4 ms·

> Delays and increased suffering for patients are all but certain consequences If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Moz

by camus2 13y ago

> Delays and increased suffering for patients are all but certain consequences If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Mozilla's. Dont blame Mozilla for your poor technology choices. Applets will eventually stop working, and you'll be responsible if your product fails , not Mozilla. Dont blame anybody else but you. You broke the medical staff instruments by choosing or maintaining a dead technology thus putting patient lives in danger. Do you think they'll sue you ? or Mozilla if there is an accident? You are responsible.

Silhouette 13y ago
If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Mozilla's. Nothing is future-proof if the people controlling the platforms move the goalposts. We have standards and value backward compatibility for a reason: it's because violating those standards and breaking that compatibility hurts. And it's going to become Mozilla's problem if they continue down this path, because Firefox will cease to be a viable browser choice for a significant proportion of their potential market. Dont blame Mozilla for your poor technology choices. Applets will eventually stop working I don't know why you're writing as if I personally broke these medical devices. I've never personally worked on any of those projects, I'm just familiar with them and citing them as examples of why this sort of change is damaging. In any case, people really should get off the "Java applets is a dead technology" bandwagon. Viable replacements using HTML/CSS/JS are very recent developments, and people have been developing web-based user interfaces for all kinds of devices for decades. Of course they're not all going to throw out all that work and rewrite everything from scratch. There's nothing wrong with it, and contrary to your claim, there is no reason those applets must eventually stop working. They'll work just fine as long as browsers run Java applets, which they've been doing just fine for many years. Obviously applets will stop working if browser makers deliberately drop support for them even though it's been available for a very long time. However, that's like saying obviously CSS3 is no use for anything because it's not all W3C standardised in stone yet so you're stupid if you use it today because it might all be different at some arbitrary point in the future that no-one can predict. You can shoot down any technology, no matter how modern and trendy, with such a generic argument, but it doesn't demonstrate anything particularly helpful to do so. You broke the medical staff instruments by choosing or maintaining a dead technology thus putting patient lives in danger. No, I didn't, but if the serious software I work on were medical in nature, you could literally bet your life that I wouldn't be letting either Java or Firefox anywhere near it and would be using an entirely different level of engineering practice to build it, as I do for certain projects in other fields where reliability is essential. However, while we build the literally life-or-death systems that way, chances are the word processor, KVM, and, yes, web browser that organisations doing vital work use for day-to-day activities are not developed to the same standards. Breaking them still hurts, if only in efficiency (which can obviously still be harmful in a medical context). Unless you're claiming that all software that runs in any medical facility must be developed to the same standards as control software for high-risk, safety-critical systems, again, your argument is so generic that it doesn't really prove anything interesting.
- camus2 13y ago
  TLDR it's your problem , not Mozilla's. You can still tell your clients to uee another browser, heck they had to install java on their machines for your solution to work... they should not had too, but smart people always make poor technology choices.
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    You can still tell your clients to uee another browser Actually, we've been doing that for quite some time on one of the major projects I work on that uses Java applets, for exactly this reason. We usually recommend a recent version of IE, and as a general policy we don't offer any sort of guaranteed support for Firefox or Chrome. Of course we still test on those other browsers routinely and we'll help customers who have problems if we can, but no-one is getting any money back if they break later because of the kinds of changes we're talking about. The worrying thing for Mozilla should be how many businesses are essentially telling us that they agree and they're moving or already planning to move back to IE as their corporate standard. It's certainly not always because of Java, but choices like rapid update cycles, lack of long-term support, and willingness to drop useful functionality do seem to be generating an increasing amount of hostility from institutional users.

by camus2 13y ago

Silhouette 13y ago

If the product you are building is not future proof it is your problem not Mozilla's. Nothing is future-proof if the people controlling the platforms move the goalposts. We have standards and value backward compatibility for a reason: it's because violating those standards and breaking that compatibility hurts. And it's going to become Mozilla's problem if they continue down this path, because Firefox will cease to be a viable browser choice for a significant proportion of their potential market. Dont blame Mozilla for your poor technology choices. Applets will eventually stop working I don't know why you're writing as if I personally broke these medical devices. I've never personally worked on any of those projects, I'm just familiar with them and citing them as examples of why this sort of change is damaging. In any case, people really should get off the "Java applets is a dead technology" bandwagon. Viable replacements using HTML/CSS/JS are very recent developments, and people have been developing web-based user interfaces for all kinds of devices for decades. Of course they're not all going to throw out all that work and rewrite everything from scratch. There's nothing wrong with it, and contrary to your claim, there is no reason those applets must eventually stop working. They'll work just fine as long as browsers run Java applets, which they've been doing just fine for many years. Obviously applets will stop working if browser makers deliberately drop support for them even though it's been available for a very long time. However, that's like saying obviously CSS3 is no use for anything because it's not all W3C standardised in stone yet so you're stupid if you use it today because it might all be different at some arbitrary point in the future that no-one can predict. You can shoot down any technology, no matter how modern and trendy, with such a generic argument, but it doesn't demonstrate anything particularly helpful to do so. You broke the medical staff instruments by choosing or maintaining a dead technology thus putting patient lives in danger. No, I didn't, but if the serious software I work on were medical in nature, you could literally bet your life that I wouldn't be letting either Java or Firefox anywhere near it and would be using an entirely different level of engineering practice to build it, as I do for certain projects in other fields where reliability is essential. However, while we build the literally life-or-death systems that way, chances are the word processor, KVM, and, yes, web browser that organisations doing vital work use for day-to-day activities are not developed to the same standards. Breaking them still hurts, if only in efficiency (which can obviously still be harmful in a medical context). Unless you're claiming that all software that runs in any medical facility must be developed to the same standards as control software for high-risk, safety-critical systems, again, your argument is so generic that it doesn't really prove anything interesting.

camus2 13y ago
TLDR it's your problem , not Mozilla's. You can still tell your clients to uee another browser, heck they had to install java on their machines for your solution to work... they should not had too, but smart people always make poor technology choices.
- Silhouette 13y ago
  You can still tell your clients to uee another browser Actually, we've been doing that for quite some time on one of the major projects I work on that uses Java applets, for exactly this reason. We usually recommend a recent version of IE, and as a general policy we don't offer any sort of guaranteed support for Firefox or Chrome. Of course we still test on those other browsers routinely and we'll help customers who have problems if we can, but no-one is getting any money back if they break later because of the kinds of changes we're talking about. The worrying thing for Mozilla should be how many businesses are essentially telling us that they agree and they're moving or already planning to move back to IE as their corporate standard. It's certainly not always because of Java, but choices like rapid update cycles, lack of long-term support, and willingness to drop useful functionality do seem to be generating an increasing amount of hostility from institutional users.