lmorchard

11 ms·

61.
by lmorchard 10y ago
Not to be too snarky, but we have more than a couple thousand users these days. You can round up any given thousand users and they will all give you different answers as to what "making a good browser" means.
62.
by lmorchard 10y ago
It looks simple, but it actually does a lot of communication behind the scenes via JS with an add-on installed in the browser. Also, someday, this whole web app may end up embedded in Firefox itself.
63.
by lmorchard 10y ago
Apropos of that, if you think hard enough in Russian at the front page, you might be able to activate our super-secret easter egg. (oh wait, no, we had to cancel that one for licensing reasons)
64.
by lmorchard 10y ago
Yeah, I can't speak for everyone, but I think Test Pilot is in part a reaction to the Pocket thing. Even among Mozilla employees, there were folks who thought it was a great addition and there were folks who thought it was a huge mista
65.
by lmorchard 10y ago
A few reasons, among which is that the addon needs an account on the Test Pilot site to work. It's not a standalone add-on, so we didn't want to distribute it that way. And we may eventually even migrate away from using an AMO com
66.
by lmorchard 10y ago
I think they're anti-gravity generators. That, or the atmosphere's just really thin up in the experimental altitudes.
67.
by lmorchard 10y ago
Yes, all of that. Also, there are legal disclaimers and privacy notices and all kinds of thing beyond my IANAL ken that are wrapped up in agreeing to participate in Test Pilot. Nothing sneaky, just mainly we want to get lots of feedback whi
68.
by lmorchard 10y ago
They work for now. But these and future experiments are going to start talking more to the main Test Pilot site, and will possibly break / disable themselves without that connection. Going out-of-band to install these will likely lead
69.
by lmorchard 10y ago
FWIW, we're also working to make these things remove themselves cleanly - and if you uninstall the initial Test Pilot add-on, it pulls out all the experimental add-ons along with it and disables any metrics we might have enabled along
70.
by lmorchard 10y ago
That's because a) we want to make it easier for folks to try these features out without switching to another release channel, and b) we want to get feedback on how they work in the browser that folks normally use day-to-day
71.
by lmorchard 10y ago
Yeah, we're mainly targeting release Firefox, and Dev Edition has a couple of rough edges (mostly cosmetic). But, feedback from all release channels will be useful & welcome.
72.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Well, some of the proposals flip the relationship on ads. For example, rather than getting access to fine-grained personal data about readers, a marketer gets some coarse data like general location (eg. midwest US) and language. Using that,
73.
by lmorchard 11y ago
I need to do more specific digging on this to have a good answer. From the bits I know, mobile browsers offer more conservative support for caching & hardware acceleration. Phones are way more sensitive to battery use & heat than a
74.
by lmorchard 11y ago
So I'm back to what I used to do 13 years ago - build my own little scrapers and adaptors to generate RSS feeds for myself :) WHEEEEEE!
75.
by lmorchard 11y ago
I've seen folks give Apple a lot of credit for this, but they're not building an ad blocker. They're offering the APIs that can be used by developers to build ad blocking extensions. Not much different than what you can do in
76.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Thanks for all these details! My rant was largely based on guessing what's going on with all the stuff.
77.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Inferior in what ways, and for what purposes? For the most part, I haven't seen a technical superiority between web & native for most of what folks want to do. It seems more a practical superiority because we haven't been allo
78.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Huh. Interesting that mine is so bad. The PageSpeed report is fair, though. I didn't optimize images, set expires headers, etc. Weird that Amazon isn't serving things up gzip'd - oh, interesting, I have to gzip the stuff in m
79.
by lmorchard 11y ago
FWIW, my post is not a rant against advertising in general. It's about doing it with such a large volume of code & third parties involved, leaning on my bandwidth & CPU to cover for a lack of coordination. Toward the end of the
80.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Yeah, I'm a lazy bastard. My blog's all static files on Amazon S3 with no server side smarts, and I wanted comments. Disqus doesn't suck completely. There's a Google Analytics tag in there, as well as some Twitter code t
81.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Actually, FWIW, I'm using pairNIC.com for DNS. I do host on Amazon S3, though.
82.
by lmorchard 11y ago
FWIW, I work at Mozilla, but I don't work on this particular project. But, I care because I <3 the web. What I think a lot of folks are missing here is that this is an attempt to change how ads are done. Whether you like it or not,
83.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Great, here you go! https://sendto.mozilla.org
84.
by lmorchard 11y ago
The Corporation isn't really for-profit, either, as it dumps any money it makes back into the Foundation.
85.
by lmorchard 11y ago
There's no such thing as a free lunch. The way to reduce ads on websites is to pay for websites. But, so far, that's proven less practical and acceptable to users than just putting up with the ads. But, ads are getting annoying an
86.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Mozilla cares about funding itself, yes. But digital advertising is also how most of the web is funded - and Mozilla cares about that, too, because it directly impacts everything else under the Mozilla mission. As a user, you might prefer n
87.
by lmorchard 11y ago
Unless you personally are paying for everything you're using on the web, you should care about the state of digital advertising.
88.
by lmorchard 12y ago
I wonder what's the positive effect of sharing the same internet with you? I never visit nor do I even know you
89.
by lmorchard 12y ago
Your browser is an "automated HATEOAS client". You can toss it any old HTML doc and it knows what to do with things described in the HTML content-type spec such as links, forms, images, scripts, etc.
90.
by lmorchard 12y ago
Everyone writing a web page with links you can click on to navigate through a web site understands HATEOS. It's just that, for some reason, when you shift to imagining a robot interacting with your site rather than a person, people get

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