TechCrunch is a bully  - <AUTHOR> http://www.lanewood.me/post/30435294794/techcrunch-is-a-bully <comment><USER2> I have no real interest in either side of this story, and Techcrunch isn't really on my rolodex of sites to read from. That being said, I don't think the original Techcrunch article was being a bully at all.

The fact that she allegedly has gotten away with the simplest of social engineering tactics against a group that most likely thinks of themselves as _at least_ smarter than average, was fairly interesting to me. It shows how easy and effective social engineering can be, even by someone as young as Shirley Hofnstein.

All the author appears to write is that they don't like the fact that Techcrunch wrote an article about their friend. It appears that the author of the above article doesn't even defend Shirley Hornstein, which leads me to believe that she was in fact guilty of these acts of social engineering.

If that's the case, then it seems like a decent bit of journalism to me. Do I think it's a huge crime? No, it's not like she pulled off a Madoff scam. But was it an interesting article? Yes, and it really points to the fact that we all need to keep on our toes.

<comment><USER3> While I agree with your not being on a side - my personal opinion is this:

Techcrunch was founded and run by a douchebag - thus douchebaggery is in its DNA.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately this is true. I'm not sure all that many people know where the founder came from, i.e., the type of stuff he was doing before TechCrunch, and the company he worked for - a company responsible for a very large portion of some of the purest douchbaggery to be found anywhere on the web. The lowest of the low. They do some very dirty work. I'd even guess there are "innocent" people working at TC who do not know the history.

I wanted to see TC as some sort of redemption for this guy, a stepping away from the sort of douchebaggery he was doing previously. But, after watching TC for a number of years, it clearly was a progression to an even more potent form of sleaze. If people are using underhanded tactics with TC, then I can only conclude that they've succeeded in attracting the very same type of people which they are themselves (excluding anyone working there who is naive and unaware).

<comment><USER5> Im sorry, but this is ridiculously unfair. Dont judge a company by what just one person in it has done. Everyone has made mistakes. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

<comment><USER6> That phrase _really_ is not universalizable at all. Where would we all be if nobody called out anybody else for anything?

Consider me voluntarily opted out from that nonsense. _Please_ call me on my crap, you do not have to be perfect yourself to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd like your leave to go a bit meta here, hope you don't mind.

What I find interesting about this exchange (the original TC article and Lanewood's response) is the message "don't do this because it hurts."

Yes, it does. But my experience is that pain is a signal you listen to, it's one of those things that says "stop doing what you are doing." It is a corrective force.

Making exaggerated claims about your influence or connections or importance to folks is wrong. It is wrong because it abuses the trust the other person put into the person lying, which then causes great hurt and shame when they realize they have been "duped" or "fooled" or "lied to". Calling someone on it, is hurtful too, but its important to do as well. That pain going the other way is a signal to moderate behavior, or change it.

So this conversation is "Shirley is a liar" / "You shouldn't do that because it hurts her feelings" seems to want to shut down a force working for good, which is better behavior.

I know I would love it if people were more honest about themselves, but I also know that some folks have convinced themselves that their own self worth is tied up in how influential they perceive themselves to be. Thus exaggerating that influence is like make-up, or fancy bling, its a crutch to prop up their self image.

I think there is pain on both sides of this conversation, at least a couple of kilo-snarks. If it helps someone to become a better person, its beneficial. But if they don't have the mental tools to process it they can (and sometimes do) become simply depressed by it. I don't think either party in this conversation represented themselves particularly well. If Shirley is young now would be a good time to come to grips with the way she presents herself. TC should work at doing better at informing rather than blaming (it did read like it came right out of Valleywag). Continuing acting this way on both parties will only hurt them going forward.

<comment><USER8> So, first off I don't give a fuck about the story, or the counter story, or people who photoshop themselves with celebrities, or people who care about whether people really know celebrities, or techcrunch.

That said, I wanted to contrast the HN reaction to this story with the HN reaction to the kid who slept at AOL. I figure in both cases we're talking about someone who did something deceptive and wrong in the supposed name of entrepreneurial hustle. The AOL kid actually went as far as breaking the law, while it's not clear this girl did at all.

In the AOL kid's article you wrote:

 _"However for a potential investor this is a great demonstration of how committed someone is to their idea, and their passion. I don't doubt for a moment that Eric will be successful at what ever he sets out to do, you can't buy that kind of focus."_

( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4019755> )

Then went on to at least play devil's advocate to the commenter who called it an 'ethical failure'.

Honestly not trying to call you hypocritical here.. I'm genuinely curious what gives the AOL kid 'moxie' while the girl that plays up her relationships with folks is less admirable.

<comment><USER7> That is a completely fair point. What is the difference?

I see it as 'who is being scammed' and what is the harm done.

Now in the kid's case he did use AOL resources which, had he not, they would have been used on AOL employees (thinking mostly food here, the energy/light/water usage is probably flat rate like it is in my facilities). He did not do monetary damage to AOL, nor reputational damage (he didn't represent his work as being part of AOL or represent himself as an AOL representative to potential partners or investors).

In Shirley's case she allegedly convinced some people she would be able to connect them with potential investors or advisers when in fact she could not. For a startup founder that can make them think there is some additional outreach going on that isn't. If the founder feels like outreach is critical to the startups ability to succeed and they find they have squandered time, their most precious resource, with this person who couldn't deliver then I could see them feel betrayed. If you hire (and pay) a PR firm to get your message out and they say they can get you into the New York Times or Inc or whatever and it turns out they can't and never could, you may be inclined to not pay them (and possibly sue them if you had already paid them).

So one is 'freeloading' (the kids case) and one is fraud (Shirley's case). I see it as the difference between saying you have a million dollars in your checking account when you don't, versus writing a check for a million dollars when you don't have it. Shopping yourself into photos feels more like the latter to me, but unless you're actually paying for her services your not financially harmed.

I think asking the hypocrisy question is completely valid. Where does this behavior cross the line from 'white lie' into 'fraud'?

In my post I really was commenting on people trying suppress conversation that is painful through peer pressure. Conflict avoidance is a huge problem in society, it lets problems grow into bigger problems. I was not particularly passing judgement on Shirley's actions, although in all honestly when I read the TC article I did feel sympathy for the folks who were misled, and I didn't feel nearly as much angst for the AOL folks who didn't realize the guy was living in their office.

The kid's motivations were pretty clear, do you happen to have any insights into Shirleys? I'll admit I accepted the implication that she does this just to prop up her own self image, but recognize that conclusion isn't completely supported by what we know. Motive does play a huge part in how the two stories get positioned.

(This comes back to my comment in that previous thread : _When evaluating a series of events involving grey areas its always useful to try to understand the principles that are in play. Different sets of principles would lead you down two different paths._ )

<comment><USER8> Wildly lucid and I imagine if I'd reflected on the topic for longer this line of thinking may have occurred to me. I really appreciate you spelling out your thought process for both.

<comment><USER9> This comment branch is proof that all is not lost on HN. Thanks for being 'Good Guy Gregs' in the comments.

<http://www.quickmeme.com/Good-Guy-Greg-/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure if you misrepresent yourself that blatantly time and time again you deserve what is coming to you.

 _"she has the top media company in the tech industry trying to take her down."_

Oh please, she blatantly lied many times about many things to high profile people. That is a story and its going to get written about by _someone_ whether its Techcrunch or someone else.

<comment><USER11> What am I missing? What do you know that you're not saying? I can't find anything in the original TC article that said "she blatantly lied many times about many things to high profile people".

Who did she lie to? What was the lie? Was it a lie or just an exaggeration?

The TC article mentions Founders Fund a bunch, and not much else.

<comment><USER12> So, photoshopping yourself into pictures with _several different people_ is "an exaggeration" to you?

<comment><USER13> That's the thing! This article is incredibly shallow and manipulative. I have no doubt this girl lied about being affiliated with Founders Fund but that's all the article says. The article never says that the purpose of the photoshopped photos was to mislead. It just puts them out there and tempts you to draw your own conclusion from the biased context. People Photoshop themselves next famous people. All the time. It's all in good fun. I'm not saying she's innocent but what I am saying is that this article was lazy and really does belong on TMZ.

I'll sum up the article:

"This random girl lied about being affiliated with Founders Fund but it's unclear who she lied to exactly. We're going to beat this horse to death and here's some Photoshopped photos of her with famous people that could be innocent but we're not real journalists here so we'll make an implication and let you draw your own conclusion thus getting us off the hook for doing any real journalism"

That's how that piece should have read. Whether she's guilty or not this article is a steaming pile. I wonder if this was ordered by Founders Fund itself. (See what I did there? I asked the question and now you get to go all conspiracy theory with that while I get to say I never made that accusation... Kind of like this article)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Clearly there is a gradient of people and how much misinformation they spread around themselves. Few never lie, some will occasionally slip a word here and there to exaggerate a truth, some will lie from time to time about small things, and then waaaaaay on the other side of this gradient there is photoshopping yourself into pictures with famous public figures and similar tactics described in the article. Of course we are not all saints, but based on the outcry most people (myself included) agree that there is a line that was crossed here.

I appreciated the article as an interesting case study.

</comment><comment><USER15> America has always been a land where you could fail, then pick yourself up. You could move west in search of a new beginning and a new identity. You could go bankrupt, then start over, and eventually fail your way to success and a better life. There is no longer a place to hide or run away to. There is no way to re-invent yourself and start over. The foolish crimes of our youths are now a permanent part of who we are. For the rest of our lives and likely eternity.

This is the sad side of the products we are helping to create as engineers at Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc...

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure what point you're making. If it's that Facebook, Google, Twitter are making it harder for confidence tricksters to move on and repeat their lies when they've been rumbled - I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

<comment><USER17> I think the point isn't that it's harder for grifters, but that it's harder for everyone. Even people who genuinely think they're playing the game, and have made statements too far, lies, or even genuine mistakes. Before, they could say "Wow, I guess I was wrong. I've learned my lesson." and try to be better. Now, they're branded, and must suffer, forever.

It's a point I personally know all too well. I was fired from a journalism job a year ago; my boss accused me of looking at pornography at work. (I argue that "looked at porn" and "looked at 4chan", are vastly different, and intent is an important factor. I didn't think I was doing anything wrong.) I'm 31, and in this market, as someone who worked my way into a "producer" role without a degree? It's an employer's market. Even after a year of job hunting, people hear that story, and the conversation goes silent. There's plenty of people they can choose from with no discernable "problems" in their past.

It seems my choices are "go into marketing, despite how you feel about hocking clients you hate", or "work two mediocre jobs of low wage". One drove me crazy, two isn't great.

And I'm not trying to make a sob story out of this; I went to a website my employer didn't like. I'm not going to lie about that, I learned a lesson is all. I'm just trying to drive the point home. If you make a single "mistake," that may be all it takes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm no TC fan, but it was a fair subject and story.

That such deceptive operators can show up anywhere (and especially in a young/dynamic community) is important to know, and it can only be vividly demonstrated with tangible and current examples.

And specifically, enough people were affected by this person's claims, leaving enough of a reportable trail, that a story warning others and documenting the _modus operandi_ could be true, well-sourced, interesting, and useful for TC's readership.

</comment><comment><USER19> Listen, this just proves that TC _is_ a gossip rag, but, you're going to defend someone who is literally Photoshopping themselves into photos with celebrities and claiming that they're real?

Uhh.

<comment><USER20> If you'll notice the article never mentioned any context for the pictures, just kind of put them out there for the reader to draw conclusions.

Was it a joke between friends, or an actual attempt to defraud people. Who knows? The article certainly didn't offer any evidence either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _"Most of us are not as big of a deal that we convey that we are. 99% of the industry is guilty."_

      Bullfuckingshit.

      Speak for yourself.

      Thou protests too much.

_"I'll admit it. But so have you."_

      Again, fuck you speak for yourself.

      A bit self-serving, aren't we?

      And I can't stand TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER22> The thing I don't get about the techcrunch article is in the comments Alexia Tsotsis wrote:

> This is the story that no one was writing. Amazing work Anthony Ha.

is his life in danger? is she some high power person that can destroy Anthony Ha's career? No... she's a person that lies...

<comment><USER23> I don't understand why a co-editor of TechCrunch would ever write _"this is the story that no one was writing"_. Er, if you were wanting someone to write it, why didn't you commission them to write it already? That's surely your job!?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Enough people still read TC to where it can be considered a bully? I'm being completely serious. It's been a long time since I paid attention to anything that was written on TechCrunch and it's been even longer since the thing I paid attention to was anything remotely sensible or interesting.

I actively avoid visiting links to TechCrunch. Because the people who work there are a poor excuses for journalists - which is why it will forever be to my mind 'just a blog'.

<comment><USER25> TC's world is people who have to look up what "BBS" means every time it comes up, both employees and readers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I seriously am considering swearing off TechCrunch because of this article. True or not, their hegemony gives them so much power, and to see it foolishly used in this way was disturbing.

The people she was claiming to know are big boys/girls. This should have been handled socially in the valley.

<comment><USER25> As someone who stopped reading them years ago, let me tell you an incontrovertible fact of the Internet: if it's worth reading, it will show up in every aggregator you still pay attention to, three times on the front page of HN if necessary. Propagation is a cue for importance, which is why TC (and RWW, and...) spend so much effort manually posting these stories all over the place themselves. They're faking it, too.

<comment><USER27> But there are so many things that are propagated that aren't important. Consistently negative world news, for starters.

<comment><USER25> While your second sentence is a non-sequitur and a pretty transparent dig besides, your first sentence is partly covered by "they're faking it." PR agencies, Digg-like upvote groups, all of them are corrupt attacks on organic popularity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> >It's like reading a middle school girl's diary.

Exactly this. There was no point to the story. Sure, I'll buy that the lady is a headcase/creeper or whatever. But that's it? No real crimes detailed or list of people screwed over? It was just a finger-pointing "hate this person right here" piece.

Cyberbullying doesn't just happen to kids.

<comment><USER29> Expose fraud isn't bullying. She's a grown woman who chose to risk her reputation by playing a con game. Most con artists get away with it: she didn't. Her being exposed will deter other would-be parasites. Good.

<comment><USER28> If there was a real exposé here, I might agree. There would be more specifics, statements from victims and prosecutors, etc.. This article lacked any purpose aside from pure humiliation. Maybe this lady is so awful that she deserves that, but the case wasn't made. What if she's mentally ill?

<comment><USER29> Well, they included a court document and any small startups thinking of pushing consulting money to her likely won't now, so mission accomplished.

>What if she's mentally ill?

Not all dishonest people are mentally ill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The article does seem a little bullying. I mean, what harm has she really done other than lie (which every business person has done since the beginning time). I could see if she caused some startup to go under or cost some company millions of dollars but to quote the author, "Shirley Hornstein has never done anything bad to me. Except, y'know, lie."

It really seems like a bunch of people got together one night and came to the conclusion that they don't like this woman and one those people said "Hey, I'm a TC writer. I can write an article about all this Silicon Valley phoney and we can all have a laugh about it tomorrow!" Do I agree Shirley Hornstein told some blatant lies? Yes. Do I think that these falsehoods deserve a front page article? No.

Besides, "Everyone lies" -House

<comment><USER31> Quoting the article:

"Sometimes it was mostly just embarrassing, in other cases reputations or deals had been affected by the deception."

However, they don't show what deals and reputations had been affected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> A calling out for really unacceptable behaviour? Yes. Bullying? Far from it in my eyes. If you consistently misrepresent yourself and promise people things you are not capable of achieving then you deserve to be called out on it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Yes, TC is a bully. Not only that, Arrington is a major con artist. Half the people in the valley these days are con artists. It's like this girl was the scape goat for this overwhelming shitstorm of lies that has grown the past few years. Pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow this whole exchange depresses the hell out of me. Can't we just build cool shit and leave this kind of lame drama for other industries?

</comment><comment><USER35> > So shame on TechCrunch for publishing something that belongs on TMZ.

TechCrunch _is_ TMZ for Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER36> I know this might come as a surprise to some.. but no one outside the valley cares. :)

In fact, I'd bet very few _inside_ the valley care.

</comment><comment><USER37> Both this article and the one it discussed seemed to go right over my head. The only impression I could get is that there is a small faction of tech related people who have formed their own hollywoodish faction and act like it too. Anyone care to take a go at explaining to me what really happened and why it matters?

</comment><comment><USER38> I thought the same thing when reading that article. Here was someone I've never heard of - and I'm pretty active at getting around the startup world; someone who seems to have got herself into a web of lies which probably started off with some exaggerations.

Let's stipulate to the fact that it's not okay to lie about yourself to get a gig, even if you think it's harmless and you'll make up for it in work. I thought it was right that the Yahoo! CEO was fired for that stuff. I've never lied on a resume, never would.

But what we have here is a nobody, who's probably got a bit of a problem. That problem is exacerbated by the bullshit celebrity culture TechCrunch tries to build around our industry. It's the bullshit attitude displayed by a ton of the current incubator ducklings, who follow their angels around in awe like momma duck, while convincing themselves they're starring the fantasy version of Silicon Valley they saw in the Social Network. TechCrunch is among the worst offenders creating this problem.

If we're going to be honest about it, there are plenty of folks - and we don't need to get ugly and name names but if you're around the industry you bump into these people - who call themselves Tech Journalists who are little more than exaggerators, fabricators and bullshit artists who have NEVER CREATED ANYTHING OF VALUE themselves, never created a job, never taken the risk. Just the role of the critic. Never the man in the arena. So it's a bit rich them all ganging up on this unfortunate person who tied herself up in knots and exaggerations leading to great embarrassment.

(Try going to any event full of tech journalists from these blogs and wait till they get a bit drunk and listen to the boasts and stories and thoroughly inappropriate behavior.)

But I have NO sympathy for any startup that works with someone without doing the most basic of background checks which would immediately expose lies and exaggerations. The valley is full of people who overstate things and word gets around pretty quickly. You can often see the smoke and smell the charcoal from burning bridges from a long distance, and way after the fact. No public interest is served by tarring and feathering a nobody for entertainment purposes under the guise of investigative journalism.

The way this story is written you'd think they'd uncovered Carlos the Jackal, cracked a terrorist ring, discovered the whereabouts of Nazi war criminals. It is pathetic and mean spirited.

I keep hoping TechCrunch will recapture what once made it a must-read, but I'm increasingly saddened by the reality that it won't happen. As I've posted elsewhere, it's a serious thing that we do here in Silicon Valley, building companies, taking risks. We often spend large sums of other people's money. We commit our lives and those of our loved ones to the endeavor. Sure we can have fun. But we cannot run the industry like a school yard and we deserve more from our media outlets than mean-spirited gossip.

<comment><USER39> pretty funny to read your elitis tirade there considering that a lot of these blogs are also startups with founders, CEO's, employees, investors etc.

<comment><USER38> Not sure what's elitist about getting annoyed at a self-appointed elite of tech journalists for a decline in standards - and also the use of a leading industry publication to attack an individual. Unless you mean elitist in the same way I want an elite pilot flying my plane and an elite surgeon doing my operation. Then, well yeah...

Tirade? Fair enough. Got a bit carried away. Why not? This stuff pisses me off. It's ridiculous that industry coverage has fallen towards the TMZ level over the last few years. I know for some reason I don't understand Arrington isn't popular around here, but when he ran TechCrunch it was must read stuff. Scoops were mostly real, and of some value. He personally wrote well, and held others to the same standard. Even post acquisition TC still puts on great events, and there's a lot to like. That's why it's so frustrating.

Startups? Not really, the specific blog in question isn't a startup - it was sold to a large corporation and its current focus is page views at any cost.

There's still good writing out there. There are tech journalists who I eagerly read everything they write, because it's well written and thought out. There are probably some I don't read because the style is not for me, but I'm sure they're great. However, there is also a parasitic element, feeding off the energy of the startups they purport to cover, having little appreciation of much of what startups do, or even the underlying technology they're writing about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm burning my karma with this, but I appreciate this article. As a startup I'd like to be warned, probably people wasted time with this girl, time to market, time to VCs, time to get there startup somewhere b/c they believed this girl would help them when indeed she didn't. Could they have done better due dilligence? Perhaps. Would others tell how they got burned? Perhaps. But I don't follow the thinking that everything other people do to you is your fault b/c you should have known better. The wrongdoer is the victim stuff. And it's astonishing how HN reacts to guys that fake startups, connections, products compared to this girl that is faking her way around. We'll see if there is coming more.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wow, the Hollywood-ness implied by this article about the tech world... this... is it really like this out there now? Is this nauseous feeling I have right now the way serious but small filmmakers feel about the entertainment industry?

</comment><comment><USER42> Most programmers are hard-working, relatively honest people. It must be difficult for them to watch people like Shirley pass them on the career ladder.

It's one thing to have people skills, and use it as a lever to add benefit and value to this world. The Shirley's of this world deserve zero sympathy.

That being said, the TechCrunch article wasn't as articulate as it should have been. At the very least, context should have been provided for these pictures.

</comment><comment><USER43> If everyone ignored them, they'd go away.

</comment><comment><USER31> "The opposite of success isn't failure; it is name-dropping" \- Nassim Taleb

</comment><comment><USER44> The moral of this blog post seems to be that most tech companies' execs are all as big of tools as this gal.

Okay.

So I'm supposed to somehow trust someone's company that's trying to be some fake Silicon Valley star effer? I dunno man. Maybe she has the best social kitten mashup ever but I can't imagine if I had a million dollars to invest that I'd let this one anywhere near it.

</comment><comment><USER45> TechCrunch is just a joke.

I would never go there outside of HN posts, but it's really amusing to see how self-important a bunch of hipster bloggers can be when writing about people doing actual work.

The puff pieces that they run as the majority of what is published, those are pretty funny. It's the slag pieces that are most entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think it's good journalism. That's their job, to get to the bottom of things and I think he did a great job.

</comment><comment><USER47> The easiest antidote to an article such as this is to out yourself. If _everyone_ knew this was coming out, she most probably knew.

The advantage of her outing herself would be that it would be far less damaging and considering people love those that seek a sort of penance, something positive would have come out of her outing post.

It is not too late though. She should write, ask for forgiveness, NOT blame TechCrunch for her woes and move on. Everyone loves a comeback stor so this might end up having a positive outcome if told well.

Ironically, I did not read the post the first time I came across it. This post brought far more attention than the original one.

</comment><comment><USER48> Exaggerating your connections to others to try and hustle favors and more connections is one thing, but photoshopping yourself into photos with celebrities is pretty damn creepy no matter how you look at it.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have called TechCrunch "assholes" twice on tweets in the last week or so (because I hate following a link to TC on my iPad and having to cancel the annoying nag popup to install their app; last time I could not get through to the article because of constant redirects back to the nag popup. Yuck.)

So, I might be a little prejudiced against TC right now, but even with that, I think the original article about Shirley Hofnstein was really mean spirited.

In any case, I usually do my web browsing on my iPad so I am not reading TechCrunch anymore anyway.

</comment><comment><USER50> Come on people, she is a con artist! She deserved every last bit of it, and then some.

If only more con artists got destroyed like this in public, the world would be a better place for sure.

</comment><comment><USER51> _And she has the top media company in the tech industry trying to take her down._

TechCrunch isn't anything close to a "top media company." TC is a shitty blog run by a bunch of amateurs who should be lucky enough to be referred to as "wannabe journalists." TC exists to whore for page impressions and ad clicks, nothing more. The best thing to do is pretend they don't exist... quit reading TC, quit sending them "news", quit responding to their bullshit, etc.

<comment><USER52> I guess it depends whether you define "top media company" as top in quality of top in readership/influence/etc. I've on idea about stats but it wouldn't surprise me if TC was at the very top for its niche on the latter.

<comment><USER51> _I guess it depends whether you define "top media company" as top in quality of top in readership/influence/etc._

Here, I'm referring more to quality / journalistic standards / ethics / etc, than readership. And even in terms of readership, I doubt TC can touch actual mainstream media outlets in terms of eyeballs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Techcrunch dropped from one of my favorite sites to one that I actively avoid more than a year ago due to a number of the shenanigans they've pulled. I make special exceptions if someone I know is covered there, but other than that I basically avoid the site like the plague.

</comment><comment><USER54> [http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls- credit-...](http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-card- fraud-records/)

</comment><comment><USER55> Leaving aside all the bruised egos of people that fell for her schtick, I'm well impressed with her photoshopping skills. She should be hired for that.

</comment><comment><USER56> I'm surprised there isn't a "Photoshop yourself with Shirley Hornstein" meme yet.

<comment><USER50> LMAO!

Thats a really good idea!

<comment><USER56> Or better yet, Shirley Hornstein with unexpected people or places: Shirley Hornstein with Darth Vader. Shirley Hornstein with the Curiosity rover on Mars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> "So shame on TechCrunch for publishing something that belongs on TMZ."

...

TechCrunch essentially is TMZ.

</comment><comment><USER58> Cry me a river.

</comment><comment><USER59> Seriously. You expect me to cry over a hustler's lies? It is amusing how recursively narcissistic the tech community is, but eventually even they reach their stack limit.

</comment><comment><USER59> [http://gawker.com/5938904/notorious-silicon-valley-fraud- shi...](http://gawker.com/5938904/notorious-silicon-valley-fraud-shirley- hornstein-is-making-friends-at-gop-convention)

She's apparently the bane (or Bain) of the Republicans now</comment>


Venture Capital and the Great Big Silicon Valley Asshole Game - <AUTHOR> https://pando.com/2014/10/06/venture-capital-and-the-great-big-silicon-valley-asshole-game/ <comment><USER2> > Without assholeswe wouldn't have relational databases, iPhones, or any other > manner of innovations that have improved our daily lives.

Wrong. Without assholes we wouldn't have people taking all the credit for the hard work of entire teams of engineers. Taking credit for something is not the same as creating something.</comment>


Experiments in programmatic graphics generation in Arc (with code, pics) - <AUTHOR> http://arcxs.posterous.com/

<comment><USER2> You might also want to check out <http://www.contextfreeart.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Fun stuff! I'd written some arc code a while back - a ray tracer, it's part of nex-3's arc github repo (www.github.com/nex3/arc).

Looking at his experiments makes me want to play around with arc again.

</comment><comment><USER4> Been following this blog (on posterous ;-) ) -- really interesting experiments.</comment>


Engineering is the bottleneck in Deep Learning research - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dennybritz.com/2017/01/17/engineering-is-the-bottleneck-in-deep-learning-research/?imm_mid=0ec94e&cmp=em-data-na-na-newsltr_20170125 <comment><USER2> Agreed. The tooling around deep learning is not as mature as the tooling around software development. There is a fair amount of engineering and grunt work needed to even get started, let alone build on others' research. A few problems from top of mind:

\- Setup: Installing DL frameworks, Nvidia drivers and CUDA is an exercise in dependency hell. Trying to run someone's project, which has different dependencies than what you have is difficult to get right. Docker images [1] and nvidia-docker make this simple, but are still not the norm.

\- Reproducibility: This is big as Denny mentions. Folks still use Github for sharing code. But DL pipelines need versioning of more than just code. It's code, environment, parameters, data and results.

\- Sharing and collaboration: I've noticed that most collaboration on deep learning research, unlike software, happens only when the folks are co-located (e.g. part of the same school or company). This likely links back to reproducibility, but there are not many good tools for effective collaboration currently IMHO.

[1] [https://github.com/floydhub/dl-docker](https://github.com/floydhub/dl- docker) (Disclaimer: I created this)</comment>


Show HN: An ASCII z-depth world (view source) - <AUTHOR> https://burrow.jollo.org <comment><USER2> > _" RAPE_IS_OK" "HEILHITLER"_

What the fuck am I looking at?

<comment><USER3> The internet.

I don't see any reason to attribute that to the submitter, though they may need a lesson in how much moderation work it is to host user-generated content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The first room is obviously already filled. Each character formatted as a link is a door to a subroom : CTRL+ENTER to go to this room. ESC to go back. If you find some white space, you can type a character which will be unformatted. Move cursor to an unformatted character and use CTRL+SHIFT+Enter to make it a link to a new empty room.

</comment><comment><USER5> Check the source for instructions: ctrl+enter will follow a link character, esc moves back one room, ctrl+shift+enter creates a room. So cool B)

<comment><USER6> Is it usable on mobile?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People are editing the js file to bypass checks lol (like overwriting cells with links in them)

</comment><comment><USER8> Getting errors on FF and Chrome:

        TypeError: cell is undefined[Learn More]
        script.js:86:11
        set
        https://burrow.jollo.org/script.js:86:11
        set
        https://burrow.jollo.org/script.js:211:11
        type
        https://burrow.jollo.org/script.js:232:13
        app.events</<
        https://burrow.jollo.org/script.js:417:7

<comment><USER9> Works fine here on FF

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought this was an autostereogram adventure game and spent the first 10 seconds cross-eyed.

</comment><comment><USER11> Aaaand it's gone

</comment><comment><USER12> This was the most fun emergent web experience I've had in awhile. RIP Uppercase C

</comment><comment><USER13> Really cool game, just had a chat with a few people in the first sub-room :p

<comment><USER14> Ah-hah. You may have been one of the anonymous two people I was chatting to :)

Were you the person who was trying to claim a piece of territory as their own?

Fascinating social experiment: when faced with a blank slate, what do humans do? Some converse, but others decide they need to claim a piece of that slate as solely theirs...

<comment><USER13> Late reply -- yes that was me :p

It was truly fun, with the right creativity it seems so easy to make something simple but addictive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm instantly reminded of Kingdom of Kroz</comment>


Getting Feedback about your startup with Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fanchimp.com/social-media-feedback-with-twitter/ How can we use the Social Media to collect feedback for my startup? This is a simple and effective guide. <comment><USER2> Another way to collect feedback, the most important thing for startups.</comment>


Britons need work hard like Chinese and Americans - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11914627/Jeremy-Hunt-says-Britons-must-work-like-the-Chinese-heres-what-that-means.html <comment><USER2> That's fine talk for a person who this year had 21 July 2015 - 7 September 2015 off work for summer and will enjoy a Christmas holiday from 17 December 2015 - 5 January 2016

[http://www.parliament.uk/about/faqs/house-of-commons- faqs/bu...](http://www.parliament.uk/about/faqs/house-of-commons- faqs/business-faq-page/recess-dates/)</comment>


It's Okay to Panic – 2020 Climate Documentary - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osm5vyJjNY4 <comment><AUTHOR> Subtitles in English, Spanish, and Russian are available.

"There is a popular TV show, "Air Crash Investigation." Many situations it presents apply to any type of disaster. Various small things happen. More and more of them occur. The situation gets more complicated. At some point the pilots lose control of the aircraft. Then there is no way to avoid the catastrophe. The moment when the disaster can be averted occurs a bit earlier. Many of us don't realize the climate catastrophe is coming, and this is this very last moment when we can do something about it."</comment>


Show HN: A resource for drawing complex primitives in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://xqt2.com/p/MoreCanvasContext.html <comment><USER2> Do you mind if I add these to my own library? [https://github.com/Lerc/whio](https://github.com/Lerc/whio) (MIT Licence)

It's a library I use when I teach kids JavaScript. It provides simple global functions to let them get started before they have to deal with ideas such as canvas context objects.

A Wiki page showing the functions they get to use is at [http://fingswotidun.com/code/index.php/API](http://fingswotidun.com/code/index.php/API)

The functions you show here are exactly the sort of thing that would be useful for beginners.

<comment><USER3> Nice, is that a LOGO programming language?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the author aware of [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRende...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/CanvasRenderingContext2D#Transformations)?

Use rotate(), translate(), and scale() instead of doing your own math.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but this is as simple. It's not really my maths, it's quite standard stuff.

I'm more excited about Path2D[0] becoming adopted by more browsers.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Path2D](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Path2D)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a resource I made for Processing. Very similar. [http://printingcode.runemadsen.com/lecture- form-2/](http://printingcode.runemadsen.com/lecture-form-2/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice work. Very interesting. Canvas is such a fun API.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is it reliable to add methods to a built-in object like CanvasRenderingContext2D? I avoid it, but perhaps just out of superstition.

<comment><USER8> You're right, extending the prototype of builtin objects is almost always a bad idea.

See String.prototype.contains → String.prototype.includes because mootools extended the String prototype[1]

[1] - [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/includes#String.prototype.contains)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> nice we need more lessons like this.</comment>


Lightspeed – A Browser Experiment - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/verdi/463/lightspeed-a-browser-experiment/ <comment><USER2> Hi, I'm one of the people who worked on this and I wanted to provide a little background and a few clarifications.

Lightspeed is currently not a product. It's a collection of sketches and thoughts. It is also NOT the next version of Firefox. While some ideas might find their way into mainline Firefox at some point, many of the assumptions on which Lightspeed is based are the exact opposites of Firefox core values (e.g. no settings or customization in Lightspeed).

More than anything else, Lightspeed helps us think outside the box that Firefox is. It's a place where we can dare to explore more radical thoughts like not having any settings or or even menus. Having constraints like these stimulates creativity much like, for example, the character limit on tweets forces you to make your message more concise.

Ideas are worthless when they just exist in your head. Sketching out Lightspeed has helped us to make make lots of ideas more tangible, so they can be evaluated.

That being said, just reading through this thread has sparked some interesting new thoughts – we'll keep experimenting :)

<comment><USER3> Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas.

I don't think the hatred is as universal as it is for, say, Australis, but it's close enough that it should be discomforting.

What is your response to this? Do you think it's right to continue work on a project that the majority of people dislike for a variety of very legitimate reasons?

<comment><USER4> "Based on the comments here and those that appear under the article, people in general are not at all impressed by these ideas." I wouldn't say that is a fair assessment, many people took it for what it was (a UI/UX experiment), and quite a few people who did take to it badly mistakenly thought it was a Firefox design concept.

<comment><USER5> Well, to be fair, the last 2 Firefox "design concepts" got almost verbatim into the mainline despite almost unanimous complaints, and now I have 2 different plugins installed to correct the mess they created.

<comment><USER4> It's only a "mess" to some, I personally have no beef with Australis, and the beauty of Firefox is that it allows for you to customise it to work how you want (hence you were able to 'fix' it). This flexibility means there's still plenty of room for UI experimentation. Besides, this Lightspeed design is explicitly not for Firefox, the designers acknowledge part of what makes Firefox what it is is the customisability, this design is seeing what could be done with an alternative browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> At first I thought "oh no, another distraction for Mozilla", but then I sat through the presentation and thought there was some really cool ideas (amazebar!). In fact, I think it can be simplified and paired down even more. Even better, some of the assumptions here even make the software portable (as in doesn't really need to be installed and could just run off a usb drive/out of my dropbox).

Automatically being in a private/secure mode makes lots of sense to me as well.

Some ideas I don't like:

\- get rid of loved sites/bookmarks altogether. Frequent usage should just percolate autocomplete suggestions to the top. This design doesn't really need them, and tbh I've barely used bookmarks in any browser in a long time.

\- too much going on in the amazebar, drop all the suggestion (which will quickly get stale, tabs, email search, etc. Just focus on most frequent sites and autocomplete, it feels like the presentation is just burying lots of the clutter that used to take up GUI space in the amazebar.

\- please don't default to a "downloads" folder. I've never liked it and before I bother to change it, my downloads folder quickly turns into a "random junk I've downloaded" folder. Forcing me to put it someplace actually is simplifying my workflow. It's almost the first option I change as soon as I install a new browser.

\- keep tabs more present, don't bury them in the amazebar

<comment><USER7> I agree with not defaulting to saving downloads in the "downloads" folder. Many people don't really know how to use their file manager. (For years, my mom would open Microsoft Word and organize files there.)

Why not default to saving downloads on the Desktop? Where did that file get saved? Oh, there it is!

<comment><USER8> What happened to just asking the user where they want to save it? To download a file I now have to download it, then open Finder, navigate to Downloads and copy the file, navigate to the folder I want to place the download, paste the file. Then navigate back to the folder and delete the file from Downloads .. because Macs don't give you a Cut option.

<comment><USER3> You make a very good point.

That sensible and effective approach has become yet another victim of the failed quest to "improve the user experience" by throwing away or changing stuff that was working perfectly fine before. The new approach is almost always far worse than whatever minor flaws might have existed with the earlier approach.

And allowing the old, working approach to be toggled back on through some preferences dialog, through about:config or through some extension doesn't justify the bad change. If anything, it's actually somewhat offensive, because it now requires users to engage in yet more fixing of things that just shouldn't be broken to begin with.

When I start using a fresh installation of Firefox, I have to spend at least a good 10 minutes installing various extensions and reconfiguring it just to get a minimally usable experience out of it. That's not acceptable, and it's not justifiable.

<comment><USER9> > When I start using a fresh installation of Firefox, I have to spend at least > a good 10 minutes installing various extensions and reconfiguring it just to > get a minimally usable experience out of it. That's not acceptable, and it's > not justifiable.

You're assuming that this is widely applicable — very few people have spent a decade building a highly customized browsing experience and most people don't customize much at all. Ever walk around the office and notice how few people even removed Microsoft's default bookmarks from the toolbar so they spend all day staring at links to a service which they don't use?

I would also note that the history of computing is littered with loaded descriptions of things which were reflexively described as a "bad change" and a complete non-issue a year later. Mouse wheels, tabbed browsing, fonts and later CSS, JavaScript, all got the kind of grumbling you made above from a few people. Sometimes it's worth asking whether you really benefit from the old way or are just reacting to something being different.

<comment><USER3> I think your understanding of the history of computing is flawed.

As somebody who lived through the events you mentioned as an adult working in industry, I can assure you that the sentiment you believe was felt was actually not felt.

Mouse wheels were seen as a very good thing when they first came on the scene. They gave the power of the three-buttoned mouse, but also made scrolling much simpler.

The same goes for tabbed browsing. It was one of the best features of Opera for a long time. Everyone I showed it to at the time thought it was very useful. And it was one of the best features of Firefox, too, when it was still Phoenix.

And the same goes for fonts, and CSS (although to a lesser extent). Their benefits were obvious from the beginning, and I don't remember them facing really any resistance.

Contrary to popular belief today, JavaScript was not seen as good when it was first released, and it should not be considered good today. In the mid-1990s it was generally seen as a rather bad and limited language. That's why it didn't see much use until the mid-2000s. The first generation of developers who experienced it found it inferior to existing technologies and generally refused to use it. Even today, it's still a very flawed language (the problems with it are well know; I'm not going to regurgitate them here).

The problem with Firefox lately isn't that there has been chance. Of course change can be good. In the case of Firefox, though, the change has been utterly horrible, and caused far more problems than it brings in benefits, for a huge number of people. This is reflected very well in Firefox's ever- dropping market share.

<comment><USER9> > As somebody who lived through the events you mentioned as an adult working > in industry, I can assure you that the sentiment you believe was felt was > actually not felt.

My comment was based on my experience as someone who also lived through that period as an adult working in the industry.

> Mouse wheels were seen as a very good thing when they first came on the > scene. They gave the power of the three-buttoned mouse, but also made > scrolling much simpler.

That's easy to assume now but at the time there were people who complained that they required more precision to use, were inconsistently supported by existing software, etc. I remember people complaining that clicking the wheel was less reliable than using a proper third-button — no doubt true for the people who did a lot of pasting in X11 but that number was an increasingly miniscule fraction of the computing world and no doubt most of them adjusted after they stopped grumbling.

> The same goes for tabbed browsing. It was one of the best features of Opera > for a long time. Everyone I showed it to at the time thought it was very > useful.

… and yet other people complained that it was confusing to have tabs when you also had windows, duplicated with the OS window management, made it easy to accidentally forget you already had something open, etc. I'm sure all of those people use tabs now without even thinking about it but that doesn't mean that they didn't grumble first and learn how to use them second.

> And the same goes for fonts, and CSS (although to a lesser extent). Their > benefits were obvious from the beginning, and I don't remember them facing > really any resistance.

Outside of your corner of the web, there were impassioned rants about how the font tag overrode the user's font selection – that was one of the early selling points for CSS! Some people complained about CSS because it was harder to use than the font tag while others complained that it made pages slow or required downloading more data, etc. Some people complained about both because they made it easy to make pages which were hard to read on the wrong browser, operating system, or if you had a very small or very large display, or were color blind or visually impaired.

> Contrary to popular belief today, JavaScript was not seen as good when it > was first released, and it should not be considered good today. In the > mid-1990s it was generally seen as a rather bad and limited language.

I started writing JavaScript back when it was called LiveScript (oh, those heady days of downloading Netscape 2 betas when their FTP server wasn't overwhelmed). Then, as now, people complained about JavaScript being bloated or slow and there's a long tradition continuing down to your comment of complaining about the technical merits of the language. This wasn't wrong – even Brendan Eich is apologetic about most of it – and yet here we are in a world where the one language you can assume will be taught in 10 years is JavaScript because a billion people interact with JavaScript programs constantly.

Again, I'm not saying that the complaints are entirely without merit – only that there's a long tradition of people who overestimated either how serious a problem was, the degree to which their reaction was representative of the general computing public, or both. I remember plenty of advocacy that pages should work without JavaScript – and personally engaged in a fair amount – but much of the web today assumes JavaScript without any of the predicted disasters.

> The problem with Firefox lately isn't that there has been chance. Of course > change can be good. In the case of Firefox, though, the change has been > utterly horrible, and caused far more problems than it brings in benefits, > for a huge number of people. This is reflected very well in Firefox's ever- > dropping market share.

As they say, citation needed. That trend started well before the new UI and appears to have rather a lot more to do with Google's successful promotion of Chrome. Even in technical forums, there will be a ton of messages but they always seem to be posted by a small percentage of highly vocal users who assume everyone who isn't commenting agrees with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The problem I have with Firefox is that it just doesn't really innovate. We've had some small UI changes. But there's legacy cruft still in there that isn't addressed.

Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them either. In some ways I think they should be at the heart of the browser.

I think a lot of people use tabs because bookmark management is so crap.

The only bit I resonated with was the similar sites suggestions. But you'd need a setting to setup suggestion services. There's a privacy concern with that.

Other helper features:

Pagination buttons were built into Opera driven off the rel=prev and rel=next, link elements. Navigation could further be ripped out the page window into a browser control. Searching sites and pages could be friendlier. Better form helpers needed. A good feed reader would be good. Tools to help read web content more simply (readability style) would be nice. Plus I like personalising the look and feel of my web browser ever so slightly, and even Firefox doesn't do that particularly well (it ignores some of my desktop theming).

So I think Firefox should really be thinking how to answer the question: 'How can we make it easier for users to consume web content?'. This has to go beyond the rendering engine. So actually a fatter featureful browser I think would be better - but with some very intuitive and simple controls.

<comment><USER11> > Like the bookmarks and history manager. There isn't anything particularly > wrong with these data-table windows, but I don't really enjoy using them > either.

And here I was thinking every browser should have such powerful tools instead of optimized-for-grandma windows.

<comment><USER10> There's nothing wrong with optimising for Grandma. The key is to make the most useful features easy to get at, and the more powerful ones discoverable.

The bookmark/history manager could be better. It has no autocomplete/awesomeness in the search. It's actually quite an awkward UI.

It's not keyboard friendly. And their are odd inconsistancies. Should the default behaviour of clicking on a link open it in new tab?

Recent bookmarks and most visited are nice smart bookmark folder, these are useful but hard to reach in that tool. Some bookmark management feels a little like a black box.

At least you can tag bookmarks. Scrolling through a massive list of tags isn't much fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was surprised to see this rise on the front page. Am I the only one who didn't get excited at all by this?

When I see a post titled "a browser experiment" from mozilla.org I tend to think I'm going to get more than some wireframes and talk about "busybees". It will be an experiment once some (any) of it has been built.

In any case from what I did see in the video I would say: 1) Bookmarks are broken, but removing them is probably the wrong approach. Tagged searchable bookmarks would be more useful - they don't need a bar in the ui, but make them full-text searchable and put them at the top of auto-complete options.

2) Tabs are an ingrained key-part of how people interact with browsers. They need to be (obvious) in the ui and easy to use. Do not go the mobile route if that is the plan. Tabs on mobile are the way they are because of constraints of the form - not because it is good ui.

There are quite a few other suggestions I would take issue with but I realise I am not the target market. E.g. I don't want or need huge tiles of sites I love - I can enter their url and autocomplete. If its a site I frequent it should be at the top of the list - navigating to it is not a problem that needs solving with more ui.

<comment><USER13> To nitpick, in the suggested experiment - bookmarks aren't removed. Although I guess you could compare the solution to "completely remove" them since they work a lot different, I guess you wouldn't "Love"-click something to read later or go back to, but their main site (Like NYT.com, BigBank.com etc). They'd be integrated into the ""amazebar"", but they'd still be there.

As has been mentioned in other threads to this discussions, tabs aren't all that important for the thought of userbase. They are people who sometimes uses tabs or never uses tabs.

Also, I, as a "Wizard/Enthusiast" user - got somewhat excited by the suggested experiment and think it kind of make sense. I wouldn't prefer using this myself, but I can certainly see benefits to a significant user share.

<comment><USER12> I understood that was the thinking re: tabs, I just think it's wrong. I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't use tabs, including my parents. In fact anecdotally I would say that the considered user base might use (or abuse) tabs more than most. They are the people who have 40 tab sessions that they never close.

As for bookmarks that is exactly my point. To "love" something is closer to marking as a favourite than as a bookmark. Bookmarks are things you want to go back to at a later date, favourites are things you go to a lot.

I think the idea that they should experiment is a good one and the idea that they might start to is exciting. They should make a dozen experimental UIs to try things. This video however doesn't do much for me - if they had a basic build to showcase it would be different, but I don't see much point in publishing a 10 minute presentation about some wireframes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty interesting video. A few things of note:

-Tabs are important to almost all web users these days. Maybe you could hide them and display them on hover but I don't think you should ever move them an extra click away.

-Not a huge fan of the click-to-play feature. Maybe it would work if you could whitelist plugins rather than websites, I guess you lose most of your security benefits by doing this though.

I think he actually raises a good point at the end though, he wouldn't use this for work but may use it elsewhere. That's great, but typical web users only want to use one browser, they get familiar with the interface and stick to that everywhere they go. If people use a certain browser at work chances are they use the same one at home, and I don't think this is powerful for many people to use at work.

<comment><USER15> > Tabs are important to almost all web users these days

Tabs would be a useless feature, if the window manager did a better job at what they should do. In a "tabbing" wm like the one BeOS has you are much better served by one-page-one-window application.

With a bit of cooperation from the window manager you can get rid of tabs. I did it few years ago and my browsing behavior and habits have changed for the better.

<comment><USER16> The way we browse the Web is fundamentally different from the way regular applications are used: we explore several paths at the same time, branch, backtrack, revisit, keep things open as reminders... Tabs make this navigation visible and enable the conscious building of a trail, which can be a very useful aid when browsing and when trying to make sense of the collected information.

Tree-style tabs (Firefox extension) are an even better solution: each new page becomes the root of a "tree", and the tabs that are opened from it become "branches". There is also a very interesting contrast between following a link (so the previous page is available on the Back button, and therefore either accessed right away or soon forgotten) versus opening it in a new tab (so the parent remains visible as a remainder of an interesting place or a branching point in the navigation).

Since we don't use desktop applications this way, I don't really see why we should modify our existing desktop window managers to accommodate this style of navigation. If anything, we could think of doing it the other way around and fitting desktop applications into a browser-like navigation structure like the one described above.

<comment><USER15> > The way we browse the Web is fundamentally different from the way regular > applications are used: we explore several paths at the same time, branch, > backtrack, revisit, keep things open as reminders...

I disagree: if I could I would do all these things also in desktop applications. Web makes it easy to do, but that does not mean that we do not have the same needs in other applications.

I explore several paths also in my email application: indeed I open messages and thread in separate windows, now that Thunderbird allows me.

I branch and backtrack my terminal: I often open a new windows just to run a command and see its output, then I close it and go back to the original window. If my window manager could track that and visualize it for longer- lived shells it would be great.

I keep many applications application open as remander, yet I would like to close them if I knew that there were a simple way to recall them, or if the system would remind me about them.

I would love to bookmark application statuses and store them.

All these needs are present in the web and would be nice to have in desktop applications. My point is that tabs are not required to support these needs, a good windowing manager and some synergy with apps is all is needed.

<comment><USER17> I agreedly disagree. Windows managers are apparently not interested enough or advanced enough to do this, but having branchable/rewindable/taggable history is something most Window manager don't do.

Hyperlinks on the other hand are easily tracked, moved, rewind, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Auto-updates are always on

I really hope this isn't going to become a standard thing. There are still plenty of people like me who are stuck with something like satellite internet, which forces us to micromanage our data usage. I can't afford to just have things auto-updating whenever they want.

<comment><USER19> It was the default in Chrome, and I believe its the default in IE as well.

It has its upsides as well, you generally only need to target the latest stable version of Chrome.

<comment><USER20> Its been a while since I used Windows but doesn't IE update through "Windows updates"? Is it on by default?

<comment><USER21> It does now--older versions did not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A very specific thought on this:

I love the fact that there are no settings because of one advantage it offers (it has disadvantages too, like any trade-off).

Namely, that you can always be sure of what settings you've changed. The answer will always be none, since there are no settings.

Removing settings altogether is not the only way to achieve that; for example see how Sublime Text does its settings, you have a very easy to read explicit list of all settings you've changed. So resetting to default or undoing a bad chance is as easy as removing unwanted entries from that Preferences.sublime- settings file.

Having less choices is nice for when you don't want to change anything, since you know your settings are optimal defaults and you don't need to spend time on making sure that they are. If you use 100 apps and each offers 100 choices, that's 10000 settings to ensure are optimal. If you don't, they likely won't be.

99% of software pushes towards more choices, more settings, more customizability, which adds to cognitive overhead of using said software if you care about having optimal settings, so I'm glad to see an experiment that boldly pushes in the opposite direction.

</comment><comment><USER23> I felt my hackles rising throughout the video, then I realised I'm not the target audience - I'd loathe most of these ideas to make it into a general- purpose browser (though I can't see FF's separate search box surviving much longer, sadly).

Still, 'no settings'? How do you do 'no settings' and also do "with your permission, we'll search your email"? Ultimately I don't really understand the difference between a "no settings" browser, and a browser where you just don't bother to change the settings.

</comment><comment><USER24> They should remove all the crap that is non-essential. For example, social and other things. Firefox size has nearly doubled in size between version 15 and 31. Also, I don't think that security would be good. I run noscript and similar. Notice how around slide 33 they said 3rd party cookies would be cleared? 3rd parties should not be allowed. Also, what if my trusted sites does not match their trusted list? Also, what if I don't want certain plugins to be enabled. Sounds less secure to me.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is a great concept. Getting rid of settings, add-ons and plugins for people that "just want their browser to work" is a good thing, especially when this is paired with good privacy defaults.

However, I see the auto suggestion features of the Awesome Bar at odds with the goal of protecting the user's privacy. This essentially means that all search terms that you enter into the search field will be sent to to all web services that were integrated by Mozilla, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon etc.

Just imagine using the Awesome Bar to search your inbox for a (business) "proposal". Then, a little while later, your partner uses your laptop for online shopping and Amazon helpfully reminds him or her that you recently searched for "proposal". Depending on your relationship status, this could become very interesting...

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm surprised "private & secure" only goes as far as deleting the browser history and cookies every once in a while.

Shouldn't a privacy-by-default experience get rid of many of the information leaks currently inherent in the web browsing experience? Shouldn't it disable the http referer header and third-party requests to tracking sites? Shouldn't it sandbox flash so that it respects the browser's proxy settings and doesn't persist its own cookie-like objects?

Just hardwiring the current porn window behavior into the whole browser seems to create more problems than it solves privacy issues. (Makes search through weighted entries in the browser history impossible, which has 99% replaced bookmarks for me; makes restarting the browser a lot bigger of a deal, especially if it also disables opening recently closed tabs).

</comment><comment><USER27> Disappointed that there isn't any innovation wrt tabs; they aren't mentioned at all.

I understand Lightspeed aims to be minimalistic, but many of these defaults are just illogical. Default click-to-play at the moment already ruins many audio sites where the flash applet is hidden, and turns others into a game of Where's Waldo.

Completely dropping extensions is antithetical to the central idea as well. Ideally, the browser would be barebones and fast (what Firefox once was) and any features would be an addon. Otherwise, you get sucked into the mentality of "if only there was this one feature".

All in all, there seem to be several inconsistencies in the central idea, but it could definitely turn out to be an interesting idea.

<comment><USER28> He does mention tabs @ 4:18.

The click to play behavior doesn't have to be on the actual applet, it could be a popup just under the top bar or something. Use some imagination.

Dropping extensions is not antiethical. The people this browser is targeted for don't care about extensions.

I don't see any of the "inconsistencies to the central idea" you are talking about.

<comment><USER20> In my experience with non technical people, they are always interested in that one addon that helps them download YouTube videos.

<comment><USER29> The browser could just bundle the functionality from popular add-ons like download YouTube videos. On Firefox's add-ons website, six of the top 20 add- ons are video downloaders! :)

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/extensions/?sort=us...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/extensions/?sort=users)

<comment><USER20> That's the catch. I believe YouTube's terms and conditions don't allow you to download videos ( not sure ). If FF bundles such an addon, they could get into trouble ( again not sure, jus speculating ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if this could be made into a modification of Firefox, such that a user could choose the "simple" version when installing for the first time. If you wanted to switch between browser modes, just visit "about:config" and flip the switch to have the full experience of Firefox. Not to say that Lightspeed would be bad as a standalone browser, but the install base and the code base already exist for Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER31> Given your target demographic, I wouldn't willingly install this for a family member, as there is no ad block.

Without being able to protect my family from scams/manipulation/malware, this is a non-starter. I'd have to alter the hosts file. I'd need to install something that updates it. Erk, and then some sites would just break permanently with no recourse.

I would say the answer would be to add filtering as part of the interface. "Hey, lightspeed filters websites so you can read them easier, is the site misbehaving, try turning me off!" Or something.

That said, even if everyone was fine with the UI proposed, there is no way the idea would be implemented. Regardless of how much of a benefit it is to the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER32> Having an intelligent non https submission warning could be good... You could go so far as to flat out refuse to send a cc number in the clear.

The degree of dependence on the search engine is troubling, would be interesting to see how much could be handled by a local mini index without involving a 3rd party.

Also think browser history could be a lot more useful if it were organized better. For example, maybe grouping pages by the search terms that led to them... Also would be nice to have a quick way to get a detailed history on any given site, along with the pages led in and followed out.

The main way I still use bookmarks is for organizing reference material, I think this could be automated partially as well.

<comment><USER29> Here is a Firefox bug about highlighting or warning about insecure password fields:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748193](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748193)

And a bug for Chromium (that also mentions credit card number fields):

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399416](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=399416)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I had a flashback to the days of web portals. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I like that they're trying _something_ because complacency is never a good thing. You have to try things to see if they work.

I think the biggest allure of this is that there are people with simple needs that want their technology to "just work" as they said. I also agree with owlish's comment in that there are some quirks that need rapid alleviation that aren't being addressed like click-to-play and dropping extensions doesn't seem like a good way to approach this.

I applaud the experimentation so long as the end results are choices we can make for ourselves.

<comment><USER34> >I applaud the experimentation so long as the end results are choices we can make for ourselves.

I don't understand why Mozilla works like this, but they won't be. They'll be pushed into an update with an option to turn them off, after 3 or 4 releases the old behavior will be pushed into the about:config, and 3 or 4 releases after that, it will be removed completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not a bad start.

This can be pared down even further:

* Adjust search results based on your own clickthrough rates. If you bounce out of a site a few times (hello, quora) then it grays out or falls off. Sites you go to and stay on become more prominent.

* Kill downloads. I know this won't be popular, but the ability to download a thing isn't necessary for everyday use. There would be a heightened awareness for the user if they had to switch browsers to download something.

* No cross-site loading of any kind; all source material MUST come from the domain you are on. This would seriously break some sites but it would close large gaps in security and tracking.

A browser just for browsing!

<comment><USER36> > No cross-site loading of any kind; all source material MUST come from the > domain you are on. This would seriously break some sites but it would close > large gaps in security and tracking.

This would probably break almost everything. Who doesn't use some sort of a CDN nowadays?

<comment><USER37> A better alternative would be to promote the use of Content-Security-Policy, perhaps by requiring it be used in order to load source material from an alternate domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if natural language processing could remove the need for a dedicated settings page. For example, just type "Change search engine" or "use this page as my homepage" or "search my bookmarks for obama" and the amazebar shows the appropriate widget or result.

In fact, I think that Siri-fication could be a huge step for a vast number of applications. I develop an accounting app and it would be a huge benefit to my users to be able to just type, "pay invoice 364" or "print a statement for John Smith" or "add my logo to documents"

<comment><USER39> There was the Ubiquity project¹ by Mozilla Labs which was officially discontinued but still lives on as a community project².

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_%28Firefox%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_%28Firefox%29)

2: [https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity](https://bitbucket.org/satyr/ubiquity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My first thought: "Well, this is just the new Spotlight isn't it? Why do we need another Spotlight?"

My second, more intelligent thought: "Oh, most people don't have Macs." I think there's some pretty great ideas here, and since my gut tells me 95% of computer time is spent in a browser, it makes sense for it to be extremely intelligent about inferring what you want.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wouldn't no plugins mean no adblock? I would never go back to not using it.

<comment><USER26> Just lobby for adblock to be built-in with a Mozilla-curated block list. Seems to fit the idea of a safer/simpler-by-default web experience. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> OT: anyone knows which tool he uses for the mockups?

</comment><comment><USER43> >Plugins are click-to-play everywhere except for a whitelist of trusted sites (e.g. YouTube, Netflix).

what is the impact from a neutrality perspective?

</comment><comment><USER44> I like the idea, although really this is very similar to Chrome (and other browsers) where you just never open the settings tab. Except for the search bar, this is just one of today's browsers with tweaked defaults.

I really don't see the disadvantage, minus the small developer overhead, of having all the choices they have made here configurable.

<comment><USER45> I wonder.. is it built on Chrome under the hood?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The one thing I find very weird is how this guy designing this and other people are saying "Well, I can't use this for work of course because I have hundreds of tabs open." Wouldn't make so much sense to try and solve that problem in particular? It seems like everyone does this, but it seems worthwhile to ask why everyone does this.

Do you have a tab open because you don't want to lose unsaved data? Do you want a tab open because it is faster switching to that tab than reloading the page? There must be some reason and I believe it can be integrated into a much simpler navigation than looking at hundreds 16 pixel icons squeezed side by side horizontally.

<comment><USER47> > I believe it can be integrated into a much simpler navigation than looking > at hundreds 16 pixel icons squeezed side by side horizontally.

Try one of the vertical tab bar extensions (i.e., the tabs are stacked on top of each other in a sidebar) such as Tree Style Tabs. It displays many more tabs (mine displays ~40 before it overflows) and you always can see their titles.

</comment></comment><comment> richard-cliqz Hi there, adding to the discussion a little late, but grateful for your comments on this one. We at the small Munich-based start-up cliqz are heading in a kind of similar direction - please have a look at [https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/cliqz- beta/](https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/cliqz-beta/) German-heavy at the moment, but going international soon, hopefully by the end of August. Please let me know your thoughts - we would be happy to take your suggestions and together with you make it more "amazing"! Thank you! Richard (email@example.com)

</comment><comment><USER11> Something about the "there are no settings to adjust" makes me want to fork Firefox and only apply security updates from the version before this new UI gets out of beta.

And tabs a click away? That's a nightmare.

Mixing what I type with search results, history and suggestions? Hello Chrome lookalike. I thought the separate search bar and awesomebar was one of the killer features for Firefox. Once that's gone, odds are I'll be switching browser.

Like with Firefox 4, it seems they are trying to redesign the browser like Chrome and doing it badly. Last time they did that I switched to Chrome for a few years before going back to open source (Firefox). Here we go again.

<comment><USER48> But this Lightspeed experiment is at first, just an experiment. Moreover, it is heavily implied it is not going to be the new Firefox. He also suggests that the idea is targeted at more simple Internet users. As in, not us.

I am not concerned.

<comment><USER3> It may just be a thought experiment at this point, but I think it's pretty clear now that all of the major browsers are unfortunately headed in this direction.

This rush to target "more simple Internet users" hasn't gone well for Mozilla and Firefox so far. All they've managed to do is create a dumbed-down UI that's harder and less efficient to use, and this has alienated a lot of Firefox's existing users. This is a big part of why we keep seeing Firefox's share of the market sliding lower and lower.

Users can forgive Chrome for its bad UI experience because it offers quite good performance and resource usage. Firefox, unfortunately, does not offer that (I know, I know, Mozilla has benchmark results that will show the opposite, but these aren't indicative of actual user experiences). When faced with two browsers offering basically the same flawed UI, then users will use the one that offers the best runtime performance and the lowest resource usage.

Going forward with this sort of a design, or even continuing down the existing path that Mozilla has been taking, ultimately won't be successful. Users have very obviously been rejecting Firefox because it now no longer offers a usable UI, nor does it offer acceptable performance and resource usage.

<comment><USER34> >When faced with two browsers offering basically the same flawed UI, then users will use the one that offers the best runtime performance and the lowest resource usage.

I don't think that Chrome wins decisively on resource usage. It cheats a lot, and if you use your browser in uncommon ways, it degenerates.

I think that Chrome will win over Firefox's 'be like Chrome' strategy because people like leaders rather than followers, and would rather have Chrome-like features _now_ on _Chrome_ rather than waiting a year for Firefox to copy them, slightly differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Okay, let me go over the things I don't like about this concept.

1\. Everything is hidden by default. No signifies. That looks less confusing... until you want to find something or something changes and you don't even notice until it's not "there" anymore. It's not clear what will happen when you interact with the UI.

2\. Everything is mushed together. I type something and zillion things pop up on the scree. How am I supposed to know what are they and where they come from?

3\. No settings in this context sounds like no choice. I don't want every download go to Downloads folder, because it will become a bloated mess in about 3 days. .

</comment><comment><USER4> Lightspeed could be an interesting alternative browser, if it could be made without diverting too many resources from Firefox then I'd like to see more of it. Could be a good browser to recommend to the less tech savvy.

</comment><comment><USER50> Looks a lot like Yandex.Browser[1]. Also built around Search, Favorites, Quick Links, Synchronization and Security.

[1] [http://browser.yandex.com/desktop/](http://browser.yandex.com/desktop/)

</comment><comment><USER51> It's interesting that his concept for inline search looks almost exactly like a current google results page. It would be very cool to have something like that available without necessarily relying on google for it.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that a composite view like that, which queries multiple services, can be created quickly without aggregating the data before the search is performed. That's problematic if you want to avoid relying on a single search provider.

</comment><comment><USER52> Bookmarks should be replaced by "app/website" drawer that shows up on your homescreen. They are useless when they are hidden in a separate window and you have to always remember to go to them. It is faster to search for them or have the them come up in the amazebar.

Instead if the new tab window provided a list of "installed/bookmarked/recently used" webapps/websites, then it will make the experience of bookmarking a lot more relevant.

</comment><comment><USER53> I really like the popup from the url bar. Safari 8.0 on Yosemite already has it, but the one they show in the presentation is more interesting and useful. I already use Spotlight as the only way of accessing applications on OSX (habit most emacs users get from using smex), so I +1 a universal "Search interface"; it's much more useful/productive then moving your mouse and pointing to icons or open an application and look for stuff.

</comment><comment><USER54> I already sort of have the amaze bar with pentadactyl and using duckduckgo bangs so... no, keep this to the buzybees and don't change firefox into this.

</comment><comment><USER55> This guy has too many ideas, and the ideas he has conflict. How can you offer contextual links without saving _some_ information?

I'm not sold yet.

</comment><comment><USER56> I would like to run this browser on an OS which is nothing but CLI. This imagined CLI based OS will come with two things only: A gigantic and thoroughly indexed PDF file containing hundreds of commands to do all kinds of things (so you would only use Ctrl+F to search what you're looking for); and a modern browser with least minimum settings.

<comment><USER57> If you haven't yet, you may want to read _The Humane Interface_ [1] (and test is working prototype Archy).

It's a description of a user interface that works exactly as you say, yet looks completely different that what you describe.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface)

<comment><USER56> Well, this idea came to mind as I was taking that Linux Edx MOOC course. I am not a programmer, but if I were, I would have built that kind of OS for myself. I think the GUI movement in the history of computers, has fundamentally diverted the real nature of computers. I am not a CLI-Nazi but going back to basics in a substantive way, is not a bad idea. Besides, there has been too much significance for mouse/pointing-device. Could we possibly have directly jumped from keyboard-only computing to touch screen? I see why not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The no setting part is not really an option. No matter how simple you want to the browser to be, if you want this to be the one browser for the personal use, you need some settings.

* setting search engine - this should be dead simple to implement and totally should be customized. I don't mind using Google but some people just don't like that.

Actually I don't get why Firefox search engine customization is the way it is. If you want to SE that is not part of Firefox's bundle choices, you have to install add-on. To me, this should be simple to implement. A user click on "manage search engine preference", press "Add", gives a URL of the search engine (e.g. [https://google.com](https://google.com)) and then OK. Firefox should just take whatever user types into the search bar / address bar (this case needs to know whether the "keyword" is url or not) and just redirect user to [http://mysearch-engine.com/?q=](http://mysearch-engine.com/?q=) / ?query=.

I can even imagine this useful when I want firefox to do code search. Imagine instead of me going to dxr.mozilla.org to find the code I want, now I just need to set the search engine to [http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/search?=](http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?=) yay!

I can even write an addon that does that right now in probably 30-50 lines of JS right now.

* home page. I think many older Internet users still set a home page.

* Download folders - you still want to expose where to set it because some people prefer to set it somewhere else.

* Bookmarks - if there is no concept of bookmark, how exactly do I find the things I want quickly? Imagine I <3 a bunch of stuff today and tomorrow I want to find that one awesome blog post I want to re-read. If I can't recall the blog title or the domain, how do I do search?

What really helps users, including me, when I just want a browser.

* security, private, clear cookies - awesome, lightspeed would be super awesome on shared computers

* Big buttons. When I first install Lightspeed I should just be prompted a couple pages with big buttons and bars to set homepage / search engine preference

* When I <3 a bookmark, fade in search bar or show me a page with big list of bookmark categories.

And personally, a little cuteness like the wireframe in the demo is always welcome.

See these scratch drawing 1 and 2. I am not a designer, so pardon me. I am also trying to do a mobile experience here. In the bookmark case, you can type, you can mouse over / click and expand to see the top 5 in that category.

[1]: [http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8](http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8)

[2]: [http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8#1](http://imgur.com/Bvtrnhi&WjAoic8#1)

And yes, as a developer, Lightspeed is awesome to me.

<comment><USER59> > A user click on "manage search engine preference", press "Add", gives a URL > of the search engine (e.g. [https://google.com](https://google.com)) and > then OK. Firefox should just take whatever user types into the search bar / > address bar

That means you don't ever get suggestions or autocompletion in the search bar.

> I can even imagine this useful when I want firefox to do code search. > Imagine instead of me going to dxr.mozilla.org to find the code I want, now > I just need to set the search engine to [http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- > central/search?=](http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?=) yay!

So you go into firefox, switch the search engine, type your query, then switch the search engine back because dxr makes no sense as a default? You know you can add keyword shortcuts to search engines and just type `dxr query` to send the query to dxr right?

Hell, you don't even have to set up a search engine: create a bookmark for "[http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla- central/search?=%s"](http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/search?=%s"), add a keyword e.g. !dxr then type "!dxr $query" in your address bar.

<comment><USER58> Auto-suggestion: that's fine if I don't have it because when I search, I expect to see result displayed on the web page, which means I will spend most of my time on google.com rather than that looking at that tiny search bar.

> You know you can add keyword shortcuts to search engines and just type `dxr > query` to send the query to dxr right?

You know why this Lightspeed idea exists? Because users don't need to consult you or a user guide to find out these fancy shortcuts. I am sorry, but true story. Actually, sample 20 Firefox developers randomly and ask them a bunch of Firefox shortcut and "hidden" features questions, I bet there is a high chance many of them can't answer or don't remember the syntax.

No. I don't want to do bookmarklet or bookmark. It's a simple feature.

My proposal is simple. Any real security risk? No. Privacy? You choose the search engine you want. Just because solution x y z exists, doesn't mean we can't make things simpler for both end users and power users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The design choices really look interesting. But shouldn't Mozilla focus more on eliminating the ever persistent memory leak bug that has plagued it since forever? I can't even use Firefox on a netbook. I end up installing Midori.

<comment><USER61> Mozilla is comprised of a lot of different people working on a lot of different things. There are people focusing on various memory and speed issues, but they can't (and shouldn't) allocate all their resources to focusing on just a few issues.

<comment><USER3> yarou obviously didn't say that they should focus everyone only on reducing Firefox's memory usage and performance problems. I'm not sure how you mistakenly got that impression, because that's clearly not what that comments suggests.

The main issue here is that we've been hearing that these problems will be fixed, or even that they supposedly have been fixed, yet they're still present years later.

Whatever work is being done clearly isn't having much of an impact. Users are still reporting problems with Firefox's performance and memory usage, even if those within the Mozilla community wish to deny these problems exist, or claim that they'll be fixed "soon".

Users can only take so much of this. With Chrome and Firefox offering UIs that are pretty much identical these days, but Chrome offering significantly better performance and significantly lower memory usage, any reasonable user will obviously consider switching from Firefox to Chrome. Many have done so already, and many will continue to do so as time goes on.

<comment><USER61> yarou's comment is in response to a presentation about unrelated features, and his/her response suggests knowledge that Mozilla isn't focusing on memory and performance problems.

Many of the memory leaks have been fixed over the years, benchmarks suggest [Firefox can compete with Chrome in terms of speed](www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera- next,3534-12.html), and Mozilla, realizing their UI still _feels_ sluggish, launched a project (called Snappy) to fight this UI sluggishness.

Many improvements have been made over the years on all counts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> See [https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/](https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web/) for a similar (released) approach

</comment><comment><USER63> I love the idea of the simplicity. Would be especially useful for not so tech savvy adults.

</comment><comment><USER64> In only 20 short years, we've gone full circle back to AOL, but now with an amazing new interface.

Feh.

</comment><comment><USER65> Two questions: What are the 1 % wizards? :D And how can I block ads without add ons?

<comment><USER66> According to mozilla, only 1% of users are technically competent and customise their browser or use advanced features. As for blocking ads, you can't - lightspeed is designed to make the browser a passive content consumption device like a TV. Welcome to the Brave New World.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Maybe "LightFx" would be a more fitting name for this experiment.

<comment><USER68> Or "Firelight".

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> If it doesn't have a debug console. I'm not supporting it :P

</comment><comment><USER70> Time to use Firefox!

</comment><comment><USER71> I think Mozilla should focus on making Firefox fast and easy on memory usage before they start trying to "innovate" in the UI space, even if it's just conceptual.

<comment><USER37> This is assuming that everyone at Mozilla is capable of focusing on speed/memory. I'm betting there are several dedicated UI developers and designers who would not be able to meaningfully contribute to the core browser, and conceptualizing things like Lightspeed is their primary job role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I don't know why this is getting up votes. This looks like a browser for bimbos. No, seriously. I don't want the browser telling me what sites to go to and while doing that, blocking my view when the address bar is in focus. 10 minutes (well, 6) wasted!

<comment><USER73> It's getting upvoted because it's interesting to discuss as well. A lot of users here don't seem to agree with the choices made in this UI either.</comment></comment>


Introducing the App Store for the Web, a new way to sell web apps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jumpstarter.io/app-store-for-the-web

<comment><USER2> No sockpuppet voting and comments on HN, please. It invokes penalties.</comment>