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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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I really enjoyed this episode. I do wish I could see Jeff’s reaction to the political aftermath, and I’m sure we’ll get the runoff next week. Great panel!
I like the political discussion, specially the way y’all handled it.
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Sure, eat fine food, drink fancy wine, go on a vacation to another country… Meanwhile, the people who are actually affected by this election are passing around lists of suicide hotline numbers and making impossible plans to flee red states for their lives.
It’s like what some people have been saying: “we survived his first term, we’ll survive the second.” But who is we?
At least Mr. Laporte is thinking of others. I really appreciated that.
I feel you. i don’t want to be on high alert for four years though (as I was 2016-2020).
I often wonder how people made it through horrific times like the sack of Rome, the US Civil War, Stalin’s reign of terror, the Third Reich, and bombardment of Gaza. I pray it doesn’t get as bad as that. I worry that it will.
We have to stick to our values, protect the vulnerable, and do our best to bend the arc of history toward justice. It’s all we can do. Ever.
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Well said.
There’s definitely a balance to be found between anxiety and complacency. Being on high alert isn’t useful unless it motivates action, and even then, it’s not a healthy state to be in continuously. Some people can’t escape it, but I do believe those who can must take care of themselves first, within reason (like, buying a boat doesn’t count, but enforcing limits on one’s own doomscrolling counts).
The airplane, the oxygen mask–you know the adage. It’s true, of course.
Compassion can become overwhelmed and burn out, so it has to be managed like a resource and put to some kind of sustainable work.
When I’m stressed about something that’s going on in the world, I ask myself, “Is there anything I can do about it right now?” If not, I need to relax. If yes, then the stress can be relieved directly by doing something, and knowing I did what I could.
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Regarding Firefox: we owe Mozilla nothing. Firefox needs to succeed on its own merits and offer things that (A) consumers actually want and (B) can’t be had anywhere else. Everyone seems to forget about Safari, which is probably part of what slowly ate into Firefox’s marketshare over the years. Aside from that, though, “We’re not Google”, “We’re private”, and “we have ad blockers” really isn’t going to move the needle. Lots of other browsers offer those things. We know about rendering engines, but do our friends? Would they even care?
The layoffs weren’t developers, IIRC, so I’m not really that worried. The company has known for a decade that their one source of funding is a problem. Users could donate $1/month and they’d have enough money to be free of Google for good! They’re going the ad route now, and I don’t blame them for that one bit. Gotta get the money from somewhere!
A browser is pretty generic, in general. And any feature they would add, if valuable, will quickly get “borrowed” by the competition. To me it’s a bit like shopping for salt… do you really have brand loyalty to a salt or do you go with whatever is readily available. (Insert your own product that you consider pretty generic if you do have a brand loyalty for basic salt.) Once something becomes a commodity, it’s really hard to compete on merits, especially in something that is fairly technical like a web browser. For example, no average user cares if your code is the cleanest and your memory management is superior, they only care that it does what they expect, and all browsers do that. Google wins in this market because they have more money (which means they can afford more developers and more employees influencing the standards bodies), more market clout, and more willingness to take risks that could be costly to engage in (there’s no real risk when the product doesn’t make the money back that it costs to develop.)
There is NO reasonable way for Mozilla to compete well in this market. They are marginalized and will remain so because you’d pretty much have to be Google to compete with Google.
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I hadn’t really considered browsers as a commodity before, but I’m a web developer so I’m extremely biased in that regard. You make a good point. Most people don’t care beyond the browser’s ability to quickly render the page, but there are quality-of-life improvements that could be had.
It was a lot easier to gain users back in the day when IE was the only choice, and it was so incredibly terrible I’ve repressed memories of just how frustrating it was to code for (and use). Now that their browser is based on a much better engine, people don’t always seek out alternatives unless they don’t like what Edge is selling. I’m not much of a MS guy, but for MS fans I hear it’s a good experience.
For Mozilla, I think they need to start doing more than just making Firefox. I dream of a world where Chromebooks can be Foxbooks instead!
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Yes I know they did this. They went with the wrong device category. They need to make a desktop OS to compete with ChromeOS.
The company needs to do more than just make a web browser if they want to have any kind of a future.
Late, but I want to point out that users do care about memory management. They care a lot. They just don’t know what it’s called.
With the modern trend of people keeping hundreds of tabs open permanently, memory management matters more than ever. Even back in 2008, it was Chrome’s high performance that attracted many of the initial converts from Firefox when it was released. People care quite a bit about how fast and smoothly their browser (or their “phone,” as they may think of it, conflating the browser on their phone with the phone itself) opens tabs, switches between them, and revives sleeping/archived tabs. There’s nothing more annoying than lag.
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100% this. People don’t want to be told that they have to close tabs. That’s the computer’s problem. In fact Chrome basically does that automatically now with the memory saver feature, just kills the process after enough time being idle. Not really any other way to fix this problem when you’re at the point of “:)” number of tabs open.