to feedback involve directly asking potential customers, or existing ones. This gives you _vocal_ feedback, but almost all of it will be of the form "just add this and change that". And while this works in terms of incremental refinement, and can improve an existing successful product, often as not they will not be satisfied if you add this and change that with something that isn't selling - because they are not expressing the underlying issue(it is most likely too complex to grasp without pouring yourself into it, and you have to make it your job to develop that domain knowledge).

Instead look for mechanisms that let you immediately evaluate whether your quality is going up or down: "if we break our performance target that's a failure." "if we take more than two button presses to perform this action that's a failure." You can poll users to ask if this signal is the form of quality they are looking for: they will happily let you know that no, actually, the button presses are not it, it's more important that they have a certain set of views pinned front and center.

A bit of philosophical reasoning goes a long way to develop new signals: You have to spend time pondering what the problem _really_ is and make sure you're building up a principled approach that addresses it in a broad, coherent way that informs the detailed decisions, and then get some confirmation that your principles work for the people you want to reach. Your customers will want to help, but you should expect to bear the brunt of this development effort too.

Many signals of engagement, interactions, purchasing patterns, etc. can be turned into numeric metrics and graphed. These make for good eye candy, but they tend to serve the internals of the business(e.g. cost reduction studies) better than the customers, who will still always proceed through their experience with the pass/fail model: "I didn't understand the documentation, so I gave up."

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.producttalk.org/2017/03/ladder-of- evidence/](https://www.producttalk.org/2017/03/ladder-of-evidence/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Tons of research!

Many many interviews with target users and/or surveys before building MVPs.

After that, user tests to get feedback on the MVP.

It takes a lot of effort to find the right people but it's well worth it!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm part of a small startup and we've found that most customers are happy to provide feedback and feel like they are helping craft the system with us.

One other thing we noticed is that people don't want to fill out surveys, and you can get much more insight by just sitting next to a person using the system.

As for signal/noise... try to keep the majority of users happy

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm giving an attendee talk on this at MicroConf in a few weeks! Y'all should come :)</comment>


Is it "Wicked" to Oppose Genetically Modified Golden Rice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/new_scientist/2013/10/golden_rice_inventor_ingo_potrykus_greenpeace_and_others_wicked_for_opposition.html

<comment><USER2> For anyone who wants to start a interesting discussion with any Greenpeace supporters, here is an excellent speech by Mark Lynas, who successfully turned anti-GM into a popular political viewpoint in the 90s and now regrets it.

[http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford- farming-c...](http://www.marklynas.org/2013/01/lecture-to-oxford-farming- conference-3-january-2013/)

On the Golden Rice topic,

[http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/10/11/ex-greenpeace- presid...](http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/10/11/ex-greenpeace-president- says-groups-opposition-to-genetically-modified-golden-rice-costing-thousands- of-lives/)

Story of an interesting protest!

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually, it was Owen Paterson who said Greenpeace is wicked, not Ingo. Please change the incorrect title.

Very interesting article.

<comment><USER3> thx</comment></comment>


Show HN: InstaNote – take notes like chat - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone! We are building InstaNote (https://www.instanote.io) to make note taking fast and easy with a familiar interface.
Most notes apps are heavyweight and require a lot of overhead to save things and manual organization to manage. They also aren't optimized for things people save often (URLs!). Many users resort to sending themselves emails or messages instead of using these apps.
I wanted something extremely simple while supporting the most common needs, so I started building this for myself. The interface is just like chat where you can send a note to yourself. InstaNote supports free form text, lists, images, audio, and custom reminders. It also natively supports shared notes, just like chat rooms.
I built this for myself, but have heard from others that they find it useful too. Would love to hear feedback from HN! <comment><AUTHOR> Link for convenience: [https://www.instanote.io](https://www.instanote.io)</comment>


Facebook auto-generates videos celebrating extremist images - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/f97c24dab4f34bd0b48b36f2988952a4 <comment><USER2> _It wasn't produced by extremists; it was created by Facebook. In a clever bit of self-promotion, the social media giant takes a year of a user's content and auto-generates a celebratory video. In this case, the user called himself "Abdel-Rahim Moussa, the Caliphate."_

See, this sort of "do it for you" activity is what I-personally-talk about when I talk about how I'd probably appreciate and use social media more if we went back to the Myspace style of social media platforms.

i.e. I get to interact with the people I add/follow on _my_ terms. No notifications telling me to go like what someone posted, no trending tickers trying to get me to care about what everyone else cares about, no 'feeds' full of inferences and deductions about what I might "like". No posts injected in front of my eyeballs based on the RNG value multiplied by the square-root of how many times I hovered over an Amazon ad for a pair of Nike running shows last tuesday...no automated videos that scan my profile and remind me "hey, member when you posted this? Wanna look at it again?"

In fact, how's LiveJournal these days? I might unironically go back to LiveJournal and try taking as many people kicking and screaming with me.

(that last bit you should take with a superfluous, sardonic pinch of salt and sarcasm).

<comment><USER3> __i.e. I get to interact with the people I add /follow on my terms __

Workinig on it ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand why people react shockingly towards this kind of news. Not all blocking algorithms work flawlessly. Learn from the mistake, fix, done. I don't understand why the news try to make it sound like FB is promoting or neglecting this kind of incidents.</comment>


Space age and old generation problematic - <AUTHOR> https://oytun.org/space-age-and-old-generation-problematic/ <comment><USER2> Old people are bad because they don't want want to move to the Oort cloud?</comment>


California's new law bans schools from starting before 8am - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1727790/californias-new-law-bans-schools-from-starting-before-8am/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, the school systems still rely on one parent at home. It is not just drop off and pick up times: school activities, parent-teacher conferences, etc. For example, in the SF Unified District, school tours for parents of kids entering kindergarten, middle school and high school are during the school hours, mostly in the morning. It is all built around the expectation of a parent at home or a job structure that allows parents to have time off and not be penalized for it. Neither of those are necessarily representative of a family's current reality.

<comment><USER3> I understand the frustration, but I think it is absurd to expect teachers and school administrators (who are woefully underpaid, especially in the Bay area) to accommodate working parents by working extra hours just for the parent's benefit. It's a hard enough job as it is, what with the poor pay, large workload, dealing with entitled, helicopter parents and the diminishing societal appreciation for their contributions and importance to society.

<comment><USER4> There's a 20:1 to 30:1 ratio so are you suggesting it's better for 20-30 working, single parent families? Maybe the government should pay teachers more and pay less on defense and we'd have a more productive society.

<comment><USER5> I've read multiple studies that the biggest influence in a kids success in school is their parents involvement.

Don't make the assumption that throwing more money at teachers will improve our schools. Zuckerberg tried that with little success, as have many before him.

I'd rather a focus on ensuring every kid has a healthy meal at the table. A support group who's invested in tbe individual kids success. A family that encourages and supports during the best and worst of times.

Arguably the "advantage" well to-do middle class families get.

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt your main point, but your main example does not support it. How much of Zuckerberg's money trickled down all the way to teachers? From what I remember seeing reported, most of it went to consulting and administration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My high school started at 7am. I also took the bus; which picked up around 6:15am; so I usually woke up around 5:45am during the week. I would often nod off during my first or second period; and routinely took 2-3 hour naps when I got home from school; which screwed up my ability to fall asleep early at night or get much homework done. I sometimes wonder what my academics would have been like if I was actually awake during those first two periods.

(This was in the 90's)

<comment> non-entity I've always been confused by TV shows showing kids leaving for school and it's bright outside with the whole family awake. Growing up, it was dark when we got up for school and just barely sun up (depending on the season still dark) by the time we left to get on the bus.

<comment><USER8> On the shortest days of the year in Los Angeles[1], there is civil twilight around 6:30am and full daylight before 7am. Maybe the writers, who even have children, live close to the schools they attend.

[1] [https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los- angeles](https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles)

<comment><USER9> Wow, this really gives you perspective. My corresponding times are 8:21 and 9:55.

I would give the world for the opportunity of sunlight evenly distributed over the year.

<comment><USER10> The thing with evenly distributed sunlight is that, if you work in an office, you're not going to have a lot of free time to be outside and not commuting while the sun is out during the week.

With a big skew between winter and summer hours, it's dark in the winter but you don't actually lose that much in-the-sun free time while you gain a huge amount of light during the long summer evenings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> School children are sleeping on average 1 hour less than theirs peers did 50 years ago. This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times. Sleep deprivation in school age children has been linked to lower test scores, lower knowledge retention, higher rates of "trouble making".

Really happy to see these laws getting put in place!

<comment><USER12> > This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times

What about later and later bed times?

<comment><USER13> > What about later and later bed times?

This is the real factor. When I was a kid - it was in bed, lights out and go to sleep at 9pm the latest during school nights - strictly enforced by my parents.

Now I regularly see small children (< 10 years old) out at the store past 10pm or 11pm on school nights.

<comment><USER14> This is also anecdotal. While it will of course vary from person to person, it's been conclusively shown teenagers circadian rhythms are shifted later than adults. Sleeping later and waking up later in teenagers is biological and it doesn't do anyone good to fight it.

<comment><USER13> While what you say is true, does pushing the start time of class back 30 minutes or 1 hour make any difference? I'm skeptical.

When I was a teen, on weekends with no where to be, I'd regularly sleep until noon, 1pm, sometimes 2pm or later. Should we push school back until, say, 4pm through 10pm-12am? Doubtful that's good either.

On some level, it teaches kids that they have to be someplace at a certain time, regardless of what they might want... You know, obligations and responsibility.

<comment><USER15> > While what you say is true, does pushing the start time of class back 30 > minutes or 1 hour make any difference? I'm skeptical.

Did you read the article? They have done several studies to show a significance difference in academic performance with a slight shift. That's the whole reason for this change.

"One three-year study (pdf, p.1) of 9,000 high-school students across three states, for example, found that academic performance, "including grades earned in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies, plus performance on state and national achievement tests, attendance rates and reduced tardiness show significantly positive improvement with the later start times of 8:35 AM or later."

<comment><USER13> Like I said - why not push it to a start time of noon or later then? Was that studied too? Or are we just basing policy off a half-baked idea, here in Calunicornia?

I can be skeptical this will have any real impact, despite the findings of one survey-study.

The cited study was a survey students voluntarily completed... which opens the door for response bias. The study was only conducted over a single school year, and no two schools had the same modified schedule. Nor did they repeat the study for a second school year to ensure they didn't observe anomalies, nor go back to the old schedule to see if a simple schedule change - not the late start time - is what prompted the changes. Nor did they follow students through their student career, maintaining the altered schedule to see if performance results were consistent.

The 9,000 students might sound impressive - but this is not actually a good long term study... far from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wonderful.

Now can we pay attention to all of the research saying that homework creates stress but doesn't work, and have schools stop assigning so much?

More precisely, the research shows that homework done right helps, done wrong hurts, and the result is that more homework increases the correlation between parent's socioeconomic status and student performance. But on average is approximately net neutral for learning.

But there is one very strong correlation. More homework means more conflict in the home...

<comment><USER17> You are misinformed about research on homework. Even when you control for socioeconomic status homework has a large positive impact. [This is a nice review of many papers]([http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational- leadership/mar0...](http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational- leadership/mar07/vol64/num06/The-Case-For-and-Against-Homework.aspx)). The only place where homework is questionable is for very young children, like in kindergarten.

<comment><USER18> The paper by Cooper cited positively in your link claims:

> _For elementary school students, the effect of homework on achievement is > trivial, if it exists at all_ > [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=86753143098932071...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=8675314309893207133)

Which is diametrically different from the "large positive impact" you described in your comment. Maybe by "very young children" you mean to include 5–10 year olds?

(For what it's worth, I don't find Cooper's arguments that arbitrary amounts of homework are beneficial for secondary students very convincing. But we should at least not mischaracterize the claims about primary students.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> All this commotion around _what time_ to begin soul-crushing conformity factory amuses me grimly. Studies show children are slightly less psychologically crippled for life if you let them sleep in for an hour before putting them in the electric Skinner Box. Terrific.

<comment><USER20> We're gonna need a box tightener over here, someone is thinking outside it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I didn't even realize schools started before 8... I believe that's when my high school started. Thinking back to the useless slug that I was in the mornings as a teenager, I can't imagine this will do anything but help learning.

If only there had been a law saying college classes couldn't start before 11am (or 2pm on Fridays) when I was there...

<comment><USER22> I used to have both a technical math and a statistics class that started at 7am in college. Fridays if i remember right for the math class. That was always a 'fun' way to start the day.

<comment><USER23> Foreign language drill classes at 7 AM was quite possibly the worst thing I dealt with during college. Rapid-fire German when it is dark and frozen and you are hung over is very rough.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a great move by California. My family engaged with school district officials a few times on why we started school so early, when there is so much research showing it is harmful for teenager. The answer we got was... buses and sports. And little kids.

Basically, the district needed to make sure that elementary school kids weren't walking to school or waiting for buses in the dark, so they had to start around 9a at the earliest. Since they needed to share the buses, they couldn't start all grade levels at the same time.

The reason why they went 725a, 750a, and 9a instead of something like 8a, 9a, 930a is that if you started Jr high or High school at 930a, they wouldn't start after school activities till 4p and would go after dark in the winter.

This always seemed an insane argument to me, but was said multiple times. My home district looks to still use the same bell schedule too.

<comment><USER25> As a non-American I find this interesting, that school start times would be decided based on availability of buses.

Here in Australia, most schools don't own their own buses (I see a few expensive private schools do). Buses are provided by private bus companies and/or by a government-owned bus company (depending on who provides regular non-school bus services in the area). The bus fare is either paid by the student's parents, or else by the government, depending on factors like how long it would take the student to walk, how old the student is, whether they have a disability, etc. The government subsidises buses for all school students equally, irrespective of whether they attend private schools or government-run schools. I don't know how exactly schools decide their start times, but I doubt bus availability would have much to do with it. Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.

<comment><USER26> >Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.

If you have all 3 classes of students going to school at the same time, your bus costs are going to be 3 times as high. It doesn't matter if it's public or private, that's just how it works.

<comment><USER27> > If you have all 3 classes of students going to school at the same time, your > bus costs are going to be 3 times as high. It doesn't matter if it's public > or private, that's just how it works.

In Australia, it is also normal that all 3 classes of students also start at around the same time. (8:45-9:00am).

This doesn't seem to be a problem that the public transit system seems incapable of handling.

<comment><USER28> What is a public transit system? What a quaint idea.

Seriously though, public transit is such a joke in most parts of the USA (especially the rural areas) that this is basically a non-starter.

I live in a part of the country that does have a pretty good public transit system, I just checked on taking public transit from my neighborhood to my son's high school and discovered that it's not possible. There is no public transit (bus, light rail, tram, trolley - all of which we have) within 2 miles of the high school.

<comment><USER29> People say "flyover country" as metonymy of the two different realities that are both called "USA", but "transit country" and "SUV country" may be better images.

Outside the USA, 80% of what we see on TV shows is NYC. Sometimes I have this acute FOMO that I should be miserably scraping by in NYC just to be in the Navel of the World. It's just a mindfuck to us unamericans how big the US really is and how empty and boring.

<comment><USER28> Empty, yes. Boring? No. The empty parts are where the national parks are like the Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zions, Canyonlands, Arches, Yellowstone, Crate Lake, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't know what to say..I grew up in India. My mom would wake me up at 4.30, make me a hot beverage and go back to sleep. I would study in the early hours because she believed that early morning is the best time for the mind to absorb and retain what I study.

Go for a brisk walk at 6.00 and leave for school by 7.15-7.30. School was from 8.30-3.30. 8.00-8.30 was morning assembly which was mandatory.

Extra curricular activities like music or dance or outdoor sports till sunset(6.00). My grandmother won't let me in before 6.00 because she thought that outdoor play was important and in the sun. Freshen up and homework till 8.00. Dinner and then TV time. Reading and to bed by 9.00-9.30.

In high school, less play and more classes. But these tutoring classes were outside. And I would leave by 5.00 to catch the bus to get to them. I was old enough to travel by myself. I loved school. I loved my teachers.

My math tutor from 1989..we keep in touch and she is now teaching me Indian classical music by whatsapp video chat thrice a week. I call her once a year and this year I told her I am joining a neighborhood music group. She made me sing. Entirely disapproved my technique and we started classes immediately.

If my teachers asked me 'jump', I would. My school years were the best years of my life. I don't think I would have had this experience had I grown up in CA in this time and age..and gone to public schools here. Case in point: The public school teachers in my Bay Area city recruit parents and students to strike in their support during their union wage negotiations. It's a travesty.

I think children should wake up earlier. It's delightful to wake up before dawn and have a goal. The rest of the day at school becomes easy peasy.

<comment><USER14> Studies show children don't perform as well in the early morning which is why this change was made. I don't want to de-value your experiences because they sound fantastic. However. Anecdota is not a substitute for science. I suggest skimming the summary by the Centers for Disease Control [1] which references numerous studies in support of schools starting later than 830am. You are of course welcome to wake your children up at any time, should you disagree with the CDC's findings, or you know, if they're morning people.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start- times/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html)

<comment><USER30> I did begin my reply with 'I don't know what to say'. It was intended to be anecdotal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _" one-quarter will need to wait an additional 31 to 60 minutes to get > going."_

So one quarter of Californian schools were starting between 7 and 7:30? I'm surprised there haven't been revolts in the streets about that. That's completely ridiculous.

Apparently this is to accommodate parents who need to leave for work at ridiculously early hours, but if you want to accommodate parents, why only those, and not the parents who prefer to get out of bed a bit later?

My wife and I have arranged it so that she works early (she often leaves at 7:15 when the rest of the family is barely out of bed) and is home in time to pick the kids up from day care, while I take the kids to school at 8:30 and am usually home a bit too late to pick them up (though I work fairly nearby and can still pick them up if I have to).

But if this isn't an option for whatever reason, why not take your kids to pre-school care? Leave early, drop the kids off at pre-school care, go to work, and when school starts, pre-school care ensures the kids get there on time.

<comment><USER32> > why not take your kids to pre-school care?

That's a very privileged view. I would imagine most of the country cannot afford any sort of paid external care.

<comment><USER31> So what do working parents do after school? Schools starting early also end early, I assume. If kids can't go to school on their own, I guess they can't come home on their own either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Weird thing is the assumption there is a single one-time-fits-all solution. Give some flexibility to kids and families on start time. Optional period 1 paired with optional period 8(or 7 or 9).

<comment><USER34> Thats not how public schooling works: its mechanics are rules on rules.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am going to ask this again, as I never receive a satisfactory answer when this subject comes up.

Isn't time all relative? Its just a number, which we adjust by an hour twice a year. It takes us a couple of days to get used to it. Can't people just be more disciplined and go to bed an hour earlier if they need an hours extra sleep? That's effectively what we do in spring when the clocks change.

I came to this conclusion travelling from Chile to Peru, going pretty much directly north. One country had daylight saving for summer the other didn't and on top of that there was an hour difference for time zone - so in total two hours difference. As I say, it took a couple of days to get used to it.

Can anyone give me a decent rebuttal to this argument?

<comment><USER36> No, not all time is relative and the presence of light has profound impacts on our biological circadian rhythm. Even DST has shown negative health impacts. [1]

1\. [https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is- dead...](https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is- deadly-2018-3)

<comment><USER35> Ok, that's a fair point, but don't certain countries effectively rise a lot earlier than others? (Greenwich meantime for example passes through London and also through Spain, yet there is an hour difference in the time zone). Is there evidence that that affects these countries differently? Plus we have light bulbs in this day and age, so lighting is not affected by the sun in the same way that it used to be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think this doesn't go far enough, there should be a ban on starting before 10 am. During high school I recall frequently falling asleep around 3-4 am and having the alarm go off at 6:30.

</comment><comment><USER38> California: everything is either banned or required.

<comment><USER14> Ultimately the buck for public education in US states stops at the state, therefore, this amounts to an administrative change. They set the curricula, is it a stretch to say they should also decide when that curriculum is administered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here, in Brazil, when my classes was in the morning, it started 7:00AM. To be at class on time, i was off the bed at 6:00AM, took a breakfast and walked 20 minutes to the school. It was rough.

They had 2 classes shifts, a 7-11:30AM and another 1-5:30AM, depending of your grade and the school, it could be on the morning or the evening shift.

Edit: I forgot to mention that i live in a city with 80k habitants, a small- medium city. At the biggest cities here, like São Paulo, the kids usually have to wake even early to take the bus.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?

<comment><USER41> This law is only for grades 7-12, so most affected kids can get themselves to school, or don't need direct supervision between when parents leave for work and when the bus arrives.

<comment><USER42> My 7 and 9yo kids start school at 8:50am, and don't get off the bus until 4:30pm. It's ridiculous. They're young and need time off but because the district moved everyone back to make room for the High Schools now elementary kids aren't home until half past 4.

Not enough time for them to play in the afternoons now.

<comment><USER43> Either their elementary school is in session for an awful long time (mine was 6 hours), or they have a really long bus ride home.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> School K-12 started at 8:30am where / when I grew up. I assumed that was just the universal time school started everywhere.

I have a feeling we're in for quite a shock when my daughter starts school in a couple years. Our current routine has her waking up sometime between 7:30 and 9.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm extremely oblivious to what the benefits to starting later are, and how stable the benefits will be over time. Anyone care to explain?

I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.

<comment><USER46> That assumes sleep(2100, 0500) == sleep(2300, 0700), which anecdataly is false.

<comment><USER45> Could you elaborate? I think you mean that there are benefits to waking up later due to the effect light has on circadian rhythm, but I don't want to assume.

<comment><USER46> That, and that some people are naturally early birds and others are night owls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I have a couple questions/concerns about this:

\- Does this only impact "regular" classes, or does it also impact optionally- early schedules (a.k.a. "0 Period", as the middle and high schools called it where I grew up)?

\- Has there been any consideration on the impact from students having less time to do homework every night if school starts (and therefore ends) later?

</comment><comment><USER48> Of course this happens after I leave California

</comment><comment><USER49> My mother works for a school district in California. There was an open hearing around moving the starting school time from 8:00 am to 7:00 am. There's been countless research showing that this is generally bad for children to wake up this early (I'm sorry for not linking a reference).

At the hearing, there are some words that go something like "Children come first" printed on some wall in a large font. My mother made her case that starting so early isn't a good idea, and is bad for children and they may as well remove those words. The reason for the change is that teachers generally live pretty close to the school they teach at. They also have a car. So, for them they can wake up at 6:30 and make it on time. Whereas kids, especially poor kids, might live further and may be taking a bus where the bus pick up times could be as early as 6:00 am so the kids are waking up even earlier just to make it. An early starting time, generally, benefited the teachers as they can wake up later and they get out of class around 2:00 pm. The after-school programs then rake in cash by keeping kids longer since most parents don't get off work until 5:00 pm.

tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. Good on California to put students over teachers. Now, if only we can raise teacher's salaries.

<comment><USER24> I'm also pretty sure at the higher grade levels (Middle to high school) it is partially about keeping other professions out of sports coaching. If high school starts at 930a and ends at 4p, an awful lot of working professionals could still be there by 415-430p to coach. When high school let out at 245, it's a lot harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> [https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.p...](https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER51> 8am is still too early for teenagers. Not only their brains need more sleep than adults (9+ hours) but their clocks shift which is why it's common for teenagers to go to bed later than adults.

</comment><comment><USER52> A lot of the comments are focusing on the burden for the parents, but there is also negative impact on the kids from less wealthy backgrounds.

My last 2 years of high school, I went to 7am first period to be able to get out early enough to put in 6-8 hours of work and still have enough time for homework. That extra hour and a half was critical to making it work.

Without the work and extra cash, I probably would have had a lot different experience and may have not stayed motivated for college/grad school/etc. But more importantly, this income let me feel on the level around much wealthier kids who didn't work or worked for their parents businesses. Confidence is priceless at that age!

</comment><comment><USER53> School may start at 8am but morning begins at 5am in an industrious household. Even one solid hour of daily morning practice before school is a great gain.

</comment><comment><USER54> Some classes in my uni started at 7:45am. I never went.

</comment><comment><USER55> Shouldn't the school do what's appropriate for the local community it is in? Now they won't be able to.

</comment><comment><USER56> My High-school started at 8 and university at 9.. I thought it was too early for both!

</comment><comment><USER57> Does this allow for before / after school care at schools to start before 8?

</comment><comment><USER58> Why not elementary schools too? :(

</comment><comment><USER59> Great, now just add a law banning parents' workplaces from starting before 8am and we are all set

</comment><comment><USER60> Public schools are a cancer. They are worse for your intellectual development than just being left alone. They actually damage your mind by suffocating you of free thought and experimentation. And in the name of doing this, they pile on the stress and expose you to viscous bullies. The kids run these schools now, they are closer to day-care centers or zoos than schools. The teachers just watch idly while their students succumb to the horrible circumstances that they are forced into. I know because it happened to me. American public schools in particular are a disgrace. And to top it all off they woke me up at 6AM 5.5 days a week which was never necessary and has been shown to be detrimental to students wellbeing. God damn if there is one thing in this world that I resent it is the mother fucking public schools. God fucking damn them.

<comment><USER61> They're the only place that most people will ever experience physical violence.

<comment><USER60> This is true for me. Public schools are so horrible that it drives me insane just to think about it. And people brush it off because of some vague notion that there's no other choice. Look at billy eilish. She's fantastic and very successful and she was homeschooled. Palmer luckey who founded oculus and is now worth something like 500 million dollars, homeschooled. "I can't afford homeschooling. I have never even tried to assemble a budget or think critically about it but I just know it would be too expensive and would not work because nobody was ever successful after homeschooling. I guess I'll just throw my child to the lions and hope they don't become a shooter."

<comment><USER62> Of course there are exceptions, but most homeschooled people I've met have displayed some sort of social deficiency. I wouldn't support a blanket statement that the solution is more home schooling.

<comment> barry-cotter Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited

[https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin- socia...](https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin- socialization-2013.pdf)

This article reviews recent research on homeschooled children's socialization. The research indicates that homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds, provide their children with a variety of social opportunities outside the family, and believe their children's social skills are at least as good as those of other children. What homeschooled children think about their own social skills is less clear. Compared to children attending conventional schools, however, research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults. They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children, and they may be more likely to act unselfishly. As adolescents, they have a strong sense of social responsibility and exhibit less emotional turmoil and problem behaviors than their peers. Those who go on to college are socially involved and open to new experiences. Adults who were homeschooled as children are civically engaged and functioning competently in every way measured so far. An alarmist view of homeschooling, therefore, is not supported by empirical research. It is suggested that future studies focus not on outcomes of socialization but on the process itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Don't worry, we'll work around that law by switching to year-round DST.

</comment><comment><USER64> On which day and timezone?

<comment><USER65> On schools day, in the time zone in use in California (PT).

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Ah, meddling central-planners preventing hard-working families from doing what it takes to achieve their dreams...

Don't you just have to shake your head at people who've literally never had to accomplish anything life-and-death in their entitled little lives, making rules to protect us?

It brings a tear to the eye.

<comment><USER14> Nope, it's science ([https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start- times/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start- times/index.html)).

<comment><USER34> Science says 8:30, law says 8:00, so the state is not following the state's recommendation.

Also, what is best for an ideal scenario for the idealized kid is not the same as what is best for the parents.

Finally the biggest perpetrator of sending kids early is precisely public schooling, private schooling has variety that suits the parent's choices.

What is the best public policy then? school vouchers, and let parents decide.

<comment><USER14> > What is the best public policy then? school vouchers, and let parents > decide.

That may work, it does in Sweden apparently, but your conclusion certainly doesn't follow from your premise. This feels like classic junior engineer baby-with-the-bath water thinking. It's easier to throw a system out and start over than make the modifications to your existing system but somehow it never does turn out exactly right, more like a ruined fresco meme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I used to get up well before the sun rose for private school, it wasn't a big deal, we just went to bed earlier than most.

It was nice to have more time to myself before parents got home from work.

It seems strange for the state to be meddling in this.

<comment><USER68> A bunch of studies came out saying that students are better with more sleep and generally waking up after 7 is best so we get this law. The problem here is that I am betting that the kids still get home before their parents from work and now they will have to start after their parents leave for work so it will put an economic crunch on dual working parents.

<comment><USER67> Why don't kids just go to sleep earlier?

Isn't part of raising children teaching them self-discipline? Things like putting down the electronic gadgets at night, not consuming stimulating food/drinks in the evening, etc.

It's shit like this that makes California look so ridiculous to the rest of the nation.

<comment><USER14> No, it's biology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The implied assumption in all this discussion is that everyone stays up late so 7am doesn't work. Perhaps the question should be why society is so geared for waking hours shifted partly into the night. Perhaps people should wake with the sun and sleep soon after dark. But so much entertainment is scheduled during the evening, and everyone is so deeply entrenched in their habits.

<comment><USER70> I don't think that is the implied assumption; the stated reason for this change, FTA:

> The American Academy of Pediatrics, which backed the bill, said in 2014 > policy statement that getting too little sleep puts teenagers' physical and > mental health at risk, as well as their academic performance. The > organization cited research that shows that biological changes in puberty > make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before 11pm, and > that teenagers need between 8.5 and 9.5 hours of sleep to function at their > best.

<comment><USER69> Did they give a cause as to why it's hard for them to sleep before 11pm? That doesn't contradict what I said in the slightest.

<comment><USER70> > The organization cited research that shows that biological changes in > puberty make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before > 11pm

I didn't follow the citation, but that would be my suggestion for the first place to look if you want to understand their theory better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This seems to flagrantly ignore the parents' need to be to work on time. I think the kids will ultimately be the ones suffering because the parents will struggle that much more.

No, the bus is not always an option, nor is leaving your kid alone at home for any amount of time.

<comment> crooked-v Given that this will be a job-negotiating concern of literally every parent in California, businesses will just have to adapt to the new normal.

<comment><USER71> It's the lower-class parents who can't afford babysitters or who might be divorced that will be the most affected by this. Coincidentally, it's those same parents who have the least room to negotiate in their positions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> If the objective is for people to get more hours of sleep probably it would have been better to pass a law dividing the day in 32 hours... Kids will sleep the same amount of time in all cases, but it would be 50% more hours.

</comment><comment><USER73> The "early wakeup time makes people groggy" story always looked puzzling to me.

I mean, when DST kicks in everyone adjusts in day or two. What prevents one from setting up their own personal DST and getting up earlier still? Certainly not biology.

<comment><USER24> Every time this comes up, I recommend "Internal Time" by Till Roenneburg. It is wonderfully written, and it demolishes this concept quite thoroughly. It really is biology.

Summary of the book as relates here though: People really do have internal clocks and preferred awake/sleep cycles. These internal clocks vary between individuals, and are there is most likely a genetic component. These internal clocks vary with age- in particular, teenagers and young adults clocks are generally shifted much later than kids or older adults. Shifts to people's schedules (such as DST) that cause them to leave their preferred sleep/awake cycle mitigate with time, but do not fully go away.

Outside that book, there are plenty of studies showing that a non-standard hours shift work is biologically harmful.</comment></comment>