Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aRelVKWbMAv0&d=2007 <comment><USER2> The best quote in the article:

 _" The iPhone will not substantially alter the fundamental structure and challenges of the mobile industry," Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a report this month.

There are three reasons that Apple is unlikely to make much of an impact on this market -- and why it is too early to start dumping your Nokia shares._

This is comedy gold, but is also a good reality check about the mainstream news we read today. Not all predictions made by supposed experts will be accurate.

<comment><USER3> ""The iPhone will not substantially alter the fundamental structure and challenges of the mobile industry," Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said in a report this month."

I'd actually argue that the quote above is substantively correct (in the US).

2006: Phones are sold largely on contract, by various retailers, including the manufacturer; churn is driven largely on pricing, network performance, and network-effect factors.

2014: Phones are sold largely on contract, by various retailers, including the manufacturer; churn is driven largely on pricing, network performance, and network-effect factors.

The iPhone changed the experience of using the mobile phone, and what we did on our mobile phones - not how we buy them, nor did the change the base reason people switch carriers - not in the long game anyhow, people still switch because of dissatisfaction with their existing provider, or that the grass appears greener on the other side.

<comment><USER4> Data became significantly more important.

We went from being nickel and dimed on minutes and SMS with unlimited data to being nickel and dimed on data with unlimited minutes and SMS.

<comment><USER5> And before the iPhone data charges where horrific, £/$/€'s per MB (not GB). If you were only nickel and dimed you were doing well. To get the initial exclusive iPhone contracts the telcos had to offer unlimited data which made a smartphone useful in a way that the earlier models weren't.

That is how the iPhone changed the market for the better at least in the UK and even if you don't have one. Competitive pressure may have caused it to happen eventually but we can all thank Steve Jobs for speeding up that important change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's easy to say this writer and those cited in the article were wrong. More broadly, reading this reminds me of an Economist article from a couple years ago discussing how Fuji and Kodak took different paths when digital cameras took off, and the choices made then led to the companies' positions today (one defunct, one doing well).

What I took from that Economist piece wasn't just the history lesson, but the reminder that what looks wise in the near term (what Kodak did) isn't necessarily best in the long term, and vice versa. In fact, Kodak likely sowed the seeds of its demise when they took the lead position in the digital camera space. So re-reading this iPhone piece merely reminds me how difficult it is to prognosticate, and that's an important lesson for those of us in guiding roles, both personally or professionally.

[http://www.economist.com/node/21542796](http://www.economist.com/node/21542796)

<comment><USER7> I generally agree that hindsight is 2020, and its hard to tell who's wise vs just throwing darts.

However, not all types of prognostications are created equal. A big part of identifying trends and devising strategies is being able to sort out what's worth getting on top of, just watching, or dismissing outright. Same for journalism.

This article was a typical counter-hype pageview driver pounded out for a deadline. The writers job was to make a plausible-sounding story for the opposite side.

Its the plausible-sounding story part thats tripping people up here. Here's what he did: * He says everyone is going gaga over it * He gives a bunch of reasons why they'll have a tough time in the market * He cites a random analyst * He muses his personal take on its market feasibility and makes a strawman argument about it being a 'defensive product' that he summarily knocks down * He concludes, decisively, that nothing is going to change

We've all read this article. Its like the 5 paragraph essay from grade school. And like the 5 paragraph essay, it can be graded for how much it makes sense.

Just on cursory view, he clearly hasn't done his homework on Apple or consumer trends. Namely, he doesn't address the success factors and relevant details of the iPod.

1\. He cites price as an issue (but the iPod was almost the same price, anchoring high end value before dropping in price to get mass market scale).

2\. He mentions people really excited about the iPhone but later muses he doesn't know who its targeted at (how does he think Apple sells things? tech specs?).

3\. He suggests the playing field is level against competing models (ignoring the demonstrated ecosystem power of iTunes, the fact that no ecosystem exists in phones, and of course, ignoring the holyshit demo that showed iPhone's superior usability).

4\. He says at the end an outside player may come provide competition but they'd have to bring some new tech or different user experience (ignoring the _decades_ of R&D groundwork and IP portfolio that Apple laid for the iPhone, all the way back to tech demos in the 80s and the Newton in the 90s).

In other words, he's probably dodging the issue or doesn't know anything. This quote is great:

"Likewise, who is it pitched at? The price and the e-mail features make it look like a business product. But Apple is a consumer company."

He's grappling aloud with a square peg in a round hole of his own making. Like the rest of the article, nowhere in there is the author demonstrating an ability to imagine something that does not exist today - the basic skill required to understand the history of technology.

To a reader without any industry knowledge, at the very least the context of what type of article this is (a counter-hype story), the logical inconsistencies within the arguments, and the complete lack of imagination would raise a flag about how valid this piece is.

To a reader with industry knowledge, they'd see points 1-4 not covered and think this guy shouldn't have his job.

\-- Now to your example, I don't think these are the same type of prediction.

That the iPhone would be a general market success was an easy prediction, because the playbook and success of the iPod was right there, and it was easy to see that phones were going to be like the iPhone once it was shown, because it was that much better.

The Fuji vs Kodak is a hard prediction, because those companies are having their core business models threatened by an external change looming over them. The change here isn't about the success or failure of a product, it's about whether companies can manage a transformation. Transformations are hard and messy, and hard to predict.

I see the 'its hard to predict the future' argument as more than a little bit similar to "correlation is not causation" that seems to pop up here occasionally. Yes, correlation is not causation, but it can imply it, depending on the circumstances, measurements, R^2, etc. Similarly, the conditions for a future prediction depend on what information we have, what the context is of change, what we're trying to predict, etc.

The only thing I think where the iPhone prediction was difficult was just how _crazy_ a success it was. But whether it was going to be a general success or general failure? For anyone who knew a bit about the iPod, that should have been answered the moment they saw the demo.

EDIT: All this said, I definitely agree with the important lesson to balance short/long term and not try to over-predict the future, especially when it comes to the path individuals are on. I think thats what you were getting at at the end. Wisdom of this kind is important in this (young) community.

<comment><USER8> A lot of people saw the potential but in 2007 there still were worries. Apple whould have been crazy not to let people develop app for the device but it wasn't possible until july 2008. Also many programmers were worried on how who apple would run their store as soon as they annunced it on march 2008 soon.

And I would say that at least until iOS4 (2010) the jailbroken version was still better than what apple was doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author subsequently scored a gig at the WSJ with multiple columns.[1] Funny how the ability to accurately comment on industry is not a useful qualification for being employed to comment on industry. :) (Written somewhat tongue-in-cheek obviously, I'm sure he has gotten lucky before with predictions before too.)

[1] [https://twitter.com/mattlynnwriter](https://twitter.com/mattlynnwriter)

</comment><comment><USER10> I love that this article wasn't just wrong, it was _spectacularly_ wrong. I remember thinking many of these same things at the time. This especially would've rung true:

Will your accounts department stump up for a fancy new handset just so you can listen to Eminem on your way to a business meeting?

At the time? Of course not! Today? Standard equipment.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious as to why this doesn't affect the credibility of the writers that publish this sort of garbage? Matthew Lynn, the author, has continued on over the years to publish stories for the WSJ and HuffPost.

<comment><USER12> Do you expect to get fired from your job if you make a single wrong decision or prediction? I can't speak to this particular writer but a lot of very intelligent, insightful people have been very wrong about important things and still managed to maintain their credibility by being right about other things (and for being wrong for credible reasons).

The big thing that helped the iPhone take off, the App Store, wasn't out yet. Things changed rapidly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Apple stock when this came out: ~$94.00. Gains to date: ~456%.

Doesn't look to bad to me! Now lets look at the cash hoard Apple has: it is enough to buy Nokia and Motorola numerous times over.

Now if only the author of the article would have written about 'apps'. Would he have labeled them as niche as well? I would have loved to see an argument in 2007 for the multi-billion valuation developers are getting now.

<comment><USER14> When the iPhone first came out there were no native apps. Only web apps. There is no way people would be making this much money if Apple hadn't opened up the platform.

<comment><USER15> In fact, I seem to remember that people were pretty much immediately complaining that there was no (official) way to bring third party apps to the iPhone (except for web apps).

If I remember this was also a major criticism: Some other phones at the time could install third party software, the iPhone could not.

However, despite the ability of installing third party apps existing in many phones, that never really took off before the iPhone SDK came out.

(Also, the iPhone did have a relatively slow start. It sold well and along with what Apple was publicly stating as its goal, but it took a generation before the phone really did take off like a rocket.)

<comment><USER16> I've heard some claims recently (perhaps true) that Jobs didn't want third party apps, but at the time the interface was so obviously suited for apps that I assumed that they simply hadn't had time to put together what was needed for third parties to build apps. At the time they talked about web apps, but it felt like stalling, then a year later the app store launches.

<comment><USER17> It's true (apple fanboy here, I remember it well). He was adamantly against them. If you look around, he did a whole keynote where he tried to present web apps as just as good as native apps-- it was ridiculous.

He'd been dead wrong before as well: just a few years before the iphone, when people wanted to see an ipod with video capability, he said nobody would ever want to watch video on a mobile device.

It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed". The next one coming is 5+ inch screens for the iphone. They'll make no mention of the fact that they criticized large screen phones before ("look, my thumb goes from corner to corner!"). Oh well.

<comment><USER18> > It really bugs me that apple makes these "nobody would ever want" > proclamations and then reverses itself without saying, "we goofed".

Apple doesn't like to tell people what it's doing. So if they say "We're not doing X", it might mean they're not doing it. Or, it might mean that they are doing it, and don't want anybody to know yet.

With the iPod Video, they ixnayed it in public up to a few weeks before they released it.

In the case of the App Store, it seems pretty obvious that Apple intended to let developers write apps for it, but the APIs weren't stable enough to have 3rd party developer depend on them. So they stalled for a year, depending on superior hardware to keep momentum going until the OS settled down some.

<comment><USER17> You're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What he didn't foresee then was the app store (it hadn't been invented yet). That is really what changed everything.

<comment><USER20> Well, the iTunes store came online in 2003. Not much of a stretch to foresee a marketplace for apps much like the marketplace for music. Whether it would be successful or not is another thing.

<comment><USER21> I disagree; apps were never a guarantee. Steve was adamant about not having 3rd party apps on the iPhone for a long time. However, with 20/20 hindsight it's easy to see.

<comment><USER22> Steve was also adamant about not doing a phone in the first place, not doing a tablet, etc. The point being that Steve always publicly denied wanting to do something that privately he was already investing significant resources in doing.

<comment><USER23> From what I've read it's much simpler than that. Steve would argue passionately for both sides of an issue before reaching a conclusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is one of the fascinating things I think folks born in the 90's are really going to regret. So much of what they say and opine about has become embalmed in the amber that is the Internet that as time passes and looking back reveals how little they knew in spite of their ardor to the contrary is going to start haunting them and become a modern albatross[1]. When I think about the some of the really silly things I believed when I was in college to be absolute truths, only to find in the passage of time they were simply projections of my dreams and fears on to the events of my day. It seems to me there is a particularly vulnerable group there in the middle somewhere, too early to recognize what things like Google would do to data retention, but late enough that their thoughts and views made it into those archives. Ouch.

According to his LinkedIn page[2] Matthew Lynn has continued to be fairly successful as a strategist so perhaps for him it is a non-issue.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_(metaphor)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albatross_\(metaphor\))

[2] [http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3770629&authType=NAM...](http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3770629&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=z62X&locale=en_US)

</comment><comment><USER25> Great Quote: "Don't let that fool you into thinking that it matters. The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won't be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business."

Nokia and Motorola and clamshells ... :)

</comment><comment><USER8> As much as people like to bash everyone who said in 2007 that the iPhone was nothing more than an expensive toy has to remember that the iPhone didn't have an application store (other than the jailbreak version) until July 2008.

And without the app store it was a great pice of engineering but if you didn't saw a jailbreaked version it was a big phone (for the time) where you can play music, watch videos and go to a completely non mobile friendly web with a crappy browser. Add to that how expensive it was compared to other phones how low the battery lasted and how fragile it was you can see why not everyone was that impressed.

It's too easy to say 7 years later, look at this fool he was wrong.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember this time. I, like many others, hated the iPhone. The app store was young. There was no basic functionalities like copy & paste. There was no multi-tasking between apps. You only had the option of one carrier (AT&T). The list goes on. I stuck with the Blackberry. Then, Apple executed. It delivered on hardware, and the app store blew up.

<comment><USER27> I never understood you guys.

Blackberry had no apps so interoperability and copy and paste barely had any use cases.

The other smart phones of the day were Windows powered bricks like the i-Mate line which were so dog slow,and hideously unreliable that frankly I might as well not have had a phone for the two years I used a K-Jam.

iPhone came on the scene and it was like for the first time it made sense to lug around a larger device.

Best iPod ever on that thing. Big screen for videos, real browser and everything it did do worked. Not like the Windows phones which had tech spec as long as your arm but crashed if you tried to perform a most if the functions.

Seriously, I remember having to remove the battery to reboot my device after simply trying to connect via Bluetooth to a samsung flip phone. I didn't care if the iPhone couldn't do that because I knew that the others couldn't even if they said they could.

Caveat: I'm from South Africa and we never got the Palm phones this side.

<comment><USER28> I was a big iPhone hater at the time. Still kind of am.

1\. It was really, really expensive when it first came out - there was a several hundred dollar price drop before it really took off, IIRC.

2\. I had a windows mobile (HTC TyTN II) which was actually sweet.

2a. The slideout keyboard was way more accurate than the software keyboard on the iPhone, and Apple hadn't entirely figured out autocomplete (I think their keyboard is still poor compared to swipe etc, tbh).

2b. It was durable - it never died after being thrown off stairs, slammed on the ground, crushed in backpacks, stepped on, getting dropped in a river, etc etc. Towards the end of its lifepan, when I wanted to get an Android phone, I found that I couldn't easily kill it even if I tried. On the other hand, my friend shattered their iPhone by bumping their pocket into the corner of a table.

2c. 3g, and ATT only. 2g is basically unusable for browsing the desktop web, and ATT sucks.

2d. Anybody could, and many people did, publish whatever apps you wanted. I was able to download a full offline database of German public transit schedules and navigate flawlessly in cities I had never been to (which was a big deal), SSH into servers in emergencies (using the aforementioned full-size keyboard), full offline GPS of the continental US (something that's difficult to come by even today!) and so on and so on. The iPhone on launch was basically an expensive consumer toy, had no allowances for third-party developers, and Steve was telling everyone that they were better off without them.

In an expansion of my last point, myself (and a lot of other people) didn't so much think that the iPhone was going to fail as dread its success. The iPhone, and really Apple, represent and drive the trend of consumerization and broader locking down of computing.

And I think that we were right to do so - the broader population largely thinks of their handheld general-purpose computers as texting and passive content consumption devices, because that's all they're allowed to be. And that's sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I worked (contracted) in the Nokia world at this time. The big game changer the iPhone bought and I think was missed by Nokia and others was the inclusive and easy to use data. In the uk data on phones was very expensive and in some cases you had to configure the apn yourself. iPhone changed all that virtually overnight

</comment><comment><USER30> >The mobile-phone industry is becoming a cozy cartel between the network operators and a limited range of manufacturers. It could certainly use a fresh blast of competition from an industry outsider.

HA! Yeah that really worked out eh?

<comment><USER31> It certainly did but only for Apple. Everyone else doesn't have the market position to make the same demands on carriers.

<comment><USER32> Has worked out extraordinarily well for Samsung. They're making $30 billion a year in profit now, a drastic increase from five years ago. They have as much clout as Apple does these days, if not more given their position in manufacturing components.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With hindsight it's almost funny how the author has managed to write this nonsense with such self-assured tone, but at the time this view was quite prevalent. Working at the time for Symbian, I remember meetings where Apple were openly mocked by senior managers and technical leaders. The only competition that mattered was from Microsoft and Android. The iPhone it was believed, would never be sold beyond the niche high-end market. The most silly, almost insincere, part of these beliefs was the fact that one could walk down the street from our offices and pick up an iPhone at a price fractionally higher than an average Symbian phone (with a contract of course). There were many other reasons for the demise of Symbian as a platform (the leadership was naïve, but had the most inflated egos in the whole of industry due to their earlier success in 'scoring' Nokia), but the bottom line was that they had no idea what consumers wanted. Boring old men still nostalgically carrying their Psion 5s, whom I respected then and respect now for their technical expertise, but not for their business or even technological vision.

A small minority that I was part of tried quite hard to convince our peers that Apple were a serious threat. Everyone laughed at us, we were called Apple fanboys and were never taken seriously. I left soon after in a state of disillusion, but had to watch from the sidelines one of the most promising British 'startups' disintegrate into absolute irrelevance. The managers who ran this company into ground when it was the only one in leadership of that industry should hang their heads in shame. Nothing to take away from great designers at Apple and from the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple owe a lot to the incompetence of Symbian leadership.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's easy for us to judge now. But if you read this article when it came out, you wouldn't be so sure. This is the reason why not many analysts publish reports that are contrary to "common" opinion. Because if everyone is wrong, then it's fine, but if it's just that analyst - that's not good for them. We should appreciate that this analyst tried to have a critical point of view.

</comment><comment><USER35> I read similar articles when the Z10 by Blackberry was being release a year or so ago. You had opinions of flops/world domination swinging both ways.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow - how could they be so wrong. I especially like the incumbents: Nokia and Motorala ... where are they now?

<comment><USER37> Motorola just finished launching their what appears to be fairly successful Motorola X and G lines under the Google name (after being purchased by Google) and is being sold to Lenovo.

Motorola is making the best phone I've used to date.

Nokia is making amazing camera phones with Microsoft.

In my world it's "where is apple now?" None of my coworkers were super pumped about the new iPhone. Before they left the company they were pumped about iOS 7 but just barely ("thank god they got rid of skeumorphism").

To me, despite how wrong this article was, the headline itself looks like it'll be coming true. Apple has been playing defense these last two or three years. Immense props for their initial creation, but the movement it spawned will end up much more wildly successful than Apple will. And the iPhone will fail in a late, defensive move.

<comment> SG- I haven't seen the new moto phone anywhere myself or heard it make any news other than Verge type site reviews, so what does "fairly" successful mean?

Nokia isn't making anything amazing these days, i suppose they are making the phone with the highest megapixels and phoney ads pretending it was shot on the phone.

<comment><USER38> > Nokia isn't making anything amazing these days

Uh, what? I ditched my Nokia a while ago (I hated the ecosystem) but the Nokia Windows phones are undeniably rock solid hardware.

<comment> SG- I'm not saying the Nokia Windows phones are good or bad, but they aren't amazing and rocking the market right now. But your comment brings up another point, it's not just about the hardware these days like it used to be for phones, software is just as important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Actually, I shouldn't blame the guy too much, except from the fact that he is getting paid to state opinions at Bloomberg, so he should be way more careful in the future.

I was sure the iPhone would be disruptive and the 6 month-early presentation (if I recall correctly) was enough to show an interface that was like 30 years ahead of Symbian.

That said, I was plain wrong on the iPad... It was way more disruptive than I initially thought. But to me, creating content is important, that's why a tablet would always lack something for me. But others apparently appreciate the intuitive interface and ease of use in every day life.

<comment><USER40> Except Symbian had a touch screen UI in the form of Nokia 7710 a few years before the iPhone, but Nokia killed it shortly after releasing it.

<comment><USER41> Nokia wasn't the first. There were Symbian touchscreen phones with a full-size display as early as 2000:

[http://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_r380-195.php](http://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_r380-195.php)

The Sony Ericsson P800 is probably the best-remembered in this category. (I think I read somewhere that Steve Jobs once mentioned the P800 as an inspiration for the iPhone -- basically he told his staff: "Let's do this kind of device, but better.")

Anyway, the Symbian touchscreen devices were more like Pocket PCs than iPhones. They didn't really manage to break out of the desktop UI mold.

Apple was the first with capacitive multitouch. They also invented the modern mobile web browsing experience, where the window size is separated from the viewport and you can zoom/pan around with realtime feedback. This seems obvious now, but think back to what it was like to use the mobile web in 2006...

<comment><USER40> Yep, I forgot about Sony devices.

I used the mobile web since the early GPRS days. Remember WML?

Although they lacked capacitive multitouch, Symbian devices before 2006 already had zoom capabilities.

My N70 could already zoom in for content, if I remember correctly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> As one of the people who fiercely defended Nokia on Hacker News when the iPhone launched, I'm entirely willing to say I was wrong here. I drastically underestimated how quickly Android powered smartphones would become cheap enough to eat into Nokia's marketshare and profits, and I totally overestimated Nokia's leadership's ability to pivot and deal with the situation.

<comment><USER41> I'm in the same boat. I believed that Nokia's market power would let them react quicker and outgun everyone else on price when necessary. I thought that Apple would treat the iPhone like the Mac, relegating it to a profitable high- end niche with 3-5% marketshare.

Nokia was killed by their incompetence in software. Symbian was originally a lightweight OS designed for constrained devices... But somewhere along the way it got turned into a "worst of all worlds" operating system with enormous code bloat, useless desktop-style features and several half-hearted touch UI layers all rolled into one big ball of fail.

It seemed like nobody at Nokia noticed this. I guess the middle managers were either afraid to pass the bad news up the chain, or more likely, they were totally clueless about the ongoing code gangrene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Failed predictions are very humorous to read in hindsight. This one is up there with:

 _No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame._

</comment><comment><USER44> "The mobile-phone industry is becoming a cozy cartel between the network operators and a limited range of manufacturers. It could certainly use a fresh blast of competition from an industry outsider." This statement is still true unforunately despite what ever else the article says

</comment><comment><USER45> He almost says the reason why it will be a hit (the-best-of-all-world!)

"Instead of lugging around a phone for making calls, an MP3 player for listening to music, and a Blackberry for checking your e-mail, you can do all three on one device. Even better, you only need one charger."

But failed to understand it!

</comment><comment><USER46> Of course no one saw it coming. Especially the media.

But "Will Fail"? Please. That stands as a terrible headline, no matter what.

</comment><comment><USER47> I like the byline:

(Matthew Lynn is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.) How he wished this was different ...

</comment><comment><USER48> Another example that shows that humans are not very good at predicting the future.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thanks for sharing. This is an awesome read!</comment>


Cory Doctorow on the Digital Economy Act: This means war - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/apr/16/digital-economy-act-cory-doctorow

<comment><USER2> Nice one Cory, spot on mate. The shills like Sharkey and the tech-illilterate in parliament have F'd us in the A.

It makes me so mad. I can't wait for this Act to get some teeth, cos I'm going to punch them in. The last two times they made my life illegal I was pretty powerless to fight back but now they stepped into my ring, bring it the fuck on.

And no, I'm not a freetard either. I don't Torrent movies and the like, I produce them. Seeing the projects I work on on TPB is pretty galling but I would _never ever_ give those fuckers more laws to beat us down with - remember Peterloo !!!

Feargal - [http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=wall&story_fbid=11...](http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?v=wall&story_fbid=113660305321745&id=584985316#!/profile.php?id=100000129987340&ref=ts)</comment>


From slum life to Disney film: Ugandan teen chess star 'the ultimate underdog' - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/10/world/africa/uganda-chess-teen/index.html?hpt=hp_c1 <comment><USER2> Nice story but it exaggerates her ability. Going from here rating and list of games here:

<http://ratings.fide.com/card.phtml?event=10000399>

She is a fairly weak tournament player, good enough to beat any casual player but I personally know some 10 year olds that would beat her.

She is ranked 14th in Uganda ( out of 15 rated players ) but only 3 of them are women (the bottom 3) so I doubt she won the National Champs since the top few players are pretty good. She probably won the Women's champs since she's the second highest rated woman.

[http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?ina=1&country=UGA](http://ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml?ina=1&country=UGA)</comment>


Forensic obstruction tool programmer backs down after Cyberspeak host reams him - <AUTHOR> http://decafme.org/

<comment><USER2> Am I missing something? All I get is some boring paragraphs on the media, and some even more boring paragraphs on Jesus.

<comment><AUTHOR> <http://cyberspeak.libsyn.org/index.php?post_id=561335>

<comment><AUTHOR> 46 minutes in.</comment></comment></comment>


A third of venture-backed IPOs between 2006 and 2012 had an immigrant founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3015616/the-shocking-stats-about-whos-really-starting-companies-in-america <comment><USER2> That doesn't surprise me in the least. Immigrants have one leg up over the competition: they have generally very little to lose and everything to gain. They have also already self-selected for being people that are not risk adverse (they just left everything behind to start a new life) and they are executing on their dreams.

I often see people that rant against immigrants in general and I always wonder how they would react if you explained to them that their old age pension likely depends on some not yet born immigrant and his or her children.

<comment><USER3> I think there are some close cousins of "nothing to lose" that are at work too. As an immigrant your out of your own system and its expectations.

Say you come from a background where your reference group mostly follows a path of: go to high school, go to 3 year Uni, travel for a year, then either start climbing corporate ladders or more Uni, etc. Obviously, not everyone follows the exact same path, but there is a lot of similarity. This peers group might be people your own age that you know. Older siblings, parents or even mostly theoretical. Most people have something like it and it is how they create their expectations for themselves.

Taking a year "off" after high school would put you "behind" your peer group. Figuring out a way of finishing Uni a year early would put you ahead. People with strong peer groups cluster around the median. This applies to performance as well as choices. I don't know how well the psychological mechanisms are understood, but I guess our self expectations are both very important determinant of performance and choices and very influenced by peer groups.

Derek Sivers wrote a good article called There is no speed limit.^ In a nutshell, a cool musician called Kimo Williams taught him 2 years with of Berkley music curriculum in five lessons when he was 17. He set an intense pace and expected him to keep up. Just because it takes 2 years in a college context doesn't mean it needs to take 2 years.

Immigrants are islands, relatively. They are on a path with few peers. Taking a few years to do something won't put you behind because there is nothing to put you behind of. There are fewer safe choices that an immigrant is hesitant to deviate from. This is good for making outliers.

^[http://sivers.org/kimo](http://sivers.org/kimo)

<comment><USER4> just a note: you mean Berklee, not Berkley (2 different schools)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One thing I always find, even when dealing with USCIS, or press, or really anyone regarding this matter, is that only very few people truly wish to make it difficult for immigrant founders to stay in the country. In fact, I have never met anyone that gave me the impression that they didn't want me around. The problem is that immigration law is slow moving and the adjudicators at the USCIS need to follow it to the dot, even if it was written before a lot of the technology we use today was invented and the world was a much less global place. And now they are rolling the issue of startup founders and high skilled labor into the massive immigration reform, where it is likely to fall through the cracks or even be used as a bipartisan bargaining chip/concession.

Personally, I think a great way to level the playing field wrt starting businesses for immigrant founders would be to allow all holders of employment visas a grace period during which they can stay in the country after they quit their job. This grace period could depend on the type of visa, your degree, your income (read taxes), the time you spent in the US, whatever. Then you can start a business without first having to secure your own presence, which is very difficult (because you don't yet have a real company) and expensive to do. A similar arrangement exists for study visas and is extremely effective in keeping college and grad school graduates in the country after school.

</comment><comment><USER6> Uh look, this is a false equivalency. Nobody is complaining about the brilliant immigrants who are founding companies.

People are upset about using immigrant labor as price competition to depress wages and capture middle class income to be transferred to the wealthy.

We all see this all the time--companies hire legal immigrant labor or import H1B's to pay 80% of the prevailing wage, meanwhile a massive and unnecessary management structure compensates itself lavishly.

This is a classic "commons" problem. It's advantageous for any individual company, but when everyone does it, it leads to the tragedy of the commons. In this case that tragedy is the collapse of the American consumer. He's being attack by high health costs, food costs, energy costs, regulatory burden, grift from financial institutions, education costs and he has no more money to spend at Waltmart-- the guys who caused the problem in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER7> That says very little. There are such a wide range of immigrants: young immigrants, older immigrants, poor immigrants, wealthy immigrants, undocumented immigrants, documented with a green card. If someone relatively wealthy immigrates here and uses the "millionaire's visa" and invests in a business, they get a green card. Well, that counts toward the statistic.

Also, the article has it TOTALLY WRONG about immigration history. Immigration was relatively loose until the Civil War, and then it was slowly closed until in the late 1800s, restrictions really increased substantially until the 1940s, particularly for Asians. Then, after WW2 it eased up, and in 1965 racial discrimination in immigration quotas was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act.

That created a new phase of global immigration, and things stayed the same until 1986 with the IRCA. That closed off some forms of immigration, specifically affecting illegal immigration. In the same time frame, it became easier for wealthy entrepreneurs to immigrate (mainly the ones from Hong Kong), and then H1B started, and it became easier for technically skilled workers to get worker visas and later green cards.

So it's not as the article said, that the doors were wide open, and then they have slowly been closing. That is at best an error, and at worst, a total deception. After reading that, I stopped, because if the writer can't get that basic history correct, they don't know squat.

(I should add that I am in favor of increasing immigration, but opposed to the current trend of expanding guest worker quotas.)

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how many more are founded by children of immigrant parents. My YC batch felt 1/3 immigrant founder, 1/3 child of immigrant founder. Quite the overrepresentation since they each comprise just over 10% of the population: [http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/foreignborn...](http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/foreignborn_population/cb10-159.html)

<comment><USER9> Not an exact answer to your question, but FTA:

        "Currently, more than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Skilled immigrants don't have much of a voter base, and the current set of US leaders don't seem to be very far sighted.

It is also pretty hard to even conceive of a good crisis that can force change.

So, yeah, pretty much a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER11> It appears that most of these entrepreneurs are documented immigrants, which may be an argument in favor of keeping the current US immigration system. However, it's important to keep a few things in mind:

a) Some of these entrepreneurs were able to stay in the US because they got married to an American citizen (that's my case, BTW).

b) Many would-be-entrepreneurs that tried to migrate to the US end up setting shops somewhere else because they couldn't stay legally.

c) Most entrepreneurs that are undocumented immigrants in the US (I know many that own small businesses) have major issues scaling their businesses and won't ever show up in articles like that one. For example: its extremely difficult for them to get credit lines. Additionally, they won't ever talk to the press because they are afraid, and legitimately so, of becoming a deportation target.

The current immigration system in the US is broken. Ignorance and political- driven xenophobia are not helping. I really wonder how long it will take for most Americans to realize that although it used to be a privilege to migrate to the US, the global dynamics have shifted. It's now a privilege for the US the welcome many immigrants, specially technology and entrepreneurship- oriented ones. Many other countries already figured that out and have adapted their laws.

</comment><comment><USER12> There's nothing shocking about this - increase the time frame to 20/50/100 years and the numbers will stay more or less the same...

It's just that in the US, you've got favorable laws and culture, existing infrastructure, lots of investors willing to take a risk and a huge market to begin with... it's the perfect starting ground for pretty much any business.

</comment><comment><USER13> As a founder, this is one of the most frustrating things you may deal with: having another founder who has to worry about visa problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> As to the innovation centers of the tech industry, I'd like to see some more decentralization of the hubs. As it evolved, the auto industry benefited greatly from stuff that came out of Europe and Asia. Same cant be said of tech.

</comment><comment><USER15> Immigrants aren't homogeneous. What is the distribution of countries-of-origin for these founders? Why does this imply that we should increase immigration for groups not disproportionately likely to found successful companies?

</comment><comment><USER16> What is % of Y combinator companies? From what I see it seems like much smaller percentage - but could be also about 1/3.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to monitor website performance from client perspective? - <AUTHOR> Also known as "Real User Monitoring". There are a lot of SaaSes doing some form of it, but I know none avoiding third-party JS or requests and most don't support First (Contentful) Paint. What's your experience? What do you use? If you hacked something together in-house, what stack did you use and how do you build reports on top of it? <comment><USER2> We use pepperreport.io to have information about how every release impact our reponse time. It doesn't require anything on our stack and is a correct estimation of the impact for our users.</comment>


The 500 Most Important Domains on the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/top500

<comment><USER2>
      17. http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/

I have honestly never heard of this site. And it's number 17.

<comment><USER3> It's the link to a Chinese Government Department that all websites in China had to register with (and link to I believe).

<comment><USER4> Wow, that's one way to get pagerank..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strange list. Does anyone know what criteria they used?

<comment><USER6> _ranked by the number of linking root domains_

So I guess how many domains these domains link to.

<comment><USER5> I would guess they mean domains that link _to_ these.

<comment><USER6> Hmm, that's interesting. I take back my initial assumption. The link numbers on the second column (inbound) are too low for what I was thinking. My initial thoughts were that it was the other way around (the third column, outbound), that these sites were considered important because they're hubs that link out to n other sites. Maybe some combination of both, or even of all the numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Finally, vindication that Geocities is indeed more important than Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER8> This isn't all true, What about the SSL providers that we hardwire in for security?

What about the Microsoft update domain.. And for that matter all automatic packaging systems

It is conceivable that if someone was to have enough access inside these services and then take over the domain they could cause havok!

But really that's just another alexa (:

</comment><comment><USER9> # of links != importance

popular, maybe.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the most important domains for me at this point in my life. (I'm just pointing out how subjective their list is.)

google.com

gmail.com

auburn.edu

news.ycombinator.com

reddit.com

slashdot.org

</comment><comment><USER11> Google owns 3 of the top 6 - google, blogspot, and youtube

</comment><comment><USER12> whitehouse.gov on the move up

most edus on the way down - a post ncaa tournament thing?

</comment><comment><USER13> why is adobe so high?

<comment><USER14> My guess is people linking to "Get Adobe Reader."

<comment><USER13> oh yeah forgot about that</comment></comment></comment>


P2P Bitcoin exchange [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://pauv.org/paper.pdf <comment><USER2> > If anyone doesn't meet the transaction contract (send the money or send the > bitcoins), both lose the deposit.

Am I understanding this correctly that if a buyer tries to scam the seller in whatever way (i.e. will initially sign the transactions but ultimately doesn't pay) then the seller will lose his deposit? If that's the case then it won't work. I ran a P2P Bitcoin exchange and it's a pretty common thing to have "fake buyers" who place offers but ultimately don't fulfill them. With a third party you can resolve these kind of situations easily, it's much harder without them.

<comment><AUTHOR> If one of the parts doesn't fulfill its order, both the buyer and the seller lose the same amount of Bitcoins. That's the way we prevent scam!

<comment><USER2> The problem is, that in a P2P system you don't have only scammers that will not fulfill the trade. You also have careless people, who will mess something up, forget about the transaction, delete their clients/wallets, etc. With this schema, you are forcing the one party to take responsibility of stupidity of other.

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, if you try to make allowance for that, you incentivize scammers to say 'oops!'. To deal with this makes things a lot more complex: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trembling_hand_perfect_equilib...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trembling_hand_perfect_equilibrium)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> An exchange is not just a transfer, it is a transfer at a price. Sure, you can transfer 1 BTC to 100$, but how do you determine a price? If A wants to buy 1 BTC from B, what is the transaction? 1$,5$,1000$? You need to integrate with the fiat system and you need a limit order book. I would suggest Harris book on microstructure for an understanding of exchange markets (ISBN 0195144708).

<comment><AUTHOR> Each peer has to determine a price per Bitcoin when opening the order. Then we match the orders that have the same price using a P2P discovery system. So there isn't a global price but rather each user has to choose a price.

<comment><USER4> Well, a chosen price is a limit order, which can go unfilled. If I order 1000 BTC for 0.01$ am I going to get filled? At current market prices no, because currently there is no supply of BTC at that price. A market determines the price. If a good is well defined a market will automatically be centralized. Gold and oil are extremely liquid markets traded on exchanges, that means traded based on limit order books.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly, that's why we will include some graphs about the state of the market so people can figure out their prices

<comment><USER4> The NYSE processes millions of orders per second, MtGox hundreds per second. So you have machines which work over a protocol (FIX) to establish the price mechanism. In a exchange system there are limit orders and the limit orderbook. You basically have a timestamp problem, which is kind of prependicular to the bitcoin system. At every point t in time, there is a fair value of BTC-USD. And a system which solves that problem will be highly centralized, by definition. So unless you come up with a new system for processing limit orders, people will be arbitraging between a slower system and MtGox, Bitstamp, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> We know, you cannot get informed of every single trade made because of the P2P architecture. But you can still use the exchange if there are enough trades that you are informed of!

<comment><USER4> What problem you are actually wanting to solve? I don't see why I would use a slower system. waiting can be very costly if the price is moving against you. you need quick traders to provide liquidity. which is what you will find if you get users onto such a system. the high volume traders won't like it. I think there is actually room to reinvent the worldwide exchange system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Paper is not clear on how their scripts work because they don't show exact scripts _per output_.

Meanwhile, using bilateral deposits you can insure any sorts of contracts, not just currency exchange. In my scheme scripts are symmetrical: [http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts- without-...](http://blog.oleganza.com/post/58240549599/contracts-without- trust-or-third-parties)

The coolest part is when this sort of thing is used in autonomous programs that randomly connect to each other and establish contracts. In such case there's no place for extortion - there's no human to negotiate with. Based on this idea you can build never-seen before networking protocols. For instance, a micropayment network that propagates IOUs from peer to peer where each pair of peers is mutually insured to repay all accumulated debt when it reaches 50% of insured amount. It'll be like a global distributed clearing house with as little fees as humanly possible (and instant confirmations!).

<comment><USER6> <<Paper is not clear on how their scripts work because they don't show exact scripts per output.>> You can found more information about contracts and the flags used on Bitcoin Wiki.

<comment><USER5> I know how scripts work in general. I mean, it's strange that you display script outside the output. E.g. on page 7 you have two outputs and only one script.

Another remark: what does mean "description message is ciphered"? You mean signed? Because ECDSA does not do encryption (like RSA), only signatures.

<comment><USER6> <<I mean, it's strange that you display script outside the output. E.g. on page 7 you have 2 outputs and only one script.>> Consideer that this transaction is not been broadcasted to P2P Network. You can storage a valid transaction as this if you add the flags SIGHASH_ALL and SIGHASH_ANYONECANPAY to the transaction.

<<what does mean "description message is ciphered"? You mean signed? Because ECDSA does not do encryption (like RSA), only signatures.>> I'm not sure about your question. ECDSA is a PKI key type, so i believe that it's possible.

<comment><USER7> Even if ECDSA relies in a PKI, what you do with it is signing and not encryption. The S in ECDSA stands for "signing". Either you don't mean "ciphering" or you mean an EC encryption algorithm (and not ECDSA).

The problem is... why would Lisa cipher her own knowledge with her public key? Only she would be able to decipher with her private key to learn... nothing!

PS: I'm from Madrid too!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't know the relation, but I've heard [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Ripple](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Ripple) is catching on as a p2p bitcoin exchange.

<comment><USER9> Ripple premined many ripple coins before releasing and it is distributed, not decentralized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On a similar line, you may also find this interesting: [http://sx.dyne.org/anontx/](http://sx.dyne.org/anontx/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's pretty cool, we'll find a way to integrate it :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess the code should be available in the future here:

[https://github.com/pauvorg](https://github.com/pauvorg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly!

<comment><USER11> Great. Following.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's the kind of stuff we need to make Bitcoin really take off.

I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > 5\. Homer sends to Lisa the transaction and Lisa adds some inputs to the > transaction > as it happens in this example:

At this point, has Lisa paid Homer yet? If not, what will force her to do so?

<comment><AUTHOR> No! No payment has been made yet, because at that point the transference is not valid

<comment><USER13> I see, that seems reasonable then. What happens in the case of reversed payments, though? Chargebacks is the reason you can't buy bitcoin using Paypal, Google Wallet, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> We will only include payment processors that don't allow chargebacks, such as OKPay or WebMoney

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How do I know if Lisa provided me with the correct amount of money in OKPay account before transaction?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question! OKPay has an API so we check if the correct amount has been transferred to your OKPay's account. If that happens you sign the transaction and the exchange happens</comment></comment>


I just broke down crying: Canadian video game creators - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/burnout-crunch-canada-1.5109599 <comment><USER2> Why does the gaming industry have such a bad track record compared to 'traditional?' software development? Is it that working 'with games' is so desirable that people are willing to go through this misery, or is there more here?

<comment><USER3> I think that's a significant part of it, but there's also fashion to consider. It's hard to make a lot of money in games unless you're chasing the latest fashions in graphics, design, content, console, etc. There are a fair number of indie developers who have chosen to avoid all of that and spend multiple years slowly growing a community around the development of a very different kind of game. A good example would be Wube Software and their game Factorio (factorio.com). They've spent the last six years working on the game (making it available as early access that whole time) and talking to the fans about it as they go. Compare that to a studio who spends three years working on FIFA 2018, releases it, and then immediately signs a contract to spend three years working on FIFA 2021.</comment></comment>


Motte and Bailey Doctrines - <AUTHOR> http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/ <comment><USER2> Compare [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another- bric...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the- motte/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This analogy irritates me because it's based around a misunderstanding of what the 'bailey' is: the bailey is within the motte; it's not the surrounding lands. I can only assume that the writer is confusing the motte with the keep or something.

<comment><USER4> Not according to wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and- bailey_castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_castle)

"A motte-and-bailey castle was made up of two structures, a motte, a type of mound–often artificial–topped with a wooden or stone structure known as a keep; and at least one bailey, a fortified enclosure built next to the motte."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a pretty confusing definition and argument. How does the author distinguish between Morality and "our beliefs about right and wrong"? The author seems to be appealing to universal objective truths, while waving away the notion that these truths are necessarily bound to human understandings of them.

If everyone called a tail a leg, it would be a leg. That's exactly how languages, and the truths surrounding languages, work and evolve!!!

<comment><USER6> Perhaps call it a bait & switch doctrine? The bait is an exciting proposition, but when you press the author for details, they perform the switch, and what's left is not really exciting anymore.

As for the example using morality, the whole point of absolute morality systems is that moral statements have a truth value independent of human "observation", and in such a world, the sentence "morality is socially constructed" means that the truth values of moral statements are socially constructed, which is exciting! But the switch or the motte in this case is that the author didn't mean that, they were talking about people's perception of morality the whole time, and it is a truism that perople's perception of morality is socially constructed, and that is boring.

Compare for example how exciting the proposition that objective reality is shaped by our thoughts (MAGIC!!!), vs the proposition that our subjective experience of reality is shaped by our thoughts (BORING!).

<comment><USER7> It's almost the opposite of bait and switch.

In the motte and bailey, the "bailey" is put front and center and only abandoned when a more defensible position when under attack ("everything is subjective").

In "bait and switch" the bait is put front and center, but it isn't the position that you want to take, it's one that's used to lure in new recruits ("learn how to learn!").

In some cases, the "motte" and the "bait" might be the same thing - a good bait can also be easy to defend, but not all philosophically defensible positions are particularly attractive.

<comment><USER6> > It's almost the opposite of bait and switch.

Yes, you are completely right, and I was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I swear i have seen this in play regarding a certain open source project...</comment>


Microsoft Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.mslinux.org/

<comment><USER2> Micrsoft did have a version of Outlook Express and Internet Explorer for Unix.

I've never seen any screen shots nor seen any descriptions of them.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX)

</comment><comment><USER3> seen it. what's old is new again! xD

<comment><AUTHOR> just stumbled on it :D</comment></comment>


Extensions in Firefox 58 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/11/20/extensions-in-firefox-58/ <comment><USER2> I still miss a lot of extensions. One of my favourites was pwgen¹. I missed it so much I decided to write my own², but writing it I found out that the WebExtensions api is still a big work in progress.

For example writing some text to the clipboard seems to be a basic thing a web extension should be able to do. BUT to do it, you have to create a textbox, set its value to something, then programmatically select the text, and then invoke document.execCommand("Copy") to copy the text. Come on! Why not something like browser.clipboard.copy('some text')? And it does not even always work like expected³.

I hope the next ff versions will improve on this. Extensions are what makes the browser your own.

¹[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwgen- passwor...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwgen-password- generator/)

²[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwgen- reloade...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pwgen-reloaded/)

³[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344410](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1344410)

<comment><USER3> I use this bit of javascript I found via HN. Just bookmark it. (paste in as the url) You can always add your own salt/tweaks too.

javascript:(function () { var pw = ''; var array = new Uint8Array(12); window.crypto.getRandomValues(array); for (var i = 0; i < 12; i++) { pw += ('0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ-_')[array[i]&63]; } prompt('Random password:', pw); })()

<comment><USER4> You should checkout pass

[https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><USER5> This is what I've used for quite a while. I used to have a browser extension to interface with it, now I just use rofi-pass with a keybinding to bring it up in any app, search for a password, and put it on my clipboard. No auto fill, but I never was comfortable with browser password managers throwing credentials into any arbitrary form box (visible or not..) that 'looked' like a password box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I must say that Mozilla have made the right call with extensions in Firefox 57.

Web extensions are probably a small part of it but I have switched back to FF after ~5 years of Chrome. I also like the redesign but the killer feature was the noticeable speed up.

I consider myself a fan again!

<comment><USER7> Great to see that new users are getting catered for meanwhile those of us that used Firefox the whole time get ignored.

<comment><USER8> I've been a Firefox user since Phoenix 0.1, and a Mozilla Suite/Netscape user before that. I used Chrome for a couple of years, but went back around when FF56 was released.

FF57 is absolutely the greatest version of Firefox to date. I have yet to hear a single legitimate complaint against it that actually holds up to scrutiny.

<comment><USER9> It broke web experience for me. I write userscripts / extensions for most websites I frequent, and almost none work anymore. Granted, it's because Greasemonkey decided to break backward compatibility, but that was triggered by this move to a new extension model.

I tried to think forward, and proactively convert my greasemonkey scripts to new style FF extensions a few months back, to avoid dependency on GM. But abandoned that after it became clear that I'm not allowed to install my own extensions on regular Firefox, because of forced thir-party signing requirement. I have no need for signing. I could create an extension by zipping a directory. Now the workflow is 1000x more complex with all the crap loaded from npm required to sign it.

My web experience is s*it, ATM.

Firefox is great anyway. But it is power user hostile in some aspects too. Personal extensions/userscripts are central to my use of the web. So this is all quite annoying, since signing was enforced. And now even my userscripts broke with 57, as expected.

<comment><USER10> This point is irksome. How hard would it be to provide a switch to disable mandatory signing? Something similar to the unknown sources option in Android.

To all those claiming that Mozilla doesn't owe this to their users, you are technically correct. But why piss off users when you can easily satisfy them with a simple option. I shouldn't have to use a patched browser for something so basic.

<comment><USER11> Last I knew, there were "unbranded" editions of Firefox - editions without the Firefox logo and name - which allowed users to disable the signing requirement. The ESR (extended service release) edition might also allow it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, i wonder how effective _resistFingerprinting_ will be...?

"If true, the resistFingerprinting preference makes the browser report generic spoofed information for data that's commonly used for fingerprinting. Such data includes the number of CPU cores, precision of JavaScript timers, and the local timezone. It will also disable features that are used in fingerprinting, such as GamePad support, and the WebSpeech and Navigator APIs."

<comment><USER13> I tested it on a fresh profile on Firefox Nightly 59.0a1 (2017-11-21), using [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/).

And well, apparently it has a pretty bad bug. It spoofs my screen size from previously 1366x768, which 1 in 9.43 browsers have, to 1318x686, which by itself is already unique, because that really is just not a screen size that anyone sells.

So, that's a thing. Maybe it's just isolated to Nightly, but if in doubt, maybe also just test yourself. Now where to report this...

<comment><USER14> > to 1318x686, which by itself is already unique,

Is it sticky though? I don't know how the spoofing works, but if the next time, the same site gets a different size, wouldn't your profile become less identifiable across visits and other web sites.

<comment><USER12> > Is it sticky though?

No, it changes every time...

<comment><USER13> It doesn't for me...

<comment><USER12> Oops you're right, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love the new Firefox, but the fact that it killed my favourite tabtree plugin, and the alternative is less nice + plus you have to do weird css hacks to make it look seemless and hide the top tab bar is very disappointing. I'm guessing the new extension system is a lot less flexible than the old one?

<comment><USER16> I think part of the problem is that Firefox doesn't have flexible, high quality tabs. Vertical tabs, tab trees etc were really popular extensions.

Personally I'd be happy to see Firefox have tab feature chrome natively has:

\- Scroll wheel to move between tabs ([https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285812](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285812))

\- Ctrl+1 (2, 3, ...) to jump to a tab. Ctrl+0 to jump to the last tab. [Edit: This works with Alt, nvm!]

\- Multi-select tab management (Ctrl+Click, Shift+Click to select, drag, snap and move multiple tabs)

Back when Firefox initially got a lot of market share, its killer feature was tabs. It almost feels like they forgot that :(

<comment><USER17> Chrome parity would be good, but I think that with little effort Mozilla could make a tremendous improvement:

\- Multiple-row tab bar.

Such an obvious improvement over tabs scrolling off the screen sides or squashing them like Chrome does, I don't know why it's not being considered.

It's already been done by Tab Mix Plus (or was it Classic Theme Restorer?). They only need to copy it and polish it a little.

<comment><USER18> It's not been considered because Tree Style Tab just is just the best solution to all these problems.

<comment><USER19> People keep mentioning tree-style tab but I don't see how that's an alternative to TMP's multiple tab rows.

Personally I don't find tree-style tabs appealing at all because (1) I usually have few pages open on the _same_ domain, but I have many pages open on different domains. And (2) I don't want a vertical column of content width lost to a sidebar.

Limiting tabs to a single row per window is awful for usability.

<comment><USER20> > And (2) I don't want a vertical column of content width lost to a sidebar.

You have to understand that this is a pretty unusual concern. Most of the world struggles with screens with aspect ratios optimized for watching TV, making vertical space very precious but leaving plenty of excess horizontal space that cannot be effectively used by the majority of web pages that only use a single column of text.

<comment><USER19> > Most of the world struggles with screens with aspect ratios optimized for > watching TV ...

You are right about that. I use two external monitors, one of which is rotated 90°. Guess which one I keep my browser window on? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't get the twisted priorities here. Extensions can do subversive things like change search engines but useful modifications to the UI are verboten.

Blindly copying Chrome is the wrong path to head down. You end up playing into Google's game of building systems with user hostile misfeatures meant to protect ad revenue.

<comment><USER22> They are not forbidden. They are just not done yet. [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1332447)

Edit: better link [https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding)

<comment><USER23> From that wiki page:

> Some of the key goals of WebExtensions are that it's not about changing the > Firefox UI in the way we used to in legacy add-ons. There's clear > limitations we need to set. However there's so much interest around tabs and > tab groups.

So tab mix plus gets its APIs because people yelled hard enough, but vimperator won't?

<comment><USER22> Those are both on the list, but they are not "priorities". [https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Future](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/Future)

[https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator- labs/issues/705#iss...](https://github.com/vimperator/vimperator- labs/issues/705#issuecomment-344383643) "The WebExtension APIs offered by Firefox already contain many features that chrome lacks and I am working constructively with them to add the APIs we need to make something a lot like vimperator in Firefox."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sandboxing user side javascript from the web seems like a reasonable security step. Sandboxing web side javascript from the user side javascript is removes power from users in the way that concerned Stallman 35 years ago.

Unfortunately, that's the direction Mozilla is going with web extensions. It must because Mozilla's complicity to bake DRM into the browser requires giving control of the user's computer over to media interests. It requires favoring corporate interests over user freedom.

The horrible thing about Quantum is it replaces the last browser that put power in the hands of users. It removes the last browser that was not constrained explicitly for media consumption.

<comment><USER25> Nothing to do with DRM, the old model let extensions modify every part of the browser that could be touched via JavaScript (and since the browser UI itself is made with XUL and JS that's quite a lot of it) and even allowed using C++ to access all of the compiled guts as well. That is impossible to support sanely (every change is a breaking change to something) and is a security nightmare as well (users have no idea what an extension can do unless they read the code, if it's even available). The new model is sandboxed JavaScript that gains all potentially unsafe functionality via somewhat fine-grained permissions which means you have a good idea what an extension is capable of and know it can't do anything unexpected like grabbing random files on your disk. The downside to this model is someone actually has to think about what an API should look like and what the security implications are and then do the work to implement it. Before if someone made an API great but if not you could just do it yourself.

<comment><USER24> XUL could have been replaced without implementing Chrome's restrictions on the user. They are orthogonal.

<comment><USER26> They aren't restrictions on _users_. They're restrictions on _add-ons_.

And the Firefox extension model does not implement Chrome's restrictions. It has APIs that Chrome does not support: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Br...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Browser_support_for_JavaScript_APIs)

<comment><USER24> Web extensions express the architectural decision to remove power from the user. The extra API's are better for the user in the sense that a sharper knife is better for the user when their hands are cut off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Firefox 57 was the version that permanently killed the extension that made Firefox usable for me: Pentadactyl (along with many other extensions).

Now I'm migrating to using Qutebrowser, as it's the closest to providing a similar experience.

<comment><USER28> Have you tried Vim Vixen?

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim- vixen/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vim-vixen/)

<comment><USER29> I don't know where this was when I was searching for alternatives to vimperator, but thanks so much for mentioning vim-vixen. It seems like it's just a port of the parts of vimperator that still work with WebExtensions but it's so much better than the alternatives out there at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The timing on this is quite coincidental, I just published a short article this morning about adding support to Selenium for installing WebExtensions to Firefox profiles [1]. I write and use extensions frequently for web scraping and browser automation, and I've really been thrilled about what Mozilla has done with the WebExtensions API. It was a quite miserable process to write cross-browser extensions in the past, but that basically changed overnight when Mozilla first announced the WebExtensions API. I think that this is ultimately going to have an immensely positive impact on the extension ecosystem.

[1] - [https://intoli.com/blog/firefox-extensions-with- selenium/](https://intoli.com/blog/firefox-extensions-with-selenium/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Are they planning to add a local file writing API too to WebExtensions (tried to search it but couldn't find). Every browser is trying to standardize on Chrome's extension model (which already has local file writing support), but "only so much", and that's a problem.

<comment><USER32> Also wondering about an unchained 'fetch'. Still can't get or set some headers ([https://github.com/github/fetch/issues/163](https://github.com/github/fetch/issues/163)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Still no API for WebExtensions with Vimperator-like or Pentadactyl-like functionality. [0][1]

For those interested, the whole discussion about adding it is here [2].

[0] [https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard- api](https://github.com/cmcaine/keyboard-api) [1] [https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut- api](https://github.com/Koushien/keyboard-shortcut-api) [2] [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215061)

<comment><USER34> Vimium-FF [0] works just fine and has since I first installed FF57 Developer Edition (right after FF55 came out?)

[0]: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium- ff/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-ff/)

<comment><USER35>
       .. works just fine ...

Not really. You can't yank the url (yy) in Firefox, and the search is borked sometimes when there is no match on the page. After spending a few months with vimium, I found vim-vixen, which doesn't have these problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> To me the important part is "Starting with Firefox 58, the CSP of a web page does not apply to content inserted by an extension". This was flagged as going to be a problem back when CSP was still a draft instead of a spec, and it was blatantly obvious that bookmarklets and extensions would get impaired if CSP ignored the difference between site-content-activated scripts, and browser- owner-activated scripts.

I would have preferred to see this land 6 to 12 weeks after CSP handling originally landed in Firefox, but landing it now is a clear case of "better late than never".

</comment><comment><USER31> What is a good replacement for DownThemAll! ? It was such an important one for me, now lost too :(

<comment><USER14> DTA lite (web extension version) was planned for release along with Quantum, but was delayed. [1] I still don't know how limited it will be compared to the XUL version though.

[1] [https://www.downthemall.net/delays/](https://www.downthemall.net/delays/)

<comment><USER13> Huh, except for the quip with calling it "Lite" and the simply factually wrong bullshit in the footnote that there would be no technical reasons, this surprises me.

He was the only bigger extension dev that threw a complete tantrum over this decision, refusing to even try to work with Mozilla to get some APIs into place, so that he could maybe actually port his extension in full. And now he's doing a port anyways.

Well, good on him. I do not think that his behaviour back then was entirely justified, so this remedies that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is there a genuine use case for changing the default search engine from an extension? Even if it has to be confirmed by the user, it still seems like a dialog that many users won't read and click on Yes anyway.

<comment><USER38> I guess this means that the extension handles the searchinput local, which seems like a very legit use case. Maybe we are lucky, and it means ALL adressbarinput is handled by the extensions, in which case this supports vimperator-style interfaces.

Another use case coming to mind is to compensate for the horrible bad ability to define your own searchengine. Leting a extension handle this would be an improvement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure how allowing extensions to change privacy settings is going to increase user privacy.

And while it's becoming easier to manipulate any website you visit, with basically nothing stopping a malicious extension from stealing user data or just taking over any online account, actually extending the browser UI, the original goal of many former extensions, is extremely limited.

<comment><USER40> If you mean the stuff under "Additional Privacy Controls" you already surf without the functionality that can be turned on with this API. That means that the new API allows you more privacy, at least until you install some extension that maybe overrides the extension that turned "on" that privacy functionality.

So it's like before, adding a new extension is _always_ a security risk.

<comment><USER39> Wow, I thought the controls are exposed in browser preferences. This makes even less sense, why would these be only controllable by extensions? (Though they are accessible in about:config at least)

<comment><USER41> I personally have them both turned on in about:config.

But It would be nice to have an extension to turn off resistfingerprinting on some sites (like firefox's extension site) because it fakes the browser's user agent which breaks things that check your user agent. I'm not sure this will allow that. It seems like it'll allow a privacy extension to easily enable / disable it for all sites with a check box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Regarding extensions, can we really trust random 3rd party developers that their code is 100% safe and will not steal our passwords.

Giving full read/write access to an extension seems VERY dangerous to me, especially if the extension was compromised unknowingly by someone who hacked into the developers machine prior to a release.

<comment><USER43> fwiw if you put a webextension on AMO they manually do a review of your code before it's release to make sure it's not malicious. not 100% safe but what is?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> And yet it still lacks the tab hiding API.

<comment><USER44> (Should you wish to follow along at home to the glorious process of Open Source you can read the related discussions here: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1384515) )

<comment><USER45> A better place to start might be: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding](https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions/TabHiding)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> One thing that might release some of the pressure around addons would be to make Gecko more embeddable, the way Blink is.

We've started seeing a lot of alternative Blink UIs (Brave, Vivaldi, new Opera, etc) alongside apps built on it via Electron. Those alternative UIs do things Chrome extensions can't, even including things Firefox 57 lost the ability to do.

I don't know how close to that state Gecko is right now, so maybe it would be less work just to recreate the necessary APIs like they're already doing. But if not it could help bring back some of Gecko's market share, which is at least as important as that of Firefox as a whole.

<comment><USER26> Blink isn't very embeddable. In fact, removing the "ports" system that facilitated embeddability was one of the main goals of the Blink fork.

The alternative "Blink" UIs, and Electron, are really just forks of the entire Chromium browser, soup to nuts.

<comment><USER46> Ah fair enough. How easy then would it be for a Firefox fork to drop the chrome the way Electron does?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > Support for PKCS #11 Security Devices

This is nice, but I'd prefer if support for FIDO U2F would be here already. But it looks like something is happening with that too:

[https://www.yubico.com/2017/09/firefox-nightly-enables- suppo...](https://www.yubico.com/2017/09/firefox-nightly-enables-support- fido-u2f-security-keys/)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1065729)

<comment><USER48> U2F support for most sites is already in stable Firefox, you just have to flip security.webauth.u2f in about:config. Unfortunately Google doesn't work yet, maybe due to missing AppID support:

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1244959](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1244959)

<comment><USER47> Whoa, TIL. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I love firstPartyIsolate and resistFingerprinting. These should probably be on by default.

<comment><USER50> What is firstPartyIsolate ? Could you please explain?

<comment><USER51> fPI will isolate every first-party domain as much as the browser can, including HSTS and other security related properties.

This means that if you visit example.com and then initech.com and both load a tracker from evilshit.org, then the tracker will see too completely fresh browser installs, not even HSTS will be setup if it was used.

Basically, every domain you type into the URL address bar behaves as if it was a unique container.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> The privacy changes look quite cool, especially firstPartyIsolate (though it also looks like it'd break most websites -- notably YouTube and similar sites would likely break).

> firstPartyIsolate – This preference makes the browser associate all data > (including cookies, HSTS data, cached images, and more) for any third party > domains with the domain in the address bar.

<comment><USER53> I already in v57 had to set privacy.firstparty.isolate.restrict_opener_access to false in about:config because every site is wanting me to login all the time... (At least I assume that was the reason.) I did toggle privacy.firstparty.isolate to true, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Looking forward to this update.

I wonder if it will be possible to load scripts into the reader view document. Currently, it isn't, so keybinding extensions, which rely on inserting Keyboard event listeners, don't work in reader view. I had been prototyping a custom reader view in Saka Key using Mozilla's Readability library to work around this issue.

The Content Security Policy fix is a lifesaver. Saka Key attaches hint elements to the DOM and attaches a script tag to load common styles/fonts. Sites with the policy style-src: self (like crates.io) block script tags, which breaks hint styling and positioning.

</comment><comment><USER55> The lack of configurable keyboard shortcuts for extensions is what stops me continuing to use Firefox each time I try it. I have yet to find a usable Pinboard extension, for example.

Is this an extensions API limitation or is not using the keyboard part of FF norms/culture? Even much built-in functionality (like save to Pocket) is mouse-only.

</comment><comment><USER56> Well isn't it just great to have a new Theme API, never even knew I missed that. And a Reader Mode API, I'm sure I'll love that too even though I've never even used that mode.

Glad they got rid of the old extension system now that the new one is so feature complete. I mean who needs spellchecker API anyway, if you miss spellchecking in your language, you can always start writing in another language, no? Perhaps they could introduce a Pocket API to compensate?

</comment><comment><USER57> Just when I thought FF57 was great. Now switching to Nightly :D

</comment><comment><USER58> All the recent developments are really great. I'm just waiting for:

\- Workspace support in DevTools (i.e. unify localhost-loaded resources with an on-disk workspace to enable updating JS & CSS without reloading, editing and saving files from DevTools, etc.)

\- queryObjects console API method (from Chrome)

\- alternate DevTools themes

If/when those land I'll likely go back to using FireFox as my primary development browser (been developing on Chrome since 2009).

</comment><comment><USER59> The tabs.Tab.isArticle does not seem to be in chrome. Anyone know how they detect if a page is an article or not?

<comment><USER59> replying to myself, it simply is the html tag <article>. Didnt realise it was that simple.

<comment><USER60> That's good to know, and I didn't think it was that simple either. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is there an extension for 57+ that shows bookmarks in a tab?

I dislike all the window-based bookmarks, downloads, etc UI ("Library"). You have a world-class extensible customizable graphical user interface system right here in the middle of the browser, use it.

</comment><comment><USER62> Nothing new about TCP/UDP socket API? That and possibility to hide the tab bar is what I miss the most.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247628](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247628)

<comment><USER60> You can hide the tab bar with userChrome.css (I think that's what it is called), although possibly not in a way that can be toggled. Should be able to hide it only in windows where only one tab is present, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> They kill many extensions, but make Pocket unremovable. That's beyond stupid.

If I care about speed, I use Chrome. If I want custombility, I used to pick Firefox. Right now, it's basically a Chrome clone, so why bother.

And the privacy argument is not strong enough.

<comment><USER64> You can disable Pocket. In about:config, toggle 'extensions.pocket.enabled' to false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> No good RSS extension yet, no mousewheel scrolling through tabs, no 'Add "run" option to download dialog'...

I suddenly lost so much with Quantum, I wish they had held onto killing the old add-ons until the WebExtensions API was complete.

</comment><comment><USER66> Does anyone found an alternative to "BackTrack Tab History", an extension that copies the history of the current tab to newly opened tabs? The author thinks he won't be able to port it to Quantum.

<comment><USER67> What's the difference with duplicating the tab then going to about:blank?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Probably silly, but I pretty much only use Chrome for the custom/compact title bar on Linux. On smaller screens it gives me more vertical on the content.

<comment><USER69> That's an expected feature for Firefox as well.

It landed in Nightly as a WIP feature, but it's getting there: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283299)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> I just want my scroll wheel switches tabs add-on back :(

<comment><USER71> I missed this when chrome removed a similar addon. It was an awesome feature, would love to see it make a comeback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> All nice feature but Firefox still doesn't support hangout or bluejeans

</comment><comment><USER73> They're clearly adding APIs that _they_ think are necessary, vs the ones addon developers actually need and clamour for. We've seen this in the entire process. Mozilla is not interested in listening to the actual needs of the developers. They just have their own idea of "brand new cool features" and they're gonna roll with it. Disappointing.

<comment><USER67> Part of the reason is that most users of some popular addons don't participate in the open source community, reporting bugs, commenting on them to add details or tell why are they important, etc.

<comment><USER74> Do Mozilla contact the creators of the most popular addons, they could serve as a useful proxy for trying to get direct input from inexperienced users.

<comment><USER67> They probably do. But Firefox addons is a long tail. There are many addons that would qualify as "popular" but Mozilla wouldn't be able to contact them all. So they have to measure not only popularity, but also if the community cares about that addon. I had many addons installed that I don't use, synchronized across devices: They may count as "popular" but it doesn't reflect the actual community and usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> One of the extensions I miss most is UnMHT.

Anyone have info about if/when it will support Quantum?

</comment><comment><USER76> This will make it easier to port extensions from and allow developers to have one codebase.

Makes it easier for me to manage my extension [https://weatherextension.com](https://weatherextension.com)

</comment><comment><USER77> [Meta] Do we really need to rehash the same discussion about tree-style- tabs/insert-favourite-extension-here every time Firefox is mentioned on here?

<comment><USER31> (Not a tree style tabs user, but ... ) Yes, because

1) Someone here might know more (updated) about when's the support going to be added for the same,

2) The Extension Author might comment on when he's going to add the support for it if possible,

3) Some of the geeks here might know a good replacement of it (because Firefox's "Find a Replacement" is not as good as it's supposed to be).

4) When people say "me too", some other Hackers around here might be inspired to write one from scratch, or Firefox people might see how important it is (I know about Bugzilla's voting system, trust me, that doesn't work)

Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years, and they are naturally concerned. Let it be.

<comment><USER8> >Firefox has just broken people's workflows that were set in place for years

The XUL deprecation in FF57 has been public knowledge for _years_. The extension authors are to blame here.

<comment><USER60> How do you port a XUL extension that relies for critical functionality on calls whose equivalents the web extensions API doesn't provide?

How do you achieve 1:1 compatibility between extension APIs when the architecture that enabled XUL to expose the entire codebase for extensions' use no longer exists, _and_ no longer exists because replacing it was the only way to resolve showstopping performance issues?

How do you keep using a browser that no longer supports extensions without which you can't satisfy the use cases for which you chose and adapted that browser in the first place?

No one is to blame here.

<comment><USER8> The extension developers could have worked more closely with the Firefox team to find possible solutions.

In the end, XUL was a _major_ performance and security issue. Good riddance.

<comment><USER78> The Firefox team _has_ a solution: Break everything to make it faster, and not care about the freaks who _like_ extensions, who _rely on_ extensions. Cooperation is a two-way street, and the Firefox devs blocked it off entirely.

<comment><USER8> There are still thousands of actively developed extensions.

I get that you're mad about some of your favorite niche extensions being unavailable due to relying on XUL functionality that shouldn't have been there in the first place, but you'll just have to find alternatives.

<comment><USER78> And the dismissive attitude of the Firefox team just makes the whole thing worse.

The alternative a lot of people will find is a different browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I recently switched to firefox and I find that chrome has much better plugin support. Just browsing between the plugin stores and you can see the difference. Hopefully firefox can catch up.

One plugin that I really miss in firefox is holmes[0]. I bookmark alot of useful sites and it can be a pain to find them in the bookmark list. It's a plugin that makes me really miss chrome.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmomagijbakglkcmhdbchbhn?hl=en)

[1] [https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search](https://www.chromium.org/tab-to- search)

</comment><comment><USER80> As far as I'm concerned Firefox is dead. I'm sticking with 56 and Pentadactyl for the times I need to do extensive research online where it is so much faster to browse and find things.

Otherwise, I'm using Safari and weaning myself off of all the power of VIM like browsing. Safari also happens to be so much smoother and does not kill the battery.

<comment><USER7> I would switch to ESR version - at least you will get security updates.

<comment><USER74> Was there anything changed between versions 52 and 56 that would make this a retrograde step?

<comment><USER60> Perf improved considerably over that span, even before e10s officially landed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>