6 ms·

Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls

Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains. Phones are doing the same as they're mini-tablets that suck at actual phone calls. Operating systems have taken on mobile centric (and the hideous flatten everything) design that is broken paradigm for a 15" laptop or 24" desktop screen. Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc. Nothing at all is user centric any more, it's all about how much lovely data can be sent back to hundreds of places. The web is a lot prettier these days to be fair, but I don't call that progress if it's at a cost of a 1TB page load. I could go on, but you get the idea.. :)

hvidgaard 11y ago
> we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains NoScript really brings this into visibility. I don't mind the domain running scripts. But the 10+ other domains that needs to run a script - sigh. My wife keeps asking my why I put up with it - it's quite simple; I decide if the page I'm about to visit is worth all the extra crap running and tracking me.
- dandelion_lover 11y ago
  NoScript does not show everything. RequestPolicy opens up a lot more.
- stormbeta 11y ago
  Personally I prefer uMatrix - it lets you enable specific things across domains instead of a binary allow/deny, and allows global versus per-domain or per-subdomain rules; e.g. I might be fine with one site collecting metrics but not globally.
cookiecaper 11y ago
>Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. Sorry, I don't think Pocket and Hello surpasses the junk bundled with Communicator, which came with a custom mail client. Mozilla's mail client is not only not installed with Firefox, but it's also pretty much dead now, in fact.
- smarinov 11y ago
  Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.
  - pyre 11y ago
    Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.
    - smarinov 11y ago
      Thanks. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic although it surely looks like it when I read it now. I was genuinely interested to find out about it since it's a program I rely on and if it won't be developed further, I'll have to look for alternatives.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2]. The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"? [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/ [1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...
_jomo 11y ago
> All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc. They are working on making Pocket a (built-in) add-on. Apparently it's harder than it sounds, but there is some progress going on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 Edit: Apparently that bug is fixed and Pocket is a "system addon" in Firefox 46+ https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  That makes me happier. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully they did the same for hello.
  - _jomo 11y ago
    They did, see my own reply :)
- _jomo 11y ago
  I found out more about "system" addons. There are different types of addons: app-profile, app-system-addons, app-system-defaults, app-global, app-system-local, app-system-share, app-system-user, app-temporary. The "app-system-defaults" (in my case Pocket & Loop/Hello) don't seem to be shown to the user, but you can find them in the extensions.xpiState config. https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/internal/XPIProvider.jsm#l148 https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
untog 11y ago
> Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Sigh. If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Did you prefer RealPlayer over HTML video? Was WAP better than LTE? Was Windows XP the pinnacle of OS design? Yeah, sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that outdates some things we used to do. Yes, it's worth the price.
- gaius 11y ago
  I will look you in the eye and say the Amiga and ST in 1986 were better than Windows or Ubuntu in 2016.
  - untog 11y ago
    They might have been better at the small subset of things Windows and Ubuntu can do that the Amiga and ST were also capable of, but they are not "better". A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.
    - c22 11y ago
      But they still make screwdrivers.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - rwallace 11y ago
    And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should have been, a decade later), let alone modern Windows or Linux. Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.
- stonogo 11y ago
  > If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer. Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues). Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground. I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar. Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?
jsight 11y ago
Yeah, everything was better ten years ago. Like this ten year old youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw (240p?). Web pages have become bloated, but they load faster on my phone now than they did on the desktop that I had in 2005. There are many frustrating things occuring with development now, but it is crazy to say that ten years ago was objectively better.
Grishnakh 11y ago
>Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained that modern cars are so great now that their picks were really just about which ones were the worst values relative to their competition, and that, unlike in past ages, they couldn't point to any true stinkers. Also, I think mobile phone software is generally better now than 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was brand new, and most people still used crappy feature phones running things like BREW. They just didn't give you the capabilities that modern phones do. Some people complain that newer phones have poorer call quality than old flip-phones, but personally talking on the phone is one of the least-used features. I spend a lot more time using it for texting, photos, voice mail, and various apps (taking notes, calculator, playing games, Tinder, etc.). However, in the software world, I will readily agree that most PC-based software was far, far better 10 years ago than today. PC-based software in the last 5 years has really, really gone down the toilet. Windows 8/10 are a prime example here, but even Linux distros really aren't doing that great either. The web is a horror show, with every site full of dozens of JavaScript scripts running, mainly for spying/tracking purposes. I don't even agree that the web is prettier; too many sites are mobile-centric, and look stupid on a regular PC screen.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  I like my car's automatic seatbelts (91 Saturn) I can't find a replacement "modern" car.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    Are you kidding? Automatic seatbelts are incredibly stupid, and are provably bad. The only reason they were invented was because the federal government required cars to have "passive safety devices" installed, and they were aiming for airbags. But lots of shitty car companies like Saturn were too cheap to install airbags so they installed mousebelts instead. The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks. They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it? So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none. Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up. If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.
mwcampbell 11y ago
As the responses in this thread demonstrate, there's plenty of cause for both pessimism and optimism. So let's all choose to be optimists, then get on with improving our own little piece of the world.
chflags 11y ago
"Nothing at all is user-centric anymore..." In my observation, this has certainly been the trend. In my experience, in this climate you have to look harder to find it user-focused software, and to some extent you have to write some of it yourself. This is because the software world has been flooded with "easy to use" programs that are either located on third party computers or must automatically connect to third party computers in order to be useful. To be truthful, I'm not sure that many users of today, i.e., younger ones, really understand what we mean by user-centric and user-focused. They may think if something is made "easy" for them, then it's user-focused. But where computer software is involved, we've seen it is precisely the opposite. If users want more control then they have to endure a little inconvenience, at least in the short term. The easier and more "frictionless" the software, the more the user should understand that the software has not been written so much for their benefit as for someone else's.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  True that. And you have no idea how much control is possible until you start switching gates yourself.
vlunkr 11y ago
I agree with most of this, but I don't think flat designs have anything to do with it, or are negative in any way.

hvidgaard 11y ago

> we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains NoScript really brings this into visibility. I don't mind the domain running scripts. But the 10+ other domains that needs to run a script - sigh. My wife keeps asking my why I put up with it - it's quite simple; I decide if the page I'm about to visit is worth all the extra crap running and tracking me.

dandelion_lover 11y ago
NoScript does not show everything. RequestPolicy opens up a lot more.
stormbeta 11y ago
Personally I prefer uMatrix - it lets you enable specific things across domains instead of a binary allow/deny, and allows global versus per-domain or per-subdomain rules; e.g. I might be fine with one site collecting metrics but not globally.

cookiecaper 11y ago

>Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. Sorry, I don't think Pocket and Hello surpasses the junk bundled with Communicator, which came with a custom mail client. Mozilla's mail client is not only not installed with Firefox, but it's also pretty much dead now, in fact.

smarinov 11y ago
Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.
- pyre 11y ago
  Mozilla has terminated development IIRC. This is probably what was meant.
  - smarinov 11y ago
    Thanks. It wasn't meant to be sarcastic although it surely looks like it when I read it now. I was genuinely interested to find out about it since it's a program I rely on and if it won't be developed further, I'll have to look for alternatives.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  I used Thunderbird daily for the better part of a decade until about 3 months ago. It's nothing personal against the project, which is currently the best serious desktop mail client available afaik. It's simply that Mozilla doesn't care about it anymore since everyone uses webmail now. Thunderbird is doing feature releases about once a year now [0], and Mozilla has pulled most (all?) of its full-time developers [1]. A few months ago, Mitchell Baker sent a message that said they were looking to detach Mozilla from the project completely, partially because it didn't have enough industry-wide impact to be worth Mozilla's resources [2]. The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"? [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/ [1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stability-and-community-innovation/ https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi... [2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from-mozilla/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...

_jomo 11y ago

> All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc. They are working on making Pocket a (built-in) add-on. Apparently it's harder than it sounds, but there is some progress going on: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694 Edit: Apparently that bug is fixed and Pocket is a "system addon" in Firefox 46+ https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67 https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67

anexprogrammer 11y ago
That makes me happier. Thanks for the heads up. Hopefully they did the same for hello.
- _jomo 11y ago
  They did, see my own reply :)
_jomo 11y ago
I found out more about "system" addons. There are different types of addons: app-profile, app-system-addons, app-system-defaults, app-global, app-system-local, app-system-share, app-system-user, app-temporary. The "app-system-defaults" (in my case Pocket & Loop/Hello) don't seem to be shown to the user, but you can find them in the extensions.xpiState config. https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd/toolkit/mozapps/extensions/internal/XPIProvider.jsm#l148 https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

untog 11y ago

> Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Sigh. If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Did you prefer RealPlayer over HTML video? Was WAP better than LTE? Was Windows XP the pinnacle of OS design? Yeah, sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that outdates some things we used to do. Yes, it's worth the price.

gaius 11y ago
I will look you in the eye and say the Amiga and ST in 1986 were better than Windows or Ubuntu in 2016.
- untog 11y ago
  They might have been better at the small subset of things Windows and Ubuntu can do that the Amiga and ST were also capable of, but they are not "better". A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.
  - c22 11y ago
    But they still make screwdrivers.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- rwallace 11y ago
  And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should have been, a decade later), let alone modern Windows or Linux. Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.
stonogo 11y ago
> If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer. Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues). Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground. I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar. Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?

jsight 11y ago

Yeah, everything was better ten years ago. Like this ten year old youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw (240p?). Web pages have become bloated, but they load faster on my phone now than they did on the desktop that I had in 2005. There are many frustrating things occuring with development now, but it is crazy to say that ten years ago was objectively better.

Grishnakh 11y ago

>Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained that modern cars are so great now that their picks were really just about which ones were the worst values relative to their competition, and that, unlike in past ages, they couldn't point to any true stinkers. Also, I think mobile phone software is generally better now than 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was brand new, and most people still used crappy feature phones running things like BREW. They just didn't give you the capabilities that modern phones do. Some people complain that newer phones have poorer call quality than old flip-phones, but personally talking on the phone is one of the least-used features. I spend a lot more time using it for texting, photos, voice mail, and various apps (taking notes, calculator, playing games, Tinder, etc.). However, in the software world, I will readily agree that most PC-based software was far, far better 10 years ago than today. PC-based software in the last 5 years has really, really gone down the toilet. Windows 8/10 are a prime example here, but even Linux distros really aren't doing that great either. The web is a horror show, with every site full of dozens of JavaScript scripts running, mainly for spying/tracking purposes. I don't even agree that the web is prettier; too many sites are mobile-centric, and look stupid on a regular PC screen.

paulddraper 11y ago
I like my car's automatic seatbelts (91 Saturn) I can't find a replacement "modern" car.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  Are you kidding? Automatic seatbelts are incredibly stupid, and are provably bad. The only reason they were invented was because the federal government required cars to have "passive safety devices" installed, and they were aiming for airbags. But lots of shitty car companies like Saturn were too cheap to install airbags so they installed mousebelts instead. The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks. They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it? So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none. Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up. If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.

mwcampbell 11y ago

As the responses in this thread demonstrate, there's plenty of cause for both pessimism and optimism. So let's all choose to be optimists, then get on with improving our own little piece of the world.

chflags 11y ago

"Nothing at all is user-centric anymore..." In my observation, this has certainly been the trend. In my experience, in this climate you have to look harder to find it user-focused software, and to some extent you have to write some of it yourself. This is because the software world has been flooded with "easy to use" programs that are either located on third party computers or must automatically connect to third party computers in order to be useful. To be truthful, I'm not sure that many users of today, i.e., younger ones, really understand what we mean by user-centric and user-focused. They may think if something is made "easy" for them, then it's user-focused. But where computer software is involved, we've seen it is precisely the opposite. If users want more control then they have to endure a little inconvenience, at least in the short term. The easier and more "frictionless" the software, the more the user should understand that the software has not been written so much for their benefit as for someone else's.

paulddraper 11y ago
True that. And you have no idea how much control is possible until you start switching gates yourself.

vlunkr 11y ago

I agree with most of this, but I don't think flat designs have anything to do with it, or are negative in any way.