Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons? - <AUTHOR> https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ <comment><USER2> > I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community > members still felt hurt by this choice.

Actually, it shouldn't be surprising at all since people lost a lot of useful functionality that still do not have replacements today. _Users were not stuck on XUL as a technology. They cared about functionality and power user functionality!_

I'm using mainline Firefox and not some fork that still supports XUL addons, but I still miss not having good replacements for:†

* Tab Mix Plus (I haven't seen any replacement for this; and if you haven't used this in the XUL world, you wouldn't know the value of it)

* Lazarus (form saver)

* Session Manager (no, other session saving extensions still feel iffy to me)

For reasons I haven't delved into, these extensions cannot live in a WebExtensions world today. _So yes, I'm one of the people hurt by the choice not of removing XUL, but not providing alternatives even several years later._

> The main drawback is, of course, that WebExtensions do not give add-on > developers as much power as the promiscuous extension mechanism. I hope that > all the power that add-on developers need can eventually be added to > WebExtensions API but that's something that takes engineering power, a > critical resource that we're sorely lacking.

I don't have a lot of hope since years have passed with progress in making some more addons work with WebExtentions but not really close to being there for other addons. Though the Firefox team has said it's currently not planning to implement Manifest V3, if and when it does (and depending on how it does), that could potentially make uBlock Origin obsolete. That would be a much larger blow to the users.

†: Please let me know if you have suggestions for great replacements for the first two extensions.

<comment><USER3> I'll agree this is all true for power users but I think that catering to that small number of power users at the expense of having a faster, more stable, more secure browser earlier was a major mistake.

I loved Tab Mix Plus too and yes, there are some things you still can't do in WebExtensions that you could do before. And that sucks. But I stopped using Firefox despite those options because it was so slow and unstable, especially on the Mac. By the time it got better, it was not only too late, but Chrome had extensions.

Catering to the loyalists is what killed Firefox. What's more important to normal users is speed, not Tab Mix Plus.

<comment><USER4> Well, Firefox is far from dead, is it?

I guess the issue is a different view of what Firefox should be; I feel that many people would be satisfied if Firefox was just a small(ish) browser catering to power users. There's nothing wrong with that: power users are users too (and there are more of them than many seem to think), and I feel that many people are somewhat frustrated that _all_ software seems designed with only my grandmother in mind. This is an issue that extends far beyond XUL by the way.

<comment><USER5> The original design goal of Firefox was to be a "90/10" browser (relative to the old Mozilla suite). e.g. 90% of the people only need 10% of the features. Catering to power users was never the goal of Firefox and they lost users to Chrome when they did. What people want is a browser that loads webpages quickly and doesn't use a lot of system resources doing so.

<comment><USER4> Well, Mozilla included email, chat, and whatnot. Regardless of what the goals were, it _did_ cater to power users and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.

<comment><USER6> > and clearly many people don't want the direction Firefox went in.

A majority? I doubt it. I think it's an extremely vocal minority that don't care about the slowness of their browser (pre-e10s, pre-quantum), about things breaking (XUL extensions) or about UI features for the broad masses.

I'd bet money that FF's 25% in Germany would be far closer to US numbers if they stayed where those vocal people want them.

<comment><USER4> I never said majority.

All I'm saying is that based on my observations people's views on what Firefox should or should not be are different, and that this explains why people are still "angry" about the extensions breaking and such. I'm not having an argument with anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I had written multiple XUL based addons that I used for personal productivity. When Firefox moved away from XUL/XPCom I think they removed not just an implementation (which I admit had many warts) but also the alternate vision of the Browser being extensible by end users who were almost on an equal footing with Browser developers. As a developer I can live with, support and cheer for a worse implementation of a better idea, but when you give up on that idea you rob me of any reasons I could use to support or evangelise for you.

It boils down to a simple question - does Firefox intend to go after power users in ways Chrome will not or cannot? The answer to this question used to be very clear to me in the first decade, now I think the answer is no. Even the Rust based oxidation efforts seemed limited to coming up with better implementation of the same primitives that Chrome offers, I didnt see anything about offering fundamentally different tradeoffs / choices.

If Firefox course corrects to going back to power users, I will be the first one to cheer them on. The vision for firefox has to be to reduce the gap between what browser developers can do and what end users can do.

<comment><USER8> I think your comment is a much more salient criticism.

In many ways, webExtensions could be a more accessible system than XUL addons if there was a serious effort to give the end-user more tools to use them. I honestly really like the overall architecture of webExtensions, and I like the idea of having more core code in modern Javascript. But there's a lot of weirdness around the ecosystem itself that makes building extensions into a chore.

There's a theoretical set of changes Firefox could make that would turn webExtensions into an extremely accessible, powerful user-facing feature for on-the-fly customizing and inspecting what their browser was doing. And I don't _think_ it would need to be _that_ inherently less secure.

It would need to approach security differently, but I feel like many of these are solvable problems, and many of the changes required (better sandboxing, active tab permissions) are stuff we want for extensions today anyway.

Some of the changes that came out of dropping XUL are really good. A lot of Firefox's styling is handled through CSS now. That should be a huge accessibility win for new users, and it should provide a nice gateway for new users to think more about moving on to making their own websites using the same technology. Except... userChrome.css is hidden in a config directory somewhere and not loaded by default[0]. They built a really nice way for users to quickly add minor styling customizations, and then they hid it from end users.

[0]: [https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome- css.html](https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html)

<comment><USER7> Sure - I can see that if we do arrive at a future where all of Firefox chrome is implemented via a HTML/CSS itself and it sits on top of a standardized core that exposes well documented APIs (which both end users and Firefox developers) can use for feature development - then yes we will be back to the world where someone outside Mozilla could build something like Komodo IDE on top of Mozilla tech.

One question I have as a user - what is an acceptable grace period for coming up with an equivalent replacement when you take an API away? Even the CSS styling not being loaded by default that you pointed out suggests that Firefox devs appear to view extensibility as something that they have to support cautiously and grudgingly. There is a chicken and egg problem here - if you make it harder to develop, build and ship non trivial extensions to end users then only a tiny fraction of users will use them. Then you will use the lack of usage of these extensibility features to deprioritize the development efforts that go into them. I would really like someone to take on the task of building a "Workstation" browser - built for power users.

<comment><USER8> > There is a chicken and egg problem here - if you make it harder to develop, > build and ship non trivial extensions to end users then only a tiny fraction > of users will use them.

This is a really good point.

> what is an acceptable grace period for coming up with an equivalent > replacement when you take an API away?

I really don't know.

I am frustrated with the current state of extensions in Firefox, even as I acknowledge that the situation in Firefox is still way better than it is in browsers like Chrome or Safari, and even as I remain hopeful that the Firefox extension ecosystem _could_ be really good. I am sympathetic to the argument that it's an engineering resources problem. But, that also makes me really nervous about the Mozilla cuts that happened recently, because now how long are we going to wait for Servo to be in a usable state, if it even ever gets to a usable state?

Like you mention above, when you're forging a new trail in an underdeveloped area and making a case that users would benefit from these features if the ecosystem supported them enough and trained users to use them, you need some freedom to be flexible and experimental and to waste some resources forging that trail. And if resources are as scarce as Mozilla is claiming, then what are the features that are going to be cut first? The experimental, trailblazing ones, the weird ideas like, "shouldn't there be a section in the Firefox options where users can just live-edit the CSS to the browser?".

<comment><USER7> So I will concede that it is time to bury all the XUL/XPCom misgivings. We now need to rededicate ourselves to the same extensible vision using the new stack.

<comment><USER8> I think we need some kind of champion to make that point -- to prove that the extensible vision we _did have_ and lost is still worth pursuing.

But that's not really a useful thing for me to say, because I have no idea where we can go to get that champion, and I'm at least low-key worried about Mozilla's ability and willingness to be that champion.

But agreed. I think it's about more than just XUL vs webExtensions, I think it's a broad tech/cultural issue about making the case that end-user- accessible control and customization is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't care about XUL addons. What I cared about was addons with full access to the browser. I understand that they wanted to move, and that addons would break. But I would still _love_ to be able to list non-sandboxed extensions in the store even if they came with a big warning "this extension will probably break with every new version of Firefox". There is still functionality that can't yet be replicated with WebExtensions.

For example I was maintaining VimFx as an unsigned extension for a while after it wasn't allowed in the store. Sure, it broke often, but the fixes were generally easy. However what really killed it was the lack of interest from not being able to be listed in the store and not being able to run on stable Firefox releases. If we could attract even a handful more maintainers I'm sure we could have kept it mostly up to date.

To this day I can't get back some of the functionality that I lost. Firefox is now just a different chrome. Sure, it is made by a different company, but the user functionality is now almost identical. (Sure, Firefox has about:config, but that is limited to what Mozilla imagined)

I'm really glad that Mozilla adopted WebExtensions. I think it is an amazing solution for most extensions. Plus it is safer and cross-browser. However there are a couple of extensions that need full access, and I wish that was still an option, even if there is no stability guarantee.

<comment><USER10> Question: would it be possible to restore the missing functionality through a companion process outside the browser?

Both Firefox and Chrome support the Native Messaging API [1] to communicate with a process outside the browser.

This would still be absolutely less than ideal as the process would have to be installed separately (I believe) and maintained separately for each platform - but it would allow the extension to be listed again.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add- ons/Web...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add- ons/WebExtensions/Native_messaging)

<comment><USER9> For some extensions, yes. But the problem isn't so much sandbox from a security perspective, but the lack of access to Firefox internals.

For VimFx the primary problem is that it makes major changes to how input is processed. It can't get the level of input access it needs from the WebExtension APIs. You can see this in the WebExtension versions of similar vim-style binding extensions, I've tried maybe a dozen and none of them work as you would expect. It is common for inputs to be missed by the extension depending on what part of the browser is focused at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article really doesn't match my recollection of how things went down. It implies that the switch to a multi-process model (Electrolysis/e10s) was held up pending the switch to WebExtensions. But I'm pretty sure I remember a transition period during which all my XUL-based extensions were either rewritten to support multiprocess or deprecated, which was years before XUL extensions were actually killed in favor of the less-capable WebExtensions. The article talks about this like it's a path they rejected, even though I'm pretty sure it actually happened. That transition was also a lot less painful than the switch to WebExtensions: over a period of several browser releases, I watched as the list of extensions preventing my browser from turning on the multiprocess capability dwindled. All the most important and popular extensions I was using made the switch smoothly with no major user-facing changes in capability or UI, which is the exact opposite of how the WebExtensions switch went.

It would really help if this article could use dates and/or version numbers to establish the timeline of events it's talking about.

<comment><USER12> (article author) Thanks for the feedback, I've just updated this part of the article to clarify it. I don't remember exact dates, though, so I won't be able to add them.

But yes, you are right, there was a time during which a number of old-style extensions were ported to be compatible with e10s. It was possible for some, impossible for others, hard when it was possible, and most add-on developers didn't port them, either because it was too difficult or because they had grown tired or the _maintenance tax_ I mention.

And yet, after they had ported their add-ons to be e10s-compatible, the add- ons broke nevertheless, one by one, for all the reasons mentioned in the article.

At some point, we threw the towel.

<comment><USER11> > At some point, we threw the towel.

You threw in the towel before your most important extension developers did. Well-maintained popular extensions like NoScript and TreeStyleTab remained functional throughout the e10s transition with fixes delivered before the breaking changes in Firefox made it to stable releases, but they were irreparably harmed by the WebExtension transition. Their WebExtension versions are _still_ not up to feature parity, despite ongoing maintenance.

It's quite obvious that the WebExtension model is better for users and developers of _simple_ extensions. But it continues to not be an adequate substitute for the kind of extensions that gave Firefox real advantages over Chrome and other browsers. It's not at all apparent why those advanced, killer app extensions had to die in order to get the bulk of the extension ecosystem moved over to WebExtensions.

<comment><USER12> The author of NoScript was part of way more meetings than me during the design of the WebExtensions API, so he would probably be able to tell you more about what happened to his add-on.

I see a TreeStyleTab on AMO, so I guess it got ported: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style- ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/) . It may have been harmed by the progressive disappearance of XUL, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> An alternative explanation about why XUL extensions needed to go by a Firefox dev Mike Conley [0], drawing pretty much the same conclusions and then some.

The same thing that happened to Firefox happened to Babel [1]. Babel's plugin API exposes the internal structures and APIs to plugins, which means they're unrestricted in what they can do, but it also means that it's very hard to change things in the codebase because you might accidentally break plugins that rely on the previous behavior / APIs. This is one of the primary motivations behind Rome [2].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4542&v=6D6idUjkv...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4542&v=6D6idUjkvqk)

[1] [https://babeljs.io](https://babeljs.io)

[2] [https://romefrontend.dev/blog/2020/08/08/introducing- rome.ht...](https://romefrontend.dev/blog/2020/08/08/introducing-rome.html)

<comment><USER14> I'd like to live in a world were instead of developers just breaking an existing api, they leave the existing, in use apis and add new ones. It's ridiculous how often shit just breaks because an api is changed in an update.

<comment><USER15> That approach is what made XUL and XPCOM un-maintainable -- a giant catalog of APIs in which large fractions were legacy, but non-removeable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> While I understand from a technical and business perspective (particularly due to the security implications of needing to manually review each and every new addon) why Mozilla eventually went down the WebExtensions route, having personally revived the old XUL/XPCOM "MessageFaces" addon (a Plan9/unix era vismon/faces knockoff for Thunderbird/SeaMonkey) from 2004 when I was in college in ~2016, I was devastated to hear that Mozilla was removing support for XUL/XPCOM and the Add-on SDK from Firefox.

Nothing that the extension achieved is even remotely possible anymore — adding custom column in mailbox Thunderbird XUL, custom icon vbox in the Thunderbird mail header, reading from a browser profile directory to display picons, windowed preferences, etc. I find this sad.

[https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces/](https://github.com/JohnDDuncanIII/messagefaces/)

[http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/](http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/messagefaces/)

[https://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/](https://kinzler.com/picons/ftp/)

What's most sad to me is that my workflow was never quite the same after I stopped using SeaMonkey with many of the famous XUL-based extensions (Old Addons Page, Chatzilla, MessageFaces, etc.) — it was aesthetic bliss, particularly with the Orthodox (Netscape/Mozilla Suite) complete theme.

I've ranted about this in the past, but I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time (see Facebook's JSX). Had Mozilla invested more development time in fleshing out the XULRunner APIs and marketing it as a universal platform- independent "native" UI language, perhaps the modern web ecosystem would look a bit different today.

I fear that the web today is slowly converging, aesthetically speaking, through the further limitation of site interfaces and UI, into a corporatized unary devoid of any creativity/novelty.

<comment><USER17> _I still feel like XUL was a bit ahead of its time_

But you said that you understand that from a technical perspective they had to replace it. That sounds more like a dead end than ahead of its time, unless there's something more?

IMHO, it was the wrong solution for a number of problems. Most of them don't exist anymore.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, i should have clarified — i feel like XUL, at a very early stage in the web's development, helped inform what advanced / platform independent interfaces might eventually look like (Facebook JSX -> React -> React Native, svgs, dom parsing, etc).

In recent years, particularly through the proliferation of things like JSX, javascript with XML-based extensions seems to be quickly becoming (for better or for worse) the dominant interface rendering paradigm.

I agree that XUL was, ultimately, probably the wrong solution due to a number of reasons, but its effects are definitely still somewhat visible in the ecosystem today.

What i'm still trying to figure out is how we recapture the freedom and aesthetic creativity that thrived during the early years of the web. We can argue that this was mostly a cultural/demographic shift in users, but I would also argue that, as McLuhan noted, shifting interfaces (particularly through a uniformity of aesthetics) can influence culture.

<comment><USER17> I see what you mean. Maybe some new app with a feature of creating something. Lately most novelty is in the consumer side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> From an engineering point of view, it's understandable that XUL add-ons had to go - this article lays out the case very well. But from a product point of view, Firefox lost its "killer app". Now the choice to use Firefox over Chrome is mostly an ethical one. That's a tough sell for most people, and it certainly won't get someone who's never used Firefox excited to try it.

Chrome may soon give Firefox a little win here by nerfing uBlock Origin, but is that enough?

<comment><USER19> > But from a product point of view, Firefox lost its "killer app".

For most of (former/present) Firefox users extensibility wasn't the "killer app".

FF gained its marketshare at the time because IE was so crappy on most metrics and that was the main competition.

<comment><USER20> Not being IE doesn't help much when the competition is Chrome.

<comment><USER19> Yes, chrome was for a long time simply better browser (mostly because it was much faster/responsive).

But as the article explains, this was largely caused by the need to provide extensive backwards compatibility which stifled innovation or completely prevented it (in case of multi-process architecture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I understand the reasoning behind why XUL and XPCOM had to go, but I learned about this technology when I was in college, just starting to become really passionate about technology, and Mozilla sold these things as "important" ideas, technological paradigms that were not just the best way forward but would make the world a better place by making development easier, exposing more things to power users, allowing better sharing of common components, etc.

Except in the end these were not the best way forward (well, at least for now, old technological paradigms do come back periodically, making the whole idea of an obvious unified "best way forward" questionable), and so Mozilla had to ditch them, and I understand that.

But that means when Mozilla is preaching that WebAsm or Rust or whatever is a truly revolutionary technology that will save the world, well, I don't ignore Mozilla, I just don't trust in their technological foresight like I used to.

In the bigger scheme of things, I tend to be more skeptical that programming paradigms like this really are revolutionary in general. Programming paradigms are interesting ideas, but I no longer see them as some forward march of progress that is paving the way to a golden age of technology.

I feel a little silly that I once thought this way, and a little silly for once being as passionate as I was for Mozilla.

<comment><USER22> I think you're confusing the implementation with the idea. XUL wasn't the right path forward for bringing web technologies into the desktop as we can see with the failure of XULRunner but a ton of apps are written today with Electron and HTML5. E4X was an interesting idea bringing XML into Javascript as native objects, but the ultimate implementation lives on as JSX with React.

<comment><USER23> As someone who had to maintain E4X within SpiderMonkey: sadly, that's another great example of the wrong technological path. JavaScript is too dynamic, it gives you too much rope to hang yourself, and E4X was apparently not designed with that in mind. It was _so_ nice when we removed E4X and didn't have to worry about `x` being an object during a lookup `obj[x]`.

To give an example of the flavor of issue: when building an array (even from a literal), you couldn't push a series of values to the stack and then construct an array out of them, because with E4X between elements 2 and 3 you might end up invoking arbitrary code with access to the array so that it establishes a setter on element 4 and adds a `valueOf` hook to what you're passing as element 5, but oh wait that's the same object you already inserted as element 0, and anyway the array might be frozen now and... (I'm making this up; I know the issues were similar to this but I probably don't have the details quite right.)

E4X was a rich, rich source of security bugs. I'm sure a simplified form of it is possible and would be quite cool, but that niche is already filled now with JSX for better or worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is a great article but it saddens me that it had to be written because all these years later, community members are still mad their extensions don't work.

I guess I've underestimated all these years that what David described as the problems with XUL and the reasons it had to go away weren't commonly understood. As the post states, it was clear as far back as 2010 (and honestly earlier), that XUL extensions were both Firefox's killer feature and also the reason that it got its ass kicked by Chrome (and to a lesser-extent, Safari). Extensions were amazing but the tax it created for performance, development, and security ended up becoming what made the browser so slow. Chrome and Safari didn't have extensions but they had speed and built-in features that replicated many of the most popular extensions. And once Chrome added extensions support — and support that didn't require that add-on development tax — it was over.

I found this bit of the post really telling:

> And yet, there was no choice for Mozilla. Every day that Mozilla didn't ship > Electrolysis was one day that Chrome was simply better in terms of > architecture, safety and security. Unfortunately, Mozilla delayed > Electrolysis by years, in part because of the illusion that the Firefox > benchmarks were better enough that it wouldn't matter for a long time, in > part because we decided to test-drive Electrolysis with FirefoxOS before > Firefox itself, but mostly because we did not want to lose all these add- > ons.

>In the end, Mozilla decided to introduce WebExtensions and finally make the jump towards e10s as part of the Quantum Project. We had lost years of development that we would never recover.

This aligns with what has always been my personal view which is that Mozilla waited too long to make the changes it needed to compete with Chrome and by the time it finally did the hard thing and lose extensions and start over.

When you consider that there was still time after Chrome was released but before Quantum where IE had the largest browser share (it wasn't a long period of time post-Chrome, but it existed), that's indicates to me that there was time both before and after Chrome's introduction for Mozilla to rip the band- aid off and drop XUL for the greater good of the browser. After all, IE didn't have extensions in any comprehensive way, which could have given Firefox to refactor and approach. Sadly, Mozilla waited too long.

But what really makes me sad is that there are still diehards mad that XUL died. When to me, we should all be angrier that it was allowed to live as long as it did.

<comment><USER24> >Firefox's killer feature and also the reason that it got its ass kicked by Chrome

5% faster page load still isn't a killer feature.

>Extensions were amazing

And the reason everyone who left used the browser.

>lose extensions and start over.

A smart company would never have done this. They would have maintained both to see if anyone would use the new browser. Instead, they took their customers on a forced march down a trail of tears.

Imagine if another company tried this. Imagine if Tesla said, "We know you love electric cars. So today we're going to stop making them and sell hydrogen powered motorcycles instead. They're faster! Sorry, we won't be making parts for or supporting the cars anymore." It would be corporate suicide. Imagine how angry the car owners would be, after they invested in the idea and the charging equipment, only to be abandoned by the company.

It makes perfect sense to continue shipping the old product in the face of a "new better" one. Apple continued selling iPods long after the iPhone arrived. Killing the successful core product and releasing a new untested competing product is an insane gamble. I can't see how Mozilla leadership ever thought that was a good idea.

<comment><USER25> At least in your analogy no one comes to your garage and replaces your car with a bike....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Over many years, I had to port an addon from Greasemonkey to XUL to Jetpack to WebExtensions. The number of add-on users steadily dropped as the number of Firefox users dropped.

Now, if you write a Firefox extension, and it's not a Mozilla-recommended extension (something you have to beg for) anyone installing it gets a scary notice:

 _" This is not monitored for security through Mozilla's Recommended Extensions program. Make sure you trust it before installing."_

This is _after_ going through Mozila's approval and signing process. Unsigned extensions won't install at all in the release version of Firefox.

Firefox extensions aren't something worth working on any more.

<comment><USER27> > Firefox extensions aren't something worth working on any more.

Unfortunately I now totally share this sentiment, I had an extension that delayed page loads in a realistic way to test slower connections. I started on back when XUL was the way to do it but dealing with the churn led me to give up. When XUL was being deprecated I ported to the newer way but I could tell that the churn was starting to get annoying and that my enthusiasm had changed. As much as I would have liked to continue work with that extension with the recent changes I'm glad I gave up when I did.

I'd really like to see something change to make working on extensions feel like it's more worthwhile again. Do people think that things are likely to stabilize in the next few years?

<comment><USER28> The entire point of switching to WebExtensions was that things could be stabilized permanently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Let's be clear on one thing that seems to be perpetually discussed whenever there is a Firefox thread: what has lead to its declining usage.

It is _not_ removing XUL 'power' extensions and replacing them with 'neutered' WebExtensions mechanism.

It is _not_ choosing to closely align with Chrome in terms of UI/UX and functionality.

It is _not_ the letting go of Brendan Eich and the newer (much criticised) management.

It is _not_ because of Mozilla foundation highlighting a few 'social justice' issues here and there.

The decline of Firefox is because of _one thing only_ \- the enormous marketing and engineering clout of Google and their utterly ruthless, relentless, anti-competitive pushing of Chrome across Android and all their web properties and even through ads all over the world.

More specifically, it is their _bundling_ of Chrome as the default, preset browser on the world most popular mobile operating system that really swung the tide decisively in their favour. Once ordinary users got used to Chrome on Android, they would naturally seek out the same browser on their laptops and desktops, to minimise interoperability issues and maximise familiarity.

And while pre-installing Chrome on Android (and by the way, it is pre- installed even on most laptop/desktop purchases by "helpful" OEMs - such is its viral reach) may not be strictly illegal as per anti-monopoly laws (because alternatives are 'freely' available on the default app store), the fact remains that if a program that comes with the OS is "good enough", the very vast majority of users will not bothering changing it, and thus Google managed to cripple all other browsers while still subtly side-stepping any potential lawsuits.

So the decline of Firefox is in my opinion a social/political phenomenon and nothing to do with its technical competence or extendibility vis-a-vis Chrome. It is certainly a more than competent drop-in replacement for Chrome (unlike say w3m or NetSurf), but _who_ will bother to do the replacement in the first place, as long as Chrome continues to be "good enough" (which is does excellently) and it doesn't outrageously hurt the user base by some extraordinarily shocking screw-up (and Facebook shows, even such odious abuse will be condoned by the user base by and large when the network effects are too big).

<comment><USER30> My friends and I stopped using Firefox after they broke our favourite XUL extensions. So did my parents. So did many, many developers I knew.

Everyone moved to using Chrome and never went back. Breaking XUL dropped Firefox adoption _considerably_. But folks who did this don't want to accept it.

XUL extensions gave Firefox unique power which it lost and never regained back. Firefox chopped off its powerful , special tentacles and grew flimsy, poor hands back. Firefox defanged itself.

<comment><USER19> Your favorite XUL extension broke so you "solved" that by migrating to a completely different browser which also doesn't provide the desired functionality.

Something doesn't add up.

<comment><USER30> At the time, Chrome had Chrome Apps. If you recall, several XUL extension authors quit in disgust and started developing chrome apps. Google wasn't considered 'evil' at the time...

Firefox had a unique, special power which differentiated it and Mozilla chose to kill it. No wonder its browser share dropped like a stone.

<comment><USER19> Chrome Apps were in no way replacement for XUL. They could not change the behavior of the Chrome itself, they just opened their own window and did their thing there. Not really an extension, more of a separate app.

To talk on more specific terms, which XUL extension did you replace with Chrome App?

<comment><USER30> I finally ended up using alternate tools since _even_ the replacement Chrome Apps were pale imitations of what Firefox offered. The good ones needed to use Nacl just to do basic stuff and still couldn't reach what XUL extensions natively supported.

But I changed my browser to Chrome since Firefox lost its value proposition. It had a differentiating factor of superior experience and features that it chose to deliberately abandon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This feels analogous to videogame modding. You either let/don't prevent the modders from messing with the very core of the game, which brings total overhaulability but also total vulnerability and jankiness; or you give them a nice modding API that, depending on how much effort you put into it might be rather powerful, safe and and convenient but IMO is fundamentally crippled in comparison to the former approach, it's as if you have to imagine all the ways people might want to mod your game beforehand.

Also, I have this bad taste in my mouth from Mozilla getting all that Google money just hours after sacking their developers, like it was a condition.

<comment><USER20> Third option: You give them a nice modding API and let them access the core of the game. That way you gain the benefits of a modding API without restricting modders' creativity.

<comment><USER32> Only a third option if you don't care about all the problems the article tells us about. Full access by third party developers and being able to update code are simply at odds with each other. There's no way around it.

<comment><USER20> That is simply not true.

<comment><USER12> How so?

<comment><USER20> Allowing addon developers to access private APIs simply doesn't prevent Mozilla from changing them, or anything else. An unstable API is much better than none at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's a good article, but in my experience explaining this stuff over and over again in HN and other fora, people don't actually want to know. They have their narrative and they're sticking to it.

<comment><USER34> My issue is simply that I _want_ an extension mechanism which _I_ can use to do anything to my browser. For me, 'extension security' means 'I must write C++ to add the functionality I want,' and I never, never want to write C++.

<comment><USER35> What prevents you from writing a patch for Firefox then? After all, it is one of the great advantages of FOSS. At this level of power you'd likely have to change the addon every upgrade anyways.

<comment><USER36> because what you are purposing is fork a browser which is only slightly less complicated than fork operating system and involves a major investment in time/money to maintain.

<comment><USER2> To whatever extent, there have been forks that are still alive today that support XUL extensions. Pale Moon [1] is one of them.

[1]: [https://www.palemoon.org/](https://www.palemoon.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was pissed off and left Firefox for Chrome not because they removed XUL add one, but because they didn't have a good replacement.

Chrome extensions are ugly and have no unified design. They are glorified web pages in a floating window.

I liked XUL because it provided a framework for extension authors and extensions felt like part of Firefox.

I eventually returned to Firefox and I find the extensions to be not so terrible.

</comment><comment><USER38> This may be an unpopular opinion: I'm very grateful for all browsers to switch to WebExtensions. To me, for the web to win as a platform, standards are a must.

I'm a new WebExtension indie dev. I just launched my first extension on the Chrome, Firefox, Edge stores. Opera is in review. Safari 14 took 15 minutes and 1 commend, just waiting for it to drop. I couldn't have shipped this quickly by myself if not for the WebExtensions standard. It leaves me time to focus on building what users want and telling users about what I built. Yes I did have to settle for less developer power and control. I'm totally ok with it.

Feel free to AMA!

[0] [https://twitter.com/rayshan/status/1292270249362956288](https://twitter.com/rayshan/status/1292270249362956288)

<comment><USER39> >To me, for the web to win as a platform, standards are a must.

What does that mean exactly? What are the other platforms that the web is competing against?

<comment><USER40> iOS and Android native apps with their walled gardens.

<comment><USER39> Hmm. As a crotchety old man (well, I'm 32, but still), I hadn't even considered mobile. I was thinking Windows/macOS/Linux native apps as the probable alternatives.

In either case though, I think this is just one more reason to hate Web Extensions. I don't want browsers to win over native applications. (Of course "applications" that are little more than a bundled browser are even worse, whether on mobile or desktop.)

<comment><USER38> @ebruchez is right. Also by win, I really mean to compete head-to-head with the native platforms. I love a good native app as much as anyone. The recent Epic vs. Apple fight shows that we need more open alternatives like the web platform. Ones that are free to develop for and free to distribute. I'm looking at you Apple, charging me $99 for a developer account just to distribute a Safari 14 web extension in the app store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Funny seeing this here, I just switched to Vivaldi yesterday because of this.

I really wanted to use mouse gestures and Vim-like controls again, and the WebExtension version of those addons is not nearly reliable enough.

The problem seems to be that those control extensions can only work by injecting Javascript into webpages, which (1) takes a moment to work when the page is loading, and (2) doesn't work in New Tab page. The effect is that even basic shortcuts like "next tab" fail to work often enough that I'm willing to switch browsers.

</comment><comment><USER42> Thanks for the article, it provides very good insights.

In the article, there are a couple of passes that mention "benchmarks" where Firefox was faster than Chrome. It sounds like those benchmarks, albeit I assume they were correct, were actually providing a distorted reality of what "fast" actually means, because I distinctly remember people (including myself) switching to Chrome in early days because it was simply objectively faster. It sounds like the existence of those benchmarks have had a net negative on Firefox: it provided a false confidence that the browser was "fast", and possibly delayed the refactorings that eventually managed to really speed up Firefox again.

You mention that Chrome used "UX tricks" but I assume what this means is that Chrome developers were actually driven by more correct benchmarks: the ones that actually translate to a better experience for the end user.

Since I'm always intrigued by the topic of false benchmarking and how complex it is to do correct benchmarks that don't fall into traps, I'd love to hear what those benchmarks you mention were measuring, and if you agree that they gave a false assurance to the Firefox team.

<comment><USER12> To summarize, we were benchmarking for throughput: how long between the time you click and the time the operation terminates. For a long time, we absolutely crushed Chrome on most of these benchmarks. Firefox started faster, loaded pages faster, switched between tabs faster, JavaScript executed faster, downloads were faster, ...

Chrome developers were benchmarking for responsiveness: how long between the time you click and the user interface shows that something is going on. And that's all that end users actually see. Chrome showed its initial window faster (although it took more time until you could actually do anything with it), was slower at loading pages (but stopped its throbber earlier), slower at switching tabs (but the screen changed faster to show you that it was switching tabs), ...

Which ones were the "correct benchmarks" remains an open question, but it's clear which ones the users perceive/remember as being faster!

Of course, the better architecture that Chrome used meant that they eventually got faster at throughput, too, on computers that had sufficient RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> We were told why they had to remove these extensions when they did so.

they also said that they would replace the APIs soon.

That they (still) haven't replaced them is why we are still angry with them. A failed promise.

We don't need to know why they made this change, we need to know when their promises will be kept.

</comment><comment><USER44> My company and I have no interest in supporting Firefox in the future and yes, I still feel betrayed when they dropped XUL. Many people did.

Even with WebExtensions, the Firefox extension review process is substantially lacking compared to the kind of developer experience I get with Chrome. The exact same extension takes a few seconds to release on the Chrome Webstore, vs. the laborious process I have to get through when releasing on Firefox.

The last straw for me was when the Firefox Extension reviewers asked me to provide a full-size package so that they can compile the extension themselves to compare if it matches the one that is submitted and if the output differs by some characters due to, let's say the order of the keys in a dictionary, though, it gets rejected. It does not matter if you have been supporting this extension for many years. It does not even matter if you are shipping the same code to Chrome and Firefox as well.

For companies that develop desktop-grade applications using web technologies, the only natural choice is Electron. It is stupid, for sure, because it forces developers to ship large binaries but what are the alternatives. QT? GTK? Please. The most popular non-native desktop applications are either based on Electron, Java, or some custom UI framework.

XUL had the chance to be the better cross-platform UI, and it was for some time until it was killed and with that, it lost an unmeasurable amount of developer time and future loss of productivity and a chance to be an actual alternative rather than a copycat.

As many others already pointed out, Firefox is Chrome, except that Chrome is still faster.

The demise of Firefox will hurt many at a personal level but frankly, it will hardly have any effect on the world because at the end of the day, WebExtensions are portable and Chrome is the pioneer in this space.

<comment><USER45> That might be very frustrating as a developer, but considering the amount of malware distributed on the Chrome Webstore this review process makes me want to use Firefox more.

<comment><USER44> I work in Security. This process produces no substantial results. They should invest into automation not some ill thought manual review process. This is part of the reasons why the Firefox extensions store is in decline. It is enough to look into the numbers to get the full picture.

<comment><USER12> In my experience, automating JavaScript analysis is a pipe dream. _Maybe_ this could work if Mozilla forced add-ons to use TypeScript, but I feel that add-on developers wouldn't enjoy being asked to switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> A great read. However, this part remains unfulfilled:

> we still haven't taken the time to explain in-depth why we had _no choice_ > but to remove XUL-based add-ons.

I'm still waiting for an acceptable explanation. The author basically says "XUL was too vulnerable to security problems and crashes" but why couldn't it be left in? I think the real answer is a mix of "We don't have the developer resources (despite millions in revenue every year) to work on it, those resources are going to develop stuff like Pocket" and "We know better than the users, and the bug reports are tiresome, so let's lock it down and disallow people from using XUL addons"

This all happened due to pressure to compete with Chrome, but I think in doing so, Firefox lost it's uniqueness and became just another Chrome follower rather than a contender for web leadership.

<comment><USER12> > The author basically says "XUL was too vulnerable to security problems and > crashes" but why couldn't it be left in?

There's an entire section called "The problems with XUL" that attempts to respond to this question (and another one called "The problems with XPCOM"). Do you feel anything is missing in either section?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As a developer, APIs changing and going away is a part of life. Apple deprecates APIs on macOS and iOS all the time. Even the concept of porting from an older to a newer OS is quite common.

Everyone rewrote DOS applications for Windows 3.x, then Windows 95, then Windows NT; Everyone rewrote applications for Apple II, MacOS classic, then OSX.

But, when I read this article, it exposes a clear need for powerful 3rd party browser APIs; even though the API may change between browser releases. (This, BTW, is what happens on Mac. If you develop a MacOS application, every year or so you need to tweak it.) Also, there's a clear need to install 3rd party plugins that can do things to screw up the browser. (This, BTW, is why desktop computers let you install whatever you want, and why you can sideload on Android.)

</comment><comment><USER48> XUL in my memory is a kind of tragedy. It seemed to me to represent a future where GUIs could be programmed on any platform using an HTML-like language. Previously you had to individually write GUIs as applications, using languages like C++ or Java. Then web applications became more popular, and XUL seemed like it could sort of unify all the special applications some day. By roughly 2010, I think HTML5 was taking away some of the appeal of XUL, and at the same time the increase in popularity of smartphones led to a reversion to specially-built "apps". I hope some day there will be a popular "browser app" that everyone builds apps on.

<comment><USER12> Mozilla made the conscious decision of supporting open standards, which meant pushing for and contributing to HTML5 instead of extending XUL.

But yeah, there's still nothing quite as powerful as XUL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based > add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see > that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by > this choice.

Know your users. If I wanted to use chrome, I'd have used it. What made Firefox Firefox was its powerful addon eco-system. Now its just a poor chrome imitation.

</comment><comment><USER50> When this kind of topic comes up, people are starting to talk about X things then at the end they say:

1\. That's why I'm using/stopping using Firefox a while ago

2\. I hope Firefox can be hanging in there, but I don't want to touch it

3\. Oh look that's cool new project is awesomen, but I'm sticking with Chrome

It's just interesting to see

<comment><USER51> 1 is understandable all on its own.

2 can be explained by a feeling of betrayal. Mozilla's target user isn't me anymore, and quite frankly isn't most of the HN readership either. At least Chrome is the devil I know. Chrome's privacy "issues" are well known and documented, and are fairly trivially worked around. I'm not too worried about them claiming to be for privacy and then one day silently installing an addon that invades it. And that's not even getting into the addon mess. Or the other addon mess, where their nannying resulted in the _worldwide_ breakage of _all_ addons for _all_ Firefox users.

3 can be explained for similar reasons as 2. I know where I stand with Chrome, and I already got more-or-less forcibly kicked out of the Firefox camp. There's a level of certainty here that doesn't exist with FF or whatever the new upstart browser is - I don't have this nagging fear that Google is going to do something with Chrome to make it more annoying or less useful. That is a very real fear I have with Firefox, and it's one that's been borne out repeatedly ever since addongate. If there's a choice between an option which gives the user more control and and option which gives the user less or takes some away, Mozilla usually picks the latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Not trying to armchair quarterback here, just speculating for entertainment

> Around this time, Mozilla started paying serious attention to Chrome. Chrome > had started with very different design guidelines than Firefox:

> * at the time, Chrome didn't care about eating too much memory or system > resources;

> * Chrome used many processes, which gave this browser heightened security > and responsiveness by design;

> * Chrome had started without an add-on API, which meant that Chrome > developers could get away with refactoring anything they wanted, without > this development tax; as Chrome introduced their extension mechanism, they > did it with a proper API, which could usually be maintained regardless of > changes to the back-end;

Was it possible to do this inside Mozilla? Release a new browser with different branding that does not have these handicaps. Then, let the marketplace decide which browser to pick. If it won out, announce publicly that ongoing investment would be on the new browser.

<comment><USER22> This sounds like a pretty bad financial and strategic plan. So you suggest that Mozilla should have concurrently developed two browser engines, doubling the cost of its engineering while also competing with itself?

<comment><USER53> Like what they did with Servo?

<comment><USER22> Servo was always a research project, and not a full browser replacement intended to compete with Firefox. As the article states, many components of Servo eventually ended up in Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> There is no XUL, only Dana.

</comment><comment><USER55> > And then, as someone pointed out on reddit, I realized that we still haven't > taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL- > based add-ons.

> * very quickly, add-on developers realized that anything they did could > break anything else in the system, including other add-ons and Firefox > itself, and they often had no way to prevent this;

> * similarly, anything Firefox developers did could break add-ons, and they > often had no way to prevent this;

> * also, some of the changes that Firefox needed to remain competitive with > Chrome were going to break most add-ons immediately, possibly all add-ons in > the longer term;

> * oh, and by the way, since add-ons could do everything, they could very > easily do anything to the operating system, from stealing passwords to > pretending to be your bank.

\---

It's a really long article with lots of background and technical detail, so I felt it safe to include a larger summary of the basic points than I normally would.

<comment><USER56> >> * also, some of the changes that Firefox needed to remain competitive with Chrome were going to break most add-ons immediately, possibly all add-ons in the longer term;

This is probably the most important point. The other points apply to almost any software that supports addons, including emacs, vim, zsh, etc. and they're not really an issue.

>> * very quickly, add-on developers realized that anything they did could break anything else in the system, including other add-ons and Firefox itself, and they often had no way to prevent this;

So they're careful. Any add-on that breaks other stuff doesn't really get adopted. Emacs shares the same namespace for everything. Addon developers just namespace their stuff by putting a prefix on their identifiers. It's not really an issue even for them.

>> * similarly, anything Firefox developers did could break add-ons, and they often had no way to prevent this;

So don't change Firefox so drastically. Well, I'd say it's nice for software to be stable, but web browsers are a good exception to that. If Firefox didn't try to keep up with Chrome, Chrome would probably have greater dominance.

But yeah, other software would just be more stable. When a change needs to be made, the benefit is weighed against the potential of breaking addons, but I imagine that's probably OK with addon developers as long as the change was reasonable.

>> * oh, and by the way, since add-ons could do everything, they could very easily do anything to the operating system, from stealing passwords to pretending to be your bank.

Most times, addons are almost like any other program, and should be judged accordingly before installing. I imagine even after the restrictions were placed on addons, they're probably still capable of quite a bit of malice.

<comment><USER8> > Emacs shares the same namespace for everything. Addon developers just > namespace their stuff by putting a prefix on their identifiers. It's not > really an issue even for them.

I use and love Emacs (Spacemacs), and I am probably never going to move to another editor.

BUT as someone who maintains a Spacemacs config, no, Emacs addons break each other all the time. It's not just a namespacing problem, it's which events you're hooking around or interrupting, it's which system features you're changing that other addons rely on.

This kind of organized chaos works out OK in Emacs because I can read the source code of the offending Spacemacs layer or script and wrap around it to get it playing nicely with the rest of my setup. Emacs has very good debugging tools built into it, and you can hack on the editor _in the editor_. It also has a fairly decent community of people online who will help you debug configs as long as you're not being too annoying about it. This all ends up being pretty important, because you are going to need to debug configs.

Emacs expects you to be a power user that knows how to program, and if you are a power user that knows how to program, there are advantages to that. But even with those advantages, the sheer amount of time I've wasted getting EXWM to play nicely with other workspace addons...

I just think there's benefits and tradeoffs to both approaches, and I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the engineers who decided that their users shouldn't need to learn how to program to keep a functioning set of addons running in their web browser.

<comment><USER57> My question is then: where's the hackabale power user browser implemented in something like Common Lisp with a REPL, hot swap debugging, and built in disassembly tools?

<comment><USER58> To be honest I'm surprised Emacs isn't a browser yet. It does everything else.

<comment><USER59> It has a browser, eww ([https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html)), and I think others.

eww doesn't work very well yet. Try it for fun only. And it's slow. Pretty certain it does cookies but not js.

I think there's an emacs web browser which delegates the actual mechanics to something external, and only acts as a front end for display/interaction. Never tried it.

<comment><USER60> I would love to know about this mythical browser, the web is one of the last things i don't have in emacs. I would dearly love to fix this.

<comment><USER59> [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=emacs%20%22web%20browsers...](https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=emacs%20%22web%20browsers%22) get you [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryWebBrowser](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CategoryWebBrowser) as the top link.

In the latter EAF isn't a web browser despite what it says. Have a look at the others. Piggyback browsers aren't going to be sophisticated, that's just how it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> > addons can change things and break the browser.

Good. That's a feature. I _install_ addons. It's not a site i visit with no consideration.

This is the same thinking of apple. People install random apps so let's restrict apps to the point the user cannot have a text editor on their phone! meh! This is all dumb!

Now it is impossible to have the choice to install an addon for tweaking hidden options. Everyone should live with the crap that is about:config and user.js (or only about:config, because they thought user.js too dangerous on mobile too!)

I trust an open source browser by random people, why not an open source addon that gives me the functionality i _need_?

<comment><USER12> Did you read the rest of the article?

That was not a summary of why the old model could not be kept, just of why it was promiscuous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Browsers that split off because of the killing of XUL and establishment of the Firefox walled garden continue to operate using XUL and the giant (and still improving) ecosystem of add-ons that defined what Firefox was. There are no problems even with a ten thousandth of the resources that Mozilla has.

Mozilla removed XUL and all the power features because they were incompatible with building a chrome clone that could protect users from themselves. They did this because market share became more important than features and the vast majority of people don't want or even understand that their browser can be customized.

</comment><comment><USER63> _The XPCOM-based extension mechanism was mostly dropped (we still use it internally)_

See, that's the rub. Many of us would choose to have add-ons that break every time the browser updates, or delay browser updates until our mission-critical extension is updated. You didn't give us that choice though. You said "do it the way we want you to do it or piss off." Looking at Firefox's 3% market share, most of us chose the latter.

<comment><USER12> Our experience is that add-on developers didn't like that. Only the few add-on developers that actually made money from their add-ons could afford to rewrite their code every 6 weeks.

Clarifying the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> A couple of years ago I swore I would never leave ff, but they decided to just neuter the add-ons and remove most of them. So I didnt think twice. Moved to waterfox, and then to Palemoon. I'm happy.

I'm sad they're losing, but they need to be adults about it and do what needs to be done. I and many others are waiting to go back as soon as they fix things.

<comment><USER65> This comment is seemingly a reaction to the post's title and doesn't address (or even acknowledge) the contents of article. Do you disagree with the technical rationale the author has presented?

<comment><USER66> The content of the article does not really make a technical argument. It just says "XUL can not be fast, because I said so". The code of Firefox has always been a historical grown mess with a lot of loose ends that need to be entangled. I'm convinced that a XUL version can be made fast as well if you spend the appropriate amount of engineering hours on it.

<comment><USER12> (article author) Pretty sure I didn't write that :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Gallery: we tear apart a $340 audiophile Ethernet cable and look inside - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/gallery-we-tear-apart-a-340-audiophile-ethernet-cable-and-look-inside/

<comment><USER2> I work in pro audio, and I always find these hilarious!

There's a new one too; recently an 'audiophile' swore his 'special audio' SD card was unbelievably good.

Mind you, as long as there are stupid people buying these, why not sell them?</comment>


Create Bullet Graphs with Google Charts in 7 Easy Steps - <AUTHOR> http://dealerdiagnostics.com/blog/2008/05/create-bullet-graphs-with-google-charts-in-7-easy-steps/

<comment><USER2> Might as well link original: <http://code.google.com/apis/chart/#url_format> I didn't know about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya that's the API docs, but it doesn't give an example of bullet graphs.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: NaNoWriMo? - <AUTHOR>

I'm curious what Hacker News thinks of this. A total waste of time? A valuable exercise in creativity?<p>Just for the record, I did it a few years ago, and I'm participating this year as well. And it does take away from the time I spend on this site... <comment><USER2> NaNoWriMo is like running linux on your PC.

It's great if you have enough time to dedicate to the project and you'll certainly get a lot out of it.

But if you don't have a good amount of free time, it's best to avoid.

<comment><USER3> Yes, PC should be better left alone. There are a huge sink of time. Even with Linux on them --- where you do not lose as much time as with that other operating system --- you will still be much more productive with pen and paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My company just published a book written for NaNoWriMo 2007: <http://www.onyxneon.com/books/gigapolis/> .

</comment><comment><USER5> For those who, like me, have no idea what's going on here: <http://www.nanowrimo.org/> \- National Novel Writing Month.</comment>


How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/platform-thinking/how-paypal-and-reddit-faked-their-way-to-traction-9411fb583205

<comment><USER2> When Paypal was still part of X.com (1999 or 2000?) they paid new users to sign up ($10 added to your new account).

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be interested to hear more stories like this about seeding sites successfully without appearing fake. I've seen a lot of startups seed their sites in ways that just look too obvious.

<comment><AUTHOR> The terms "two sided market seeding" seem to yield good search results if you want to explore further.

<comment><USER3> That phrase is new to me. ikeboy, thanks for the tip.</comment></comment></comment>


ShowHN: LiveNearUSC - A better way for students to find housing - <AUTHOR> http://www.livenearusc.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My first major web-development project. Coded and designed all by my lonesome. I'd love some feedback from you guys!</comment>


Millennials Continue to Leave Big Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-continue-to-leave-big-cities-11569470460?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> That's because most cities have poor quality of life, and once you get out of the twenties, you realize quickly that some breathing room, a safe neighborhood, and a single family home with a yard make you much more happy than having access to a large number of bars, restaurants, and other city amenities that you visit less and less. Most millennials are in their thirties now and as they start families they're realizing high-density urbanism isn't all its cracked out to be.

Of course what I'm saying isn't universal and I think there's a middle ground with cities that retain low-mid density zoning, but it's my general observation nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> > That's because most cities have poor quality of life

And the ones that don't have incredibly expensive properties.

Of course, if you live in the bay area there's a good chance you're exposed to both expensive prices _and_ a poor standard of living, which I'm sure explains a lot of the horrifying experiences I read about here.

Personally, I live in Cambridge MA. Despite this city being the world's top biotech hub, the part of Cambridge I live in is incredibly family-friendly. I don't see needles or crime unless maybe you get close to the "main street" but that's a 15 minute walk away. The cars drive slowly, there's kids and parks everywhere. I would love to raise a family here. But, a single floor in a 3 family building (which was working class housing just a few decades ago) now sells around a million bucks. It's just not feasible, so my wife and I rent and will probably move out to buy somewhere else if prices don't go down in the next few years.

<comment><USER4> > > That's because most cities have poor quality of life

> And the ones that don't have incredibly expensive properties.

This, so much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't help that people in cities have voted to make it illegal to build more city. The nice bits all existed before cars. The stuff built since then is mostly parking and roads. As a result, only the wealthiest can afford to live in the nice part built before we decided apartments needed as much room for parking as for people.

I'm on the older side of millenial (mid 30's). I love cities. I love walking and cycling everywhere and having a low carbon footprint and being near interesting people and great food and being able to go to museums, etc. I think having more people in cities is a requirement for stopping climate apocalypse.

But after we had a kid we thought "where can we live where our kid can ride a bike and not die" and "where can we live where we can afford a home for three"? And there was... nothing. Suburbia was full of high speed arterials and only slightly less expensive homes. The core city was too expensive for a 2 bed flat.

I got a remote job and we moved way out. I have cows on three sides. It's boring. The roads are still dangerous, sadly, but the house was so astonishingly cheap we can consider it effectively worthless and still come out ahead.

Maybe in time we'll be eligible to live in DK, NL, etc. but until then the rural middle of nowhere is the only option that makes sense financially (if remote work holds up).

</comment><comment><USER6> Most urban schools are highly stratified. Either cream of the crop or bottom of the barely and little in between. The best of schools have entry requirements and a waiting list. You're either brilliantly gifted or rich enough to afford the tutors to help get you there. If you're not in that group, academically, there is very few resources for you. The other inner- urban schools are just fighting to keep the heat on and have no time for you.

The city I live in has no school, beyond the single K-5, within the city limits. It's a chicken and egg problem through lack of political will. The parents petition the school board to open a middle and high school. They commission a years long study. Those parents eventually have to move because of work, increases costs, and lack of schools. A new set of parents petition the school board for more schools... ad nauseam

Our son has a longer commute to school than I do for work. He's lucky enough to be on a fast bus line. Him growing up in the city is orthogonal to most childhoods. He visits galleries and museums when he can. Has a lot more sympathy for the homeless. He's also gotten into the habit of skipping school lunch and going to the hipster cafe instead.

All this to say I know my family occupies special circumstances that allow us to live in the city. If any one of those changes I know we'd have to look at a suburban lifestyle.

<comment><USER7> The reason suburban districts have good public schools and urban ones have bad schools is that dividing students into school zones is a legal method of segregation. Cities and districts will intentionally build only expensive single family housing in good school districts to keep the riff raff out.

<comment><USER6> City schools usually have no address requirements. Our school even has students coming from the next county. They can get a commuter waiver because the parents work near the school. since businesses pay the same taxes it actually works out better for students and parents. The best schools have entry requirements that usually stratify by race and class.

<comment><USER8> A number of persons have been hit with large bills for sending their children to District of Columbia schools while not residing in the District. In many cases the city school administration did a really bad job of following up information, and the parents have been or will be cleared. In other cases, the parents really did live in Maryland or Virginia.

And then there is gaming addresses to get one's kid into the best non-magnet high school (Wilson).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting because in Atlanta the inner city is growing and the suburbs are becoming more like the city and creating walkable downtown areas. The new millennial ideal seems to be a revival of the main street and a rejection of both the strip malls and super urbanized downtowns.

If millennials really didn't like the urban lifestyle then wouldn't prices be dropping instead of staying high?

I was recently in a coffee shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan that was indistinguishable from one in Brooklyn. I think more and more people are realizing they can keep the things they want from trendy metros and move to places like Raleigh, Salt Lake City,Austin,Atlanta,Boise ,Dallas,Ann Arbor in exchange for lower costs and less traffic.

<comment><USER3> > If millennials really didn't like the urban lifestyle then wouldn't prices > be dropping instead of staying high?

A million times this. I don't want to (and can't afford to) pay for the ultra luxury downtown destination living experience. But urban living is more than luxurious downtown destinations.

I want my day-to-day trips (bringing kids to school, going to the grocery store, going to work) to be safe and accessible without a car. Just starting there implies a lot about the built environment, and your stereotypical suburb just can't offer that.

<comment><USER10> Why do you want to go without a car so badly? I get not wanting one IN the city (did it for several years myself), but outside of the city driving is not bad at all.

<comment><USER3> It's not really the end-all-be-all, but it's a matter of personal preference that I would like to go without one if possible.

Having grown up in the deep suburbs of a car-dependent city (including having a car to myself for a few years in high school), it basically comes down to this:

(a) I don't like driving and I'm bad at it.

(b) I don't want my kids to grow up like I grew up: with no friends in walking distance, nowhere to hang out in walking distance, ultimately bored and only spending time on the internet as a result. By the age I had a car to spend time with friends on my own terms, I basically had no social skills to speak of.

(c) Driving cars just _feels bad_ to me. Like, from an environmental point of view. I know it's not sustainable for the earth in the long-term, so it sucks feeling like I am reliant on that technology.

Again, it's all personal. But having lived both without a car and completely car dependent, my optimum for quality of life is living a car-optional lifestyle, where the car is only used for the occasional luxury (e.g. a weekend trip out), not for day to day necessities.

<comment> dawg- I want to chime in here too, because I am from a similar place - deep suburbs where having a car is a necessity. Only difference is I still refuse to pay to live in an inner city. I am counting on the current renaissance of suburban cities to continue, where these smaller towns are embracing walkability/bikeability. My dream is to live in a little suburban town where I can actually walk and bike to important places, and only go into the big city when necessary. It seems like we are getting there, slowly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A house down the street from where I grew up costs $650,000 for 1500 sq ft on a sixth of an acre. Meanwhile I was offered $55k with 2 years experience. There is also a massively crappy public transit system that lets me commute 4 hours/day to work my 8hour/day job, or I have to buy a car as well. How is the math supposed to work out?

I moved out of the metro area and have been much happier for it... Sure jobs are harder to find, but when I started getting offers they actually paid a livable wage.

That was my story 7-8 years ago. I could probably move back and make really good money, but the quality of life difference is atrocious and homes only got more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ya, here's my story:

When I moved to a rapidly expanding city from my small town, some 15 years ago, rent was pretty decent. Real-estate was on the rise, then took a hit in 2008, but has been rising ever since.

Rent alone has gone up like 3 times (my first rented apartment, which cost $500 / month, now goes for $1500 / month). We used to joke that who in their right minds would pay $1500 bucks a month, unless the apartment was a complete penthouse...these days you get a 300 sq.ft for that kind of money.

After college I landed a pretty nice job - but I could not shake off the feeling that I was throwing away money on increasing rents.

Doing some quick calculations, I found out that I would save roughly $20000 a year on moving somewhere smaller. My job involved travel, so it didn't really make much sense anyway.

So that's what I did. Moved away, and have saved soon close to $100k, which I use to invest.

I visit friends in the old city every two months or so - a long-weekend tour.

My younger brother is in a similar position, and it's next to impossible for his peers to get a foot inside the housing market, unless you come from resourceful families that can bankroll your first apartment. So from what I've heard, it's indeed become a "life-hack" to simply move somewhere cheaper, save like crazy, and then move back - cash rich.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's my paradox: The city i live in has a median 1BR condo price north of $500k, which I cannot afford, but i more or less have to live here because this is the hub of my field. I hate long commutes, so, I rent.

<comment><USER14> Nothing wrong with renting, so long as you can sublet it, and you have rent control. Consider it an investment without all of the capital cost expenditures that come with a ownership. I have a coworker whose family member rented a one bdrm condo in downtown Toronto 20 years ago when she was attending university. When she left univ, she sublet it to another family member, and so on, and so on through the years. Thanks to rent control the rent has only increased a few hundred dollars over those twenty years. However, the she sublets it at current rental market value which pockets her $1000/month. Nice!

<comment><USER15> That's great! Your coworker's family member is breaking the law! You can't sublet for more than the rent controlled rent.

<comment><USER14> It's not illegal in Toronto. [https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2011/02/12/the_...](https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2011/02/12/the_ins_and_outs_of_subletting.html) My mistake. Sublet rental amount cannot be > leased rental amount. I didn't know that. Good to know. Does the landlord have recourse if this can be proved?

I'm surrounded by law-breakers then. [https://www.kijiji.ca/b-short-term- rental/gta-greater-toront...](https://www.kijiji.ca/b-short-term-rental/gta- greater-toronto-area/sublet/k0c42l1700272)

<comment><USER15> At least in SF, if you're caught doing it, you get the pleasant task of repaying all the excess payments back to the subletter.

It's rampant here in SF as well. I know a few folks who are getting 2-3x their total rent payment by renting out a couple rooms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I must be very sick in the head because the thought of a single family four bedroom house 30+ min away from my work does not sound appealing at all.

I quite enjoy urban life and the tapestry of humanity that fills it.

Anywhere other than SF, NYC and maybe Boston and LA condo/house prices aren't too unreasonable imho.

<comment><USER17> Are you less than a 30 min walk from work?

<comment><USER16> I'm about 6ft and have a slightly longer stride than most folks, I'd say I could do it comfortably in about 40 minutes.

Depending on traffic lights and the such it's about 15 mins on the bike or train.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Does not seem surprising, cities are expensive places to live and millennials probably can't afford it yet.

<comment><USER19> Millenials are between 39 and 23 years old. I don't think it's useful to pretend that their earning capacity is what defines them as a group.

<comment><USER18> That is, in fact, one of the main arguments the article is making. Cities are too expensive, millennial are fleeing to less expensive suburbs.

Also because public schools in the city continue to struggle compared to their suburban counterparts, and millennial with children care about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> [http://archive.is/uGNld](http://archive.is/uGNld)

</comment><comment><USER21> Copy-paste from another thread, cause it's still relevant.

Urban environments aren't really "nice". For all I hear about the joys of urban living, as espoused by others, I haven't enjoyed it much. Public transportation is crowded and smelly. Fat people take half of my seat (not nice to say, but I'm not sure how else to put it). Things are small, which for a taller guy like me, is pretty tough. As in, every thing is tiny. Living spaces, shops, streets. Streets often have trash strewn on them, and don't smell particularly good. I have to keep one hand on my wallet. Sometimes, hobos get aggressive. Not as much as an issue for me, but I'd hate to be a 4'9" lady. Keeping pets is hard. Cooking food is hard. I didn't have kids, but those I knew had a hard time with them. Things are very expensive. It's loud. There's a lot of traffic. Some times (all winter and some times in summer), it's bad weather for walking. I guess I shouldn't be complaining, since I at least didn't see much in the way of human feces. This is not to say there aren't up-sides. I like the food, and there are interesting people. It's also much easier to find certain things; for instance, a few major cities still have serious "maker shops" with tons of electronic components. Smaller ones or sub-urban areas often can't accommodate them, as they are in low enough demand that serious density is required.

I like sub-urban living and empty green space. I can hardly blame people for moving out, if it's viable. The above applies differently to different cities; some are better, some are worse, but all have most of these problems in the urban core. Considering how expensive it is to live in a city rather than a suburb (especially if you're talking a similar amount of land), I don't want to pay more for less.

</comment><comment><USER22> "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" -Satchel Paige.

<comment><USER23> That quote is attributed to Yogi Berra. You mixed up your baseball players.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Millennial here. I like cities...the spread of ideas and culture is fast. Concerts, coffee shops (to read in) and its easier to meet hardworking people in a city(i feel like most relatively young people stay in cities at the very least until they reach their goals)...and learn how to make money just like them. Suburbs to me are where people go wait to well...die and I don't mean literally. I lived with my parents for a year after finishing school in a really nice suburb I felt suffocated. They love it.

My old man always told me not to call things 'expensive' but to ask myself why I cant afford them (at the moment). If you aren't willing to make the money to live somewhere comfortable then just call it what it is: not a priority.

FYI im immigrant and did not start out life well off but I did have parents that are very no nonsense and honest about why and how people choose to live where they live and why. Most just want to be comfortable and that's O.K

</comment><comment><USER25> I thought they just got there?

<comment><USER26> This was my immediate reaction. Haven't there been a lot of articles about the millennial rush to the city?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nobody would stay in the city unless for the jobs. Sure, some cities are nicer, but not that many.</comment>


LibreOffice 6.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2018/01/31/libreoffice-6/ <comment><USER3> This is wonderful to see, big fan of LibreOffice.

I am left questioning a few things based upon the feedback in this thread. I'll preface this that I'm trying to be cordial and tactful here.

Why is it so bad that Microsoft charges for their product? I use Office in my professional life and Libre+Office in my personal life. I think if you make a decent product, it's perfectly okay to charge for it. Am I missing something ideological?

I constantly read that Office is clunky and unstable, and I haven't experienced that in years at this point, probably since Office 2007 after they famously had to rip out CustomXML in a hurry. For me, both Office and LibreOffice perform well, and I often only use one over the other when I find support for one or the other is lacking because of some crazy scenario.

P.S. To those barking about "scary" warning for ODF files. It does the same thing for Office 2003-2007 documents too...

<comment><USER4> It's more the fact that they hold a quasi-monopoly AND have severe interface flaws that are now "standard". If it was just one of the two, I think people would be more forgiving (see Adobe Photoshop/InDesign, which, while flawed, understand user interface).

I have seen people waste _hours_ doing things in MS Office that should take 5 minutes because of how broken its UX is. They got a tiny little bit better but then you try setting the print area for an Excel table again and spend a good 15 minutes and you know they still have the same problems at their core.

The problem with LibreOffice & Co is that they basically just copy Microsoft's mistakes, making UX an afterthought with wobbly, unaligned buttons and illogical grouping and hierarchies of different elements. We'll likely won't escape that office software hell any time soon but projects like LibreOffice at least have the freedom to chisel at its foundation.

<comment><USER5> This really underestimates the amount of work that goes into UX for such a massively used product. Look no further than the ribbon to see the type of backlash that comes from any interface update. For any sufficiently large and complex project nearly every new UI tweak willl help some and hurt others. Measuring and walking that line is not to be underestimated.

<comment><USER6> So, I have a relative who worked Microsoft UI, and know a lot about it from that. I understand all the design and user testing that was involved.

This is what I see:

With the ribbon, MS came up with something that was nice and innovative. But it was also incomplete. Unlike the menu, which was consistent across all the functions you might want to apply, the ribbon exists for some things, and then you break into this totally different UI for other things.

Is this ok? My concern is that with Microsoft's monopoly (still) we could argue until we were blue in the face about whether or not the ribbon as implemented was worth it or not, and will never know because there were not really any other options other than "ribbon or not." We can't tell if people just habituated to the ribbon's flaws, or decided that the pros of upgrading outweighed the cons, or were forced to upgrade, directly or indirectly, by the legions of corporate decision makers who were afraid to be lagging behind, or what.

Office has improved a lot since LibreOffice's predecessor, OO, emerged. In some ways I think MS Office is superior. But I still have this nagging feeling that we never know what we _could_ have had if there were more competition, in terms of pricing, options, formats, etc. I also resent being forced to use MS Office for things that absolutely do not require it at all (e.g., by certain publishers, etc.). Because then I have to choose an OS that MS Office is on, and then certain hardware, etc. It's not the cost of MS Cloud or whatever anymore, it's that cost, plus the hardware infrastructure that's required to run it.

At the moment LO, for me, is competitive with MS Office, and meets my needs, and to me that's important.

I don't think there's anything wrong with MS charging for a product. What I do think is wrong is everyone requiring it, explicitly or implicitly, and there being lack of choice. At the moment I'm not even sure that's MS's fault--most of the time I encounter it I attribute it to laziness or inconsiderateness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like LibreOffice, but I really wish they would put more effort into their UI, even just basic things like standardisation of controls and simple text spacing and positioning. This is taken from their video summary of 6.0:

[https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt](https://imgur.com/a/LB1jt)

<comment><USER8> So is your issue that the dropdown sizes and associated font sizes are different?

<comment><USER7> No, I'm referring to the UI in general. The images just basic examples of poor and inconsistent text spacing and positioning. I didn't even mention the more important issues like the crowded dropdowns, poor layouts and use of space in general.

As I said, I _like_ LibreOffice, but the UI needs work.

<comment><USER8> My only issue is that it's hard sometimes to _find_ how to do something I'm trying to do. But that's also a problem in MS Office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is rather unfortunate that MS Office sets the bar for office suite of programs and so many people (not necessarily in CS/IT/Tech) can only think Office == MS Office.

The only way for an Open Source equivalent to dethrone MS Office is to beat MS Office at its own game WHILE retaining compatibility to it. Perhaps, retain a MS Office compatible core, and invest mindshare in making an absurdly fast, intuitive, and productive UI that is not necessarily the same as MS Office. Show people why one would want to use LibreOffice instead of the only factor being that it's free (as in beer and as in speech).

The day the suite of Libre Office impresses me enough to use it on my laptop inspite of having MS Office installed is when the tide changes..

Sort of like the Mozilla of Office programs.

<comment><USER10> You mean Google Docs / Sheets?

(Which incidentally I use 90% of the time despite having an Office 365 subscription)

<comment><USER9> Honestly, I really like Google docs. I use it for drafting my blog posts which will be public anyway on my website. But, Google is the reason I can't use it for private/ personal documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And still it has a UI like in the nineties. Thousands of buttons, adding more and more, without thinking about it, making it harder and harder with every version for new users to learn using it.

Instead of adding more fonts by default, they should start thinking how they can improve their UI, make it clean, discoverable and easy to use.

Microsoft has done it, and while initially it was hard for everyone familiar with the old concept, I know nobody who prefers that now, after familiarizing themselves with ribbons.

<comment><USER12> _Raises hand_ As a power user of Office before and after that change - <USER2> menu bar was massively better. Now you know someone.

Seriously, who apart from utter novices would ever want to use a UI where the keyboard shortcuts are non-obvious, the buttons take up half the screen, and discoverability is non-existent (and not even Google can help half the time because things jump around from version to version).

<comment><USER13> If there was an option to switch back from ribbons, I'd do it every time.

<comment><USER14> Office for Mac has the original menus _and_ ribbon. Just the old toolbars disappeared.

Best of both worlds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I like LibreOffice but what made me switch back to MS was the compatibility problem. In particular in thr older version of LibreOffice thr fonts weren't even compatible for me... I didn't look back since going back, to save the overhead. FWIW, I did my thesis on LibreOffice but after that I switched away. Same happened to Thunderbird to Outlook, but mainly due to performance issue (handling tens of thousands of emails and searching through those emails), otherwise I would love to keep Thunderbird (its UI and functionality is just as good as Outlook by OSS standard).

MS isn't perfect. It's slow to open files, occasionally Outlook's data file will corrupt or too large to be usable, then I have to delete the file and force Outlook download the emails again. I miss one license for life time model, instead of subscription.

<comment><USER16> I want to use Thunderbird, and for whatever reason even thunderbird performance is better on my computer.

The problem I have is that its junk filtering is absolutely messed up. It ends up marking several important emails as junk.

Also it's not very clever in auto completing email addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did anybody here use LibreOffice online? How does it compare to Google Docs or Office 365?

<comment><USER18> LibreOffice is worse in all ways.

<comment><USER19> I downvoted your comment as it was too lazy. If you're going to provide feedback, at least try to give examples to back it up. For example, compare one similar feature available in all three applications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When I installed this on macOS 10.13, it wouldn't run at all. Crashed on every document it tried to open, including a new document based on the default template, and then got stuck in a recovery loop. I had to force-quit it.

After deleting ~/Library/Application Support/LibreOffice it seems to be fine. So there must be an issue installing with old preferences in place.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wish they would use this in schools instead of getting kids accustomed to MS office.

<comment><USER22> Why? So kids can be even more unprepared when they enter the world of work, where nobody uses LibreOffice?

<comment><USER23> Quite the opposite.

The idea is that children learn concepts, not individual implementations. And since Writer is arguable better than MS Word I see lots of institutions moving to LibreOffice.

Note, however, that Excel is better than Calc for anything non-trivial, and Powerpoint just blows the LibreOffice counterpart away completely. Praise to Writer is _not_ praise to the whole LibreOffice suite.

<comment> alok-g I would not want my child to learn Excel/Calc at all, so that doesn't bother me. :-) While spreadsheets have been very sticky, super-useful for quick calculations, they are often abused for a variety of cases where alternative tools would be better. If I could, I would ban installation of Excel and Calc at my workplace!

Hope LibreOffice Impress improves over the time to catch up with PowerPoint.

<comment><USER24> digital spreadsheets - without macros - are arguably the simplest form of functional programming you could teach anyone, so i wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.

<comment><USER16> Spreadsheets are immensely useful. In many situations they are more useful in specific tasks than software designed specifically for those tasks, because their general nature means that they can be used to do things beyond what the creator of the designed software intended.

People don't use Excel for everything because they are masochists. Excel very often really is the best solution available for a very wide variety of uses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just asking: did they, by any chance, fix or at least improve the usability of the LibreOffice API?

Last time I tried live-updating a cell in a Calc worksheet it was a huge mess and a total pita.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did it get outline mode yet? That's what always held back my colleagues that write documentation. I use it when I need an office suite, though not often.

</comment><comment><USER27> release fail: sudo apt-get upgrade libreoffice libreoffice is already the newest version (1:5)

<comment><USER28> Distributions always lag a bit behind upstream releases, so don't expect a new release of any upstream software to be available instantly in Ubuntu/Debian/etc.

<comment><USER29> To be fair, the LibreOffice Fresh PPA also doesn't (from it's website) have 6.0 yet. While OS vendor repositories naturally take time, I don't know that there is a good reason for the PPA to get debs slower than the website.

<comment><USER30> Arch has 6.0 in testing at the moment. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rwx</comment><comment> name one software feature that is better in LibreOffice than MSOffice.

<comment><USER19> Saving CSV files. In Excel you have to do a bunch of tricks to get quotes around certain fields in the exported CSV (I end up using a custom field format to force quotes, then doing a find and replace in a text editor, as Excel likes to save "Text" as """Text"""), whereas in LibreOffice Calc there's an option to 'Quote all text cells' when exporting the CSV, which is much simpler.

<comment><USER31> Also importing CSV files works much better. I don't know how many times I had to suggest friends or customers to use openoffice for that, it was just easier than finding the right way to do it in Office.</comment></comment></comment>